All Quiet on the Western Front

“They left for war as boys, never to return as men.”

Paul Bäumer (Richard Thomas) is a young German who signs up for the army with his school friends, sure the war is a cause worth leaving home for. Delbert Mann follows the boys from the classroom into the trenches, where Stanislaus Katczinsky (Ernest Borgnine), an older soldier, teaches them how to stay alive. As the friends around him are killed or wounded, Paul starts to doubt that a few hundred yards of ruined ground can justify any of it.