NFR Project: 'A Time Out of War' (1954)

 

NFR Project: “A Time Out of War”

Dir: Denis Sanders

Premiere: 1954

20 min.

This beautiful little film, barely 20 minutes long, helped to launch two brothers into the business and garnered an Oscar to boot.

Denis and Terry Sanders created this film to serve as Denis’ thesis at UCLA. It is a gentle, elegiac film. Two Union sharpshooters cover a river crossing sometime during the Civil War. A Confederate soldier holds the opposite bank.

The Rebel soldier calls out for an hour truce. The Yanks agree, and the two share the pleasures of the river, and even trade goods by hurling it across the river. One Yankee, determined to fish, finds a body – the remains of a Union cavalryman. The two men dig a grave and bury the body; all three soldiers fire their guns into the sky together in salute. The sun goes down.

The Sanders approach is simplicity itself. There are no directorial flourishes; the camera tells the tale as though it were true. The film’s black-and-white cinematography is stunning; it makes full use of the evening’s “golden hour.”

This low-key, assured short showed Hollywood that students ould craft excellent films as well – nd at that teaching cinema could lead to commercially viable careers for its students.

The NFR Project is one writer’s attempt to review all the films listed in the National Film Registry in chronological order. Next time: Lady and the Tramp.