All Quiet on the Western Front

Exceptional DVD treatment of a classic
All Quiet on the Western Front has finally gotten the DVD that it deserves. After languishing for years in a stopgap DVD release that was difficult to hear and had terrible picture quality, this classic anti-war film has been restored by the Library of Congress and digitally remastered. The results are fantastic.

Note: This review refers to the new Universal Cinema Classics release (black case with close-up of Lew Ayres), not some of the older releases (bluish monochrome case with a German helmet) which Amazon has seen fit to post this review on.

Picture: Huge improvement. The previous release was dull, low-resolution, sometimes blurry, and reproduced lots and lots of distracting scratches and dirt from old reels. Now the picture is crisp, very sharp, and as clean as it has ever been.

Sound: Another huge improvement. The 1930-vintage sound effects are still rather clunky and the dialogue is hard to understand once or twice, but overall the restoration...

One of the first war movies is still one of the best
This reviewer give this move 5 stars. It is actually 10 out of 10.

Some people will say the movie's black and white color is distracting. This the Great War we are watching. Only the paintings were color. Color photography was not invented yet. So it actually enhances the feel of the movie.

This movie is a great. It completely captures what trench warfare was like. It was a muddy, miserable life with rats and little food. Somebody was always shooting at you. That is trench warfare.

The basic plot is about a school student, Paul, who is convinced by his school teacher to join and fight with the army in 1915. The class enlists in mass, goes through training together, and then march off to fight at the Western front.

The movie is like chapters in a book. Most Americans don't understand what old Germany was like. Old Germany was a land of Christian values. The Kaiser (translation: the emperor) was seen as a direct official working...

The Sound of Silence
Winner of the 1930 Oscars for Best Picture and Director, "All Quiet on the Western Front" remains a stunning and timely film. Based on Erich Maria Remarque's classic anti-war novel, the movie follows a group of patriotic German schoolboys as they are urged to enlist in World War I, and shows how their initially idealistic spirits are forever changed by the brutal reality of death and dismemberment, suffering and sorrow. Beautifully acted by its entire cast (with special kudos going to Lew Ayres, Louis Wolheim, and Slim Summerville), the film also features some incredible special visual effects (those two detached hands clinging to the barbed wire fence never fail to shock) and some meticulously staged battle scenes that manage to put the viewer into the heart of the action. Arthur Edeson's cinematography is often truly astonishing in its artistry; his visual choices are impeccable. Worth a special note is the film's soundtrack; how incredible the terrible sounds of exploding...

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