CIVIC

Sun (Auckland), Volume IV, Issue 1048, 12 August 1930, Page 15

CIVIC

“ALL QUIET ON THE WESTERN FRONT" The film of Erich Maria Remarque’s arresting novel at the Civic Th ratre is an important epic to add to the collection of war films which in their spectacles of death and destruction are permanent records, shouting their cry against the brutality and futility of war. “All Quiet on the Western Front is a directorial achievement. The players, expressive as they are of the. irreconciliable waste of young bodies and the despoiling of youthful spirits, are subjugated to the mob value of the production. Lewis Milestone has put into these reels an impressive panorama of the devastation on the German side of the western front. He has, as did the book, concentrated his characterisations and closeups to emphasise the fierce wrong done to the youngest of the fighters, but even in his sequences where death and terror signalled out individuals there was the avalanche upon hundreds of others. This is no war of proud patriots following the beat of inspiring drums while thousands cheered from the side lines. It is conflict in cesspools of blood and death flesh, a carnage of dreadful proportions which even at its most direful moment shrieks the uselessness of it all. There isn’t a moment in the whole picture when the war, either in its motive or in its execution is given a single justification. And Milestone has done a wonderful job with the thousands of men he let loose on a movie battle ground. In the midst of the most awful advances he has focussed his cameras upon enemy infantry that seemed to move through air above the crouching trench occupants and caught ghastly figures on barbed wires, in pits and under a hundred feet. Owing to the length of “All Quiet there is a very short supporting programme, only a Paramount Sound Hews and a musical selection by Mr. Howard Moody’s orchestra.