All Quiet on the Western Front

All Quiet on the Western Front

Director: Lewis Milestone

Year: 1930

Starring: Louis Wolheim, Lew Ayres, Ben Alexander and William Bakewell

     I've said before that films depicting the First World War are few and far between, but they were some of the earliest war movies made. All Quiet on the Western is one of the earliest, and one of the best. The film is also known for being produced by Carl Laemmle Jr, the man who one year later would launch the successful Universal Monster movies Dracula and Frankenstein, and would continue to do so for the rest of the decade. The film also holds the distinction of being the first film to win both the Academy Award for Best Picture and Best Director in the same year. 
     As a war movie, it's fantastic. The film gives one of the most brutal, but realistic, depictions of the war. The combat scenes in the trenches are some of the best I've personally seen in film, and it makes you appreciate how at one time, everything that you saw happened on screen. The production value in these scenes is the film's high point, as the battlefields and trenches are recreated to the point where you feel like you yourself are in there with the characters.
     The characters themselves is another high point of the film. You are introduced to a small group of German students who all enlist together. As they endure training and the actual battles themselves, they are clearly affected by their surroundings. The film does a great balancing act in this way. It will show a shocking combat scene, and them the characters discuss the events and how they were affected. It doesn't sound too interesting, but it's effective because the filmmakers used this opportunity to develop how the characters slowly change as a result of the conflict. These characters go from naive, gun-ho students to hardened, almost lifeless soldiers over the course of the film.
     The film, even over 83 years later, is still shocking in how it represents the war. The film has an anti-war feel to it, much like Stanley Kubrick's Paths of Glory. The film keeps you hooked from beginning to end, and is still to this day one of the greatest portrayals of the horrors of war ever put to screen.