Lewis Milestone

Lewis Milestone
Milestone in 1930
Born	Leib Milstein September 30, 1895 Chişinău, Bessarabia Governorate, Russian Empire (now Moldova)
Died	September 25, 1980 (aged 84) Los Angeles, California, U.S.
Occupation	Director screenwriter producer
Years active	1918–1964
Spouse(s)	Kendall Lee (m. 1926 – died 1978)

Lewis Milestone (born Leib Milstein (Russian: Лейб Мильштейн);^[1] September 30, 1895 – September 25, 1980) was a Russian-American film director. He is known for directing Two Arabian Knights (1927) and All Quiet on the Western Front (1930), both of which received Academy Awards for Best Director. He also directed The Front Page (1931 – nomination), The General Died at Dawn (1936), Of Mice and Men (1939), Ocean's 11 (1960), and received the directing credit for Mutiny on the Bounty (1962), though Marlon Brando largely appropriated his responsibilities during its production.^[2]

Early life

Milestone was born Lev (or Leib) Milstein near the Russian Black Sea port of Odessa, Ukraine into a wealthy and distinguished family of Jewish heritage.^[3]

In 1900, when Milestone was five, his father moved his household to the provincial town of Kishinev, capital of Bessarabia of the Russian Empire (now Chişinău, Moldova). Milestone's primary education at Jewish schools reflected his parent's liberal social and political orientation, and included a study of several languages. Milestone's early love of theater and his desire to follow the dramatic arts was discouraged by his family, who dispatched their son to Mittweida, Saxony to study engineering.^[4]

Neglecting his classes to attend local theater productions, Milestone failed his coursework. Intent on pursuing a theatrical career, he purchased a one-way transatlantic ticket to the United States, arriving in Hoboken, New Jersey on 14 November 1913, shortly after his eighteenth birthday.^[5][6][7]

Struggling to support himself in New York City, Milestone worked odd jobs—"janitor, door-to-door salesman, lace-machine operator"—before finding a position as portrait and theater photographer in 1915. He enlisted in the Signal Corps in 1917 shortly after America's entry into World War I. Stationed in New York City and Washington, D. C., he was assigned to its photography unit and trained in aerial photography, assisted on training films and edited documentary combat footage. His cohorts at the Signal Corps included future Hollywood directors Josef von Sternberg and Victor Fleming.^[11][12]

In February 1919, Milestone was discharged from the army and immediately obtained his US citizenship, legally changing his surname from Milstein to Milestone. An acquaintance from the Signal Corps, Jesse D. Hampton, now an independent film producer, secured Milestone an entry level position in Hollywood as an assistant editor.^[13][14]

Hollywood Apprenticeship 1919-1924

Milestone arrived in Hollywood in the same financial straits as he had in Hoboken, New Jersey as a Russian émigré in 1913. He recalled in later years that in order to sustain himself until his studio job commenced, he worked briefly as a card dealer at a oil field gambling joint.^[15][16]

Despite a number of mundane assignments from Hampton—at $20 per week—Milestone's trajectory from assistant editor toward director proceeded steadily. In 1920 he was tapped to serve as general assistant to director Henry King at Pathé Exchange.His first credited work was as assistant on King's 1920 Dice of Destiny.^[17][18][19]

During the next six years Milestone "took on jobs in any capacity available" with the Hollywood film industry, working as editor for director-producer Thomas Ince, as general assistant and co-author on film scripts by William A. Seiter and as a gag-writer for comedian Harold Lloyd. In 1923 he followed Seiter to Warner Brothers studios as assistant director on Little Church Around the Corner (1923), assuming most of the filmmaking tasks on the production.^[20][21] Milestone's reputation as an effective "film doctor" skilled at salvaging movies was such that Warners began offering his services to other studios at inflated rates.^[22]

Director: Silent Era, 1925-1929

By 1925, Milestone was writing numerous screen treatments for films at Universal and Warners studios, among them The Mad Whirl, Dangerous Innocence, The Teaser and Bobbed Hair. The same year, Milestone approached Jack Warner with a proposition: he would provide the producer with a story gratis if he was allowed to direct it. Warner agreed to sponsor his directorial debut, Seven Sinners (1925).^[23]

Seven Sinners (1925): One of three films Milestone directed with Marie Prevost, and a former comedienne with Mack Sennett. Jack Warner appointed Darryl F. Zanuck as screenwriter. A "semi-sophisticated" comedy incorporating elements of slapstick, Seven Sinners proved sufficiently successful with critics and the public to warrant Milestone, now 29-years-old, additional directing assignments.^[24][25]

The Caveman (1926): Milestone delivered his second Prevost comedy The Caveman quickly and efficiently, earning him praise for its "adroit direction". During production, Milestone broke his contract with the studio over his exploitation as a "film doctor": Warners sued for damages and won, forcing Milestone to file for bankruptcy. The Caveman would be his last film for Warners until Edge of Darkness in 1943. Undeterred, Milestone was quickly acquired by Paramount Pictures.^[26]

The New Klondike (1926): A sports-themed drama based on a Ring Lardner story was filmed on location in Florida. Despite a "lukewarm" response from critics, Paramount was enthusiastic regarding Milestone's prospects, showcasing him with other young studio talent in the promotional Fascinating Youth (1926). A subsequent contretemps with screen star Gloria Swanson on the set of Fine Manners (1926) led to Milestone walking off the project. Director Richard Rosson received credit when he completed the picture.^[27]

Two Arabian Knights (1927): Considered Milestones most outstanding work during the silent era, Two Arabian Knights was inspired by he Anderson-Stallings stage play What Price Glory? (1924), and director Raoul Walsh's 1924 screen adaption. The first film in a four-year contract with Howard Hughes' The Caddo Company—and his only film of 1927— it garnered Milestone an Academy Award for best comedy direction in 1927, prevailing over Charlie Chaplin's The Circus (1927). Set during World War I, doughboys William Boyd and Louis Wolheim, and love-object Mary Astor form a comic triangle.^[28][29]

