In this First World War drama, from 1936, the director Howard Hawks, working with a script co-written by William Faulkner, presents the destruction of bodies and minds in trench warfare with cold, harrowing plainness. The howling agony of a wounded soldier stuck on barbed wire on a blasted plain, the hectic fear of soldiers who hear the enemy burrowing beneath their barracks, and the wizened ravage of the commander, Captain Paul La Roche (Warner Baxter), who has lost half his regiment in battle and lives on drink and pills, are balanced by the silent self-sacrifice of honor-bound fighters and the lusty, raucous ribaldry of a gruff veteran sergeant (Gregory Ratoff). But when the captain’s mistress, Monique La Coste (June Lang), a hardened-porcelain field nurse, takes refuge in a basement, she meets a bluff-humored, tender-hearted musician, Lieutenant Michel Denet (Fredric March)—La Roche’s second-in-command—and romance ensues. The landscape of smoke and ruins, the moral burden of battlefield authority, and the haunting proximity of death infuse the affair with frantic urgency; for all the steadfast courage and patriotic passion, Hawks and Faulkner leave a blank, metallic aftertaste of no exit.