Watching a thought-provoking film like All Quiet On The Western Front is a cathartic experience- for it questions the validity and necessity of some of the basic core concepts like nationalism and patriotism. This 75-year old film graphically portrays the horrors of war and analyses the devastating effects it leaves behind- not only in terms of death and destruction but also in terms of the irreversible scarring of young minds.
 

Eric Maria Remarque- a German ex- soldier wrote a novel based on his own experiences of the First World War and that book (with the same title) was then made into this film. For a change, it shows the German perspective of the First World War and without any political bias, dissects into the overall futility of wars.

 

The film starts off in wartime Germany with an old professor animatedly urging his young students to let go off their personal dreams and aspirations and to respond to the call of Father Land by becoming soldiers. Fired up by his rhetoric, a group of callow college students get recruited in army nurturing lofty dreams of valour and victory. Almost immediately the difference between the fact and fiction starts becoming apparent. A once- genial town-postman has now become their nasty officer- a cowardly tyrant who takes sadistic pleasure in making them grovel in mud in the name of drills. As they reach the war front-line, they are in for further reality shocks. Scarce food, terrible quarters, lack of medical facilities, constant barrage of enemy fire, fierce combats, crippling injuries, meaningless deaths – it is a world of chaos and confusion, where the only emotion left is the self-survival instinct.

 

Paul Baumer (Lew Ayres) - the brightest amongst these recruits is totally shattered witnessing these untold horrors of war and when he comes back on a leave to his town, he finds himself distanced from his own people, who are still braying for enemy blood and talking nonchalantly of more sacrifices and winning strategies. Canceling his leave, he returns back to the front- only to become another casualty of war.

 

The final scene where Baumer extends a hand to touch a butterfly hovering outside his trench and the enemy sniper shots him dead is a poignant image. That final frame of Baumer’s still, lifeless hand which would never reach that butterfly’s wing is symbolic of how war destroys the human bond with everything tender and beautiful in this world.

 

Directed by a 33 year-old director Lewis Milestone and featuring a cast of actors mostly in their early twenties, this grainy Black-and-white film presented the grim and grimy realities of war with clinical precision. Fittingly it won the Best Film and Best Direction Oscars in 1930.