All Quiet on the Western Front (1929-30)

Watching All Quiet on the Western Front always brings to mind a key point in the debate over war films: Do they glorify war by making battles seem exciting or are they inherently anti-war because they show the destruction caused by war? On one side of this debate is, allegedly, French director Francois Truffaut, who said that there was no such thing as an anti-war movie. On the other side is American director Steven Spielberg, who said that all war movies are anti-war. Perhaps they’re both correct to a degree, but it’s tough not to see All Quiet on the Western Front as a film demonstrating the futility of war and the price it exacts in the lives of the young, in particular.

Set during World War I, the film begins with a group of young German men who are incited by their teacher (professor?) to join a new company that is forming. Conveniently, a troop of soldiers marches by the open windows of their classroom just as the teacher is pushing them with talk of “protecting the fatherland”—words that should be chilling to those of us who have the perspective of history on our side. In an innovative use of technology, several of the boys are shown imagining themselves as soldiers or heroes or perhaps victims of war, and the close-ups of each daydreamer is spectacular. The editing in the film is really first-rate, and it’s a shame that there wasn’t yet an Oscar category for film editing.  

Of course, all the young men (are they truly boys?) join the military, and their “leader” is Paul Baumer (played by a very youthful Lew Ayres, later of Dr. Kildare fame). They know their drill sergeant, Himmelstoss (an unctuous John Wray), but he is no longer the friendly neighborhood mailman. No, he’s now a brutal and vindictive task master, and he makes their training painful and exhausting. They talk a lot in the barracks about how much they resent him, usually while mostly or partially unclothed (a recurring motif that highlights the healthy bodies of the young actors), and they manage to get their revenge on the night before they are supposed to go into battle. He’s prevented them from enjoying a single night of promised leave by making them march through mud, seemingly his favorite pastime, and forcing them to clear their uniforms before leaving for the front.

The film doesn’t spare us the brutality of war. It’s only about twenty minutes into the film before the first of the young men is killed. It’s a scary moment for these soldiers who probably thought they would never be the ones being shot or bombed, but the constant gunfire and explosions frighten them when they first arrive at the battlefield. With such inexperienced soldiers, you know there’s going to be a rather grizzled veteran, and he’s Corporal Stanislaus “Kat” Katczinsky, played here with great humor and generosity by Louis Wolheim. He thinks they’re not ready for battle—he’s right, naturally—but he befriends Paul and the rest by showing them how to survive.

The film features a lot of battle sequences, and they are presented with a lot of kinetic energy: soldiers running everywhere, explosions all around them, people falling into foxholes, others barricading themselves in trenches only to have the “enemy” jump into those same trenches. One of the most harrowing sequences occurs when Ayres’ Paul falls into a foxhole only to be followed by a French soldier, whom he stabs with his knife. However, the wounded man then takes a long time to die from his injury, and Paul winds up trying to save him by giving him water. Eventually, he even apologizes to the Frenchman and asks for forgiveness; he also vows to provide for the dead man’s wife and daughter. It’s one of the moments that clearly means to suggest that all of this death—and there’s a lot of death in this film—is really unnecessary.

If you need further evidence that the film’s makers are attempting to present a case against war, at least a couple of times during the film, the soldiers themselves discuss the purposes of war. They cannot see what goal is being served by killing other men. They assume that someone in one country offended someone in another country, but they aren’t feeling offended themselves. Since they’re German soldiers, they also ponder what exactly the Kaiser gets from having the country be at war. They don’t want to kill other people, and they don’t fathom why someone wants them to kill others and destroy property. Yes, I realize that there are some comic undertones to a few of the points they make, but the overall subject is quite serious, and they raise several valid and intriguing points that are still relevant today.

If you really want another poignant example from the film that shows the irony of war, consider the case of Franz, one of Paul’s classmates and fellow soldiers. He’s come to battle with a very expensive pair of leather boots, an object of envy for most of his classmates who must march is much cheaper, lower quality boots. He’s injured in battle and has one of his legs amputated. Paul gives the boots to another young soldier, Mueller, who is injured not long after he acquires the footwear. A closeup of his legs clad in the boots is the last image that we have of him.

