Note: This is the third in a series of posts examining the movies that have won the Academy Award for Best Picture. We’ve previously covered 1927’s Wings and 1929’s A Broadway Melody.

1930’s All Quiet on the Western Front is perhaps the best-known of the early Best Picture (then still called “Best Production”) winners. It’s one of only two of the first ten winners to be included on AFI’s 100 Best Films list. It has a 98% positive rating from critics on Rotten Tomatoes, an 89% rating from audiences, and a 8.0 on IMDb. But does it hold up for modern audiences?

All Quiet on the Western Front: A genuine Hollywood classic

All Quiet on the Western Front is a 1930 production from Universal Pictures, directed by Lewis Milestone and starring Lew Ayres, Louis Wolheim, and John Wray, and it’s based on the novel of the same name by Erich Maria Remarque. It was the first movie to win both Best Picture and Best Director.

It’s been a few weeks since I last visited the Best Pictures, in large part because I was hesitant to watch All Quiet. I do a lot of my movie watching late at night, and tackling a 2+ hour black-and-white World War I film at 11 pm was a bit too daunting to contemplate. But I finally found some time during the day to watch it.

It was, honestly, not at all what I expected. I knew the basic idea: it’s about trench warfare in WWI and considered to be one of the first openly antiwar movies. So I guess I was expecting something heavier, and although the movie does have some heavy moments, it is on the whole much lighter in tone than I was ready for.

Another surprise was how much the movie followed the template for countless other war movies that followed, from its Best Picture predecessor Wings right up through today – and including at least one other Best Picture winner, 1986’s Platoon.

The movie shows a group of young men getting caught up in nationalistic propaganda, mainly from a horrifically irresponsible teacher, and volunteering to join up, thinking war would be wonderful and glamorous. We then get a series of scenes at boot camp, where the men are forced to deal with a sadistic training sergeant and begin to learn that maybe this war thing isn’t so great after all. When they finally get to the front, they learn that is most definitely isn’t.

Perhaps because it’s now been done so many other times, I found it hard to keep my interest through the training camp scenes, but once the movie got to the war, I began to appreciate a bit more why it’s such a beloved movie. The battle scenes are frantic and wonderfully well shot. Steven Spielberg has cited All Quiet as an inspiration for how he shot the battles in Saving Private Ryan. But, fitting with its antiwar theme, the movie goes out of its way to portray the horrors of the conflict, with some scenes that frankly surprised me for their depiction of graphic violence (surprising in a movie from this era).

Between battles, our protagonists live in a small bunker attached to a trench. While later war movies, particularly WWII films, would try to show these men as brave heroes fighting for a cause, we quickly learn there are two types of men in the trenches: old veterans who have learned to shut out their humanity in order to survive, and our new recruits who are absolutely terrified about what is going on around them.

As with other war movies that follow this template, there is the obligatory scene of the men having a brief leave. The four remaining main characters go swimming in a river and come across three young French women. Interestingly, the conversations between them are in French, with no subtitles.

My best guess is that this was the result of a combination of things. Subtitles were still a new invention and maybe not an entirely reliable technology at the time, and the studio knew its audiences were still used to seeing silent films, so a few minutes of dialog they couldn’t necessarily follow wouldn’t be as odd to them as it seems to us today.

Overall, I can say that even though I won’t be adding All Quiet on the Western Front to any of my “favorite movies” lists, I can see and appreciate why, 90 years later, it’s still considered one of early Hollywood’s crowning achievements.