Talk:Lewis Milestone

Charles Higham quote and McCarthysim
Dear DD - I do not object to you removing the Higham quote, but I do request that you replace it with one that supports the material that preceded it. As is, the material left without a source.

You wrote that the Higham quote is "a hyper-ideological apologia for McCartyhism [sic] [and] totally inappropriate" in a Wikipedia article. Perhaps you can provide the names of those film critics you consider qualified to comment on the Hollywood blacklist, under which Milestone may have suffered.

Your imperative "The quote has been excised and must not be reinstated" is delightful and daring. In return, I offer you this remarkable obituary on the inimitable actor Richard Harris, like yourself "a professional Irishman", and written by Marxist writer and film critic Paul Bond.

https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2002/10/harr-o30.html

--Lord Such&#38;Such (talk) 15:47, 10 September 2021 (UTC)

Tone
This article is in need of editing for tone - encyclopedic writing should not use colloquialisms and should remain impartial. For example, words to watch should generally be avoided, as should flowery phrasings like "had the shared misfortune of competing with a veritable pantheon". Nikkimaria (talk) 03:49, 25 April 2023 (UTC)


 * Thanks for pointing this out, Nikkimaria, agree 100% here. Hopefully the repeated reverts by a certain user will stop now and encyclopaedic work will proceed. Robert Kerber (talk) 13:10, 25 April 2023 (UTC)
 * Ok, that's one phrase and I do not really see why this should be rephrased, the phrase is interesting to read. At least two (Gone with the Wind and Wizard of Oz) of the films against his film competed are quite legendary, on the other films I do not know enough to be sure, but the discussion above lets me assume good faith. Of the other films he competed with I 1939 are Wuthering Heights, Stagecoach, Ninotchka and they are considered to be some of the 850 historically valuable movies by the Library of Congress. Love Affair was subject to censorship but anyway nominated to the academy awards, etc. Please be more specific to include the tag.  Paradise Chronicle (talk) 00:36, 4 May 2023 (UTC)


 * Maintaining encyclopedic neutrality takes priority over interesting phrasing. Nikkimaria (talk) 01:33, 4 May 2023 (UTC)
 * Really? I do not understand what you want to have improved and nominated the article at the GOCE, let's get some help from the specialists.Paradise Chronicle (talk) 06:33, 4 May 2023 (UTC)
 * I wanted to rephrase it, but I couldn't after having read the source according to which 1939 was Hollywoods greatest year. Paradise Chronicle (talk) 18:35, 4 May 2023 (UTC)

Manual of style
Not sure why my edit has been but this article is a mess. Thedarkknightli (talk) 23:02, 26 April 2023 (UTC)


 * A certain user has made repeated reverts, including repeated removals of the "tone" banner, but it looks like this has stopped now thanks to the above comment by Nikkimaria. Robert Kerber (talk) 07:09, 27 April 2023 (UTC)


 * User:Thedarkknightli: You are welcome to revert, but keep them within Wiki Rules limits. Using the pejorative term "a mess" to describe an article requires positive evidence. The article, as written has been visited and edited numerous times without any generalized complaint. Please enter into a discussion and defend your position.--CerroFerro (talk) 17:47, 30 April 2023 (UTC)


 * CerroFerro, at the moment there are multiple editors who see problems with the article as written, and so far no defense has been put forward for your position that it has none. I'd invite you to join the discussion above. In the interim though, the tag should remain in place. Nikkimaria (talk) 03:26, 1 May 2023 (UTC)


 * Exactly one...ONE...editor has complained about the "tone" or that the article is "a mess." The person who continues to post the notice has not offered a single argument as to why the entire article should be stigmatized as such: "so far no defense has been put forward" by the posting editor. The high quality of article speaks for itself.--CerroFerro (talk) 18:15, 1 May 2023 (UTC)


 * Three people on this talk page have suggested they believe the article has issues. There are specific rationales for the tagging in the section above. So no, we cannot say that the "high quality of article speaks for itself", and it's not appropriate to remove the tag at this time. Nikkimaria (talk) 00:15, 2 May 2023 (UTC)


