ALL QUIET ON THE WESTERN FRONT 1930
1930’s Oscar-winner may be the first that people today have heard of, even if they’ve never watched it. They can see a remake in 2012, starring Daniel Radcliffe (Harry Potter).
Themes
Erich Maria Remarque’s 1929 novel sold 2.5 million copies in 25 foreign languages, but it was banned and burned in Nazi Germany and several other countries. Why? It exposed war’s myths and propaganda.
In the opening 1914 scene, Professor Kantorek hyped the Great War to his teenage pupils – these “iron men of Germany” – that it was the duty of every gallant German to enlist, to repulse the enemy, and to heap glory on the Fatherland.
Flattered by unwarranted praise, intoxicated by heroic ideas, they rose and convinced each other – including the reluctant Behm – that they all must go to war.
Afghanistan and Iraq’s recruiting propaganda was more sophisticated. Think of the heroic pose struck by Bush when he declared “Mission accomplished!” on the aircraft carrier. Think of how Cheney and Rumsfeld demonized Saddam Hussein and the Taliban. Think of how Pat Tillman and Jessica Lynch were lionized, and how investigations later showed those official tales were just lies.
Happiness is a warm gun
After four years of battle, creative, compassionate soldier-writer Paul Bäumer inhaled poison gas and was given 14 days leave. By now, he was the only surviving classmate of Kantorek’s original students. Bäumer returned to the classroom just in time to hear the professor lecture his latest students: “In one of the schools, the boys have risen up in the classroom and enlisted in a mass. But of course, if such a thing should happen here, you would not blame me for a feeling of pride.”
The professor turned to Bäumer for corroboration, but the disillusioned veteran owed these boys the truth: “I thought maybe the whole world had been learned by this time. Only now, they're sending babies, and they don't last a week… Three years we've had of it, four years… And our bodies are earth. And our thoughts are clay. And we sleep and eat with death… War isn't the way it looks back here. I heard you in here, reciting that same old stuff. Making more iron men, more young heroes. You still think it’s beautiful and sweet to die for your country, don’t you?”
The boys called Bäumer a coward, even though they’d never fired a gun and he’d fought with comrades who’d been killed and maimed. Bäumer’s response: he was no good for “back home” anymore; he wanted to return to his mentors and comrades at the front.
The themes, then, are that glorious war is a lie, that the thrill of combat is actually the agony of killing other human beings, that returning soldiers isolate themselves from family and friends because war itself destroys soldiers, not just bullets and bombs and gas, and they’re unable to revert to civilian life after such extreme physical and mental stress. Governments know all this, of course, which makes what they do to these young men all the more dastardly. After every war, movies have hit similar themes: The Best Years of Our Lives, Coming Home, Apocalypse Now, The Hurt Locker.
Ignored
Howard Hughes was the Stephen Spielberg of his time. Hell's Angels was a technically perfect high-budget movie, but it wasn’t selected for Best Production, nor was the Marx Brothers classic “Animal Crackers.”
Norma Shearer was nominated for two movies and won for The Divorcée, but 18-year-old Hell’s Angels star Rita Hayworth was snubbed.
Greta Garbo was also nominated twice for movies largely forgotten, but Marlene Dietrich’s star-making role in The Blue Angel – still one of the all-time most sensual films – was overlooked.
