Into the Mud with Lewis Milestone

By Fearless Young Orphan

All Quiet on the Western Front (1930) Directed by Lewis Milestone

I saw it: November 8, 2009

Why haven’t I seen it yet?

Because it’s a war movie, and I don’t dig war movies (remember The Bridge on the River Kwai? How I went on and on!), because it’s very old and I didn’t think it would interest me much. It’s about as simple as that.

All Quiet

What struck me most powerfully about All Quiet on the Western Front its age in relation to its technical prowess. This movie is nearing on 100 years old, and was made in a year when there were still silent films in production because sound in a movie was a fairly new idea. There are epic battle scenes here, lengthy and detailed and, gulp, actually filmed by real people using other real people and real landscapes, with hundreds of men charging into the terrified chaos of a war. I love the looks of the movies they are making now, and I love what computer graphics have made possible, but what director Milestone had to accomplish in order to put this film together demands respect. In black and white it is often hard for us to tell one side from another on the battlefield, yet that seems to be rather the point, because when filthy troops come together and actually wrestle and stab each other, the confusion is the point and is quite effective. I wanted to say, “For God’s sake stop, you fools, this is ridiculous, you’re grappling in the mud.”

Well that’s the point. This is an anti-war film, made when World War I was still just known as The Great War, based on the German novel by the same name. It is about young German men, driven by patriotism (and/or less noble reasons) to enlist to fight the French, and the terrible disillusion that comes over them almost the moment they set foot on a military base.

Acting style in 1930 was different than what we are accustomed to seeing. It was better in some ways and worse in others. I appreciate the diction used by actors back then. Probably thanks their own production limitations, folks weren’t allowed to mutter, mumble or whisper much. You could hear what they were saying, quite clearly. Nice as that is, it doesn’t always sound realistic. Their performances are less film and more stage in many instances, by which I mean that the actors behave as if they are making sure that people way in the back row of the theater will be able to catch their every nuance, ignoring the fact that being on film makes this unnecessary because your every action is blown up huge on the screen. “Make sure you bug your eyes out real big, there, son!” Sometimes rather boisterous overblown expostulations were used when the quiet or subtle would have been more effective.

I think the acting is as good as could be expected at the time, but you must make some effort to contextualize it for style; at many moments I felt I had to be very forgiving of the performances.

Now, another thing from the modern perspective: this movie isn’t going to tell the new viewer much that he or she doesn’t know already. We live in a very cynical age and the truth about the horrors of war is not something that needs to be taught to us. We are aware that it’s a nasty, dirty, brutal business. So when a young soldier is fatally shot while reaching for a beautiful butterfly, it might not pack quite the same emotional punch as it once did.

The first minutes of the film occur while a parade of young German soldiers are marching to war. This patriotic parade is framed by the windows of a classroom, where bright young men sit listening to their professor as he preaches the glories of war, preaches in fact the glories of dying for one’s country, urging his young students to cast aside their books and enlist. As he rants, we see various boys in the classroom daydream about being soldiers and their fantasies are about proud parents, fawning girls and glory. None of them daydream about dying, of course.

The professor singles out Paul Baumer (Lew Ayres) whom he calls the “leader” of the boys. Paul is an aspiring writer, handsome and intelligent, and it’s not hard to believe the other boys would adore him. If Paul signs up, implies the professor, all the boys will! Well, Paul doesn’t look too sure about it (if he daydreamed, we did not see it) but youth and peer pressure play out here. He seems to agree with an aw-shucks attitude like he’s agreeing to take them all out to a country club that they couldn’t enter without his credentials. The boys leap up in joy, scatter their books and papers in a whirlwind and race out of the classroom to enlist, and one shouts, “no more lessons!” as if getting out of school is the best reason of all to enlist for war.

