Best Picture Winner: #3
Release Date: August 24, 1930
Rating: NR
Runtime: 2 hours, 32 minutes
Director: Lewis Milestone
Quick Impressions:
During the opening credits of All Quiet on the Western Front, I noted, “Erich Maria Remarque, he wrote the novel.”
“There’s a novel of this?” my daughter said in surprise.
“Oh yes,” I replied. “It’s a classic.”
About halfway through the film, she clarified, “You said there’s a novel of this, right?”
“Yes,” I replied.
“Could I read it?” she asked.
“Sure,” I answered, picking up my phone and ordering her a copy.
The instant the movie ended, she said, “You said you bought the book for me, right? How soon will it be here?”
So All Quiet on the Western front was a hit with my eleven-year-old daughter.
Her little brother, five next week, had some wise observations of his own. Why would a movie about noisy warfare have such a deceptive title? “I have an idea,” he mused. “Maybe they call it that because it is a no sound movie.”
“That’s a good guess,” I told him, “but this isn’t a silent movie like Wings.” In fact, it’s different from Wings in so many ways that it’s hard to believe they were made about the same war at about the same time.
My daughter noted this, too. “They’re about different sides,” she reasoned, “so they have such different perspectives.”
“Plus,” I reminded her, “Wings is about pilots, and the protagonists of All Quiet on the Western Front are in the infantry.” They are literally in the trenches.
The boys in Wings come home men, battle-tested heroes. (Well, the protagonist does, anyway.) The boys in All Quiet on the Western Front just die. And why? I suppose being on the winning versus the losing side does make some difference. But All Quiet on the Western Front makes a convincing case that war has no winners. This is a gripping, well-made film, but it’s no blockbuster adventure. Instead, it’s drama at its bleakest, harrowing anti-war propaganda composed of well-crafted scenes that make trench warfare look thoroughly unromantic.
The Plot:
Teen classmates listen to a rousing call to arms from their professor, then enlist in the German army at the beginning of World War I. A leader among them, Paul, dreams of becoming a great writer. Through Paul’s eyes, we watch the conflict drag on and on as one-by-one his companions are destroyed by the horrors of a senseless war.
The Good:
In Wings (and in a number of other war movies I’ve seen), the Germans seem so efficient and organized. They’re vaguely sinister, ruthless, cunning. Their technology and strategy often seem dauntingly superior. (I mean, in Wings there’s a scene featuring the Germans spying on our soldiers in a blimp, and they’re up there drinking wine, practically picnicking.) In this movie, the German soldiers we see are young boys fighting rats for a moldy scrap of bread down in a trench. They’re rarely fed. (In fact, no one in Germany ever seems to get fed, as we learn late in the movie when Paul is on leave and someone says something like, “Of course, we can’t feed you as well here as they do in the army, but all the best food goes to the army!”)
Paul and his companions join the army as the war is beginning. Right from the start, the entire war effort seems like a poorly organized disaster. This is somewhat surprising. I would have assumed it would take longer for things to fall to the level of chaos Paul and his friends encounter at the front, but I wasn’t there. If not for the guidance of benevolent older soldiers Kat (Louis Wolheim) and Tjaden (Slim Summerville) the young recruits would have no idea what to do at all. Wolheim’s Kat is easily the most sympathetic and engaging character in the film. He forages for food. In fact, he is pretty much the only person in the film who knows how to find food. I don’t know what the rest of the army is doing for food. The second company wouldn’t eat without Kat. He also gives the boys helpful advice, telling them when to duck, what to do to continue living, how quickly to forget the dead. He treats them like a kind father, a mentor, a friend. Without him, life in the army would be unbearable.
All Paul and his companions ever seem to do is starve, die, or get horribly wounded. But there is a general spirit of camaraderie among the soldiers of the second company that warms the heart.
I know the film was adapted from a novel, but it feels very much like a stage play. Every scene is so carefully crafted. And every one of these scenes either shows us or tells us (pointedly) why war is so awful.
Watching, I was a bit baffled. You can’t help thinking, “Are they trying to win?” I also found myself wondering, “Are there other soldiers who view what’s happening differently than Paul?”
I studied World War I in high school, of course, but I focused mainly on what all those first cousin heads of state were up to and quickly went down a Rasputin rabbit hole. I’ve read Hemingway and Wilfred Owen, but I don’t know that I’ve ever learned much about the actual battle tactics of the Germans. Everything I know about the war from a German point of view comes from the biographies of Adolf Hitler I devoured when I was my daughter’s age. Hitler and Wilfred Owen agree that gas attacks are no good. Beyond that, I don’t know much about the actual fighting.
Trench warfare confuses me. Now I’m no tactician. I’ve been known to let opponents win at tic-tac-toe. I’m sure great military minds can explain the logic driving World War I campaigns. But I personally do not see any advantage to trench warfare. My daughter asked me about it as we watched the film, and I said evasively, “Trench warfare is a hallmark of World War I battle.”
“Why would this be a good way to fight?” she wondered.
“I have no idea,” I told her. I felt like the dad in those old Time Life Books commercials when the son asks, “Dad, what was Vietnam about?”
