An overturned statue of the crucified Christ lies in a contaminated fountain - a dead dove, downed by a stray bullet, sits at the fountains edge. A mortar unceremoniously rips through the head of the statue and tosses the dove into the filthy water of the fountain, where it sinks slowly to the bottom. “Shit! Aren’t you tired of playing around with my carcass!” screams a wounded soldier, tossed about by shell fire, in the opening line. We are then introduced to other soldiers - tired men in haggard uniforms forced to clean themselves as best they can in the polluted water of the fountain.

So begins I ACCUSE (the literal translation of the French title J’ACCUSE - the film was released in a truncated form in the USA in 1939 under the title THAT THEY MAY LIVE), less a remake than an expansion of the latter two thirds of director Gance’s 1919 film J’ACCUSE! The thesis of the piece is evident from the very beginning: This is what war looks like, Gance tells us. This is what you’ve all forgotten. Further evidencing this latter point is the handwritten introduction by Gance himself - it reads, roughly, “This film is dedicated to the war dead of tomorrow, who will no doubt watch it without recognizing in it the face of their own times.”

The first third of the film is set in and around the town of Chattancourt in the north of France in November of 1918. Paralleling the needless and seemingly unending conflict of World War I is the ongoing battle between Francois Laurin (Marcel Deltaire) and Jean Diaz (Victor Francen, a familiar face to those who have seen Gance’s previous film LA FIN DU MONDE; 1931), the latter of whom has fallen in love with the former’s wife. Jean discovers the dead dove in the fountain while washing the blood from his bayonet and the unlucky animal soon becomes a symbol (however meager) of peace for the men. Francois finds Jean burying the dove in a crater and, as shells fall around them, makes an uneasy peace with the man who has taken his wife’s love from him.

We are introduced to a number of his compatriots in the scenes that follow - including young soldier Giles Tenant and Flo, the entertainer (who’s song and dance number is performed in time with the constant shelling) he loves. We also learn more of Jean’s character. A former officer and interpreter, Diaz left the position and rejoined the army as a regular soldier - he’s also the only man to survive one of the weekly suicidal patrols of the front lines (the area patrolled is given the ghastly nickname “Ravine des Dames”, or “Gully of the Maimed”). As luck would have it, another patrol has been ordered and twelve more soldiers are selected to be wasted - included Giles and Francois. The captain in charge of sending out the patrol talks with Jean in hopes that the sole survivor of a previous patrol might have some advice for this new one. Jean has little hope - he survived only by scurrying into a pillbox until the shelling quieted. He’s also none to happy with the idea of another patrol going out - the enemy hasn’t had the time necessary to set new mines, the finding of which is the entire purpose of the patrols, and sending out another twelve men would be the height of irresponsibility.

The captain agrees to give headquarters the information Jean provided him, in hopes that it will stop the patrol from having to go out, and Jean leaves to talk with the chosen men. He can offer little of positive note, but he promises the men - all of whom are afraid that their children will have to face the very same conditions that they, themselves, are facing - that they are fighting the last of all wars. He begins collecting letters from the 12 men, including a stack from Francois, who, wishes a letter sent to his wife every two weeks so that she isn’t informed of his fate until the last possible moment. With death looming and his mind mad with the thought that Diaz may so easily be able to take over as head of his family, Francois then nullifies the earlier reconciliation between the two men. Jean promises to Francois that Edith, Francois’ wife, will never again mean anything to him.

The captain’s attempts to contact headquarters meet a dead end - Henry Chimay, the officer above him fails to get in touch with the Lieutenant in charge and refuses, using duty as his excuse, to call off the patrol himself in light of the new information. The patrol will go ahead as planned. Diaz hands off all of the letters to an unidentified officer with expressed instructions on what to do with them and takes the place of Lamandau, a soldier with a wife and four children waiting for him to return home. The patrol leaves the comparable safety of the trenches during a lull in the fighting - shortly thereafter the combat ensues again. The next morning we see young Giles die, covered in mud and in the belly of a crater, as the trumpeters on both sides announce a cease fire. It’s November 11th - Armistice Day.

