A Time to Love and a Time to Die

1944, the Eastern Front. The German soldier Ernst Graeber is given three weeks' leave and goes home. The city has been bombed, his house is gone and his parents are missing. Looking for them he meets Elizabeth, a childhood acquaintance whose father is in a camp. The two marry during his leave. The subject is not love but the limit of three weeks. Ernst and Elizabeth build a life and both know its end date; all of the tension is on the calendar. The form is Sirk's wide-screen melodrama, but the colour here is not decoration: a single green tree in the rubble, or a clean tablecloth, exists to show how impossible such a thing is in that world. The source is Erich Maria Remarque's novel. The author appears in a small role as Ernst's former teacher; his books were burned under the Nazis and he was stripped of citizenship. Douglas Sirk had also left Germany, and this is the only film he made about his own country; it was shot in Germany, and the studio reversed the order of the words in the title relative to the novel. John Gavin plays Ernst and Liselotte Pulver plays Elizabeth. Who it is for: viewers who like war melodrama and Sirk's use of colour. Who it is not for: anyone wanting action; the film is almost entirely one city and three weeks.