Movie Odyssey Review #040.1: All Quiet on the Western Front

Rating: 10/10 (11 January 2007)

040.1: All Quiet on the Western Front (1930) - released 4/21/1930.
DOUG: We watched this film as part of our exhaustive War Movie Odyssey two years ago, and it was definitely one of my favorite movies in the set, not to mention one of the all-time best movies about WWI. It shows the war from the German point of view, but I got the feeling they could have done practically the same movie from the point of view of nearly any nation in the war. The themes are pretty universal for what happened; the needless massacres, the officers who had no idea how to handle an army, the soldiers asking "why is this war happening?" The movie is made up of nothing but memorable scenes; the scene where the soldiers get back at their drunken CO for spoiling their leave; the scene where a fellow soldier realizes that his leg has been amputated; the scene where Paul spends the night in a foxhole with an enemy soldier he has killed; the scene where Paul enters the class of students, just like the one he was in years ago, and tells them all how war really is. War movies of the day were clearly about how war was pointless as that was the feeling about WWI (or, as it was called then, The Great War); this would change when WWII came along, when the word would be that the war was necessary, and worth fighting.
KEVIN: We watched this film years ago to kick off our massive war movie odyssey, and there were no other films throughout that list that equaled this one in anti-war sentiment. Most war movies are anti-war on some level, but All Quiet spends every frame of its 130-minute running time driving home its point. I remember so many scenes in this film. The scene when Paul and his friends are listening to their teacher go on about the honor and patriotism of going to war and fighting for their country, and the scene later when he returns to the same classroom after his disillusionment to find that his old teacher is telling the same bull story to a new flock of prospective corpses. The scene when Paul finds himself in the hospital bed being wheeled through the door of no return. And of course there's the unforgettable scene when Paul winds up in a shell hole with a dying enemy soldier. I remember the battle scenes were gritty and graphic to a degree that we would not see again until Saving Private Ryan, the way the camera tracks viciously across the trenches as the enemy forces advance. One of the interesting things is that the fact that the characters are German is incidental, as the conditions and the despair were nearly identical on all sides of the conflict. Had we watched it again, it would have been the first film depicting World War I on the list (after the more uplifting The Big Parade), and it would have been almost unnecessary to watch any others, simply in the way that this film captures in every way the disillusionment the world saw during that war, brought to life from the point of view of a few scared youths facing horrors no one before them had ever experienced.
Last film chronologically: The Divorcée (1930). Next film chronologically: Hell's Angels (1930).