To me, trench warfare seems like setting yourself up to fail. Its purpose seems to be inspiring decades of great literature. Later, I asked my husband, “How can you ever gain any territory like that?”
“Trenches are not intended to gain,” he explained. “They’re intended to hold.” (So, if your intention is to hold ground, why not stay home in your own country and not start a war?)
In reply to my husband, I objected, “But it seems like you’re setting yourself up to be besieged. Why would you want to be the besieged? I would rather be the archers than the castle. It seems more masculine, like what everyone would want who loves conquest.” (I include these idiotic comments to highlight my own ignorance of warfare. On my dad’s side of the family, almost every male has served in the military. I’m sure they understand far more about war than I do.)
“But in a trench you aren’t cut off from behind,” my husband explained. “There’s still a supply chain from one side.”
“Then when the other side was bombing the trench,” I wondered, “why didn’t they have any food down there?”
“Probably because nobody was sending it to them,” he wisely answered.
That is the reason they give in the movie. Was somebody in the German army getting food, just not the second company? Paul and his classmates enlist at the beginning of the war, but it must take them longer than it seems to get to the front. I mean, that trench is in France. Somebody in the German army must have done more than starve in trenches waiting to die.
At any rate, if you’re contemplating enlisting to fight a war in a trench, All Quiet on the Western Front will make you reconsider those plans. My daughter is quite eager to share it with her older brother for that reason.
Best Scene:
This film is a series of poignant, well-crafted scenes. Two in particular stand out to me. They’re completely different in tone, but they occur back-to-back in the film.
One is the conversation among the men in the second company after they have finally gotten some decent food. (They practically have to kill the cook to get it, too. He’s got it right there, and he’s like, “We-e-elll….I don’t know if I should give this to you. Maybe I should throw half of it away.”) They sit around under a tree, discussing the purpose of war. Who wanted the war? Why did it start? What exactly is the point of it all?
My daughter loved this scene, too, and called it out as her favorite as it was happening.
But for me, the best moment in the entire film comes just after this in the infirmary when the young soldiers visit their injured companion Franz Kemmerick. When I heard him complain of unrelenting pain in his foot, a deep, intense sensation of horror genuinely shook me. I understood the situation before he did, and the horror it stirred in me almost made me physically ill. I cried. A lot. For a moment, I couldn’t even speak. Actor Ben Alexander is excellent as Kemmerick in this tremendously emotional scene.
Best Scene Visually:
As we watched, my daughter and I kept calling out visually striking scenes to each other. She found so much symbolism in the film’s carefully staged scenes which fill the frame so thoughtfully. The first scene in the classroom is beautifully set and another early scene at a train station has this same careful construction.
During one battle in a graveyard, she gasped, and I exclaimed, “Is he hiding in a tomb?” Paul is, in fact, down in a grave, and when he realizes this, it horrifies him. My daughter, on the other hand, was delighted. “Hiding from death in a place of death!” she gushed. “That’s so symbolic! You can’t hide from death!”
Probably my favorite visual moment comes next, a series of upward looks from Paul’s perspective of soldiers leaping over his head. “You couldn’t get that on stage,” I thought, and kept looking for other examples of visuals that only a motion picture could deliver. The film’s chilling curtain call is another highlight. “You couldn’t get that shot on stage either,” I thought triumphantly. Then a moment later, I realized, “Yeah, you could. Easily.” But the way of achieving the effect on film is creative.
Both of us also admired the disorienting scene featuring the paper girl and her easily disposable companion. My daughter got a thrill when she realized she had initially misunderstood the space.
Best Montage:
In the middle of the movie, we follow a pair of boots as it makes its way through the company. Artfully done, this sequence on its own illustrates the senseless brutality of war.
Best Action Sequence:
War is brutal. All Quiet on the Western Front sugar coats nothing. It includes graphic images of the violence of battle, including a pair of arms desperately gripping barbed wire. (That’s arms only. The rest has been blown away.) In two amazing adjacent scenes, the second company waits out a bombing attack (which lasts days). They have almost no food (no shortage of rats, though) and can’t risk sleep. (Only one young man is sleeping, and he’s having continuous screaming nightmares, even more nerve-racking for everyone else.) Then after waiting for days in these maddening conditions, the men finally go out into the open air of the trench to attack an advancing force flooding in to attempt to overtake them.
This battle is more violent than some more recent war movies I’ve seen. (In 1917 for example, the protagonists are usually wandering through deserted spaces. They never face a rushing hoard attacking with both ends of their rifles.) In Wings, the battles sometimes look exciting. This just looks awful.
We winced as we watched. “Is he hitting him with a shovel?” my daughter asked. “It looked like a hatchet,” I said. But there may have been a shovel, too. I know I spotted a couple of short swords. It’s easy to understand the crazed, desperate energy of the fight, too, since we have watched the period of awful, torturous waiting leading up to the ground battle.