 * CerroFerro, three users, User:Thedarkknightli, Nikkimaria and I have tagged this article for "tone" issues. There are clear directions how to proceed with the article before removing the tag. Each time, you removed the tag without addressing any of the issues regarding the article's tone, even despite Nikkimaria's given examples. Neither have you followed the invitation to a constructive participation made by Nikkimaria. Instead you make false claims about the number of users questioning the article's alleged quality and restrict your comments to your reverts to ones like "I see you on the talk page". If you persist removing the tagging for tone without addressing any of the mentioned issues, your behaviour can be regarded as vandalism, which it already has been in the past. Please act according to WP rules from now on. Robert Kerber (talk) 10:59, 2 May 2023 (UTC)

Does the article have "issues"? Then provide examples. Please, be precise.--CerroFerro (talk) 20:15, 2 May 2023 (UTC)


 * Again, there are examples provided in the section above. Nikkimaria (talk) 23:46, 2 May 2023 (UTC)

Removed text
CC-BY-SA declaration; text in this section has been removed from the article by me; see that article's history for full attribution. I've removed the text because it's off-topic or belongs in another article. I'm leaving it here for the benefit of future editors and in case its removal breaks any named references.

1932–1939
Rain is based on the short story "Miss Thompson" by Somerset Maugham, which had gone through several adaptations, both for stage and film, before and after Milestone filmed the work in 1932. Cheers,  Baffle☿gab  02:45, 27 June 2023 (UTC)

Early 1940s
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.  Baffle☿gab  01:52, 28 June 2023 (UTC)

Edge of Darkness (1942)
Edge of Darkness is Milestone's fulsome demonstration of these sentiments that exposed "the severe limitations" created by Hollywood's self-imposed propaganda requirements. 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."

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 Joseph 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.

Milestone's overall cinematic execution renders the story adequately in a realist style, but lacks his bravura use of the camera. 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.

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

 Baffle☿gab  03:39, 28 June 2023 (UTC)

This entire subsec need to be refocussed around Milestone. I'm dumping the original here for now, don't yet know how much I'll excise.

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.

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. 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).

Beyond this point, the necessities of Hollywood war propaganda asserts itself, shifting the focus to German atrocities. 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. Russian doctor Dr. Pavel Grigorich Kurin (Walter Huston), Harden's moral opposite and nemesis, ultimately dispatches his Nazi prisoner. Biographer Joseph Millichap observed that "Single-minded hatred of Fascist evil countenanced action, shooting a prisoner [the Nazi Dr. Harden] or shooting a mindless melodrama".

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

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.

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.

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.

 Baffle☿gab  00:24, 29 June 2023 (UTC)

A Walk in th Sun (1945)
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 6 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".  Baffle☿gab  02:36, 29 June 2023 (UTC)

I'm thinking to excise most of this subsection. Some of it may be usable but most of it should go in the film's article, not here.

Arch of Triumph (1948)
Remarque's brutally realistic depictions of the Paris underworld, which describe a revenge murder and a mercy-killing approvingly, was at odds with the strictures 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. The miscasting of screen stars Boyer and Bergman as Dr. Ravic and Joan Madou, respectively, impaired Milestone's development of these characters with respect to the literary source. The director described his difficulty:

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

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. The film includes some of the macabre elements of the novel through effective use of expressionistic camera angles and lighting effects. Milestone's overall disaffection from the project is evident in his indifferent application of cinematic technique, contributing to the failure in his film adaptation. Biographer Joseph 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"

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

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).

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.

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

 Baffle☿gab  01:39, 30 June 2023 (UTC)

My Great-Great-Great Uncle
I was looking online and saw one of the movies Lewis Milestone directed and noticed his last name which matches mine, so I asked my father if he’s related to us and he explained that my great-great-great grandfather and my great-great-uncle worked with making movies and told me where they were from. I decided to google his name and I was surprised that it came up as a wikipedia page. I think that it’s very interesting that someone related to me made such famous movies. 2600:1008:B06E:C49C:2179:4E26:AB2B:A162 (talk) 05:31, 3 December 2023 (UTC)