"I can't tell you anything you don't know. We live in the trenches out there. We fight. We try not to be killed. Sometimes we are. That's all."

The first (and still best) adaptation of Erich Maria Remarque's partially autobiographical recounting of the torturously bleak experience of serving in the German army trenches of WWI at the age of 18, a novel filled lots of disturbing ground level detail of what he witnesses but also a broader brutally pointed sadness and conviction about how much was lost over so little for an entire generation. It's one of the earliest DNA strands of what would become nearly every harrowing "war is hell" anti-war film, directly addressing the war machine conveyer belt that turns eager, idealistic fresh-faced boys into meat sacks disillusioned by what fighting for the pride and glory of the Fatherland actually looks, sounds and smells like. Which makes it all the more impressive that Lewis Milestone was so quick to see its potential only a few months after its publication as a potential feel-bad Hollywood epic where its unsubtle pacifist messaging could be matched with viscerally powerful filmmaking craft. Turning the meaningful, dutiful combat the boys were excited to partake in after listening to rousing nationalistic propaganda speeches from their professors ("is a little experience such a bad thing for a boy?") into an endless stream of screaming, starving, gassing, amputating, bombing, etc. as soon as they step foot on the front lines; a series of traumatizing mass-casualty massacres where friends are suddenly turned into corpses with little-to-no tangible progress made in of occupying land or accomplishing any sort of goal.

These sequences are impressively constructed, and were shot simultaneously by accomplished German Expressionist cinematographer Karl Freund (Metropolis, The Last Laugh, Dracula) and future Universal horror and noir cinematographer Arthur Edeson (Casablanca, Maltese Falcon, Frankenstein) who both work wonders with shadows, smoke, rain, dirt and architecture, and find a good balance between stark and striking silent era imagery and cutting that makes these events seem so grand and hellish, with the focus on naturalism that makes this first hand ing of such awful detail so upsetting and real. Locating a disorienting contrast between its smaller moments of tensely claustrophobic trench waiting (boys playing cards, killing rats, going hungry/mad, unable to sleep due to bombardments, burying their friends) and brief glimpses of hospitals and home life (which feel so divorced from the ground reality of the fighting itself it's like another world), and the large-scale battlefield setpieces themselves. Which begin as barren and apocalyptic until they are suddenly filled with a ridiculous number of storming extras getting blown up, shredded by gunfire, tripping over barbed wire, all in such quick succession it's horrifying and dizzying.

This being pre-code, every so often you get a gruesome detail like a pair of dismembered hands holding onto some barbed wire or an authentic translation of how painfully elongated and pathetic the scene is in the book of the boy listening to a man he stabbed die slowly and miserably before begging his corpse for forgiveness. These moments are hurled in your face just long enough to leave an impression before they're moved on from and lost in one of the blurry, explosive montages of senseless chaos. To me this stuff so good it overpowers any qualms I might have with the early sound performances (and post dubbing) which can be a bit awkward at times in that way many early talkies still figuring out the production tools were, but the sense overdetermined boyishness you get during the more unsubtle stretches of dialogue running headfirst into these immaculately directed sequences of pure ugly destruction is an effective method for getting Remarque's haunting and tragic point of view across. (I’m glad they kept the books opening text about how “this is to be neither an accusation nor a confession, and least of all an adventure…” intact.) Also, it's honestly kind of insane that they first ever one of these they made and they just got it right away. You've probably scene a hundred films that have in some way or another taken cues from this in the last century, and I can probably count the ones as good on one hand.