All Quiet on the Western Front

I knw we already have a question about this
Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front
but I thought I'd maybe start a thread that wasn't homework googlers?

I watched the 1930 movie over the weekend. It was interesting bcz the actor of Baumer (and Kat, and many others) had a kind of joviality or jollity that was endemic in acting at the dawn of talkies. But man, incredible shots! Incredible depictions of war. Incredible acting, even, and so poignant and startling.

The book I read about eight years ago, and I don't remember the details. But it was potent. And of course I thought for a book that described war as it was, it was a perfect anti-war book.

Both book and movie are quite something, especially in how the sensibilities of the former were inevitably -- but, I think surprisingly, rather effectively -- translated to what was already a formal American film approach recently tempered by the introduction of sound. Oddly enough my first encounter with the story was the late seventies TV remake with Richard Thomas and Ernest Borgnine, which I remembered followed the episodic, atemporal book plot instead of the straight-through movie version.

Posted some thoughts about the film over at FT a few years back as part of a larger project.

I remember when I was about 11 or 12 my parents telling me what a great film it was, and it came on TV one night and I watched it, and it was. I remember crying in the bit where he's trapped in the shell-hole with the French soldier he'd bayonetted but who wouldn't die.

Also, in a weird bit of trivia, the battlefront scenes were all filmed here in Irvine, when it was still the Irvine Ranch and utterly wide open land.

I want to read more Remarque--anyone got any suggestions?

I remember crying in the bit where he's trapped in the shell-hole with the French soldier he'd bayonetted but who wouldn't die.

For real, that was otherworldly intense and heartbreaking. And the guy did such a perfect idiot death mask.

I saw the movie of the sequel today, The Road Back (1937), directed by James "Frankenstein" Whale. Quite a strange cast of Americans playing Germans, top to bottom -- Andy Devine (!), Angela Lansbury's beautiful twinky gay first husband Richard Cromwell, Aunt Em from Wizard of Oz, Jim Rockford's dad -- but the first 30 minutes in the trenches are very good.

It was recut and partly reshot by Universal, bowing to pressure from the Nazis. Whale was furious and quit the studio.

Whale film of the sequel has been restored to 200 minutes.

http://www.moma.org/calendar/events/2082?locale=en