Directed by: Lewis Milestone
Starring: Lew Ayres, Louis Wolheim, John Wray, Arnold Lucy, Ben Alexander, Slim Summerville, William Bakewell
Based on the novel by: Erich Maria Remarque

STORY
They are young enough to believe the speeches.
Paul Bäumer and his German schoolmates sit in a classroom while their teacher fills their heads with visions of patriotism, honor, glory and duty to the Fatherland. They are boys being told that becoming soldiers will make them men.
So they enlist.

And then Lewis Milestone takes them to war.
Almost everything they were promised begins to disappear. The uniforms don't make them heroic. Hunger doesn't care about patriotism. Artillery doesn't distinguish between the brave and the frightened. The battlefield has no interest in the stirring words that sent them there.
Paul and his friends discover another kind of education in the trenches of World War I — one taught by exhaustion, terror, mud, rats, hunger, injury and death.
Among the soldiers is the older and battle-hardened Stanislaus "Kat" Katczinsky, played magnificently by Louis Wolheim. Kat knows how to survive. He knows where food might be found, when danger is approaching and how to navigate a world in which ordinary rules have ceased to matter. To Paul and the younger soldiers, he becomes something more important than a military leader.
He becomes a teacher of reality.
And Paul learns.
He learns what it means to watch friends disappear one by one. He learns that the enemy soldier across the battlefield has been taught to fear him just as he has been taught to fear the enemy. He learns that killing another human being from a distance is profoundly different from being trapped close enough to watch that human being die.

And eventually Paul returns home.
The classroom is still there.
The speeches are still being made.
Another group of boys is listening.
But Paul is no longer the boy who once sat among them.
He has seen what exists on the other side of those beautiful words.
And he knows something they don't.
War has already taken something from him that returning home cannot restore.
That is the terrible heart of All Quiet on the Western Front.
It isn't ultimately a story about who wins a war.
It is about what war takes from the human beings asked to fight it.

AIN BACKSTAGE SECRETS & AINTOIDS

A GREAT NOVEL BECOMES A GREAT FILM
Erich Maria Remarque's novel had become an international sensation before Hollywood brought it to the screen.
Adapting a beloved novel is always dangerous. A filmmaker can reproduce events and still lose the soul of the book.
Lewis Milestone and his collaborators understood that the essential subject wasn't military strategy.
It was disillusionment.
The film had to take young men who believed one thing at the beginning and allow us to watch experience strip that belief away.
That makes Paul's journey not merely a plot.
It is the architecture of the film.

LEW AYRES HAD TO AGE WITHOUT GROWING OLD
Lew Ayres was only in his early twenties when he played Paul Bäumer.
Look at what the performance asks of him.
Paul doesn't simply become sadder. His entire relationship with the world changes.
The eager schoolboy and the exhausted soldier are recognizably the same person, yet something behind the eyes is different.
That is extraordinarily difficult acting.
Ayres cannot announce Paul's transformation. He has to let us discover it in his face, his body, his silences and his reactions.
The performance becomes increasingly internal as the film progresses.
The boy doesn't disappear physically.
Something inside him does.

LOUIS WOLHEIM AND THE ART OF MAKING A CHARACTER FEEL LIVED-IN
Louis Wolheim's Kat is one of the film's great achievements.
Kat feels as though he existed before the camera found him.
That is one of the highest compliments we can give a screen performance.
Wolheim doesn't seem to be demonstrating that Kat is experienced. He behaves like a man who simply is experienced.
His physical ease, humor, practicality and relationship with the younger soldiers create something essential to the movie: warmth.
Without warmth, tragedy can become an abstraction.
Milestone gives us people worth caring about before asking us to confront their loss.

THE CAMERA GOES TO WAR
Some early sound movies became visually cautious because cameras and actors suddenly had to accommodate microphones and cumbersome recording technology.
Lewis Milestone refused to allow sound to imprison his camera.
The battle sequences move.
The camera travels alongside soldiers as they run through trenches and across devastated terrain. Men enter and leave the frame. Explosions erupt. Bodies fall. Movement occurs at different depths within the image.
The filmmaking gives battle geography, rhythm and terrible momentum.
This isn't spectacle merely for spectacle's sake.
The technique serves the experience.
The audience needs to feel that events are moving faster than these young men can comprehend them.
ARTHUR EDESON'S CAMERA DOESN'T ROMANTICIZE THE BATTLEFIELD
Cinematographer Arthur Edeson helped create images that remain startling because they aren't interested in making war beautiful.
Mud looks like mud.
The trenches feel confining.
Smoke obscures vision.
Human beings can become frighteningly small within the machinery surrounding them.
That visual choice is crucial.
A different cinematographer might have transformed battle into pageantry.
Here, scale often makes the individual seem more vulnerable.
The battlefield isn't a stage upon which Paul becomes magnificent.
It is an environment capable of swallowing him.

