German troops are starving, and winter is upon them. In the film, we break away from Paul to follow Matthias Erzberger (Daniel Brühl) leading a delegation to negotiate an armistice with France. While the war ended in 1918, the terms of its conclusion sparked a domestic conflict that would rack Germany for over a decade and eventually lead to World War Two. In this new adaptation, nearly a century later, Edward Berger draws on a fuller understanding of German history. Neither Laemmle nor Remarque could have predicted what consumed Germany in the 1930s.
#DUDE WITH GAS MASK WW1 MOVIE#
When it won the Academy Award for Best Picture, Laemmle became convinced this movie would turn the world away from destroying humanity. Sparing no expense in production, the film offered a visceral cinematic experience, immersing audiences in the sounds and images of war. Laemmle, who retained deep ties with family and friends in Germany, traveled to Berlin to meet Remarque and buy the rights to the book. It is this candor that made the novel an international bestseller and in 1930 caught the attention of movie mogul Carl Laemmle, the founder of Universal Pictures. For hours he lay next to the slowly dying Frenchman and finally, wracked with guilt, confesses, “If we threw away these rifles and this uniform you could be my brother.” In one of the most famous scenes from the book, Paul falls into a shell-hole and buries his knife into the chest of a French solider. They fight because they are told to fight and do not want to die. Paul and his comrades hold no animus towards the French. When Erich Maria Remarque started writing the novel in 1927, he aimed to capture his experience of the war with journalistic clarity. Unlike most war stories, All Quiet on the Western Front makes no effort to justify or sentimentalize either side of the conflict. This story feels more relevant than ever. Only a nation so deluded with its own sense of exceptionalism that it has paved the way for its own demise. First adapted into an iconic film by Universal Pictures in 1930, Berger has reclaimed this story with a distinctly German understanding of war and power. Man is a beast.”ĭirector Edward Berger’s new adaptation for Netflix of the 1929 novel All Quiet on the Western Front offers a grim, yet stunning portrayal of trench warfare in WWI. “Give a dog a bone and he will always snap it up,” he mutters.
A sergeant, convinced Paul will be dead by dawn, pulls the mask from his face and orders him to bail the rainwater from the trench. Like a creature from a distant planet, he takes in his first glimpse of the western front.
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Another was hopelessly smashed up and must have got it full in the chest.Peering through the yellow lens of his gas mask, seventeen-year-old Paul Bäumer struggles to breath. One man was unconscious, and died of gas later. We pulled four men out of the debris unharmed.
One man was sick all over the sandbags and another was coughing his heart up. The others were slower and suffered for it. I had my respirator on in a hurry and most of our men were as quick. With my first glance I saw what looked like half a dozen bodies, mingled with sandbags, and then I smelt gas and realised that these were gas shells. After a quarter of an hour of this sort of thing, there was a sudden crash in the trench and ten feet of the parapet, just beyond m, was blown away and everyone around blinded by dust. These shells came over just above the parapet, in a flood, much more quickly than we could count them. It sounded like a gigantic firecracker, with two distinct explosions. The Huns started to bombard us with a shell, which was new to us. H S Clapham, a British soldier fighting on the Western Front, wrote about his experiences of a gas attack upon his return home: The more experienced soldiers also realised that it would be fatal to dive into a shell hole during an attack as the gas was heavier than air, and so would sink down. While not particularly effective, they did develop rapidly during the war and did save many lives. Soldiers who had experienced trench warfare for months or even years would quickly attune themselves to the sound of gas attack warning sirens, and would put their respirators on very quickly.
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