Late in the film, after Paul recuperates from an injury, he’s allowed leave to visit his family. His mother and sister greet him with great joy, but they can’t fully comprehend what he’s endured, and he doesn’t feel comfortable telling them about the horrors he’s experienced and witnessed. A group of older men, including his father, debate what should be happening in the war and where the troops should be engaged in battle, but it’s very clear that they have no idea what’s really happening. Paul becomes so disillusioned that he returns to the frontlines earlier than expected. When he meets his company again, none of his classmates are still alive, and many of the newer soldiers are just teenagers. Only Tjaden (played with great humor by Slim Summerville) and Kat are still around… but not for long. That’s not a spoiler alert since the film was released almost a hundred years ago.

I’d like to point out two technical elements of the film that really stand out. Even though the dialog was rather, um, quiet or low in the print that I saw, the sound effects were very effective. Paired with the visual effects, they really put the audience into the realm of battle. Bombs and bullets abound in this film, and you get a clear sense of the constant danger that soldiers face. The other technical achievement worthy of note is the film’s cinematography, which was nominated for an Academy Award. It’s quite stunning, and the final sequence of Paul reaching for a butterfly during a fight is just magnificently shot. I also enjoyed the way that the camera sometimes moves through the trenches, showing the faces of the soldiers about to shoot at their fellow humans on the other side. There’s fear and strength and determination and exhaustion there.

The final image of the film—before a very long fade to black—is a superimposition of a cemetery filled with rows upon rows of white crosses and the young men from the beginning of the film as they were when they first marched off to war. We’ve all seen those cemeteries, and it’s haunting to know that it seems those soldiers were destined to rest in one of those locations, probably far from their home countries. If you still haven’t decided whether this is an anti-war film by that point, you should leave with a very strong, clear sense after watching that unfold on screen.

The film is based upon the 1929 novel by German veteran Erich Maria Remarque, and it shares the book’s emphasis on the repeated acts of trauma experienced by the soldiers. At times, they have no food to eat. We even get a scene where eighty soldiers show up, but there’s enough food for 150 men because that’s what the cook expected. However, he doesn’t want to give them double portions because that goes against the rules. Many veterans have what we now call post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and you get a very clear picture of that trauma and stress in this movie. It’s worth noting that Remarque’s novel and the film adaptation of it are primarily focused upon the German side of World War I, but it doesn’t take much imagination to see how the other side was having many of the same experiences. I don’t think it’s problematic to note that almost everyone suffers during wars, not just one side.

All Quiet on the Western Front was recut several times for rereleases over the years, so the version/s that we have today might not be exactly what audiences initially saw in 1930. It’s actually about twenty minutes shorter than the first version. The director, Lewis Milestone, was the first person to win two Oscars, having received a directing award two years earlier for helming the comedy film Two Arabian Knights, which also starred Wolheim. Another interesting Oscar history note is this was the first film to be named Best Picture (or “Outstanding Production”) and have its director be chosen for Best Director, a trend that would be quite common over the years.

Oscar Wins: Outstanding Production and Best Director (Lewis Milestone)

Other Nominations: Best Writing and Best Cinematography

Odd Man Out (1947)

 

