Lewis Milestone is known for directing Two Arabian Knights and All Quiet on the Western Front, both of which received Academy Award for Best Director.
77 Facts About Lewis Milestone
2.
Lewis Milestone directed The Front Page, The General Died at Dawn, Of Mice and Men, Ocean's 11, and received the directing credit for Mutiny on the Bounty, though Marlon Brando largely appropriated his responsibilities during its production.
3.
Lewis Milestone enlisted in the Signal Corps in 1917 shortly after America's entry into World War I Stationed in New York City and Washington, DC, he was assigned to its photography unit and trained in aerial photography, assisted on training films and edited documentary combat footage.
4.
In February 1919, Lewis Milestone was discharged from the army and immediately obtained his US citizenship, legally changing his surname from Milstein to Lewis Milestone.
5.
Lewis Milestone arrived in Hollywood in the same financial straits as he had in Hoboken, New Jersey as a Russian emigre in 1913.
6.
Lewis Milestone recalled in later years that in order to sustain himself until his studio job commenced, he worked briefly as a card dealer at an oil field gambling joint.
7.
Lewis Milestone's first credited work was as assistant on King's 1920 Dice of Destiny.
8.
Seven Sinners : One of three films Lewis Milestone directed with Marie Prevost, and a former comedienne with Mack Sennett.
9.
The Caveman : Lewis Milestone delivered his second Prevost comedy The Caveman quickly and efficiently, earning him praise for its "adroit direction".
10.
Lewis Milestone's cinematic rendering of Two Arabian Knights and The Garden of Eden established him as a skilled practitioner of "rough and sophisticated" comedy.
11.
The Racket : Wary of being stereotyped as a comedy director, Lewis Milestone shifted to an emerging genre popularized by director Josef von Sternberg in his gangland fantasy Underworld.
12.
Lewis Milestone was so displeased with the final cut that he asked to have his name removed from the credits.
13.
The most significant technical innovation of All Quiet on the Western Front is the success to which Lewis Milestone integrated the rudimentary sound technology of the early talkies with the advanced visual effects developed during the late silent era.
14.
Lewis Milestone's technique is demonstrated in both the opening tracking shots of the newspaper's printing plant and the confrontation between Molly Malloy and a throng of reporters.
15.
The Front Page received a Best Picture nomination at the Academy Awards and Lewis Milestone was listed among "The Ten Best Directors" by a Film Daily poll of 300 movie critics.
16.
Troubled by film directors declining control within the studio system, Lewis Milestone gave his full support to King Vidor's proposal to organize a filmmaker's cooperative.
17.
Under these conditions, Lewis Milestone embarked upon the final phase of his early sound period, a period in which he experienced difficulty in locating compelling literary material, production support and proper casting.
18.
Rain is based on the short story "Miss Thompson" by Somerset Maugham, which had gone through several adaptations, both for stage and film, before and after Lewis Milestone filmed the work in 1932.
19.
Lewis Milestone was assigned rising star Joan Crawford by Allied Artists, known for her silent film roles as a flapper, to play the prostitute Sadie Thompson.
20.
Attempts by Milestone to make a film about the Russian Revolution, based on Stalinist Ilya Ehrenburg's The Life and Death of Nikolai Kourbov, and an adaptation of H G Wells's The Shape of Things to Come proposed by Alexander Korda, neither project materialized.
21.
In lieu of these unrealized films, Lewis Milestone proceeded to make "a string of three insignificant studio pieces" from 1934 to 1936.
22.
Lewis Milestone accepted a lucrative deal to film a John Gilbert vehicle and left United Artists for Harry Cohn's Columbia Pictures.
23.
Lewis Milestone's largely improvised film featured an ensemble of Columbia's character actors, among them Victor McLaglen and The Three Stooges.
24.
Lewis Milestone next embarked on two films for Paramount, his only musicals of his career, but relatively undistinguished in their execution.
25.
