CIVIC

Sun (Auckland), Volume IV, Issue 1049, 13 August 1930, Page 17

CIVIC

“ALL QUIET ” FILM Do you know war for what it really Is? Not war as seen from the footpaths when the patriots waved their flags in farewell to the men wVio 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 you are lucky enough not to know war. you will when you have seen the picturisation of the German novel, “All Quiet on the Western Front.’* The film is now being shown at the Civic Theatre. The book, despite those sections which led to its undoing, was a sermon against war greater than any heard elsewhere. That sermon is made a hundredfold more unforgettable by the picture. Those who objected to phases of the book will find 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. Men 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 the find release in that death, which, for all its mangled, mutilated terrors, came as a merciful release to so many tormented so.uls in those grim 1914-18 days. Owing to the length of “All Quiet” there is a very short supporting programme, only a Parjfmount Sound News and a musical selection by Mr. Howard Moody’s orchestra.