Lewis Milestone (born Lev Milstein) (September 30 1895 - September 25 1980) was an accomplished, and award-winning motion picture director. He is known for directing Two Arabian Knights (1927), All Quiet on the Western Front (1930), The General Died at Dawn (1936), Of Mice and Men (1940), Ocean's Eleven (1960), and Mutiny on the Bounty (1962).
Milestone was born in Kishinev (also called Chişinău), a city in what was then Bessarabia, Imperial Russia (now the state of Moldova). He came to the United States just prior to World War I. Milestone held a number of odd jobs before enlisting in the U.S. Signal Corps, where he worked as an assistant director on Army training films during the war. In 1919 he became a naturalized citizen of the United States.
After the war he went to Hollywood, where he first worked as a film cutter, and later as an assistant director. Howard Hughes promoted Milestone to director, and one of his early efforts, the 1928 film Two Arabian Knights, won him an Oscar in the first Academy Award ceremony. He also directed The Racket, an early gangster film, and later helped Hughes direct scenes for his aviation saga Hell's Angels (for which he never received credit).
Milestone won his second Academy Award for All Quiet on the Western Front, a harrowing screen adaptation of the antiwar novel by Erich Maria Remarque. His next, The Front Page, brought the Ben Hecht/Charles MacArthur play to the screen. It earned him another Oscar nomination. His work during the 1930s and 1940s was always easily identifiable by its lighting and imaginative use of fluid camera. He worked extensively in television from the mid 1950s.
On his passing in 1980, Lewis Milestone was interred in the Westwood Village Memorial Park Cemetery in Los Angeles.
Won the only ever Best Comedy Director Oscar (for Two Arabian Knights (1927)) at the first Academy Awards ceremony in 1929.
Replaced Carol Reed (I) as director of Mutiny on the Bounty (1962) after Reed quit due to not being able to cope with the massive ego of the film's star Marlon Brando. Milestone didn't find Brando any easier to work with and in the end let Brando do as he pleased (when asked by the cameraman why he wasn't watching the filming Milestone replied, "I hate to see movies in pieces, so you let him do this and when it's all finished and cut, for ten cents I can walk into the theatre and see the whole thing at once. Why should I bother to look at it now.")
Biography in: John Wakeman, editor. "World Film Directors, Volume One, 1890-1945". Pages 770-778. New York: The H.W. Wilson Company, 1987.
Among his close friends were Harold Lloyd, Gilbert Roland and Dana Andrews (I).
Born in Russia, Milestone emigrated to the US in 1917 in order to escape being drafted into the Russian army during World War I, but upon his arrival in the US immediately enlisted in the US Army and was sent to France, where he fought until the war's end.
A favorite device Milestone uses in most of his war films--i.e. All Quiet on the Western Front (1930), Edge of Darkness (1943), Walk in the Sun, A (1945) and Pork Chop Hill (1959) is the dolly shot which moves across infantry attacking toward the camera in echelon and being felled one at a time by machine gun fire.
