Should This Be Considered One of the Greatest War Films of All Time?
Two World War 1 movies came out in 1930, one out of Germany and one out of Hollywood, but why is that All Quiet on the Western Front is considered one of the greatest anti-war films of all time while Westfront 1918 is mostly left off lists of great war films.
I’ll say up front that this may just be good ol’ American bias and maybe Westfront 1918 is a more referenced film in its home country of Germany, let me know in the comments if I’m being a dumb American. But I had never heard of the film until I started this project of watching some of the greatest films from each year starting in 1930.
I will also say that the success of the original novel, or the lasting success of the original novel All Quiet on the Western Front, has probably done a lot for the film adaptation and its legacy. I can get a mass market paperback of All Quiet on Amazon for seven bucks whereas the book Westfront 1918 is based on, Four Infantryman on the Western Front, it looks like you can only get it used starting at eighty dollars.
It may just come down to All Quiet being the better film. I think that All Quiet is the better film. I’ve read people describing Westfront as having a documentary style, which I don’t necessarily agree with, especially having just watched People on Sunday which absolutely does. Westfront, aesthetically, felt very much “of its time” on my first watch. I’ve also heard it described as a much darker film than All Quiet, which, again, I don’t agree with, the final scene where we travel through field hospital is intense and is more visceral and darker than anything one moment in All Quiet, but I think All Quiet on the Western Front is a pretty bleak film.
In my opinion where Westfront really excels compared to All Quiet is when the soldiers go on leave. When Paul in All Quiet goes home he’s confronted by a delusionally optimistic society that cannot understand what he is going through at the front lines. It feels like a bit more of an indictment of the people back home.
When Karl from Westfront gets home he walks in on his wife in bed with another man, the local butcher. But this isn’t just an instance of a cheating wife, the picture we see back home is one where people are standing in long lines in the hope of getting some bread before they run out. We find out Karl’s wife has been sleeping with the butcher in order to get some extra food to survive. She’s doing the best she can in a bad situation to make it through in the same way that he is. And I think the film is really sympathetic to her situation in a way that Karl can’t, or won’t, be. She is empathetic because she knows he is suffering at war, but he’s unable to see that she’s also suffering back at home and he can’t wait to get back to the front line and back to his brothers in arms. So while All Quiet says, look what we did to these boys, Westfront says look what we did to the people of our country.
I do think All Quiet is the better film, but Westfront 1918 is another great example of early anti-war filmmaking.
