Espoir

Begun in 1938 in Barcelona, but interrupted by the arrival of Franco's troops, Malraux's crudely made but historically fascinating film only drew on one episode from his novel of the same title. Basically an assemblage of memories of the anti-Fascist fighting during the Civil War, the dialogue scenes now look very inadequate. Whatare extraordinary, however, are the sequences of combat, a bombing raid filmed from the air, and the film's climactic set piece, a procession of over 2,000 carrying dead and wounded pilots down the mountain of the Sierra de Teruel to the music of Darius Milhaud.