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A Time to Love and a Time to Die (1958)

Director: Douglas Sirk

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From Time Out Film Guide

Under the opening credits of Sirk's penultimate masterpiece, set during World War II and filmed on location in Germany, the camera rests on the branches of a tree, its blossom forced early by the heat of a nearby bomb blast. It is the perfect symbol for the love between John Gavin's German soldier on leave and a barely remembered childhood friend, Lilo Pulver: a love forced by the everyday facts of war. This superb adaptation of Erich Maria Remarque's novel rests on a painful symmetry between the scenes at the Russian front and the central section in the half-ruined home town, and on a typically tough-minded acknowledgment of the irony that the doomed romance exists not in spite of the war, but because of it.

Author: PT 0000-00-00 00:00:00

Time Out Film Guide

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Cast & crew

Director: Douglas Sirk

Producer: Robert Arthur

Cast: John Gavin, Lilo Pulver, Jock Mahoney, Don Defore, Keenan Wynn, Erich Maria Remarque, Dieter Borsche, Barbara Rutting, Thayer David, Dorothea Wieck, Klaus Kinski full cast

Duration: 133 mins


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