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All Quiet on the Western Front
is considered a realistic and harrowing account of warfare in
World War I, and was named number 54 on the AFI's 100 Years... 100
Movies. However, it fell out of the top 100 in the AFI's 2007
revision. In June 2008, AFI revealed its 10 Top 10-the best ten
films in ten "classic" American film genres-after
polling over 1,500 people from the creative community. All Quiet
on the Western Front was acknowledged as the seventh best film in
the epic genre. In 1990, this film was selected and preserved by
the United States Library of Congress' National Film Registry as
being deemed "culturally, historically, or aesthetically
significant." The film won the Academy Award for Best Picture
and Best Director. And it was the first film in history that was
an all-talking non-musical to receive a Best Picture Oscar. It's
often called the greatest war film ever made. Suspect critics say
that it is unduly influenced by its historical significance as the
first important war film to be made after the talkies were
introduced. By today's standards the movie does not hold up nearly
as well as the book. It's somewhat melodramatic, slow in places,
and overacted. This is not to put down director Lewis Milestone,
Lew Ayres as the disillusioned German soldier Paul Baumer or any
of the others associated with the film. This is just how early
Hollywood films were made. Three years after the first talkies
appeared, All Quiet on the western front still seems like a silent
picture in many ways. A very good one though. The visual
storytelling is brilliant-from one of the initial scenes of troops
marching past school windows flanking the jingoistic old teacher
haranguing his young students to the last scene of the soldier's
dead hand reaching for a butterfly. Throughout, the use of shadow,
the juxtaposition of odd images, and dramatic camera angles
provides fodders for film-study classes.
Isabella
Bogdain
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