Wooden Crosses

Wooden Crosses (1932)

Les Croix de bois

The young and patriotic student Demachy joins the French army in 1914 to defend his country. But he and his comrades soon experience the terrifying, endless trench war in Champagne, where more and more wooden crosses have to be erected for this cannon fodder.

Date of release
1932-03-17
TMDB
7.1 / 10 (53)
Runtime
1h 50m
Genres
Drama, War
Director
Raymond Bernard

Casting

Interesting facts

Wooden Crosses is a 1932 French anti-war film by Raymond Bernard based upon the autobiographical novel of the same name written by Roland Dorgelès.

Filming

The film is set some time after the Great Retreat, where the British Expeditionary Force and the French 5th Army fought a fighting retreat to the Marne. The events follow Gilbert Demachy, a young French law student, who enlisted in the French army some time after 2 August 1914, and the infantry squad he joins.

The producer, Bernard Natan, himself a veteran of the First World War and a Croix de Guerre recipient, wished to make those watching the film "hate and despise war". He was given free rein to use Pathé's new sound department to create recordings of explosions and gunshots, something he referred to as "the reconstitution of the sonic ambience of the battles".

A large amount of the film was filmed in Mont Cornillet on the outskirts of Reims in Champagne, where Raymond Bernard said they "simply had to redig the trenches, traces of which were still in evidence." He used detectors from the army to search for and remove unexploded munitions due to the risk of the fake shells used in filming setting them off.

Read on Wikipedia · Text from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Data from Wikidata.

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