Douglas Sirk - A Time to Love and a Time to Die (1958)

Published by Ice Zero | Filed under Video

During World War II, German soldier Ernst Graeber leaves the ferocious fighting on the Russian front to return home on furlough but upon arrival finds his house decimated and his parents gone. He and a childhood acquaintance, Elizabeth Kruse, find one another amid the ruins of the town and fall in love, though Graeber knows he must eventually leave Elizabeth and return to combat.








“Life is the most melodramatic story of all” , said Sirk. In 1929 in Germany he had divorced his first wife and married a Jew, a fact which the first wife used after Hitler won power to get a court order barring Sirk from contact with their son, then eight, whom she was turning into a Nazi and the top child star in German cinema: Claus Detlef Sierck. Sirk was able to see his son only in movies, sometimes as a Hitler Youth. And when he fled Germany, Sirk had to leave his son behind. Toward the end of the war Claus was drafted, sent to the Russian front, and reported missing in action. After the war Sirk came back to Germany, and searched in vain for traces of the son he had left behind. He asked interviewers not to publish these events during his lifetime. But he made a movie, A Time to Love and a Time to Die, that was autobiographical.








Sirk goes out of his way to show not all Germans are Nazi madmen, but he comes to the conclusion that though there were some good men there were still not enough of them. One of the good men was Ernst’s former teacher Professor Pohlmann, whom he goes to for advice and finds the professor risking his life to hide a Jew (Régnier). The film’s urgent anti-war message is best captured in the premature bloom of tree blossoms in the hometown, caused not by nature but by the bombings. As for the film’s belief in humanity overcoming evil, the answer it comes up with is taken from the lips of Erich Maria Remarque: “Without doubt, there would be no need for faith.” There is a strange universal beauty found in the unlikely Hollywood film about a WW11 German soldier as the hero. The beauty is in the empirical images of the fearful symmetry between the horrors at the Russian front and the hometown in partial ruins, and in the doomed romantics trying to overcome the world gone crazy around them. Dennis Schwartz: Ozus’ World Movie Reviews

Thanks to unclemeat (KG) for the upload and screenshots.




Œuvre déchirante et intense sur la folie et l’absurdité de la guerre, Le Temps d’aimer et le temps de mourir marie le film de guerre avec l’intensité et la beauté du mélodrame. “Ce qui m’a intéressé, devait déclarer Sirk, c’est ce décor en ruines et ces deux amants. Cette histoire d’amour est inhabituelle. C’est un film qui est très proche de mes idées, particulièrement pour sa description de la brièveté du bonheur.”