Westfront 1918: Vier von der Infanterie (1930)

(On Cable TV, January 2021) I’ve said it before and will say it again, but even if it’s wholly unfair to criticize a film by comparing it to another one, cinema is an ongoing conversation and when two voices say more or less the same thing as more or less the same time, it’s entirely natural to identify which one does it best. In this case, director G. W. Pabst’s Westfront 1918 had the back luck of coming out at the same time as All Quiet on the Western Front, with both of them taking a skeptical look at World War I as experienced by German soldiers. The point of similarities as such that anyone having seen both would be hard-pressed not to make comparisons. As good and humanistic as Westfront 1918 can be; however, it does pale when measured against its Oscar-winning American counterpart. Whatever is similar between the film will feel familiar, and the other film feels as if it has a few more highlights (the boot sequence, the poignant ending) than the German one. I still think that both are worthwhile and welcome contributions to the war movie corpus on the eve of a thirty-year cycle that would not accommodate many antiwar films. But if I have to re-watch one of those again, it’s not going to be Westfront 1918.