Today's audiences may feel films such as Platoon and Apocalypse Now are the definitive war movies, but this classic Oscar-winning tale has lost none of its ability to shock and involve. As a study of the inhumanity of war, it retains all the impact of the novel by Erich Maria Remarque upon which it is so faithfully based. This epic saga about German schoolboys called up during the First World War marked the coming of age of the war movie, and of Carl Laemmle Jr's Universal Studios which produced it. It also demonstrated, as an early talkie, the flexibility of the new technique, with staggering trench sequences brilliantly filmed by director Lewis Milestone, who received his second Academy Award for his work. The performances are also exemplary, but it is primarily a film of great moments - the climactic sequence of the young conscript reaching out for a butterfly in the sun - that, once seen, are never forgotten.

When a group of idealistic young men join the German Army during the Great War, they are assigned to the Western Front, where their patriotism is destroyed by the harsh realities of combat.