As Chattancourt erupts into celebration the patrol returns, one by one, toted in by fellow soldiers on stretchers. Only one is initially found to be alive - Francois - and he is expected to die in short order. On a second inspection it is found that Diaz has survived as well and (though originally thought dead) is expected to make a full recovery. Jean is brought to a dead by Francois and the two once again make amends between themselves - the scene ends with the two holding hands, even after Francois has passed on. La Marseillaise plays over scenes of human destruction and images of vast cemeteries filled with the dead of WWI. In St. Paul, Edith is fixing her daughter Helene’s clothes. The young girl asks where daddy is - she wanted him to bring a gun home to her so that she could kill the war.

Jean returns home and, in keeping with his promise, refuses to involve himself with Edith. He sets himself to work at a glass factory, researching some new compound for reasons that are not made immediately clear. Made unhappy by his proximity to a woman he knows he cannot have, Jean leaves the factory (though he keeps his job) and sets up a new workshop alongside his buried comrades. He renews his promise to them - that the war in which they died would be the very last. Years pass by and, though separated by a great distance, he continues to correspond through letters with Edith and Helene - in no time at all it’s 1936. In a development that’s quite unexpected, Helene (now all grown up) begins to fall in love with Jean as her mother did before her. Meanwhile, the kindly owner of the glass factory has died and, irony of all ironies, the more politically motivated Henri Chimay is given control - Jean returns to the factory and, in spite of his hatred for Chimay, assists in bringing the factory up to speed under the new management.

After a particularly well received political speech by Chimay, Diaz decides he’s had enough. He offers a few choice words of his own, accusing the war profiters and egotists and even the every day people of forgetting the lessons of the first world war as they march perilously close to a second. Diaz heads off once more - sickened by what he sees happening around him - and sets up a new camp near the grand cemetery at Verdun. There he unexpectedly finds an old friend - Flo has opened a new pup just outside the cemetery. She, like him, remembers the fallen soldiers, even to the point of still recognizing a full 42 of their individual voices. Jean continues his research to end war once and for all while, back in St. Paul, Helene is starting to fall for Chimay. Diaz’s workshop, in its latest incarnation, could not be further from the glass works of years past - passages lead out of his work room and into the catacombs beneath the cemetery, where he spends much of his time. Just outside, the friends he lost to the patrol on Armistice Day lay buried in a field of cornflowers, daisies, and poppies that he planted in the form of the French flag. His old laboratory at the glass works is in worse shape than ever - equipment lays all about, covered in monstrous cobwebs. Chimay and one of his aides, while picking about the place, stumble upon a journal of his: “Inventions for Prevention of Wars” . . .

One night, in the midst of a torrential storm, Flo is awakened by noises coming from downstairs - it seems that something is knocking at her door, though no one is there to do so. Suddenly Jean appears - his face frozen in fear and his hair stark and white. “It’s beyond all human comprehension!” he says. “I almost succeeded!” Jean returns to St. Paul and it becomes obvious, little by little, that he’s beginning to go mad. A fragment of a shell lodged in his brain has moved and before long he’s lost all reason and is reduced to little more than furniture around which the rest of the world revolves. Helene and Chimay become heavily involved and Europe begins making preparations to go to war once more - all as Jean sits idly by. Only when the prospect of a new war becomes entirely inevitable does Jean waken from his insanity. Chimay has stolen one of his inventions - steel glass that can be molded into armor that is almost entirely impenetrable. Diaz had intended it to be an invention to help bring an end to war, but Chimay is using it to hype France’s superiority in the next and make a fortune in the process. He bids a final farewell to Edith, whom he’s always loved, and makes his way back to Verdun . . .

