And our bodies are earth. And our thoughts are clay. And we sleep and eat with death.
All Quiet on the Western Front (1930) - watched 7/30/2024
Director: Lewis Milestone
Writers: Maxwell Anderson, George Abbott, Del Andrews
Starring: Lew Ayres, Louis Wolheim, John Wray, Slim Summerville
Available to watch on Tubi
First Time Watch? Yes
Folks—we did it. We made it into one full month of this newsletter. How about that? I’m as surprised as anyone else, considering I am a bit of a slacker and definitely a serial project-abandoner.1 Early on in writing this newsletter my fiancé made the observation that this was basically like giving myself homework. And that’s true! It does kind of feel like homework! Except instead of being like the homework of yore, which sucked and I hated, this is homework that rocks, that I love. If only my high school self could have done homework on topics that actually interested me, instead of calculus or whatever. I might have been less depressed, who knows!
On top of my one-monthiversary, I’ve reached another milestone, and it’s one that I’m especially excited about. We’ve come to the first Best Picture nominee to make me tear up. Finally!!
I’m a bit of a crier. It doesn’t take much to get me emotional—and I’m especially affected by bittersweet, or even full-blown happy, sentimental moments. For example, the ending of It’s a Wonderful Life still gets me to shed some tears, even though it’s a film I’ve watched at least once a year every year since I was a teenager.
This probably goes without saying (unless you know absolutely nothing about All Quiet on the Western Front, which is fair), but the tears that this movie brought on were, uh, decidedly less happy ones. Still, after a streak of ho-hum movies that I mostly felt extremely neutral towards, it was nice to finally watch a Best Picture nominee that made me feel something.
We live in the trenches out there. We fight. We try not to be killed, but sometimes we are. That's all.
I’m going to try to keep this synopsis as concise as possible without skimping on the important details, because it’s a little long, a lot happens, and I have a lot of thoughts!
We begin in Germany during World War I. A professor is psyching up a classroom full of boys (and, truly, for the most part these actors looked like boys) about joining the war and defending their country. The boys, led by Paul Bäumer (Lew Ayres) are all super stoked and ready to fight. They basically treat it like summer camp, all giddy and eager as they arrive at their base. Their joy is quickly extinguished once they begin training, under the relentless former mailman Sergeant Himmelstoss (John Wray).
The new recruits mingle with the veterans of their post, where they meet Corporal “Kat” Katzinsky (Louis Wolheim) and learn that he’s their go-to guy when in need of food rations. They set out on their first mission together, which turns out to be more brutal than any of the boys expected, with one soldier after another getting killed in battle. Following the battle is a great scene where the men of the 2nd Company, their numbers now dwindled by half, go to the cook, who has made rations for 150 men, and bombard him until he agrees to give them double rations.
From this point forward it’s essentially a series of gruesome battles and heartbreak. During one particularly gut-wrenching scene, Paul stabs a French soldier in a shell-hole and becomes more and more distraught as the man slowly dies right in front of him. He pleads with the man to stay alive, tries to get him to drink water, and begs for forgiveness.
Paul continually loses people around him, his good friends, along the way. Franz Kemmerich (Ben Alexander) is a young soldier who believes his boots will bring him good luck in the war, becomes severely injured in battle and ends up having his leg amputated. Visiting him in the infirmary, one of the men, Mueller (Russell Gleason) tries to take his boots, rationalizing that he won’t need them anymore since he’s been amputated and he’s close to death anyway. Pretty cold-blooded, dude! Paul refuses to let Mueller take the boots, believing that Kemmerich will heal. Paul is by Kemmerich’s bedside as he dies (this is the part that made me cry, by the way), and afterward, he takes the boots and brings them to Mueller. Mueller is later severely injured by shrapnel, thus proving once and for all that Kemmerich’s boots really aren’t so lucky.
Our boy Paul is also not immune to the brutality of war—he is badly injured in battle, and sent to a hospital where it is believed he will die. He survives against all odds, and once released from the hospital he is sent home on furlough. His sister greets him and shows him to his room—at one point Paul stops to admire and reminisce over a butterfly collection on the wall, a detail that comes back with heart-shattering force later on.
With his mother bedridden from illness and everyone in town still believing that war is about glory and heroism, and that everyone is doing great out there, Paul immediately feels out of place, like this isn’t really his home anymore. He goes to visit his old professor, the one who got everyone all hyped up to go to war. In speaking to the professor and his new (much younger-looking!) students, Paul cracks, telling them about the reality of war—that they’re all just machines, being sent out into battlefields to die. The students decry him as a coward, and Paul leaves. He lies to his family and says that he has been ordered back to the 2nd Company, but really Paul chooses to go back on his own free will.
