Lewis Milestone

Lewis Milestone directed All Quiet on the Western Front, the film that brought the German soldier's view of the First World War to an American audience and was banned by the Nazis. He was born Leib Milstein in Chisinau, then in the Russian Empire, sent to Belgium to study engineering, and emigrated to the United States in 1913. He served in the US Army Signal Corps making training films, which is where he learned the trade. His adaptation of Remarque's novel in 1930 was made with thousands of extras on a California ranch, with trenches dug to scale and a moving camera on a crane running the length of them, and it does not soften anything: the schoolmaster who recruits the class, the latrine conversations, Paul killing a man in a shell hole and spending the night with the body, and the ending with the hand reaching for a butterfly. It won the Academy Award for best picture. Goebbels sent brownshirts to release mice in Berlin cinemas showing it, and the film was banned in Germany within weeks and later in Italy and Austria. He directed forty more films across five decades, including Of Mice and Men and Ocean's Eleven, and was grey-listed during the McCarthy period after refusing to testify. He had already won the first Academy Award for comedy direction in 1929. The German ban was lifted in 1952. Remarque, whose novel it was, had his own citizenship revoked and his sister was executed in Berlin in 1943, the judge telling her that her brother had escaped but she would not.

• Lived: 1895 CE – 1980 CE
• Nationality: American
• Roles: artist