 The Best Picture Our Columnists Reflect on Oscar's Best Films |
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(1929-30) |
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 Lew Ayres, left, with Raymond Griffith: the famous shell hole scene. |
Milestone's immortal anti-war film
still retains its knockout punch
By
RON MILLER
of TheColumnists.com
THERE WAS no way to prepare me--then an 11 or 12-year-old kid--for
what I experienced when I first saw "All Quiet on the Western
Front" in a theatrical reissue of the Oscar-winning film
of 1929-30 in the early 1950s.
I had been raised on the John Wayne/Randolph Scott brand of war film--lots of action and gung ho patriotism, usually followed by a flag-waving commercial for War Bonds. My dad hadn't gone to war because of a disabling leg injury, so we didn't hear nightmare war stories around the house. A cousin I never even knew was killed on the very last day of the war in the Pacific, but that was so remote that it didn't leave any kind of impression on me.
So, there was nothing to make me think that war wasn't as exciting and adventurous as it looked when The Duke blew away the Japanese in "The Fighting Seabees" or Van Johnson and his buddies cleaned up on the Germans in "Battleground" while singing "Sound Off" like an all-male glee club.
I'm guessing they re-released "All Quiet on the Western Front" because America was once more at war, this time in Korea. There was even a romantic nostalgia about World War I then because Gen. Douglas MacArthur had given his famous "Old Soldiers Never Die" speech after being relieved of his command in Korea by President Truman--and that line came from a World War I military song.
Anyway, I knew nothing about the movie when it flickered onto the screen with its snapping and popping old soundtrack and all the jumps where movie projectionists had spliced it together over the years. Put simply, as creaky as it was, it literally changed my mind forever about war.
Adapted
by playwright Maxwell Anderson from Erich Maria Remarque's best-selling
novel, "All Quiet on the Western Front" is the story
of several young high school classmates in Germany who are whipped
up into a frenzy of patriotism by their teacher and all volunteer
to join the German infantry, then engaged in a major European
war against France and England.
As the somber precis to the film tells us, they symbolize "a
generation of men who, even though they may have escaped its
shells, were destroyed by the war." I instantly related
to the film's hero, Paul Baumer (Lew Ayres), a would-be writer
who went to war with his buddies because he believed what his
teacher had told them: They were the iron men of Germany, answering
the call to defend the land that gave them birth.
Though I was barely out of childhood, that was me. At that time, I loved everything that had to do with war. I had scrounged a French World War I infantry helmet at a thrift store, along with a decrepit World War I gas mask, and regularly went to make believe war after school with the other neighborhood kids.
So it would be fair to say my eyes were opened significantly by "All Quiet on the Western Front," which is still a powerfully effective anti-war film after more than 70 years.
For
one thing, I was used to thinking of Germans as the bad guys
after America had fought them in two consectutive world wars.
But these weren't bad guys. They were just guys like everybody
else I knew. They weren't out to conquer the world. In fact,
in one of the film's immortal scenes, the men are sitting around
talking after their first decent meal in weeks and start openly
wondering how this war got started in the first place. They haven't
a clue.
And right away I was numbed by the horror of their world: Hunkered
down in rat-infested bunkers for day after day under heavy bombardment
until they're ready to try anything, including bayonet charges
into barbed wire and machine gun fire, just to get away from
that incessant pounding of heavy artillery shells.
In most war movies I'd seen, people died cleanly if they were
Americans. But I'll never forget one scene that transfixed me:
A French soldier is shot while charging the German trenches,
he falls onto the barbed wire just as a grenade goes off and
when the smoke clears all that's left are his severed hands,
dangling on the barbed wire. That never happened to The Duke.
In another gut-wrenching sequence, Paul is dazed by an explosion and hunkers down in a shell hole. Moments later, the tide of the attack turns and he realizes those are French soldiers leaping over his hole, chasing retreating Germans. When one Frenchman spots him and jumps into the hole with his fixed bayonet, Paul attacks him with his knife and mortally wounds him. Still pinned down in the hole, Paul is trapped all night just a few feet from the dying man.
