All Quiet on the Western Front (film)

1930 film directed by Lewis Milestone.It stars Louis Wolheim, Lew Ayres, John Wray, Arnold Lucy and Ben Alexander.

The film won the Academy Award for Best Picture in 1930 for its producer Carl Laemmle Jr., and an Academy Award for Directing for Lewis Milestone. It also received two further nominations: Best Cinematography, for Arthur Edeson, and Best Writing Achievement for Abbott, Anderson and Andrews.

For many viewers, the film remains harrowing today, and its battle scenes are often considered extremely realistic even by contemporary standards, although the acting is considered very melodramatic. ^{[[Citing sources citation needed]]}

The film has been selected for preservation by the United States National Film Registry. In the late 20th Century and early 21st the United States Library of Congress undertook an exhaustive restoration of the film, which is vastly superior in sound and picture quality to most other existent prints.

Twenty-nine years later, Milestone directed two other gritty war films, A Walk in the Sun set in the Second World War, and Pork Chop Hill set in the Korean War.

Without diluting or denying any...criticisms, it should be said that from World War I to Korea, Milestone could put the viewer into the middle of a battlefield, and make the hellish confusion of it seem all too real to the viewer. Steven Spielberg noted as much when he credited Milestone's work as partial inspiration for Saving Private Ryan...Lewis Milestone made significant contributions to (the genre of) the war film. (Mayo, Mike: War Movies: Classic Conflict on Film, Visible Ink Press, 1999.)

A made for television version in full colour starring the then-popular Richard Thomas. Historical accuracy seems to have been strived for; the scene of Kaiser Wilhelm awarding decorations correctly shows him using only his right arm (in reality Kaiser Wilhelm's left arm was stunted).