Film Details

Released one month after the better-known All Quiet on the Western Front, the first sound film by the celebrated German director of Diary of a Lost Girl and Pandora’s Box is grimmer and more powerful than that Lewis Milestone WWI classic. Like All Quiet, Pabst’s film follows a German soldier during the final days of the Great War, fighting in the trenches, going home for a brief but dispiriting leave, and returning to the front’s hellacious fury. A few years after its release, Joseph Goebbels denounced this pacifist classic as “cowardly defeatism.” Cleveland revival premiere. Subtitles. DCP. 96 min.