Cinema's Golden Oldies

lynnruth@lynnruthmiller.com

Golden Oldies

by

Lynn Ruth Miller

Every Saturday afternoon, when I was a child, my mother gave me a nickel to take the bus downtown with my best friend Gwendolyn Turner. We tucked fifty cents for popcorn and a soda into our purses along with a hankie to mop our tears if the movie was a sad one. This was the highlight our week: an afternoon at the movies.

In those days, the movie cost us each ten cents, the popcorn we munched during the double feature was a nickel and we saved the thirty five cents we had left over for a chocolate soda (30 cents) and the bus ride home. The movies we saw then are the forerunners of those we view today. They were exciting glimpses into worlds very different from the one we experienced in Toledo Ohio in 1945, when television was still a novelty. Those films are still treasured today, considered the classics of the cinema, never to be forgotten.

One such movie was All Quiet on the Western Front. The version Gwendolyn and I saw at Toledo’s Loew’s Theater, was a re-issue of this 1930 masterpiece, the first major anti-war film of the sound era. It was based on the 1929 novel every literate human being should read and re-read every time he is tempted to believe that anyone ever can win a war. That book, written by Erich Maria Remarque is still on my library shelf, its pages yellowed and soft with age. It painted a picture of the suffering and deprivation our enemies suffered that the newspaper headlines ignored. The movie‘s impact was even greater because every sequence portrayed German youngsters not as the villains we heard about in the papers, but innocent, valuable human forced to be part of a nightmare of cannon fire, mutilation and human loss. All Quiet on the Western Front is considered one of the greatest pacifist films ever made. It is a penetrating and shocking exposé of the human cost of war to the human race not just in the death count, but even more in the psychological destruction of the survivors. The film won the Academy Award for Best Picture and Best Director (Lewis Milestone’s first sound feature) and set a pattern for such movies as Platoon (1968) and Saving Private Ryan(1998), because they reflect the soldier’s viewpoint. The prologue is taken directly from Remarque’s novel: “This story is neither an accusation nor a confession, and least of all an adventure, for death is not an adventure to those who stand face to face with it. It will try simply to tell of a generation of men who, even though they may have escaped its shells, were destroyed by the war….”

All Quiet on the Western Front shows us how empty victory is and the cost of defeat with a power unsurpassed by any film made today. Lew Ayers played one of the four central characters of the film and it launched his career.

In the movie, one soldier compares war to a “fever”: “Nobody wants it in particular. And then all at once here it is. We didn’t want it. The English didn’t want it. And here we are fighting.”

Gwendolyn and I were spellbound that Saturday afternoon in 1945 not three years after World War II had ended. We gripped each others hands horrified and sickened by the massacre we saw on the screen. When the movie was over, we walked out into the sunlight and tried to erase the nightmare we had just witnessed with huge chocolate sodas topped with real whipped cream, before we returned to our own battles: the ones all twelve year old girls face as they gear up for the wars of puberty.

Rent this film. It is a must see for all of us, especially now in this era filled with wars we never wanted to fight and battles we cannot win. It is a cinematic masterpiece and a literary classic, a national treasure to remind us the havoc war causes to each of us, whether we win or lose.