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| Paul Bäumer (Lew Ayres) and his classmates march to war. |
Release Date: Apr. 21, 1930. Running Time: 133 minutes. Screenplay: Maxwell Anderson, George Abbott, Del Andrews, C. Gardner Sullivan. Based on the novel by: Erich Maria Remarque. Producer: Carl Laemmle Jr.. Director: Lewis Milestone.
THE PLOT:
In the first year of the First World War, Paul Bäumer (Lew Ayres)'s class of idealistic young Germans enlist en masse. Visions of glory dance through their heads as they begin their training. They endure abuse from their instructor, postman-turned-corporal Himmelstoss (John Wray) - but that doesn't in any way break their illusion that they will soon be experiencing a grand adventure.
What greets them at the Front is anything but grand or exciting. At their first village posting, food is so scarce that veteran soldier Katczinsky (Louis Wolheim) spends the nights scrounging to keep them from starving. When they go off to the trenches, they huddle in a bunker, fending off rats while hoping the shelling doesn't bury them alive. This is interrupted by periodic calls to attack or defend - either of which ends with more of their number dead or wounded.
One by one, Paul's classmates succumb to the war. Leaving him increasingly disillusioned, seeing no life or future beyond the hope of another day's survival...
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| Paul learns from the weathered Katczinsky (Louis Wolheim). |
CHARACTERS:
Paul Bäumer: The influence of broader silent movie acting styles is very visible in Lew Ayres' performance. A notable example, a little over a third of the way through the film, sees Paul at a dying friend's bedside. He prays to God that his friend "doesn't want to die." The scene is slightly overwritten (and a follow-up, in which he describes his reaction to his friend's death, is even more overdone), but Ayres makes it worse by milking it for every ounce of melodrama. He gets better in the second half, when Paul has been reduced to a weary shell of his former self. These later scenes see some fine acting, as the weary Paul makes ever fewer stray movements and speaks almost in a monotone. The contrast is effective - but iould have worked just as well if he had toned it down a bit in the first half.
Katczinsky: Louis Wolheim is terrific as "Kat," the scrounger who does more to keep the members of the company alive than anyone else in the film. Though Wolheim had far more silent credits than sound ones, he seems to instinctively know to keep his performance restrained. As two natural survivors, Kat and Paul become friends not because of anything they have in common; they simply become accustomed to each other. This makes their relationship feel far more real than in the 1979 remake, which pushed the friendship much more strongly.
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| Paul prays at a dying friend's bedside, |
THOUGHTS:
I first watched All Quiet on the Western Front when it was released on VHS in a "restored" edition in the 1990s. My memory of it was as a scratchy, technically clunky film. Memories aren't always accurate. I'm sure the VHS was of much lower quality than the print on the current blu-ray, but there is nothing clunky about the movie's production. This is a highly visual film, with many sequences that retain their power more than 90 years after release.
One standout sequence follows a pair of boots from owner to owner. The boots are carefully introduced as being of particularly fine quality, offering comfort to the wearer in a situation in which comfort is all but unheard of. We can recognizable them every time they appear, because the black & white photography reads them as a different shade than everyone else's. We follow the boots from wearer to wearer - as each owner dies, another soldier claims them. The sequence on its own is breathtaking. Later in the film, another young man shows up wearing those distinctive boots... and though we never see that extra's fate, he is unlikely to be any luckier than his predecessors.
The script is an adaptation of Erich Maria Remarque's celebrated anti-war novel. It jettisons Remarque's non-linear narrative, which moves back and forth in time, in favor of a purely chronological sequence. Still, it retains the book's sense that time isn't so much passing as simply existing. Once Paul and his friends arrive at the Front, there ceases to be any sense of narrative progression. There's just a series of episodes - a village, running barbed wire, huddling in trenches, another village, another trench. Occasionally, someone will mention the year, and familiar faces gradually cease to be there. But for the most part, the episodes could be a week apart or a year apart, and we wouldn't know... because those intervals make no difference to the soldiers, who can look forward to nothing but more of the same.
All Quiet on the Western Front was one of many films from the early talkie period that was shot in a silent version in addition to the sound one. The silent version is included on the blu-ray, and is worth a look. With no extended dialogue sequences, the editing has been tightened in several places, and some reviewers have indicated a preference for that version. I still prefer the sound version, but the film is excellent in either cut.
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| A charge, in which nothing particular is gained or lost. Other than lives, of course. |
OVERALL:
All Quiet on the Western Front does show its age. In addition to some uneven audio quality, there's no question that the script gets didactic, with a few too many instances of characters suddenly launching into anti-war speeches. There is one effective instance of this, when a weary Paul reluctantly tells a class the truth about the war, only to be branded a coward by the young boys who are consumed with their own visions of heroism. Most of the other speeches, however, just comes across as heavy-handed, with too much of Remarque's narrative shoved clumsily into monologues when simply showing the life in the trenches communicates the message far more effectively.
Still, that and a handful of melodramatic acting moments are really the only faults I can find here. As an adaptation, the movie captures the essence of a complex novel in a little over two hours. As a work of cinema, it remains startlingly effective.
A great movie. Not an entertaining one, per se - but still well worthy of a watch and, for my money, still easily the best film version of the novel.
Overall Rating: 10/10.
Outstanding Picture: 1928/1929 - The Broadway Melody
Outstanding Production: 1930/1931 - Cimarron
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