All Quiet on the Western Front follows a group of German schoolboys, talked into enlisting at the beginning of World War I by their jingoistic teacher and sent to the Western Front, where their patriotism is destroyed by the harsh realities of combat.
The rawness of the audio eradicates any lingering notion that war is romantic or exciting, and at times suggests the very battered eardrums of those engaged in combat.
It not only seeks to straddle the high dramatic of the silent era with the more staid aesthetics of the sound era, but it seeks to reveal wartime horror to such a heart-wrenching degree that it will undo war altogether.
The production values are incredibly high and not just for the time. And as the movie has aged and the film has gone grainier and the flickers increased, it almost adds to the effect.
The film's strength now derives less from its admittedly powerful but highly simplistic utterances about war as waste, than from a generally excellent set of performances (Ayres especially) and an almost total reluctance to follow normal plot structure.
The performances are also exemplary, but it is primarily a film of great moments -- the climactic sequence of the young conscript reaching out for a butterfly in the sun -- that, once seen, are never forgotten.
So magnificent, so powerful, that it hardly behooves mere words to tell of its heart-rending appeal, of its dramatic fire, its breath-taking battle shots in which men stab and kill each other, for the glory of war.
