Focus Features

In 1958, more than 20 years after he’d escaped Germany, director Douglas Sirk returned home to make A Time To Love and A Time To Die, a World War II drama told from the perspective of a German soldier. In it, Ernst Graber (John Gavin) returns home from the Russian front and falls in love with Elizabeth (Lilo Pulver), grasping a brief moment of happiness before being sent back to the war. Sirk, who was actually of Danish descent, had grown up in Germany, studying and working in theater in the Twenties and Thirties. In 1934, he started directing films in Germany before his leftish politics and Jewish wife made it necessary to flee the country in 1936. While he became famous for his widescreen, Technicolor melodramas, like Written on the Wind and All That Heaven Allows, Sirk never lost his German roots. When Erich Maria Remarque’s 1954 novel A Time to Love and a Time to Die became available, Universal bought it up. (Universal’s 1930 adaptation of Remarque’s novel All Quiet on the Western Front had had become a film classic.) Sirk’s decision to film A Time to Love and A Time to Die in Germany marked a homecoming of sorts. While he employed a mostly German cast, the post-war nation was not completely film-ready. The great studio UFA was under the Russian command, and therefore off-limits, and many buildings were still in rubble. The production team ended up propping up walls, adding new doors, and repainting ruined buildings to make them serviceable. Upon its release, the film suffered critical apathy, if not disdain. The New York Times panned it, while the Saturday Review accused it of whitewashing history: "Hollywood is, in fact, creating a concept of the 'good' German...who remained strangely ignorant of Hitler's purposes." Indeed, the film was banned in Russia and Israel for its heroic portrayal of a German. At the same time, Jean-Luc Godard, writing for Cahiers du Cinema, championed Sirk and the story: “I find the film remarkable because it gives me the feeling that Ernest and his Lisbeth, this couple with the smooth Premingerian faces, by closing their eyes with passionate simplicity in Berlin under the bombs, ultimately delve deeper into themselves than any other character in a film to date.”