The Garden of Eden (1927): Made under a Caddo releasing agreement with Universal Pictures, The Garden of Eden, "a variation on the Cinderella story...of acidic sophistication", was adapted by screenwriter Hans Kraly and resembles, in both script and visual production, the works of Ernst Lubitsch. The project benefited from the lavish sets designed by William Cameron Menzies and the cinematography of John Arnold. The film stars the popular Corinne Griffith.^[30][31] Milestone's cinematic rendering of Two Arabian Knights and The Garden of Eden established him as a skilled practitioner of "rough and sophisticated" comedy.^[32]

The Racket (1928): Wary of being stereotyped as a comedy director, Milestone shifted to an emerging genre popularized by director Josef von Sternberg in his gangland fantasy Underworld (1927).^[33] The Racket, a "taut and realistic" depiction of a mobster-controlled police department distinguished Milestone as an able practitioner of the genre, but its reception was blunted by a flood of less superior gangster films released in the late 1920s. Nonetheless The Racket was nominated for Best Picture at the 1928 Academy Awards.^[34]

Early Sound Era: 1929-1936

New York Nights (1929): Segue to Sound

Milestone's first foray into sound productions, New York Nights proved inauspicous. A vehicle for silent screen icon Norma Talmadge (spouse to producer Joseph Schenck), Milestone attempted to accommodate United Artists' desire to blend "show-biz" and gangster genres in an adaption of "the justly forgotten" Broadway production entitled "Tin Pan Alley". Film historian Joseph Millichap appraises Milestone's effort:

"In several ways New York Nights is best considered with Milestone's silent efforts, as it seems an obviously unimportant transitional piece. Like many early sound films it is shot from a few camera settings, and it is full of static scenes in which the cast is all too obviously speaking into hidden microphones. Milestone was so displeased with the final cut that he asked to have his name removed from the credits..."^[35]

Millichap adds that "the film is not worth considering as Milestone's first sound work."^[36][37]

Chef-d'œuvre: All Quiet on the Western Front (1930)

Milestone's anti-war picture All Quiet on the Western Front is widely recognized as his directorial masterpiece and ranks as one of the most compelling dramatizations of soldiers in combat during the The Great War.^[38] Adapted from Erich Maria Remarque's classic 1929 novel, Milestone conveyed cinematically the "grim realism and anti-war themes" that characterize the literary work. Universal studio's head of production Carl Laemmle, Jr, purchased the film rights so as to capitalize on the international success of Remarque's book.^[39][40]

All Quiet on the Western Front presents the war from the perspective of a unit of patriotic young German soldiers who become disillusioned at the horrors of trench warfare. Actor Lew Ayres portrays the naive and sensitive youth Paul Baumer.

In collaboration with screenwriters Maxwell Anderson, Del Andrews and George Abbott, Milestone (uncredited) crafted a scenario and script that "reproduces the terse, tough dialogue" of Remarque's novel, so as to "expose war for what it is, and not glorify it."^[43] Originally conceived as a silent film, Milestone filmed both a silent and a talkie version, shooting them together in sequence.^[44]

The most outstanding technical innovation of All Quiet on the Western Front is the success to which Milestone integrated the rudimentary sound technology of the early talkies with the advanced visual effects developed during the late silent era. Applying post-synchronization of the sound recordings, Milestone was at liberty to "shoot the way we've always shot...it was that simple. All the tracking shots were done with a silent camera." In one of the film's most disturbing sequences, Milestone uses tracking shots and sound effects to graphically show the devastating effects of artillery and machine guns on advancing troops.^[45][46][47]

The picture met with immense critical and popular approval, earning a Best Picture Oscar and a second Best Director award for Milestone.^[48][49]

All Quiet on the Western Front established Milestone as a genuine talent in the film industry. Howard Hughes rewarded him with a prime property for adaption: Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur 1928 play, The Front Page.^[50]

The Front Page (1931)

One of the most sensational and influential pictures of 1931, The Front Page introduced the Hollywood archetype of the hard-boiled and fast-talking reporter in Milestone's depiction of the backroom denizens of Chicago newspaper tabloids. The film's script retained the "sparkling dialogue [and] hard, fast and ruthless pace" that characterized Ben Hecht's and Charles MacArthur's stage production of 1928.^[51] The Front Page set the foundation for a virtual "journalism genre" in the 1930s, imitated by other studios and spawning a number of remakes, among them Howard Hawks' His Girl Friday (1940) and Billy Wilder's The Front Page (1974).^[52]

The selection of Pat O'Brien to play the hard-bitten reporter "Hildy" Johnson was disappointing to Milestone, whose request to cast James Cagney or Clark Gable in the role was vetoed by producer Howard Hughes, in favor of O'Brien, who had performed in the Chicago stage production The Front Page.^[53]

More than a product of Milestone's fidelity to the play's lively and profane dialogue, he endowed the work with an Expressionistic cinematic style. Biographer Joseph Millichap evaluates Milestone's technique:

Milestone employs "several framing devices, a quick cross-cutting between scenes, a moving camera intercut with close-ups, juxtaposition of angles and distances, and a number of trick shots...Overall, the deft combination of Realistic mise-en-scene with an Expressionistic camera draws the best out of the realistic, melodramatic and comedic elements of the original [play]...creating the most cinematically interesting, if not the most entertaining, version of The Front Page.^[54][55][56]

Both the opening tracking shots of the newspaper's printing plant and the confrontation between Molly Malloy (Mae Clarke) and a phalanx of reporters demonstrate Milestone's mastery of the technique.^[57][58]

