“ALL QUIET" FILM

Sun (Auckland), Volume IV, Issue 1043, 6 August 1930, Page 15

“ALL QUIET" FILM

COMING TO THE CIVIC Tho much-discussed war film, the epic of the German trench warfare entitled “All Quiet on the Western Front,” commences a season at the Civic Theatre on Friday evening. According to critics overseas, nothing has been passed over in the niceties; nothing glossed over for the women. Here exhibited is war as *t is, butchery. It is this very thing in a very great talking picture that will draw all Auckland to “All Quiet on the Western Front.” If. as they say, all of this was also in the book, then it is understandable why a story of this worst side of war did become the best seller Acknowledging the unbounded credit that must go to Lewis Milestone for the superb direction of a most difficult subject all the way through, there Is behind all of this Universal picture something else again. It’s quite true that the company has turned out a 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 he 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 best 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 duo to Mr. Milestone’s direction ani let it go at that. But there are standout performances, even in bits. Mr. Wolheim 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 Himmelstoss, the postman who became sergeant and put the 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 the 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 boy home: and the Sisters of Mercy, the nurses and the doctors of the hospitals.