All Quiet on the Western Front 8/10

All Quiet on the Western Front (NR) 1930
Reviewer’s Tilt (7)
War-130min
Special DVD Features worth a look-Production notes

Erich Maria Remarque’s story remains as impressive an achievement today as it was in 1929. Recognizing this potential, Universal obtained the movie rights, threw over a million dollars and thousands of people at the project, and garnered two Academy Awards (including Best Picture) in the process. The film follows a group of young German classmates into war. Whipped into a patriotic frenzy by their zealous teacher, the boys dream of heroism and adventure. Cruel training and horrific battles quickly supplant fervor with despair. Battle whittles their number, but the psychological toll is even more devastating. The boys actually begin to congratulate the wounded for getting a ticket out of the war. A discussion of wartime tactics by noncombatants brings home the chilly realization that only the killers and their victims are able to grasp the futility and wrongness of war.

The dialogue and acting are trite and stilted. The special effects are crude and distracting. The audio and video are barely intelligible. The focus and vision, however, come across completely untarnished. The fact that the Polish decried the movie as pro-German and the German’s decried it as anti-German is evidence that the movie strikes a nerve in everyone. At its core, the film is a painfully accurate reflection of the governments and attitudes in place during WWI, and, unfortunately, still in place today. As the seminal work in the genre, this film, despite its many flaws, is still a “must see.”

Format: B&W, Full Screen, Closed captioned.
Sound: (Dolby Digital Mono)
Extras: Production notes, trailer.