La Bataille Du Rail

This 1946 first feature by the distinguished French director René Clément (1913-1996) builds upon the technique of his earlier non-fiction shorts, with its semi-documentary portrayal of the resistance activities of French railway workers during the WWII Nazi occupation, featuring real people rather than professional actors. The initial reels illustrate how the men regularly sabotaged German plans to employ the rail lines in their war effort—and the brutality with which the occupiers responded (one sequence, of the execution of several men, may be compared to the famous scene in Kubrick's Paths of Glory). But most of the film is devoted to recreating a single episode: the coordinated effort to stymie a Nazi convoy taking reinforcements to Normandy after the initial D-Day landings. The patriotic tone of the film is obvious throughout (reaching its apogee in the final triumphant scenes of liberation) but even though La Bataille Du Rail (The Battle of Rails) is a post-war celebration of the French Resistance, it's also a solid cinematic exercise—grittily authentic-looking and, in the elaborate closing sequence, genuinely exciting and suspenseful. It can serve both as a fine rejoinder to Leni Riefenstahl's Nazi propaganda films and as an excellent complement to Clément's exquisite fiction film on the effects of World War II, 1952's Forbidden Games. Recommended. (F. Swietek)