Lewis Milestone | All Quiet on the Western Front / 1930

the end of nature

by Douglas Messerli

 

George Abbott (screenplay, as adapted by Maxwell Anderson and Del Andrews, with added dialogue by Anderson), Lewis Milestone (director) All Quiet on the Western Front / 1930

 

Based on German author Erich Maria Remarque’s best-selling anti-war fiction Im Westen nichts Neues (“Nothing New in the West”) of 1927, the 1930 film All Quiet on the Western Front, directed by Lewis Milestone and produced by Carl Laemmle, Jr is probably the greatest war film ever filmed, a stunning realization given its strong pacifist sentiments. The US film won Academy Awards for most outstanding production and director, and the film is listed on Library of Congress’ National Film Registry as being deemed "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant".

     The film’s most memorable scenes—the early rabble-rousing speech by a German high school  teacher who extolls the values of human sacrifice as he encourages his young teenage students to sign up for the military; their sudden realization of what war is truly about as one of their group, Behn, dies almost the moment as they are trucked to the front lines; the death of Franz Kammerick (Ben Alexander) in the hospital while his friend Müller (Russell Gleason) ardently pines for his hand-leathered long boots; the mental breakdown of several of their group in the seemingly endless hours of trench warfare; another moment in another hospital when the central figure, Paul Bäumer (Lew Ayres) is terrified as he is taken away to what he believes is the dying ward and soon after his friend Albert Kropp (William Bakewell) realizes his leg has been amputated; Paul’s return home on leave to discover just how out of touch his family and their friends are with the real sufferings of the soldiers; Paul’s belief that he is carrying his wounded mentor and friend Sanislaus Katczinsky (Louis Wolheim) to safety only to discover upon arrival that his burden is now a corpse; and Paul’s final attempt to reach out to touch a butterfly which results in his death—contain dialogue and images that are nearly impossible to remove from the memory of almost all who have seen the movie. 

      Given the many years of intelligent commentary on this film, I have selected a few quotes that will free me from having to restate the obvious.

     In his blog review of the film Keith Noakes (writing on Keithlovesmovies) nicely summarizes the plot and the narrative power of this work of cinema:

 

“All Quiet on the Western Front follows a young, idealistic German soldier named Paul Bäumer (Ayres) who enlists to fight in World War I. Very soon, the horrors of the real war, away from academic ideology, crushes his body and soul, destroying his relations and marking him forever. Nothing prepares us for the horrors of war. It doesn’t matter how idealistic our views are, it doesn’t matter if we foolishly romanticize war. In the battlefield, all the pretty words spoken to us are stripped away, leaving us with the fact that we might die any second. There’s no romance in the trenches, there’s no bright side to the fight. What happens to dreamers who become dehumanized by the same people that asked us to be there and promised everything would be fine? More so, how do we deal with the fact that those who urged us to fight using all sorts of idealistic babble are far away from the actual fight?

      World War I was a particularly brutal war, and All Quiet on the Western Front doesn’t shy away from any of it. In a way is quite disconcerting since classic war films were not usually known for being critical with the war. In fact, many were used as propaganda for advertising the great sacrifice that war represents, turning every sacrifice into a heroic one and turning away from depicting how bad and ugly the fight truly is.

      Bäumer goes into the war sure he’s doing the right thing but he is stripped away of all his dignity once the fight begins. His character arc here is fantastic, showing us the destruction of one’s soul. All Quiet on the Western Front has so many iconic moments it’s impossible to choose one. But the ending might be the best one in that it is so cruel while so optimistic. Bäumer is long gone, a shadow of his former self; he endured everything a man should not endure, and he survived. He is deeply broken, both on the inside and the outside. But then, this shadow of his former self manages to see beauty in a small butterfly in the middle of the battleground. In that little moment, in the middle of such a chaotic environment, we see Bäumer become alive again, his good nature coming out, and that sparkle of his old self ignites all our hopes. We cannot look away from these men; they might be terribly broken, but we must search for the light inside. It’s there somewhere.”

 

      Writing on the Empire site, Ian Nathan reiterates:

 

“Even more than the visceral evocation of trench life, with all its wanton squalor, the philosophical underpinnings of the film reach deep into the heart and head. At the opening, in the dreamy almost fairy-tale safety of their school life, they are resolved, thanks to the stirrings of their teacher, to sign up and fight the good fight. What becomes hastily clear amongst the mud and blood of fellow comrades and shadowy enemies alike is that there is no good fight to be fought, only a terrible one, where victory is a pointless as defeat.”

