Worth a Closer Look

Rating: Null/10 (27 November 2011)

Few movies have used mud so tellingly. The schoolboys dream of joining the noisy glory that marches by their classroom window. So, egged on by their teacher and a wave of patriotic enthusiasm, the German boys sign up. But what do they get instead of military glory--- miles and miles of foot slogging mud as the company marches to the WWI battlefront. And that's after they've crawled face down through training fields of the slimy stuff, looking more like human worms than soldiers.
Worse, when they get to the war front, what do they get but more slimy dirt in the trenches that make up their new home. It's all living, eating, and dying in the same wet ground. And when they get killed, as they almost surely will, what will their flesh and bones do but make more mud for new waves of mud-makers to slog through. No wonder the movie is considered an anti-war masterpiece-- military glory itself is reduced to the earth's most elemental stuff.
I've often wondered how American audiences would respond if the boys were American instead of German, given the movie's militantly anti-war message. But however that may be, the 2-hours-plus never drags as we watch the boys encounter the various horrors—and the mischief, too—of life at the front.
No wonder one kid freaks out when the coffin-like closeness and constant shelling of the trenches finally gets to him. My understanding is that once the battle lines of WWI settled in, the front never moved more than 75-miles in four-years. No wonder the fabled poppy fields of Flanders grew so abundantly afterwards.
And if the horrors of the trenches aren't bad enough, there's the "dying room" in the hospital where the hopeless cases are taken. There they can expire alone and out of sight. I can imagine how other wounded boys dangled on the precipice of being moved there or anywhere. It's that constant dread amidst the tidy surroundings and caring hands, and far from the battlefield, that's stayed with me over the years.
Lewis Milestone's staging of scenes along the front remains a technical marvel. What a triumph of fluid camera work is that panorama of troops attacking across the no-man's-land, only to be mowed down by defenders and their hell-fire machine guns. I gather throwing men at waves of bullets was the basic brutal strategy of both sides. Small wonder then, that the war was also called the great European slaughter bench, and small wonder that a lot of generals on both sides should have been court- martialed, as a result. Fortunately, Milestone's inspired staging makes these larger dimensions understandable.
At the same time, it's an inspiration to personalize the impersonal dimension of battle. In a shell hole in the middle of no-man's- land, Paul (Ayers) encounters the face of a dying Frenchman, only to realize that the enemy is a man pretty much the same as Paul. That central scene puts a critical human face on the act of killing, transforming combat for Paul and us into an excruciating personal close-up. For without that intimate encounter, the battle scenes would be reduced to an abstraction of colliding gray figures.
The narrative does have its lighter moments as when three of the boys encounter three French girls, and nature takes its course, helped along, of course, by treasured loaves of bread. In the process, we realize that hunger and lust have a way of cutting through minor matters like who's French or German or anything else. Note too how fairly explicit the innuendo is during this early pre-Code period. There's also that black humor scene of the shells blowing up the graveyard as though dying once just isn't enough in wartime.
Then, of course, there's Louis Wolheim as Kat who steals the film with his gruff humor and unforgettable mug. The final scenes between Paul and him manage a poignancy rare in any film. In fact, as Paul says, Kat has become his "family" now that soldiering has consumed them both. Too bad that the boy's horrific experiences have likely separated him forever from mother, sister, and hometown. To me, this is one of the more subtly unsettling aspects of the movie's anti-war message.
Ayers hasn't as much depth as I would like, but he does have that critical air of innocence that magnifies the story's tragedy. It's his mere presence, rather than "acting", that gets the point across, which is pretty much the case for all the young actors. At the same time, it's hard to forget their one-by-one glances at us as they march off into the anonymous pages of history.
In fact, the war has done this to thousands like Paul and his comrades, and all the patriotic hype of their elders cannot bring them back or heal the psychic wounds of those who survive. Thanks be to Universal studios and director Milestone for sparing no expense in bringing Remarque's epochal novel to the popular screen. For what they left us with is a truly remarkable film.