All Quiet on the Western Front (1930)

When I watched Gone with the Wind, I found one massive flaw that spoiled my appreciation of what was otherwise a film of wonder. Now I've seen All Quiet on the Western Front, I've done the same thing again. In Gone with the Wind, it was that I couldn't care about a single character. Here I very much care about most of the characters, who are painfully human in a highly inhuman environment, but none of them are believable in the slightest in the roles they are given for one very simple reason.

The story follows an entire class of young Germans who sign up en masse to fight for the fatherland in the First World War. However, just as they discover that war is nothing at all like their teacher had led them to believe, we discover that the German army is nothing at all like we had been led to believe. If All Quiet on the Western Front is anything to go by, Germans look like Americans, sound like Americans and act like Americans. By the time the cast had reached the western front, which is far from quiet, I'd entirely forgotten that I was supposedly watching the German army and it took me some time to realise that I wasn't watching France fight the United States.

There really is no excuse for this. During the First World War, legendary director Erich von Stroheim found great success as an actor playing no end of German officers, and that war ended twelve years before this film was made. I can't believe that he was the only German actor in Hollywood in 1930, which also benefited from much better relations between the countries than after Hitler took over in 1933. If the studio bosses didn't want to cast Germans, then why didn't they look beyond a book about Germans and film something similar that focused on Americans? Or if they really had their minds set on this one in particular, why didn't they ask their actors to at least try to act like Germans? Even if they'd only skimmed the surface by changing 'the' to 'ze' and 'that' to 'zat', it would still have been ten times more believable.

One reason could be because Universal Studios may have been treating the Germans as Everyman. All Quiet on the Western Front was released in what is known as the pre-code era. This roughly covers the period between the advent of sound in pictures in the very late twenties up until the imposition of the Production Code in 1934 that deliberately and effectively censored much of the complex behaviour that was then being portrayed in Hollywood films. America was a highly pacifist nation in 1930, a time when over 70% of the population believed that it had been wrong to enter what became known as World War I.

Only in the pre-code era could a film like this be made, that treats the enemy with sympathy and understanding. There is simply no way that Americans would have stood for a sympathetic portrayal of Nazis after World War II, or the Vietnamese or Koreans or Iraqis after other conflicts that involved their country's troops. Yet in 1930, All Quiet on the Western Front wasn't just tolerated. It was a huge critical and commercial success and it went on to receive both the Best Picture and Best Director Oscars for that year.

Given this background, it's very possible that the American cast didn't pretend to be Germans only so that their American target audience could identify with them better. If so, it's understandable but still very confusing.

Outside this one major flaw, I was very much surprised by how much I enjoyed All Quiet on the Western Front. Of all the films that have added up over time on my DVR so far for this project, this one stayed there the longest before my wife and I finally bit the bullet and decided to watch it. It just didn't seem appealing. Neither of us had seen it before and all we expected was an old black and white film that would depress us about the horrors of war. It was made in 1930, very early days for sound, so it was likely to feature silent stars overacting because they hadn't got used to sound technology yet. It was so easy to leave it for later and watch something else in the meantime.

Happily most of these expectations proved to be entirely wrong, and even though the actors aren't believable in the slightest as Germans, they are very believable as naïve soldiers. We suffer with them as they go so quickly from the schoolroom to the battlefield and they teach us not just about the horrors of war but the fundamental pointlessness of it as well. What's more, they don't depress us too much in the process because there are light hearted moments too that ease the weight of the film's message.

Lew Ayres is the lead, playing a young German named Paul Baumer, and he has more heart and compassion than most. He signs up only because his teacher, Professor Kantorek, has thrust blind nationalism down his and his classmates' throats until they would almost believe that black is white. Kantorek is the only real villain in the film. Every other war film I've ever seen has an easily defined enemy because we're watching the good side fight the bad side, but that's not the case here because this is a war film from the pre-code era. Here the enemies are the figures of authority who may not have started the war, but continue to feed it: Kantorek the teacher who glorifies war to children, Himmelstoss the postman who trains the recruits to be soldiers but doesn't prepare them for the reality of war, and the elders back home who Baumer encounters on leave who have no clue what war is really like and exhort him to go on alone and take Paris.

These scenes when Baumer comes home on leave are the most powerful for me. When he visits his old school, the very same teacher who persuaded him to sign up is busy at it again with even younger children. Professor Kantorek exhorts Baumer to help him in what seems to be an almost holy task, but he can't do it. Instead he tells them: "It's dirty and painful to die for your country. When it comes to dying for your country, it's better not to die at all. There are millions out there dying for their country, and what good is it?" However the children are already brainwashed enough for them to see him as a coward, and Baumer heads back to the front early, unable to exist anywhere else now.

Ayres is good and he gets the best scenes, including a notable one where he gets stuck in a foxhole for an entire night, talking to the corpse of a French soldier that he has killed. However Louis Wolheim is better as the veteran Katczinsky who teaches the kids how to survive at the hard edge of battle. He is also possibly the only German at the front who could almost be taken for a German.

The crew are excellent too. The cinematography is spectacular, especially in the battle scenes that featured a couple of thousand extras and which saw acres of California ranch land echo with some truly awesome explosions. The script is sharp and intelligent and always engrossing. I admire the subtle way that certain devices were subtly worked in as recurring themes, such as Kemmerick's boots. Kemmerick is one of Baumer's young comrades who was passed down a pair of quality boots through his family. As he dies he gives them to a colleague, and we soon realise that deaths are piling upon deaths merely by watching these familiar boots being worn by a neverending succession of new soldiers in a stunning montage.

Above all though the biggest star is the message, that plea for pacifism that rang so true in the pre-code era but was soon censored out of existence. When it came to later wars, the media had discarded All Quiet on the Western Front and became Professor Kantorek instead of Paul Baumer. Times had changed and so had the feelings that went with those times. Luckily for us this film hasn't changed and its message becomes more effective because of what those times brought. No wonder the Nazis banned it.

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