Without beating us over the head, the scene is quite effective at summarizing the misperceptions that these young men had before they are thrown into the mud. These moments become even more powerful when later in the movie, an emotionally shattered Paul returns on leave to visit his home town. He enters the same classroom, and finds the same professor preaching his hyper-patriotism to new starry-eyed lads, who look even younger than Paul and his classmates had. When the professor elatedly calls for Paul to add his own rally cry, poor Paul cannot. He is hard-pressed to even describe what happens out there in the battlefield, reducing his testimony basically to “you live in a trench, and then you die, or you don’t die.” The professor and the boys are outraged by this summary, by the way. Nobody wants to hear it.

Paul and his companions have their grand ideas about war squashed pretty quickly, starting with kind of a lousy time in basic training. Their drill sergeant is actually their former mailman, whom they used to tease and badger; now the mailman goes a little bit nuts with his own power over the bright young lads and turns into the kind of control- freak-in-a-uniform. I am not sure whether the movie is playing this for laughs or as a real commentary on what a little power can do to the wrong kind of person.

But the real eye-opener comes when finally the boys march off to fight the Great War and discover almost at once that their army suffers from extremely poor organizational skills. There’s nowhere decent to sleep and there is very little food, so the soldiers have to scavenge for themselves most of the time. Funny how no one mentioned this in the patriotic speeches, these irritating little details. In fact much of the rest of the movie dwells rather poignantly on the bare essentials to which life reduces when all around is chaos: something to eat, somewhere to sleep, a comfortable pair of shoes. We watch the silent story of a pair of finely made boots as they are passed from one soldier to another, and the previous owners are not giving them up out of charity, if you catch my meaning. The boots outlive several owners. Where they come to rest by the end of the film is a mystery.

But back to Paul and his school friends. One of their friends is killed almost immediately on a midnight mission. Then they are sent to the trenches where they sit, for days on end, underground in a cramped hole while they are constantly barraged by enemy shelling. They have almost no food, are unable to sleep, are constantly in danger of being buried alive, and they have not a damned thing to do. This goes on for days. What a nightmare; I can hardly imagine worse psychological torment. The ones who don’t crack under the strain (and some do) are finally and abruptly called out of the trench to hurtle into a battle that makes very little sense on the ground, for what the powers-that-be want from overhead is anyone’s guess. They are basically told to run and shoot at the enemy and try not to get killed. The enemy is doing the same thing.

Another scene I found important, though the acting was once again a hurdle I had to overlook, was one in which Paul is trapped in a ditch while a battle rages only a couple feet overhead. An enemy soldier falls in with him, they struggle and Paul stabs him repeatedly. The battle rages on for hours and Paul’s new roommate doesn’t have the courtesy to die. Nor does Paul have the will to just finish the guy off. So Paul sits for hours beside this man who is bleeding to death and his emotions run the spectrum, from rage to fear to guilt to heroism to adoration and back again. Perhaps it is not such an easy thing, to stab a man, if you don’t do the job nice and neat first thing off.

And after all this, Paul finds himself utterly unable to go home. He’s wounded and sent on leave to his home town, as I mentioned before, only to realize that he has been so warped by his horrifying ordeal that he barely recognizes the people he used to love, and that others have very little understanding of what he has gone through. He seems to believe he is sullying his sickly mother by being near her. So he flees safety and comfort and returns to war early, ostensibly because it is the only place where he feels he fits any more—but the movies welcomes you to try and think of a few reasons of your own.

Did I love All Quiet? No, I did not. Blame my disinterest in the war film in general, or my cynicism, or my brains being mush from too many modern edits. Did I admire it? Hell yes, I admired the hell out of it. Technologically speaking, it’s a marvel. It’s a must-see for those who do enjoy a battlefield story (but not if you want to see your soldiers bursting with patriotism and valor). The movie taught me a thing or to, and gave me a good deal to think about. I already know that war is hell. All Quiet on the Western Front reminded me of some reasons why that is so. Companion Film: Rain (1932)

Directed by Lewis Milestone

If you bothered to notice the date on which I watched All Quiet, you’ll see that it was over six months ago. In fact, in my “classics” project, it was either the second or third film I actually watched, and the review has been waiting on my hard drive all this time. It has taken me this long to figure out what movie I wanted to pair with it. I like to pair up an original with its remake, but frankly, the remake sounded like such a disappointment, and I don’t think it would have told me anything new. However, I was very impressed with the directorial touch of Lewis Milestone, so decided to check out this subsequent film Rain, based on Somerset Maugham’s classic story of the prostitute Sadie Thompson.

