All Quiet on the Western Front (1930)

Because of the revolution in sound films that started with the first synchronised sound recording on The Jazz Singer (1927), silent films over the next couple of years quickly became an endangered species. By 1930 virtually every film in the Western world was embracing sound, and silent films had soon gone from being a medium developed after three decades of experimentation culminating in some of the best cinema ever made, to being almost extinct. Due to the insistence of film studios that every picture was now to be made using sound (though some could later have intertitles added and turned into silents for foreign distribution), for the first and only time in its history cinema took a large step backwards.
Suddenly filmmakers who had great confidence in their ability were finding themselves in an alien environment. All of the crew now had to be quiet on set or the background noise would be picked up by the primitive microphones. Sound also meant that clunky camera rigs of the time often had to be locked in place, just as many directors were devising ways of releasing the camera, allowing sweeping shots to be filmed. Silent stars who had foreign accents, though not a problem when nobody could hear you speak, suddenly found themselves out of favour and many never appeared in films again. Even the lighting had to be altered, as Mark Cousins ably demonstrated in The Story of Film (2011), so that multiple angles could be filmed without breaking the dialogue. Some stubbornly refused to embrace sound films (Charlie Chaplin held out until The Great Dictator in 1940), but few had the power to oppose the studio executives.
Because of all this, early sound films were almost entirely worse that the silent films they had replaced. What this also means is that when a good sound film appeared in the early 30s it had to be amazing. All Quiet on the Western Front, released in 1930, is truly amazing.

To realise how much of an achievement All Quiet on the Western Front was, and how much of a gamble producer Carl Laemmle Jr. took, it's worth considering the state of the world at that time. Watch almost any other film from the 1930s, and they're generally entertaining, escapist films - because the world was in such a mess at this time people wanted to go to the cinema where they could forget about all their troubles for a couple of hours and enjoy a good film. The Great War had ended 12 years earlier but with such a great loss of life, certainly in Western Europe, that entire generations had been wiped out. The Wall Street Crash at the end of 1929 had led to the Great Depression and heavy unemployment, and though World War II was still a decade away, people didn't have a lot to be happy about.

The film is based on the 1929 anti-war novel of the same name by Erich Maria Remarque. Remarque was a German solider during World War I and wrote the book to document the immense physical and psychological pressure that soldiers were under. Though there was a lot of reluctance on the part of publishers to print the book, once it was released it became a sensation. What's perhaps surprising considering they were fighting against Germany during the war is that it was Universal Studios in America who decided to make the first cinema adaptation of the novel. Universal had been running since 1912 under the guidance of founder Carl Laemmle, but in 1928 as a 21st birthday present, he made his son, Carl Laemmle Jr., head of the studios. Despite the blatant nepotism, Laemmle Jr. worked hard to modernise the studios' output, and would be responsible for much that Universal are now famed for, such as the 'Universal Monsters' franchise, begun in 1931 with Dracula. But the biggest risk he took (and he took many which failed to pay off) was to produce an adaptation of All Quiet on the Western Front.
The story starts off in Germany at a high school at the beginning of World War I. As soldiers march through the streets, the students' teacher delivers a rousing speech about the pride and glory that can be gained by "saving the Fatherland". He inspires the young men and they are roused enough to all want to join up and serve their country. We then see the recruits at their basic training, where they quickly begin to realise that this isn't the glorious dream they had been promised. Under the guidance of their cruel ex-postman, now a serving officer, they are instructed in basic drill and little else. Ill-trained, they are then told they are heading off to "the front".
The young men arrive at the trenches and are shocked when one of their comrades is killed as they head towards their post. They see a hellish world where even morsels of basic food are hard to come by. What follows are some of the most stirring fighting sequences since D.W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation (1915) as the soldiers cross no man's land and head for the French trenches. What's very unusual in these scenes is the freedom with which the camera moves. Though a few directors had experimented with free-moving cameras (notably F.W. Murnau), as mentioned earlier, given the technical limitations of sound film, this was almost impossible to create on a sound film, yet director Lewis Milestone managed to do it here. He would extend this fluid camerawork on his next film, The Front Page (1931), and it would go on to be a signature of his films.

Also unusual at a time when film stars were in their ascendance is that All Quiet on the Western Front is very much an ensemble piece, though it's the young soldier Paul Baumer (Lew Ayres) who is present through most of the film. The actors here (and the cast are obviously almost exclusively male) are all excellent, and from the start when they are a jovial close group of friends to the change in their characters following the horrors they witness as they see their best friends killed in front of them, this change is never less than believable. The scene in which a soldier stabs a French fighter to death and then is forced to spend the night out on the battlefield with his corpse is truly memorable and it is easy to feel empathy and the conflict of emotions going on in the young man's mind. Something should also be said about the inspired final shot. To give the film a happy ending would have undone all of the work that had been done crafting such a realistic anti-war film. I won't spoil it here, but there are few endings as iconic and powerful.

Though the book was still selling in huge quantities, there was a lot of concern at Universal that All Quiet on the Western Front may turn out to be a very expensive flop. However, despite the fact that it was flying in the face of conventional Hollywood films of the period, it enjoyed great success. Carl Laemlle's gamble paid off, and he was honoured with an Academy Award for Outstanding Production, as well as Lewis Milestone's win for Best Director. It seemed that the public didn't mind a bit of well-made realism after all.
Watching the film today, it's surprising how well it still stands up. Because of the quality of the production, it still looks authentic and it's easy to see how this has inspired war films from Apocalypse Now (1979) to Saving Private Ryan (1998). It's true that there are some hangovers from the silent period which are jarring to a modern audience (the early scene where there are closeups of the schoolboys' enthusiastic faces was unnecessary in the sound era and would soon be phased out), but the emotional impact is still as strong as it ever was, over 80 years later.