All Quiet On The Western Front: 1930 - NOW We’re Getting Somewhere

Number Three on the list is All Quiet On The Western Front from 1930, directed by Lewis Milestone. It tells the story of a group of naive and hot-headed German students driven to enlist in World War I by a patriotic professor, only to have the loss, trauma, and shell-shock destroy them from the outside in. I was riveted from the very beginning of the movie, so I didn’t write a single note while I was watching. However, I did take note of what the introductory card said:

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

Honestly, I don’t have a ton to say about it. It was a great movie. The only difficulty I had was trying to differentiate character names; All Quiet was, in its essence, an ensemble film, so learning a lot of character names right off the bat that were all pivotal to driving the plot was a little confusing. Inevitably, given the course of the story, the ensemble dwindles to zero, but there wasn’t really a main character established in my eyes. 

I could probably talk about the story and how heartbreaking it was, and how much I loved the character development, and how the inevitable ending of the story still left me aching regardless of how prepared I was for it, but I’ll just say how much of a distinctive step up this film was from the first two winners. Maybe it’s my preference for what drives a film, or maybe it’s my preference of genre or flair for a dramatic story, but I enjoyed All Quiet leaps and bounds more than I enjoyed Wings and The Broadway Melody. It sent a message, it told a story, it had no difficulty getting me to connect to at least one character, it made it easy to engage with the story and connect to it from the very beginning. 

In terms of which of Aristotles Six Elements I think won this film Best Picture, there are, for the first time, several contenders:

The Plot was riveting and heartbreaking; it lived up to the opening card and sent the message it was trying to send. It wasn’t a glamorous story of a group of young and virile gentlemen going off to war and all becoming heroes; these men are picked off one by one, both physically and emotionally. Paul goes home to find that there is no place left for him in his old world; he is too changed from what he’s seen and done to be able to field any of his family’s expectations of who he is or will be when he returns for good. The moment he returned from leave early, I knew that Paul had only one way of leaving the battlefield.

All Quiet was also an incredible example of how Character can drive a story. It’s the first true ensemble piece of the Best Picture winners, and the development of every single one of the men unfolded in such an artful and tragically beautiful way. Each of the men died in a surprising and unexpected way, which mirrored life in such a heartbreakingly fragile manner. The ending scene was a direct response to the title card; the chipping away of these men’s egos and expectations was tragic and moving, and sent the message the film was trying “simply” to send.

An Element I haven’t seen in either of the other two Best Picture Winners was Thought, which I touched on briefly when mentioning the other two Elements. I probably would have understood this film’s main Thought without seeing the introductory paragraph, but I thought it was a very effective tactic to publish the film’s intention in the beginning and then see it play out on screen. I thought it was brave and bold to make a film about the dark side of fighting on the front lines when the War was so fresh in everyone’s minds; I would have thought the main goal of that period of time would be to commend the veterans for their bravery and heroism, and to celebrate the accomplishments of the men who returned home in (what seemed like) one piece. To make a film which so eloquently and accurately depicted the psychological effects of front-line battle, before there were even studies on shell-shock and PTSD, was a surprise to me. And I was shocked and glued to my seat from the jump. I felt for these men; the friends they lost, the ways their lives changed, and how they each fell from a pedestal they didn’t realize they were standing on.

Watch it. Run, don’t walk.

Next: Cimarron.