Review of The Unknown Soldier (1955)

Moving picture, 177 minutes

Seen in 2017.

The Continuation War (1941–1944).

A war movie by and for the generation that fought the war, but a transparently hasty, cinematographically dull adaptation of the 1954 novel, which I haven’t read. The script is too literary, with soldiers often speaking quite trivially, at excessive length in static shots. Rather than capturing the “hurry up and wait” aspect of the draftee’s life, this just makes the movie run rather longer than it should. There is no literary ambition along the lines of The Naked and the Dead (1948).

References here: The Winter War (1989).

moving picture fiction