As all the armies of the world mobilize, Jean stands before the mighty ossuary at Verdun and makes his final stand. Speaking in a variety of languages - French, English, German . . . - he calls back all of those who died in World War I. And, with terrifying effect, the crosses disappear and the dead rise. From the cemeteries and the forests and the oceans they come, all marching on their respective countries, silently accusing the living of the world of their ignorance and stupidity. The skies darken and nature itself recoils as the lost souls of 12,000,000 march forth from their graves. “Take a god look at them. . . may the desire to fight be torn from you forever! Fill your eyes with this horror and the weapons will fall from your hands. . . Fear will save you in spite of yourselves. . . Profiteers, traitors, and men who know no love - hear the death-rattle in those millions of throats! I accuse! I accuse! I accuse!” The people of Verdun riot, leading to the capture and lynching of Jean. Flo arrives to stay by his side and both of them, relics from the war and two of the few who really still remember, are burned to death. But rather than route the souls of the dead and send them back to their graves, the souls of Jean and Flo rise - the latter into the arms of the long-dead Giles - and march on the world with the others.

I ACCUSE, while obviously sharing a multitude of plot points with its 1919 predecessor (the World War I segments, the affair between Jean and Francois’ wife, and the climactic sequence in which the dead are called back from their graves to silently accuse an ignorant world), seems an extension (and a superiorly executed one, at that) of ideas proposed in the earlier and even more obscure Gance effort LA FIN DU MONDE; 1931. The character of Jean Diaz in I ACCUSE plays like a refined and more believable version of Gance’s own character Jean Novalic in that film - there Jean is also a hopeless idealist driven to madness by a blow to the head. I ACCUSE expounds upon the character while dropping many of the overt religious symbolisms present in LA FIN DU MONDE (Novalic portrays Christ early in that film and reappears as such in a vision had by the female protagonist later on). THAT THEY MAY LIVE’s Diaz is an idealist, to be sure, but he is by no means pure. Having inadvertently stolen the wife of a friend, he intentionally puts himself in harms way by retiring from his position as an officer and rejoining the army as a common soldier - when the war is over he keeps his promise to Francois in steering clear of his wife, only to fall in love with his daughter instead. The characters in both films share a similar fate, as both are struck down in an attempt to help others - Novalic is felled by an angry drunken father after he saves the man’s daughter from being beaten by him while Diaz, as has already been mentioned, is brought down by a lynch mob.

Parallels between the two Jean’s are hardly the end though - the embodiment of Schombourg from LA FIN DU MONDE is present in I ACCUSE as well in the guise of the sleazy and greedily motivated Henri Chimay (Jean Max). Much like Schombourg from the earlier film, Chimay weasels his way into Jean’s life in despicable ways - by refusing to put an end to the proposed patrol early on in I ACCUSE and being thusly responsible for the untimely deaths of 11 men. Much like the previous character, Chimay has his eye on the same woman as Jean and, in the end, gets her. LA FIN DU MONDE’s Schombourg was a scheming opportunist who sought to ride the crest of what he saw as a false alarm and make a killing on the stock market. In I ACCUSE, Chimay intends to do much the same with the oncoming war by manufacturing the steel-glass armor proposed by Diaz. Unlike Schombourg, Chimay manages to avoid any kind of grisly on-screen fate - the former is killed when Martial Novalic and his rich friend sabotage the Eiffel Tower. The comet (RD: the inevitable onslaught of war) from LA FIN DU MONDE has its place here as well, though Gance passed on the idea of hiding the possibility of war behind a symbolic image and went straight to depicting war, itself. Unlike the oncoming comet from the previous film, the disaster of I ACCUSE is entirely man-made and entirely avoidable. The prior film’s focus on what was to be done after the disaster is here shifted to what can be done to avoid it all together.

