Starring
Richard Alexander as Westhus
Ben Alexander as Franz Kemmerich
Lew Ayres as Paul Bäumer
William Bakewell as Albert Kropp
Edmund Breese as Herr Meyer
G. Pat Collins as Lieutenant Bertinck
Owen Davis, Jr. as Peter
Russell Gleason as Müller
Harold Goodwin as Detering
Scott Kolk as Leer
Arnold Lucy as Professor Kantorek
Beryl Mercer as Mrs. Bäumer, Paul's mother
Walter E. Rogers as Behn
Slim Summerville as Tjaden
Louis Wolheim as Stanislaus Katczinsky
This movie was brilliant. It was the
war movie made for me. I know that sounds stupid but I loved it. It
neither glorified nor bashed the idea of war. It put it in plain
terms. You fight you die, for your country and for those who run it.
That’s it. For a group of young brash German boys, the war could
mean anything, what they never thought it to mean was death. Not
death from a bullet, but of starvation, indecent sanitation, cold and
insanity. The main character of the story paul is a brash young man
who is fallen in with a war veteran named Kat. He befriends him while
they watch their friends die in the trenches. Paul is witness to the
many ways soldiers dies in war. Mostly by watching his friends as
they slowly diminish in numbers. He himself is taken to the hospital
when he is struck by a bomb with hihs friend. There in the hospital
you see the soldiers who are dying and who are taken to places to die
because after awhile fighting proves futile. Paul is relieved to go
on break after he gets better and there he finds everything almost
the same as when he left. He goes to visit his old school master and
is asked to give a speech about war, where he delivers the famous
line of the movie. He is heart broken by the war and he realizes that
he can't just come back to normalcy, he too has gone off the looney
bin in more than one way. He decides to go back. He is reunited with
Kat and they are to go get some wood and Kat is killed by enemy fire.
But Paul brings him to the surgeon nonetheless to try to fix him but
is only devastated. The last scene is of Paul in the trenches and a
butterfly. This movie was awesome and sad. It was beautiful and
tragic, it was the realness which made it that much more believable.
I don't think I could watch it everyday but I definitely love
everything about it.
It also won awards for:
Best Director Lewis Milestone