Once he returns, Paul is shocked to find that most of his comrades are gone, injured or missing or dead. He finds Kat while he is out on a fruitless search for food. As they start to walk back to their post together, a bomb drops, breaking Kat’s shin. Paul carries Kat across his back to a medical tent, where the medics tell Paul that he could have saved himself the trouble—Kat died on the way there.
With almost everyone he knew from the 2nd Company now gone, Paul is alone on the front line. He sees a butterfly a short distance away. He smiles, and slowly reaches his hand out toward it. An enemy sniper sees him, and shoots him on sight, killing him instantly—his hand falls limp near the butterfly. We then see a superimposed image of Paul and his comrades, each looking over their shoulder one last time as they march into battle.
It’s not home back there anymore.
I knew going into this film that it was going to be a somber experience. But being that it’s a two-and-a-half hour war movie from 1930, I was fully expecting it to be kind of boring. I wasn’t expecting it to be nearly as brutal and poetic and heart wrenching as it turned out to be. I was pretty blown away by it, all of it—the writing, the acting, the camera work, the editing. All of it just worked to effectively tell this very real, very raw story and get its anti-war message across.
It’s the first of the Best Picture nominees that I can safely call a masterpiece. One thing that I appreciated about it was the fact that very little actual blood and gore is shown on screen—you see bombs drop, you see the men writhing and screaming in agony, you see the bandages and scars in the aftermath, but there’s very little in the way of “body horror,” which I feel like we see more and more in modern war films. I’m not squeamish or anything, but I appreciated this choice, as I think it helps the story to really focus on the emotions and the trauma of the war over just the physical wounds.
Seeing how much pleasure these men got from the mere idea of going into war was so fascinating and disturbing—propaganda is a helluva thing. Watching them discover the harsh reality that there’s no real glory in war, their expressions fading from joy, to confusion and fear, to despair, to madness—it took my breath away. Lew Ayres gives a truly devastating performance as Paul and it makes no sense to me why he wasn’t nominated for best actor. And if Best Supporting Actor had been a category at the time, Louis Wolheim would have been a shoe-in. It’s a stunning failure to me that The Love Parade had more nominations2 than All Quiet on the Western Front. It’s maybe the first truly unjust Academy Award decision I’ve come across so far, but hey, I know it won’t be the last, and maybe not even the most egregious.
The way that the battle scenes were shot was so stunning and so effective that it made a lump form in my throat, a pit in my stomach. There was one long tracking shot, in particular, that seemed to go on forever as body after body collapsed to the ground, limp. It drove home the feeling that this war was relentless and had no end in sight, that it didn’t care to end at all.
All Quiet on the Western Front also had just the right amount of levity—a few of the characters were good for cracking jokes, Kat in particular. And the beer hall scene (with one especially poignant moment where the men stare at a poster of a young woman, daydreaming about a life with her) as well as the scene where the soldiers flirt with some French babes brought some much-needed relief. But these moments, still, are tinged with gloom, with the knowledge that these bright moments are only temporary.
Everything builds up, of course, to the final scene, which was just—I have no words for how beautiful the final scene was. It was an oddly serene moment, and one that comes with mixed emotions. It’s tragic to lose Paul, the bravest boy, but there is also a sense of relief. In his death, he’s free from the burden of bearing the aftermath and trauma of this war. Pretty fucked up, I know, I’m sorry!!
The whole time we’re with Paul during the war, he’s looking for a sense of belonging, of home. He couldn’t find that in the 2nd Company, with his comrades dying one after the other. And he couldn’t find it with his family or in his hometown, where they will never understand him or what he went through. In his final moments in that trench, his only wish is to hold that delicate butterfly, and it’s here that he is home.
You still think it's beautiful to die for your country. The first bombardment taught us better. When it comes to dying for country, it's better not to die at all.
Quick Facts:
Nominated for 4 Academy Awards, won 2
Best Picture (Won)
Best Director (Lewis Milestone, won)
Best Writing (George Abbott, Maxwell Anderson, and Del Andrews)
Best Cinematography (Arthur Edeson)
The first ever film to win Academy Awards for both Best Picture and Best Director, and the only Best Picture nominee with no acting nominees.
Was initially banned in several countries, as it was considered to be anti-war propaganda. After the Hays code was introduced, re-releases of the film were heavily edited to remove nudity, some blasphemous references, and particularly gory scenes. Most of these scenes were then restored in 1980.
Due in part to his role in this film, Lew Ayers became a conscientious objector during World War II, which ended up getting his films banned in over 100 theaters. Hell yeah, comrade.
Stray Observations:
Me watching the first act: This is just like when I was in high school marching band
Something very poetic about the soldiers charging through a cemetery as it’s being bombed
My Rating: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐¾
Next Up: East Lynne (1931)
Ask me about my knitting! Or my paper-making! Or my bookbinding! Or literally any other writing project I’ve taken on! Or! Or! Or! Or!
But, rightfully, won zero.