Saturday, February 21, 2009
All Quiet on the Western Front
Although old and clearly dated, I found All Quiet on the Western Front very enjoyable. I am an enormous fan of war films, and this only helped add to my interest. AS a fan of war films, one of my favorites is the classic Full Metal Jacket. This movie demonstrates the cruelty in the war. The training sequences in the beginning are forever burned into my memory. To my surprise the training sequences in All Quiet on the Western Front bared a striking resemblance to those in Full Metal Jacket (minus the vulgar language, murder and suicide). It is quite possible Kubrick used this film as inspiration for Full metal. As for All quiet on the Western Front it to was a very good film. Although it was overacted and ridiculously unrealistic dialogue wise and gore wise it proved to be a very accurate portrait of WW 1.
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The standard boot-camp training film is D.I. with Jack Webb of TV's Dragnet playing the hard-as-nails drill instructor. At one point a recruit kills a sand flea. Webb bawls him out, telling him that if they were in combat he might have given away the position of the whole platoon. The kid apologizes. Webb answers with one of my favorite lines. "A dead Marine is never sorry, Owen. A dead Marine is just dead."
ReplyDeleteTry these war films: Paths of Glory. The War Hunt. Stalingrad. Guadalcanal Diary. Sands of Iwo Jima.