Genius series no.6 : All Quiet On The Western Front (1930)

Directed by Lewis Milestone ; written by Erich Maria Remarque with Maxwell Anderson and George Anderson.

"At last....the motion picture!"

Milestone's film version of Remarque's hugely successful novel is one of the first great films of the sound era.

The film opens in a classroom in a small German town during the early days of World War I : a group of older teenagers is listening to a lecture from a teacher that suddenly changes direction and becomes a patriotic call-to-arms, a passionate appeal on the subject of the need to protect their country and lifestyle from the foreigners who seek to wreck them.

As he finishes the young men spontaneously and (almost) without hesitation decide that they will leave their studies and enlist. The setting then changes to the battlefield as the students arrive at the front line and begin their tour of duty.

From there the film follows them through years of trench warfare, loss, regret and a growing questioning of the value of their sacrifice.

Milestone's remarkable direction puts the viewer in the centre of much of the action- there are some tremendous (and at the time technically difficult) tracking shots used as the German army advances into no-mans land, retreats again, then slowly pushes forward once more. The abject squalor and misery of daily life in the trenches is on the screen and it's unremitting.

Given the static nature of so much of Hollywood's output during the early days of sound recording there's a wonderfully fluidity to much of the camera work here. Milestone clearly put a lot of thought into how to use his camera to capture the sheer bloody awfulness of daily life for the enlisted men.

And then there's the closing scene - one of the most famous series of frames in any twentieth century film. Beautifully constructed and perfectly shot and still, more than 80 years later, with the ability to shock.

There are one or two weak performances among the cast - a little too much theatricality that's odds with skilfully cinematic nature of so much of the film, but it's not enough to undermine the message, purpose and utter brilliance of this earliest and best realised of anti-war films.