The military drama directed by Lewis Milestone, which came out in 1930, is based on the famous novel by Erich Maria Remarque. An adapted script by Lewis Milestone and George Abbott was made for this film. Censorship at the German Ministry of Foreign Affairs issued the film All Quiet on the Western Front with a rental certificate. Then the first secretary of the city party committee, Joseph Goebbels, came to the cinema where the picture was shown with two hundred stormtroopers who threw smoke bombs into the hall and thwarted the show. Nationalists called on President Paul von Hindenburg to intervene and stop showing the film, offending the feelings of war veterans. At the direction of the Federal Minister for Interior, the censors revised their decision and banned All Quiet on the Western Front – for “low aesthetic quality.”
It was a very bold movie of this time, which laid the foundations of the anti-war movie genre and a whole direction in the history of world cinema and philosophy. The problem of the “lost generation” – yesterday’s schoolchildren, faced with the horrors of World War I, for many years became dominant in the work of filmmakers, writers, and philosophers. The film is no different from the book, and the director tried to reproduce everything as close as possible in the novel; the main hero dies from the sniper’s bullet. The Milestone film influenced the global process, setting a new standard in the genre of anti-war tapes, which were not very popular at that time. I liked the movie because the director accurately conveyed the spirit of the Remarque generation. Unfortunately, I do not know any other war novels or movies that I can compare.