 

      And finally, Slate contributor Ron Humanick summarizes the influences of this great movie:

       

“Anti-war statements of the cinema in the subsequent 80 years have occasionally surpassed Lewis Milestone’s technically and artistically groundbreaking film, but few can match it for relentless despair or elemental fury—both on and off the battlefield. Through both the refreshingly unsubtle rendering of its anti-war themes and a pre-Searchers doorway motif that suggests that we view these events as if from naïve, domesticated eyes, Milestone’s film eschews the typically visceral nature of on-screen action, instead supplanting it with a sickening monotony that borders on nauseating, the camera often down in the dirt and mud with the men and every thunderous explosion as shuddering and final as the last. All Quiet on the Western Front may well feature the most ambitious sound design of the early talkies, and while early mixing equipment was technically primitive compared to what moviegoers have experienced for the past decades, such limitations add immeasurably to the artistic fabric of this film; the rawness of the audio eradicates any lingering notion that war is romantic or exciting, and at times suggests the very battered eardrums of those engaged in combat.”

 

      So powerful was the film that even a heavily censored version shown in Berlin on December 4, 1930, was attacked by Nazi brownshirts under the command of Joseph Goebbels, who disrupted the viewing by setting off stink bombs, filling the air with sneezing powder and releasing white mice in the theater, escalating their attacks on the audience by shouting “Judenfilm!” (“Jewish film”).

      Goebbels himself described once such disruption in his personal diaries:

 

 “Within ten minutes, the cinema resembles a madhouse. The police are powerless. The embittered crowd takes out its anger on the Jews. The first breakthrough in the West. 'Jews out!' 'Hitler is standing at the gates!' The police sympathize with us. The Jews are small and ugly. The box office outside is under siege. Windowpanes are broken. Thousands of people enjoy the spectacle. The screening is abandoned, as is the next one. We have won. The newspapers are full of our protest. But not even the Berliner Tageblatt dares to call us names. The nation is on our side. In short: victory!”

 

    The original book and movie were so powerful and influential, indeed, that it has made its way into other movies, showing up, for example, in the gay-related film Allons z'enfants (The Boy Soldier, 1981) directed by Yves Boisset wherein the central character Simon Chalumot, forced by his father attend a French military academy, is punished for reading and having a copy of the Remarque book. And prohibitions of both the book and movie existed in Australia until 1941, in France until 1963, and in Austria and Italy up until the 1980s.

     The many thousands who have read the book and watched the movie might naturally inquire why does this film appear in these pages? And I will be the first to admit—much to the surprise of those who have criticized me over the years for including films in which they can perceive absolutely no LGBTQ-related scenes or issues—that this is almost an entirely heterosexual film with little of interest for readers concerned LGBTQ characters and their behavior.

     Certainly, this film would not pass Vito Russo’s version of the “Bechdel Test.” *   

     But then that test was not meant as a guide to reading films as much as it was to be seen as a guide to help future directors and producers to realize how few films might be said to actually be involved with lesbian, gay, bisexual or transsexual or transgender individuals. And All Quiet on the Western Front does in fact show up on several notable gay lists, including Matthew Floyd’s “Homosexuality in Pre-Stonewall Cinema,” MundoF’s “In the Closet: A List of Minor Interest LGBTQ+ Films,” and Beryl Parkey’s “Any and All LGBTQ+ Films.” And, although I have disagreed with the inclusion of many films on all three of these important lists, this time it is perhaps justified, particularly given the homoeroticism that exists in this and many of pre-1934 films with all-male or female settings, particularly movies about wartime experiences. 

    All Quiet on the Western Front definitely has its share of erotic male scenes, particularly when the young students first appear at training camp and begin to strip off their civilian clothes for their newly-issued army uniforms. In a matter of moments, they tear off their shirts, poke one another in the ass, and, in one case, one even awards his friend a kiss when he issues a mock-command. From the above bunk bed, in what might be described as a suggestion of S&M, Franz sticks his boots in Albert’s face, the latter complaining—a foreshadowing, obviously, of what will later occur when the boy is dying and Albert very much wants the books on his tired and worn feet.

 

     None of this might compare with the scenes in William A. Wellman’s Wings, where the director shows some of the new recruits’ naked showering bodies, and wartime intimacy comes to mean something quite different, involving a real male/male love relationship; but the sense of barracks intimacy in Milestone’s film is not quite matched by any of the other movies of the day, including the more truly gay-oriented Doughboys of the same year which puts Buster Keaton in full drag.

