All Quiet on the Western Front story
All Quiet on the Western Front is a 1930 American pre-Code epic anti-war film based on the 1929 novel of the same name by German novelist Erich Maria Remarque. Directed by Lewis Milestone, it stars Lew Ayres, Louis Wolheim, John Wray, Slim Summerville, and William Bakewell. The film opened to wide acclaim in the United States. Considered a realistic and harrowing account of warfare in World War I, it made the American Film Institute's first 100 Years...100 Movies list in 1997. A decade later, after the same organization polled over 1,501 workers in the creative community, All Quiet on the Western Front was ranked the seventh-best American epic film.
28 total · 1 choice · 9 major · 18 minor
| Theme | Level | Motivation |
|---|---|---|
| the horrors of war | choice | A main point of the story is to show how awful the realities of war can be. Scenes showed soldiers starving and pilfering. Scenes showed soldiers being mowed down by machine guns. Scenes showed soldiers suffering dismemberment. The main character, Paul, ended up being killed in flower of his youth by a sniper as he reached out of his hiding place to touch a butterfly. |
| commander and subordinate | major | The young recruits had various run-ins with Sergeant Himmelstoss whom they loathed. |
| coping with post-traumatic stress | major | It was shown how some soldiers lost their nerve while on the front lines. Kemmerick, for instance, bugged out from the ceaseless shelling of his company's fortification, and was never the same again. |
| coping with the death of a friend | major | Paul saw friend after friend perish in the line of duty. Toward the end, Paul was devastated when his friend, Kat, was killed shortly after they had just reunited. |
| disillusionment | major | The story follows Paul's journey from enthusiastically enlisting in the German Army to becoming a battle-hardened and disillusioned soldier on the front lines. |
| humans in hierarchy | major | The story featured various people in the German Army interacting within a command hierarchy. The newly enlisted boys treated their old postman, now their superior, with familiarity but were swiftly corrected. |
| military related work | major | The story concerns German rank and file military men during the First World War. |
| patriotism | major | Professor Kantorek appealed to his students sense of patriotism in order to make them join the war effort as soldiers. Paul came back to refute his professor and stated that it's better not to die at all than to die for one's country. |
| what it is like in a combat zone | major | The viewer is shown scene after gruesome scene of what a soldier might have experienced in the trenches or while otherwise under fire and bombardment. Other realities of trench warfare as hunger, sleep deprivation, rats, and lice were depicted. |
| World War I | major | The story shows what things might have been like for German soldiers advancing on France during the Great War. |