When the Locarno Pact of 1925 would effectively readmit Germany to the community of nations, it was to be followed by an era of reappraisal by the end of the 1920's. This was reflected by three of the greatest anti-war films ever turned out. Lewis Milestone's All Quiet on the Western Front, G.W. Pabst's Westfront 1918 (respectively 1930) and Anthony Asquith's (from his Welwyn Studios days )masterwork The Battle of Gallipoli in 1931. Milestone's film would be remade in the year 1980 albeit a mite dispassionate and with decidedly less gravitas, was still the most embraced films regarding the subject of the first World War. Adapted from Erich Maria Remarque's, (a German novelist who specialized in war), novel. It tells of the ultimate destruction of a group of young German recruits; mercilessly begrudging the war of any such glamour, and further hammering home its pacifist message by inviting audiences to sympathize with enemy characters rather than American ones.
Pabst's Westfront 1918 itself follows the brutalization and elimination of a group of recruits, this time the group in question being French, conveying the squalor and mortal terror of life in the trenches with a grinding realism which some have even claimed outstrips All Quiet on the Western Front. Marginally the weakest of the triune and belied by its nostalgic eulogy of the British class system. Tell England, is nonetheless redeemed by its unwavering humanity. Its two young heroes are sent to Gallipoli, where the outmoded concepts of honor and loyalty that compelled them to enlist are eroded until one is killed during a raid on the Turkish trenches. Peter Weir's Australian film Gallipoli (1981) has a curiously similar plot with an infinitely greater
eye for earthy realism and a disparate national consciousness.