The Last Bridge

Slap blop. "...And then..."Gouge gouge. "...Lincoln underwent the most extreme change in years..." Squeeze slap slap. "...He parted his hair on the other side..." Sloop.

Like a travesy on the preposterous state of American patriotism, this short subject on The Face of Lincoln precedes a grim and experienced movie made by Europeans about the second World War.

A kind of Norman Rockwell of the plastic arts purports to trace the significant events of Lincoln's life on a clay facsimile of his forehead. This furrow is Gettysburg. Pinch.

This simpleton idea shows up bright and clear, though, because the Brattle has a new projection trick that does away with its infamous flickering gray screen. The weakness, smallness and sunkenness of the Brattle's screen came from the fact that the Brattle wasn't designed as a movie theatre (or indeed as a theatre at all), and the projectors have to be behind the screen instead of over the balcony as in any other theatre. Being behind, the screen image is reversed, and to return the image to normal a prism previously had to be mounted in the projector lens. This prism cut down the light by about 40 per cent, forced the screen to be pushed to the back wall, and made a "hot spot" of bright light in the center of the screen.

But now, as Sid Harvey will tell you, things have changed. The staff have put their heads together and devised a pair of angled mirrors at which the projectors aim. The mirrors turn the image rightside right and the obscuring prism has been plucked out. Not only is the screen now sharp and bright, even at the corners, but the Brattle can employ Cinemascope or nearly any other big screen system. All the better to see good movies by.

The film at the Brattle this week and next is not so much seen as experienced. It is a series of powerfully delineated situations in which the loyalty to a national cause is set up against the more universal demands of humaneness and mercy. A German doctor (Maria Schell) working as a nurse in a line hospital in Yugoslavia is kidnapped by partisan guerrillas and forced to tend their wounded. At first she refuses, tries to escape, but gradually she comes to see that the partisans have as much of a claim to her ability to prevent suffering as her countrymen have. She is traitorously happy with the roving bands of peasant soldiers until one day a German prisoner is captured who shames her patriotism to the forefront of her thoughts. She manages for him to escape, though refusing to go herself.

In the final sequence, she enters a German-held village disguised as a Moslem peasant, in order to procure a cache of medical supplies. There she meets her former lover, a sergeant of the occupation forces. She reveals herself to him and he implores her to give up her collaboration and return to the German side and the rationality of her past life. She cannot forsake the dying men on the other side of the river, but declares that after this last act of merciful contrition towards the unattainable standard of humaneness, she will return. It is a tragic attempt at a moral compromise--her own conciliation of the universal conscience--it races to its unavoidable conclusion as, delivering the drugs, she is caught in a cross-fire on the bridge.

Such a description of the plot makes it sound melodramatic, which it is. The unlikelieness of her meeting the sergeant again, and the often unrealistic tenor of the dialogue, in which peasant women tend to talk in profound concepts of duty, etc., when isolated seem corny. But the situation can hold the actors in such a tension of dramatic excellence, and the film as a visual whole exerts such a physical impact, that the inherent melodrama and sentimentality blur into unimportance.

The director, Helmut Kautner, can speak through the visual medium many times more subtly than through the verbal. He records scenes that express the whole depth of the film in a few seconds. And old woman offers the boots of her dead grandson to Helga, thinking she has deserted the Germans of her own will, and Kautner elicits a dramatic poignancy that is almost unbearable. In just the last few frames of one sequence a kitten appears to follow Helga out of the room, and by his cinematic control the director turns the kitten into a pure manifesation of the faltering yet beautiful spirit of the girl. And the symbol of the bridges itself is handled superbly. The first bridge is love, the rapport of one individual with another; the rest are humanitarian honor, the responsibility towards mankind of one who is not an island.

That Miss Schell won the Cannes Best Actress award is not surprising; she is a highly accomplished actress and, not incidentally, beautiful. But she is somewhat disappointing. As the blinky-eyed ads would imply, she has a bad knack for simpering; she simpers very well, but too much. Her face is wonderfully mobile, but the fine differences of its expressions are limited. She does not stand out over all else in the film, but she does posses a dramatic urgency and an understanding of the excruciating moral dilemma which makes The Last Bridge as profound and important a film as it is.