All Quiet on the Western Front (2022)

Butterflies Not Included

or

"Germany Will Soon Be Empty" (The Ever-Diminishing Perspective)

 

"We are not youth any longer. We don't want to take the world by storm. We are fleeing from ourselves, from our life. We were eighteen and had begun to love life and the world; and we had to shoot it to pieces."

Im Westen nichts Neues "Nothing New in the West" 

Erich Maria Remarque's "All Quiet on the Western Front"—not an exact translation of the title, but it's stuck in the vernacular—created a sensation on its publication (in magazines form November 1928 and in book-form January 1929). Within a year, the author's fictionalization of his time during the first World War had been bought by Hollywood and made into an Oscar-winning film (for "Best Production") by Lewis Milestone. There was a TV version in 1979, directed by Delbert Mann, which won a Golden Globe for Best TV Movie—it was filmed in Czechoslovakia—and an Emmy Award for editing.

 

There was considerable buzz in the air around the Holidays in its being mentioned for Oscar nominations—and not just for Best Foreign Film. Frequent Twitterers mentioned it as a contender for the Best Picture short list.

Now Netflix has sponsored a new version of All Quiet on the Western Front (I guess you need 40 years or so to pass before doing it again—as if we weren't reminded enough that war is hell). The story of "Paul"* (played by Felix Kammerer—who seems genetically predisposed to have a "Thousand Yard Stare") one of a number of young German students, spurred by the patriotic speeches of their professors to join the German Army and to fight. Their teachers and academics fill their heads with dreams of glory and burnished reputations in protecting the Fatherland (who were the aggressors, if memory serves). But, once they tramp out to the trenches at the front lines, they learn different. They're stuck in shit-holes, where they arbitrarily wait for their generals (safely ensconced away from the battles**) to launch attacks that will gain them mere yards of ground, only to have them taken back when the French attack later. The absolute futility of the First World War was in how both sides traded time in each other's trenches.

Director-writer Edward Berger has changed a few things (from the novel). He starts—as with most of the segments—with beautiful shots of the terrain, forests, the natural world. Picturesque contrasts with what will come after—the grays and browns of the trench area punctuated with barbed wire strung on fallen crucifixes. The trenches are ramshackle caves where the soldiers huddle with the rats and offer little protection from aerial attacks. It's like the graves are already dug for the soldiers—they just don't know it yet.

After the beauty shots, Berger cuts to an attack—prior to Paul and his chums being sent to the line. It goes badly. The dead are catalogued, with their dog-tags broken in half (that's how they keep count of the kills and who's "winning"), graves are dug, and their uniforms recycled. Bullet holes and rips are repaired and readied for the next batch of soldiers—Berger will do a call-back on that later. But, it makes the point. The lives of the German troops are just as recyclable as the equipment. When one dies, another is put in their place. They're literally cannon fodder, indistinguishable from another. For small patches of ground.

But, there's an added element here. Ever since Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now, there has been an artistic dichotomy to supposedly "anti-war" films.*** They're beautiful. Films like Stanley Kubrick's Full Metal Jacket. Sam Mendes' 1917. There's horrendous, ugly carnage, absolutely (all wars look the same from the inside), but there is also a directorly effort to make some shots as beautifully lit as possible. Michael Herr mentioned it—that dichotomy—after working with Kubrick on his Vietnam film. And Bergen is no exception. One of the things that bothered me about 1917 was how beautiful it looked (thanks to cinematographer Roger Deakins) and wondered if that was enticing to potential recruits, the way the Top Gun movies are. Is this the film-making equivalent of shooting yourself in the foot?

Another thing got to me about the film. There is something called "One Point Perspective" Kubrick used it a lot in The Shining and 2001. Wes Anderson's films are masterclasses on one-point perspective. Here, Berger uses it to the extreme. At one point, there's a sequence in a train station with a slightly off-axis that I thought, "Oh, he's not going to center the train in the shot. Good choice."

I had thought too early. Within a minute, Bergen had moved the camera until, like it was on a track or something, the camera hit the mark so that the train was perfectly centered. Perfectly. Centered.

But, it is an interesting choice. Both Kubrick and Mendes used that technique to make an almost vertiginous experience, sucking you into the screen...and the story (when you're not distracted by all that symmetry, of course).

