Lame TV soap opera which was subsequently deemed good enough to go theatrical. Beats me. Famous for his Oscar-winning low-budget hit Marty (1955), Delbert Mann tries without much apparent conviction to deliver an honest adaptation of Erich Maria Remarque's famous novel, and fails woefully in pretty much every account. The film's main flaw is the thoroughly "unecht" depiction of German society in the dying Kaiserreich, of military drill, and of war in the trenches in general. In substance, everything seems to have been magically softened, as if late 1970s TV spectators were not to be bothered with too much ugly stuff in between commercials. Accordingly, Mann's version is nowhere near the mother of antiwar films, the eponymous 1930 mega-buster directed by Russian-born Lewis Milestone, crafted in close collaboration with Remarque and with the German-born head of Universal Pictures, Carl Laemmle, who secured the rights to the book shortly after it had been published (and hit the 1,000,000 copies mark). The uncut version of this epic milestone delivers a powerful tale of both physical and moral deprecation that digs deep into the black heart of human nature, and for all its early talkies' acting, makes its successor look like a sanitized romance. In Mann's unworthy update, none of the actors comes across as German, the costumes and set feel awkward all the way through, and the war action is anything but realistic. Worse, even by technical standards travelling shots, special effects, editing, and yes, even sound this feel-good version would have had a lot to learn from early filmmakers. Add an endless trickle of tiresome dialogues, a virtual absence of directing and a schlepping plot, and you get a tedious telly drama that lacks true interest. Don't settle on this ersatz if you can lay your hands on the real thing.
Review of All Quiet on the Western Front
