3. All Quiet on the Western Front (1929/30)

Plot Intro

A group of German schoolboys, spurred on by a jingoistic schoolteacher, enthusiastically sign up for war. After a gruelling training, and on arrival at the mud and smoke of Flanders Fields, their search for honour and glory rapidly turns to bitterness, disillusionment, and death.

Doug says...

All Quiet on the Western Front is groundbreaking. It’s also unrelentingly bleak, centres around death, and at times so grim you can’t really bring yourself to fully watch it. I had about three strategic Facebook checks just to look away from the graphic, torturously realistic scenes on screen. 

What struck me particularly about this is how similar Joan Littlewood’s 1960s seminal Oh! What a Lovely War is. Despite Littlewood’s being about the Allied forces and All Quiet being about the Germans, both focus on the pointless death, the complete absence of real understanding between the generals and the foot-soldiers, and the propaganda that pushes unwitting boys into blood-strewn fields. 

The difference - and what a difference it is - is that where Littlewood, thirty years on from this film, resorts to metaphor to capture the horrors of the war. All Quiet on the Western Front uses no such trickery. It shows you the horrors of war in full realistic detail. We see people blinded, bodies thrown into craters, amputations, death in every manner. There is no humanity on the battlefield - at one point an officer berates the soldiers for retrieving their dead colleague’s body. Why bother saving the dead when the living are barely scraping through? 

I’m also aware that this film is the first to feature particular focuses seen across reams of war-based art. In Sebastian Faulks’ 1993 novel Birdsong, the hero goes home from the trenches on leave to find his parents having a summer garden party and telling him off for being too ‘silly’ about the horrors of the war. In All Quiet the hero Paul goes home to find his father telling him he ‘doesn’t understand what war is’ and his old teacher still spouting the same heroic propaganda to a new class of boys, getting angry with Paul when he refuses to join in with it. 

In between the scenes of constant banging and crashing (bringing us into the soundscape which is remarkably effective), we are privy to a number of intense conversations between the soldiers. These range from musings on what the war is even about, to just scenes where they list how their friends have died. ‘Went out to rescue a dog then -‘. Thanks to the actors having American and British accents, we lose track of the fact that this is the German side, and see the whole thing as just a monumental, chaotic, loss of life. It is fitting perhaps that it closes (like Littlewood’s Oh! What a Lovely War) with a camera scanning over the graveyards full of white crosses. 

Filmed just ten years after the war, this is an astonishing piece. Not only does it question the war’s motives and why it happened (when many people would still be grieving for their lost ones), it highlights the similarity between German and Allied losses removing any sense of ‘goodies’ and ‘baddies’. Grim and constantly hopeless, it’s a triumph in bringing real, gut-wrenching war to the screen. 

Highlight 

The scene when the men eat and debate why they’re at war. With startling poignancy, they realise they bear no ill will towards the English or French, and imagine they bear none towards the Germans either. ‘Maybe war just happens’, one of them says. 

Lowlight

The scene where Paul and his friends meet & seduce local Frenchwomen is just a bit odd. 

Mark 

9/10

Paul says...

Out of the first three Best Picture Oscar winners, two are about the First World War (or, The Great War, as it would have been known then). By my count, 22 out of the 89 winners are about war, or war at least plays a significant part in the story. By the end of our Oscars journey, we will have seen films about both world wars, Vietnam, Iraq, the American Civil War, the Pacific War and even a fictional war in Middle-Earth. Already, we have found a recurring theme, and clear evidence that you can grab a lot of awards by pretending to slaughter several hundred warriors.

But whilst Wings had a gung-ho heroism about it, All Quiet deals with the First World War with more humanity and gruesomeness. Eyes and limbs are blasted off. Vast numbers of extras and main characters perish. Grown men turn into gibbering, hysterical wrecks. The action scenes are still impressive to watch today, so they must have been awe-inspiring in 1930. The film refuses to relinquish its audience from the gruelling and relentless nature of these battles, and whilst it has nothing much to say other than “war is bad”, it says it with realism and integrity. 