I’m glad I did. Rain is a good, juicy story. Basically it’s about a bad girl (Joan Crawford) who tries to take refuge on the South Pacific island of Pago Pago but is beleaguered by an unforgiving missionary called Davidson (the great Walter Huston, who gained my admiration so much in Dodsworth). Davidson does everything in his power to get her sent to prison, whether or not she deserves to go.

Sadie is a fun, friendly, practical girl who also happens to be a hooker, and she does her damnedest to convince Davidson to just “live and let live,” and that if he would only leave her alone, they could soon go their separate ways and he could simply leave her to Hell. But Davidson has it in for Sadie and will not do so; one gets the distinct impression that if Sadie were not so vibrant and sexy, he wouldn’t care half as much that she gets the punishment she deserves. You don’t see him going to any extra lengths to rescue the local natives, the slovenly innkeeper, or the innkeeper’s rather cryptic and superstitious wife.

Joan Crawford is not an actress I know except by infamous reputation. She was so badly villainized by Mommie Dearest that it’s about all I can picture when I think of her. So, I’m glad I saw her in this. She’s quite a good actress, and her beauty has a hardness about it that suits Sadie Thompson pretty well.

If you watch this, and I recommend it to those who like a good story of religious hypocrisy, in the vein of tales by Sinclair Lewis and the stagey style of Tennessee Williams, you will probably come up with your own interpretation of what exactly Sadie does. My interpretation follows in the next two paragraphs, but you might want to skip them for now, if you’re really interested in seeing the movie for the first time. I don’t want to spoil.

Here’s what I think. After trying every logical and friendly recourse to fight Davidson’s interference in her life, Sadie realizes that the only way to get out of this man’s clutches is to play his game. She does a very convincing conversion (because given her life, we can believe that Sadie is one hell of an actress by now), committing to the role so completely that she fools not only Davidson but everybody else. Maybe she even fools herself a little bit. She passes all Davidson’s tests for righteousness and then hits him with the full power of her feminine wiles, which she has worked to perfection. He is so madly in lust with her by this time that he falls, helpless to control his desire, on the last night of her stay in Pago Pago.

We don’t see precisely what occurs between the two of them, but you know something must have. To put it indelicately, I believe that either he has sex with Sadie, or he tries to and she rejects and shames him. I hope it was the latter. But whatever it was, it crushes Davidson. He commits suicide and is found in the ocean the following day and Sadie is restored, with startling rapidity, to her happy old self. She does seem saddened by the man’s death; I personally think she just wanted to defeat his religion, not his will to live. But Davidson made his own choices, and Sadie has her own life to think about. It may be a rather happier one.

Okay, resume reading here if you skipped the spoilerish part.

Whatever your interpretation of the story, you have got to admire Lewis Milestone. His direction is the reason I watched this, and I was not disappointed. Milestone evokes every mood and nuance of this rainy, sloppy tropical island so well that you may start to feel the humidity. Though the script itself has a definite stagey feel to it (the story was also a popular stage play), Milestone takes us through the fourth wall by moving the camera with his characters, following lines of sight, and pressing his actors together with a great use of sound `(the rain, the native drums, Sadie’s raucous music). He seems like a director way ahead of his time. It’s very interesting to wonder what he might have done with the technology of today. But he directed well into the 1960s, and it might be worth my while, and yours, to check out something he did in later years. In fact, I’m going to do just that, when I watch his 1962 remake of Mutiny on the Bounty as a companion to the original classic version from 1935. I can’t wait to see what he does with it.