Berger does some interesting things with the script, as well. A whole section where Paul goes home and is repulsed by his household's fascination for the war is reduced to a single line in a bivouac sequence. And as persistent as he is with the perspective issue, he isn't as dedicated to the book's reluctance to show anything beyond Paul's perspective. He inter-cuts the scenes at the front with the attempts by Matthias Erzberger (played by Daniel Brühl) to sign an armistice with the French, which as protracted and stilted as it is, still manages to convey some tension about the outcome of our singular hero.

It's an odd push-pull kind of dynamic that the film presents: the country that launched the war makes a film about it, not neglecting the bloody carnage or the irresponsibility of its generals, but making pains to show its humiliation in negotiating the armistice; showing the waste and destruction, but also including decorously-lit sequences that romanticize it; criticizing the war and its costs, while also making it romantic and poignant. One can acknowledge a film's worth, but also be deeply cynical about it, at the same time.

I can my reaction to it can be briefly summed up in that I watched it with English sub-titles—the film, as it should be, is in German—that are none too subtle. And at one point, had the foresight to clue me in to what I was not hearing.

* "Paul," by the way was Remarque's real middle name; he changed his pen-name to "Maria" to honor his mother.

 

** See Paths of Glory. No. Really. See Paths of Glory. 

 

 *** Notice I didn't mention Oliver Stone's Platoon? Can the lack of romantic lighting in that film be because Stone actually fought in the Vietnam War.

M (1931)

M (aka M-Eine Stadt sucht einen Mördor, Fritz Lang, 1931) A rash of child-murderers in the Weimar Republic led Fritz Lang and his then-wife Thea von Harbou to use it for what Lang wished to be a film about "the ugliest, most utterly loathsome crime."

He could only have topped it if he'd stayed in Germany and waited a few years. Indeed, when he was attempting to arrange the start of filming, he was refused the use of Staaken Studios, as the head of production was a Nazi and thought the working title—"Murderers Among Us"—would be critical of the up-and-coming political movement. One wonders why, if he thought that was the case, he wanted to be a Nazi Party member in the first place. Actually, given History and given people, one no longer wonders.

 

But, Lang's M had more things on its mind than just a film about a child murderer. Lang's films usually did.

Lang presents the emotional issue in one shot.

 

The film begins with an ironic sequence—children in a circle out on a street playing a counting-out game (where when a child is pointed at, they drop out, or disappear from the game) with a rhyme that has to do with a "man in black" who makes "mincemeat" out of children with a "cleaver's blade." One by one, children get eliminated. How's that for foreshadowing? The song is an annoyance to one of the women at the tenement who is taking her laundry up to be washed, and when she complains about the kids, the washer-woman says "At least if we hear them, we know they're safe."

Then, it's a good thing this is Lang's first film utilizing sound. And a cacophonous world it is, with street-noises, off-screen alarms and sirens...even the passage of time when her little girl doesn't arrive for her regular lunch is emphasized mockingly with a cuckoo clock. In fact, after the titles, the first thing we hear is that children's on-the-nose game-chant. When the little girl is late, the woman no longer depends on sound and goes looking, asking the other kids coming up the stairs if they'd seen her. Then, as if to emphasize that she's not coming, Lang shows her empty place at the table, the yawning empty staircase to her flat, the still basement—then, outside, telephone wires to which gets stuck a balloon that we had seen a man buying for her, then the girl's ball as it rolls...and becomes still.

Horrible things are done in this film, but Lang shows them off-screen, suggestively, and lets the audience do the dirty work, making us culpable. But, we're not alone in this. As fear grips the city, everyone becomes suspicious of each other. Talking to a kid on the street? You could be the murderer! The accusations are made directly to the camera, as if we're the guilty ones. Suspicions turn into accusations, and the police, under considerable political pressure starts to ramp up their investigation, looking in all those empty spaces for victims, rousting criminal hang-outs for clues, making the city sweat, especially those dens of iniquity where aberrant behavior are ever-present.

While the populace looks over their shoulders, buying up the hysterical headlines in the newspaper, squinting at any suspicious activity (or even not suspicious!), the criminal element begins to feel the heat and they determine to catch the pedophile by the means the police don't have at their disposal—their own spider's web of a network utilizing beggars on the street to keep an eye on every child. The police, meanwhile, are narrowing down their suspects and starting to close in. It's just a matter of who catches him first, the authorities or the outlaws.

