Under Four Flags

A kinetic palimpsest of 1918 celluloid, Under Four Flags stitches French vineyards, British coalfields, Italian olive groves and American steel towns into one trembling tapestry that marches toward the Marne. Rothafel’s camera, often wedged between shell-cratered ribs of churches, gulps smoke from the first mobilisation proclamations, lingers on women sawing wedding rings into shrapnel scrap, then catapults to muddy cantonments where Yank doodles of Statue-of-Liberty kisses float beside Tommies humming music-hall ditties. Beaton’s intertitles—half-biblical lament, half-bureaucratic telegram—chart casualty lists that bloom like poppies before cutting to the home-front’s ration-book theatre: Belgian nuns distilling ether in bell-towers, Viennese children swapping Kipling for potatoes, Anzac signallers tapping Walt Whitman in Morse across the Dardanelles. The film’s spine is not victory but velocity: troop trains become hospital barges become victory arches within a single dissolve, while the soundtrack—recorded by army bands six days before the Armistice—keeps slipping into off-key euphoria, as if history itself hiccups on champagne it hasn’t yet tasted. When the final reel erupts in simultaneous armistice bells from four nations, the image ghosts, overexposed, dissolving into white that feels more funeral than festal; peace arrives not as closure but as overexposed blur, a continent blinking at the sun after four years of gaslit limbo.