ALL QUIET’ FILM

Evening Star, Issue 20587, 12 September 1930, Page 7

ALL QUIET’ FILM

COMING TO THE EMPIRE The much-discussed war film, tho epic of the German trench warfare, entitled • All Quiet on tho Western Front,’ commences a season at the Empire Theatre on Friday next. According to critics overseas nothing has been passed over in the niceties, nothing glossed over for the women; hero exhibited is war as it is—butchery. It is this very thing in a very great talking picture that will draw all Dunedin to ’ All Quiet on the Western Front.' If, as they say, all of this was also iu the book, then it is understandable why a story of this worst side of war did become the best seller. Acknowledging tho unbounded credit that must go to Lewis Milestone for the superb direction of a most difficult subject all tho...way through, there is behind all of Ibis Universal picture something else again. It's quite true that tho company has turned out • talking picture that may live for ever as a picture of the Four-year war, and did so commercially, but to whom is due the rose for this daring to make such a picture as this with that commercialism in mind? If that person were young Carl Laemmle, then lie has done perhaps something no other producer in the film industry would have cared or dared to chance. And what a war picture, without an English or American soldier in it! And the beat war picture ever filmed. Because it’s the real war, whether made in Hollywood or in what was the western front of the supreme holocaust. In performance one might say it's due to Mr Milestone’s direction and let it go at that. But there are stand-out performances, even in bits. Mr Wol-v lieim leads, closely seconded by Mr Summerville, for those two must make them laugh as well, and they do; then John Wray in his fine character drawing of Ilirnmelstoss, the postman who became sergeant and put tho former pupils over the ropes as soldiers in training, with a laugh out of this when they turned the tables on the trainer. Raymond Griffith is the Frenchman stabbed and who died in flic trench. He didn't have to talk, for Griffith died as no one else has on the; screen; Russell Gleason, who made a short story out of a pair of boots; Lewis Ayres, as a heroic youthful soldier figure; Beryl Mercer, who seemed an uncertain mother as she welcomed her hoy home; and the Sisters of Mercy, the nurses, and the doctors of the hospitals.