re: All Quiet on the Western Front getting rave reviews out of TIFF

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WW1 seems to largely be forgotten when it comes to war movies due to WW2 being such a fascinating event

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I think the First World War is just as equally as fascinating as the Second World War. However, the latter was more black and white and easier to understand. It's difficult for modern audiences to really understand what the soldiers of that first conflict were actually fighting for. Even they really didn't know.

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WW1 seems to largely be forgotten when it comes to war movies due to WW2 being such a fascinating event

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The conflicts can be viewed as largely the same war with a 20-year pause.

Now, as to the "forgotten" part, certainly Hollywood has not produced nearly the volume of WWI films as it has for WWII, but recall just how many Hollywood types served in WWII or had fond memories of that period of time (for the U.S. it is largely viewed as our only "good" war outside of the Revolution) and the U.S. had only a brief (albeit intense at times) involvement in the Great War.

However, the WWI films that have made it to American cinema have included a lot of gems.

Starting with the classic "Big 3" - Wings (1927), All Quiet on the Western Front (1930) and A Farewell to Arms (1932). These are legendary, seminal films. During that same era, you had gems like What Price Glory? (1926), Both The Lost Patrol films (the silent British film from 1929 which John Ford remade in 1934), Howard Hawks' The Dawn Patrol (1930, which was remade by Edmund Goulding in 1938), Howard Hughes Hell's Angels (1930), and just a ton of dramas, thrillers and other action-oriented films in the 30s with the war as a backdrop.

Obviously many of these are interwar films and that subject matter would be replaced by the second war's recentness, scope, breadth and modernity.

Once the war started in earnest, real quality films set in the first war (mainly as a proxy) abound. Look no further than The Great Dictator, Sergeant York, Yankee Doodle Dandy, Colonel Blimp and Michael Curtis' This is the Army. Now, many of these films served as soft propaganda, but they're outstanding.

Post-war, again, the latter conflict sucked a lot of the oxygen out of the room for war-themed films, but you have literal masterpieces like The African Queen, East of Eden, Vidor's remake of A Farewell to Arms, Paths of Glory and Lawrence of Arabia made between 1950 and 1962.

The 1960s saw the British films The Blue Max and Richard Attenborough's Oh! What a Lovely War. 1971 saw Dalton Trumbo's anti-war (targeting Vietnam, but using WWI, as M*A*S*H had done with Korea) Johnny Got His Gun.

Gallipoli (launching Mel Gibson's career) was 1981. The next significant (in my mind) WWI film wouldn't hit until Legends of the Fall.

I would be remiss if I didn't mention the outstanding made for television film The Lost Battalion starring Rick (don't call him Ricky) Shroeder. This is our old friend Russell Mulcahy again, who directed about 1/2 of the music videos played on MTV in the 1980s as well as Highlander.

ETA: Bottom line - there are tons of quality WWI films out there if one wants to watch them. Top tier films with top tier actors and top tier directors.