In terms of battle scenes, All Quiet matches Wings’ ambition, but surpasses Wings in terms of emotional scope. Grand love triangles and tragic Shakespearean tales of self-sacrifice are replaced with naturalistic perspectives on war from the young soldiers, the older, more dispassionate ones, and the women and old men left behind at home. There is a stunning sequence close to the end in which one of the main characters gets furlough, and realises that even in 1917/18, his old schoolteacher is still giving patriotic speeches to groups of naive teenage boys with their lives ahead of them. In fact, the film is pretty much a series of vaguely-connected sequences, each illustrating different aspects of The Great War. Put together, they form a harrowing panorama of conflict at its absolute worst.

It’s true that acting, writing and directorial styles have developed considerably since this film was released. As in The Broadway Melody, there is still an amateurish and rustic nature to the production. But nonetheless, I challenge anyone to not be touched by the last 20 minutes, when the film subtly makes you realise just how far you’ve come, and how much death and devastation has occurred. 

I could easily condemn the film’s age and call it out-dated, but its subject matter and messages are too important and relevant for me to do so. Its significance is compounded by the fact that the Nazis banned the film and its original book for anti-war sentiments, and the lead actor, Lew Ayres, became a conscientious objector during the Second World War. I liked All Quiet on the Western Front, and I look forward to seeing how war films change as the decades go on.

Highlight

The main character Paul’s confrontation with his old schoolteacher, who can’t understand why this young soldier has become so disenchanted in the last 4 years,

Lowlight

The main group of men all looked the same- which led to a lot of “Who’s that? Was he the guy with one leg? Oh, he’s dead anyway, never mind.”

Mark

8/10

2. The Broadway Melody (1928/29)

Plot Intro

Eddie Kearns, enthusiastic Broadway entrepreneur, has a new revue to perform on stage in New York City. He has employed the two Mahoney Sisters to star in it - he is betrothed to the elder, but falls in love with the younger. As the production rehearses, he and the girls must navigate a complicated love triangle, a tyrannical theatre manager, greedy and lecherous investors, backstage rivalries and the limited movie-making technology of the late 1920s. 

Paul says...

Every now and then, a film comes along that brings a new technological innovation into the mainstream. Toy Story established 3D animation, Gone With the Wind established Technicolour, and The Broadway Melody established the Hollywood musical. Though not the first film with recorded sound (that title is given to 1927’s The Jazz Singer), it set a benchmark for how extensively and expensively sound should be used in film, and paved the way for similarly-styled musicals such as Chicago, A Chorus Line and The Producers. At the time, this would have been a feast for the eyes and ears, like seeing a grand Vaudeville show- but in your local movie theatre.

Now here’s the bad news- the film is as outdated and antediluvian as patterned carpet. There are awkward cuts and pauses lasting longer than they should; cue cards announcing the setting and timing of each scene like a silent film; and fight scenes that are ropey at best. 

The script and acting is basically that of a substandard stage musical put on by students. It lacks so much subtlety that even Bonnie Langford would have given it a miss. Cries of “Oh gee whizz!” and “Hey, that little ditty sure is swell!” as well as a few thigh slaps, hand-to-mouth gasps and over-enthusiastic dancing permeate the drama. At one point the heroine is complimented for being “regular”. I had no idea that having clockwork bowels was considered admirable in the ’20s. 

A minor saving grace (if I were to be fair-minded) is the variety of minor characters who get some decent one-liners. An effeminate costume designer at loggerheads with a buxom, matronly dresser; a pair of money-hungry investors who bear a resemblance to Laurel and Hardy; a grumpy electrician; a narcissistic tenor; and a stuttering agent all get unfairly brief moments to shine. Ideally the film would have given them funnier and more frequent lines, transforming the film into a high-energy, fun-filled comedy-musical about the chaos of creating entertainment. But alas, my advice will go unheeded because most of the cast and crew are dead by now.

I am well aware of the fact that we will be hitting some duds on our Oscars journey, and this appears to be our first. The Broadway Melody may have some interest for film historians but it’s now dusty, badly edited, and overshadowed by the far more polished musicals yet to come.

Fun fact: Follow-up films with the same title were made in 1936, 1938 and 1940. But with new characters, actors and storylines, creating a sort of tenuously-connected franchise.

