All Quiet on the Western Front (1930)

d. Lewis Milestone / USA / 138 mins.


Lewis Milestone's 1930 classic All Quiet on the Western Front is typically considered to be the first great work of Hollywood's sound era. No doubt it is an influential and important film, complete with an amazing production value and ultra-realistic depictions of World War I (both on and off the battlefield). It is not, however, a war film I would cite as rousing or tremendously entertaining; one pass through All Quiet on the Western Front and you'll probably have your fill.

Lew Ayres stars as the idealistic Paul, who enlists in the war effort after a nationalistic teacher pushes his class be loyal countrymen and do their part. Paul survives the front and returns disillusioned to his politically deaf hometown, finding no one really cares how his first-person point of view has changed his views on warfare. It's not a great performance, but it is a mission fully accomplished by Ayres. (The film had such a profound effect on him he became a conscientious objector during World War II and served as a medic.) Strangely, although the film takes an unflinching allegiance to the ordinary men who become pawns in their government's war games, none of the principal actors really shine and instead seem to become pawns in Milestone's message. (His adaptation of Erich Maria Remarque's novel plays no games with the anti-war and pacifist message; it is straightforward and always consistent, if often ingratiatingly preachy.)

The battle scenes are nothing short of technically spectacular, however. Despite the fact that it was released in 1930 (and without the Production Code in full enforcement), it's a fairly brutal movie. Both the cinematography and the editing are as finely attuned as one can hope; the great Arthur Edeson's cinematography was nominated for an Oscar, but he lost to the photographers of the film With Byrd at the South Pole, which absolutely no one remembers today. (All Quiet on the Western Front did win Best Picture and Director, though.)

The film's success seems surprising in hindsight; it debuted between the World Wars and right as the United States had fallen into the Great Depression. Although it stars a cast of all-American actors, the point-of-view is told from the German side of World War I (re: the enemy side), and even if you're looking at its cast as American stand-ins, it's not particularly a I-love-my-nation kind of film. All Quiet on the Western Front had an unquestionable influence on greater war films – Stanley Kubrick's Paths of Glory and Steven Spielberg's Saving Private Ryan come to mind immediately – but it's valuable more for its message and advanced filmmaking rather than its entertainment factor.

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Wings (1927)

d. William A. Wellman / USA / 141 mins.


Wings won the first Oscar for Best Picture, setting the precedent for giving that award to less deserving films. Okay, okay, to be fair, the award it won was technically called "Best Picture, Production" and the more deserving candidate – F.W. Murnau's Sunrise – won "Best Picture, Unique and Artistic Production," an award that no longer exists unless you count Best Original Screenplay, so often given to those popular and quasi-indie little-unique-films-that-could. (Because giving those films any other award would simply soil the Academy's collar.) After 1927 the award would simply be consolidated into Best Picture, so today Wings is remembered at the first winner.

I mention the whole Best Picture element because it's ironic. Most action and adventure films today fail to yield much, if any, of a response on the ballot, and Wings is in essence a forerunner to the summer blockbuster: there's action, romance, drama, deaths, and spectacular effects. In fact, you could make an argument that the best part of the film is its surprisingly skillful cinematography, particularly during the amazing World War I aerial battle sequences. That sort of compliment doesn't bode well for the rest of the film though, including its stiff cast and free-falling script. The plot concerns two men – rich boy Jack (Buddy Rogers) and middle-class boy David (Richard Arlen) – in a bitter rivalry for the affection of the girl-next-door named Mary ("It Girl" Clara Bow). They enlist for the war and are stationed together, grating against each other until they become brothers in arms. Mary ships out to assist the war effort, and the ribbons of their relationships begin to unspool as the war ravages on. (A young Gary Cooper also appears in one scene in what is considered to be a career-launching role, although he'd been appearing in movies for years.)

