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.
