The Road to Glory

76.000

A war drama inspired by the French movie Les croix de bois (1932), remade with a strong cast of Fredric March, Warner Baxter and old Lionel Barrymore in uniforms. They even re-use some of the actual footage from that movie in the spectacular battle scenes and explosions! Everything to save expenses when you got to pay well known actors like that. For a WW1 movie it's rather dull. Still a very dark story and because of it also becomes a serious production where very little light shines in.

Hawks provides beautiful thoughts and concerns about how a group of professionals must stick together to fight fear and death, an idea that would give depth to his best films in the future. The love triangle -- the nurse, the lieutenant and his boss -- struggles after 30 minutes, but The Road to Glory becomes immense near the end, after the squad tries to install a phone line in the battlefield -- the horizontal travelling is superb -- , father and son dying, and the final Hawksian monologue.