Antique acting but fresh action

Rating: 7/10 (22 December 2009)

Time has wounded this very old film but it certainly hasn't killed it. The main obstacle is the acting, which isn't exactly bad (it's too sincere to be jeered at) but is too obviously still inspired by the grimacing, exaggerated style typical of so many silent movie actors. When Lew Ayres settles down late in the film, stops mugging, and speaks calmly, he's much more appealing.
On the other hand, the direction and camera work are very good throughout, especially in the outdoor scenes. The ruined villages behind the lines are convincing, the front itself is a horror: flat, cratered, featureless, never more dreadful than when the bright sun glares down on it. The attack scenes, which skillfully employ only modest numbers of extras, are as vivid and unnerving as anything done since, especially the explosions. Once or twice they detonate in a vicious line across the advancing troops, driving them back. The use of sound during the bombardments is surprisingly good by any standards, not just those of 1930. All in all, the battle scenes lose nothing by comparison with those in Stanley Kubrick's Paths of Glory.
SPOILERS: Even when the guns are not firing, there are scenes that work in spite of the problems with the old-fashioned acting. In one, three soldiers bed down three French farm girls in a scene that is as gracefully suggestive as the standards of the day would allow. Better is an interlude late in the film, when Lew Ayres, home on leave, finds the old life utterly alien after his horrific experiences at the front, his family unable to comprehend anything about the world he lives in. This sets up the famous ending, in which he is shot while reaching from the trench to touch a butterfly. In the blasted moonscape that is now his real home, a butterfly is too much of a miracle to resist.