The Front Page received a Best Picture nomination at the Academy Awards and Milestone was listed among the "The Ten Best Directors" by a Film Daily poll of 300 movie critics.^[59]

Troubled by film directors declining control within the studio system, Milestone gave his full support to King Vidor's proposal to organize a filmmaker's cooperative. Supporters for a Screen Directors Guild included Frank Borzage, Howard Hawks, Ernst Lubitsch, Rouben Mamoulian and William Wellman, among others. By 1938, the guild was incorporated, representing 600 directors and assistant directors.^[60][61]

Paramount Pictures was experiencing a financial crisis during the mid-Thirties that inhibited their commitments to their European film stylists such as Josef von Sternberg, Ernst Lubitsch and Milestone.^[62] Under these conditions, Milestone embarked upon the final phase of his early sound period, a phase that would expose his difficulties in locating compelling literary material, production support and proper casting. The first among these films was Rain (1932).^[63][64][65]

Rain (1932): The short story Miss Thompson by Somerset Maugham has gone through several adaptive permutations, both for stage and film, before and after Milestone filmed the work in 1932.^[66][67]

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. Her suitability for part has been widely scrutinized, and according to film critic Joseph Millichap "almost every comment on the film says she was miscast." Crawford herself registered disappointment with her interpretation of the role.^[68][69]

Milestone was not encumbered as yet by the Production Code, and his portrayal of the overwrought Puritan missionary Reverend Davidson (Walter Huston) and his rape of Thompson blends violence with sexual and religious symbolism through adroit intercutting.^[70] Termed "slow and stage-bound"^[71] and "stiff and stagey",^[72] Milestone offered his own assessment of Rain:

"I thought [audiences] were ready for a dramatic form; that now we could present a three-act play on the screen. But I was wrong. People will not listen to narrative dialogue. They will not accept the kind of exposition you use on the stage. I started the picture slowly, too slowly, I'm afraid. You can't start a picture slowly. You must show things happening."^[73]

Hallelujah, I'm a Bum (1933): Released during the depths of the Great Depression, Hallelujah, I'm a Bum was an attempt by United Artists to reintroduce early talkie singer Al Jolson after his three-year hiatus from film roles.^[74] Based on a Ben Hecht story, with a score by Rogers and Hart featuring innovative "rhythmic dialogue" delivered in song-song, its sentimental and romantic theme of a New York City tramp met with indifference or dismay among moviegoers.^[75] Film historian George Millichap observed that "the problem of this entertainment fantasy was that it brushed aside just enough reality to confuse its audience. Americans in the winter of 1933 were not in the mood to be advised that the life of a hobo was the road to true happiness, especially by a star earning $25,000 a week."^[76] Milestone's miscalculated effort to make a "socially conscious" musical was generally ill-received at its New York opening and Milestone was left struggling to locate a more serious film project.^[77]

Attempts by Milestone to make a film about the Russian Revolution (working title: Red Square), based on Stalinist Ilya Ehrenberg's The Life and Death of Nikolai Kourbov (1923), and an adaption of H. G. Wells's The Shape of Things to Come (1933) proposed by Alexander Korda, neither project materialized.^[78][79] In lieu of these unrealized films, Milestone proceeded to make "a string of three insignificant studio pieces" from 1934 to 1936.^[80]

The Captain Hates the Sea (1934): Milestone accepted a lucrative deal to film a John Gilbert vehicle and left United Artists for Harry Cohn's Columbia Pictures.^[81] The Captain Hates the Sea was conceived and recognized by critics as a spoof of the 1932 star-studded anthology, Grand Hotel, which showcased Hollywood's emerging screen legends Greta Garbo, Joan Crawford and John Barrymore. Milestone's largely improvised film featured an ensemble of Columbia's character actors, among them Victor McLaglen and The Three Stooges. Described by critic Geroge Millichap as "a very uneven, disconnected, rambling piece", the cost overruns on The Captain Hates the Sea—complicated by heavy drinking by the cast members—soured relations between Milestone and Cohen. The movie is notable as the final film of Gilbert's career.^[82][83]

Milestone next embarked on two films for Paramount, his only musicals of his career, but relatively undistinguished in their execution. Milestone himself described them as "insignificant": Paris in Spring (1935) and Anything Goes (1936).^[84]

Paris in Spring (1935) and Anything Goes (1936): Milestone was assigned Paris in Spring, a romantic musical farce. Leading man Tullio Carminati had just completed the operetta-like One Night of Love (1934) with Grace Moore at Columbia studios. Paramount paired their own Mary Ellis with Carminati, and it was Milestone's task to make a picture rivaling the Columbia success.^[85][86] Aside from a credible replica of Paris created by art directors Hans Dreier and Ernst Fegte, Milestone's camera work failed to overcome "the essential flatness of the tale."^[87][88][89]

Anything Goes, a musical starring Bing Crosby and Ethel Merman and adapted from his 1934 Cole Porter Broadway musical, enjoyed the advantage of some enduring numbers, including I Get a Kick Out of You, You're the Top, and the title song. Milestone's work is conscientious, but he showed little enthusiasm for the genre.^[90][91]

Milestone's personal life was more gratifying than his artistic endeavors in the mid-Thirties. In 1935 he and Kendall Lee Glaezner, an actress whose professional name was Kendall Lee, were married. She and Milestone had been a couple since they met on the set of his 1932 film Rain, in which Lee had played the role of Mrs. MacPhail. They remained married until Mrs. Milestone's death in 1978. They did not have any children. Biographer George Millichap reports that "over the years the Milestones were the most gracious of Hollywood hosts, giving parties that attracted the cream of the film community."^[92]

The General Died at Dawn (1936)

