All Quiet on the Western Front

The book and film were both banned during Nazi rule. That's the price she has to pay. The Road Back, another book written by Erich Maria Remarque, is about a different group of soldiers trying to cope with postwar Germany: dealing with the defeated German society after the war, trying to go to school, and trying to live a normal life. When I invite a woman to dinner I expect her to look at my face. The film has also been selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry. Dumont:I've been sitting right here since 7:00.
Groucho:Yes, with your back to me. It also received two further nominations:. The film contains one of the most famous comedy scenes of all filmdom (designed in part by Buster Keaton), when loads of people crowd into Groucho's tiny stateroom (see image).

The movie starred Louis Wolheim, Lew Ayres, John Wray, Arnold Lucy and Ben Alexander. The British rock group Queen later paid homage to this film by naming one of their most famous albums after it (see A Night at the Opera (album)). Gardner Sullivan, Walter Anthony (uncredited) and Lewis Milestone (uncredited), won the Academy Award for Best Picture in 1930 for its producer Carl Laemmle Jr., and an Academy Award for Directing for Lewis Milestone. It has been deemed "culturally significant" by the Library of Congress and selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry. The film version, adapted by Maxwell Anderson, George Abbott, Del Andrews, C. Sam Wood was the director. Also, when he sees the French countryside, he sees it is not different from the German countryside, why should he destroy this either? When wanting to change the tone of the book to a nice tone, the author uses nature as a tool to achieve that. Kaufman, Morrie Ryskind, Al Boasberg (uncredited) and Buster Keaton (uncredited) from a story by James Kevin McGuinness.

He wonders why this nature is being destroyed on the front, he wants to preserve this beauty not destroy it. The movie was adapted by George S. When traveling by train, Paul describes the beautiful mountains and plains of Germany. Classic scenes included the Stateroom scene (where more and more people are piled into a tiny ship's cabin until they literally spill out at the end), and also the contract discussion scene between Groucho and Chico, which is a masterpiece of non-communication:. Nature is used to represent escape, it is beautiful and pure. These were honed on stage, as the brothers returned to touring new material on road before filming began (another Thalberg change). The landscape on the front is barren, but when Paul goes on leave, he sees nature. Some Marx Brothers fans were appalled at these format changes, yet the film undoubtedly contained some of the brothers' funniest routines ever.

If the war has not killed the soldiers then the lethal combination of physical and mental anguish have figuratively killed the soldiers. The opera setting allowed MGM to add big production song numbers, which were one of this studio's specialities. They are forced to deal with the emotional shock of watching the violent deaths of their friends. It stars Groucho Marx, Chico Marx, Harpo Marx, Kitty Carlisle, Allan Jones, Walter Woolf King, Siegfried Rumann and Margaret Dumont. No food or water for days on end. In A Night At the Opera, the brothers help two young lovers to succeed in love as well as in the opera world. And their living conditions are atrocious; they live in mud/earth dug-outs infested with rats, along side rotting corpses. So in the MGM films, the brothers were recast as more helpful characters. From now on they heaped their comic attacks upon only the obvious villains of the piece.

They are in constant fear. Thalberg, however, felt that this made the brothers come across as unsympathetic, particularly to female film goers. The never-ending attacks and counter-attacks destroy their nerves. (Usually, they did deserve it). Physically, they are in constant danger from being shot and bombed. In their Paramount films, the brothers' characters were much more anarchistic: they attacked (comically) anybody that was unfortunate to cross their paths, whether they deserved it or not. One of the other main themes in this book is how war completely ruins soldiers. It was the first film the brothers made for MGM after their departure from Paramount, and, at the suggestion of producer Irving Thalberg the film marked a change of direction in the brothers' career.

War is ultimately fought by human soldiers, and this book is set where they fight. A Night At the Opera is a 1935 comedy film starring the Marx Brothers. The day Paul eventually dies was otherwise militarily uneventful, the army report just noting "All quiet on the western front". Nothing short of being there could show the sheer numbers of dead and wounded every day in the war. Vivid descriptions are presented throughout the book.

Finally, the French troops come and the German lines disintegrate. The trenches and fortifications are shelled continuously, poison gas blankets the battlefield, snipers shoot at anyone with their head above ground. Paul describes the horrors of war throughout the book. Another main theme seen throught All Quiet on the Western Front is the way the soldiers metaphorically change from humans into animals.

The novel shows these weapons being used for butchery on a grand scale; for instance, battles lasting for four months. World War I saw the development of many new horrible innovations such as poison gas, machine guns, and tanks; all of which made killing easier and even more impersonal. This book shows a vivid, realistic, and horrible portrait of war. The archetypical war novel romanticizes war and exhults the heroes of the story.

A main theme in All Quiet on the Western Front is the brutality of war. Nobody has any answers. Some of the soldiers ponder how the war was started, what is it for, and who it benefits. After all, none of the characters have ever seen a Frenchman before the war, much less have reason to kill them.

The first is that war is total nonsense. There are many central themes in the book. Battle seems to be waged only to gain pitifully small pieces of land. Rather, one after another they offer a chance for him to be killed.

Battles have no names. He is also indifferent to the significance of any of the battles. While all the soldiers at the front wish for nothing more than peace, knowing that they are losing the war, people back home talk about marching on Paris. He finds it difficult to understand people at home anymore.

Occasionally Paul receives leave from the army, and returns home temporarily. We are fleeing from ourselves, from our life. We were eighteen and had begun to love life and the world; and we had to shoot it to pieces.". We don't want to take the world by storm. "We are not youth any longer.

Remarque often refers to the living soldiers as old and dead, emotionally depleted and hardened. The monotony, the constant artillery fire, the struggle to find food, and the overarching role of chance in the lives and deaths of the soldiers, all are described in detail. The book focuses not on heroic stories of bravery as do so many other war stories, but rather gives a realistic view of the hell the soldiers found themselves in. They are the only people that can gain anything from this war, not Paul and his friends.

All his friends say that they are fighting the war for a few persons whom they have never met and most likely never will. Paul and his friends have to endure day after day of non-stop bombardment. Eventually it all becomes clear to him: war is entirely pointless. Paul and Kat swiftly became almost brothers, bonded by the hardships of the war. Kat soon becomes Paul's mentor and teaches him about the realities of war.

He arrives on the western front with his friends (Tjaden, Müller, and a number of other characters) and meets Stanislaus Katczinsky. The story follows the experiences of Paul Bäumer: a soldier who joined the German army shortly after the start of the war. Although it is unrelated to the novel, "all quiet on the Western Front" has become a popular slang for the lack of action, a reference to the Phony War in World War II's Western Front (WWII). In 1930 the book was turned into an Oscar-winning movie of the same name, directed by Lewis Milestone.

It sold a million copies within a year in Germany and a further million abroad. The book was first published in German as Im Westen nichts Neues in January 1929. All Quiet on the Western Front is a novel by Erich Maria Remarque, a German veteran of World War I, about the horrors of that war and also the deep detachment from German civilian life felt by many men returning from the front. Best Writing, Achievement - George Abbott, Maxwell Anderson and Del Andrews.

Best Cinematography - Arthur Edeson.