All Quiet On The Western Front

The Greatest Anti-War Film Ever Made. Unlike most "message" films which date almost immediately, Lewis Milestone's low-key, unpolished and deeply-felt screen adaptation of the Erich Maria Remarque anti-war novel has lost little of it's original impact. Years after it's release it was still being banned in countries mobilizing for war. The plot follows a group of young German recruits in World War 1 through their passage from idealism to disillusionment, until the central character Paul Baumer (Lew Ayres) declares. "We live in the trenches and we fight. We try not to be killed-that's all." All Quiet is an anthology of now -famous scenes-Ayres trapped in a shell crater with a man he has killed: the first meeting of the recruits and the veterans: infrantrymen being mowed down to machine-gun visual rhythms: a moonlight swim with French farmgirls: and the final shot of the soldier's hand reaching for a fatal butterfly. © Uiversal Pictures Corp.