All Quiet on the Western Front Rating: Release Date: 23 April, 2002 Retail Price: $9.98 OUR Price: $9.98 You SAVE: $0.00! Cast: Richard Thomas Ernest Borgnine Donald Pleasence Patricia Neal Complete Cast (11 total)

All Quiet on the Western Front Reviews

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Very well made, well acted, important message.
This film is really excellent, with a great cast, and a thoughtful and frightening message. We see the story of a group of high school boys graduating and then immediately joining the German army to fight in World War I. The story revolves around Paul Baumer, a thoughtful and sensitive young man who gradually sees so many horrors of war, and loses so many of his friends, that he is transformed into a different person, a war-weary pessimist with no illusions, no dreams, no purpose, and no homeland. Richard Thomas does a masterful job of playing Paul Baumer. He is supported with a fantanstic cast of actors. Ernest Borgnine plays the peasant shoe maker who leads their platoon. He is an earthy fatherly survival focused man who does his best to ensure his men have food, rest, shelter, and take no outrageous risks of glory. Paul learns much from this man, who becomes a surrogate father and mentor. Ian Holm plays a military school drill instructor who is a sadist. Eventually his sadism goes too far and he is sent to the front lines where he exhibits cowardly actions that ironically result in his receiving a medal from the Kaiser. Patricia Neal plays Paul's dying mother. Paul has seen so much death that he is only able to show dispassionate empathy with his mother and tells her lies about the front lines so that she does not die of cancer worrying about her son. Donald Pleasance plays a high school instructor who fills the heads of young men on concepts of national glory, heroism, manhood, and other nonsense to which 18 year old boys fall victim.

The oddessey of pain is carefully told as Paul experiences one loss and disillusionment after another. The tired eyes of the German infantry speak volumes as the Kaiser urges them on to give their lives for the fatherland. Paul's return home is a wonderful turn in the film as he finds that his father and the older fellows have no idea of the reality and horror of the war. They make simplistic overgeneralized comments such as 'the war will be won if we surround them' and other such nonsense. Paul's eyes glaze over as they discuss these abstractions while his young friends die in the muddy trenches. Paul's best friend, a gymnast and forrester, dies after a leg amputation. Paul tells his mother a story that her son died immediately and painlessless, which is far from the truth. She makes Paul swear by everything he holds sacred that this is the truth. He does so. Then she makes him swear by his own safe return home that this story is the truth. Again, he does so. In this extremely painful scene we see that Paul has beent totally transformed by the war. He no longer believes in anything but his ability to periodically protect himself and others against random and senseless violence and pain. He also realizes that he is no longer able to feel comfortable in his past or in the land of the living away from the war. He returns to the front lines fully expecting that the random nature of war may soon take him.

Exceptionally well done, this is a film every family should see. It is only when peopel face the reality of war rather than the abstractions that war would ever end.

All Quiet on the Western Front
As a history teacher I am always looking for good materials to use in the classroom. I use exerpts of the book in my Global Hist. class and used to use the 1939 version of the film as a supplement to the reading. The older version is truer to the book but the over the top acting of Lou Ayers doesn't click very well with today's young viewers. They are more likely to laugh at the drama of the older version. The 1979 version misses some of the books irony because it bipasses, or treats very lightly, some crucial scenes in the book, but the character portrayals and somber mood of the film are much more apt to hold my students attention. I enjoyed this film when it first aired on television almost 30 years ago and was happy to finds it on DVD so that I can use it in the classroom.

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