You might need to know a little bit about the Irish nationalist movement to understand some of the finer points of Odd Man Out, a film that never directly identifies its protagonist and his fellows as anything other than members of an “organisation” rather than the Irish Republican Army in the novel on which it is based. James Mason, giving one of his best performances, plays Johnny McQueen, who’s been hiding out after escaping from prison. The “organisation” demands that he participate in the robbery of a mill to get money for their needs. The robbery goes bad, though, and Johnny kills one of the security guards and gets shot in his left arm. He falls out of the getaway car, and the film follows him as he tries to make his way back to his hideout. A parallel story involves the search by Kathleen Sullivan (played by Kathleen Ryan), the woman who’s fallen in love with Johnny and has been hiding him in her grandmother’s home, to locate and rescue him. The most interesting visual aspects of the film involve Johnny’s “visions.” While he’s hiding out in a railway station, he flashes back to his days in prison and mistakes a little neighborhood girl for someone he knew there. The camera recreates his sense of dizziness during this scene and his hazy memories of time in jail. He’s put into a carriage by some guys who think he’s drunk and manages to make it through a police barricade because no one thinks he'd actually be in a carriage. He also winds up hiding out in a private booth in a bar and starts seeing the images of all of the people he’s encountered on this strange night (and there have been a few) in the beer suds. It’s a wild visual effect, topped only by the sequence involving Johnny seeing various paintings moving about and their images coming to life. The cinematography is sharp film noir, and it makes for a stunning film visually. I can’t possibly recount all of the events of Johnny’s torturous journey, but the film’s suspense is naturally derived: Will Johnny make it back to Kathleen’s place? Will Kathleen find him in time to allow them both to escape? Did she have some sort of romantic relationship with the police officer trying to track down Johnny? How can the local priest help without compromising his moral obligations? The most authentic aspect of the film may be the way that so many people in this city don’t want to help Johnny or, at least, don’t want to be found out to have helped him. That sense of fear from what might happen if you choose the “wrong” side in an ongoing climate of political reprisals shows very clearly on the faces of those supporting characters who encounter Johnny. Interestingly, many of those supporting actors were from Dublin’s Abbey Theatre, which had as one its cofounders the great William Butler Yeats. Another intriguing aspect of this film is that it was the first recipient of the BAFTA (British Academy for Film and Television Arts) for Best British Film—in fact, the first of two films directed in the late 1940s by Sir Carol Reed to receive the honor.

Oscar Nomination: Best Film Editing

Dirty Pretty Things (2003)

 

Dirty Pretty Things can be a difficult film to categorize. It’s sometimes called a thriller or a crime drama or even a romance of sorts, which it is at times, albeit a very unconventional one, certainly. It’s also a searing examination of the immigrant experience in London, that city where so many of the formerly colonized have gone to try to make a new life. I’ve always considered it primarily a character study focusing on Okwe (played perfectly by Chiwetel Ejiofor), a cab driver and night desk clerk at the Baltic Hotel who was a doctor in his home country of Nigeria. That’s quite the character description, isn’t it? Okwe always seems to be the moral center of the plot, never wanting, as he puts it, to harm anyone and always trying to do the moral or right thing. However, after he discovers a heart clogging a toilet in one of the hotel rooms, he (and we) has to confront a rather bizarre series of plot twists. The woman he loves, a Turkish immigrant named Senay (Audrey Tautou), faces the constant threat of raids by immigration officers because she’s not supposed to be working (at the hotel or at a sweatshop) or taking rent from someone else like Okwe. Their scenes together are lovely but challenging because we know what they seem unable to say: they love each other. We also learn that the hotel manager, a guy called Sneaky (Sergi Lopez), has been selling organs like kidneys on the black market in exchange for forged passports and citizenship papers, and he’s been using vacant hotel rooms as the locations for the surgeries. Befitting such dark subject matter, the film features some very evocative gritty cinematography so that we’re always aware of the kind of lives these people have to endure. Most of the characters are from somewhere other than London or England, and the international cast brings the plight of the undocumented to the surface throughout the film. Dirty Pretty Things has some exceptional actors in addition to Ejiofor and Tautou, including Sophie Okonedo as Juliette, a hooker with a good heart (and who gains a great deal of depth with the Okonedo’s performance), and Benedict Wong as Guo Yi, Okwe’s friend who works in a crematorium and helps him to obtain medical supplies from the hospital. Decades after its initial release, Dirty Pretty Things still has the ability to shock at times and to move a viewer to tears, and few films can take as many risks as it does with such great results.

