World War II has been a fecund milieu for filmmakers, one that has birthed countless movies during the second half of the 20th century and into the current one. As people still try to comprehend the madness that plunged most of the Northern Hemisphere into years of warfare, a common thread materializes: What the hell were we thinking? In a recent feature by Time Out magazine (assisted by Quentin Tarantino), the three best World War II movies were born from directors hailing from different countries: Come and See (E. Klimov – Russia), The Thin Red Line (Terrence Malick – United States) and Das Boot (Wolfgang Petersen – Germany). None of these films glorify battle, nor do most on the list. Conspicuously missing, however, is Bernhard Wicki’s 1959 masterpiece, The Bridge, one of the earliest antiwar films to emerge from Germany following the war.

Set in a small Bavarian town, The Bridge takes place as the war winds down. Germany keeps losing ground to the Allied forces and most know that surrender is eminent. In a last-ditch effort to keep the town safe, a group of teenage boys, conscripted into the army just a day before, are assigned to guard an old bridge leading into town, one that is scheduled to be blown up to prevent American forces from advancing. What begins as an errand filled with youthful brio devolves into a fight to the death as the group of friends must ward off American tanks with just a minimum of resources and no training.

The Bridge tells a common story for those in the Volkssturm, a militia made up mostly of Hitler Youth and senior citizens cobbled together to fight in the final days of the war. Established not by the army but by the Nazi Party itself, Hitler created the corps as a final-gasp of the Total War blitz to stop the Allied forces. With most of the German men dead or off fighting, only boys and the old are left to defend their towns. In The Bridge, Wicki goes to great lengths to portray this desolation and the reasons why the boys feel like there is no one else left to fight but themselves.

The film is based on a novel of the same name by Gregor Dorfmeister (under the pseudonym Manfred Gregor). A journalist who experienced a similar situation as a teenager in his hometown town of Bad Tölz in 1945 and the only survivor, Dorfmeister claims that he became a pacifist that day after seeing an American soldier burn to death before his eyes. Wicki does away with the structure of Dorfmeister’s book, streamlining the story into a chronological order and deleting character flashbacks that disrupt its main narrative. In fact, the first half of The Bridge is more a coming-of-age story about typical high school boys facing typical high school boy problems rather than an all-out war film. Wicki takes his time establishing his characters as they navigate problems with their families, school, girlfriends and one another. Yes, war is on the horizon, but it’s not truly a reality for many of the film’s young protagonists.

A marked shift to nightmarish violence is swift and brutal when the boys are suddenly thrust into the fight. What begins as almost idyll—the boys building a boat, chasing girls and drinking stolen liquor—changes into a landscape of shouting men, grime and explosions. Frontloading his film with nothing but character development makes Wicki’s second half all the more devastating. Everything goes wrong and when the unit’s commanding officer is killed in a misunderstanding, it is up to the boys to defend the bridge from the Americans on their own, the irony stemming from the bridge’s already scheduled destruction regardless.

When the violence starts, it’s brutal and doesn’t care for our sympathies to these young men. According to film critic Terrence Rafferty, “Wicki looks at his characters’ youthful delusions with both a fierce skepticism and kind of paternal sympathy.” These aren’t fierce Nazis running a concentration camp. This is a group of dumb, young kids that is hurtled into the worst depths of manhood via a trial by fire. Wicki also refuses to assign one of the boys as the clear protagonist. If any survive, it will be out of sheer luck rather than narrative distinction.

Leaving The Bridge off any list of best World War II films is a shame because the movie deserves a larger legacy than it currently has. Recently reissued by the Criterion Collection, the movie is a somber look at a time that is sometimes captured with bravado and inglorious violence. Wicki would go on to direct more films, but never really established himself as a beloved auteur. However, The Bridge did impact a generation of filmmakers, including Volker Schlöndorff, whose The Tin Drum (1979) features some of the same weary comedy that punctuates The Bridge. It doesn’t scale the same poetic heights as The Thin Red Line or possess the grand sweep of Das Boot, but The Bridge is an antiwar masterpiece, one of the first films in a tradition that is still trying to make sense out of such a terrible time.