So this movie is by the same people who did A Matter of Life and Death, right, which you’ll (let’s say for the sake of discussion) remember that I wasn’t particularly impressed by. And the beginning of this one continued to not impress me.

So we start off in Britain, in the late years of WW2, during a military training exercise; the general in command is having a mock invasion exercise starting at midnight, but a young whippersnapper lieutenant decides that he’s going to show initiative and do what he would do in a real war — ignore the stodgy rules and go for it — and starts before the official time, ultimately surprising and capturing the old general in a Turkish bath house.

The general is infuriated, and shouts at the whippersnapper, who is all “you’re old and out of touch” and… we’ve got our framing story, and now we flashback to that old general as a young man in like 1903 during the Boer War.

And so they’re setting up an obvious parallel thing — he wants to go off to Berlin at the invitation of a British expat woman to take care of a PR crisis for the British army (apparently someone is saying that the British were committing atrocities, which ps I’m pretty sure they did, and it’s not clear whether the movie thinks he’s naive for not realizing it or whether it was too soon for Brits to admit it when this movie was made in 1943); they tell him not to, and… as a young whippersnapper, he goes off and does it anyway.

He cocks it up, and ends up fighting a duel with a German officer; they become fast friends, and there’s a whole romance subplot that ends up with the German officer and the woman getting engaged.

This takes up a pretty good chunk of the movie — like easily over an hour — and at this point, I’m thinking that’s what the movie is, this illustration that the old general was once just as young and reckless, which… it’s enjoyable enough in a light way, but it’s the kind of thing you’d watch on a Sunday afternoon on a UHF channel, not anything you’d seek out for particular excellence. But it turns out that the movie is nearly three hours long; there’s a lot left yet, and it’s going to get better.

Our military officer goes back to England, and we get a hunting montage to show the passage of years (it shows animal heads going up on his wall with the year he shot them — horrifyingly, it shows tigers and lions and rhinos and elephants, and uh, I guess conservation wasn’t really a thing at the time?).

So then it’s WW1, and there’s a scene where he’s interviewing captured German soldiers, to see if they know his old friend (who should be in charge of their unit), and they won’t speak, and there’s a discussion about how the Germans use torture and bomb hospitals and attack innocent boats and such-like, and how the British would never do that. It’s an indefensibly anti-German take — essentially pure propaganda with no connection to reality — but again it’s not clear if the movie knows it, or if it really imagines that Britain fought a gentleman’s war in WW1.

At any rate, after the war, the British officer finds his German friend in a POW camp; the friend refuses to talk to him at first out of wounded pride — his nation having been defeated, he feels personally humiliated and lost — but eventually they reconcile, and there’s this weird-to-a-modern dinner scene where he sits down with a bunch of the British officer corps who were just fighting him in the war, and they’re all like “right ho, chap, of course Germany will come roaring back, why we count on it, we don’t want to put our boots at its throat” in this really bonhomie way suggesting that aristocratic class consciousness transcends nationality. Which, if anything, that era was ending post-WW1 (and of course in reality, the terms put on the Germans were super-punitive).

And then we come to the run-up to World War 2, and this is where it gets brilliant, because the German friend comes to England as a refugee — his wife is dead, his children are Nazis and lost to him, and he will have no truck with the Nazis. And under examination by a refugee administrator, he gives this monologue that’s quietly emotional and full of loss — he’s the same man that we saw as a young dashing duelist, as an outraged nationalist in the wake of defeat in WW1, but he comes to us now as an old man who has lost everything in his life, and seen his ideals shattered.

It’s a brilliant scene, one that makes the movie worth it, and one that couldn’t work without all the buildup of his life history. This is when it becomes clear that the movie really does belong on this list.

And so, the British officer, now a general, comes and vouches for his friend, and takes him back to his house. And then comes the second remarkable scene: The general was meant to give an address on the radio, but army censors, after seeing the text of his address, cut it entirely, and also force-retire him from the army. He’s confused about it, but the German friend explains — it was an address that echoed the things he’d said in WW1: That the Germans might engage in atrocities, bombing hospitals and harming civilians and so forth, but that’s what separated them from the British, who would never do such things.

But now, in WW2, that’s not a message with any relevance. The British are going to do those things, they are going to engage in the same kind of atrocities, and — he argues passionately — they are right to do so, they must do so, because in a war this total against a force so evil, it would be a crime to leave any advantage unused. Even tactics you would normally shun have to be used when you are up against the might of the Nazi war machine. The general can’t accept this; he understands what his friend is saying, but it just goes against everything he believes in the world, and that tension, well-acted, is so compelling.

The general is despondent without his lifelong military career to sustain him; but he’s able to re-find a sort of purpose to his life when he takes up command of the Home Guard, the militia-esque force that will oppose the Nazis if they should get past the regular military in an invasion. The Home Guard, at least, can handle a leader who still believes in the old rules.

And now, we are coming back up to our initial framing story, and can see it as the tragedy it is. Because whereas before, we saw it through the eyes of the young officer pulling off a clever Miles Vorkosigan-like move against a stuffy old general, we now see it through the eyes of people in the general’s orbit, and the dawning horror as they realize that this old man who believes fundamentally in decency and civility is about to have that faith shattered by a training exercise of all things in the very Home Guard where he took a refuge after the army couldn’t be what he wanted it to be. The old general, we now understand, isn’t just outraged because this kid didn’t follow his stodgy orders, he’s outraged because he can’t escape the fact that the civilized world he wants to live in doesn’t exist anymore.

The second half of the movie completely transforms the first half, and turns what looked like a disposable entertainment into something much deeper and more profound. And there are more layers to it, too — a lot about how little-appreciated the wisdom of age is by youth; and a romantic subplot that plays out throughout the movie, with three different women who are played by the same actress.

Also, the acting is phenomenal, particularly from the lead. I actually thought that they had different people playing the old general and the young lieutenant at first, but no, it’s the same person (Roger Livesey). I don’t know that I’ve ever seen someone age as convincingly; and it’s not just the makeup, it’s his speech and mannerisms — he’s recognizably the same person as that dashing young officer, but is at the same time a slightly embarrassing old fool.

This is good stuff. And it’s shocking that they made a film like this about WW2 while it was still going on. It seems so much like a postwar film that I originally wrote “after the war” a bunch of places above, but had to go back and edit because it turns out Germany didn’t surrender until 1945. The movie is too kind to English imperialism by half, but taken as a portrait of how the English saw themselves in the waning days of WW2, it’s superb.