The Oscar Project #3: All Quiet on the Western Front (1930)

by Chris Marshall:

What happens when you take American actors who speak English with American accents, put a German army uniform on them, give them German names and characters, and roll the cameras? You get a Best Picture winner, of course!

Lewis Milestone’s film adaptation of Erich Maria von Remarque’s classic novel All Quiet on the Western Front was the second World War I film to win the Oscar in its first three years of existence, and it’s easy to see why. In just over two hours, it manages to make the whole business of war seem absurd and pointless. In many ways, it is the spiritual forerunner of Catch-22.

Perhaps more impressively, it works not only as a message film, but it succeeds on a narrative level as well. Once I got over the initial weirdness of the casting and accepted the actors as actual Germans, I was totally engaged (and really, I guess the American accents were no more ridiculous than speaking English with a pseudo-German accent). I genuinely cared about Paul, the central character, and his journey from being a naïve, enthusiastic army volunteer to a cynical, grizzled veteran truly seemed to matter.

And it does matter, of course, but there’s something more fundamental at work here. In general, how do war films succeed? Usually, as is the case here, it happens when the filmmakers completely depoliticize the war itself. When Paul returns home on leave and the men in the bar are showing him a map and telling him what the Kaiser’s larger ambitions are, we see how completely removed he is from these machinations.

At around the halfway point of the movie, there is a brilliant scene in which several of the soldiers are sitting around their camp and discussing the circumstances that led them to their current predicament.

Albert Kropp: Ah, the French certainly deserve to be punished for starting this war.
Detering: Everybody says it's somebody else.
Tjaden: Well, how do they start a war?
Albert Kropp: Well, one country offends another.
Tjaden: How could one country offend another? You mean there's a mountain over in Germany gets mad at a field over in France?
Albert Kropp: Well, stupid, one people offends another.
Tjaden: Oh, well, if that's it, I shouldn't be here at all. I don't feel offended. 

And that’s really the long and short of it. After spending so much time on the battlefield, the soldiers no longer have much interest in the big picture. They don’t care who’s right and who’s wrong politically. They just want to survive. In Catch-22, Yossarian says "The enemy is anybody who's going to get you killed, no matter which side he's on... And don't you forget that, because the longer you remember it, the longer you might live." I think the volunteers in All Quiet would agree whole-heartedly.

Before The Addams Family, Thing was a French soldier.

The choice to use German soldiers was incredibly bold. Obviously they are German in the novel, but it really wouldn’t have changed anything to use any other nationality, so universal is the story being told. To make a movie from the “enemy’s” perspective, just a decade after the end of the war, and still make it palatable to the public is quite a feat. Unfortunately, I don’t think this would be possible today. If somebody made a movie ten years from now from the perspective of Iraqi soldiers, I fear it would immediately be denounced as leftist propaganda.

And I suppose there is a leftist agenda, but it has nothing to do with choosing sides. When we view a conflict as one army against another, one government against another, we tend to forget about the soldiers themselves. People who may or may not agree with why they’re fighting but who want nothing more than to come home safe.

As always, Yossarian knows best: "It doesn't make a damned bit of difference who wins the war to someone who's dead."

[Note - In the early years of the Oscars, awards were given out yearly, but the period of eligibility spanned over two years. The first ceremony was for 1927/1928, followed by 1928/1929, and 1929/1930. This explains why no 1929 film won the award.]