Company K

The 1933 novel Company K, by decorated Alabama war veteran William Campbell March, is considered the American All Quiet on the Western Front – a brutally honest depiction of war from a man severely disturbed by it. The film adapts the novel — a modernist work made up of 113 segments each with by a different character from the fictitious Company K — into a continuous narrative. The episodic structure of the novel is retained but March himself becomes a main character, not as a protagonist but a witness. The film begins, as does the novel, in a small American town in 1933. Troubled WWI veteran Joe Delaney has just finished writing a book about his experience as a U.S. marine and the decimation of the men around him — how in the nightmare of war, each man is defined by singular moments in which his true character is revealed. Delaney describes a traumatic incident William March himself experienced — bayoneting a German soldier and killing him while on patrol in a bucolic forest. In the end Delaney/March visits the old barracks where he and his fellow marines trained for war. He has written his novel but can no longer remember their faces. But he does remember their stories which will will haunt him the rest of his life.

With Ari Fliakos, Terry Serpico, Thomas Sadoski, Tina Benko. Music score by Donald Stark and Craig McConnell.

“This movie has loads of integrity and lots of personal vision. Robert Clem should be happy that his labor of love turned out so well. That he also made the kind of movie Hollywood studios would hope to achieve on a tiny fraction of a Tinseltown budget is an amazing accomplishment.”

Bill Gibron, DVD Verdict

“Clem’s film testifies to the capacity of the combat war film and its conventions even as it so evidently aims to undo them.”

Marek Paryz, “I Shall lie Broken on the Broken Earth: William March’s Company K on the Screen” in The Great War in Post-Memory Literature and Film (2014)

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