A Grainy War

The Guns of August, showing shrewd fidelity to its source, begins with film clips that vividly reproduce the opening of Barbara Tuchman's witty and colorful history. The time is May 1910, and a matchless assemblage of European royalty has gathered in London for the funeral of King Edward VII. Striding among the plumes, epaulets and gold braid are Edward's nephew, Kaiser Wilhelm of Germany, King Albert of Belgium and Austria's ill-fated Archduke Franz Ferdinand, three players already swept up in the genesis of a tragedy to be known as World War I.

After an auspicious start, however, Guns runs an erratic course in outlining the ancient rivalries that lead to the Archduke's assassination at Sarajevo, thence to the rape of Belgium, and the devastating battles of attrition launched at Verdun and the Marne. Vignettes at the Czarist court are fascinating, and one oddly heartwarming sequence (marred by a fake shot of a meter clocking up a fare) shows the famed 600 vintage Paris taxis rattling off to the front as troop transports.

But this ambitious documentary understandably bogs down. Struggling to render a superbly organized book in capsule form, it is limited to film available in archives, all of it at least half a century old. The result is too often a barrage of names and statistics, accompanied by endless cycles of grainy newsreel footage: statesmen shake hands, famous field marshals solemnly confer, the 14-in. guns boom and recoil, the tanks rumble, the infantry scatters. And the audience fidgets, uneasily aware that the horrors of war have begun to seem less tragic than tiresome, and that a picture is sometimes less eloquent than a few well-chosen words.

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