A Time to Love and a Time to Die (Import , All Regions), Douglas Sirk

I have to admit that the only reason why I bought this DVD was the fact that Jock Mahoney plays a part in it. I had to watch the movie three times before I figured out which part Mahoney was playing. It's a very short scene during the war.Being a big fan of Douglas Sirk's glossy melodramas I expected more. This film cannot live up to his other classics like "All that Heaven allows", "Sleep, My Love" or "Magnificent Obsession" (Rock Hudson & Jane Wyman version).Lilo Pulver and John Gavin play their parts well, but both had better parts in other movies.

This is a great movie about how war affects the people who have to fight it and those who have to live with it. Too bad the Masters of Cinema edition is only available in PAL format. There are ways to get around that- the easiest way is to watch it on your computer and it is worthwhile to do so. Be careful, do not get the Korean import.It is a sad movie- but then, war is a sad business. It seems our country is always at war so we have suffering and broken families as depicted in this movie.

This is an amazing DVD - an American-made film about World War II (based on a novel by Erich Maria Remarque) in which all the characters are German and Americans are never mentioned - and the DVD is Korean-produced. But what a moving film it is: a Wehrmacht soldier on the Russian front, disgusted by the brutality of war, returns on furlough to his home-town in Germany to find it practically destroyed. He locates the pile of rubble that used to be his parents' home, but cannot locate his parents. As he searches for them, he finds a young woman whose outspoken father is now languishing in a prison camp and who, herself, has been pushed into one small room of the family home to make way for others who have been bombed out of theirs. One of her housemates is an officious harridan who makes it her business to spy on, and report, any perceived criticism against the Nazi regime. Naturally, even as bombs rain down upon the soldier and the girl, they fall in love. But it is a bittersweet affair, because dangling above their heads like the sword of Damocles is the end of his furlough. And probable death on the Russian front.Remarque, whose books were banned by the Nazis, must certainly have watched the war from the safety of his home in the United States with immense disquietude. His sympathy for what his former countrymen were enduring comes across movingly in `A Time to Love and a Time to Die,' as does his revulsion of small-minded people who have been handed great power, like the harridan in the girl's home: Remarque's sister was beheaded during the war after an accusation was made that she caused low morale for having voiced the opinion that Germany could not win the war.John Gavin plays the soldier and Keenan Wynn has a bit role, but all the other actors were unknown to me; Remarque has a small part, as well. The film, made in 1958, has the inevitable whiff of the fifties, but that did not stand in the way of my enjoyment of it. And while all the writing on the back of the box is in Korean, the actors speak English and the Korean subtitles can be removed.In the crowded annals of World War II films, `A Time to Love and a Time to Die' occupies a niche all of its own, and one no less interesting, exciting, or moving than the others. Highly recommended.

One of my all-time favorite movies!

A Time to Love and A Time to die is a classic film, and an usual one, since it tells a story about the horrors suffered by the average German people in World War II. I have many World War II films, but none are like this. If you're looking for a combat film you will be disappointed. To me, this is romance in the truest since with a powerful message about the insanity of war and how it affects the general public no matter what nationalities are involved. As General MacArthur said at the end of the war when accepting the surrender of the Japanese on the battleship Missouri, "War is man's greatest sin." A Time to Love and a Time to Die is a small snippet of that great apocalypse that fell on the world from 1939 to 1945. This is a great movie that gives us something to reflect upon these many years after the end of the war.

I had never heard of this movie until one night I stumbled upon it on late night cable. This is an incredible war movie which tells the story of a young German soldier (John Gavin) who must deal with the horrors of war while the Russians are knocking at the front door of the Third Reich. The German soldier willingly participates in the brutalities committed against his enemy while fighting an internal battle that all he has been taught is morally wrong. He sees his home town and own family destroyed by war and begins to question its worth. I wont go into how it ends but it is pretty climatic. This movie was made before my time but If you ever saw Gavin in his small part in Psycho, then you know just how good an actor he was. If you are a fan of war movies which make you think, take on the topics nobody wants to discuss, and the dark realities of war, then go get this movie!

Several yrs ago I read "A Time to Love and A Time to Die" by Eric Maria Remarque. It is one of my favorite novels. When I found out that there was a movie of it, I really wanted to see it.The film was made in the late 1950's, so it had that atmosphere about it, but I felt it did justice to the book. It is a romantic tale about two lonely souls who meet up in a war-scarred city in Germany as WW2 draws to a close. One is a German soldier who is war-weary, and the other is a non-Jewish woman whose father was taken to a concentration camp for speaking out against the war. Their love affair takes place amidst the ruins of the city they live in. The film does not have the classic "Happy ending" of 1950's American movies, but that is good,since it is true to the book, and adds to the poignancy of the story. I highly recommend both the film and the book.