Lewis Milestone described them as "insignificant": Paris in Spring and Anything Goes.
26.
Lewis Milestone was assigned Paris in Spring, a romantic musical farce.
27.
Lewis Milestone's work is conscientious, but he showed little enthusiasm for the genre.
28.
Lewis Milestone's adversary is the complex and multidimensional Chinese warlord General Yang played by Akim Tamiroff.
29.
Lewis Milestone's brings to the adventure-melodrama a "bravura" exposition of his cinematic style and outstanding technical skills: an impressive use of tracking, a 5-way split-screen and a widely noted use of a match dissolve that serves to transition action from a billiard table to a white door handle leading to an adjoining room, "one of the most expert match shots on record" according to historian John Baxter.
30.
The Night of Nights : In an effort to remain employed, Lewis Milestone accepted Paramount's offer to direct Pat O'Brien in a show business programmer The Night of Nights.
31.
Lewis Milestone had been favorably impressed with both Steinbeck's novella Of Mice and Men and its 1938 stage production, a morality play set during the Dust Bowl, and he embraced the film project with enthusiasm.
32.
Lewis Milestone enlisted Steinbeck support for the film and the author "essentially approved the script" as did the Hays Office who made only "minor" changes to the scenario.
33.
Lewis Milestone maintains the " anti-omniscient" detachment that Steinbeck applied to his novella with a cinematic viewpoint that matches the author's literary realism.
34.
Lewis Milestone placed great emphasis on visual and sound motifs that serve to develop the characters and themes.
35.
Critic Kingley Canham points to the importance Lewis Milestone placed on his sound motifs:.
36.
In collaboration with Dutch filmmaker Joris Ivens, working with The Government Film Service in 1940, Lewis Milestone depicted the struggle of Russian villagers to resist the German invasion of the Soviet Union.
37.
Lewis Milestone returned to Warner Brothers in a one-film contract after seventeen years, his last feature with the studio the silent movie The Caveman.
38.
Lewis Milestone employs an "anti-suspense" device, that shows the ultimate carnage suffered by the inhabitants, then reveals the story in flashback.
39.
Lewis Milestone was ambivalent regarding the cast and their characterizations for Edge of Darkness.
40.
In one exceptional scene, Lewis Milestone reveals the dramatic epiphany experienced by the villagers when the Nazis publicly burn the local schoolteacher's library collection.
41.
Lewis Milestone uses a tracking shot to follow the aged comic figure Karp as he rides his cart through the village, a device Lewis Milestone uses to introduce the film's key characters.
42.
An extended sequence portrays the villagers celebrating the harvest with food, song and dance, resembling more an ethnic operetta, with Lewis Milestone using an overhead camera to record the circular symmetry of the happy revelers.
43.
Lewis Milestone was removed from the project when he experienced an emergency appendectomy during filming.
44.
Lewis Milestone contributed some scenes in this United Artists production that was ultimately credited to director John Brahm.
45.
Lewis Milestone invested $30,000 of his own savings, a measure of his enthusiasm for the literary property and its cinematic potential.
46.
Lewis Milestone's trademark handling of tracking shots is evident in the action scenes.
47.
The Russian-born Lewis Milestone, always a liberal intellectual with Leftist inclinations, was a natural target for the witch hunters of the HUAC.
48.
In 1948, the anti-communist writer Myron Fagan implied that Lewis Milestone was a Red sympathizer, [a claim made explicit] by Hedda Hopper in her nationally syndicated Hollywood column.
49.
Unlike the Hollywood Ten and many others, Lewis Milestone was able to keep working.
50.
The movies that Lewis Milestone directed in the late Forties represent "the last distinctive period" in the director's creative output.
51.
Lewis Milestone's first effort after completing his series of wartime propaganda pictures was a Hal B Wallis production, The Strange Love of Martha Ivers, based on the story "Love Lies Bleeding" by John Patrick.
52.
