The Bridge (Bernhard Wicki, 1959)

Hans Scholten: Folker Bohnet
Albert Mutz: Fritz Wepper
Walter Forst: Michael Hinz
Jurgen Borchert: Frank Glaubrecht
Karl Horber: Karl Michael Balzer
Klaus Hager: Volker Lechtenbrink
Sigi Bernhard: Günther Hoffmann
Franziska: Cordula Trantow
Stern: Wolfgang Stumpf
Unteroffizier Heilmann: Günter Pfitzmann
Hauptmann Fröhlich: Heinz Spitzner
Oberstleutnant Bütov: Siegfried Schürenberg
Sigi's Mother: Edith Schultze-Westrum
Albert's Mother: Ruth Hausmeister
Jürgen's Mother: Eva Waiti
Walter's Father: Hans Elwenspoek
Walter's Mother: Trude Breitschopf
Karl's Father: Hans Hellmold
Barbara: Edeltraut Elsner
Sigrun: Inge Benz

Director: Bernhard Wicki
Screenplay: Michael Mansfeld, Karl-Wilhelm Vivier, Bernhard Wicki
Based on a novel by Manfred Gregor
Cinematography: Gerd von Bonin
Production design: Heinrich Graf Brühl, Peter Scharff
Film editing: Carl Otto Bartning
Music: Hans-Martin Majewski

Something of a landmark in the revival of German filmmaking before the burst of creativity wrought by Volker Schlöndorff, Werner Herzog, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, and others in the 1960s and '70s, The Bridge is an appropriate title in that it not only looks back to what Germany was during the war, but also suggests some of the trauma that lingered into the increasingly affluent present. The decimation and psychic mutilation of the generation that came of age during the war is the film's central subject. It focuses on seven young men, still in their teens, in the final days of the Third Reich, inspired by the dream of military glory but undermined by the incompetence of the remnants of the Wehrmacht, facing a defeat it cannot admit is coming. The boys have grown up together in the same town, and they all receive their draft notices on the same day. But a well-meaning officer decides not to send these raw draftees into the heat of battle but to give them a nonsensical task: defending the bridge across the river near their town -- even though the bridge is slated to be blown up as a deterrent to the advancing Allies. It will keep them out of harm's way, the officer thinks. But communications wires get crossed and the boys on the bridge never get the message to retreat. Instead, they die "heroically," doing all the right things -- including blowing up an Allied tank -- as they make their futile stand. The story, from the novel by Gregor Dorfmeister, under his pseudonym Manfred Gregor, is based on a real event told to Dorfmeister by one of the survivors. The film is full of well-staged action and an effective re-creation of the real setting which had been completely transformed in the years since the war ended. The interaction between the boys and their families is touching without slopping over into mawkishness.