All Quiet on the Western Front

Although All Quiet on the Western Front hoovered up the BAFTA awards I was a tad disappointed.

It’s a German film so it was good that foreign films are recognised.

The story is of German school friends who, persuaded by the xenophobic rhetoric of their headmaster, became conscripts in the Kaiser’s Army but soon found trench warfare to be totally grim and life-threatening.

The theme of Band of Brothers is scarcely new and the film is extremely gory.

Most of the scenes are of troops moving forward in the rain through puddles the size of ponds.

They are above all hungry.

It was all rather like that depressing picture Menin Road by Paul Nash where the cut trees are symbolic of the dead.

It must be remembered that World War One had a strange conclusion for Germany.

The feeling was – and Adolf Hitler was able to maximise this in the Rise of the Nazis – that Germany had lost the war on foreign soil when Ludendorff was mounting his counter offensive.

In the railway carriage in Compiegne – the best scene in the film – total surrender on onerous terms was demanded of Germany, which again Hitler could maximise.

So a more interesting film could have been made instead of a remake of the earlier film based on the Erich Maria Remarque novel.

Germany invented film noir in the 1930s in the UFA studios and has made some fine war films like Das Boot.

This merits inclusion in the pantheon of German movies and tv dramas.