Broken Lullaby

Directed by Ernst Lubitsch, Broken Lullaby follows a French soldier (Phillips Holmes’ Paul Renard) as he attempts to make amends with the family of a solider he killed during World War I. There’s little doubt that Broken Lullaby gets off to a less-than-promising start, as Lubitsch, working from Samson Raphaelson and Ernest Vajda’s screenplay, kicks the proceedings off with a sluggish opening stretch that contains few attributes worth wholeheartedly embracing – with the arms-length atmosphere compounded by an initial emphasis on stilted, unconvincing dialogue and performances. It’s clear, then, that the picture improves immeasurably once Holmes’ character arrives in Germany to seek forgiveness, as the movie, which boasts a terrific sequence wherein Paul first meets with that aforementioned family, slowly-but-surely morphs into an overwrought yet compelling melodrama that builds towards an unexpectedly potent finale – thus cementing Broken Lullaby‘s place as a hit-and-miss that is, to an increasingly prominent extent, more the former than the latter.

**1/2 out of ****

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