NFR Project: 'All Quiet on the Western Front' (1930), the first great anti-war film

 

All Quiet on the Western Front

Dir: Lewis Milestone

Scr: Maxwell Anderson, George Abbott, Del Andrews, C. Gardner Sullivan

Pho: Arthur Edeson

Ed: Edgar Adams, Milton Carruth

Premiere: April 21, 1930

133 min.

Germany banned because it thought it was anti-German. France banned it because it was anti-French. Australia banned it because it was pacifistic.

Despite governmental disdain, this film won the Oscar for Best Picture and for Best Director and proved quite popular, despite its grim subject matter. There had been American films about World War I films before, most notably The Big Parade (1925) and Wings (1927). However, the 1928 source novel from which the film is derived is explicitly anti-war, and so is this picture.

Director Lewis Milestone was another director, like Raoul Mamoulian, who could make the sound camera move. He used it to follow the soldiers in the story into battle, and back and forth across enemy lines. He moves in tightly to capture the disbelief and horror the young soldiers experience when exposed to battle.

The protagonist is Paul (Lew Ayres, in his first big performance), who, like his schoolmates, is seduced into volunteering for the army by his teacher, who spouts words like glory and honor. They soon find out army life is not so pleasant. Eventually, they are taken under the wing of the honest and resourceful Katt (the marvelous Louis Wolheim), and they become inured to the hellish life on the front lines.

The movie is composed of disparate scenes, one following the other and then fading out. It gives the whole work the feeling of being a memory play, with isolated incidents cropping up in the mind. This episodic framework is like a set of stairs, carrying the viewer lower and lower.

Even when Paul is home on leave, he can’t stop thinking about the front. He no longer feels at home. He finds himself yearning to go back to the battle. This he does, with a tragic final act underlines the futility and wastefulness of war.

The NFR is one writer’s attempt to review all the films listed in the National Film Registry in chronological order. Next time: The Augustas.