All Quiet on the Western Front

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Summary: Remarque's "All Quiet": The Stripping Away of Illusion
Review: It is surprising that there are as few classic anti-war movies as there are. ALL QUIET ON THE WESTERN FRONT is one of them. What is even more surprising is that is was filmed in 1929 when Hollywood was just making the switch from silent to talking films. Director Lewis Milestone adapted the novel by Erich Maria Remarque and lost none of the power of the ghastly images on the printed page. What he filmed has not been topped in the seven decades since then. You will not find any reference to war that has glory attached to it, except perhaps to denigrate glory as a Hollywood adjunct to celluloid combat. There is no call, John Wayne or Stallone-like, to present killing as a means to an end. Here, mass killing and the horror of trench warfare strip away the illusion that war somehow glorifies those who are caught up in it. At the start of the movie, Lew Ayres is German college student Baumer, who one day while in class, gets suckered into the maw of war by his college teacher who regales his class with stirring tales of heroism set amidst some equally stirring martial music. Student Baumer quickly becomes Private Baumer. At their training depot, Baumer and his comrades still think war is simply another side of life. Their collective view of war is not unlike the view that Henry Fleming had at the start of Crane's THE RED BADGE OF COURAGE. Baumer soon finds out that with the first shots of war, the reality mugs the image. What director Milestone succeeds in doing has never been equalled. These new German recruits open the film as happy, confident and goodlooking. Quickly, they learn that war devolves them into blundering atavisms. Not only do they act ignobly and irrationally under stress, but they seem to get uglier as the picture progresses. This ugliness is not simply the result of missing a few baths or shaves, but almost as if they were subject to a regression that swoops tham back to their primeval ancestors. The effect on the audience is startling as it is forced to acknowledge that war destroys both the inner and outer man.

Ayres, of course, carries the movie as he alone seems to maintain his precious sense that his humanity cannot be frittered away even if his sanity might. The technology of the time, while quite crude by today's standards, is still stunningly effective in assaulting the eyes and ears of the audience in a crunching cacophany of disorienting images. There is a series of montages of French soldiers attacking entrenched German trenches and getting slaughtered by massed machine gun fire, and then incredibly enough, the Germans counterattack to meet the same fate. By the time the armistice is announced, the "all quiet" of the title, both Baumer, his comrades, and the audience have been stripped of their flimsy illusions that war has some end other than its cessation. ALL QUIET ON THE WESTERN FRONT serves to remind each new generation that the maw of war will gobble up warm bodies even more rapaciously than it will those illusions that led those bodies into that maw in the first place.

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Summary: "You'll get to go home before I do"
Review: This is a more realistic view of war, instead of the War Hero type movies you may be used to watching. The reviewer below who wrote "As always, the book is better"(someone by the name of Claire) complained about the sound and the fact that it was in black and white. I don't know if Claire knows it (let alone would care) but I believe this was the 1st movie with sound throughout the entire picture and no subtitles (the original Jazz Singer came out a year before Western Front, but even though it featured Al Jolson's vocals, all dialouge was in subtitles). Not only that, the war scenes (used by a revolving crane) introduced a new form of cinematography. A Cinema professor showed it in class when discussing the beginning of the sound era in movies. Lew Aires (who was 22 during the filming of Western Front) plays Paul Baumer, a soldier during World War I on the side of Germany. As the movie begins, a teacher over-enthusiastically exhorts his students to fight for their country. So Paul enlists and leaves enthusiastically to serve in battle. However, while seeing many of his comrades die in battle and after killing an "enemy" doesn't seem to be all it's cracked up to be, Paul has a change of heart. The DVD version talks about the original book written by Erich Maria Remarque and some of what went on the set and features biographies of the cast members and director Lewis Milestone.

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Summary: As Always, the Book is Better
Review: I read the book first, several times. It's my favorite. This movie is stagey, and hard for people used to modern sound and color to watch. It's a great story, but so much more is in the book. It's more about Paul's personal change during the course of fighting, not so much about action so I find you get so much more out of reading the book. Much more emotional, and you get to envision the characters as you like (I hate having a picture in my head and then the movie is completely different!) The 1979 version with Richard Thomas is better, if just for the improved cinematography.

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Summary: War...What is it good for?
Review: I am going through a phase where I want to see every movie that the so-called Academy granted "Best Picture". This film won in 1929 and I think was the third such feauture to receive this honor. The quality of the DVD is good when you think of how old the film is. The poor quality that arrives at times adds to the history of the film and film making in general. I wouldn't watch it without it.

This is a war film that makes no claims to be anything else. It brings to life the realistc brutality, comradeship and emotional strains involved with living on the battlefield. The film makers did a tremendous job on recreating war in France while filming just outside Hollywood. The explosives are real. Turn up the volume. The non-stop bombing might just begin to brush your nerves as if you were there.

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Summary: Extraordinary War Movie
Review: ALL QUIET ON THE WESTERN FRONT is based on the classic novel and concerns a group of young Germans who enlist for WWI together at the urging of their professor. The movie heartbreakingly follows this group through the horrors of war. Thousands of war movies have been made since, but AQOTWF remains one of the best attempts to capture war on film.

Although the soldiers are all German, others should have no trouble sympathizing with and rooting for them. Lew Ayres stars in one of his earliest roles as Paul, an idealistic young man who quickly becomes jaded by war. He is wounded and briefly returns home, where he realizes that he no longer belongs, so affected has he been by combat. One of the best scenes occurs when he returns to his classroom and sees the same professor urging a new and younger batch of youth to enlist.

AQOTWF was released in 1930, and at times it shows some age(e.g., some stiff acting). However, it's really a timeless movie. This copy is fairly good - the sound is a bit scratchy, but the captions are very good and help fill in any sound glitches. The extras include a brief written narrative of some beyond the scenes facts and a trailer. A true classic to be watched over and over again.

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Summary: Fatal butterflies
Review: As we open to the first scene of the film, based on the novel writen by Erich Maria Remarque, who was a German Veteran of WW1, and directed by lewis Milestone, we see a group of schoolboys, children really, listening to their teacher teling the boys why they must join the Army. Outside we hear the crowds cheering for the departing soldiers leaving for the battlefield. You almost feel the same pride for country weling up inside of each of these boys and almost feel yourself ready to run of to war with them. they march off from schoolwith dreams of themselves as victorious heros. They are sent off to training and become more tightknit in their hatred for their instructor, the towns postman. When they arrive at the front, they see no victory, only hunger, fear and death greet them. They fight and watch as soldiers die next to them,their friends lives ended beforetheir own eyes they kill and in one scene, the films star Lew Ayres, Paul kills another soldier and spends the night in a ditch trying to save him, then seeing him die as he tries to give im water. In one of the last scenes you see Paul, having just that day returned from R&R, walking along the road back to camp with Kat, Louis Wolheim a gruff looking and wondrful actor, they dive downto miss a bomb. Kat is hit and the not so young Paul says he will carry him back to camp. Another bomb, we are safe Paul says to Kat as he continues to carry the older soldier back to be bandaged. When they reach the hospital, Paul puts Kt on a stretcher and says he just needs bandaged, Kat is dead. The closing scene was, for me, quite dramatic. Paul, seeing a Butterfly, reaches his hand out to let the Butterfly lit on him, he is shot. Fade to black.

You are able to easily see that talkies are still quite new, many of the actors are still accustomed to the 'overacting' from silent filmwork. So many of the movements seem forced and overworked. But it is an amazing anti-war film. Interestingly, Milestone had originally wanted Erich Maria Remarque, the writer, to play the leadrole. After seeing the film go to the Cast & Filmmakers Bios, I was amazed at the many sccomplishments of the films stars. Rightly this film was awarded the Best Film Oscar in 1930. It spoke volumes then that today, especially in recent years, is still heard fresh.

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Summary: From Real to Reel
Review: What makes this movie so remarkable is that the story is told through a man as human being and not a soldier. It shows that they wanted to treat the opponents as human to human and not as enemy to enemy.

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Summary: The classic Oscar-winning anti-war film from 1930
Review: "This story is neither an accusation nor a confession, and least of all an adventure, for death is not an adventure to those who stand face to face with it."

One of the things that is surprising about "All Quiet on the Western Front" is not only that a German anti-war novel about the First World War was made into an Oscar-winning American motion picture, but that it happened so quickly. "Im Westen nichts Neues" by Erich Maria Remarque (who had experienced the war first-hand as a young German soldier) was published in 1928, when it was serialized in the "Vossische Zeitung," appeared in book form the next year in German and numerous other languages, became an immediate best-seller, and was filmed in 1930. The story of Paul Baumer, an everyman who confronts the horrors of war and comes to the realization that such conflicts are futile. The novel is also an indictment of any civilization that could allow itself to descend into a war and put its people through one.

The idea is a powerful one and as such forgives the shortcomings of this 1930 film, most particularly the performance of Lew Ayers as Paul. But it is his haunted likeness that looked out from the movie poster and continues to be the dominant image of the film preserved on the DVD case. The film is faithful to the novel (Maxwell Anderson was one of the scriptwriters) and, more importantly, was given a big budget of $1.25 million by Universal Pictures, who hired 2,000 extras for the battle scenes. However, unlike the book, which started with Paul in the trenches and had flashbacks, the film proceeds chronologically.

We begin with young Paul, a schoolboy who is caught up with his friends in the war fever and who joins the army expecting a grand adventure. Instead they find brutal discipline, enforced by the sadistic drill sergeant Himmelstoss (John Wray), who used to be the village postmaster. When they get to the front there is the shock of being shelled, seeing friends die, and learning hard lessons about not risking your life for a corpse. The showpiece of the film is a battle between the Germans and the French, involving some rather sophisticated camera techniques, which ends with dozens dead and the two armies right back where they started. Everything else that happens in the film after that point just reinforces that brutal reality. There is also a powerful montage involving a pair of boots that passes from one dead soldier to the next doomed comrade, a terrifying scene where Paul is trapped with a dying French solider in a shell hole, and an unforgettable epilogue

"All Quiet on the Western Front" won Oscars for Best Picture and Best Director for Lewis Milestone, working for the first time on a sound feature. Of the early sound films this remains one of the most watchable, and even the grainy black & white photography lends appropriate pathos. After all, there is not much difference between this what we see here and the film taken on the actual battlefields of WWI. But more importantly there was an effort here to make a great film and even though acting in sound films was in its infancy they succeeded.

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Summary: Excellent Film
Review: This is a much better adaptation than the later (70's?) version. I show it to my Sophomore English class.

It's interesting to cross over our discussion of the novel to the film adaptation, and discuss why the story is re-ordered in the film.

It's also interesting to compare to more current war films and discuss differences in film-making.

It is my understanding that many of the extras in this film were actual WWI soldiers helping to re-create battle scenes. I feel that many of the best battle scenes ever captured on film were done in this movie. (With very few 'special' effects!)

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Summary: Yeah, it's anti-war, but...
Review: One of the things that can get lost in reviewing cinema is political viewpoint. There are some people that can get pushed away from a great film because some form of political activism gets shoved into it. Needless to say, 'All Quiet on the Western Front' is an anti-war film. But the war involved is the First World War. By any standards WWI was the most senseless and brutal of the great wars. However, people will too often turn to this movie as an argument against any war. In fact, that may be true, I never did read the book, but don't be turned away because of any of that.

This movie is awesome. For a film from the early era of sound, it is epic. We learn to care about the characters, we see the evolution of young men in war, and we see the brutality and senseless death that was WWI. It's very entertaining and thought provoking.

Also, when you watch any movie based on a book, you really should suspend your knowledge of the book, and try to judge the median for what it is. Maybe you have read the book, and love every passage, big deal. Don't nitpick. A lot of people can get caught up in some of that.

This movie will be always an important one. It is the stronger of the two versions made. Not an essential movie for the video library, but worth having around.