#122: All Quiet on the Western Front

All Quiet on the Western Front

Lewis Milestone
Initial release: April 21, 1930 (USA)

images c/o FILMGRAB

It seems like, for the western world at least, every war in modern history has one or two definitive films — movies that, for better or worse, reflect the common mood of a nation or society in regards to a conflict. For the United States' experience in Vietnam, Apocalypse Now is probably the lasting example people look to. For the Second World War, it's… well, take your pick — there's plenty on all sides across multiple decades to pick from, but as far as America is concerned, the modern example would be Saving Private Ryan. And for World War I? The original 1930 adaptation of Erich Maria Remarque's 1929 novel All Quiet on the Western Front was the film that would set the pattern for the 1979 and 2022 adaptations that followed, an honest, uncompromising look at a war that was just a little over a decade concluded. This is one of those iconic films that defined a generation of war films, and would inform the genre for decades to come. Most war films are essentially — almost necessarily — propaganda; but it'd be a stretch to call this, an American production about German soldiers, produced at the start of a fresh rise of xenophobic, nationalist fervor, a propaganda film.

The film opens with a school teacher exhorting his young students into enlisting in the German army at the beginning of the Great War; overwhelmed with patriotism, and with everyone thinking the war would be over quickly, they have no idea what horrors await them. In this, they're not so different from the Brits, who also treated the war as a sort of sporting event, something to get all proud and patriotic about, a chance to let out some of the frustrations and fears of the last half-decade of empires rattling sabers at each other across Europe, to give the other side a fucking good kicking and show who's really top dog on the Continent.

It didn't really turn out that way, of course. By the end of the war, most of the students-turned-soldiers are dead, to say nothing of the pure hell they went through to get there first: bombardment, raids through no-man's-land, constant shelling. The survivors are utterly disillusioned amidst a country that urges them on, oblivious to and contemptuous of their suffering.

Across a runtime of two hours and change, the story is told in a series of anecdotes and vignettes, and we follow the cast from enlistment in 1914, through bootcamp, through their first bombardment, all the way to a quiet day on the western front shortly before the armistice.

For a film that's 96 years old, it's held up pretty well; the battle scenes are as well-put-together as any you might find in later films, with long panning shots of whole swarms of soldiers moving across no man's land, charging and dying. A key scene is the main character, trapped in a crater as the enemy moves all around him, his only companion the dying Frenchman he'd stabbed. He swings from guilt to rage to guilt again to begging the man's corpse for forgiveness, but there is none to be had.

It's obvious that this film was made in the era before the Hays Code; while it still adheres to the sensibilities of 1930, it does not skimp on the body count, nor does it shy away from a few calculated scenes of gore (with some impressive practical effects!) to shock and impress the nightmares of modern warfare. In 1930, the memories of the war would have still been fresh in the minds of those who lived it; many of the production crew would have been veterans, and their personal touch is what makes the film, ultimately, truer to its subject than the later remakes (despite the latter films actually being made in Germany.) Another reason for the film's technical success is down to Carl Laemmle Jr., the film's producer; barely into his 20s, the talent he brought to this film was of a piece with his work for the iconic Universal horror films he would later produce, including Dracula and Frankenstein.

While this isn't as aggressively, unrelentingly sad as Johnny Get Your Gun (which to me was the most iconic modern World War I film until I saw 1917) it's still a stark, harrowing, depressing film that speaks to the horrors of war openly and honestly. No wonder the Nazis hated it — they went to some lengths to disrupt showings and eventually got the film banned. Speaking of Nazis ruining movies, the 1937 sequel, The Road Back, about the survivors of the German 2nd Company trying to reintegrate into society after the war, has spent years being something of a quasi-lost film. By that time, Laemmle Jr. and his father had been ousted from Universal; fear of losing money in the German film market led to Universal making severe cuts — just one more example of how Hollywood wimped out for far too long, willfully continuing to appease the Nazis, at least until 1940 when MGM's The Mortal Storm dared to say "hey, maybe Nazis are bad actually." While The Road Back has been restored, it so far remains  stuck in the Library of Congress with no wider release as far as I can see. While by most accounts it fails to achieve the heights of its predecessor, it still deserves preservation.

And as for All Quiet, we're lucky this film continues to enjoy a robust following today. With everything that's happened in the last decade and change, it's worth looking back on this film, and the world that created it: a stark warning for the future.

-june❤