 Lew Ayres, far left, with Louis Wolheim, center, and Ben Alexander, far right. Alexander, who played the soldier whose boots are passed on to others after his leg is amputated, years later played Jack Webb's sidekick, Frank Smith, on TV's "Dragnet." |
If there is anything I wouldn't like about being in a war, it would be having to look into the eyes of somebody I had just killed. Before it's over, Paul is begging the dead man for his forgiveness--after extracting a photo of the man's wife and child from his jacket pocket.
"Oh, God!" Paul cries, "why did they do this to us? We only wanted to live, you and I!"
As the film's wise old veteran, Kat (Louis Wolheim), suggests, whenever a war starts developing, they ought to rope off a field and put all the politicians and generals in there with clubs to fight it out. It has nothing to do with the people who actually wind up doing the fighting. Amen.
Ultimately, after Paul is wounded and goes home on leave, he's asked to speak to the new brood of high school boys the teacher is working up into an enlistment lather. By now, Paul is much older in spirit and severely disillusioned. All his buddies are either dead, disfigured or ruined in some way. In one of the most telling anti-war speeches ever put on film, he shocks the teacher and the boys by telling them there's nothing glorious about going to war, that "every day is a year, every night a century," that "when it comes to dying for your country, it's better not to die at all."
In
the film's most enduring scene of pacifist symbolism, Paul dies
a few weeks later while reaching out of his trench to touch a
butterfly that has landed in this place of hell on Earth--and
an enemy sniper kills him. In the film's last scene, the ghosts
of all the classmates pass in review, marching off to nowhere,
looking back over their shoulders with the grim faces of the
dead.
"All Quiet on the Western Front" so affected me that
I became a lifelong fan of novelist Erich Maria Remarque, and
of director Lewis Milestone. I consider it to be the best film
ever made about World War I. Milestone also made "A Walk
in the Sun" (1945), my favorite film about World War II
(at least until "Saving Private Ryan" turned up), and
"Pork Chop Hill" (1959), my favorite film about the
Korean War. He did many other great films, including the original
"Of Mice and Men" (1939).
Milestone won the Oscar for directing for 1929-30, but none of the actors was nominated and the film lost out on the best screenplay award. The film was remade as a television movie in 1979 with Richard Thomas as Paul and Ernest Borgnine as Kat. It was directed by Oscar-winner Delbert Mann ("Marty").
Before writing this homage to the film, I watched it over again for what must be the 20th or 30th time. It still gets me as it did 50 years ago, renewing my belief that war is something we don't ever want to see America involved in again, if we can possibly help it.
© 2001 by Ron Miller.
OTHER NOMINEES THAT YEAR: "The Big House," "Disraeli," "The Divorcee," "The Love Parade."
OSCAR
TRIVIA: Though her qualifications as a dramatic actress should
have been firmly established by her searing performance in von
Stroheim's "Greed," Zasu Pitts was mostly known as
a comic actress and preview audiences laughed when they saw her
playing the film's most sentimental scenes as Paul Baumer's mother,
so they replaced her and re-filmed all her scenes with Beryl
Mercer....Handsome Lew Ayres took the pacifist message of the
film to heart all through the rest of his life. Devoutly religious,
he refused to serve as a combat soldier in World War II and was
fired by his studio, MGM, even though he was the star of the
popular "Dr. Kildare" series of movies. Ayres proved
himself a valiant and courageous American by serving as a medical
corpsman during the war and his career regained its momentum
in the post-war years, leading to his Oscar nomination for "Johnny
Belinda" (1948) as the kindly doctor who befriends a deaf
mute girl--Jane Wyman in her Oscar-winning performance.
You can contact Ron Miller with an email to: talkback@thecolumnists.com
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