We already know who it is: we've watched him (Peter Lorre) work, watched him write taunting letters to the paper, watched at how close he gets to getting caught and slip away. But, it's the investigations that take him out of the shadows and provide him with a name and a familiarity. We've listened as he whistled "In the Hall of the Mountain King" and fretted, even if we haven't seen him, but felt the tension increase. Then, when he's been marked, we watch as he struggles to avoid detection only to realize that it's not the police he has to fear, but everyone around him. The tables have been turned. The populace are no longer potential victims, but potential threats.

Murderers as victims. Criminals as detectives. The audience as co-conspirator. Lang's film—his favorite of his career—subverts so many elements to such devastating effect that's it's no wonder anyone who wants to make a thriller—at least a smart, cynical one—has borrowed from Lang's playbook for many years. And his parlaying of a black and white world into one where the colors are switched was so alarming to the Nazi's that once they seized power, they banned the film in July of 1934 (although they did use clips of it in their anti-Semitic propaganda). Seems they didn't want any moral complexity for the masses. Black is black and White is right and they got to choose what was good and evil in the Universe (they chose wrong). Lang saw child murderers as vermin. But, he also saw vigilantism and mob-think as dangerous, as well. The message he said he wanted to convey was "watch your children" not only to keep them from harm, but prevent them from becoming monsters, as well.

The Thousand Eyes of Dr. Mabuse

The Thousand Eyes of Dr. Mabuse (Fritz Lang, 1960) Peter Barter, respected journalist and broadcaster for a German news program, has gone missing for his evening news program. It turns out he IS the news; he's been murdered on the way to the studio by an unknown assassin, who has fired a shot into his neck while the reporter is stopped at a street-light. The other cars in the jam move on, but a traffic policeman investigates what the hold-up of one car is, and discovers Barter slumped over the steering-wheel, dead.*

But, the unusual thing about the assassination is that the local police had been warned of it before it happened: Inspector Kras (Gert Frobe) had received a call from the blind clairvoyant, Cornelius (Lupo Prezzo), who has seen the future crime happening in his mind's eye. Kras visits Cornelius, and expresses his cynicism about the mystical. What he responds to is cold, hard clues—like the thin blade discovered in Barter's neck that came from a secret military weapon that was under development—but strangely vanished—from the United States.

It's just one of a string of unsolved crimes that have occurred, and they have only one thing in common—the victims have all previously stayed at the Hotel Luxor in Berlin, and the authorities are starting to concentrate their investigative efforts there. That's a lucky thing as the Luxor has another crisis going on that day. Marion Menil (Dawn Addams) is standing on a high ledge of the Hotel, threatening to jump. The police can't reach her, but the American millionaire Henry Travers (Peter Van Eyck) is staying at the Luxor—he's just negotiated buying a British rocket company—and his window is a life-saving arm's length away from the distraught woman. His soothing words and offers to help convince her to come in off the ledge.

Her psychiatrist—who happens to be in the same building—is called. He is Professor Jordan (Wolfgang Preiss) and is treating Marion with hypnosis as she has become agitated by the manipulations of her estranged (and club-footed) husband. The Luxor seems to be the busiest joint in town with Travers and Kras and Jordan and Menil and the husband—and the busy-body press!—all bustling around the rooms and halls and very busy bar. And then there's the vociferous Heironymous B. Mistelzweig (Werner Peters), an insurance agent (and doing good business evidently!) always tagging along trying to get information on leads. It's enough to make the manager, Berg (Andrea Checchi), dehydrate from his constant sweating.

But, Berg knows something about the Luxor not everyone knows—it used to be a Nazi stronghold, designed for and fitted with false rooms (the better for spying) and, keeping up with the times, outfitted with secret cameras and microphones. No one's safe from having their business monitored almost constantly. But, who's doing the watching? 

Interpol has a strange theory: they think that it might be the work of Dr. Mabuse, a crime-kingpin, who had a spider's-web network of contacts and a magician's ability to cloud victim's minds. It's crazy, but we have seen a van of thugs (answering only to numbers) circling around the city-streets in radio contact with the purported voice of Dr. Mabuse giving them orders to carry out—including the murder of that reporter. Then, Kras' office is bombed, that missile plant Travers was buying is sabotaged and Cornelius warns Travers off Marion by saying that a woman would lead to his death.