Following his two lackluster musicals, Milestone returned to form in 1936 with The General Died at Dawn, a film that in theme, setting and style is reminiscent of director Josef von Sternberg's The Shanghai Express (1932).^[93][94]

The screenplay written by Leftist playwright Clifford Odets is derived from an obscure pulp-influenced manuscript by Charles G. Booth. Set in the Far East it carried a sociopolitical theme: the "tension between democracy and authoritarianism."^[95] Actor Gary Cooper plays the American mercenary O'Hara, a man possessing genuine republican commitments and whose character Milestone adroitly establishes in the opening frames.^[96] His adversary is the complex and multidimensional Chinese warlord General Yang played by Akim Tamiroff. Actress Madeleine Carroll is cast as the young missionary Judy Perrie ``trapped between divided social forces" who struggles to overcome her diffidence and ultimately joins O"Hara in supporting a peasant revolt against Yang.^[97][98]

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 a adjoining room, "one of the most expert match shots on record" according to historian John Baxter. ^[99][100]

Though disparaged by Milestone in retrospect, The General Died at Dawn is perhaps one of the "masterpieces" of 1930s Hollywood. Milestone was well-served by cinematographer Victor Milner, art directors Hans Dreier and Ernst Fegte, and composer Werner Janssen in creating "his most exquisite and exciting if not most meaningful examination of social friction in a human context."^[101][102]

Directorial Hiatus: 1936-1939

After completing The General Died at Dawn, Milestone encountered a series of professional setbacks—"unsuccessful projects, broken contracts and lawsuits"—that placed his film career in abeyance for three years.^[103][104]

A number of serious projects which Milestone did pursue, including directing a film version of Vincent Sheean's Personal History (1935) (later directed as Foreign Correspondent (1940) by Alfred Hitchcock) went unfulfilled, as did a screenplay written by Milestone and Clifford Odets for a film adaption of the Sidney Kingsley Broadway hit Dead End (1935) for Sam Goldwyn that went to William Wyler, a director, like Milestone, of literary texts.^[105][106]

The Night of Nights (1939): In an effort to remain employed, Milestone accepted Paramount's offer to direct Pat O'Brien in a show business programmer The Night of Nights. A "second-line" studio production, the film was best served by Hans Dreier's stage settings.^[107][108]

After signing a contract with Hal Roach in late 1937 to film a version of Eric S. Hatch's novel Road Show (1934), Milestone was dismissed by the producer for straying from the comedic elements of the work. Litigation ensued, and the matter was resolved when Roach presented Milestone with another project: to adapt to film John Steinbeck's novella Of Mice and Men (1937).^[109][110]

Of Mice and Men (1939)

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.^[111] Producer Hal Roach hoped to emulate the anticipated success of director John Ford's adaption of another Steinbeck work, The Grapes of Wrath (1940). Both films drew upon the political and creative developments that emerged in the Great Depression, rather than the approaching 1940s and the impending conflict in Europe.^[112][113] 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.^[114]

The film opens with what was at the time an innovative device, a visual prologue that sets the "mood, tone [and] themes", identifying the lead characters, George and Lennie (played by Burgess Meredith and Lon Chaney, Jr., respectively) as itinerant laborers, even before the credits are displayed.^[115] As a cinematic interpretation of a literary work, Of Mice and Men managed to convincingly blend the elements of each art form. Milestone maintains the " anti-omniscient" detachment that Steinbeck applied to his novella with a cinematic viewpoint that matches the author's literary realism.^[116] Milestone placed great emphasis on visual and sound motifs that serve to develop the characters and themes . As such, he conferred carefully on image motifs with art director Nicolai Remisoff, and cameraman Norbert Brodine and persuaded composer Aaron Copland to provide the musical score.^[117] Critic Kingley Canham points to the importance Milestone placed on his sound motifs:

"...the [musical] score, one of several scored for Milestone by Aaron Copland, played a decisive role in the form of the film: natural sounds and dialogue sequences were interpolated with the music to act as complimentary motifs to the visual and narrative development."^[118]

The picture garnered Copland nominations for both Best Musical Score and Best Original Score.^[119]

Milestone, who preferred to cast "relative unknowns"—in this case influenced by budgetary restraints—Lon Chaney, Jr. to play the child-like Lennie Small and Burgess Meredith who plays his keeper George Milton. Actress Betty Field, in her first important feature, plays Mae, the faithless spouse of straw boss Curly ( Bob Steele).^[120][121]

Though nominated for Best Picture of 1939, Of Mice and Men had the shared misfortune of competing with a veritable pantheon of Hollywood films: The Wizard of Oz (Victor Fleming), Stagecoach (John Ford), Goodbye, Mr. Chips (Sam Wood), Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (Frank Capra), Dark Victory (Edmund Goulding), Love Affair (Leo McCarey), Ninotchka (Ernst Lubitsch), Wuthering Heights (William Wyler), and the winner, Gone with the Wind (Victor Fleming)."^[122]

Despite critical accolades for Milestone's Of Mice and Men, the tragic narrative that ends in the mercy-killing of the doomed Lennie at the hands of his comrade George was less than gratifying to audiences, and it failed at the box office.^[123]

Lucky Partners (1940) and My Life with Caroline (1941): Milestone's reputation as a director was undiminished among Hollywood executives after Of Mice and Men, and he was signed by RKO to direct two light comedies, both of which were vehicles for Ronald Colman .^[125] Provided with his own production unit, he quickly satisfied his contractual obligations, directing Ginger Rogers in her post- Astaire period in Lucky Partners, and marshaling Anna Lee in the "totally disarming frolic" in My Life With Caroline.^[126]

My Life With Caroline was released in August 1941, just four months before Pearl Harbor and America's entry as a belligerent in World War II. ^[127]

