"All Quiet on the Western Front":

[Brigid]

There have been plenty of excellent anti-war movies over the years, but this 1930 classic is the first (as far as I know) and the best.

[RandySF]

1. Try "Johnny Got His Gun".

[Brigid]

6. Checked it out on wikipedia.

Sounds interesting.

[nadinbrzezinski]

9. I recommend book

And film is nc-17, so s the book.

Not recommended for actual vets with PTSD. Take my word on this.

[Bigmack]

2. Yes. When I was teaching

high school social studies - when we got to the unit on WW 1, I used to assign my students to READ All Quiet, because I'd been assigned to read it in high school, and I'd NEVER forgotten it. Anyhow, I THINK it had a similar effect on my students. My husband always showed the original film, which I
do like, but I've always preferred the book itself..... Ms Bigmack

[aint_no_life_nowhere]

3. Great film

My favorite anti-war films are La Grande Illusion (1937) and Paths of Glory. The German film Stalingrad, with horrific and relentless scenes of killing and despair is something I would call anti-war. And the 1932 Les Crois de Bois (Wooden Crosses) about the horrors of trench warfare on the western front is pretty good. Another interesting film that might qualify as anti-war is The Bridge, a German film about 13 and 14 year old children in uniform being ordered by the Nazis to defend a bridge against the advancing Americans at the end of the war, when kids and old men were being pressed into service. The children barely had time to enjoy life at all and were expected to die for the Fatherland.

[TreasonousBastard]

11. And I'd add "Two Women" to that list. There's a lot more I can't think of right now...

that speak to the victims of war.

[aint_no_life_nowhere]

12. There was a German film entitled Westfront 1918

that came out in that early 1930s period that was in the same category of gritty trench warfare realism as All Quiet On The Western Front and Les Croix de Boix. I've been meaning to find and watch the German film. I wonder if anyone here has seen it.

[alcibiades_mystery]

4. I like the German title better, given the double meaning

"Im Westen Nichts Neues"

Nothing New in the West.

[Brigid]

7. That is a good title.

I wonder why they changed it.

[alcibiades_mystery]

10. A tad too radical, I suppose

The benefit of the German title is that it doesn't delimit the critique to the Great War.

I'm being somewhat facetious. The story of All Quiet's uptake in English speaking countries is actually quite fascinating. There had been something close to an enforced silence about the war in literature and memoir through the first six or seven years of the 1920's. Then in the late 1920's, you had just a massive flood of such literature, kicked off in some ways by the success of All Quiet... (less successful was the somewhat more aggressive "Storm of Steel" (In Stahlgewittern) by Ernst Junger, though it is arguably a far better memoir than Graves' "Goodbye to All That," also considered a classic of the moment, and certainly a founding work in the genre of 20th century memoir.) The dynamic was probably something like what happened in the States with the Vietnam war, where you had very few literary and artistic works about the war until the war was well finished (with the exception of, perhaps, Tim O'Brien's "If I die in a Combat Zone..." and "Going After Cacciato"), then this massive flood of memoirs and fiction in the early to mid-1980's (Al Santoli's stuff, which basically invented a genre, Caputo's A Rumor of War, and etc., and etc., until it now fills up three or four shelves in every Barnes and Noble in the country.

Point being, "All Quiet..." was probably a better title for English speaking markets. To be fair, the translation of the title is quite literal, to the extent that both the English version of "All quiet on the front..." German version of "Im X nichts neues..." were the actual military jargon for the same kind of communication. But Remarque was quite clever about this in a way that his translators were not (though he approved these translations). The German version is both the correct military jargon and a wry comment on the history of the West. The English version misses that cleverness.

[muriel_volestrangler]

13. I think 'Journey's End' deserves a mention for the English war literature

First performed at exactly the same time as "Im Westen Nichts Neues" was first published in a newspaper.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Journey%27s_End
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_Quiet_on_the_Western_Front

It may not be fully anti-war, but the ending is so bleak that's it hard not to get 'war is waste of people' as the overall message.

[rug]

5. Das Boot

[Swede]

8. Die Brücke (The Bridge)

It's always stuck with me.


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Die_Br%C3%BCcke_(film)

[Selatius]

14. You may want to try watching Joyeux Noël. It's about the Christmas truce of 1914.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0424205/

[sarge43]

15. Recommend The Lost Battalion

Gives some sense of the horror and chaos of war.

[BlueMTexpat]

16. One that I find quite powerful, but that is very difficult to view in the US

is "The 25th Hour" (1967), with Anthony Quinn & Virna Lisi, directed by French director, Henri Verneuil. It has absolutely nothing to do with the recent film of the same title. http://www.tcm.com/tcmdb/title/2853/The-25th-Hour/ http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0062445/

See also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_25th_Hour_(1967_film) Although you can't ascertain it from the descriptions, the ending is both tragic and extraordinarily prescient in some ways.

I first saw it in Europe and it occasionally repeats on the TCM channel over here.

For some reason, it never received wide distribution in the US. Interestingly, "Forrest Gump" has echoes of this film.

Another film from the 60s that I have only seen in Europe is "The Victors" (1963) that has a strikingly international cast and a powerful anti-war message. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Victors_(film) and http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0057652/

I also concur with several of the posts in this thread. It's difficult to find one "best."