Word: gregorer
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...Bridge (Allied Artists), adapted from the novel by Manfred Gregor, is a skillful and ferocious West German film (with English subtitles) that examines one of the more horrible absurdities of World War II: the war's end draft of German schoolboys, none of them trained, many of them thrown into Hitler's crumbling defenses as "human sandbags...
Summer bonus: four remarkably fine first novels. The Bridge, by Manfred Gregor, a brisk, bitter account of teen-age Nazi conscripts, thrown into the suicidal campaign of 1945; Now and at the Hour, by Robert Cormier, the touching story of how death brings dignity to an obscure factory worker; To Kill a Mockingbird, by Harper Lee, an uncommonly well-written tale about the irregular but effective education of the most appealing little Southern girl since Carson McCullers' Frankie; and The Paratrooper of Mechanic Avenue, by Lester Goran, more growing pains, but this time those of a less savory hero...
Plus four remarkably fine first novels: The Bridge, by Manfred Gregor, a brisk, bitter account of Nazi teen-age conscripts thrown into the suicidal campaigns of 1945; Now and at the Hour, by Robert Cormier, the touching story of how death brings dignity to an obscure factory worker; To Kill a Mockingbird, by Harper Lee, an uncommonly well-written tale about the irregular but effective education of the most appealing little Southern girl since Carson McCullers' Frankie; and The Paratrooper of Mechanic Avenue, by Lester Goran, more growing pains but this time those of a less savory hero...
...boys think they are replacements to take over their position. Discovering that the unit is really a demolition team come to blow up the bridge, Scholten cries hysterically: "Why did we have to defend it, then? Five are lying over there who've fought for this bridge." Author Gregor's final irony: after driving the demolition squad away from "our" bridge, Scholten is killed by a fellow German...
...surrounded by sweet, long-suffering mothers and avuncular lieutenants, with hardly a Nazi in sight. But these scenes from the boys' past merely serve as counterpoint to the adventure at the bridge and as clues to the variety of boyish responses, which range from terror to heroism. Gregor's bitter little novel labors no point, nor does it have to. The futility it illustrates would have been depressing enough even if it had been grown men who held the bridge. Its special dimension of bitterness grows, without overstatement, from the fact that children suddenly forced into...