Where to watch All Quiet on the Western Front (1930)
All Quiet on the Western Front is available to stream in GB on Prime Video. It can also be rented or bought from Amazon and AppleTV.
Idealistic young German students enlist during the Great War, expecting honor and adventure, but training and frontline combat quickly expose war’s brutality. As their group struggles through hunger, fear, loss, and exhaustion, their patriotic beliefs give way to disillusionment and a desperate focus on survival.
Cast: Lew Ayres, Louis Wolheim, John Wray, Arnold Lucy, Ben Alexander, Scott Kolk, Owen Davis Jr., Walter Rogers, William Bakewell, Russell Gleason, Richard Alexander, Harold Goodwin
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Trivia & production notes
- Director Lewis Milestone shot the film with two cameras running simultaneously, with one negative edited for sound and the other as an 'International Sound Version' for non-English speaking markets.
- Around 2,000 extras were used in the film, including many German Army veterans living in Los Angeles at the time, and future director Fred Zinnemann appeared as a bit player.
- The famous scene of Paul's death reaching for a butterfly was invented for the film and inspired by an earlier scene showing Paul's butterfly collection, since the novel never specifies how Paul dies.
- Director Lewis Milestone had to use his own hand for the final butterfly scene because the actors were unavailable during editing.
- Comedic actress ZaSu Pitts was originally cast as Paul's mother and completed her scenes, but preview audiences laughed at her appearance in a dramatic role, prompting Milestone to reshoot her part with Beryl Mercer before release.
- The original preview cut ran 152 minutes and premiered in Los Angeles on April 21, 1930, followed by New York on April 25, with the general US release not coming until August 24.
- Nazi brownshirts organized disruptions of the film's Berlin premiere on December 4, 1930, releasing stink bombs, sneezing powder, and white mice while shouting 'Judenfilm,' eventually forcing projectors to shut down.
- German authorities banned the film on December 11, 1930, following the Nazi campaign against it, and it remained prohibited until April 25, 1952, when it was finally re-released in West Berlin.
- Steven Spielberg cited Lewis Milestone's direction in this film as partial inspiration for the battle sequences in Saving Private Ryan.
- A 2006 Library of Congress restoration of the film incorporated all known surviving footage and runs 133 minutes, fulfilling director Milestone's dying request in 1980 for a full restoration.
Adapted from the Wikipedia article All Quiet on the Western Front (1930 film), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Rewritten for StreamShack; errors are ours — tell us about them.
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