G. W. Pabst's first sound film, titled Westfront 1918 (1930) is based on a German anti-war novel Four From the Infantry. Made under bizarre circumstances just 12 years after the Great War, the picture is probably the most truthful account of that conflict ever committed to film. Pabst doesn't fall into the traps that undercut most anti-war films -- he doesn't make the carnage spectacularly photogenic (Apocalypse Now) nor does the film devolve into some kind derring-do in which individual characters get to display their heroism and courage (Saving Private Ryan); further, 1930 norms as to representation prevent the film from becoming unbearably gory (Hacksaw Ridge) -- a movie can't make any points with you if you have eyes firmly closed for half of the scenes. Rather, Pabst sets out to prove that the entire martial endeavor is pointless and futile and that it is not only destructive, but totally destructive. Needless to say, the "four from the infantry" are doomed and the picture makes this pretty clear from beginning to end.
Journalists sometimes describe combat soldiers returning from the front as showing a "thousand yard stare", that is, a hollow-eyed, unfocused gaze that signifies that the infantryman has seen too much to bear. Pabst begins his film with the four infantrymen making supper and flirting with a pretty French peasant girl -- the sexual byplay is always uncomfortably close to rape. The men are behind the trenches on the front lines and seem cheerful, but several inserted close-ups show the distinctive "thousand yard stare" -- left to themselves, these soldiers already seem on the verge of mental breakdown and the movie hasn't even begun yet. In particular, the Lieutenant has a haggard, cadaverous appearance that doesn't bode well -- in his first close-shot, he looks like a mad man. There's a bombardment and the four men (the Lieutenant, the Student, the Bavarian, and Karl) return to the front. The camera glides along them as they traverse hundreds of feet of trench, scuttling this way and that like rats, the lens watching them from a high-angle. The earth is ripped open and, in some ways, the film could be said to be about different textures of mud and dirt and clay, all closely observed by the tracking documentary-like camera. The trench is shelled by friendly fire and the Bavarian and Karl find themselves trapped in a black pit, shoring up the collapsing roof with their carbines and helmets -- they can't breathe and collapse, buried alive, but the Student and the Lieutenant root them out of their muddy grave. The Student, who is in love with the French girl, volunteers to run back to the headquarters to stop the friendly fire bombardment of their trenches. (A German shepherd dog has been previously dispatched and killed by a shell.) The Student makes it through the cannonade to HQ and the shelling stops. He enjoys a romantic interlude with the French girl, interrupted, however, by an MP announcing that all front-line deserters are going to be shot. Rejoining his comrades, the Student goes back to the Front where there is more desultory fighting.
Normally, in films like this the Home Front scenes are just an interruption in the action and filmed in perfunctory fashion. The strength of Westfront 1918 is that it applies itself equally to the Home Front and, in fact, uses some of the same film techniques in those sequences. Karl makes it to his home in Berlin. A long line of women and, apparently, crippled men stands outside of a grocery. A woman who has just learned of her son's death loiters disconsolate near the head of the line. The others in the queue ruthlessly demand that she go to back of the line and the camera tracks relentlessly with her as she stumbles past the ragged people queued-up for food. Karl's mother sees her son walking down the street (he has purchased provisions in Belgium) but she can't leave the line to greet him for fear of losing her place. Karl goes to his apartment and finds his wife in bed with a "butcher's boy" who has brought her what looks like a small rotisserie chicken -- everyone is starving and the women are exchanging sex for food. Karl threatens to kill the butcher's boy who's appalled and terrified face is indelible -- it's a tiny role, but the actor playing the part is so effective that you will remember his face long after the move ends. (I saw this film about twenty years ago and still remember the guilty, shocked look of the butcher's boy as he stands near a window that he couldn't scramble out of, Karl demanding that he "kiss" his wife at gunpoint.) The butcher's boy has been drafted and we know what awaits him and the man is clearly transfixed by a state of mortal terror. Karl is exhausted. At the queue, Karl's mother learns that the food is all sold-out for the day and she has waited for hours for nothing. She goes to Karl's apartment, grasps the situation, and tries to make excuses for the weeping wife (all of this is nearly unbearable to watch) and, then, tells her to make up the bed for the tired soldier. The next morning, Karl departs; crying on the landing, the girl asks: "Not one kind word for me?" Karl goes back to the trenches with the news that the Home Front is worse than the Front Line -- everyone is starving, social norms have broken down, and it's every man for himself. At least, on the Front there's camaraderie. The Student has been killed and his rotting body is sunk in a water-filled shell crater. There's a raid and, then, attacks and counter-attacks. Dying men are stuck between the lines and howl for days before they go silent. The killing continues, this time involving tanks and wafting clouds of gas, and, at last, Karl and the Bavarian are shot. The Lieutenant goes completely mad and is dragged from the pile of corpses where he is standing and saluting, shrieking like a banshee. The movie ends in the worst of all places, a field hospital in a church where Christ's head lies atop a pile of rubble, and the surgeons are, themselves, half-crazed with exhaustion -- the anesthesia runs out and fragments are men, still living are hauled on stretchers here and there: people are screaming that they have been blinded or have lost their legs. Karl dies recalling that he left his child-wife in Berlin without speaking "a kind word" to her. The Bavarian, who is gut shot, dies. A French soldier dying next to him reaches out his hand to the dead man, clasps his fingers, and says that they are "not enemies." This is powerful stuff and Pabst has the tact to pull most of it off.
Pabst films the battle scenes, which account for 2/3rds of the picture, as pure chaos. The battlefield looks lonely -- little groups of isolated men scrambling about while shells explode around them. The shells create fountains of mud and dirt but we don't see any burst of fire, just a pillar of flying dirt and, then, a pall of smoke. There is no front line or rear to the fighting -- the peril comes from all directions: you can be killed from the front or the back. The French attacks seem to be enfilades -- men suddenly swarming right or left across the screen. There are no bravura sequences involving hundreds of men -- rather, we see shots recorded from a static camera, many of them very long in duration, with the troops crawling and diving back and forth across the screen. Everyone seems to carry about a dozen hand-grenades and there are whole attacks that involve people throwing grenades which burst with little unprepossessing puffs of white smoke. In many scenes, you can't tell the French from the Germans and everyone is covered in thick, caked mud. Pabst shot the battle scenes at Kuestin on a wealthy family's estate -- the head of the family was a right-wing Nationalist and a financier of the so-called Black Reichswehr (that is, the covert German army in training notwithstanding peace accords that had demilitarized the country.) Pabst gathered sixty or so extras and said that they were a paramilitary undertaking training on the estate and, under this guise, the film was made.
The film is not without defects. It has a long sequence showing a kind of morale-building musical revue performed for the front-line troops. This sequence is clearly intended as a exhibition of the new sound technology that Pabst has brought to the screen. In effect, it's a musical interlude complete with erotic dancing, corny jokes, and two costumed clowns playing exuberant solos on matching xylophones -- it's weird, even verging on the uncanny, but to a modern viewer who is not intrigued by the sound film technology, the sequence with lasts eight minutes (and feels like a quarter hour) doesn't improve the film. But the picture is so powerful, it overcomes these kinds of defects. (The Supplements on the Criterion disk are minimally helpful -- there's a long 1969 French TV show in which a group of WW I vets, both German and French, watch the movie and, then, respond to phone inquiries from viewers -- it's utterly bizarre and the dignified old men almost get into a fist fight over which army had the best artillery at Verdun: viewers ask idiotic questions, basically attempting to ascribe blame for the War. "How many people died in the War?" someone asks. No one really knows. The old men were front-line combatants not historians: one guy answers the question, at length, with no answer at all.)
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