User Reviews

I'm adding reviews for films that lack one, so here goes... 'Set in the English trenches on the western front in 1918 a few days before a major offensive; the new officer arrives fresh from training, he has pulled strings to serve under his old friend (C.Veidt) who is engaged to his sister, however his friend is none too pleased as the pressure of the front has made him turn to drink, not something he wants to get back to his intended. Based on Journey's End, not a film that would be made in Germany a few years later. Good film.' I got this from a collector, it had English subtitles, was a good clean print, though it ran 97 min, so possibly 10 min' is missing? My reason to get this was C.Veidt, I will watch anything he's in, and this gives him a good part to play, the film is well made, well acted by all, in fact I liked it more than the famous J.Whale version made the previous year. Recomended if you can find a copy.

Journey's End (the play on which this movie is based) never fails--people come to scoff at the portrayal of life in a WWI trench, and stay to cry. The movie is even more gripping--the fresh-faced young chap from England coming out to join Stanhope, his old chum and his sister's fiance, and being shocked at what he sees and smells. Stanhope reeks of the whisky he knocks back to keep him going after three years without a break. He expects to die, and he accepts that his death will be futile.

Our intimacy with the trench-bound men is created by dozens of little scenes that show us their jokes, their affection for one another in the midst of despair and the countless humiliations of trying, however pessimistically, to stay alive. The great Conrad Veidt is more than 10 years too old to play Hauptmann Stanhope but who cares--he conveys all the bitterness and sorrow of the role without ever being affected or melodramatic.

It is strange indeed seeing--and hearing--Germans playing Tommies, shouting Schnell! And Donnerwetter! But the effect, of course, is to heighten the Kameradschaft (as the title of a famous silent film had it) between them and us. And it can be no stranger than it was for the Germans, watching an American play one of them the year before in All Quiet on the Western Front, to which this film could be a reciprocal gesture. But that's not the only disjunction--at one point, the cook, distraught at the absence of his terrier, calls him: "Kitti! Kitti!"