The film is filled with double-identities, double-tricks, trapped rooms, and a paranoid world-view that would only unimpress the most aluminum-capped conspiracy theorists. It's a continuation of a series that Lang had started on in Nazi Germany, and, returning to post-war Germany and making this film at the age of 70 (it was his last film), it's themes are just as relevant on the pervasive and slippery nature of Evil. But, now that world is not limited to the rarefied world of spies and criminals. As with the films of Hitchcock—most recently in his 1959 film North By Northwest—it spills over into the every-day, invading the nightmares of people just living their lives and turning their normality of quiet desperation ass over tea-kettle. No longer are they being spied on from around corners and through un-draped windows. Now, they're being monitored by technology in the Holy name of Security (as opposed to these days where it's in the Holy names of Convenience and Consumerism). And evil wraps itself in superstition and assumes a mantle of power only because it tells you it's there.

And the thing is, it works...just as well as it did in the Silent Era. The nightmares may have changed over time, but Lang's ability to create them, whole and fresh and insinuating, never ebbed.

* Lang used a similar sequence in his The Testament of Dr. Mabuse, filmed 27 years earlier.

The Testament of Dr. Mabuse

The Testament of Dr. Mabuse (Fritz Lang, 1933) A man hides in a warehouse that is shaking with the vibrations of heavy machinery in an industrial area of town. Two men come in and open a storage container behind which the man is hiding. The dust and dirt from the lid fall over the hiding man and he involuntarily flinches, exposing his foot behind the container. The two men see it, and while one takes out a black-jack to kosh the fellow, the other urges discretion and they leave the way they came. The hiding man, gun in hand, comes out from his hiding place and listens at the door. The other men are on the other side listening. The man steels his courage, pops a couple pills, takes a swig from a flask, and charges through the door. 

No one is there. He looks around. The coast is clear. He exits the building. Just in time, he throws himself against the building as a slab of concrete falls right where he'd been standing. Alarmed, he runs down the street, only to see three thugs at the end of the block waiting for him. He turns and runs the other direction down an alley. At the end of the alley, two men wait with oil drums. they push one off the truck and it rolls down the street towards our man. He dodges out of the way, just as the drum explodes in a violent explosion that rains fire throughout the alley. 

And that's just the film's first six minutes.

Welcome to the paranoid world of Fritz Lang. It's a world just like ours—but with actual conspiracy theories coming true—and dialed up to "11." Conceived in Germany in its early death-throws between World Wars I and II, when the first war's defeat inspired a dangerously enervating arrogance, Lang used movies to show the best and the worst of societies only too eager to lie to themselves out of some misbegotten quest for power, and it could come from government, from industry, even the motley interests of a lynch mob.

Those were inspired by what was happening in Germany. But, Lang's fantasy instigator was a master racketeer, capable of single-mindedly disrupting the delicate balance of life—Dr. Mabuse. Created in 1921 by the author Norbert Jacques, the Bad Doctor first appeared in a massive two part film project in 1922, then Lang brought him back in a sequel The Testament of Dr, Mabuse, (partially based on an unfinished Jacques novel) even though the previous film had seen the evil manipulator turned mad by the perceived souls of his victims. But, even that cannot stop Mabuse.

All the masterminds of crime you could name—Professor Moriarty, Fu Manchu, Ernst Stavro Blofeld, Hugo Strange, Hannibal Lecter—they don't hold a suddenly-snuffed-out-candle to Mabuse, Fritz Lang's "man behind the curtain," so powerful he can control his vast drug, counterfeiting, terrorism, assassination and extortion rings from his near catatonic state inside a Berlin mental institution, his minions receiving their instructions from a mysterious source, who might be Mabuse himself. 

Lang made three movies about Mabuse--one in 1922 Mabuse, Der Spieler, and in 1960, The Thousand Eyes of Dr. Mabuse, his last directed film. This one, the middle of the trilogy (or actually tetrology if you count "Inferno" as the second chapter of Der Spieler), was made under the unapproving gaze of the Nazis, and subsequently banned by Goebbels, prompting Lang, one of the stellar visionaries of German cinema (M, Metropolis) to flee the country for Hollywood. 

