‘When it comes to dying for country, it’s better not to die at all…’
Erich Maria Remarque’s anti-war novel All Quiet on the Western Front has been incredibly influential. It looms large over the work of Joseph Heller and Kurt Vonnegut and it’s no surprise that it has spawned two Oscar-winning film adaptations. While I loved Edward Burger’s 2022 iteration, the original film version also has its charms…
A group of young German soldiers led by Paul Baumer (Lew Ayres) soon discover the harsh realities of life on the front line of a terrible war. As a film from the German point of view, this adaptation was no doubt daring enough at the time of release especially considering it came just 12 years after the end of the war, and so, unlike the 2022 version, this one has characters speaking in their normal American voices (which is odd but understandable). Despite this, the powerful message of the film isn’t diluted. Indeed, this film is surprisingly violent for its era (coming as it did just before the prohibitive Hays Code that saw films forced to become less violent).
I’m currently in the midst of re-watching Band of Brothers, and this film’s DNA is all over that masterwork. Director Lewis Milestone crafts a wonderful mixture of convincing battle sequences and quieter moments, and it’s surprising how much the former stand up almost 100 years later and how much the latter are still so poignant and prescient. The themes of both the book and this film adaptation are universal and it is admirable that Milestone and his cast make no effort to lessen the impact of the source material’s robust anti-war message.
At over two and a half hours, All Quiet on the Western Front does justice to the novel and has clearly been an influence on every war film made since. As one of the earliest Best Picture winners, Milestone’s film should be on every cinephile’s list, not least because the complete lack of a background score gives the film a timelessness that many films from the same era don’t possess. An excellent exploration of the awful mundanity of warfare.