It’s easy to forget how good “All Quiet on the Western Front” is — film (1930) and novel (1929). Both have been anti-war staples so long they’ve become almost invisible, relics from an era when its theme (war is madness visited on the young by delusional old men) had novelty. In Homer, warriors instigate war; in Tolstoy, war is a product of historical forces; in Crane, it bestows red badges of courage. It took World War I to engender a battlefield literature of futility, outrage, repentance, and self-pity. Its warriors were characterized as “greatest” by no one, and as “lost” by everyone. “We are forlorn like children, and experienced like old men, we are crude and sorrowful and superficial — I believe we are lost,” Erich Maria Remarque’s sacrificial hero, Paul Bäumer, says.

The novel’s invisibility stems from its odd reliability as high school fare, a tribute to the A. W. Wheen translation, which no one has thought to update in 75 years. The film has weathered less well, and not because it lacks an ongoing adolescent base: The acting is sometimes creaky, the rhetoric verges on cant, the complexion is black and white. Yet, like the translation, it survives with untouchable grandeur, free of remakes and endlessly influential. Enduring aspects of Lewis Milestone’s picture are especially evident in the year of Clint Eastwood’s bravura diptych, “Flags of Our Fathers” and “Letters From Iwo Jima.” Like the former, “All Quiet” corrosively examines home-front patriotism; like the latter, it is told from the viewpoint of the enemy.

Universal has now released a bright DVD transfer of “All Quiet” in an otherwise skeletal package — you’d think the novel’s ongoing utility and the film’s historical importance would mandate, at least, a commentary. For an ironic addendum, though, later this month Criterion will issue a two-disc edition of Michael Powell’s “49th Parallel” (1941), which also narrates its story through the eyes of German combatants. What a difference a decade made. Powell’s Germans are, with one exception, not young boys who struggle to keep their humanity, but the devil’s playthings. His film was designed to encourage America to enlist in the war.

Powell’s argument is virtually the same as that advanced by the vile schoolmaster in “All Quiet,” whose rhetoric whips his students into gung-ho froth. Perhaps mom and dad don’t want them to go, he remonstrates: “Are your fathers so forgetful of their fatherland that they would let it perish rather than you?” Not a nurturing lot. Yet those responsible for “49th Parallel” also ask us to recognize that the fatherland is in peril, especially Canada: What red-blooded Canadian or American boy could fail to relish punching out a Nazi? Punching is the recourse of choice here. The trouble with propaganda is that, however well intentioned or justified at the time, it later leads to levity or remorse.

Remarque’s short, declarative sentences are a triumph of journalistic precision, packing more images of physical revulsion and mental anguish than the novel’s modest length would indicate. Milestone’s film also pursues accuracy, but it is more self-conscious in its search for style. His innovative use of cranes and other techniques ensure a mobile camera; the scenes of trench warfare, as soldiers charge into machine gun fire, have lost nothing to time — the battle scenes are visually stunning and emotionally taxing. He uses rapid editing to isolate and satirize members of mobs. His tracking of Kemmerich’s boots adumbrates Steven Spielberg’s girl in the red coat in “Schindler’s List.”

Milestone’s camera twice passes through gates, from one space to another. It subdivides the screen in the scene where Paul and his friends study a poster, the men reflected in a mirror so that they seem to be standing to its right. It stops all together for 90 long seconds, showing only unmoving shadows as we hear the postcoital conversation of Paul and a woman he has bought with food. Today a filmmaker might not hesitate to shoot the decapitated lance-corporal (“He runs a few steps more while the blood spouts from his neck like a fountain”), but no one could improve on Milestone’s indelible image of the soldier whose “body drops clean away and only his hands with the stumps of his arms, shot off, now hang on the wires.” Milestone’s subsequent career was a mixed bag, including racist wartime melodramas in the 1940s (“The Purple Heart”), but in 1930, he was the right man for the job.

Maxwell Anderson’s script is, despite a few too many soulful meditations, a textbook example of adapting a famous novel. Remarque’s story employs Conradian breaks in time and internal meditations. Maxwell broke the story down to its components, arranging them chronologically to emphasize the surreal descent from classroom to shelled trenches. Much is missing, but much is preserved. Had the film been made a few years later, after the imposition of the Production Code, the violence, homoerotic barracks life, incontinence, and casual sex would have all disappeared.

The acting is mostly solid, especially the broken-nosed Louis Wolheim, who is incapable of a false moment. Lew Ayres makes a yeoman attempt to hold the picture together as Paul, but his hysteria ventures into the range of Colin Clive on amphetamines. For most of the young actors, “All Quiet” topped their careers, including Ben Alexander (thin and haunted, nothing like the overweight partner to Sergeant Friday on “Dragnet”) and William Bakewell, as Paul’s friend Albert Kropp.

I interviewed Bakewell several years ago. At the time “All Quiet” was shooting, Universal was also making a financially disastrous musical revue, “King of Jazz,” with Paul Whiteman. Bakewell recalled shooting the war by day and hanging out with Bix Beiderbecke, Bing Crosby, and other party animals at night. Call it the magic of old Hollywood, but watching “All Quiet on the Western Front,” you forget they were anywhere near a studio or California.

“49th Parallel” was an important film in its day; it jolted the British film industry, made the case for American intervention, and cemented the team of Powell and the writer Emeric Pressburger. But it’s among their lesser works. Scripted as a conventional thriller in which six Nazis stranded in Canada attempt to cross the 49th Parallel into America, murdering and looting until they are winnowed down to the leader, it offers few thrills. The tension is diluted by unstoppable agitprop and stereotypical characters, of whom the most risible are Laurence Oliver as a jovial French-Canadian trapper who takes his nasal accent to the brink of cuteness and never returns, and Leslie Howard as an English twit who reads Mann and camps in a tepee with a Matisse and a Picasso.

Still, the film boasts location vistas, including an opening montage tracing the titular parallel, and stupendously good photography by Frederick Young, rendered in Criterion’s transfer with a high-definition level of detail. A few performances are outstanding, especially those by two actors who incarnate aspects of Ayers’s distress, proving that even in a pro-war exercise, the memory of “All Quiet on the Western Front” could not be entirely quelled: Anton Walbrook as the leader of a German-Canadian Hutterite commune and Niall MacGinnis as a reluctant Nazi who would rather bake bread for the Hutterites.

The accompanying disc includes an excellent 50-minute television film from 1982 on Powell and Pressburger, audio recordings of Powell dictating sections of his autobiography, and Powell and Pressburger’s “The Volunteer,” a witty 45-minute promotional film for the Fleet Air Arm, in which Ralph Richardson — wearing Othello drag in one scene — tells the story of his incompetent dresser Fred, who becomes a wartime volunteer, saves a plane, and wins a medal from the king, smiling the whole time. War: What fun!

Mr. Giddins’s most recent book, “Natural Selection: Gary Giddins on Comedy, Film, Music, and Books,” is available from Oxford University Press.