All Quiet on the Western Front (1930)

Amidst all the First World War centenary commemorations this year, comparatively little but necessary due attention must be given to this classic - the war film to end all war films about the War to End All Wars. It is still as potent today as it was back in the 1930s, and almost as provocative in its message as it was then.

The greater significance is that its perspective is from the losing side (if there are any real 'winners' here.) The novel, by Erich Maria Remarque, covered a group of enthusiastic Germanic boys fired up by the onset of war in 1914 to join the cause and fight for the Kaiser. They enlist and join the fight, but life on the Front is cruel and harsh and far from the crusade they expected, but through comradeship they struggle through the battles against the French, at a price.

Particularly potent is that this was made only a short time after the Great War itself, when dark memories were starting to fade away, but Germany itself was gripped by economic depression. The country was very much in a state of upheaval, and the Weimar Repubic tried (and failed) to deal with the problem. It led to the reactionary Nazi movement in time, and the subsequent burning of copies of Remarque's most famous anti-war book.

The novel was prestigious and powerful enough for Universal studios in Hollywood, U.S.A. to acquire it for a feature film adaptation, with all the technical expertise at their disposal - and also, back in those days, a strong adherence to trench life and the environment for those young German boys on the front.

Sometimes the effect of working on such a film as this can have a profound effect on an actor; for the casting of the central role, this most definitely happened to Lew Ayres. A young romantic lead with boy-next-door looks, his casting as Paul  Baumer led him to question the whole validity of warfare, just as his character does in the film. Particularly vivid is the scene where he is trapped in a shell hole in the middle of No Man's Land with a dead enemy French soldier, and realises the futility of what they are both doing in the name of their country.

It compelled Ayres enough to be declared a Conscientious Objector during World War II (although he was later allowed to join the Medical Corps - which was a similar case of life emulating art as he also played Dr. Kildare!), but his career was inevitably tarnished in the often cliquey world of Hollywood, when such attitudes during WWII were not fashionable.

Across the Atlantic, in 1930 the predictable violent reaction to the film in Nazi Germany led to sabotage and cinemas set ablaze, and pressure from Goebbels and the like to remove all "anti-German" sentiments. The subsequent sequel in 1937 The Road Back, also suffered by the political pressure imposed from Germany, and was heavily sanitised into something barely resembling the spirit of Remarque's follow-up novel. Its director, James Whale (who had directed Frankenstein and before that the British WWI play Journey's End), was never quite the same director again. It all seems highly incredible and unlikely to happen now, but recent evidence has shown how these feelings still unnecessarily come to the fore, so there are many lessons still to be learned.

My own memory of first watching All Quite on the Western Front as a child, is the unforgettable finale (not in the novel but a suitable coda) where Paul is the only one of his comrades left, and sees a small butterfly fluttering in the ground just beside his trench. Unfortunately, so too does a French sniper. When I saw this film again years later in 1991 (during 75th anniversary family commemorations of the war), a video release had inexplicably added grandiose music to the ending together with a heavily shortened edit of the film - this evidently, was one of the truncated versions of AQOTWF at the behest of the Nazis and butchered by a gullible Hollywood studio. It was only until many years later (in a restoration at the Curzon Soho), I was able to see the true, original dark ending in all its power, with no glorification, no music, just sobering respectful silence, as the sight of the soldiers looking back becomes a ghostly haunting memory.

In an era of Remembrance, here is the one war film that should be remembered most of all.