The Bridge

Bernhard Wicki's The Bridge (German: Die Brücke) opened in West Germany in October 1959 and became one of the founding works of postwar German cinema's reckoning with the Nazi era. It was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film at the 32nd Academy Awards in 1960, and won the Golden Globe in the same category that season.

The screenplay adapts Manfred Gregor's 1958 autobiographical novel of the same name. Gregor (the pen name of Gregor Dorfmeister) had been a sixteen-year-old Hitler Youth member assigned to defend a bridge near Bad Tölz in the last days of the war, and the book was a thinly fictionalised account of it. Wicki, Austrian-Swiss-born and then in his early forties, had worked as an actor and theatre director in Vienna and Munich before he turned to directing films; this was his second feature.

The cast is almost entirely teenage non-professionals recruited from Bavarian secondary schools, with Folker Bohnet, Fritz Wepper, Michael Hinz, Frank Glaubrecht, Karl Michael Balzer, Volker Lechtenbrink and Günther Hoffmann in the seven principal roles. Gerd von Bonin shot it in stark, high-contrast black and white. Few European anti-war films have had as much influence, and it belongs on the shelf with Jean Renoir's La Grande Illusion (1937) and Stanley Kubrick's Paths of Glory (1957). Wicki later directed sequences of The Longest Day (1962) and kept working in German cinema until his death in 2000.