Edward Berger’s 2022 German remake of Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front is remarkable in many ways, not the least of which is its 4K Blu-ray release, a rare Netflix film to be released on home video and the first to be released so quickly after its Netflix release, a mere five months.

Winner of 4 Oscars for Best International Film, Cinematography, Score, and Production Design, and 11 BAFTAs including Best Film, Director, Film Not in the English Language, and Adapted Screenplay, the film is only the second remake of an Oscar-winning film to also be nominated for Best Picture. Steven Spielberg’s 2021 remake of Robert Wise and Jerome Robbins’ 1961 Oscar-winning film of the Leonard Bernstein and Stephen Sondheim musical West Side Story, a gap of sixty years, was the first. The gap between Lewis Milestone’s 1929-30 Oscar-winning version of All Quiet on the Western Front and Berger’s film is a whopping 92 years. It’s a record that is not likely to be broken soon.

The film itself is one of the best films about World War I but is different from the original in that it adds a subplot about the negotiations to end the war. It is also less romanticized than the original version in which the protagonist goes home on leave to welcome arms and dies while reaching for a butterfly. It is closer in style and tone to G.W. Pabst’s German film Westfront 1918, filmed at the same time as Milestone’s film but released in the U.S. a year later. In that film, the protagonist goes home to find his mother waiting on a long breadline and his wife in bed with the landlord. He also dies an unremarkable death, just another statistic in a senseless war.

Milestone’s film was not the first anti-war film. That distinction belongs to King Vidor’s 1925 silent masterpiece The Big Parade, which stayed in theatres almost until the release of All Quiet on the Western Front. William Wellman’s 1927-28 Oscar winner, Wings, has elements of an anti-war film but is mostly remembered as a romantic drama. The last great silent anti-war film is John Ford’s 1928 masterpiece Four Sons in which a German mother loses three sons to the war and a fourth to America.

The first anti-war talkie was James Whale’s 1930 film of R.C. Sherriff’s Journey’s End about WWI British soldiers in the trenches, released just before Milestone’s film. Released late in 1930 was Howard Hawks’ film of John Monk Saunders’ The Dawn Patrol about the terrible toll taken on bomber pilots.

Films about the war continued well into the 1930s, but with the rise of Nazism, anti-war films were no longer popular. Ernst Lubitsch’s masterful 1932 film Broken Lullaby, about a World War I French soldier who ingratiates himself into the family of the German soldier he killed by pretending to have been his university friend, was the only film by the celebrated director to lose money.

Stanley Kubrick’s 1957 film Paths of Glory, also set in the World War I trenches, would become the first in a quarter of a century. While other anti-war films followed, Peter Weir’s 1981 Australian film Gallipoli would become the first anti-war film to focus on World War I since Kubrick’s film.

In recent years, anti-war films set during World War I have had a resurgence. Among the best have been Steven Spielberg’s 2011 film of Michael Morpurgo’s War Horse, Saul Dibb’s 2017 remake of Journey’s End, Francois Ozon’s 2017 remake of Broken Lullaby, now called Frantz, and Sam Mendes’ 1917, based on stories his paternal grandfather told him about the war. The question now is whether the trend will continue or will Berger’s excellent film be the last for now?

Full-length feature commentary for Berger’s All Quiet on the Western Front is provided by the director.

Florian Zeller’s The Son, now out on Blu-ray from Sony Pictures Classics, is, like The Father for which Zeller and co-writer Christopher Hampton won Oscars for writing two years ago, based on a French play written by Zeller and adapted for the London stage by Hampton. Unlike The Father, however, this one met with general disapproval from critics and audiences alike.

Not an easy film to watch, The Son is about a successful Manhattan lawyer played by Hugh Jackman who left his wife (Laura Dern) and teenage son (Zen McGrath) for a woman half his age (Vanessa Kirby) with whom he has an infant son. He also has an estranged father (Anthony Hopkins), a nasty piece of work who he realizes he is turning into.

The film centers on the teenage son who is severely depressed. Newcomer McGrath plays him well and the always reliable Jackman has his moments, but both Dern and Kirby are given poorly written roles to play as needy, whiny women that are hard to take throughout. It’s not a film I recommend to anyone. Rewatch Ordinary People if you want to see a good film about depression and how it is handled by different family members.

No commentary is provided on the disc.

Kino Lorber continues its remarkable wave of classic films newly released on Blu-ray. New this week are If I Had a Million and Counsellor at Law.

If I Had a Million is about a dying tycoon who picks the names of eight people out of the Manhattan phone book to give his fortune away to. Each of them receives a check for a million dollars from him. It’s from a story by Robert Hardy Andrews, adapted by numerous writers, including Jospeh L. Mankiewicz and Ernst Lubitsch. It is directed by eight different directors, including Lubitsch, whose episode starring Charles Laughton is probably the most famous, having been included as an extra on Criterion’s Blu-ray of his Design for Living. The prologue and epilogue were directed by Norman Taurog straight from his winning direction of Skippy.

Richard Bennett (The Magnificent Ambersons) is the dying tycoon whose recipients include Laughton as a disgruntled clerk, Gary Cooper as a naïve marine, W.C. Fields and Alison Skipworth as a pair of vaudevillians, Charlie Ruggles and Mary Boland as a henpecked husband and his wife, George Raft as a petty thief, Gene Raymond as a man on death row, Wynne Gibson as a tired prostitute, and saving the best for last, May Robson as an old lady in a rest home who gets to turn the tables on her caregivers.

Full-length feature commentary is provided by filmmaker Allan Arkush and filmmaker and film historian Daniel Kremer.

William Wyler’s Counsellor at Law was the director’s breakthrough film featuring John Barrymore in one of his most acclaimed roles as the title character. Personally, I preferred him in two other 1933 films, Harry d’Aabbadie d’Arrast’s Topaze and George Cukor’s Dinner at Eight, but it’s worth a watch for its historical context.

Full-length feature commentary is provided by Kremer and Wyler’s daughter, Catherine.

Happy viewing, everyone.