Westfront

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. .

My husband and I just finished seeing this movie. We hadn't heard of it before. We were quite impressed. It's an old movie. It was made just at that time when overacted stage conventions were being abandoned for the more subtle gestures of film. Taking that into account, this movie for us packed quite a wallop.

This is a movie about people attempting to fight a war as a group of small-towners who get to know each other and build a society as they go. Although they don't like the war, they are willing to go and do their part. But can these deep relationships endure in the face of an impersonal war machine? And whose fault is it if they can't? Who is responsible for the situation?

There's a fairly slow start, during which the movie establishes relationships, etc. Then there is a decisive battle. Somehow there isn't another trench warfare movie I can think of which really gets the nuances and habits of the people who were in the trenches in World War I, on either side. We don't have anything like it now. And yet it's not gruesome, so don't be worried about that. I'd definitely recommend this movie, especially in mid-2006 in the U.S. This movie asks all the right questions, subtly but effectively.

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.

This is a movie that actually doesn't really have a main plot-line in terms of following one main character and have a clear beginning, middle part and end. Just like war there is no logic in it and things just happen within this movie as the movie moves along. It puts you right in the middle of things and shows you the madness of war.

It handles all different kinds of aspects from the war. It doesn't only show the situation from the viewpoint of the young soldiers but it also focuses on the family and girls back home. It doesn't do this by featuring it too prominently but picks out an handful of minor characters and just a couple of sequences to get the message across. This works out really well and it doesn't feel melodramatic or anything like that. Modern movies can really learn something from this.

But of course foremost the movie gets set in the trenches, somewhere in France. The movie is filled with some WW I battle sequences, which are all surprising good and authentic looking. Guess lots of materials and places from WW I were still around during the production of this movie so they did not have an hard time recreating the look and feeling of the battles fought out in the trenches.

It was the first sound movie from Georg Wilhelm Pabst and this shows. Nothing too major, it are just some little things showing you that 'talkies' hadn't been around yet for very long and Georg Wilhelm Pabst wasn't also too experienced with it yet. He pretty much shot this movie in the same way as he would had filmed a silent movie.

The movie is of course also original with the fact that it tells the story from the German point of view. While watching this movie you don't actually ever give you the feeling you're watching the movie from the 'evil' and bad point of view. All parties are more or less victims within a war and things are not as black & white as they always seem.

Simply a real good and effective WW I production, especially when considering that it got shot way back in 1930.

8/10

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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.