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Simply A Masterpiece

Sadly Over-hyped

The film makes a home in your brain and the only cure is to see it again.

a film so unique, intoxicating and bizarre that it not only demands another viewing, but is also forgivable as a satirical comedy where the jokes eventually take the back seat.

I understand that the book was episodic, but that does not mean it translates into a good film that way.Poorly directed and acted, not to mention produced. How tough would it have been for the actors to at least have gotten haircuts? Not the best film about WW1. Not even close. Perhaps having one person being the producer, writer and director is not the best idea? The actors were not in the least convincing.Someone should have said "Whoa" before this was put together. Oh, and I wrote this review using the same disjointed style the director of this movie used. Do you think it made for a better review this way? I did not think so.

Company K by Robert Clem is a serious work that should be seen, and, more importantly, re-seen.The film begins with a quotation from William March's autobiographical World War I novel of the same name, but it could have begun with the quotation from Erich Maria Remarque's novel, All Quiet on the Western Front: "This book is neither an accusation nor a confession. It will simply tell of a generation of men who, even though they may have escaped its shells, were destroyed by the war." There are differences. Remarque's book was about German soldiers, whereas Company K is about American soldiers. And Company K is more of an accusation and a confession, although the film has an overall documentary feel.The plot is a string of episodes, each focusing on a key experience of a different soldier in the unit. The structure follows March's plan for his book where each story is placed on a wheel and the wheel spun "in an unending circle of pain." Some viewers might find this narrative structure too unusual because there isn't really a high climax. The end of the war is simply a brief episode bridging to the postwar traumas of Private Joe Delaney (March) and others. This anticlimactic episode is handled subtly: The soldiers don't jump up and throw their helmets in the air; they sigh, stare dumbly, and drop their helmets to the ground.Many other episodes have similar ironic strength. A country soldier who has never seen an airplane exclaims one's approach; he is strafed. Inexperienced officers talk Ivy League politics but make battlefield blunders; one attempts suicide and another is murdered by an exhausted enlisted man. Two soldiers with grumbling stomachs eat blood-soaked enemy pumpernickel. An experienced French prostitute admits that she had promised to save herself for her boyfriend until he was killed early in the war.In a prologue scene before the opening credits, Delaney tells his wife of his book about the war. She advises him to leave out the part about murdering a group of German prisoners. It's a well-chosen prologue -- the events surrounding that episode and its aftermath are the film's most powerful.The young actors are excellent and perform with conviction. Dialog is well written and delivered. The authenticity of uniforms, weapons, vehicles, and battlefield locations is impressive. There is no cast of a thousand extras, but the judicious use of actual WWI footage expands the scope some.Company K is one of those few films that get better with re-seeing. Fresh nuances appear each time – wiping blood off bayonets, soldiers crossing themselves as shells falls on friends, battle-fatigued faces – and the effect grows. This film ought to be studied alongside the novel in college courses.

Based on the novel by William March, Company K tells the story of Joe Delaney who is trying to write a book about his experiences during WWI. While writing about the others soldiers in his company, he remembers each of them through a specific incident that each was involved in. I was recently lucky enough to receive a preview disc of this film and I enjoyed it all, having been unsure what to expect after hearing that it was not a conventional war film. The film is not unconventional, however it is different in the way that it separates the different stories, using frames with each character name on to show who the following part of the story is focusing on. Although lacking the budget of major Hollywood releases, Company K contains many well-shot action sequences, which, combined with the scenes off the battle field create an interesting portrayal of the soldiers during the war. The most memorable moments include a plane attack, the shooting of prisoners and going over the top to find that the Germans aren't firing. Overall I found this an enjoyable film and is a must-see for fans of war films.

Before he found his writer's voice, writer William March spent the better part of fifteen years thinking about the horrors he experienced as an infantryman in World War One. The book was titled "Company K," and has become a war classic alongside "Johnny Got His Gun" and "All Quiet on the Western Front." Seventy years following the book's publication, filmmaker Robert Clem has converted March's story into an accessible and engaging documentary."Company K" is Clem's latest, and in my opinion, best work. The film provides a stark and compelling look at the First World War in which 100,000 American men died, although the memory of that war has virtually vanished. (I know Robert Clem and his work from the documentary he made partly of the life of my grandfather, in another WWI film "War Birds: Diary of an Unknown Aviator.")Using a score of vignettes that roughly follow March's written format, the film portrays war's farce and horror. Here is a young soldier joining his cohorts in a French bar. One of the hostesses seduces the man by telling how her husband recently died on the Front. It might have turned into a love story, except for the fact that as soon as they return to the bar, she moves on to the next soldier. Our naive protagonist is initially dumbstruck, and then becomes enraged, attacking his company mates. A nice allegory of how war operates on the push-pull emotions of lust and betrayal. Another off-battle scene could easily have occurred in peacetime. The company's commanding office bullies his men relentlessly, tearing up their shore passes one by one as he throws their washed clothes into the mud. "Wash them again," he commands. The men are crestfallen. These opening scenes quickly move to grittier stuff. If it's gore you're looking for, you won't be disappointed. The violence is low key--and devastating. One scene shows two soldiers coming across a dead German. The men are hungry, and discover a loaf of bread on the dead man. The scene might not work in color, as the realism could prove a distraction. When the men discover the bread to be soaked in the soldier's blood, they hesitate. One after the other they dig in, swallowing every bite. Another scene develops more slowly. Americans are ordered to shoot German prisoners. At first the men resist, but then comes the clincher. "These prisoners are not really surrendering," the sergeant tells them. "It's an old trick. The sergeant's words prove effective. His men's astonished sense of betrayal pushes them into slaughtering their counterparts. The scene proves to be a harrowing preview of the Nazi techniques used twenty years later. Company K is particularly instructive in today's political turmoil. You won't hear any arguments among academics or war hawks that the Great War lived up to its name, or succeeded in making the world Safe for Democracy. In Robert Clem's "Company K," we experience what poet Robert Lowell called war's "blundering butcher" as it tromped across Europe and left scars that remain with us today.