“A Jolly Little War”-The Film Adaptation Of Eric-Maria Remarque’s All’s Quiet On The Western Front 

DVD Review

By Sam Lowell

All’s Quiet On The Western Front, starring Lew Ayres, from the book by the same nameby Erich Maria Remarque, 1930  

It is rather appropriate during this the 100^th anniversary of the beginning of the third year of the bloody and futile First World War to review what is probably the greatest anti-war film of all times, the film adaptation Erich Maria Remanque’s All’s Quiet On The Western Front. No question that this 1930 film which rightly won the Oscar that year retains today almost as much power, if not more in the age of endless wars, as it did when audiences first saw the film back then. The question of whether the world has learned anything, or better, whether those who are called to fight the wars, called then by old men, today called by old men and old women, have learned anything from the film is problematic.   

Yet, as in the novel, there are many scenes which should give anyone who wants to tout war as the solution to much of anything a quick retort. The film itself starts out in a schoolroom in Germany (although that scene could have been replicated in Great Britain, France, Russia, later here in the United States and most of the other combatant countries of that conflict) where the good teacher is exhorting, as waves of troops headed to the fronts pass by outside to cheering civilian throngs, his all male class to be ready at a moment’s to defend the Fatherland (or Motherland if we extent our concept mentioned above). Of course, as we are all too familiar with, all wars are argued by those who wish to send troops to fight them to be to defend something. The scene though painfully reminded me of my own war, the Vietnam War where we were exhorted by parents, teachers, priests, and governmental officials to defend America against some vague communist threat over in Asia at the cost of being invaded, or something like that. And I, we, the guys I hung around with in front of the local pizza parlor, my corner boys, naïve as hell about war as much else, went, maybe not as enthusiastically as most of the lads in that film’s classroom but we went.    

This film is centered on the fate of those aroused and eager schoolboys, especially one, Paul, played by Lew Ayres, who will be among the few left standing until near the end, and until his own end. As the film progresses we see the real face of war, the ill-prepared citizen soldiers who fight the mass wars taught by those who only demand obedience and to go forward against the enemy, as the first waves are depleted the throwing of more and more green troops to the front, the various reactions of the soldiers from fright to shellshock to dull acceptance, the first reactions to the causalities among the boys, most graphically one who lost his leg, the inanity of various offensives and counter-offensives over a few yards of “no man’s land,” the boredom of war during the lull periods, and then as the years go by the sullen indifference to getting by anything but the next moment. Above all the sense of despite, the futility of going on when one discovered that all the damn thing was about was quick and early deaths. That death pervaded everything, that each man was a “dead man on leave,” an an old German put it one time.      

Of course since this film was based on Remarque’s observation and reflections after the war there is quite a bit of talk about how all men are brothers, in those days when socialism was in play, perhaps, all men were comrades and that the war aims on all sides were only to serve the rich, the ruling class, those who had something to gain by the outcome. In the end though, as Paul laid sown his head unseen reaching out to a butterfly, all that one saw was the peace, the peace of the graveyard with thousands of small white wooden crosses to acknowledge all those who did lay down their heads in a futile war. One hundred years later this film still has something to say to those who will listen. Watch it.