Cinema Hype

The title placard before the 1929-1930 Best Picture, All Quiet on the Western Front, reads, “This film is neither a confession nor an accusation, and least of all an adventure, for death is not an adventure for those who stand face to face with it.” That said–accusation, confession, or not–the message of the film is clear: War is ugly.

Both the film and the novel on which it was based show signs of a world still recovering from the effects of war; published in Germany in 1929, it had been translated and adapted to film in America within the year. There’s a sense of urgency and necessity to the story, like the Great War was still very much on the minds of Europeans and Americans alike. The resulting movie is big, with a bit of a mile-wide/inch-deep sensibility: a group of high-school boys are carried away by a teacher’s rhetoric and enlist in the German army just as World War I begins to rage, and go on to life in the trenches.

In a way, little has changed between then and the American war movies we see today: the men bond, kill time between battles, crave food and leave time, and come out of the experience hardened. The tone of the film differs from most American war movies in one important area, though: Americans generally like war movies about victory, and Hollywood responds accordingly. All Quiet on the Western Front carries with it a sense of futility–the knowledge that the soldiers who die aren’t even sacrificing themselves for the winning side.

The pace of the film is a little like the pace of battle itself, as portrayed in the movies: time meanders along, slow and steady, until something disturbing happens. Everybody’s sitting around in the barracks; suddenly, a bomb drops, a soldier loses his mind (and his boots), another soldier drops to the ground and never wakes up. It’s not a bloody film, particularly, but the emotional angst–the howling of soldiers in the hospital–more than make up for it. It’s a good movie, but for a soaring heart and increased faith in mankind, best to look elsewhere.

Next up for Project 501: Cimarron and Grand Hotel

All Quiet on the Western Front, Project 501, Oscar winners