Quatre de l'infanterie

Director G.W. Pabst uses sound well in this, his first sound film. There's the noise of continual bombardment, which adds to the visual realism. Moreover, sound serves continuity. Whistling continues from one scene to another in one transition; in another, the music of a band playing at a canteen turns into the drumbeat for marching soldiers. Also endearing of this antiwar statement is that it is not exciting, unlike other supposedly dovish pictures that end up romanticizing battle. There's the screaming Frenchman between trenches. An artillery firing line is too short, hitting patriot trenches. A return home on leave has a soldier discovering that his wife trades sex to get by.

The framing, editing and visual quality are adept, as one would expect from Pabst, if not from an early sound film. I especially liked the framing and fluidity of the staircase goodbye. There's a surveying moving camera, as there is in "All Quiet on the Western Front". The long battle sequence at the end is the climax of the salient film-making. There is a very long take from an unmoving position, as if the camera were a hidden soldier observing; it is unexciting, yet my attention was not discouraged.

Very much worth viewing. I caught it on Turner Classic Movies recently, and was very pleasantly surprised by the quality of this film.

This film transcends the limitations of the sensibilities of the time and the special effects available to movie makers. It makes no sweeping statements or judgments about war and aggression. It simply gives you a glimpse of what it was like to live and die in the trenches of The Great War.

Although not as intense as "All Quiet on the Western Front" (whose subject matter it shares), it has its moments of artistry. It is also more narrowly focused than "All Quiet..", but its story is compelling and riveting. Should be in anybody's serious list of worthy war movies.

Although this covers the same broad subject matter as "All Quiet", there is a different and welcome perspective and the film making is very definitely more European in style, harder edged and more matter of fact, which I have to say I prefer. For the English speaking audience it does suffer in that it has not been cared for and restored in the same way as "All Quiet". The version I saw had some rather jarring (at least to my English ears) subtitles, which showed that the UK and the USA are indeed two countries divided by a common language. I'm not sure what German words translate as "What in tarnation". Having said that the film was powerful, innovative and quite startling in its use of sound, which we should bear in mind had only been in use for 3 years or so. If someone knows where there is a restored version for the English speaking audience (preferably on DVD) I will be first in the queue

In this German WW1 movie from director G. W. Pabst, the film follows a small group of German infantrymen during the waning days of the war. The "Student" (Hans-Joachim Moebis), a young eager soldier, volunteers for dangerous messenger duty in order to grab time with a nearby village girl (Jackie Monnier). Karl (Gustav Diessl) pines for his wife back home, but a trip back during leave doesn't bring the desired results. And all around them rains death and destruction. Also featuring Claus Clausen.

This makes for an interesting companion piece to this same year's All Quiet on the Western Front. This movie is a bit rawer, with some minor fondling and cursing that wouldn't have made it into a US film, even during the pre-code era. The performances are all good, and I especially liked the turn by Clausen as an intense lieutenant in over his head. There's a section in a beerhall with a USO-type show featuring musicians, a raunchy singer, and a clown, that goes on a bit too long. The last 15 minutes or so are some of the most devastating war scenes in film. Highly recommended. .

Invariably any piece of art banned by the Nazis as degenerate or in this case "cowardly defeatism" has something to offer. G.W Pabst crafts a powerful antiwar film by simply showing so many of its truisms - the senseless, horrific death of course, but also many other subversive elements, e.g. the possibility of friendly fire, the idiotic decisions made by leaders who are out of harm's way being served posh courses of food, one's wife or girlfriend being unfaithful, and the psychological trauma. At his best he simply leaves the camera stationary in longshot while men scurry about and kill one another for no good reason, letting the viewer draw their own conclusion about the madness they're witnessing.

I have to say though, the impact of it all was a little lessened because the images and concepts weren't as novel for me 90 years later, as unfair to the film as that might be. It lags as well when it's off the battlefield, showing among other things an uninteresting (and long) performance at a canteen, and the confrontation with the wife in bed with another man. I think it was trying to balance out the warfare and build up characters so that we were invested in them, but I struggled to stay interested (this and the bleakness of the thing make it one I wouldn't reach for again). Kudos to Pabst for making it, and I loved the way he closes it with "The End?!", certainly well aware of growing militarism and possibility for another devastating war.