The director is William A. Wellman, a steady and reliable filmmaker whose later work would include James Cagney's breakthrough in The Public Enemy (1931) and The Ox-Bow Incident (1943), a wonderful western morality play starring Henry Fonda. Wellman's direction is good but sometimes unfocused; there's an odd and distracting gag that appears in the middle of the movie, where alcohol causes partying military personnel to see bubbles. If it had been brief, it might have been too cutesy but at least over quickly; as it appears, it drags on for an reasonable amount of time. (More than a few portions run on for too long; I imagine forty-five minutes to an hour could have been easily trimmed.) Wings is a relatively solid silent drama at a time when the best silent films were the comedies, and not an altogether uncomfortable experience. If you enjoy war films and have the wherewithal to stay seated for two and a half hours, then Wings might just be for you. Otherwise you'd be better off devoting your time to Sunrise.

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The Birth of a Nation (1915)

d. D.W. Griffith / USA / 190 mins.


And so here we have the grandfather of feature-length cinema: epic and inventive and influential and stained with a vile stripe of unatonable racism.

No new ground can be broken in discussing D.W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation. It's the elephant in the critic's room that everyone has talked about yet still tries to ignore. Watching Griffith's Civil War epic is to be put into a corner against your will, simultaneously asked to defend its technical achievements and denounce its repulsive, revisionist racial elements. The film is a battle of immutable forces – it's both embarrassing and extraordinary, both virtuosic and villainous.

Racism and racial ignorance in old movies tends to be forgiven, ignored, or brushed aside with a dash of, "That's the way they were, so what's the big deal?" Yet it does matter. Well-made stupidity is not an oxymoron and is not mutually exclusive. Racism aside (and make no mistake, evaluating a film on its ignorance is still valid form of criticism), we must stake out a middle ground and ask, taken for what it is, is it still a great movie?

The ultimate answer is: not by a long shot. The adjective "well-made" can only be applied to the strictest technical elements. The camerawork during the battle sequences is powerful and remarkably fluid, and the cuts are sharp throughout. Griffith also plays with light in ways that were wholly unique; the captured landscape is as haunting as the ghostly photography that came out of the war. But when the film is broken down into pacing, plot, characters, etc. – the hallmarks of any good movie – "well-made" doesn't even begin to describe The Birth of a Nation. At 190 bloated minutes, it's entirely too long (the second half containing the most egregious episodes of racism, too). Most of its characters are abstract and non-emotive (the result of a sagging story). Like Edwin S. Porter's The Great Train Robbery, it is a film that has eclipsed its original intent (to entertain) and has become a stolid artifact of film history. Rendering a verdict might involve more a struggle if the film was consistently entertaining, tightly edited, and robust in its story.

The film still comes up in conversation, though, and I think the primary reason why the film continues to fascinate is its own brutal internal dichotomy. In order to be as technically innovative as he was, Griffith needed to be as detail-oriented as possible. There are shots that attempt to recreate scenes with unrivaled precision and exactness (Abraham Lincoln's assassination, for example). But when it comes to the film's approach to race, it is the categorical opposite of detail-oriented; its picture is painted with sweeping, inflammatory, and prejudiced strokes: white actors appear in blackface as barbarian caricatures; it endorses anti-miscegenation and pro-slavery positions; it glorifies the Ku Klux Klan and is audacious enough to imply that the white supremacy hate group brought law and order to the post-war South. (The critic Andrew Sarris wrote, "[The film] was regarded as outrageously racist even at a time when racism was hardly a household word.") Viewing the film you see these forces of innovation and bigotry dueling right in the celluloid as Robert Mitchum's "Love" and "Hate" knuckle tattoos battle for dominance in The Night of the Hunter. As with Leni Riefenstahl, we wonder how Griffith can be a filmmaker of such genius in one realm and be so ignorant in another.

The Birth of a Nation is, in the end, mathematically not much of a masterpiece. Its innovation is outweighed by its problems. It's an important film to be sure (for both cinema and the twentieth century), but it's not one of the all-time best – it's not even the best film Griffith made. And yet, you really do owe to yourself to watch it once. What you come away with after that single viewing is enough material to argue about the tumultuous relationship between art's content and form for the rest of your life.

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