Cool history on All Quiet on the Western Front

Neat stuff.

Universal released another war film two years later, "The Doomed Battalion" (1932), starring Luis Trenker, which is quite a forgotten film. It's actually a rather interesting curio, showing the WW1 conflict between the Austrian and Italian armies in the Dolemite mountains. The Austrians hold fortifications high in the cold, snowy, desolate mountains, keeping the Italians from progressing, although the latter control the village below. Filmed on location, it has some marvelous photography gracing a rather hellish scenario.

The film is one of those odd ducks in which Universal, run by Carl Laemmle, was making deals with the German film industry, right before Hitler came to power. The movie was primarily a German production, but there was an English-language version made at the time, with some new scenes with familiar faces from American films, like Herman Bing and Gibson Gowland, undoubtedly shot in California by Universal. Trenker himself spoke some English lines for the English-language export version, and there were some scenes with obvious dubbed English chatter by soldiers. Anyway, it's a pretty obscure, forgotten film, but as a gritty war-themed film quite an interesting one.