Lewis Milestone’s All Quiet on the Western Front, the first major war movie made in the era of sound, won an Academy Award for Best Picture and Best Director. The film is based on Erich Maria Remarque’s poignant novel, published in Germany in 1928. Its influence in Europe and America was considerable, contributing to powerful anti-war sentiment that encouraged pacifism in the United States and western Europe during the 1930s. Accordingly, Nazi Germany banned both the book and the film.

The film, like the novel, opens with a statement that disavows any accusatory purpose. Rather, it promises to tell about “a generation of men who, even though they may have escaped its shells, were destroyed by the war.” As a war veteran wounded five times, Remarque viewed the narrative as a testament to the future.

Set in Germany, the movie begins with scenes of spike-helmeted soldiers marching through the streets while women wave handkerchiefs and throw flowers. As the parade passes, a teacher addresses a class of boys about the patriotic virtues of volunteering for military service. “You are the life of the Fatherland, you boys, you are the iron men of Germany.” Moved by his appeal, the students decide to enlist in the army and march out of the classroom to the tune of military music.

Slowly, but surely, the boys come to know the reality of military discipline and the horrors of war. Among them is the narrator, Paul Baum (played by 21-year old actor Lew Ayres). After enduring military training that demands they forget whatever they have learned at school in order to be remade as soldiers, they head for the war zone, where tough veterans teach them lessons in survival. “I'm going to take one of you volunteers apart,” says one soldier, and “find out what makes you leave school and join the army.”

Even before they see action, the young soldiers experience hardships of hunger. Then, sent on a nighttime mission to string barbed wire in front of the trenches, they are terrified by the blasts of modern warfare, which are made palpable by shrieking shells, rifle shots, and screams on the sound track. One recruit is blinded and killed. The first to die was the only student who earlier had hesitated to enlist.

Back in an underground bunker, the soldiers suffer bombardments that shatter their nerves. Starving rats invade their supplies. One soldier suffers nightmares; another cracks up. A third flees the claustrophobic space and is wounded by an enemy shell.

After the artillery stops, the men take positions in the trenches, and the horrors continue. As French troops charge the German lines, machine gun fire cuts them to shreds. In a shocking scene, one man’s hands are left clinging bodiless to the barbed wire. Explosions of grenades and shells blow apart both soldiers and emplacements.

When French soldiers penetrate the trenches, bloody hand-to-hand fighting ensues. The Germans retreat. But then a counterattack drives the French back to their lines. Now Germans are slaughtered by machine gun fire. In the end, both sides are back where they started.

After the battle, the survivors rest behind the lines and discuss the causes of their misery. They assume that the French have started the war. But one soldier wonders how wars start. Another answers, “One country offends another.” The first soldier asks, "How could one country offend another? You mean there's a mountain over in Germany that gets mad at a field over in France?"

The discussion continues as the Germans claim they don’t even know any English or French who could have offended them. Nor could they have offended the others, since they had never seen them before. “Maybe the Kaiser wanted a war,” one speculates. But they decide that he already has everything he needs. “Maybe the Kaiser needs a war,” the soldier replies. Generals need wars, says a soldier, and manufacturers who get rich. War, they agree, is a kind of fever. Finally, one proposes that the next time there’s a war coming, they should put all the kings and generals in a field, sell tickets to observers, and let them fight it out with clubs.

After the interlude, Paul visits a wounded comrade, Franz Kemmerick, who is 19 and dying from a wound in a military hospital. Paul prays for his friend, but doctors cannot help him. Kemmerick’s boots pass from one soldier to another, as each dies. The group gets smaller in each scene. When the war is fought in a cemetery, Paul takes shelter with skeletons and then is tossed into a crater with a French soldier who he kills. Lying with the corpse, he suffers guilt for the enemy, who is humanized by a photograph of his wife and child.

The war continues. After an overnight rendezvous with three French farm girls, Paul is wounded and sent to a hospital filled with other suffering men. Paul recovers and is granted a leave home.

The homecoming is more bitter than sweet. The patriotic chatter of armchair generals who know nothing of real war offends Paul. He visits his old teacher, but doesn’t want to address the eager students. Pressed by the teacher to speak, he denies that it is good to die for your country. “When it comes to dying for your country, it's better not to die at all. There are millions out there dying for their country, and what good is it?” The students call him a coward.

Frustrated and disoriented by the home front, Paul returns to the war. German armies are suffering more than ever, lacking adequate food and facing a better-armed enemy. All of Paul’s comrades are gone when he reaches out from his trench to capture a butterfly. A sniper takes aim and kills him. The film ends with a long shot of a cemetery and lines of troops heading for death.

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