Most Amusing Scenes:
Late in the movie, we get some scenes that made me laugh. The late hospital scene when Paul is wounded made me think fondly of Catch-22. His jubilant return made me laugh out loud. This is the one moment when I enjoyed the performance of Lew Ayres. The situation is awful. And then Paul’s visit home provides humor, too, in the form of dark, bitter, irony. Paul’s sweet mother and his father’s obnoxious friends have no idea about the reality Paul has experienced at the front. It’s the kind of thing that makes the audience want to laugh and cry and drains Paul of the ability to express genuine emotion.
The Negatives:
The movie is not subtle. Of course, neither is the recruiting call of the war-mongering professor. I suppose you have centuries of enthusiastic dolce et decorum est sentiment, and in 1930, this movie feels the need to rebuke all of those war lovers in as loud a voice as they have been extolling the virtues of war down through the ages. (It’s funny. I thought to myself, “It’s Horace, right?” Of course, when I googled the phrase to confirm, all I got was Wilfred Owen. I had to supply Horace myself to get the confirmation I sought from an internet search. So obviously the anti-war sentiment now has a very loud voice of its own.)
The recent film 1917 also made me think of Wilfred Owen’s poems and filled me with a sad melancholy, a feeling of, “Why do we send our sons to die in pointless war?” But 1917 was subtle, moving, contemplative. In All Quiet on the Western Front, we get speech after speech, lecture after lecture. It’s out-and-out anti-war propaganda. I agree with its message, but still, I find the delivery a bit…I don’t know. Didactic? It seems so pointed. Of course, I guess it wasn’t pointed enough. Less than ten years after the film was made, along came World War II. My husband is always telling me that things I find heavy-handed and obvious are actually needed to get the message across to most people, that some messages I find obvious aren’t even detected at all by many viewers. Maybe this is true because it’s a complaint I have a lot. We first started talking about this after watching Knives Out, a film I love, but that in my view has a really heavy-handed message.
But clearly All Quiet on the Western Front intends to beat us over the head with its heavy-handed message. It definitely knows it is anti-war propaganda. Clearly the Academy Awards were out of touch right from the start. The Academy declares, “What a fine film with a socially relevant message,” and everybody else says, “Hey I have a good idea. Let’s have World War II.” Clearly in its own time, the film was not heavy-handed enough. In the film’s defense, I suppose there were gifted orators making even more blatant pro-war speeches in the 1930s.
And, in fairness, I should also add that while I feel that surely just about everybody in the world knows that enlisting to serve as infantry in a trench in World War I is a terrible, terrible idea, we might not all know that had not All Quiet on the Western Front and works like it been created and popularized. So even though I wanted to say back to the movie, “Yes, yes, I get it. You don’t have to work so hard to convince me. You had me at hello,” I know that back in 1930 when the film came out, the audience was different. I’m not sure how widely known the realities of fighting on the ground in the Great War were at that time, but I’m positive few Americans thought of the German army as vulnerable children, deceived into dying in horror. This film’s message is old to me, but in 1930, audiences probably needed to hear it.
In the lead role as the sympathetic and observant young author/soldier Paul, Lew Ayres has some fine moments, but overall, his acting style is a bit too mannered for my tastes. Sometimes he seems over-dramatic, like he really is on a noisy battlefield trying to make an impression on an assembled live audience. I don’t exactly fault the performance. I think it’s just an example of an acting style not aging well, or maybe even more accurately of me being the wrong audience for his work. I always had the sense he was acting for the back row. I wanted to tell him, “I’m sitting right in front of the TV. Dial it down a little.”
I mention this mainly because it didn’t happen as often as I expected when I was watching Wings and The Broadway Melody. Bessie Love’s emotional breakdown is so convincing, intense, but not overplayed. In Wings, Richard Arlen doesn’t even get dialogue to tell us what David is feeling. He must convey the complex emotions entirely non-verbally. But he does so without seeming showy. Ayres, on the other hand, is always showy. He’s a good actor, and he conveys intense emotion in a gripping way. But there was never even one moment when I believed he was actually Paul. Instead, I felt like I was watching a stage play featuring a charismatic lead gifted enough to capture the audience’s imagination as he plays someone pushed to his physical and psychological limits. It’s always exciting to watch a gifted actor “go mad” on stage, but part of what makes it so thrilling is the awareness that it is a performance. I never completely believed Ayers was Paul, though I came closest in late scenes of the film, during his depressing leave.
One thing I didn’t quite understand was the film’s treatment of Himmelstoss, the mail carrier. I don’t understand why the boys view him as such a buffoonish villain. Yes, he seems to enjoy humiliating them. But dropping to the ground and throwing your face into the mud seems like good training for the front. After all, if you don’t go all the way to the ground, someone may be killed. I’m extremely confused about why the boys feel it is acceptable behavior not to respect rank in the military. They can’t be that young. Himmelstoss has some clear character flaws, yes, but they are hardly in a position to treat him the way they do. I’m eager to read the novel to clear up some of my confusion here.
Overall:
All Quiet on the Western Front is a great anti-war film. It definitely makes its point. You will not miss the message. The visual symbolism is rich, sometimes spectacular. And the intensity of the violence is upsetting even by today’s standards. I loved Louis Wolheim as Kat, and Lew Ayres plays Paul with eye-catching intensity. The novel just arrived on our porch today, and my daughter is eager to devour it.