We use Optical Character Recognition (OCR) during our scanning and processing workflow to make the content of each page searchable. You can view the automatically generated text below as well as copy and paste individual pieces of text to quote in your own work.
Text recognition is never 100% accurate. Many parts of the scanned page may not be reflected in the OCR text output, including: images, page layout, certain fonts or handwriting.
128
CELLULOID
r
printing press, bearing in Remarque's words the army report for the day of Paul's death : " All Quiet on the Western Front." It is not good, but it is preferable to the one by Laemmle Junior which was used. In actuality, the film should have ended on the shot of Paul Baumer's hand, the butterfly and the earth, with the hissing twang of the sniper's bullet left stinging in our senses.
The cognoscenti of the film world will delight when they discover that Lewis Milestone is a Russian and studied mechanical engineering in his youth, but at the same time they must admit that the direction of All Quiet on the Western Front is essentially as American as that of Cimarron, The Birth of a Nation or The King of Jazz. The only traces of European influence in his film are found in the cutting, and then only in the sequences of attack.
Milestone seems to have been first associated with the film industry as an editor for Universal, probably the best way in which to gather knowledge of the cinema. Later he received several opportunities for direction from other companies and he made two good pictures : Two Arabian Nights, a comedy, and a bootlegger melodrama with the late Louis Wolheim, The Racket. In both of these he displayed a flair for wellchosen camera angles and for motives of tension contrasted with unexpected movement of material. These qualities, together with his knowledge of editing, go far to explain his handling of All Quiet on the Western Front. Universal claim, of course, that his