I Accuse! (1920)

[akiratubo]

World War I starts.  Two Frenchmen go to the trenches, leaving behind the woman they both love.  A whole lotta melodrama ensues.  No, I don't think you understand.  A WHOLE.  LOT.  OF.  MELODRAMA.  ENSUES.  One of the two men gets killed and his friend ends up standing watch over the makeshift graveyard where he and thousands of other dead soldiers are being kept, apparently until someone can manage to arrange for the bodies to be transported home.  Then, suddenly, after about two hours of being mostly intolerable, I Accuse becomes one of the best movies ever made.  How?

Spoilers ahead.

Before the spoilers, I will say one other thing about this movie.  It really was shot during WWI and really does feature actual combat footage.  I think even the mass graveyard was real, at least in some shots.  If you are historically inclined, I Accuse may be worth watching for that alone.

Now, spoiler time ...






















All of the dead bodies (and I mean all the war dead everywhere, not just the ones in that particular graveyard) get up, march home, and demand their loved ones tell them their sacrifice was worth it.  The movie ends right there, leaving what happens next up to our imaginations.  The climax hits like a sledgehammer, driving home what it must have been like for the soldiers who fought and died in WWI in a way a more "serious" take on the subject matter could not.

The zombies look fantastic, genuinely dead, and they have a much stronger than usual rationale for existing.  They are pretty scary even today and must have been extraordinarily so in 1920, when this kind of thing was unprecedented.  It makes sitting through the previous couple hours of love-triangle melodrama worth it.

[indianasmith]

Where did you find this?  I want to see it!

[Trevor]

Akira - is that the Abel Gance film? If it is, then the soldiers portrayed in that film almost all died during the first world war, according to Gance's biographer. They played themselves as ghosts in the film and then died for real. 

[akiratubo]

Where did you find this?  I want to see it!

I watched it on youtube in surprisingly high quality.  That video appears to have been taken down now, however.

Akira - is that the Abel Gance film? If it is, then the soldiers portrayed in that film almost all died during the first world war, according to Gance's biographer. They played themselves as ghosts in the film and then died for real. 

Yes, it is.  While I was watching the movie, I wondered how many of those men actually died during the war.  Very depressing to think about.