One of my favorite sequences in All Quiet on the Western Front occurs when director Lewis Milestone follows around a pair of boots as they make their way from one owner to the next. Each owner is a German soldier, desperate for a decent pair of walking boots. In a life filled with rats, dysentery, trench foot, spoiled food and constant assault under fire, a decent pair of boots is tantamount to winning the lottery. Only this lottery turns the winner's luck around on him the second he wins. Each soldier who wears the boots dies.
Roderick Heath, in the comment section of his excellent review of The Big Parade, said of All Quiet on the Western Front, "no matter what else you say about it, you can’t get away from the fact it’s a message picture." I agree, even while also believing it to be one of the greater works of early sound cinema and a film filled with great battle scenes regardless of the era. Still, the point is taken: It's a message picture through and through and the boot scene hammers the message home as hard as any other scene but does so in a self-contained, short film kind of a way. It could exist as its own little movie without the rest of the story surrounding it. Also, the boot scene is the one point in the film in which Paul, the main character, disappears while a vignette breaks out in his absence. Maybe that's why I like it so much: it's all so very self-contained. So self-contained (it's only a minute long!), in fact, that the rest of the movie may as well be elaborate ornamentation surrounding it.
The vignette's full story starts with Paul walking out of the hospital with his recently deceased friend's boots. But the character walking out of the hospital with the boots might as well be anyone as far as the vignette is concerned. After all, Paul isn't around to watch the other soldiers die, he's just there to get the vignette rolling. In it we see two soldiers get the boots bringing the death toll to three, which includes Paul's friend. I like that about it too: it's just two soldiers in the vignette, not five or six. The whole sequence commands a sense of brevity and clutter-free message-making that the rest of the film, great as it is, could have turned to a bit more.
12 comments:
You know I've never seen this movie? I read the book, and I saw the TV movie with Richard Thomas and Ernest Borgnine. But still, have I ever seen any movies??? I'm starting to think I haven't!
It's one of those American classics that I've made a point to remember vividly what happens in it. Maybe there are some things I've forgotten, but the two key parts of the film that still grab me are a) Lew Ayres and his comrades spending the night with the French babes across the river, and b) Ayres screaming at his old history teacher for inspiring his students to volunteer for combat. And of course [spoilers] the ending in which Ayres is brought down because of a butterfly.
Milestone is a filmmaker I've been meaning to see more of. The only other one of his I've seen is his boring Ocean's Eleven for which he was a director-for-hire. I have The Front Page and Mutiny on the Bounty in my bedroom library, though, and plan to watch either of them any day now. I've also heard his version of Of Mice and Men is the best version of them all.
Bill, I still haven't seen so many movies I should have seen I can't even keep count any more.
As for All Quiet..., it suffers, like all early talkies, from overly emoted acting. Lew Ayres was a terrific actor but here he falls into many of the same acting traps as his comrades in movies during this era, where he is trying to combine speech with silent film pantomimed acting.
However, the battle scenes are tremendously well done (although they too have some of the pitfalls of the period, you know, guys dramatically grabbing their chest after being shot instead of just collapsing into a heap). Check out my post at Unexplained Cinema to see just how willing they were to project realism in war, showing things that the Production Code would rule out just three years later.
Adam, I've seen a few of Milestone's films and, on the whole, he doesn't have a lot of verve. Even The Front Page, filled with sharp witty dialogue, plays a little flat under Milestone's direction. His best film for me is The Strange Love of Martha Ivers. He handles the weirdness of the relationships really well and, based on what's there, I think he would have done well doing more noir and underworld films.
He started out doing silent comedy and had some minor success with sound comedy but it was All Quiet... that drove him to more serious work. The thing is, as seen in All Quiet..., it's his silent tendencies to focus on expression and central focal points that make the battle scenes work so well and the noir of Ivers.
The scene with Ayers alone in the trench with the french soldier that dies slowly from a wound Ayers inflicted on him always gets to me.
That is a great scene, Christopher. Justifiably famous, both in the book and on film.
Ho ho, Greg, thanks for the shout-out, even if it does sound like I'm seeing All Quiet... off. Actually, whilst I do find The Big Parade just a little bit preferable, and for the very reason stated, I do admire the hell out of All Quiet..., which is for me possibly the film that really, truly proved that sound cinema could work in the most meaningful way: the sheer relentlessness of the film's background noise of raining shells is cumulatively exhausting. I like Lewis Milestone a lot as a director, and his handling is instinctively innovative.
Yeah, sorry about that. I wasn't trying to make it look like you didn't like it, I just agree that it is a message picture without question. And you're right about the sound combined with the visuals because you start to feel a sense of fatigue as the battle scenes keep piling up, making you realize just how hellish it all must have been.
A belated welcome back, Greg. Was glad to read of your new employment gig.
Thanks, Larry, you and me both. It's good to feel normal again about everything.
I hope you all get a chance to see Milstone's remarkable PORK CHOP HILL and his equally amazing A WALK IN THE SUN. These are his best movies, by far. For me, as good as ALL QUIET is (and I don't mind the acting at all, because I don't equate method acting with good acting), these are his finest achievements in movies, to me. PORK CHOP HILL is one of the three best war movies ever made.
Dean, Pork Chop Hill is a great film, I agree. I haven't seen it in years but now I must see it again soon.
By the way, I don't equate method acting with good acting at all. I've derided it many times here and praised the performances of the thirties and forties again and again. I'm talking about early sound, i.e. 1928-1930. In those three years the talking picture was still getting its feet wet and most of the acting, writing, direction, cinematography, and above all else, sound effects, suffered as a result. There was an uncomfortable blending of silent pantomime expressions combined with oddly cadenced line deliveries. By the time you get to 31 and 31, it's already going away.
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