“All Quiet” Film Impresses Sydney

Sun (Auckland), Volume IV, Issue 1016, 5 July 1930, Page 25

“All Quiet” Film Impresses Sydney

faithful adaptation r OF BOOK Oo you know war for what it really is? Not war as seen from the footpaths whence the patriots waved their flags in farewell to the men w ho were going to fight for them. But war —naked, stripped of all its lying glamour. The war of dreadful, terrifying death for friend and foe alike. If y ou are lucky enough not to know war, you will when you have L e n the picturisation of the German novel, “All Quiet On the Western Front.” says a writer in the “Sydney Guardian." A pre-view was staged for the I press. The hook. despite those ! sections which an over-careful Sydney magistrate thought made it, necessary (or him to ban its sale in New South Wales, was a sermon against war -reater than any which I have heard elsewhere. That sermon is made a hundredfold more unforgettable by the picture. Those who objected to phases of the book will And nothing objectionable in the film. True, the lads swim the river to the girls, but there the episode ends. But all Paul Remarque’s awful skill in drawing a word-picture of bombardment is transferred to the moving film. Last night I went through the hell of s drum-fire barrage; I sat behind a German machine-gun, and saw the Frenchmen pounding on until they filled the sights. ThenMen don't die nicely in war. And “All Quiet on the Western Front’’ is war as it was. If you can see this picture and still want to urge the young men into the next war, you deserve to be the first recruit called up. And, God help you, the last to find release in that death, which, for all its mangled, mutilated terrors, came as a merciful release to so many tormented souls in those grim 1914-1 S days.