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ALL QUIET ON THE WESTERN FRONT 121
been the conflict of opinion over the dialogue cinema that we have been led to expect that the Americans may yet bring forth a film which will shatter our carefully nourished, critical European standards of cinematography. Every now and again, amidst the welter of ordinary output, Hollywood pulls off something big. There is Cimarron, for example, and there is All Quiet on the Western Front. I willingly admit that for the first time Universal have surprised me.
Universal have a reputation for sensationalism on a large, opulent scale, and a name for lavishness of spectacular effect, all of which have often concealed a rather hollow kernel. They have to their credit a multitude of sins for which All Quiet on the Western Front is a welcome atonement. Most of us have not yet forgotten the case of The Phantom of the Opera, especially since, having allowed some time for the notoriety to subside, Universal tried to put over the picture a second time by adding sequences in colour and incidental dialogue, and by spreading gigantic posters over the whole face of a prominent London building. It is not as if the picture itself was worthy of such advertisement.
To their faults I would add the synchronizing of dialogue to The White Hell of Pitz Palu, a curiously ineffectual attempt to make an already popular silent film more popular; and the production of Resurrection, unrivalled for its sentimentality.
There is nothing odd in the fact that Carl Laemmle should have fallen for the idea of making All Quiet on the Western Front. It is in the direct tradition of Universal policy to buy the film rights of a novel that