"All Quiet on the Western Front" is another film about World War I, from the perspective of young German soldiers. The actual plot is pretty minimal: a group of young German boys get caught up in patriotic fervor and sign up for duty during WWI. Turns out war sucks.
There's more to it than that, of course, but that really is the basic premise. It's a film about the horrors and futility of war. To that end, it's quite a graphically gruesome movie. Most of the main cast ends up dead after living through horrific scenes of carnage. It's scene after painful scene of young men being slaughtered. Seriously.
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| Lew Ayres and Raymond Griffith |
One particularly painful scene involves a soldier named Paul (Lew Ayres). He stabs a French soldier and then is trapped in a hole with the dying man for the rest of the night. He tries desperately to help the Frenchman, but is ultimately unable to do anything to save him. As the Frenchman lays dying, Paul realizes they have a shared humanity, which the war asks them to ignore. He begs the corpse to speak and forgive him: "we have the same fear of death, and the same dying and the same agony. Forgive me, comrade, how could you be my enemy?"
Later, Paul goes back home on leave and is angry at how little the people know about what the war is really like on the front lines. He hears the professor that inspired him and his comrades to "fight for the fatherland" make the same speech to a new class of boys. Angry and disillusioned, he returns to the front lines. In the final, iconic scene, Paul sees a butterfly just beyond his trench. As he reaches out for it, he is exposed to the enemy. He is shot and killed.
This is a film that's hard to like, honestly. It's easy to appreciate - the cinematography, the realism, the acting, the message - but it's very, very depressing. Of course, it would be next to impossible to make an anti-war film that wasn't.
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