World War II Hollywood Propaganda: 1942-1945

Milestone's reputation as the director of All Quiet on the Western Front (1930), though an emphatically pacifist and anti-war film, positioned the director as an asset in Hollywood's "patriotic and profitable" production of anti-fascist war films. ^[128] Film curator Charles Silver noted Milestone's "facility for capturing battle's intrinsic spectacle...there is an inevitable pageantry to cinematic warfare that works against whatever pacifist intentions the filmmaker may have." Milestone himself reflected "how can you make a pacifist film without showing the violence of war?"^[129] Responding to the "general climate of opinion in wartime Hollywood" Milestone abandoned any reservations as to his commitments to the US war effort and offered his services to the film industry's propaganda units.^[130]

Our Russian Front (1942): Our Russian Front is a war documentary assembled from 15,000 feet of newsreel footage taken on the Russian front by Soviet citizen-journalists during Nazi invasion of the USSR in 1941. In collaboration with Dutch filmmaker Joris Ivens, working with The Government Film Service in 1940, Milestone depicted the struggle of Russian villagers to resist the German invasion of the Soviet Union. Actor Walter Huston narrated the documentary and the composer Dmitri Tiomkin provided the film score. ^[131][132]

Edge of Darkness (1943): Milestone returned to Warner Brothers in a one-film contract after seventeen years, his last feature with the studio the silent movie The Caveman (1926).^[133] The first of three successful films he made in collaboration with screenwriter Robert Rossen, Edge of Darkness signaled a change in Milestone's attitude toward his war films, both professionally and personally.^[134] The director of the anti-war film All Quiet on the Western Front (1930) made this explicit in 1943:

"Edge of Darkness has done away with disillusionment. We know the enemy we are fighting and we are facing the stern realities of the present war. The moral of Edge of Darkness is 'United we stand, divided we fall.' That is the great lesson of our time and the keystone for victory for the democratic cause."^[135]

Edge of Darkness is Milestone's fulsome demonstration of these sentiments that exposed "the severe limitations" created by Hollywood's self-imposed propaganda requirements.^[136] Film critics Charles Higham and Joel Greenberg comment on this phenomenon:

"The majority of films set in Europe [during World War II] were concerned mainly with emphasizing two things: Nazi cruelty to civilians and the latter's organized clandestine resistance...set usually in a small town or village, these films were well-meaning but stereotyped exercises in predictable propaganda. Occasionally, in Milestone's Edge of Darkness, they did achieve eloquence and power, but they suffered from the too frequent casting of Americans as Europeans, and from an ultimate sameness that detracted from their propaganda value."^[137]

Edge of Darkness unfolds in a remote Norwegian village where its inhabitants are brutalized by Nazi occupiers, inspiring collective resistance among the townspeople who liquidate their oppressors in a single, violent uprising. Milestone employs an "anti-suspense" device, that shows the ultimate carnage suffered by the inhabitants, then reveals the story in flashback. A melodramatic film fantasy, Milestone's "thematic oversimplification", reflected Hollywood's penchant for melodramatic propaganda.^[138]

Milestone was ambivalent regarding the cast and their characterizations for Edge of Darkness. The picture stars Errol Flynn and Ann Sheridan, who had been costars in the western Dodge City, here portraying Norwegian freedom fighters. Helmut Dantine appears as the sociopathic Nazi commandant. Biographer George Millichap reports that "the frequent rasp of New York accents from Norwegians and Nazis" distracts from the picture's authenticity. A number of the players, including Flynn, were embroiled in personal and legal issues that detracted from their work on the production.^[139]

Milestone's overall cinematic execution renders the story adequately in a realist style, but lacks his bravura use of the camera.^[140] In one exceptional scene, Milestone reveals the dramatic epiphany experienced by the villagers when the Nazis publicly burn the local schoolteacher's library collection. Through expert cutting and panning, Milestone documents a collective transformation that will spur the outraged residents to plan an armed uprising against their oppressors.^[141]

Edge of Darkness delivered effective war propaganda to Warner Brothers studios and fulfilled Milestone's contract. His next project would be set on the Eastern Front in a Sam Goldwyn production at RKO: The North Star (1943).^[142]

The North Star (1943): The North Star is a war propaganda picture dramatizing the devastation wrought by the German invasion of the USSR on the inhabitants of a Ukrainian farming collective. US President Roosevelt dispatched Lowell Mellett, the chief of the Bureau of Motion Pictures of the Office of War Information to enlist producer Sam Goldwyn in making a film celebrating America's wartime alliance with Russia. Milestone's "lavish" production support included playwright-screenwriter Lillian Hellman, cinematographer James Wong Howe, set designer William Cameron Menzies, film score composer Aaron Copland, lyricist Ira Gershwin and a competent cast of players.^[143][144]

The Hellman script and Milestone's cinematic compositions establish the bucolic settings and social unity that characterizes the collective's inhabitants. Milestone uses a tracking shot to follow the aged comic figure Karp (Walter Brennan) as he rides his cart through the village, a device Milestone uses to introduce the film's key characters. An extended sequence portrays the villagers celebrating the harvest with food, song and dance, resembling more an ethnic operetta, with Milestone using an overhead camera to record the circular symmetry of the happy revelers.^{[145][146][147]} Milestone displays his "technical mastery" both through image and sound as villagers discern the approach of German bombers announcing the shattering of their peaceful existence. Portions of this sequence resemble documentary war footage, recalling Milestone's work in All Quiet on the Western Front (1930) and Joris Ivens The Spanish Earth (1937).^[148]

