All Quiet on the Western Front (1930) Blu-ray Feb/2012

[pro-bassoonist]

All Quiet on the Western Front Blu-ray




Delbert Mann's made for TV All Quiet on the Western Front (1979) has received a preliminary release date: October 12. Courtesy of ITV Granada. Golden Globe Winner: Best Motion Picture Made for TV (1980).

Matchflick:

One of the greatest anti-war movies ever made, based upon one of the greatest anti-war novels ever written, All Quiet On The Western Front is the story of a group of young German soldiers who enlist to fight in World War One at the urgings of their parents and teachers, none of whom have the faintest idea what it is the boys will face.

The film unfolds through the eyes of Paul Baumer (Richard Thomas) a dreamer and a thinker, as he and his friends are introduced to the realities of trench warfare by the wily Kat (Ernest Borgnine, in one of his best roles). Their ideals and naive ideas of war are quickly stripped away by the mud, the gas, the bullets, and the rats. The horrors of disease and primitive medicines take their toll and Thomas's narration documents how war changes a man irrevocably, and how the suffering and the dying is always carried out by the men on the ground.

While the film has dated in terms of effects and direction techniques, it retains all of its power- scenes like Kemmerich in the hospital, or Baumer's vicious hand-to-hand combat with a French soldier in a foxhole and its aftermath speak volumes about the nature of war and of being a soldier.

A sad movie, a smart movie, and an important movie, All Quiet On The Western Front is cinema at its finest.

Pro-B