American cinematic depictions of war have run the gamut from patriotic images filled with wide-eyed national chauvinism to harsh self-criticism over the value of conquest. There have also been considerable efforts to imagine wars and military crises in other countries, and certainly other historical periods, as much to thrill audiences with lavish sets and costumes as to shed light on little known events in far-off lands.

Likewise the depiction of wars with American involvement is nearly as numerous as the number of conflicts in the historical record, the most noteworthy of which being the Civil War, World War II and Vietnam. To a lesser extent there are films about lesser conflicts like the Gulf War but there is a curious quality to movies focused on the 20th century's first global crisis, World War I. Among these qualities is the coincidence of American involvement from 1917-1918 with the birth of feature films.

Practically speaking this coincidence means that movie images and still photos from the period are in scant quantity due to the restrictions of camera equipment expense and size in the 1910s. The 18-month involvement of the United States further limited the size of the mass media's ability to render a detailed representation and the country's post-war focus on isolationism hastened this forgetfulness from the start.

Because some 83 years have passed since the armistice of 1918, and since very few survivors of the period remain alive to bear witness, movies, books, photos and sundry artifacts carry unusual weight when considering World War I. That the United States finds itself newly embroiled in a murky global circumstance with possibly ruinous implications and a number of difficult campaigns in the months and years ahead, there are many things to be learned from the parallels between then and now.

Not least of all is the complicated nature of international treaties that obliged the United Kingdom to ally itself with France, Serbia and Russia against Germany and the Austria-Hungarian empire then and the obligations of NATO allies against an ill-defined international terrorist collective now. Added to these connections is an effort to render the enemy inhuman from both sides of the conflict, one half regarding Americans as evil capitalists without souls and the other half rendering terrorist attackers as a group of intolerant Islamic fanatics.

More unusual still are movies that sympathetically depict "the enemy" without relying on broad stereotypes. In the history of American movies there is an important example of this tendency with the fact of how Carl Laemmle, Jr. successfully ran the risks of bankrolling an adaptation of Erich Maria Remarque's anti-war novel All Quiet on the Western Front and turned it into an award-winning drama of the highest quality.

First published in 1928 to remarkable critical and public acclaim, Remarque's book was optioned by Universal Studios and designed as a project for one of its main directors, Lewis Milestone. From the first his effort, along with credited screenwriters George Abbott, Maxwell Anderson and Del Andrews, was to fashion the novel's portrait of German foot soldiers along the Western Front into an accurate historical depiction of the period that would also be commercially viable.

To this end a young Lew Ayres was cast in the central role of Paul Baumer, the novel's first-person German soldier/narrator, whose experience is meant to draw audiences into his story of innocence lost. His journey, appropriately enough, begins with patriotic fervor and results in his army enlistment as a high school student. He grows older and his adventures continue through his eventual disillusionment with the war as each of his friends is killed and as his sadness deepens with poor living conditions and the constant fear of dying.

In creating a visual spectacle equal to the trench battles so central to the film, Milestone employed the cinematography of Arthur Edeson and Karl Freund along with the brisk editing of Edgar Adams, all of them put to the task of giving added life to the detailed and impressive sets of Charles D. Hall and William R. Schmidt. The resonance of the film, however, may very well stem from its special effects by Frank H. Booth who created memorable moments in his harrowing depictions of no man's land, night raids against miles of barbed wire and the horror of extended bombing.

Among the film's more remarkable moments is the contrast between the peaceful joy of Paul and his friends enjoying the company of a group of French maids and the grotesque imposition of severed hands clawing at barbed wire emplacements during a skirmish. Then there are the de rigueur plot points of war movies including a training montage, the first mission with the risk of crushing naivety and the concluding moments when our lead is left without any surviving friends only to be killed by a sniper's bullet. This concluding moment is made all the more poignant as Paul reaches out towards the beauty of a butterfly from his relatively safe foxhole.

Importantly, Universal's efforts to produce the film with a tune to historical accuracies and high drama echoed well within the Hollywood community as well as audiences who made it a financial success. Eventually it was released globally although members of the nascent Nazi party who protested its pacifism interrupted its exhibition in Germany by releasing rats in theaters and shouting counter-slogans at the screen. Eventually it won the third Academy Award for Best Picture and beat out the films The Big House, Disraeli, The Divorcee and The Love Parade.

In the final analysis, though, All Quiet on the Western Front pertains to 2001 for two reasons. It holds up well as a movie entertainment despite a few lapses into over moralizing and the movie renders an American enemy with humanity and fairness. Thus the German youth of the film are our heroes and it's difficult to see them ripped apart by their country's war.