The Winner of Best Picture for the Third Academy Awards was All Quiet on the Western Front. Released on April 21, 1930 by Universal Studios, it was well received by the public and critics alike. With an astonishing 1.2 million dollars budget (over 16.8 million in today's money) Universal Studios made one of the most honest war films ever created. Not only did it beat out MGM's The Big House, Warner Brother's Disraeli, MGM's The Divorcee, and Paramount's The Love Parade it also took home the Oscar for Lewis Milestone as best Director.
This movie is a treasure because it has to both glamourize and in-glamourize war at the same time. When we are introduced to the characters at the beginning of the film they are deciding whether or not they want to volunteer "to save the fatherland" at the start of what would become World War I. Their teacher is giving a speech about "the pride of the land is in them" and "you can become hero's", and also "we need you". That gets a group of friends pumped to join, which they do, and then they come to realize what war is actually like. The trenches, the lack of food, their friends dying around them, and the realization that none of them will come back the same way they came in, really starts to sink in with Paul (the leader of this group of friends). The movie does make you really think about what it's like for soldiers fighting in the war.
Even today we like to glamourize war. There have been plenty of movies made about war, there have been many speeches about the men and women who serve our country, and even TV news stations make it up to be a great cause. We don't really get the real opinions of war for all soldiers. We don't see it from their side. This film does an amazing job of bringing up issues like what soldiers think, how civilians act when they are talking to a soldier (and we sometimes don't realize how we are acting), and asks why are we fighting a war the we didn't want in the first place or one that we did not even start?
This film is so great that it was added onto the fist 100 Years... 100 Movies list in 1998 where it was ranked number seven on Best American Epic Film. Then in 1990 it was selected and preserved by the Library of Congress. The reason for the choosing was because the film was deemed "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant".
I would say that this film is historically significant and does need to be watched by everyone. Just so everyone has a better understanding of what war is really like. However, as great as it was I probably will hold off before I see this film again.
