All Quiet on the Western Front novel

Erich Remarque author

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All Quiet on the Western Front (1930, DVD)
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All Quiet on the Western Front (1979, DVD)
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All Quiet on the Western Front

Three film versions have been made of the novel All Quiet on the Western Front, the two you are most likely to find being the 1930 black-and-white classic and the 1979 made-for-TV movie. Both are pretty good.

Classic anti-war film
One is even considered great. The 1930 film of All Quiet on the Western Front won wide acclaim for its anti-war portrayal of the First World War, as well as Academy Awards for best film and director. It also caused great controversy, perhaps being the only film both boycotted by the American Legion and banned by the German Nazis. It's often called the greatest war film ever made.

This is hard to understand though when you watch the actual film. Critics may be unduly influenced by its historical significance as the first important war film to be made after the talkies were introduced. By today's standards the movie does not hold up nearly as well as the book. It's melodramatic, badly paced and overacted.

This is not to put down director Lewis Milestone, Lew Ayres as the disillusioned German soldier Paul Baumer, or any others associated with the film. This is just how early Hollywood films were made. Three years after the first talkies appeared, All Quiet still seems like a silent picture in many ways.

A very good one though. The visual storytelling is brilliant—from one of the initial scenes of troops marching past school windows flanking the jingoistic old teacher haranguing his young students to the last scene of the soldier's dead hand reaching for a butterfly. Throughout, the use of shadow, the juxtaposition of odd images, and dramatic camera angles provides fodders for film-study classes. Especially effective are the scenes of Baumer in the crater trying to save the French soldier he had just attempted to kill, the camaraderie he experiences with his fellow soldiers (especially with Katczinsky played memorably by Louis Wolheim), and his disorienting return to civilization which sends him running back to the front where paradoxically he feels most alive. The heart-rending conclusion to the 1930 film is a change on the novel but in complete agreement with its spirit.

Even better
At two-and-a-half hours, the 1979 TV movie uses more modern filmmaking techniques to be more faithful to the book's complexity. Richard Thomas as Baumer buries his goody-good image as "John Boy" of TV's The Waltons once and for all. (Though his former image actually helps, since the character is meant to develop from wide-eyed innocence to weary fatalism.)

Also starring are a too-old but brilliant Ernest Borgnine as his comrade-in-arms Katczinsky and Patricia Neal as his mother. Despite all the acclaim for the previous Hollywood film, I think this one is much better. It's certainly better for our times.

— Eric

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