The Young Lions (1958)
Directed by Edward Dmytryk

Film Review

Edward Dmytryk's overblown adaptation of Irwin Shaw's popular wartime novel The Young Lions is a sprawling and uneven affair that struggles to fill its over-generous two hours and fifty minutes of run time, but it has at least three things in its favour: riveting performances from each of its three lead actors, Marlon Brando, Montgomery Clift and Dean Martin.  For Martin, the film was crucial, his chance to prove that he could make it as a solo actor after his break-up with his long-time comedy partner Jerry Lewis - he acquits himself superbly, with what is quite possibly the best performance of his career.  Brando and Clift also manage to exceed our expectations - remarkably this is the only occasion we get to see them together in the same film.  Clift's sensitive portrayal of a working class Jew who triumphs over middle-class and racial prejudice is intensely poignant and true to life, although it is Brando who steals the film, with what is assuredly one of his finest character turns, totally convincing as an idealist young German officer who becomes sickened by the realities of war and the demonic side of Nazism.

Dmytryk's direction lacks its customary flair and too much of the film feels as if it was shot half-heartedly, with simple camera set-ups and no real attempt to build tension.  The contrivances that riddle the screenplay become increasingly absurd as the film progresses and a more committed director would perhaps have worked a little harder to turn these into cruel ironies of fate rather than what looks like lazy writing.  In parts, the film descends to the level of lowgrade soap, gushing with the kind of mawkish sentimentality that is an instant turn off.  The few battle scenes are competently staged but overall appear to be superfluous in a film that is fundamentally about the inner conflict within a man, rather than the external conflicts between men.  The three main characters all have a harrowing personal journey to negotiate, and for each of them the greatest enemy is himself.  One (Martin) is an outright coward whose only interest is to avoid being killed, at any cost.  The second (Ackerman) must overcome racial prejudice to prove himself a decent American citizen, worthy of the respect of his fellow comrades in arms and the family of the woman he hopes to marry.  The third (Brando) is driven to see what Nazism stands for and becomes ever more sickened by the cause he is fighting for, knowing that any attempt to resist it would be a futile gesture.

The storylines involving Dean Martin and Montgomery Clift are what you would typically expect to find in an American war film of this era, and here The Young Lions offers few, if any, surprises.  What makes the film so interesting, and so compelling, is the inclusion of the third narrative strand involving Marlon Brando's character, which, unusually, shows us the war from a totally different perspective, that of a decent young man who happens to be a Germany officer.  Bizarrely, it is not the square-jawed American GIs who grab our sympathies and emerge as the real heroes of the film - it is Brando's conflicted German Lieutenant Diestl.  Through a combination of subtle writing and even more subtle acting, Diestl is revealed to be a character of staggering complexity and there is hardly a scene in the film in which Brando does not make us want to weep for the horrible predicament he finds himself in, having to support a regime he knows to be inhumane and totally misguided.  It is a pity that the film had to end with a typically soppy Hollywood coda, rather than just a few seconds earlier.  How much more powerful and meaningful the film would have been if the last thing it had showed us was Diestl's casual butchery by a soldier who had known nothing of his agonising loss of faith and personal disintegration.  The Young Lions was a brave attempt at a different kind of war film, but in the end it is let down by its own pusillanimous reluctance to stray too far from the cosy conventions of its time.

Film Synopsis

On the eve of World War II, Christian Diestl has high hopes that Hitler's National Socialist Party will bring about a better future for his country, but his illusions are soon shattered by the harsh realities of warfare.  After the surrender of France, he meets and falls in love with a young woman in Paris, who makes him realise that he is on the wrong side of history.  Meanwhile, on the other side of the Atlantic, Noah Ackerman and Michael Whiteacre are called up to serve in the United States army.  Ackerman, a Jew, is viciously ill-treated by his fellow conscripts and platoon leader, whilst Whiteacre, a self-confessed coward, uses his influence as a well-known name on Broadway to secure a safe posting far from the front line.  Whilst Ackerman and Whiteacre are both improved by their wartime experiences, Diestl has his morale slowly eaten away as he comes to realise the full extent of the evil that his country has unleashed upon the world...