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
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
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