Importantly what is the 'feel' that I get from this film that is over 60 years old, and that might interest a younger or first viewer ? Defeat and survival of the ordinary German people in a nutshell. Bombing by the British at night, bombing by the Americans by day, artillery barrages suffered by German troops on the Eastern Front from the Russians. At home a chance remark that could send you into a concentration camp if reported to the Gestapo. Not a glimpse of a car save for a couple of beautiful German fire engines. The country was on its knees and that flavour is stunningly brought out in this production, but like the fire engines, a flowering young love enhances the dourness of the story line, and thank goodness.One of the first post WWII Hollywood films that gave use a glimpse of war from the German viewpoint and fittingly made by a German who has enjoyed several retrospectives of his work since his death. Douglas Sirk is a re-jumbling of his real German name penned after he came to Hollywood after escaping from pre-war Germany.This is a melodrama, a favourite mode of Herr Sierck that divided and intrigued audiences with his depiction of everyday but contentious issues such as race and class often spiced with irony.Interestingly the film is based on another novel by Erich Maria Remarque, also the author of the famous novel 'All Quiet on the Western Front', and he has a small part in the film. John Gavin plays a German soldier on a brief leave from the Russian front who meets and falls in love with a young German girl played by Liselotte Pulver, (a dead ringer for tragic British actress Janet Munroe). Their brief relationship is skillfully handled by Sirk's direction and I hardly believed all the events shown during the film took place over a few short days and not years.Loved the film having first seen it on tv, in black/white, in the 1960's / 70's, and a joy to see it in pristine colour on this Eureka Masters Of Cinema 2-disc edition, the first disc has the full 128 minutes film with disc 2 brimful of extras.English subtitles, 128 minutes with a bonus of a French dubbed dialogue soundtrack. A booklet with plenty of stills from the film and some very arty praise from French director Jean-Luc Godard who is rabid in his admiration of the film.

A Time To Love And A Time To Die is one of a very small group of American films made during the 1950s, i.e. only very shortly after WWII itself, that explore the human side of the German experience of that epic conflict.The only other similar film, in this particular respect, that I've seen thus far is Decision Before Dawn. The latter is a black and white movie, as much espionsge thriller as war film, set on the Western and Home Fronts, whereas A Time To Love is more melodrama and romance, is set on the Eastern and Home Fronts, and is in bright Technicolour.Both depict decent young Germans as central characters, and both find these men back in Germany, struggling to reconcile their consciences with their roles in the war, and their relationships to the Fatherland and it's peoples.This film is based on a book of the same name by German author Erich Maria Remarcque (of All Quiet On The Western Front fame*), and director Douglas Sirk was himself also of German extraction, so it has a personal resonance for two of the key figures behind it.Despite their roles in the making of the film, which one hopes bring some authenticity to it, I found the choice of male lead, Frank Gavin, who plays German soldier Ernst Graeber, rather problematic. Decision Before Dawn's Oscar Werner was both actually German, and an excellent actor, making for a very convincing character, whereas I found Gavin too hammy and all-American to be very plausible. I was more than half expecting him to blurt out, 'Gee, ain't the Fatherland swell, baby!' at some point.Having said this, both films explore in different ways the moral compromises and complexities facing basically decent young men fighting on behalf of a toxic ideology. In Sirk's movie this theme ought perhaps to feel even more central, inasmuch as the film starts and ends in that infernal crucible of the Nazi quest for 'lebensraum' (a horrifically ironic misnomer, as it transpired, in that it was always more charnel-house than living space), the Eastern or Russian Front.It's really only the poignancy of this thread that prevents this film from being somewhat cornball, thanks to the rather hammy home-front roles of several chief actors, including Gavin himself, female lead and love-interest, Lisalotte Pulver, a Swiss actress who was at least a star of German cinema of that era.Amidst the ruins of the German homeland we see how civilians cope or go under, and the paranoia of the regime is evoked (the nosey conformist 'house-frau' is suitably repellent). We even meet a Jew in hiding, who's temporarily sheltered by Professor Pohl (played by Erich Maria Remarque, no less!), whose conscientious behaviour has predictable results.The ending is sad but predictable, and whilst it helps make one of the films central points, about the senseless waste of war (another thing it has in common with Decision Before Dawn), it still feels less convincing or weighty than perhaps it wants to.When the credits rolled I must confess I felt somewhat disappointed by this film, especially as it's packaged and marketed by Eureka as part of their Masters of Cinema line, and would have given it just three stars. However, in the course of writing this review I begin to think that, whilst Sirk's melodramatic style and the Yankee-doodle feel of some of the acting seem at odds with the subject, it is an interesting if uneven film, and worth watching.* As a result this film was sometimes referred to as All Quiet On The Eastern Front! In addition to the author making a cameo, it's interesting that Klaus Kinski also has cameos in both Decision Before Dawn and this film.

