TSPDT

Key Production Country: USA
Key Genres: Drama, War, War Drama, Comedy, Adventure, Adventure Drama, Melodrama, Thriller, Psychological Drama, Crime
Key Collaborators: Duncan Mansfield (Editor), Nicolai Remisoff (Production Designer), Robert Rossen (Screenwriter), Charles Lederer (Screenwriter), Roman Bohnen (Character Actor), Walter Catlett (Character Actor), Louis Wolheim (Leading Actor), Maxwell Anderson (Screenwriter), Del Andrews (Screenwriter), Victor Milner (Cinematographer), Tony Gaudio (Cinematographer), Richard Conte (Leading Character Actor)

"A director of more than three dozen movies spanning the silent era to the 1960s. Yet for all his many and varied projects, only a handful of his films have survived the test of time. One of these is All Quiet on the Western Front (1930), Hollywood's most powerful antiwar film… Though not a genius of the stature of Orson Welles, Milestone suffered a fate similar to the great director's. Every project he completed after All Quiet on the Western Front was compared unfavorably to his earlier effort." - The Encyclopedia of Hollywood, 2004

"Lewis Milestone is undoubtedly best remembered for his classic statement against the horrors of war, All Quiet on the Western Front, for which he won an Academy Award. The film, coming so early in his career, raised high hopes that subsequent efforts would expand upon the brilliant potential exhibited in his first effort. In the minds of many, his following work, with the exception of 1931's The Front Page, failed to live up to this early promise… Milestone has yet to receive the critical reassessment that he undoubtedly deserves. Films as diverse as A Walk in the Sun and The Strange Love of Martha Ivers indicate that his later films contain moments of high achievement comparable to his two great early efforts. They also suggest a greater correlation between his technical innovations and his sensitively handled theme of men in groups than many scholars give him credit for." - Stephen L. Hanson (Film Reference)

"In the cinema of Lewis Milestone technique is mistakenly thrust forward as a substitute for style. Almost everywhere one looks, one finds evidence of an admirable cinematic intelligence, often capable of ingenious narrative invention. But far too frequently Milestone's penchant for theoretical experimentation derails rather than sustains the narrative, bending its course into academic culs-de-sac and, at worst, betraying the implicit logic of the director's topical intentions." - Richard T. Jameson (Cinema: A Critical Dictionary, 1980)

"Although suspected of having communist leanings, Milestone was never called to testify before the HUAC, and he was never officially blacklisted. However, for much of the 1950s, he struggled to find film assignments. After a two-year absence, he returned to the big screen in 1952 with both Kangaroo, an adventure with Maureen O’Hara and Peter Lawford shot on location in Australia, and Les Miserables, a respectable adaptation of the Victor Hugo novel." - Michael Barson (Encyclopaedia Britannica)

"Although his initial reputation rested on a monument against war, his Second World War projects settled for the glamour of battle and the standard group portrait of unambiguous soldiers: The North Star, The Purple Heart, A Walk in the Sun, and later, Halls of Montezuma. After the war, the surface excitement flickered out. The Strange Love of Martha Ivers was a rich, neurotic thriller, but Arch of Triumph—again from a Remarque novel—was an overlong commercial failure."” - David Thomson (The New Biographical Dictionary of Film, 2010)

"Milestone was one of Hollywood's most technically accomplished early directors and had a reputation for meticulous pre-production planning and preparation; he continued directing until the 1960s (mostly, by then, in TV), though he too frequently squandered his talents on inferior vehicles." - Turner Classic Movies