"All Quiet on the Western Front" is still as relevant today as it was in 1929, on November 18, Armistice Day commemoration, when the filming began. It was filmed on forty acres of ranch country near Los Angeles where a full scale French village was recreated along with realistic battlesfields pocked by explosives. Over 2,000 men played in the battlescenes, all of them veterans of war. Eventhough they were from many countries, they all fought together in the movie as Germans or French. Lew Ayers, who played the lead role as Paul Baumer, was a pacificist, refusing later to fight in WWII for which the film was banned in many U. S. theaters. The film is adapted from Erich Maria Remarque's novel of the same name. He fought in WWI for Germany and then took ten years to absorb the experience and write the story. It is a classic anti-war film and more. I do not remember the last time I saw it, years ago.My family and I have long been touched by war. Mom's father drove an ambulance in WWI in France; the family stories portray someone who, like Paul Baumer and his friends, came back disillusioned, a little "off his rocker." My grandfather, Dudley Jones, carried schrapnel in his legs. He became an alcoholic after returning home and died before I was born. I wonder if he was in pain or just depressed... or both. Later my own father flew B-29 Superbombers in the Pacific, participating in the fireraids that brought Japan to its knees in the latter days of the war and just before the atomic bomb was dropped... twice... by my country. Dad was a career pilot in the USAF after the war. I grew up a military "brat" submerged in the idealism and patriotic hype within the American defense community. Then my husband flew Hueys in Vietnam with the Americal Division, U.S. Army. The experience profoundly shaped him emotionally for decades until he began to meet up with other Vietnam vets and talk things out.
War made a pacifist of my father. The military made a pacifist out fo me and my whole family. As in the film, when you are touched personally by war, it changes your mind about it. There is just nothing good about it ever.
All Quiet on the Western Front explores the basic question every soldier must ask him or herself in the middle of carnage and destruction: who wants this? who benefits from this? who started this? At one point in the film, a character suggests a way to work out differences between leaders and business interests (the "kaiser and the manufacturers"): clear off a large field and sell tickets; dress all the politicos and business tycoons in their underwear and let them duke it out with clubs. I think it makes more sense.
Read an excellent review of the film: http://www.filmsite.org/allq.html
Susan
