[5] The war scenes include "some particularly brutal footage" of the Normandy landings, rest areas, WAACs dancing in slow motion with combat soldiers... "and then, the grim shaky records of the next campaigns—artillery barrage, automatic-weapons fire cutting down the distant running figures, and a final sweep of slumped corpses, obscene, rotting, flies unaffected by the presence of the camera.
At the ceremony, the veterans stand solemnly and remove their hats as The Last Post sounds over them and echoes through rooms of companies stricken with palsy, amputatations, resectioning, and senility.
Final scenes include a few old friends who watch a BBC documentary of their campaigns with little reaction and a compilation of 1944 liberation sequences, returning to wards of bedridden and semi-conscious veterans.
[8] However, as Ian McKay and Jamie Swift note, Shebib "shuns all patriotic tropes", and presents the audience images with a sense of irony that would have done Paul Fussell proud, for example juxtaposing "an ironically absurd war song" along with Gustav Holst's The Planets orchestral suite and a "throbbing rock anthem".
But then the lovely photograph dissolves to a toothless veteran in the pub, his face blank in some mindless odyssey, and we know that he was that boy, once; and by some magic we in the audience are all three, stinking carrion, bright youth, and haunted age.
[4] Mark McCarty describes John Granik's narration as "sometimes laconic, only reminiscent names of half-forgotten battlegrounds," and at other times, "consciously poetic" in the vein of Wilfred Owen or Siegfried Sassoon.
Certainly not the people who fought it", and wrote of a difficult-to-describe feeling evoked by the closing poetic lines, images, and music, "creating a rich emotional effect", a "fusion of exhilaration plus a sense of loss, a movement into accusation and uselessness.
The Canadian Film Encyclopedia describes the "moving and powerful documentary" as a "personal, passionate elegy for the past," and a "tautly structured, elegantly crafted dirge" reflecting the guilt and madness of war.It benefits from the inherent sense of irrelevance that serves as the central mood for virtually all of Shebib's films, and has been justly compared to such pacifist classics as Georges Franju's Hôtel des Invalides (1952) and Alain Resnais's Night and Fog (1955).
[1]Geoff Pevere calls the documentary a "wrenching portrait" of the "forgotten war vets", the most "eloquent attainment" of the balancing act of passion and objectivity by Shebib as a non-fiction filmmaker.