ALL QUIET ON THE WESTERN FRONT Movie Review
1930 Lewis Milestone
“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. It will try simply to tell of a generation of men who, even though they may have escaped its shells, were destroyed by the war.”
That's the preface to the first great war film, which is also the first great anti-war film. In adapting Erich Maria Remarque's novel, director Lewis Milestone creates many of the conventions and archetypes that virtually all other serious war films acknowledge. The contemporary viewer discovering the film will recognize every key scene, character and conflict. They've been copied and transformed countless times.
The story begins in a nameless German town in the first year of World War I. Young Paul Baumer (Lew Ayres) is an impressionable high school–age student who believes his professor's fervent patriotic sales pitch. “You are the life of the Fatherland, you boys,” the teacher declaims before the all-male class. “You are the Iron Men of Germany! You are the great heroes who will repulse the enemy when you are called upon to do so!” Spontaneously, Paul and several of his classmates enlist in “The Great War.” Everybody's doing it—even the post-man (John Wray). The boys are simply afraid that it'll all be over before they've had a chance to taste glory. Their first disillusionment comes early.
Given an officer's uniform, the friendly hometown postman is transformed into a strutting, self-important little tyrant. Their training is brutal, dirty, and painful. Despite some stage-bound cinematic techniques—Milestone tends to create a proscenium arch to frame many of his interior scenes—the film deftly captures the speed and ease with which the individual becomes one small cog among many in the military machine. Once the young men move toward the front, the pace picks up. That's where they meet the scrounger, Katczinsky (Louis Wolheim, with a wonderful catcher's mitt of a face), and his pal Tjaden (Slim Summerville), a couple of seen-it-all veterans who take the youngsters under their wings.
After that, the film turns to the horrors of trench warfare—incessant shelling, rat infestation, claustrophobic underground barracks. The only area where the film might be accused of a rose-colored vision is in the depiction of hospitals and medical procedures. It's a bit antiseptic there, and makes no mention of the diseases that claimed so many lives, but that is a niggling criticism. Instead, Milestone focuses directly on combat and the daily life of a soldier, and he creates some indelible images: hands on barbed wire, the boots, the beans, the French soldier (Raymond Griffith) in the crater, and, of course, the famous “swimming scene” with the French girls. Milestone's use of the shadow of a bed frame to indicate sexual intimacy may seem dated and coy to today's audiences, but it certainly captures the emotional importance of the scene with a lightness that a more explicit approach would miss.
Finally, Milestone and Remarque make their point with simple, unrefined eloquence. When Paul returns home for a brief visit on leave and stands beside the same windy professor who talked him into enlisting, he describes the reality of his experience to a new generation of boys: “I can't tell you anything you don't know. We live in the trenches out there. We fight. We try not to be killed but sometimes we are. That's all.”
That's where the filmmakers leave it. Because they're telling the story from a German point of view, virtually all politics and nationalism have been stripped away. It really doesn't matter which side the soldiers are on. Their experience is the same. Steven Spielberg restates the idea in Saving Private Ryan, but he has little beyond a second world war to add to Milestone and Remarque.
Cast: Lew Ayres (Paul Baumer), Louis Wolheim (Katczinsky), John Wray (Himmelstoss), Slim Summerville (Tjaden), Russell Gleason (Muller), Raymond Griffith (Gerard Duval), Ben Alexander (Kemmerick), Beryl Mercer (Mrs. Baumer), Arnold Lucy (Kantorek), William “Billy” Bakewell (Albert), Scott Kolk (Leer), Owen Davis Jr. (Peter), Walter Rodgers (Behm), Richard Alexander (Westhus), Harold Goodwin (Detering), Pat Collins (Lt. Bertinck), Edmund Breese (Herr Meyer); Written by: Maxwell Anderson, George Abbott, Del Andrews; Cinematography by: Arthur Edeson, Karl Freund; Music by: David Broeckman. Producer: Carl Laemmle, Universal. Awards: Academy Awards ‘30: Best Director (Milestone), Best Picture; American Film Institute (AFI) ‘98: Top 100, National Film Registry ‘90; Nominations: Academy Awards ‘30: Best Cinematography, Best Writing. Budget: 1.2M. Running Time: 103 minutes. Format: VHS, Beta, LV, DVD.