In "All quiet on the Western Front" a couple of German students is seduced by the nationalistic talk of their teacher to volunteer for the First World War. Once at the front they die one after another, just like in "And then there were none" of Agatha Christie. Unlike the Agatha Christie characters however these German boys are not guilty of anything.
Main character Paul (Lew Ayres) survives and when he is on leave in his home town he sees that the same teacher is telling the same story to pupils a few years below his age. The teacher recognizes Paul and invites him to tell his story to the class. He doesn't like the eyewitness account of Paul.
"All quit on the Western front" is THE classical film about the First World War. Only "Westfront 1918" (1930, Georg Wilhelm Pabst) from the same year came close.
After the Second World War the First was no longer fashionable when it came to making a war movie. Only when the start if the First World War was 100 years ago in 2014, this war was rediscovered.
Although the First World War would soon cease to be the main subject of war movies, "All quiet on the Western front" continued to influence war films about other wars. To mention just a couple of examples, think of the drill sergeant in "Full metal jacket" (1987, Stanley Kubrick) or the nervous breakdown in "The deer hunter" (1978, Michael Cimino), both films about the Vietnam war.
The film is an adaptation of the novel "Im Westen nichts Neues" (1929) by Erich Maria Remarque. Where the novel tries to remain as factual as possible, the film clearly has a moral anti war message. In this respect the film is a little bit old fashioned because after the Second World War we all know that war is a terrible thing.
More important to me than the slightly overdone morality is the fact that the film shies away from the hero epos as far as possible. The soldiers in the trenches are terrified and only the teacher at the school and old men in the pub (all of them far away from the front) are using tough language.
A few scenes emphasize that ordinary German and French people do not have problems with each other. It is only their countries, or more precisely their leaders, that are at war. I am referring to the scene with a German and a French soldier in the same pit in the "No man's land" between the trenches. I am also referring to the scene in which German soldiers and French girls are having a good time together, doing what boys and girls of their age wants to do in peace time (and also during a war).
I am afraid these scenes are examples of the slightly overdone morality of the film. Before the First World War it was hoped in socialist circles that workers of different nationalities would not fight against each other but would give priority to the class struggle. In reality they didn't.
The ending of the film is really superb. Everybody knows the scene with the butterfly, but the images after that are in my opinion even more insistent. We see a column of marching soldiers, some looking back, looking us right into the eyes. Slowly these images fade into the image of a gigantic graveyard.
Main character Paul (Lew Ayres) survives and when he is on leave in his home town he sees that the same teacher is telling the same story to pupils a few years below his age. The teacher recognizes Paul and invites him to tell his story to the class. He doesn't like the eyewitness account of Paul.
"All quit on the Western front" is THE classical film about the First World War. Only "Westfront 1918" (1930, Georg Wilhelm Pabst) from the same year came close.
After the Second World War the First was no longer fashionable when it came to making a war movie. Only when the start if the First World War was 100 years ago in 2014, this war was rediscovered.
Although the First World War would soon cease to be the main subject of war movies, "All quiet on the Western front" continued to influence war films about other wars. To mention just a couple of examples, think of the drill sergeant in "Full metal jacket" (1987, Stanley Kubrick) or the nervous breakdown in "The deer hunter" (1978, Michael Cimino), both films about the Vietnam war.
The film is an adaptation of the novel "Im Westen nichts Neues" (1929) by Erich Maria Remarque. Where the novel tries to remain as factual as possible, the film clearly has a moral anti war message. In this respect the film is a little bit old fashioned because after the Second World War we all know that war is a terrible thing.
More important to me than the slightly overdone morality is the fact that the film shies away from the hero epos as far as possible. The soldiers in the trenches are terrified and only the teacher at the school and old men in the pub (all of them far away from the front) are using tough language.
A few scenes emphasize that ordinary German and French people do not have problems with each other. It is only their countries, or more precisely their leaders, that are at war. I am referring to the scene with a German and a French soldier in the same pit in the "No man's land" between the trenches. I am also referring to the scene in which German soldiers and French girls are having a good time together, doing what boys and girls of their age wants to do in peace time (and also during a war).
I am afraid these scenes are examples of the slightly overdone morality of the film. Before the First World War it was hoped in socialist circles that workers of different nationalities would not fight against each other but would give priority to the class struggle. In reality they didn't.
The ending of the film is really superb. Everybody knows the scene with the butterfly, but the images after that are in my opinion even more insistent. We see a column of marching soldiers, some looking back, looking us right into the eyes. Slowly these images fade into the image of a gigantic graveyard.