The film on which Howard Hawks' The Road to Glory was based, Raymond Bernard's Les Croix de Bois was produced and acted entirely by veterans of World War I (including Charles Vanel and other French actors). The film generated an impressive response on its release in 1932, critics and public alike hailing it as the ultimate artistic statement on the war, surpassing All Quiet on the Western Front in its honest depiction of life at the front. The impact of this rare French film is largely visual; its themes and narrative will be easy to follow in this un-subtitled print. In a recent re-assessment of Les Croix de Bois, film historian William K. Everson finds the film "tremendous," and notes that "all the big battle scenes in the Hawks film come from the French. (They used a piece of it earlier in Ford's The World Moves On; Ford fanciers claim that Hawks inserted it in his film as an homage to Ford!) Especially interesting is the manner in which the visual look of the Hawks film has been designed to incorporate the French footage so that it does not look like stock footage." Les Croix de Bois follows the fates of a sensitive, intellectual soldier, Gilbert Demachy, and his regiment of recruited bakers, farmers, laborers and other non-professional soldiers. "Here we have artistic sincerity," note the original New York Times review, "no frills, no lovely girls, no artifices, no freak photography, no declamation, no exaggeration. Raymond Bernard decided that nothing could be more dramatic or thrilling than the simple truth..."