From four Academy Award nominations, it won the Academy Award for Best Picture (the third winner in the history of AMPAS) and Best Director (Lewis Milestone with his first sound feature), and it was also nominated for Best Writing Achievement (George Abbott, Maxwell Anderson, and Del Andrews) and Best Cinematography (Arthur Edeson). It was a critical and financial success, and probably the greatest of pacifist, anti-war films - the grainy black and white film is still not dated and the film hasn't lost its initial impact. The episodic film is still one of the few early sound films that modern audiences watch. However, it was criticized as being propagandistic and anti-militaristic, and it was denounced by the Nazi government of the 30s.
A prologue, that introduces the film, was taken almost verbatim from the foreword to Remarque's novel:
This story is neither an accusation nor a confession, and least of all an adventure, for death is not an adventure to those who stand face to face with it. 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...
Unlike Remarque's novel that begins with the young men already at war, with flashbacks to earlier times, the film is told in a logical, chronological fashion. The content of the film can be divided into four distinct parts. The pre-war education of schoolboys, and the enlistment of the young German recruits. The soldiers' arrival at the front of World War I. The experiences of the cruelties and horrors of war in trench warfare and the hero's homecoming, return to the front, and ultimate death.
To say that this movie is one of the greatest war films of all time would be an understatement. Naturally, since the picture is based on Erich Maria Remarque's marvelous novel, the screenwriter was given quite a powerful story to begin with. The three main reasons why this movie so forceful are the acting, the cinematography, and simply the sincerity.
Lew Ayres, the man who plays Paul Baumer, convincingly portrays the main character in many ways. The sheer innocence of his facial appearance adds a poignant touch to the film, because the overwhelming theme of the story is how the war effects all young people of each nation, whether that person dies in the trenches or survives only to lament his days in the war. Other characters with relatively minor roles have major importance in the film because they portray touching, heart wrenching scenes of death. These peripheral characters all help add to the general tone of the film (and the book) because they show how dark and terrible the war can be; and they in turn show how propaganda can be so harmful, because most of the soldiers in Paul's regiment are volunteers who receive a very rude awakening when they discover what the war is really all about. The acting is simply superb.
The cinematography of this film is absolutely magnificent. The film doesn't rely on gratuatous gore to imply death and its emotional effect. Rather, the emotional horrors of war is envisioned in many ways. One way the cinematographer does this is to allow single body part to represent the whole body. Showing a clasping hand slowly opening to represent a soldier losing the fight and succumbing to death is much more effective than showing a gaping chest wound. The use of high overhead angles and wide pans across along the tarrain, punctuated with soldiers falling back into frame after being shot, give the implication that the trenches are a symbol of hell. In short, the cinematographer Arthur Edeson allows the camera to do the talking and to drive the film, taking advantage of the the sparse dialogue offered in the script, thus allowing the actors' facial expressions do the bulk of the talking in the film.
The film obviously had an effect on its star, Mr. Ayres. Once World War II began, he was drafted, he was a conscientous objector. America was outraged, and theaters vowed never to show his films again, but quietly he achieved the Medical Corps status he had requested, serving as a medic under fire in the South Pacific and as a chaplain's aid in New Guinea and the Phillipines He admits later in a biography that his opinions stem from his work in this movie. Certainly this is a powerful admission, because his protest caused him and his films to be blacklisted in Hollywood, and his career suffered greatly.
Later,Kenaz
