Douglas Sirk's A Time to Love and a Time to Die (1958)

 I find this film beautiful because it gives me the impression that the two leading characters, Ernest and his Lisbeth, with their gentle Preminger-like faces, manage, by shutting their eyes with a kind of passionate innocence to the bombs falling around them in Berlin, to get deeper into themselves than any other characters before them.                                                                                                                       

--Jean-Luc Godard (translated by Susan Bennett) on A Time to Love and a Time to Die (Screen, volume 12, issue 2)

It is a story very close to my concerns, especially the brevity of happiness.                                                     --Douglas Sirk on A Time to Love and a Time to Die (Sirk on Sirk, Viking Press1972)

A Time to Love and a Time to Die is Sirk's penultimate film and one of his most beautiful, with its screenplay by playwright Orin Jannings (from Erich Maria Marque's novel), music by Miklos Rozsa and widescreen cinematography by Russell Metty, who photographed a number of Sirk's films. Under the credits is a mood of foreboding, as the buds of Spring are gradually destroyed by the snow of Winter, producing a feeling of fatalism that is occasionally interrupted by brief moments of happiness.   

Ernst Graeber (John Gavin) is on the Russian-German front in 1944 as the Germans are in retreat, shooting civilians as they go.  Graeber eventually gets a brief furlough to his home in Hamburg and meets Elizabeth Cruse (Liselotte Pulver) as he looks for his missing parents, Elizabeth being the daughter of his parents' doctor.  Elizabeth and Ernst fall in love while hiding underground during the constant bombings.  Graeber continues to search for his parents while Elizabeth tries to find out what happened to her father, arrested by the Gestapo for suggesting that the Germans could not win the war.  Ernst and Elizabeth decide to get married on the last day of his furlough, spend their wedding night in a bombed-out art museum and the next morning Ernst heads back to the front. 

This technicolor film has a very limited palette, mostly blacks, greys and browns, with the only bright colors coming from the fires and explosions that are turning the whole city of Hamburg into rubble and the only blue coming from the always-threatening sky.  Sirk effectively uses the awkwardness of Gavin and Pulver to convey their youth, their brief moments of happiness (always interrupted by bombs) and their fatalism, underscored by Rozsa's melancholy music.