“All Quiet on the Western Front,” a 1928 World War I novel by war veteran Erich Maria Remarque, was banned and burned in Nazi Germany. When the Academy Award-winning 1930 film version from Universal Pictures opened in Berlin, Joseph Goebbels himself entered the theater and started a riot. In 1979, a second version of the film was seen on American TV. Now, we have a version from Germany itself, and the film is the country’s selection for the Academy Award.
I don’t know much about director Edward Berger, whose previous film “Jack” was about a troubled family. But his version of “All Quiet on the Western Front” is at least the equal of Lewis Milestone’s early talkie classic.
His lead actor Felix Kammerer, who plays the lead Paul Baumer, has a haunting, terrified, shattered expression on his face throughout most of the film, a look that is going to stay with me for a long time. Several times, that face is caked in mud and resembles a death mask. As in all film versions of this book, Paul is one of a close-knit group of young men, some still adolescents, who are encouraged to join the fight by a teacher who delivers a war-mongering speech resounding with themes and images from the St. Crispin’s speech of Shakespeare’s “Henry V.” Not knowing what awaits them, they sign up and literally wearing the clothes of dead men they are soon in the trenches at the Western Front.
