A Time to Love and a Time to Die **** (1958, John Gavin, Liselotte Pulver, Jock Mahoney, Keenan Wynn) – Classic Movie Review 6669

John Gavin made two films with German-born director Douglas Sirk in the late Fifties – A Time to Love and a Time to Die (1958) and Imitation of Life (1959) – that greatly raised his profile. Gavin won a Golden Globe as Most Promising Newcomer – Male for playing Ernst Graeber in A Time to Love and a Time to Die.

Sirk’s A Time to Love and a Time is notable as one of few American World War Two films where the focus is the enemy and remarkable as a film where German-born director is returning to film in the country he fled from for an American studio, Universal. Happily, as with Hitchcock, Sirk’s reputation was on the rise in 1958, thanks to the French and Jean-Luc Godard’s support in Cahiers du Cinema. It is his favourite of Sirk’s films.

The clean-cut all-American actor John Gavin is perhaps oddly cast but he is surprisingly good as German soldier Private Ernst Graeber, who is among a company of German soldiers fighting on the Russian front towards the end of the Second World War in 1944. He returns on leave to his heavily bombed hometown and searches desperately for his parents.

Then he re-meets, falls in love with and marries Elizabeth Kruse (Lilo [Liselotte] Pulver), a distant friend from childhood, before returning to the horrors of the Russian front, in director Douglas Sirk’s convincing 1958 film version of Erich Maria Remarque’s 1954 anti-war novel.

The movie is packed with style, ambition and the best intentions, and director Sirk goes full out to whip up enormous personal and anti-war feeling, with romantic scenes in Germany and realistic scenes on the eastern front. The realism of filming on location in West Germany is backed up by the extraordinarily effective performances. Gavin and Pulver are sweet and charming together.

They shot in war-torn Berlin and studio work was done at the Central Cinema Company Studios in Spandau, while the Russian battlefront sequences were filmed in northern Bavaria.

In his only on-screen performance, Remarque, also author of All Quiet on the Western Front, appears as an old teacher, Professor Pohlmann. It is a rare instance of a novelist appearing in a filmed adaptation of his novel.

Notable non-American players include the Swiss-born Dorothea Wieck, Klaus Kinski and Dieter Borsche. Most of the non-American cast spoke English in the film so only a few of the German-speaking actors are dubbed in the English version.

A Time to Love and a Time to Die is written by Orin Jannings, shot in Eastmancolor and CinemaScope by Russell Metty, produced by Robert Arthur and scored by Miklos Rozsa.

Also in the cast are Keenan Wynn, Jock Mahoney, Thayer David, Agnes Windeck. Dorothea Wieck, Jim Hutton, Don DeFore, Klaus Kinski, Dieter Borsche and Kurt Meisel. It is Jim (then Dana) Hutton’s first film.

Sirk, who was born Hans Detlef Sierck on 26 April 1897 in Hamburg, Germany, started his career by making films for Germany’s Ufa Studios but fled to America during the Nazi regime. He and Remarque became friends during the shooting and later in Switzerland became neighbours too. Months after the release of the film, Remarque married actress Paulette Goddard in a marriage that lasted until his death in 1970.

Sirk also made the war films Hitler’s Madman (1943), Mystery Submarine (1950) and Battle Hymn (1957), though he is most famous for his Technicolor melodramas Written on the Wind (1956); Imitation of Life (1959); Magnificent Obsession (1954) and All That Heaven Allows.

RIP John Gavin, who died on 9 February 2018, aged 86.

RIP John Gavin, also star of Psycho, Douglas Sirk’s Imitation of Life, Kubrick’s Spartacus and Thoroughly Modern Millie (1967), who died on 9 February 2018, aged 86.

© Derek Winnert 2018 Classic Movie Review 6669

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