Highlight

A camp costume designer who gets all of 5 lines but delivers all of them with Nathan Lane-esque gusto.

Lowlight

A so-called “fight scene” in which a punch misses by about a mile, but the punchee still throws himself several metres.

Mark

2/10  

Doug says...

When I heard that the second film of our project was the 1928/29 movie musical The Broadway Melody, I was delighted. I’m a lover of anything glittery and musical, and the idea of seeing the one of the first ever silver-screen musicals was exciting. Yes, the old film style of acting was going over the top, but over-acting is one of the joys of an old-school song and dance film. This was going to be great. 

Only, it wasn’t. It was terrible. The whole thing was badly put together with the film’s footage jumping constantly so you could see where different takes of the same scene had been roughly glued together. The occasional joke was delivered with such appalling comic timing that what could have elicited a chuckle only fell flat. The storyline was trite and ended up forcing some sort of ‘happy ending’ which made zero sense and left the audience to bewilderedly fill in the gaps after the film’s end. 

Trying to find something decent in this car-crash of a movie to write about is a challenge. Of all the posturing actors, the lead female called ‘Hank’ (apparently a contraction of the name ‘Harriet’) is played by Bessie Love who at least attempts to portray her character with conviction. There are some huge vaudeville theatre scenes that were originally shown in basic Technicolor and would, I’m sure, have wowed the audiences of the time. And there are some ideas of a story that could be better told - the wider scenes with an arrogant actor demanding a spotlight, and the camp costume designer having a bitch-off with the dancers’ minder hint at a far better film. 

I think what this film truly represents is the rocky transition from silent film to talkies. They are continuing to act in the silent film style which becomes pantomime-like when you can actually hear them. Having said this, I longed for the charisma of last week’s Clara Bow in Wings: this film needed someone with her magnetism to lift this into something actually watchable. The director appeared to be asleep, while it was clearly edited by a monkey on steroids. There are a number of scenes where actors stare meaninglessly at the screen for around a minute before it randomly cuts to another scene somewhere else. And there’s a character who, it took me half the film to work out, is supposed to have a stutter. Colin Firth he ain’t. 

This is a film that should probably be put in a skip ‘by accident’ and forgotten about. Oh, and the music (what there is of it) is bland, vapid and forgettable. 

Highlight

It ended. 

Low light

Out of a parade of options, the astonishingly bad editing takes the crown. 

Mark

0.5/10

1. Wings (1927/28)

So rare, we could only get a Spanish version

Doug says...

About five minutes into Wings, I was regretting ever starting this project. The shuddering black and white film had 

obvious jump cuts, the sentimentalised language on the cue-cards (it’s a silent film)  were generally punctuated with an exclamation mark, and then there was the constantly reverberating barrel-organ music the whole way through. It is by no means a modern film. 

But sticking with it, I found myself as a modern cinema-goer slowly absorbed into the drama. Wings tells the story of two men Jack and David who go off to be pilots in World War One, both in love with the same girl Sylvia, while the heroine Mary (famous silent-movie actress Clara Bow) is desperately in love with Jack and signs up to drive cars in the war. There’s also a comic Dutchman who kept getting punched. The plot isn’t particularly wonderful, a Shakespearean tale of two rivals who become friends (I guess silent films aren’t made for intricate moments), but I finally understand why Clara Bow was the belle of the Silent Screen. 

She lights up on stage. Her acting now would be totally over the top, but it’s necessary for silent films. Her movements are almost choreographed, her emotions implicitly readable (she’s cracking at both comic and tragic acting). One scene that has her cowering under her own car as bombs fall around her is extraordinarily emotional considering the simple methods of film making they had compared to today. 

And actually I’m doing it down by calling it simple. The cinema work is athletic and inspiring - dogfights in the sky are enacted (and in 1927 they would have been actually enacted). A whole town crumbles to dust in front of your eyes, and there’s even some ‘effects’ when the drunken Jack starts seeing champagne bubbles coming out of everywhere, (possibly the oddest moment of the whole film).

