Critics always said the advent of the talkies set cinematography and the movies back years, if not decades. The art of the silent film had reached an apex with the utterly dreamlike “Sunrise,” but it would be years before the camera would be liberated again to float and glide in the way it once did.
And yet in 1930, “All Quiet On the Western Front” defines itself as the first great war movie with sound, even setting the stage for modern war movies to come. The director Lewis Milestone came to be known as the American Eisenstein, allowing his fluid camera to dominate over the content in most of his movies later in his career.
But “All Quiet on the Western Front,” his first great talkie and second Academy Award after “Two Arabian Nights” shows the harsh reality of war on screen for the first time. The kinetic intensity of the war scenes combined with the film’s bleak beauty and even surreal chills makes the film a unique installment in the genre worthy of being remembered today.
The film’s early scenes recalled for me some of the more exotic images in “Metropolis,” the wide-eyed faces filling the off-kilter frame as they shout and jolt in joy after a professor inspires his classroom to join the army. The scene makes terrific use of space, but the scene’s real gift is in Milestone waiting patiently in a high angle to show the desolate, empty, littered classroom war will leave behind.
It also establishes certain tropes that would carry through for generations. It’s an ensemble war picture in which each character has their own little quirks and backstory. There may be a movie star in the bunch, but no one stands out as the hero until long after the squad’s ranks have been thinned. It even has the brash drill sergeant and the training montage that provides the movie with a lighter tone than what will be the norm later on.
But then the movie quite literally explodes, action scenes taking place on sound stages made up to look like infinite, other worldly vistas. The frame rate of action is sped up and soldiers leap over the camera lying perilously in the middle of the battlefield. The edits go by like machine gun fire and we get glimpses of carnage behind the numerous explosions, like the sight of a man caught by a grenade until all that’s left are his hands gripping a strand of barbed wire. It’s a tireless and endless sequence that tests the average shot length of Hollywood up until that time and for several more years to come.
When the movie does finally find a hero in Paul (Lew Ayres, giving a hammy performance), it does get a bit melodramatic, even veering into subplots involving foreign women that don’t hold up as well. And yet there’s a great scene in which the movie discusses issues of great importance while maintaining its congenial tone and not dipping into territory that’s too overtly profound. In one scene, the soldiers have all received extra rations of food from a cook who prepared enough food assuming no casualties. They gather to eat and joke about what it is they’re fighting for. It’s an amusing scene, but we’re left with something stronger.
“I’m not even old enough to carry a gun; just to die.” “All Quiet On the Western Front” ends quickly and without warning, which is the harsh nature of life. This is a hell of an ending for an Old Hollywood movie, but it’s one that’s been quietly remembered.