Best Pictures #28:
1929-30 (3rd) Academy Awards Outstanding Production Winner
All Quiet on the
Western Front was not the first big budget war film to be nominated for or
win Best Picture—that would be Wings (1927)—but
it is the first antiwar film to be recognized by the Academy. This film opens with
a title card explaining that it is “neither an accusation or a confession…
least of all an adventure… It will try simply to tell of a generation of men
who, even though they may have escaped its shells, were destroyed by the war…” Wings was an adventure film about young
men that dreamed of flying airplanes. In 7th
Heaven (1927) war was a fact of life that interrupts a couple’s romance. All Quiet on the Western Front has its
main character telling a classroom full of boys eager to enlist in the army and
go the frontlines, “It’s dirty and painful to die for your country.” The boys
and their teacher call him a coward.
At the beginning of the film The Great War has just broken
out and young Paul (Lew Ayers) jumps up from his desk at school to declare that
he is enlisting in the army after his teacher gives an ultra-patriotic speech
about the glory of war. The other young men in class follow suit and jump up
and declare they will go off to war too. They all hope to go to the front and
they all expect to come home in one piece. Their first experience as soldiers
is the petty tyranny of the local postman turned drill sergeant. He
makes sure the boys get plenty muddy and miss their leave, but that is just
another school experience that in no way prepares them for real combat. The
harsh realities of modern warfare overwhelm Paul and the rest of the new
recruits almost immediately and their experiences only get worse and worse as
the war goes on and on.
All Quiet on the
Western Front had the large budget of $1.4 million (the equivalent of
nearly $21 million in 2016 dollars). With the then recent stock market crash
and ensuing depression less a year before, it was quite a risk for Universal
and its studio head, Carl Laemlle, Jr. The risk turned out to be worthwhile. All Quiet on the Western Front was a hit
at the box office and won Universal its first Best Picture Oscar. The film was
less well received abroad however, most notably in Germany. Based on the novel
by Erich Maria Remarque, inspired by his own experiences at the front, this is
one of the few films about World War I to portray Germans as the main
characters. Laemmle himself was a German immigrant and he and director Lewis Milestone felt they made a film that was antiwar, not anti-German. The film
caused riots in Germany, most notably Berlin, where the disruptions of
screenings—mice were released into theaters showing the film—and subsequent
riots—the beating of projectionists and anyone that looked Jewish—were led by
Joseph Goebbels and Nazi thugs. The film was ultimately banned by the German
government, though the Nazi party had yet to take power. Laemmle agreed to make
cuts to the film and even took out an ad in a Berlin newspaper explaining that
the film was not anti-German, it just objectively showed the experience of war.
The film was rereleased but memories of the Nazi riots kept audiences away. It
would be banned again by the Nazi government a few years later. Interestingly, it
was banned in Poland for being pro-German.
There are several shots and sequences that keep All Quiet on the Western Front visually
interesting; a stark contrast to the visually dull The Racket (1928), also directed by Milestone. Milestone won Best
Director, his second Oscar, making him the first person to win more than one
Oscar and All Quiet on the Western Front the
first film to win awards for Best Picture and Best Director. One of the most
memorable scenes in the movie is an extended tracking shot that shows enemy
soldiers running toward machinegun fire and being mowed down and tumbling into
barbed wire. A bomb goes off in front of one enemy soldier and when the smoke
clears we see a brief shot of his severed hands clutching the barbed wire. The
rest of him is nowhere to be found.
I think this would have been a violent film for its time. Though
there is very little blood, there are many, many dead bodies. There are
explosions galore, bursting bombs, and hand to hand combat, but none of it is
exciting in an adventurous way. One of the early battle scenes has the soldiers
hunkered down under a prolonged bombardment. The shelling goes on and on and
the roof of their bunker cracks dumping dirt on them. It is not the glorious
adventure they imagined as schoolboys.
Perhaps because the characters, even the main characters,
are all basic, thin archetypes, I was never fully engaged with this movie. They
serve the plot just fine, but All Quiet
on the Western Front feels like it is lacking full-fledged characters. The
performances of Louis Wolheim and Lew Ayers may have been fine for the time
that this film was released, but they do not hold up as well as the technical
aspects. The heightened, exaggerated acting style of time feels at odds with
the gritty realism All Quiet on the
Western Front was aiming to achieve.
All Quiet on the
Western Front is impressive technically for its battle scenes and sound
quality. Even more impressive is the fact that it was a big Hollywood movie that
dared to acknowledge the many horrors of war at a time when sentimentality and
happy endings were the order of the day. It is hard not to hold all of the
antiwar film beats and clichés against All
Quiet on the Western Front, however, as with its fellow Outstanding
Production nominee, The Big House and
its genre clichés, it must be kept in mind that this film is the source of
those familiar beats and plot points. All
Quiet on the Western Front is notable for being the first Best Picture
winner that was more than pure escapist entertainment. Unfortunately it has not
aged well.
Nominee: Universal
Producer: Carl Laemmle, Jr.
Director: Lewis Milestone
Screenplay: George Abbott, adaptation & dialogue by
Maxwell Anderson, adaptation by Del Andrews, based on the novel by Erich Maria
Remarque
Cast: Louis Wolheim, Lew Ayers, John Wray
Release Date: August 24th, 1930
Total Nominations: 4, including Outstanding Production
Win(s): Outstanding Production, Director-Lewis Milestone
Other Nominations: Writing-George Abbott, Maxwell Anderson,
Del Andrews, Cinematography-Arthur Edeson
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