I wanted to but couldn't!

Absolutely the worst movie.

Although it has its amusing moments, in eneral the plot does not convince.

Great movie! If you want to be entertained and have a few good laughs, see this movie. The music is also very good,

The 2006 restoration of this amazing 1919 film presents one of the very best opportunities to learn about the period from watching a contemporaneous film. Aesthetically, it stands on its own merit as a completely engaging and emotional piece, which on the whole deserves a much wider audience. The restoration drops whatever there was of a phony happy ending in the 1922 re-release, and adds an excellent score by Robert Israel. Israel scores are a quick tip that a silent film has been given a sensitive and elegant restoration that will be very palatable to modern tastes.The story is a complex family/romantic melodrama built around a poet in love with a woman trapped in a bad marriage to a violent man. With the war, the two men become comrades in arms, and complications ensue. (I really dislike reviews that go on and on telling the film's story. If someone is going to watch the movie, it is up to the director to tell the story in his own style and at his own pace.) I believe the film is mischaracterized as an anti-war film. No one is really for war, so a realistic film like this by a veteran and using real footage will include a lot of pathos that will serve the purpose of an anti-war message. But everyone is anti-war, the difference between a pro-war and and an anti-war film is that a pro-war film blames the war on the enemy and creates situations for nobility based on service of the just cause. An anti-war film turns the proponents of war into greedy liars, emphasizes the humanity of the enemy, and creates situations for nobility based on refusal to participate in the war. So defined, this piece (like The Four Horseman of the Apocalypse - 1921) is a pro-war film.

This film by Abel Gance was lost for many years but has now been restored from a number of sources and made available for viewing by the Nederlands Museum. Gance's later silent spectacular Napoleon is rightly revered for its innovation and inventiveness - but is the same true of his war epic, J'accuse? In three parts, this film is first a conventional love triangle between the tiresome and bullied Edith, her drunken husband Francois, and dreaming poet Jean. But when the great war strikes, it will affect them all in ways they can't imagine.With some great images, especially in parts one and two, and for the most part, restrained acting, J'accuse is a powerful plea against the waste of war. For a film made ninety years ago, it has a modern feel with numerous close-ups, overlays, and other camera tricks. Although a bit ponderous in places it does not flag and is still extremely watchable, and relevant in a world where war has not yet become a thing of the past.J'accuse deserves to be regarded highly, and shows Gance to have been a skilled and ahead-of-time filmmaker in the silent era.

The first thing to bear in mind is that there are actually two movies ,the 1919 silent film -and its watered-down editing of the twenties- and the 1937 talkie which is (and is not )a remake.The silent version was filmed when the war was just over ,using real pictures of that slaughter.That was first intended as an anti -German manifesto -but only the rape scene with the big German shadow on the wall shows it-.This is the work of a pacifist ,Abel Gance,the French David Wark Griffith .The director is in the film:he is Jean Diaz -even if he does not play the part- the pacifist poet who writes an hymn to the sun (Gance already displays his love of poetry :later in a duel in "le capitaine fracasse" and in almost the whole "Cyrano and D'Artagnan" ,the actors declaim verses);Gance's depiction of a small village has the beauty of a pastoral:this quiet nature haunts him as the final pictures of "la fin du monde" (1930) bear witness.He bows to no one when it comes to direct movements in the crowd : the inhabitants of the village gathering around the decree of mobilization is a great moment.As is the "farewell scene" : Gance uses only hands on the picture and emotion reaches unbelievable peaks.Two men are fighting in the trenches.They love the same woman ,one of them is her husband ,the other her lover (Jean Diaz).At times the movie might seem patriotic -which the remake was not at all- but Gance manages to show his disgust with war.The subtitles include moving real soldiers' letters to their family.His hero becomes mad and he thinks that soldiers should write lots of letters so that their wives would receive news long before they were dead.When he comes back to his village ,the film suddenly turns supernatural,and that's Gance's genius ,one of the most famous scenes in the French cinema,which will be even more impressive in the remake:here anger gives Gance the strength of ten.Let the Dead rise from their graves! War casualties' rise from the grave will haunt the viewer till his death."Your dead will come back,Diaz says,and they "ll ask you for an explanation! Shame on you ,unfaithful wives, war profiteers , politicians and president!A dance macabre, a skeletons' dance in a ring had already warned us.The 1937 remake -by no means inferior to the silent work- had to be different:Hitler had come to power and as Jean Renoir said that very year ,"we are on the verge of a "grande illusion" .So Gance 's snatches of patriotism had disappeared and been replaced by strength born from despair .The 1937 "J'accuse" was a distraught plea for an universal peace ,and, in spite of its grandiloquence,it still stands today as one of the greatest pacifist works of all time.Besides ,the coming of sound allowed Gance to include ferocious lines (such as : "pretty soon ,there won't be enough wood to make crosses" ) A question I will always ask myself:I wrote it in my comment on "Austerlitz" :why was a convinced pacifist such as Gance so fascinated by a warrior like Napoleon (to whom he devoted two works)?

It's hard to describe the images you will see in this film. They cut to the very core of the most horrific results of war. It is a fantasy which will leave you with images that will not leave you.Any mention of the particulars here might spoil the experience of this great silent offering.