In collaboration with screenwriter Robert Rossen and some outstanding artistic support, Lewis Milestone directed The Strange Love of Martha Ivers, a "striking addition" to the post-war Hollywood film genre of film noir, combining a grim 19th century romanticism with the cinematic methods of German Expressionism.
53.
Rossen and Lewis Milestone's script provided the capable cast, starring Barbara Stanwyck, Van Heflin and Kirk Douglas with a "taut, harsh" narrative that critiqued postwar urban America as corrupt and irredeemable.
54.
Lewis Milestone left Paramount and moved to the rising independent Enterprise Studios.
55.
Lewis Milestone accordingly excised "the bars, brothels and operating rooms" as well as the sordid ending from the screenplay.
56.
Lewis Milestone delivered a lengthy four-hour version of Arch of Triumph that had been pre-approved by Enterprise.
57.
Lewis Milestone cannot be completely absolved of responsibility for the disaster.
58.
Lewis Milestone continued with the studio, accepting an offer to produce and direct a comedy vehicle for Dana Andrews and Lilli Palmer: No Minor Vices.
59.
Lewis Milestone departed Enterprise and joined novelist John Steinbeck at Republic Pictures to make a film version of The Red Pony.
60.
Composer Aaron Copland's highly regarded film score perhaps surpasses Lewis Milestone's visual rendering of Steinbeck's story.
61.
Lewis Milestone moved to 20th Century Fox where he made three films: Halls of Montezuma, Kangaroo and Les Miserables.
62.
Lewis Milestone denied that Halls of Montezuma addressed his "personal beliefs" on the nature of war and had agreed to make the movie strictly as a financial expedient.
63.
Lewis Milestone reverts to the formulaic war movie with a standard "Give 'em Hell" climax, accompanied by the strains of the Marine Hymn.
64.
Lewis Milestone attempted to evade the poor literary vehicle by concentrating on "the landscape, flora and fauna" of the Australian outback at the expense of dialogue.
65.
The Technicolor cinematography by Charles G Clarke achieved a documentary-like quality, incorporating Milestone hallmark panning and tracking methods.
66.
Les Miserables : For the last of his three pictures at 20th Century Fox, Lewis Milestone delivered a 104-minute version of Victor Hugo's sprawling romance novel Les Miserables.
67.
Lewis Milestone traveled abroad to England and Italy seeking work during the Fifties where he directed a biography of a diva, filmed an action World War II drama as well as an international romance-melodrama.
68.
Lewis Milestone accepted an offer from Warner Brothers to produce and direct a picture for Dorchester Studios, Ocean's 11 a comedy-heist feature.
69.
Burdened with a "preposterous" screenplay by Harry Brown and Charles Lederer, Lewis Milestone delivered a film that equivocates between a pure satire of American acquisitiveness or its celebration.
70.
The 65-year-old Lewis Milestone assumed directorial duties in February 1961 after filmmaker Carol Reed became disillusioned with the project due to inadequate scripting, abominable weather and interpretive disputes with leading man Marlon Brando.
71.
Lewis Milestone was tasked with bringing good order and discipline to the production, and to curb the "mercurial" Brando, who had clashed with Reed.
72.
Rather than inheriting a largely completed film, Lewis Milestone discovered that only a few scenes had been shot.
73.
Lewis Milestone found television productions unappealing, but returned to that medium after completing Mutiny on the Bounty, directing the series Arrest and Trial and for The Richard Boone Show, both in 1963.
74.
Lewis Milestone experienced declining health in the Sixties and suffered a stroke in 1978 shortly after the death of his wife of 43 years, Kendall Lee.
75.
Lewis Milestone is interred in the Westwood Village Memorial Park Cemetery in Los Angeles.
76.
At the outset of talking pictures, the 29-year-old Lewis Milestone brought to bear his talents for an adaptation of Erich Maria Remarque's compelling anti-war novel All Quiet on the Western Front, which stands as the director's magnum opus.
77.
Lewis Milestone is almost the classic example of the uncommitted director.