Oscar Nomination: Best Original Screenplay

The 400 Blows (1959)

 

Director Francois Truffaut reportedly based The 400 Blows on his own childhood. The lead character of Antoine Doinel (played for the first time here by Jean-Pierre Leaud) is really a rather ordinary young boy who keeps getting into trouble with the school authorities and with his parents for what seem to be rather harmless actions. For example, he loses his recess time early in the film due to a “naughty” picture he’s caught with; it wasn’t his picture, and most of the other boys in the classroom had already seen it by the time it got to Antoine. Why wasn’t everyone punished? Because Antoine was the one who had the incriminating photo when the teacher turned around. To be honest, none of Antoine’s alleged crimes seem all that significant to us nowadays, at least not from my perspective. He writes some bad things on the wall after being punished by his teacher? He forgets to bring home flour from the store? He plays hooky from school with a friend and goes to the movies and to an arcade and to a centrifuge? None of these seem particularly serious, frankly, and he’s seemingly no worse than any of the other boys in his school. He just seems to get punished more. By the way, his punishment for one of his alleged crimes is conjugating? That’s a pretty severe way of getting someone to do that onerous task. We learn a bit more about his family dynamic as the movie progresses. His mother (Claire Maurier) is cheating on her husband with another man, and we realize that the man Antoine calls his father (Albert Remy) is actually his stepfather. Perhaps there’s always been tension between the three of them over their connections or disconnections. Antoine runs away from home after his stepfather slaps him in front of his classmates and stays with his friend who’s also been suspended. By the way, the reason Antoine was suspended was due to his being so inspired by a Balzac novel that he wrote a closing for his essay that was meant as a homage to the great French writer but was considered plagiarism instead. I always knew Balzac was trouble; it’s why I’ve tried to avoid reading his works. Of course, some of what Antoine does could be chalked up to youthful ignorance. He and his friend steal a typewriter from his father’s office (even though they’re apparently all marked) and try to sell it for some cash. They fail at this, so they try to return it only to see Antoine caught and then jailed for vagrancy and theft. He winds up in an observation center for juveniles, and we get to witness two remarkable sequences as a result. One is an interrogation or interview that was reportedly improvised, and you get to see Leaud at his most charming and vulnerable. The other is the final scene where an astonishing tracking shot follows him as he runs away from the detention center and winds up at the sea, a place he’s always wanted to visit. The film ends with a closeup of Antoine’s face as he stares at the camera. It’s one of the most famous endings in film history for a reason. What is going through his mind? What will happen to him next? As one of the earliest films in the French New Wave movement, The 400 Blows sets a high standard for excellence. By the way, I would like to note that the film itself pays tribute to the joy we receive from the movies. Antoine and his friend go to see a movie when they play hooky, and the whole family enjoys a night out at the cinema, talking about the film they saw on the way home. A charming film that reveals our love of the movies is quite an accomplishment.

Oscar Nomination: Best Story and Screenplay Written Directly for the Screen

A Quiet Place (2018)

 

A Quiet Place is a masterful film in so many ways. It truly deserved more Oscar attention than it received (a sole nomination for its amazing sound design), but popular opinion ensures that the film will be remembered long after the memories of award-show glory have gone. Set in a post-apocalyptic world where sound-sensitive monsters from another planet have attacked Earth and killed almost everyone, the film chooses not to focus upon that story directly, but instead it shows us how a family isolated on a farm has adjusted to this new and frightening reality. Emily Blunt and John Krasinski (who also directed), married in real life, play a couple whose primary goal seems to be the protection of their three young children. Everyone has to keep silent as much as possible, communicating when necessary via American Sign Language or waiting until their speech might be drowned out by a louder, more natural sound like a waterfall. The family has learned to be pretty much self-sufficient, but the dangers of their world appear early in the film. It’s a bold move on the part of the filmmakers to kill off the youngest (at the time) child near the start of the narrative, but it does quickly cement for us as viewers the very real dangers everyone must now deal with. Every little incident becomes a potential threat, so footsteps have to be carefully mapped and even the corn shifting in a silo could possibly lead to someone’s death. The monsters themselves are, oddly enough, incredibly loud, and the method for getting rid of them turns out to be a genius move. Blunt gives the best performance in the film, but everyone here is astonishingly good. Without the words that actors can use in most performances to convey emotion, everyone has to use their facial expressions more. The casting of Millicent Simmonds, an actress with hearing loss, as daughter Regan was an inspired choice, and her talent really influenced the performances of the others. A Quiet Place is not a silent film – it even has a musical score at times – but it does know how to use silence so effectively.

