Evan D. As a project this year we are taking a trip through time to revisit all of the Best Picture winners in history, Wings to Wicked??? (hopefully not Wicked.) All Quiet on the Western Front is the third film in that series, to see all the other Best Picture reviews, click here. War was clearly fresh on the Academy’s mind in the late twenties and early thirties. Having just recently emerged from the First World War, two of the first three Best Picture winners were in depth depictions of the tragic conflict. Where Wings was a film made to valorize the bravery of WWI pilots, All Quiet on the Western Front detailed the bleak horrors of life at war to form a much sharper critique. It makes sense that the men who fought and saw their compatriots die, would be consumed by the tragedy of war and seek to immortalize it to film. In some way these early war pictures have a far more sober view than ones that have emerged in recent years at the hands of filmmakers with a comfortable distance from the nationalistic fervor of the early 20th century.
Lewis Milestone directs this adaptation of Erich Maria Remarque’s sharply anti-war novel about a group of German high school kids persuaded to enlist, only to find out that war is not nearly as glamorous as they were told. Chief among them is Paul (Lew Ayres) who, alongside his classmates, is whipped up into a frenzy by the zealous encouragement of their teacher. Soaring speeches of honor and duty to one’s homeland send these boys excitedly off to boot camp fantasizing about glorious victory and daydreaming of when they’ll get to shoot guns and practice bayonet. Once off to the front they begin to see how gruesome and unglamorous combat is as they unceremoniously die off, one by one. All Quiet on the Western Front is radically different type of war picture than one you might see today, a stark contrast even to Edward Berger’s adaptation of the same material from just a couple years ago. One telling feature of Milestone’s film is the time it spends on the hunger and scarcity of food among the soldiers. More than any combat, the soldiers here are shown in search of basic accommodations — a bite to eat, a place to sit or stay warm. His story is most interested in the ways war is foolishness and hell even far behind the front lines. Bombs drop constantly throughout the background and there are plenty of sequences of combat but those moments often obfuscate the identities of the men in battle. It’s as if to say that the nameless sacrifices were so frequent as to be insignificant in the big picture. All the glory these boys were promised yet their untimely ends come quietly and alone in some muddy ditch. In fact, one of the most startling sequences of the film follows not a man, but a pair of boots as they march on upon the feet of a series of doomed soldiers. Leather endures longer than life in the course of combat. Where we see the men most clearly is in the camaraderie outside the front. Over a rare meal the soldiers talk about how this war might end. They carry no animosity toward the French or the British men they are sent to kill and none of them have any clue what they are even fighting over. Did the French offend the Germans? Does the Kaiser want a war for glory? All they know is that they are the ones forced to kill and die for it. When Paul does return home on a weeklong leave, he does not recognize the lively little town he once knew. Is it home that had changed or was it Paul? He watches as old men who had not set foot on the battlefield squabbled of which killing field would be best to send him and his company in pursuit of an impossible march to Paris. He returns to his classroom only to see his same professor spout the same speech in pursuit of transforming more boys into soldiers and ultimately more soldiers into corpses. War has shattered his youthful innocence and estranged him from the life he once knew. Perhaps François Truffaut is right that “every film about war ends up being pro-war,” but if there was ever an exception to prove the rule it would be All Quiet on the Western Front. Milestone’s epic bluntly depicts the horrors of war and, more importantly, the dangers of nationalistic fervor. It is the kind of look at war that could only come in the wake of the real life devastation that inspired it. To this day it remains one of the most remarkable and harrowing films honored by the Academy. 10/10
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