And it’s especially puzzling that a caption at the start of the film, when Paul and his chums join the army, reads “Spring 1917.” In the book, they join up two years earlier, closer to the start of the war. Berger omits another of the novel’s themes, the harsh cruelty imposed by “small men” who are elevated by war to junior officers. Paul’s comrades are never fully traced as characters, except for Kat, the illiterate cobbler who emerges, in the novel and film, as the most moral and humanistic of the bunch. The version by Mann, a veteran of Playhouse 90 productions, won a Golden Globe for best made-for-TV movie, but his directing was too stagey and his battlefields too clean. Milestone’s film closely followed the novel, which had been published just two years earlier, and his battle scenes were remarkable for the era (it won Oscars for Best Picture and Best Director), but the melodramatic acting makes it unwatchable today. These qualities make it a tough nut for would-be adapters to crack, though three directors have tried: Lewis Milestone in 1930, Delbert Mann in a CBS TV movie in 1979, and now Edward Berger for Netflix. All Quiet on the Western Front may be the best war novel ever written, a work told entirely in first person and present tense that evokes the myriad aspects of combat-its gruesome horrors, routine banalities, feverish otherworldliness, and fervent camaraderie-with engrossing vividity, in language at once sparse and explicit, though never gratuitously graphic or sentimental.

Company of heroes movie inaccuracies