SOUND WAS NEW — SILENCE WAS STILL POWERFUL
This film arrived at a fascinating moment in cinema history.
Hollywood had discovered synchronized dialogue, and audiences were hungry to hear movies speak.
But great filmmakers were also learning something enormously important:
Just because movies could talk didn't mean they should talk constantly.
Milestone understood the dramatic value of contrast.
Noise can overwhelm us.
Silence can make us lean forward.
A filmmaker who understands both possesses something far more valuable than a new technology.
He possesses rhythm.

AINTOID — TWO OSCARS THAT MATTER
All Quiet on the Western Front won the Academy Award for Outstanding Production — the award we now call Best Picture — and Lewis Milestone won Best Director.
Those victories are particularly meaningful because the film's greatness is inseparable from its direction.
Milestone isn't merely illustrating a famous novel.
He is translating literature into cinema.
He asks:
Where should the camera be?
When should it move?
What should we hear?
What shouldn't we hear?
How long should we remain on a face?
When should a death be shocking?
When should it be quiet?
Those are the decisions that turn a screenplay into a motion picture.

THE FILM REFUSES TO GIVE US A COMFORTABLE ENEMY
One of the most sophisticated things about All Quiet on the Western Front is its point of view.
This is an American film asking American audiences to identify with young German soldiers little more than a decade after World War I.
Think about the artistic courage of that choice.
The film isn't asking us to change sides.
It is asking us to see human beings.
That distinction is everything.
The uniform tells us which army a character belongs to.
The camera asks us to look underneath it.

THE CLASSROOM MAY BE THE MOST DANGEROUS BATTLEFIELD IN THE FILM
AIN loves this piece of storytelling.
The movie begins with words.
Beautiful words.
Patriotic words.
Words spoken by an authority figure to young people who trust him.
Then the film spends its running time showing us what those words actually cost.
When Paul eventually returns to that world, his tragedy becomes even clearer.
He knows.
The new students don't.
There is an enormous lesson in that construction for filmmakers.
If you establish an idea at the beginning of a story and return to it after your character has been transformed, the location may be identical while its meaning has completely changed.
That is storytelling.

AND THEN THERE IS THE BUTTERFLY
Some movie endings conclude the plot.
Great movie endings can contain the entire movie in a single image.
After so much noise, movement, violence and death, All Quiet on the Western Front ultimately understands the power of something small, delicate and alive.
A butterfly.
There are no grand speeches necessary.
The image does the work.
That is cinema.

THROUGH THE EYES AND EARS OF AIN
Why is All Quiet on the Western Front a classic?
Not because someone put it on a list.
Not because it won Oscars.
Not because it was made in 1930.
And certainly not because we're supposed to admire it simply because it is old.
It is a classic because the filmmaking still works.
The performances still reach us.
The camera still puts us inside the chaos.
The silences still make us uncomfortable.
The losses still hurt.
And the story still understands something frighteningly permanent about human beings: every generation is capable of convincing its young that glory waits somewhere beyond the battlefield.
Lewis Milestone understood that the filmmaker's responsibility wasn't to lecture the audience about that idea.
His responsibility was to make us experience it.
And Lew Ayres understood that Paul's tragedy could not merely be performed as suffering. We had to see the gradual disappearance of innocence.
That is where filmmaking and acting meet.
The director constructs the journey.
The actor lives it.
The cinematographer gives it an image.
The editor gives it rhythm.
Sound gives it terror.
Silence gives it thought.
And eventually all those separate crafts disappear into something much larger.
A story.
Nearly a century later, we don't watch Paul Bäumer because we are curious about an antique piece of Hollywood history.
We watch because somewhere in that classroom there is always another young person ready to believe the speech.
Somewhere there is another Paul.
And somewhere there is another artist trying to find the image, performance or story powerful enough to make us understand what those beautiful words can cost.
That is why All Quiet on the Western Front endures.
That is why great filmmaking endures.

And that is why this isn't merely an old film in the AIN Treasure Chest.
It is one of the reasons the Treasure Chest exists.