Still Packs a Wallop.

Rating: 8/10 (19 September 2007)

Surprisingly powerful after almost eighty years, this is a true "anti-war movie." "Anti-war" is an adjectival phrase flung around too easily these days. Any recent movie with an excess of gore can be called anti-war, but if you leave the theater glowing with pride at the sacrifice and heroism of our own boys and girls, anxious for the next opportunity to display those old-fashioned virtues, you're not talking "anti-war." This one, like a few others, leaves you feeling that you've witnessed not a brave last stand but a moral tragedy as well as a material disaster. Few movies make that cut. "Das Boot" and "Go Tell the Spartans" come to mind. They're not necessarily great movies, but they're definitely anti-war.
"All Quiet on the Western Front" (the title is ironic) tells the story of a handful of school boys who leap at the opportunity to join the army at the beginning of World War I and kill the enemy. By the end they are disillusioned and dead. We know they have lost hope not only because they tell us so but because the director (Lewis Milestone) and the writer show us a few of the details by which ideals are lost.
The dialog and some of the acting are pretty corny by today's standards, and the general outlines of the story, a kind of Bildungsfilm, are overly familiar by now. But it must have been quite shocking on its release because, as a matter of fact, it's STILL shocking. Much of its success is due to the special effects. The incoming artillery shells seem to whistle this way and that, up and down the scale, before exploding in what looks like lethal bouquets of crumbled soil. The mortar rounds don't even whistle. There's only a quick, silly ZOOP, a small pop of dirt, and a man is dead, a stylized fatality.
Lewis Milestone has been criticized for being too obvious but I don't know why. He puts his camera on a dolly and runs it at speed across a line of charging men, watching them fall in irregular groups, and it's a powerful and original technique. And the scene in which Lew Ayres tries to talk to the dying French soldier he's just bayoneted is clumsy and ill acted but still wrenching. Particularly effective is Milestone's set-up after the Frenchman has died. The corpse is propped up in a sitting position, a slight, strangely peaceful smile on its face, and Ayres must spend the night next to this horrifying apparition.
Lew Ayres turns in the performance of a novice. He was to become a conscientious objector in World War II and it damaged his career, although, as a medic, he performed under combat conditions like any other soldier. Louis Wolheim is Kat, the wised-up veteran with a face like the rear end of the huge, dirty truck you get stuck behind on the Sunday night Long Island Expressway.
I think I'll let it go at that. It's an iconic film and not one you're likely to forget in a hurry.