Tempora Mutantur, Nos Et Mutamur In Illis

Rating: 8/10 (5 January 2012)

"All Quiet on the Western Front" was perhaps the first great war epic of the cinema- certainly the first great war epic of the "talkie" era. It was based on the novel by Erich Maria Remarque, published only the year before. (The phenomenon of film-makers raiding the best-seller lists for inspiration is nothing new). The familiar English title of both book and film is the one assigned to it by Remarque's translator Arthur Wheen, and is something of a mistranslation. Remarque's original title was "Im Westen Nichts Neues", or "Nothing New in the West", meaning "no change in the military situation".
The film opens in a boys' high school in a small German town in 1914. We see a schoolmaster named Kantorek giving his pupils an impassioned speech, urging them to join the Army and fight for their country. Kantorek ends his peroration with Horace's line "Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori" ("It is sweet and fitting to die for one's country"), a line which to English-speaking audiences in 1930 would have recalled Wilfred Owen's poem in which he describes this sentiment as "the old lie".
Almost to a man, the boys are persuaded to join up, and we follow their progress through the war, especially that of the main character, Paul Baumer. (In the novel his surname was Bäumer; perhaps the American actors failed to realise that the umlaut above the "a" makes a difference to the German pronunciation. Several names, in fact, are mispronounced; "Mueller", for example, is pronounced to rhyme with "colour"). We see how early enthusiasm for the war was replaced by disillusionment, at least among those who actually had to do the fighting. One by one Paul's companions are killed or severely wounded, and the mood of the survivors becomes embittered. Their preoccupations are not honour and glory but firstly survival and secondly getting enough food. Only on the home front does enthusiasm for the war persist; visiting his home town on leave Paul is disgusted to see Kantorek giving the same speech to another class of students, who react with the same patriotic zeal as he and his classmates.
In a film from this period one would not expect the same degree of realism in battle scenes as in a modern film such as "Saving Private Ryan", although Steven Spielberg has stated that Lewis Milestone's film was an inspiration for his own. There is, however, one surprisingly good action sequence featuring a French attack on the German trenches, although the most effective scenes are often those, like the one in the hospital and the one where Paul addresses the dead French soldier he has killed, which do not involve any actual fighting.
Although there are many grim moments, the film's tone is not unremittingly grim. Scenes of bloodshed and pathos are interspersed with those containing a certain, often satirical, humour, such discussion between the soldiers as to the causes of the war. (They conclude that the best way of solving international disputes would be for the kings and politicians to fight among themselves after stripping down to their underwear). Perhaps the best acting performance comes from Louis Wolheim as Stanislaus Katczinsky, a gruff, cynical older soldier who becomes Paul's closest friend and who, even in the early days of the war, embodies a spirit of sardonic disillusionment. (His surname suggests that he is an ethnic Pole who, while nominally a German citizen, has little loyalty to the German cause).
To make a war film from a German viewpoint and which treats its German protagonists with humanity and understanding was, in some ways, a brave move in 1930, only a dozen years after the press in America and other Allied nations had been abusing the Germans as "beastly Huns". Yet to tell an anti-war story from the German side was, in other ways, politically expedient. Such a story told from an American viewpoint might have been attacked as unpatriotic, as implying that the Allied cause had not been a just one and that the American soldiers who had laid down their lives in 1917-18 had done so to no good end. America, Britain and France had their own Kantoreks- Owen's poem was aimed at one of them, the jingoistic poetaster Jessie Pope- but such people are never mentioned in the film. Audiences might have inferred that "God, king and country", or "the war to end all wars" were slogans as empty as "Gott mit uns" or "Deutschland über Alles", but Milestone never spells this out directly.
Following the bloodshed of World War I, pacifist sentiment was widespread in the twenties and early thirties, and the film takes the same strongly anti-war stance as Remarque's novel. This message was highly popular in 1930; the critic of Variety wrote that "The League of Nations could make no better investment than to buy up the master-print, reproduce it in every language, to be shown in all the nations until the word "war" is taken out of the dictionaries".
Yet we now know this was not to be. To quote another Latin tag, "tempora mutantur, nos et mutamur in illis". (Times change, and we change with them). Less than a decade after the film was made, the world was to be plunged into a second war, even bloodier than the first. Lewis Milestone's contribution to that war would be to make patriotic pro-Allied propaganda films such as "North Star" and "The Purple Heart", demonising the Germans and Japanese as monsters in human form. It might be unfair to accuse Milestone of deliberate hypocrisy- he was far from being the only ex-pacifist to have his pacifism tested to destruction by the savage inhumanity of Nazism- but there is a certain irony in the fact that the cinema's great chronicler of the First World War should have become one of America's Kantoreks of the Second. 8/10