Movie Response Prompts

 
These prompts are meant to help focus your thoughts for your responses and get you thinking about what you are watching. You can respond to any of them, or, if you have another idea you would rather explore, you are free to write about that instead. Note that I suggest you examine the prompts before watching the film.

All Quiet on the Western Front (1930), directed by Lewis Milestone; screenplay by Maxwell Anderson, adapted from the novel by Erich Maria Remarque; starring Lew Ayres, Louis Wolheim, and Slim Summerville

All Quiet on the Western Front is a quite faithful adaptation of the novel of the same name (in English — its German title is Im Westen Nicht Neues, literally In the West No News), written by Erich Maria Remarque, who had been a German soldier in the war. In fact, the director Lew Milestone traveled to Germany to get the rights to film the novel from Remarque himself, then stunned the author by asking him to play the lead role of Paul Bäumer. Remarque refused for the excellent reason that he was not an actor. The film begins with virtually the same lines as the novel: “This story is neither an accusation nor a confession, and least of all an adventure” and so on. (The book’s wording in its English translation is “This book is to be neither” and then is identical.) Do you agree? Is it neither an accusation nor a confession? If you disagree, is it both equally? Or is it one more than the other?

The major change the film makes in the novel is structural. The novel begins with the characters already at war. The first dialogue is the argument with the cook who does not want to begin serving because he has cooked for too many men. The dialogue is often virtually identical — the adaptation simply takes whole passages directly from the book. Scenes from before the war are told in flashback. Why do you think Maxwell Anderson (himself a successful playwright) chose a chronological structure? How does he use the scenes at the beginning and the scenes when Paul Bäumer returns home on leave as a framing device for the narrative of the film?

This film was an immediate box office and critical success. It won the Academy Award for Outstanding Production — what we call the Best Picture Award today — and was the first talking dramatic film to win. (The Broadway Melody, a musical, had won the prior year, and the silent film Wings about Great War pilots had won the first Outstanding Production award the year before that.) The American Film Institute ranked it as the 54th best film ever made. Since then, AFI has also named it the 7th best epic film. Virtually every director who has made a war film since its release has named it as an influence. Meanwhile, the countries in which it was banned at one time include France (until 1963, for being anti-French), Germany (for showing Germans as cowards), Poland (for being pro-German), Italy (who knows why, but they banned it until 1956), Austria (until the 1980s!), and Australia. When the film was first shown in Germany, before Hitler came to power, Nazis stormed theatres, threw stinkbombs, and released rats into the audience. The film was re-made in color in the 1970s with Richard Thomas as Paul and Ernest Borgnine as Katczinsky, and that version is better than you might expect. It is being filmed again now for release supposedly in 2020, although the production has been on-again, off-again since 2010, and this press release does not leave me hopeful: “By creating new storylines ourselves, we believe this modern rendition will encompass greater depth and historical context, but still remain congruent with the spirit of Erich Maria Remarque’s work.” What accounts for this film’s powerful and enduring impact? And don’t just say the subject matter; many films were made about the Great War and none are as acclaimed as this one.

 
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