Synopsis
Westfront 1918 (1930), Georg Wilhelm Pabst's German anti-war drama, is available to watch online on iFILM. Released the same year as Lewis Milestone's All Quiet on the Western Front, it covers the same catastrophe from the other side of the wire.
Four German infantrymen — the Bavarian, the Student, Karl, and the Lieutenant — are grinding through their final months in the French trenches. A village behind the lines offers occasional relief. Karl goes home on leave and finds his family scraped hollow by wartime poverty. He returns in time to face an enormous French tank assault.
Pabst offers no glory and no redemption. The camera stays with the men in the mud, unheroically, until there is nothing left. One of the first German sound films, and arguably the bleakest account of the Western Front committed to the screen. Stream Westfront 1918 online on iFILM.
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