Religious symbolism, while not quite so prolific as in LA FIN DU MONDE, is present in I ACCUSE as well. The opening scene featuring the overturned statue of Christ is a prime example, though there’s certainly much more to be found in the film’s running time. Jean Diaz is juxtaposed in the foreground of crosses a number of times throughout the film, namely in the mirrored scenes in which Jean meets up with Flo in Verdun and in the effective scene in which Jean visits Flo’s pub on the night of the storm after nearly rising the dead. The pictures of Diaz’s dead comrades are also organized into the shape of a cross on the wall of his shop. Jean himself is a Christ figure of sorts - though not so obviously as Jean Novalic in LA FIN DU MONDE - and dies by being burned to death while tied to a statue of the virgin Mary holding the baby Christ. Non-religious symbolism is rampant as well - a rifle smashing to the ground after falling from its place above a window at the end of one scene, a black cat running along a rafter, and the breaking of the skylight during the stormy night sequence are all prime examples. As with many of his films (NAPOLEON; 1927 in particular), Gance is here obsessed with absurd imagery, though he manages to contain himself largely until the film’s climax. The sequence depicting the rising of the dead is full of mattes and overlays and various optical effects that will be familiar to anyone who’s seen Gance’s NAPOLEON or his other aesthetically similar work. The sequence remains shockingly effective to this day due in large part to a chunk of it being devoted, much as it was in the 1919 version, to actual World War I veterans who’s faces were horribly disfigured in combat. The scenes depicting the final days of World War I itself are also well done, with many being filmed on large and elaborate sets (the ruins of Chattancourt, for example) - much of the footage present here is edited from the 1919 film and features a number of real-life soldiers in the midst of real-life combat as well as a few staged special effects sequences.

Some may consider the connection between this film and the nuclear age to be tenuous at best, but a number of themes present in I ACCUSE would go on to be showcased by atomic films of all sorts from the early 1940’s on through to today. The film’s overt anti-war posture is perhaps the easiest to assess if only because of its immediate visibility. The 1951 science fiction epic THE DAY THE EARTH STOOD STILL would adopt a similar stance and a similarly immense way of getting the message across, as would less familiar nuclear features like THESE ARE THE DAMNED; 1963. The fear of an invention created to prevent war being used to wage it more efficiently also appears, even in the earliest of atomic films. THE BEGINNING OR THE END; 1947 has its fictional scientist protagonist Matt Cochran frequently debating with himself over whether or not the atom bomb should be developed - a notable scene has him wandering through the desert after the first blast and musing that he had hoped the atom bomb would have been horrible enough to stop war all together, but that seeing the reality of it made him wish it hadn’t been built. Similar concerns are conveyed by Akihiko Hirata’s Dr. Serizawa in 1954’s GOJIRA - in that film the scientist develops the oxygen destroyer and is put in very much the same position as the Allied forces in World War II (this is a strange paradox, given that Gojira, itself, is a walking metaphor for the atom bomb - the idea of GOJIRA being sympathetic to the perspective of the Allies in WWII will be explored when that film is covered here in the future). Having developed a weapon of almost unimaginable destructive potential, he must decide whether to keep it a secret forever or use it against an enemy that will, if not stopped, be a constant threat to the world. In the end he decides to use it but, given the nature of his invention, commits suicide to prevent it from being used again. In historical perspective, I ACCUSE was released in its native country nary a year before Einstein sent the fateful letter that jump started America’s atomic ambitions and scarcely three before the Manhattan Project was underway (it was only a matter of months after its release that the Nazi war machine was on the ground in Poland), placing it some seven years before the first atom bomb test and the true dawn of the age of atomic cinema.

I ACCUSE is an obscure little film that, thanks in large part to its gut-wrenching climax, should go down as an important anti-war film right alongside JOHNNY GOT HIS GUN; 1971 and ALL QUIET ON THE WESTERN FRONT; 1930. One of the very best films that Gance would produce outside of the silent film era, I ACCUSE has been and is oft overlooked (having been released in the states only on VHS in a horrific transfer with equally horrific subtitles, this reviewer first remembers hearing of it during the Kevin Brownlow directed TCM special Universal Horror from 1998) and should be marked down as absolutely essential viewing for anyone reading this article.