Oscar Nomination: Best Achievement in Sound Editing

Nosferatu (2024)

 

I suppose I understand the nominations in several technical categories for the most recent version of Nosferatu, the vampire film that keeps alternating with Dracula in terms of being remade. It is certainly stylish in its way, and the costumes and sets and general atmosphere of the film are all very evocative and contribute a great deal to the feel of the film. However, it seems to me that it’s almost all atmosphere and very little substance. I was, frankly, bored because I’ve seen this film before. It’s not really all that different from the classic 1922 version, and it even has moments when it seems to copy Bram Stoker’s Dracula, Francis Ford Coppola’s vampire film from 1992. It does seem to be a matter of style over substance. Other than giving Lily-Rose Depp’s Ellen Hutter more of an active role in the plot that previous iterations, I can’t really see what the point of the remake is. It’s certainly grosser and more disgusting than previous versions, particularly in the depiction of Count Orlock (Bill Skarsgard). Otherwise, it’s a lot of very attractive people (Nicholas Hoult, Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Emma Corrin) and some rather odd people like Willem Defoe, who always seems nowadays to be acting in a different movie than the one he’s actually in. Is this really that much of a retelling? Other than giving us a bit more backstory with Ellen seeking help from a demon and a bit about some gypsies, what really sets this apart so much from other vampire movies other than in its more technical achievements. So, as I said, I get it, I guess, but why spend all that money just to tell a story with which we’re already familiar? I just think there were other choices perhaps more deserving of nominations, more original works than this retread of a movie we’ve seen many times before.

Oscar Nominations: Best Achievement in Cinematography, Best Achievement in Costume Design, Best Achievement in Production Design, and Best Achievement in Makeup and Hairstyling

Written on the Wind (1956)

 

When an actor or a movie star learned that they were going to be in a Douglas Sirk movie like Written on the Wind, they must have been very excited. They knew that they would always look their best in the movie because they would be wearing nothing but stylish clothing. They would never look scruffy or disheveled; everyone looks beautiful in a Sirk movie. They would also be performing on soundstages that displayed some of the most thoughtful and thorough attention to the details of set design. Everyone and every place looks just gorgeous in a Sirk-directed film, no matter how destitute or despairing the situation of the plot. Even the people who are supposed to be lower income are always impeccably dressed, and a dive bar looks like a rather reputable location, frankly. Such is definitely the case with Written on the Wind, one of Sirk's best films and an almost perfect example of the style he brought to his films. Look at how Lauren Bacall’s Lucy Moore Hadley and Dorothy Malone’s Marylee Hadley are dressed in this melodrama. There's not a single misstep in their costumes even if you wonder sometimes why anyone would go through all the trouble to wear one of those gowns or why they seem, um, overdressed at times. Rock Hudson’s Mitch Wayne (how butch is that name!) and Robert Stack Kyle Hadley are almost always in tailored suits and hardly ever look like they've broken a sweat even after a fight, and there are lots of fights. And the sets are just as fantastic. Who wouldn't want to live in homes like these or work in offices like these? Whether it's New York or Florida or Texas, no one has second-class surroundings. Why this film and others like it weren’t nominated for their exquisite production design is a mystery. Of course, beneath the surface of all these accoutrements that the wealthy display, there's a lot of psychological damage. The Hadleys, a family made rich from oil production, had plenty of demons, what with Kirk’s drinking and womanizing and Marylee’s rather wanton pursuit of every man in sight. She wants to bed Mitch, but they and Kirk grew up almost like siblings, so he’s never going to sleep with her. Of course, their lifelong closeness doesn’t keep Kyle from stealing Lucy away from Mitch before the poor geologist even has a chance. However, the causes of this kind of behavior are never visible if you only pay attention to the beauty of the surroundings, but Written on the Wind slowly lets you see the dangers underlying these beautiful people and their lovely clothes and their fantastic homes. Perhaps Sirk was trying to tell us something.

Oscar Win: Best Supporting Actress (Dorothy Malone)

Other Oscar Nominations: Best Supporting Actor (Robert Stack) and Best Original Song (“Written on the Wind”)