Beyond this point, the necessities of Hollywood war propaganda asserts itself, shifting the focus to German atrocities.^[149] Hellman's screenplay provides for a complex treatment only for the German aristocrat and surgeon Dr. Otto von Harden {Erich von Stroheim), who, though dragooned into service, rationalizes Nazi atrocities. Milestone presents him in the Gothic style of German expressionism.^[150][151] Russian doctor Dr. Pavel Grigorich Kurin (Walter Huston), Harden's moral opposite and nemesis, ultimately dispatches his Nazi prisoner. Biographer George Millichap observed that "Single-minded hatred of Fascist evil countenanced action, shooting a prisoner [the Nazi Dr. Harden] or shooting a mindless melodrama..."^[152]

The film's melodramatic climax resembles a commercial action-movie, where untrained Russian guerrilla fighters overrun and obliterate the Nazi stronghold and its defenders.^[153]

The picture received fulsome approval from the mainstream press, with only the Hearst papers interpreting the film's pro-Russian themes as pro-Communist propaganda. The Academy of Arts and Sciences nominated The North Star for Best Art Direction, Best Cinematography, Best Special Effects, Best Musical Score, Best Sound and Best Original Screenplay. The film was largely ignored at the box office.^[154][155]

Sam Goldwyn's The North Star and two other films—Warner Brothers Mission to Moscow (1943) and M-G-M's Song of Russia (1944)—came under scrutiny by the anti-communist House Un-American Activities Committee in the post-war years.^[156][157]

The North Star was reissued in a heavily reedited form that expunged any sequences that celebrate life under the Stalinist regime. Retitled Armored Attack and released in 1957, the setting is represented as Hungary during its uprising with a voice-over condemning communism.^[158]

The Purple Heart (1944): In the Pacific War during WWII, captured American airmen are prosecuted by Imperial Japan with violating the Geneva Conventions for participating in the July 18, 1942 Doolittle Raid over Japan by B-25 bombers, specifically through indiscriminate bombing of civilian targets.^[159]

Based on a true incident, Milestone's technical skill in presenting the airmen's ordeal, and the inherent injustice they endured made for potent propaganda, but at the risk of rationalizing the US bombing and anti-Japanese jingoism.The Purple Hearts, upon which the captured officers and men are ultimately bestowed, is earned through wounds inflicted by torture to extract military secrets, and not through combat. ^[160] A cinematically superior war film, Milestone defended his commitments to supplying propaganda for the American war effort: " We didn't hesitate to make this kind of film during the war." ^[161]

Guest in the House (1944): A psychological thriller à la Alfred Hitchcock, Milestone was removed from the project when he experienced an emergency appendectomy during filming. Milestone contributed some scenes in this United Artists production that was ultimately credited to director John Brahm. The film prepared Anne Baxter for her starring role in Joseph L. Mankiewicz's 1950 feature All About Eve.^[162][163]

A Walk in the Sun (1945): In his second collaboration with screenwriter Robert Rossen, and based on Harry Joe Brown's 1944 book, Milestone's invested $30,000 of his own savings, a measure of his enthusiasm for the literary property and its cinematic potential. ^[164]

A Walk in the Sun takes place during the US invasion of Italy during WWII: a platoon of American soldiers are tasked with advancing inland six miles from Salerno to take a German-held bridge and farmhouse. The social and economic backgrounds of the officers and men represent a cross-section of America, who often express ambivalence about the purpose of the war. Film critic Kingley Canham describes the characters as "a group of unwilling civilians, who find themselves at war in a strange land...a sense of hopelessness pervades the film and the final outcome means nothing to the men who are fighting the war..."^[165][166]

Milestone's perspective on war as conveyed in A Walk in the Sun differs with that of his 1930 All Quiet on the Western Front, a moving indictment of war.^[167] Biographer George Millichap observes:

"All Quiet on the Western Front, both the novel and the film, used the microcosm of one platoon to make a major thematic statement about the macrocosm of war. A Walk in the Sun's thematic statement is muted by the demands of propaganda and the studio system in the film."^[168]

Despite these limitations, Milestone avoided the "set hero and mock heroics" typical of Hollywood war movies, allowing for a measure of genuine realism reminiscent of his 1930 masterwork. Milestone's trademark handling of tracking shots is evident in the action scenes.^[169]

The Red Scare and the Hollywood Blacklist

At the onset of the Cold War, Hollywood studios, in alliance with the US Congress, sought to expose alleged communist inspired content in American films. Milestone's pro-Russian The North Star (1943), made at the behest of the US government to encourage American support for its wartime alliance with the USSR against the Axis powers became a target. Historians Charles Higham and Joel Greenberg describe this paradox:

"As World War II progressed, movies purporting to show its actuality in terms of battle began issuing from the studios. A favorite setting was Soviet Russia, for these were the days between the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union and the beginning of the Cold War—when differences between the East and West were temporarily forgotten, Russia was naively lauded in films that were later to prove embarrassments to their makers."^[170]

The North Star, as well as Michael Curtiz's Mission to Moscow (1943), Gregory Ratoff's Song of Russia (1944) and Jacques Tourneur's Days of Glory(1944) were "to haunt their creators in the McCarthy era" when any hint of sympathy for the Soviet Union was considered subversive to American ideals.^[171][172]

Milestone's alignment with liberal causes such as Committee for the First Amendment compounded suspicions that he harbored pro-communist sentiments during the Red Scare. He and other filmmakers were summoned by the HUAC for questioning. Biographer George Millichap describes Milestone's ordeal:

"The Russian-born Milestone, always a liberal intellectual with Leftist inclinations, was a natural target for the witch hunters of the HUAC. As early as November of 1946, Milestone appeared before the committee as an 'unfriendly witness'; in other words, he claimed his constitutional right not to testify. In 1948, the anti-communist writer Myron Fagan implied that Milestone was a Red sympathizer, [a claim made explicit] by Hedda Hopper in her nationally syndicated Hollywood column. Unlike the Hollywood Ten and many others, Milestone was able to keep working..."^[173][174]