     The closeness of these students before conscription remains an issue even as a few of them show up in the same military unit. And there is a moment when Paul and the others decide to visit their fallen comrade Franz, particularly after the others leave, we almost think that Paul might bend in for a kiss, but this film, unlike Wings doesn’t take it that far, and furthermore the narrative has not established a homosexual-like bond between the two. But the gesture is still there, and more importantly, Paul is terribly broken by Franz’s death and he is even more traumatized later by the death of the Frenchman, Gerald Duval, whom he desperately attempts to keep alive after severely stabbing him in the foxhole where he has been holding out until the gunfire ceases. This time the profundity of death is made even more real as he promises the dying man that we will write to his wife and send money.

     Perhaps the most truly homoerotic moments of the film occur when Paul and Albert, finally returned to civilization for few days’ visit with the rest of their company, drop into a local Bierstube where they spot a poster of a beautiful young woman and her male companion. Having not even seen a woman for months, they fantasize about the young girl, who Albert determines is just 17, tearing away the male in the picture. For a moment Paul suggests that they even take a bath, clean themselves up, perhaps even get deloused. Albert reminds him that the girl is months away at this point. But still, Paul suggests a bath might not be a bad idea, as they exchange knowing glances.

     What he seems to be suggesting is that the two visit a local stream together for a little mutual masturbation, and Albert agrees, their friend Tjaden (Slim Summerville) coming up behind them as they discuss the matter without being able to comprehend why anyone would want to bathe, Paul suggesting he wouldn’t “understand,” another hint of their intentions.

      In the next frame the two are together in a stream, soaping up, already a little “tired of nature” when Tjaden and another of their group suddenly appear, ruining obviously their private get-together. But at that very moment, on the other side of the stream, three French women appear strolling past, and the naked men attempt to get their attention, leaping out of the water and diving, butt-naked back into the waters and if revealing their treasures somewhat like a male version Wagner’s Rhinemaidens.

     The girls mock them and move on, but the men swim downstream in pursuit, Tjaden seeming to turn back. Suddenly he reappears with a large sausage, a large round of bread, and a bottle of wine, showing it to the girls who now take a far greater interest in their would-be molesters, encouraging them to swim across.

     At the moment, however, a German officer appears to warn them that it is not permitted for them to confer with the enemy, and they are forced to swim back. The girls, however, suggest in French that they come back later that evening, Tjaden somehow comprehending what the others cannot. But there are only three of them, and they arrange soon after for their group leader Katczinsky to entertain Tjaden that evening while they swim across with the food stuffs. When they arrive naked, however, the girls immediately toss them two dresses and a long coat, which they are forced to wear before entering. The moment the men enter, now momentarily in drag, the girls grab the offerings of sausage, bread, and wine and begin to devour the treats. Nonetheless, the three men get their reward which we intrude upon by overhearing the gentle conversation in two languages between Paul and Susanne, the girl with whom is obviously now sharing a bed.

    Come early morning the three reappear in their drag outfits, leaving them on a hook as they race back into the waters in the nude, presumably donning their uniforms on the opposite shore.

    If these scenes suggest the possibility of some same sexual activity and momentary gender switches it is all for the sake of heterosexual lust.

     Finally, Paul’s friendship with Kat (Katczinsky) is, as he himself puts it, “all I got left.” And their relationship is truly one of love, which Paul reveals when he lifts up his heavyweight friend to lug him back to safety after he is shot in the shin. But even that last salvation is of no avail since the man who Paul saw his father and mentor dies en route. With his elderly friend’s death, it is clear he no longer has any will to go on living. His final reach for the butterfly is only a throwback, a reflex from his childhood—we observe his childhood butterfly collection when he returns home on leave—that sadly cannot be returned to in this young adult’s life. Nature of almost any kind is no longer available to these World War warriors. Even the soldier who goes AWOL in his attempt to return home to his fruit trees is killed before he reaches it. The War has taken the lives, either literally or spiritually, of entire generation of young men. And those a few years younger than them will describe themselves, as Ernest Hemingway and others did, as being “lost.” Just as the German soldier Paul saw no way any longer to return home, so many US soldiers stayed on in Europe to discover who they might be, hopefully different from the men and women who had sent so very many to their deaths.

 

*Russo’s LGBTQ version of the test reads as follows:

 

1.The film contains a character that is identifiably lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and/or queer.

2.That character must not be solely or predominantly defined by their sexual orientation or gender identity (i.e. they are comprised of the same sort of unique character traits commonly used to differentiate straight/non-transgender characters from one another).

3.The LGBTQ character must be tied into the plot in such a way that their removal would have a significant effect, meaning they are not there to simply provide colorful commentary, paint urban authenticity, or (perhaps most commonly) set up a punchline. The character must matter.

 

He found only a handful of the films he discussed fit these qualifications, proving, in short, that hardly any films had truly been devoted to LGBTQ individuals.

 

Los Angeles, December 29, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (December 2022).