Urgent News! TCM Features Lewis Milestone’s 1930 Version of All Quiet on the Western Front, the 35th Greatest Picture Ever Made, this Sunday (Tonight!) Night-Early Monday Morning at 1:30 a.m. ET.

By David in TN
sunday, march 12, 2023 at 9:30:00 a.m. edt

TCM features Lewis Milestone’s 1930 version of All Quiet on the Western Front this Sunday Night-Early Monday Morning at 1:30 a.m. ET. TCM is showing Academy Award war films all day and night.

N.S.: I rank this version as the 35th greatest picture ever made.

Two or three years ago, I saw it again, after a 50-year break, with my chief of research, and it had lost nothing.

This is not a mere bag of clichés saying “war is hell.” You have camaraderie and romance. (Then again, the notion of war pictures being mere bags of clichés saying “war is hell,” is itself a cliché.)

There’s the mailman who becomes a sadistic drillmaster. There’s the system of tunnels below the trenches. A young man and his equally young, callow fellows cross the lines into the country of der Erzfeind (the mortal enemy), to enjoy a first night of love with three pretty, French, heretofore virgins in a farmhouse. And later, that same young man carries a much older, heavier comrade a long way to safety, only to discover that he has been carrying a corpse.

Milestone, like all other interwar directors of WWI pictures, was deeply influenced by King Vidor’s silent, The Big Parade (1924, #11), which starred John Gilbert and Renée Adorée.

During my days as a West German university student, at the Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen, I read that after WWI, Eric Maria Remarque’s novel, Im Westen, Nichts Neues (All Quiet on the Western Front), was by far the most popular novel to come out of the war, but that its popularity was buried under a torrent of pro-war novels.

Twenty-five to 30 years ago, I saw the 1979 TV movie version, starring Richard Thomas. This was such a lavish, exquisite production that, if you hadn’t checked the listings, you’d swear it was a theatrical picture.

Richard Thomas was a really big deal in those days on TV, having just come off a seven-year run starring on The Waltons, which was the 1970s’ dominant TV drama.

And while Thomas was excellent, as Paul, the key casting decision may have been having Ernest Borgnine play the older soldier who befriends Paul. Ernie Borgnine was a magical creature (or, depending on the role, a monster). If he had anything to work with, he could hold his own with anyone. From Here to Eternity (1953). Bad Day at Black Rock (1955). Marty (1955). The Wild Bunch (1969).