The precise impact of the Hollywood blacklist on Milestone's creative output is unclear. Unlike many of his colleagues, he continued to find work, but, according to film critic Michael Barson, the quantity and quality of his offers may have been limited through industry "greylisting." Millichap adds that "Milestone refused to comment on this side of his life: evidently he found it very painful." ^{[175][176][177]}

The Post-War Films: 1946-1951

The movies that Milestone directed in the late Forties represent "the last distinctive period" in the director's creative output. His 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.^[178]

The Strange Love of Martha Ivers (1946): a film noir classic

In collaboration with screenwriter Robert Rossen and some outstanding artistic support, 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.^[179]

Rossen and Milestone's script provided the capable cast, starring Barbara Stanwyck, Van Heflin and Kirk Douglas (in his first screen appearance) with a "taut, harsh" narrative that critiqued postwar urban America as corrupt and irredeemable.^[180] Cinematographer Victor Milner's camerawork supplied the film noir effects and musical director Miklos Rozsa effectively integrated sound motifs with Milestone's visual elements.^[181][182]

Milestone left Paramount and moved to the rising independent Enterprise Studios. His first film for Enterprise was Arch of Triumph, based on the Erich Maria Remarque 1945 novel.^[183]

Arch of Triumph (1948)

Milestone's second adaption of a Erich Maria Remarque novel, Arch of Triumph, was highly anticipated by moviegoers, and by Enterprise studios, which committed huge capital investments to the project.^[184] Set in pre-war Paris of 1939, Remarque's autobiographical work examines the personal devastation suffered by two displaced persons: the surgeon Dr. Ravic, fleeing Nazis persecution, and the demimonde courtesan Joan Modau. Each of the lovers suffers a tragic fate.^[185]

Remarque's brutally realistic depictions of the Paris underworld, which describe a revenge murder and a mercy-killing approvingly, was at odds with the structures of the Production Code Administration. Milestone accordingly excised "the bars, brothels and operating rooms" as well as the sordid ending from the screenplay. Enterprise studio executives, who called for a picture that would rival Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer's recently re-released Gone with the Wind (1939), had procured Charles Boyer and Ingrid Bergman to that end.^[186] The miscasting of screen stars Boyer and Bergman as Dr. Ravic and Joan Madou impaired Milestone's development of their characters with respect to the literary source.^[187] The director described his difficulty:

"One thing wrong was that it was supposed to be a realistic piece, and it had two major stars in the lead. If you have two major stars like that, then half your reality goes out the window." ^[188]

Milestone delivered a lengthy four-hour version of Arch of Triumph that had been pre-approved by Enterprise. Executives reversed that decision shortly before its release, cutting the picture to the more standard two hours. Entire scenes and characters were eliminated, undermining the clarity and continuity of Milestone's work.^{[189] [190]} The film includes some of the macabre elements of the novel through effective use of expressionistic camera angles and lighting effects.^[191] Milestone's overall disaffection from the project is evident in his indifferent application of cinematic technique, contributing to the failure in his film adaption. Biographer George Millichap observes:

"...Milestone cannot be completely absolved of responsibility for the disaster… Even given the fragmentary state of the final print, the film seems strangely inert and lifeless. Mainly studio shot, the careful mise-en-scène of earlier films is missing. Aside from two or three sequences, the compositions are dull, the camera is static, the editing predictable...Milestone seems to have almost given up..."^[192]

Millichap adds that "Wherever the blame is placed, Arch of Triumph is a clear failure, a bad film made from a good book."^[193]

Arch of Triumph proved an egregious failure at the box office, with Enterprise suffering significant losses. Milestone continued with the studio, accepting an offer to produce and direct a comedy vehicle for Dana Andrews and Lilli Palmer: No Minor Vices (1948). ^{[194][195][196]}

No Minor Vices (1948): A "semi-sophisticated" programmer reminiscent of Milestone's 1941 comedy My Life with Caroline at RKO, it added little to Milestone's oeuvre.^[197][198]

Milestone departed Enterprise and joined novelist John Steinbeck at Republic Pictures to make a film version of The Red Pony (1937).^[199]

Directing career

2003 stamp

After the war, he was blacklisted under the suspicion that he was a communist sympathizer. Deciding to wait for anti-communist hostility to cool, he and his wife left for Europe: here he made a few films. In the U.S., he made other films before leaving for Europe, but his postwar films did not have the same power as the early works. He worked extensively in television from the mid-1950s on.

He returned to the U.S. to make two more films: Ocean's 11 starring the Rat Pack including Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin, and Mutiny on the Bounty starring Marlon Brando. The original Ocean's 11 worked, but Mutiny on the Bounty became a box office bomb. With no other work to do, he turned to TV work which he disliked, then left directing as his health began failing. Milestone died from natural causes on September 25, 1980, five days short of his 85th birthday.

Lewis Milestone's final request before he died in 1980 was for Universal Studios to restore All Quiet on the Western Front to its original length. That request would eventually be granted nearly two decades later by Universal and other film preservation companies, and this restored version is what is widely seen today on television and home video. Milestone is interred in the Westwood Village Memorial Park Cemetery in Los Angeles.

