All Quiet on the Western Front is a 1930 American pre-Code epic anti-war film based on the 1929 novel of the same name by German novelist Erich Maria Remarque.

Directed by Lewis Milestone, it stars Lew Ayres, Louis Wolheim, John Wray, Slim Summerville, and William Bakewell.

Considered a realistic and harrowing account of warfare in World War I, it made the American Film Institute's first 100 Years...100 Movies list in 1997.

A decade later, after the same organization polled over 1,501 workers in the creative community, All Quiet on the Western Front was ranked the seventh-best American epic film.

[5][6] In 1990, it was selected and preserved by the United States Library of Congress' National Film Registry, being deemed "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant".

Early in World War I, Professor Kantorek gives an impassioned speech to his male German students about the glory of defending the fatherland.

Their unit is composed of older, unwelcoming veterans, and, having not eaten since morning, they pay Corporal "Kat" Katzinsky for a meal of stolen hog with their tobacco, alcohol, and soap.

There are heavy losses on both sides, but no ground gained, after the boys' first major battle, and when 2nd Company is sent back to the field kitchens for a breather and a meal, each man receives double helpings, simply because of the number of dead.

Paul stabs a French soldier and becomes increasingly distraught as he spends the night trapped in a shell-hole with the slowly dying man.

While marching behind the lines, Paul and his good friend Albert Kropp are severely wounded by artillery fire and sent to a Catholic hospital.

When he visits Kantorek's schoolroom, he is asked to share his experiences, and, unexpectedly, expresses hopeless disillusionment with the war to the professor and his young students, who call him a "coward".

Cutting his furlough short, Paul returns to the front to be with people who understand him, only to find 2nd Company filled with new recruits who are even younger than he and his classmates were when they enlisted.

Paul finds Kat, who is on his way back from an unsuccessful search for food, and the friends greet each other warmly and discuss the grim outlook of the war.

[12] After re-shooting the scenes with the character of Paul's mother and doing some additional editing, the all-talking version of the film went into general release in the US on August 24, 1930.

[14] Various edited versions of the film have been distributed on home video, including a Japanese subtitled Laserdisc with a running time of 103 minutes.

Variety lauded it as a "harrowing, gruesome, morbid tale of war, so compelling in its realism, bigness and repulsiveness", and concluded its review with the statement: The League of Nations could make no better investment than to buy up the master-print, reproduce it in every language, to be shown in all the nations until the word "war" is taken out of the dictionaries.

"[21] On the film review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes 98% of 90 critics' reviews of the film are positive, with an average rating of 9.2/10; the site's "critics consensus" reads: "Director Lewis Milestone's brilliant anti-war polemic, headlined by an unforgettable performance from Lew Ayres, lays bare the tragic foolishness at the heart of war.

"[22] On Metacritic, the film has a weighted average score of 91 out of 100 based on reviews from 16 critics, indicating "universal acclaim".

During and after its German premiere in Berlin on December 4, 1930, Nazi brownshirts under the command of Joseph Goebbels disrupted screenings by setting off stink bombs, throwing sneezing powder in the air, and releasing white mice in the theaters, eventually escalating to attacking audience members perceived to be Jewish and forcing projectors to shut down.

Between 1930 and 1941, All Quiet on the Western Front was one of many films to be banned in Victoria, Australia, on the grounds of "pacifism" by chief censor Creswell O'Reilly.