And what a vision it is, reflecting the paranoia of National Socialist Germany. Men are sniped while trapped in traffic jams, or nearly blown to bits with barrels of gasoline thrown down narrow alleyways. Among the plots that Mabuse inflicts are plans for jewelry heists and a long-running counterfeit scheme. But, along the way will be death-traps with no exits and only the inexorable ticking of a hidden bomb, and the sabotage of Mabuse's lab, designed to provide a distraction for the mad man's escape, while the city of Berlin is threatened with a resulting cloud of poison gas. 

Lang even uses the limitations of the film-frame itself to keep you on edge, as lethal chunks of concrete fall from out of frame to threaten those trapped inside it. No one is safe, and little is what it seems in the web that Mabuse spins, even unconsciously. Lang expertly uses double exposures—some almost miraculous ones—to lend a disconcerting bizarreness to the look of the film.

Two men try to stop the mad-man's plot: the personally beleaguered police Commissar Lohmann (Otto Wernicke), who is brought into the madness by the psychological cracking of a former detective, and one of Mabuse's gang, Thomas Kent (Gustav Diessl) who lost his penchant for killing after a stretch in prison and the love of a good woman (Monique Rolland). The men, the authority working outside and the man on the inside, must resolve their own distrust of each other when confronted by an over-arching nemesis, whose power extends even beyond the grave.

One sees in this, the inspirations for Hitchcock and 007 (the film ends with an impressive series of chain-explosions), that not only evolved the thriller genre, but the action film as well. But leave it to Lang to take Mabuse's evil and take it to the next level, a supernatural one, influencing people's minds like a Jedi Master, such is the criminal hypnotist's power. No one's safe, in reality or beyond. 

Now, that is genuine creepiness.

The American Friend

The American Friend (Wim Wenders, 1977) Of all the "Talented Mr. Ripley's" that emerged from the poison-pen of Patricia Highsmith, there was never one so unusual as this adaptation. Wim Wenders had been looking for a Highsmith property to adapt, and came up trumps—all the writings of the author of "Strangers on a Train" had been secured for adaptation. And when the elderly Highsmith met with Wenders, she was suitably impressed to present him with a prize she'd been saving, the galley of the unpublished "Ripley's Game," her third novel in the exploits of Tom Ripley, American A-type (amoral, asexual) sociopath, who's managed through murder, masquerade and machiavellian tactics to make himself a very rich, cultured man in the selling of forged paintings.

There've been many Ripleys: you could say that Robert Walker's Bruno Antony in Hitchcock's adaptation of Strangers... was a good blueprint, but then Alain Delon had played the character in René Clément's Purple Noon, Barry Pepper in Ripley Underground, the almost-respectable adaptation of the first book starred Matt Damon, and John Malkovich portrayed him in the remake of Ripley's Game. She initially didn't like Dennis Hopper's portrayal of "a cowboy in Hamburg," but she came around.

This was Hopper's first movie after the strung-out (in all meanings of the term) work he'd done as the fried photojournalist in Apocalypse Now, and the contrast couldn't be more striking. Hopper's Ripley is quiet, almost shy, highly observational—check out the once over he gives Bruno Ganz in the gallery—and highly self-reflexive.

His Ripley seems to believe that a movie is being made about him, and he's constantly recording himself, and taking self-polaroids. But, in action, his Ripley is fast, savage, uncompromising, and truly scary.

He's matched, step by clumsy step, by Bruno Ganz as the hapless picture framer, Jonathan Zimmermann, who becomes entangled in Ripley's scheme to provide for his family as he's dying. 

Wenders has fun with the film, casting many directors in prominent roles, most notable to American audiences, two experts of the crime film, Nicholas Ray (he portrays Ripley's one-eyed genius of a forger) and Sam Fuller, who plays the snakish gangster at the center of the plot. 

 

Also of note is the incredible work of director of photography Robby Müller, who manages to make every location suffuse with an unnatural glow of evil.

Ultimately, though, it is a love story. Whatever Ripley's motivations, his squiring of Zimmermann through a series of plots, murders and misadventures, secures the man a fortunate death. In the Malkovich Ripley's Game, the character celebrates his accomplishments by luxuriating in a sumptuous concert performance, but The American Friend is much more heart-breaking. Ripley observes the final act of Zimmermann on a beach, embracing a pier support, a sad, satisfied smile on his face, alone with his triumph. Simple, poignant, and a glimpse into a monster's heart, it is the one I prefer.