This is a brilliant adaptation of a great novel written in 1954 by German writer Erich Maria Remarque (mostly known for his master piece "All quiet on the Western Front").Except a mistake on my part "A time to love and a time to die" was the first big Hollywood production showing the World War II from German point of view, and even if Remarque was a declared anti-Nazi (he was a wanted man in the Third Reich and spend all the period of 1933-45 as a refugee in Switzerland), making this film in 1958 was a pretty courageous thing.An important thing to know before watching this most excellent film is that IT IS NOT a war movie. The story happens of course integrally during World War II, in 1944, and yes, there are some scenes from Eastern Front at the beginning and at the end of the film, but other than one big artillery barrage falling on German soldiers no actual fighting is showed. German soldiers march a lot in the mud and talk a lot about war and life in general, but the only shots they fire are directed against defenseless Russian civilians they execute "just in case" if they are partisans...This film describes mostly the story of one soldier, private Ernst Graeber (John Gavin), who in the spring of 1944 receives his first leave in two years. Most of the film describes the eventful three weeks he spends in the town where he was born. However, although not a big city, this place is now regularly raided by allied bombers, targeting local industries, but slowly flattening the whole town in the process. When looking for his parents, Graeber meets a girl, Elisabeth Kruse (extraordinary German actress Liselotte Pulver), whom he knew once when they were together in the same class in high school. They never were friends before and in fact they hardly ever spoke one to another when in school - but since then they both changed a lot and the world around them changed even more, and they are both terribly lonely... I will say no more here - you deserve to discover this beautiful film by yourself.Now, even if there is no fighting, this film is very dramatic and really keeps the viewer on the edge, because life in Germany in 1944 is incredibly dangerous. Daily bomber raids are a constant element in everybody's life, to such a point that some soldiers actually shorten their leaves and go back to the Eastern Front(!) because there at least they can shoot back at those who try to kill them... But an even greater threat is the omnipresent shadow of the Gestapo. People must all the time watch carefully their language as every careless word can make a difference between living another day or being send to the concentration camp or simply executed...This permanent state of fear at every moment of life (which affects even the Nazis themselves...) is possibly the strongest element of this film and it is a high achievement for a Hollywoodian production. Possibly the most terrifying moment of the film is a simple administrative visit in the Gestapo building, where a little, ugly and weird subaltern officer (played by Klaus Kinski in one of his first roles) just asks to fill some papers... Other than the quality of the original story this excellent description of the omnipresent fear was mostly made possible by the fact that the director, Douglas Sirk, who was half-Danish half-German, personally experienced between 1933 and 1937 life in the Third Reich (he escaped to USA in 1937 to save his Jewish wife from death). I do not think I ever saw any of Douglas Sirk's other films, but he certainly impressed me with this one...Although the love story is very beautiful and Liselotte Pulver is a delight to watch, this is definitely not a "feel good" film. It is in fact a pretty terrifying thing to watch, as other than the peripeties of the heroes, what it shows is a society which put itself in such a tight corner of hell, that there is virtually no way out. And even if people begin to do the right things again, it may be already too late to save them from death - although maybe not from eternal damnation, as a certain professor Pohlmann (played by Erich Maria Remarque himself) suggests it to Graeber in their most important discussion...Bottom line, this is an EXCELLENT film, to discover and watch absolutely and then to conserve preciously to watch it one day with your children (once they are big enough). I can not really say that I enjoyed it, but it certainly impressed me and made me think a lot.

Films by Douglas Sirk, with their subtle manipulations of surfaces, may not present themselves with the gravitas of, say, a Bergman or Herzog, but they are deadly serious -- and never more personally so than here. In A Time to Love and a Time to Die, Sirk, Danish born and German bred, films circumstances similar to those in which his son died. This is Sirk's penultimate film. In collaboration with cinematographer Russell Metty, he uses his long experience to make it one of his most visually striking. War may be turbulent, but among its fruits are static tableaux, rubble-ridden emptinesses, frozen landscapes within which the living move furtively, as if in nightmares that may all too soon dissolve into worse nightmares. (Even twelve years after the 1945 armistice, the film's producers had no problem finding desolate, bombed out locations.)In such a death world is there any place for fictions such as morality, for games such as art? In such a world is love mere encumbrance? An expensive luxury? Scene by scene the film examines these and corollary questions from different angles (as a gem's facets describe different contiguous angles). The film as a whole is indeed greater than the sum of its angles, its facets. It glows from within with the fitful light of human empathy. Here is no tract against war; here is an actual demonstration of how the mindset of war devalues our humanity.Because it portrays Germans not as types but as individuals (including Nazified individuals) A Time to Love and a TIme to Die was not warmly received after release. It waited fifty years for the respect it was due, respect provided by this superb edition.

A very long and drawn out almost epic of a movie, with some good editing it could be brought back to life, but I fear it will never happen . said to be one of his best (Douglas Sirk ) i must have missed that bit , a good Sunday afternoon movie as if you nod off you will soon catch up ..was looking forwards to this but alas disappointed .