Some of the acting is definitely of its time (today's acting isn't any less over the top as we will notice in a couple of decades) but I disagree with your assessment of the movie's qualities. It still holds up after more than 80 years simply because the whole presentation is so "unspectacular". Sure the effects are great but to me the atmosphere is so much stronger than most war movies because the horror and fear grow so banal after a while. French get gunned down, then germans get gunned down, then the french again, there's nothing grandiose about it. Modern war movies aren't more realistic because of improved gore effects and cinematic orchestration, to the contrary, war is just men in the dirt waiting for death as simplistic as it sounds. People get killed in Saving Private Ryan but it's still one hell of an adventure, all quiet on the western front is not.
Maybe age is a factor here, but you don't have to be young to be totally dependent on the version of cinema you're currently being fed. I watched AQOTWF the first time in school after we read the book and it resonated massively with me.
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courtthomas2000
10 years ago
What a lot of people forget when watching this movie for the first time is that movies had only recently moved wholescale into the era of sound. Many of the actors were probably still getting used to this. Acting in silent movies had to be more demonstrative to compensate and convey to the audience what was going on. Undoubtedly actors were probably still adjusting.
This movie needs to be appreciated for the time it was released. It was so far ahead of its time with an anti-war message that it was banned by many countries that were mobilizing for World War II. It was also graphic for its time, having been released before Hollywood would fully begin to enforce the production code. The fully unedited version was not released in the United States until the mid 1970's.
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