Picture-Play Magazine (Jul - Dec 1930)

28 Over trie Top xtfitk Lev? The lead in "All Quiet on the Western Front" put Lewis Ayres far up the line as a juvenile player, but six months in the make-believe trenches left him with no taste for light pictures. By Samuel Richard Mook But little 1 thoughl my time was coming, Sudden and splendid — supreme and soon; Yet here 1 am with the bullets humming As I crawl and 1 curse the light of the moon. Out alone for adventure thirsting, Out in mysterious No Man's Land, Prone with the dead when a star shell bursting Flares mi the horrors on every hand. — Service. WAR! Stark, naked realism. Blood. Slime. Mutilated youth. Churches crumbled. Cemeteries uprooted. Shells screaming. Shuddering men crouching in blasted graves. Wails and groans of the dying. Twelve years ago and the world has forgotten. The world is afraid to remember. Or should one say was afraid to remember? For afraid or not, I doubt that the world will ever again be able to hear strains of martial music, see a troop of soldiers drilling, or look at one of the wooden crosses that mark the graves in Flanders, without thinking of that simple, inarticulate little German soldier, in "All Quiet on the Western Front," groping his way through the maze and horror of war — toward what? Death. ' 'Death Takes a Holiday,' " Lewis Ayres mused. "Death needs a holiday, a long one, after that. We were six months making that picture, four months of it in a camp where the battle scenes were filmed. It was only make-believe with us, but I got an idea of it. Right now I feel just like that German lad must have felt when they were talking in that dugout, wondering what they had to go back to after the war was over. They couldn't go back to school — they'd outgrown that. What difference did it make if the earth was round, or whether x squared minus y equaled z, when you'd seen men dying by inches, and had come face to face with eternity? "I feel as let-down as that German boy. I lived with that war for six months and now that it's over, I don't know what to do with myself. People call me up and say. 'Let's go do so-and-so.' but the things they want to do seem so silly and empty — so — so futile, if you know what I mean. "How can I go back to making program pictures after doing a thing like that? Vet you can't make an 'All Quiet' every daw I've just finished 'Common Clay,' but it didn't seem real. "One thing thai spoiled it for me, I had to dress up. They got me six suits from the most expensive tailor in town, and I look like the devil in them. I simply can't wear clothe-." lie was dressed in the most spotted pair of slacks I Photo by Jones boy soldier portrayed by Lewis Ayres in "All Quiet" brings to a focus the futility and misery of war. have ever seen, not even excepting Neil Hamilton's famous "personality pants," a dirty shirt and a windbreaker that, from its looks, might have descended from Adam. But he surely looked comfortable. "I'm afraid I'm not very good in the picture. I just don't seem to fit into light things very well." He paused for a moment and that baffled look came into his eyes, the one seen so often in the eyes of the little German. In a way Lew is terrifically worldly-wise for his age — he's just twenty-one — and in another way he is the most naive person I've ever met. He left home when he was sixteen to go to the University of Arizona, and he's been alone ever since. He didn't remain at the university long. He plays the banjo, guitar, and piano. He played with the university orchestra, and when he found that his studies interfered with his music, he gave up the studies. From there he drifted from one orchestra to another, down in the border towns. Mexicali, Nogales, Tiajuana all knew him. Life in those towns is elemental. How a kid seventeen or eighteen could have come through that and remained as clean as Lew is a mystery. Lew says it is only because he was such a kid that he did manage to come through clean. "Everybody was mothering me or fathering me or bigbrothering me. I couldn't have gone wrong if I'd wanted to." From there he came to Los Angeles and began playing with the orchestras around town. Occasionally he'd go to the studios trying to get work in pictures. "Finally I made up my mind that you can't play all night and look like anything, if you go to the studios during the day, so I gave up the orchestra. I had saved a little money and I spent most of it on a wardrobe. But nothing happened. I had about a thousand dollars' worth of band instruments and I hocked every one of them. I had determined that I was going to fight to get into pictures to the last breath. Then, if I still hadn't landed, I'd just have to go back to playing and forget about pictures. "Ivan Kahn, the agent, saw me dancing with Lily Damita and assumed that I was an actor. He sent for me and signed me. Ivan got me a contract with Pathe. I did a bit in 'The Sophomore,' and they let me go after six months, without my ever appearing again before the camera. "Paul Bern gave me the contract with Pathe. When he went over "to M.-G.-M.. he sent for me to do the pari with Garbo in 'The Kiss.' He was also indirectly