The whole film is made far more affecting by the knowledge that cinema-goers would have been watching this only ten years after the end of World War One (and that they had no idea what war was heading their way). The scene when David and his mother say a tearful goodbye at the film’s start would probably have resonated sorrowfully with the audience who were still healing from one of the greatest losses of life in modern times. Saying this, it hasn’t travelled through time well. Silent film is a whole different style of film-making, and not really applicable to modern audiences, requiring far more focus the whole way through. But by recording the 1927 attitude to the war and how audiences were beginning to view it, Wings is a fascinating historical document. 

Highlight 

Clara Bow proving why she was the J-Law of her day 

Lowlight

The very long air-battle scenes with accompanying unconvincing ‘dying’. 

Marks 

A historical 5/10 

Paul says...

Picture it! Los Angeles, 1929. The Wall Street Crash was just around the corner. Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton already established with Laurel and Hardy just starting out. Nuclear weaponry, The Beatles, and Twitter are concepts far beyond human reasoning (Twitter still is). And in the first Academy Awards ceremony, Wings is awarded Outstanding Picture- the equivalent of our modern-day Best Picture.

The ceremony was 15 minutes long, and the winners were announced beforehand, a far cry from the 4 hour slog and two month build-up we get now.

Wings covers the exploits of two young lovelorn pilots during the final years of World War 1. The sensitive one, David, loves the delicate Sylvia. Jack, the gung-ho one (and a Gareth Gates lookalike), also loves her. But, oh no! Jack has no idea that Sylvia only has eyes for David, and Sylvia can't bring herself to tell him. Meanwhile, the plucky and charming Mary is desperately in love with Jack, but he only has eyes for Sylvia! Into this tangled web is thrown a war and, as expected, heart-felt tragedy.

Just from the above, you can see that this is the prototype for historical love stories. Pearl Harbour, Titanic, and Independence Day all stem from Wings. The difference here is that Wings is silent. No sound effects, no audible dialogue. And this is unexpectedly hard work. You can't take your eyes away from the screen for fear of missing some important exposition or action. In the 21st century when we can have one eye on the film and one eye on Tinder, that's exhausting.

The musical score is original to the 1927 film, so we were subjected to two hours of barrel organ music, transporting us from Flanders Fields to Brighton Pier.

Having said all this, I actually really enjoyed our first Oscar-winner. I found myself fully involved in the love story thanks to Clara Bow's endearing and natural performance as Mary. She's funny, feisty, courageous and vulnerable, and stole the show for both of us. 

The opening scenes in which David and Gareth Gates say tearful farewells to their stoic parents and loving heroines are heart-breaking, and all the more so when we remember that most audiences of the late ’20's would have had a loved one perish on the Somme.

Also, if you're expecting Thunderbirds-style strings on the planes, then think again. The action sequences were filmed sans special effects. Real planes, real explosions and hundreds of extras in army uniform re-enacted the Battle of Saint-Mihiel (meticulously researched by the director, an ex-army pilot himself). The result is a sense of gargantuan film-making, contrasting beautifully with the intimate scenes between the leads. 

Has it stood the test of time? To be honest, no. But no silent film has. Seeing the characters over-act purposefully, then cutting to a dialogue cue-card feels disjointed by today's standards. Unless Chaplin is battling policement or sliding down a drainpipe, then silent films can become arduous for most. But if you're interested in seeing a piece of film history, and you're in the mood for a strong tale of heroism and tragedy, then this could be the film for you. Just don't expect Celine Dion to sing over the closing credits.

Highlight

The grand finale, which looks like the director took his camera back  in time and just filmed a World War 1 battle. Saving Private Ryan, eat your heart out.

Lowlight

The awkward cutaways to cue-cards. Thank God this is the only silent film on our list until we reach The Artist!

Mark

A solid 7/10

Welcome!

Hi there!

We're Doug and Paul - boyfriends with a passion for film. We decided that we wanted a project, and the idea of watching all the winners of the Academy Award for Best Picture in order would suit the bill.

That's 90 years of film winning, beginning in 1927 with a black-and-white silent film, and ending up right now in 2017 where 'Moonlight' has just taken the prize.

We'll be rating them out of 10, choosing a highlight and a lowlight, and discussing some of the central themes of the film, looking at each movie's social & political background, and working out whether we think they've lasted well over the years since winning.

So without further ado - let's get started. Rewind back to 1927 with 'Wings'.