The German "All Quiet on the Western Front," mentioned a few weeks ago in the discussion of "M." There was a poster on the wall for a movie, and I googled to see if it existed. It did, and it's on YouTube. It's an amazing movie.

I didn't watch it with subtitles, for reasons irrelevat to this. It doesn't really matter. You know what a German movie about the Western Front in 1918 will be about. War and defeat, sympathy and a stark finger pointed at the present. We start in a village bar, where the characters are introduced, and we get those wonderful faces of German silent movies:

Then it's off to the front - the trenches, at night, explosions, terror, death. The constant shelling, and whistling of the bombs, rattling of the guns. It has the feel of a documentary, and must have struck audiences at the time they way, say, "Platoon" did in the 80s. This wasn't ancient history.

Every frame is bleak poetry:

Of course, it's about the camaraderie; that's always what it comes down to in the start, before the inevitable horrors of the end.

There's a respite in the middle when a soldier goes home to a populace unaware of life at the front, and a wife who's caught with another man, and then it's back to the front to die. The battlefield is mostly stark, but there are scenes of destructive detail:

The final battle could be spiced up with quick editing, but Pabst just plants the camera and lets the French assault unspool for an eternity. At the end of the wave of soldiers, the tanks appear, monsters from the modern world:

It's brutal, unceasing, unrelenting, nightmarish -

And it drives men mad.

It ends in a hellish field hospital in a church, filled with the screams of the wounded and the mad ravings of the lieutenant, who completely lost it during the assault and cannot stop shouting "Hurrah" and saluting the dead and wounded. Wiki:

In a fever Karl sees his wife again and dies with the words "We are all to blame!". He is covered up, but his hand is hanging out the side. A wounded Frenchman lying beside him takes the hand in his and says "comrades, not enemies".

And the film darkens to turn Karl into a skull . . .

And then:

Hitler would answer that: nein. It would only take a few years before this realism would be incompatible with the glorification of combat. The Nazis banned the film. It showed the true face of war, and they shouldn't be allowed to do that.