3. 1929/30 - All Quiet on the Western Front

Fact Sheet:

Oscars:

• Directing - Lewis Milestone
• Outstanding Production - Universal

Nominations:

• Cinematography - Arthur Edison
• Writing - George Abbott, Maxwell Anderson, Del Andrews

Best Picture Contenders:

• The Big House
• Disraeli
• The Divorcee
• The Love Parade

Duration: 125 min.

Dulce et decorum est, pro patria mori. It is sweet and glorious to die for the fatherland. That is what a German teacher tells his students in the beginning of All Quiet on the Western Front. He incites them all to go off to war, and fight bravely and gloriously for their country. They all enlist, and are all determined to be heroes.

But this isn't a story of heroism or bravery. This isn't even the story of a war. This is the story of those young men, who were disillusioned by the horrors they have seen. They went there to fight the war to end all wars, but instead they were met with death and destruction.

The story of World War I has been told many times. We have seen those heroes fight valiantly. We have seen love stories of those heroes (see Wings two years earlier). But All Quiet on the Western Front tells the story of what truly happens in the war. We really follow those young soldiers in the trenches, we live with them, we see the few brothers we have die in Flanders' Fields, we struggle for food, we struggle with our own despair in the desolateness of those trenches. We don't even know why we're there, we don't know if the war ever ended or who won (of course we do know, but the film never tells us - it ends where our main character ends).

There is almost no music - apart from the music the men make themselves with their harmonicas, killing time in their trench. The score of the film consists of the bombs, the gunfire, the screams of dying men. And it tells a story no music could.

I don't have many words for this movie, because solemn silence is truly what it deserves. It is the best tale I have seen of World War I, because it really allows you to feel the pain of those young men, sense their shattered lives. It is a beautiful film because it tells such an ugly story. I leave you today with a famous poem of Wilfred Owen, which tells the same war story this movie does.

DULCE ET DECORUM EST

Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of tired, outstripped Five-Nines that dropped behind.

Gas! Gas! Quick, boys! – An ecstasy of fumbling,
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time;
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling,
And flound'ring like a man in fire or lime...
Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light,
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.
In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.

If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie; Dulce et Decorum est
Pro patria mori.

8 October 1917 - March, 1918