Several of Milestone's films—Seven Sinners, The Front Page, The Racket, and Two Arabian Knights—were preserved by the Academy Film Archive in 2016 and 2017.^[200]

Academy Awards

Filmography

Footnotes

References

• Arnold, Jeremy. 2009. Hallelujah, I'm a Bum. Turner Classic Movies. https://www.tcm.com/tcmdb/title/77232/hallelujah-im-a-bum/#articles-reviews Retrieved 30 January, 2021.
• Arnold, Jeremy. 2003. The Stange Love of Martha Ivers. Turner Classic Movies. https://www.tcm.com/tcmdb/title/91604/the-strange-love-of-martha-ivers#articles-reviews?articleId=60067 Retrieved 5 February, 2021.
• Barson, Michael. 2020. Lewis Milestone: American Film Director https://www.britannica.com/biography/Lewis-Milestone Retrieved 10 January 2021.
• Baxter, John. 1970. Hollywood in the Thirties. International Film Guide Series. Paperback Library, New York. LOC Card Number 68-24003.
• Baxter, John. 1971. The Cinema of Josef von Sternberg. London: A. Zwemmer / New York: A. S. Barnes & Co.
• Cady, Brian. 2004. The Racket (1928). Turner Classic Movies. https://dev.tcm.com/tcmdb/title/499953/the-racket#articles-reviews?articleId=85281 Retrieved 17 January 2021.
• Canham, Kingsley. 1974. The Hollywood Professional, Volume 2: Henry King, Lewis Milestone, Sam Wood. The Tantivy Press, London. ISBN 0-498-01394-4
• Criterion Collection, 2014. Of Mice and Men (Lewis Milestone, 1939). Criterion.com https://makeminecriterion.wordpress.com/2014/01/23/of-mice-and-men-lewis-milestone-1939/ Retrieved 31 January, 2021.
• Cojoc, Andrei. 2013. The Message of American pro-Soviet Movies during WW II - The North Star, Song of Russian, Mission to Moscow. http://journal.centruldedic.ro/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/Andrei-Cojoc_2013-1.pdf
• Higham, Charles and Greenberg, Joel. 1968. Hollywood in the Forties. A.S Barnes & Co. Inc. Paperback Library, New York. 1970. ISBN 9780498069284
• Erickson, Glenn. 2010. Errol Flynn Adventures. Turner Classic Movies. https://www.tcm.com/tcmdb/title/2891/edge-of-darkness/#articles-reviews?articleId=344157 Retrieved 31 January, 2021.
• Erickson, Glenn. 2014. Arch of Triumph on Blu-Ray. Turner Classic Movies. https://www.tcm.com/tcmdb/title/67562/arch-of-triumph#articles-rev Retrieved 10 February, 2021.
• Hoberman, J. 2014. Soviet Valor, Revised for the '50s. Movie Home Video. https://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/27/movies/homevideo/lewis-milestone8217s-8216armored-attack8217-and-8216arch-of-triumph8217.html Retrieved 2 February, 2021.
• Koszarski, Richard. 1976. Hollywood Directors: 1914-1940. Oxford University Press. Library of Congress Catalog Number: 76-9262.
• Koszarski, Richard. 1983. The Man You Loved to Hate: Erich von Stroheim and Hollywood. Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-503239-X
• Miller, Frank. 2007. Rain (1932). Turner Classic Movies. http://dev.tcm.com/tcmdb/title/87613/rain/#articles-reviews?articleId=161060 Retrieved 23 January, 2021.
• Millichap, Joseph R. 1981. Lewis Milestone. University of Tulsa, Twayne Publishers. C. K. Hall & Company. ISBN 0-8057-9281-3
• Murphy, Brenda. 1999. Congressional Theatre: Dramatizing McCarthyism on Stage, Film and Television. Cambridge University Press. http://catdir.loc.gov/catdir/samples/cam032/99040314.pdfISBN 0521640881
• Passafiume, Andrea. 2009. The North Star. Turner Classic Movies. https://www.tcm.com/tcmdb/title/85227/the-north-star#articles-reviews?articleId=276075 Retrieved 31 January, 2021.
• Rhodes, Gary D. 2020. The Milestones of Milestone. Los Angeles Review of Books. https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/the-milestones-of-milestone/Retrieved 10 January 2021.
• Steffen, James. 2010. The Captain Hates The Sea. Turner Classic Movies. https://www.tcm.com/tcmdb/title/70233/the-captain-hates-the-sea#articles-reviews?articleId=333881 Retrieved 31 January, 2021.
• Steffen, James. 2007. A Walk in the Sun. Turner Classic Movies. https://www.tcm.com/tcmdb/title/94993/a-walk-in-the-sun#articles-reviews?articleId=161092 Retrieved 9 February, 2021.
• Strago, Michael. 2017. The Front Page: Stop the Presses! Criterion Collection. https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/4382-the-front-page-stop-the-presses Retrieved 22 January 2021.
• Tatara, Paul. 2009. Of Mice and Men (1939). Turner Classic Moviles https://www.tcm.com/tcmdb/title/85392/of-mice-and-men#articles-reviews?articleId=240794 Retrieved 25 January, 2021.
• Tatara, Paul. 2011. My Life With Caroline. Turner Classic Movies.https://www.tcm.com/tcmdb/title/1584/my-life-with-caroline#articles-reviews?articleId=409106 Retrieved 31 January, 2011.
• Thomson, David. 2015. All Quiet on the Western Front. https://silentfilm.org/all-quiet-on-the-western-front/ Retrieved 11 January, 2021.
• Walsh, David. 2001. A dull thud; or, Filmmaking in bad faith: Ocean's Eleven, directed by Steven Soderbergh, screenplay by Ted Griffin. https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2001/12/ocea-d11.html Retrieved 1 February, 2021.
• Whiteley, Chris. 2020. Lewis Milestone (1995-1978). Hollywood's Golden Age. http://www.hollywoodsgoldenage.com/moguls/lewis-milestone.html Retrieved 18 January 2021.
• Wood, Bret. 2003. The Front Page (1975). Turner Classic Movies. https://www.tcm.com/tcmdb/title/5902/the-front-page#articles-reviews?articleId=62600 Retrieved 22 January 2021.

Bibliography

External links

• Lewis Milestone at IMDb
• Lewis Milestone at Find a Grave
• Lewis Milestone at Virtual History
• Lewis Milestone papers, Margaret Herrick Library, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences