All Quiet on the Western Front

The Best Picture Oscar of 1929-30 went to All Quiet on the Western Front, directed by Lewis Milestone and based on the classic novel by Eric Maria Remarque. I read the book as a teenager and remember that I enjoyed it a great deal. I believe I saw the film many years ago, but I just took another look at it. Unlike The Broadway Melody, this film still has resonance more than seventy-five years later.

The film is about German schoolboys who go off to war during the first World War, but it could be about any young men in any war. At first, they are caught up in patriotic fervor, egged on by their professor, who has no idea what warfare is like. They want to fight--one boy says he wants to be in the infantry, because that's where the fighting is. But after their first taste of bombardment, the ugly reality is apparent. They live in trenches, hungry, side by side with rats, struggling to maintain their sanity and try not to get shot.

The boys learn under the wing of some older soldiers, most notably "Kat," gruff but lovable, who has a knack for finding food. The main character among the young men is Paul Baumer, who hopes to become a great writer. He is played by Lew Ayres, who ironically would one day be jailed during World War II for being a conscientious objector.

The dialogue was written by acclaimed playwrights Maxwell Anderson and George Abbott, and there are some fantastic scenes, particularly one where Paul makes his first kill, stabbing a Frenchman to death, but realizing he's just a man with a wife and child, just a man like anyone on either side. There's also a wonderful scene where the men try to figure out how wars start. One country offends another, Tjaden (Slim Summerville) is told. He doesn't understand that--does a mountain offend a field? Kat says the answer is to rope off a large field and have the country's leaders and generals strip down to their underwear and fight it out, and the winner takes all. Then, when Paul goes home after being wounded, he goes back to his classroom, and tells his professor off, saying dying for one's country isn't what it's cracked up to be. This film should be shown in classrooms all over the world.

The battle scenes are also quite well done. They may not have the realistic bloodflow of later films like Saving Private Ryan, but they are exciting and give one a flavor of what it must be like. The Western Front was actually shot in Irvine, California, but it seems real nonetheless. The very last scene, in which a soldier dies when reaching for a butterfly, still packs a wallop no matter how many times one sees it.

This film also outraged both sides, which must count for something. The American Legion threatened a boycott because it treated Germans sympathetically, while Germany banned it for years (and released rats in the theater when it did play) because it dared question the bravery of the master race. It was voted film #54 in the first AFI Top 100 survey, but for some reason fell off it in the second go-round.