I have long awaited a decent version of this anti-war classic which I first saw in college from a very bad 16mm print. Years later I got a Connoisseur Video Collection VHS copy of the film. It was slightly better in visual quality but it still suffered from subtitles that were incomplete as well as hard to read. That issue as well as the picture quality has been more than corrected in this new Olive Films Blu-Ray release. However I was greatly surprised to see that the ending of the film had been changed from the version I first saw and purchased. In the original version the principal character, Jean Diaz, comes to a very different end which is far more cynical and allows him the opportunity to utter the film’s title J’ACCUSE (I Accuse).
This new version removes that scene which lasts about 4 minutes with a shorter, more optimistic ending where war is completely abolished. I have read where director Abel Gance kept tinkering with the film for years and this ending seems to be a product of that tinkering. It still doesn’t rob the movie of its visceral power and although heavy handed in places and burdened with a romantic subplot typical of the time in which it was made, J’ACCUSE should be mandatory viewing in any serious film class as well as for anyone interested in European cinema.
Gance first made this material as a silent film back in 1919 which has also been restored and released on home video. That version is longer and more focused on other characters and the climactic ending where the War dead return to life is not nearly as startling or horrific as it is here in the 1938 remake. For those of you unfamiliar with the movie (and there are far too many of you) the story follows the life of Jean Diaz a poet and teacher who fights in the First World War and is brutalized by its horrors. He resolves to bring about an end to war by devoting himself to creating technology that will end war.
Of course his inventions are subverted by the powers that be and as the world prepares for the next global war (WW II which was a year away), he passionately summons the World War I dead to rise from their graves to stop the coming conflagration. This hallucinatory zombie sequence, years ahead of its time, once seen cannot be forgotten. Many thanks to Olive Films for making a quality copy of this masterpiece available. It’s just too bad they couldn’t have had the original ending. The use of stock footage has not been speed corrected which would have been nice but that would have made the restoration a lot harder and a lot more expensive.
The Capsule Critic 