All Quiet on the Western Front

United States, United Kingdom

1979

150 Min

Color

1.33:1

English

Currently 2.7/5 Stars.
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SCR Paul Monash, Erich Maria Remarque

CAST Richard Thomas, Ernest Borgnine, Donald Pleasence, Ian Holm, Patricia Neal, Paul Mark Elliott, David Bradley, George Winter, Dominic Jephcott, Mark Drewry, Colin Mayes, Ewan Stewart, Michael Sheard, Katerina Lirova, Mary Miller, Denys Graham, Mark Roemmich

ED Alan Pattillo, Bill Blunden

Paul Baumer, a healthy optimist, graduates during World War I and like his twenty classmates volunteers for the German imperial army. Their naives romantic illusion starts turning sour during training in Oldenburg under sadistic corporal Himmelstoss, who later proves himself a coward at the front, yet is decorated by Kaiser Wilhelm, unlike many braver boys. Sensitive Franz Kemmerich, the friend whose mother made Paul promise to watch over his mate, is the first to perish in hospital, where amputations and neglect abound, yet when it’s Paul’s turn to be treated for a wound he survives. Many friends perish on the French battle fields or in the trenches: hellholes under shell – and toxic gas-threat, full of mud and corps-picking rats, where veteran Stanislaus ‘Kat’ Katczinsky tries to teach the ever younger recruits practical survival skills, although often too late. Even easy killing of enemies becomes gruesome when the boys meet a deadly wounded French soldier and hungry girls face to face. —IMDb

Director

Delbert Mann

Delbert Martin Mann, Jr. (January 30, 1920 – November 11, 2007) was an American television and film director. He won the Palme d’Or (Golden Palm) at the Cannes Film Festival and the Academy Award for Best Director for the film Marty. It was the first Best Picture winner to be based on a television program, being adapted from a 1953 teleplay of the same name which he had also directed. Mann is also the only director other than Billy Wilder and Roman Polanski to win an Oscar for his direction and a Cannes Palme d’Or for the same film. From 1967 to 1971, he was president of the Directors Guild of America.

Mann was born in Lawrence, Douglas County, Kansas, the son of Ora (née Patton), a civic worker and teacher, and Delbert Martin Mann, Sr., a college professor. Mann graduated from Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee. After school, he served with the U.S. Army Air Corps in WW II, then got discharged after service in the European theater. He then attended Yale Drama School… read more