All Quiet on the Western Front

Lewis Milestone’s Oscar® winning All Quiet on the Western Front is one of the Dad’s all time favorite movies and I’ve known about it since I was a little kid.  What I didn’t realize as a kid though, what I only recently figured out upon reviewing, was that All Quiet on the Western Front is an amazing anti-war film.

It tells the story of a group of German schoolboys who all enlist in World War I and end up learn the reality of what war means through witnessing death and thus gaining a larger understanding of right and wrong.  The scene above has always stood out for me, as has the first title card featured in the film:

This story is neither an accusation nor a confession, and least of all an adventure, for death is not an adventure to those who stand face to face with it. It will try simply to tell of a generation of men who, even though they may have escaped its shells, were destroyed by the war…

This is a film that doesn’t try to create false drama but instead uses drama to try and bring truth to the front.

In nearly all the sequences, fulsomeness is avoided. Truth comes to the fore, when the young soldiers are elated at the idea of joining up, when they are disillusioned, when they are hungry, when they are killing rats in a dugout, when they are shaken with fear and when they, or one of them, becomes fed up with the conception of war held by the elderly man back home. [NYTIMES]

So many war films today glamorize war and make it seem like a place where heroes are born.  I wonder how a film from 1930 managed to paint such an honest portrait of war and how we seem to have lost that understanding today, at least in the cinema. It makes me sad.

Watch this film to see how it pushed the envelope and then takepart with United for Peace and Justice.

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