Cinema: Revival: Oct. 2, 1939

• Share

All Quiet on the Western Front (Universal). When Carl Laemmle Jr. produced this picture in 1930, critics hailed it as one of the few great U. S. films. When Nazis burned the book by Erich Maria Remarque from which the picture was made, the film was revived, again stirred U. S. audiences with its simple record of why men go to war, how they kill, how those who survive spend the time until their turn comes.

Fortnight ago Universal Pictures hit on the idea of warming over All Quiet on the Western Front for the peace trade. The picture was still as fresh as a raw amputation. High lights of horror were still two severed hands clutching the barbed wire, Lew Ayres stabbing a poilu in a shell hole, then trying to save him. But its conscientious producers tried to improve the masterpiece. Improvement No. 1: instead of opening with the mute, reproachful faces of dead soldiers, trooping past in an endless file of ghosts until they vanish in the sky, they began it with a historical newsreel, flashing back to the Kaiser reviewing goosestepping troops, the Lusitania sinking, etc. Improvement No. 2: a commentator to interrupt the picture at significant moments, ram home obvious points about peace.

When the revamped picture opened last week in San Francisco, result of such tinkering was almost as complete a disaster for All Quiet on the Western Front as even Nazis could have wished. Hard to spot were any restored cuts. The historical newsreel was a separate show. The strident commentator, harshly sounding off in the worst tradition of Russian soapbox films, demolished each of the picture's high-voltage, moving climaxes as efficiently as if a 12-inch shell had ripped through the screen.