Milestone, Lewis, Alexander, Ben, Ayres, Lew, Lucy, Arnold, Wolheim, Louis, Wray, John	...	(Director)
Erich Maria Remarque, Maxwell Anderson	...	(Writer)
Louis Wolheim	...	Kat
Lew Ayres	...	Paul
John Wray	...	Himmelstoss
Arnold Lucy	...	Kantorek
Ben Alexander	...	Kemmerich
Scott Kolk	...	Leer
Owen Davis Jr.	...	Peter
Walter Rogers	...	Behn
William Bakewell	...	Albert
Russell Gleason	...	Mueller
Richard Alexander	...	Westhus
Harold Goodwin	...	Detering
Slim Summerville	...	Tjaden
G. Pat Collins	...	Bertinck
Beryl Mercer	...	Paul's Mother

Comments: DEN 172

Summary: This 1930 film, No. 54 on the AFI's Top 100 list, still holds up as a surprisingly forceful and honest antiwar drama. Indeed, the modern sensibility is almost as startling as the sometime stagey acting of Lew Ayres, which can be excused by the fact that, three years after the introduction of sound, actors were still applying stage techniques to talking pictures. Ayres plays a German college student during World War I, who is brainwashed into enlisting in the Army (along with the rest of his class) by a zealously inspirational college professor. Once in uniform and on the front lines, however, he quickly discovers that the glory of the Fatherland is of little concern to a soldier dodging bullets and explosions, whose comrades are dying in his arms. As powerful in its way as Platoon almost 60 years later, it remains a classic tale of young soldiers' confrontations with the possibility of imminent and arbitrary death. Director Lewis Milestone shows a surprising range of techniques in this film from the formative years of moviemaking with sound. --Marshall Fine