--- name: "Lewis Milestone" canonical: "https://film.one/person/lewis-milestone" roles: ["Producer","Director"] born: "30 September 1895" died: "25 September 1980" reviewed_on_fi1m: 1 average_as: "producer" average_over: 0 updated: "2026-09-19T15:41:23.355970+00:00" licence: "© Fi1m Ltd. Written by AI under a human editor; checked against sources before publication. Quote with attribution and a link to the canonical URL." --- # Lewis Milestone Producer and director. Born 30 September 1895 in Kishinev, Russian Empire. Died 25 September 1980. ## Details - **Work:** Producer, Director - **Born:** 30 September 1895, Kishinev, Russian Empire - **Died:** 25 September 1980 - **Also known as:** Lewis Stone, 루이스 마일스톤, Leib Milstein - **Academy Awards:** 2 Oscars (2 won · 3 nominated) - **Elsewhere:** https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lewis_Milestone, https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q285928, https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0587277/, https://www.themoviedb.org/person/2000 ## Streaming the US now - **Tubi:** [*Ocean's Eleven*](https://film.one/film/oceans-eleven-1960.md) (55) For United States; add `?region=XX` for another country. ## Fi1m on Lewis Milestone > A director trained in the cutting room, who staged war as something that happens to groups rather than heroes, and whose last films handed him stars instead. *Ocean's Eleven* (1960) shows the habit surviving the assignment for about twenty minutes. Five casinos go dark in turn. In *Ocean's Eleven* (1960) Lewis Milestone stages the robbery of the Las Vegas Strip as a night raid, calm and exact, eleven former paratroopers moving through the blackout while Philip W. Anderson's cutting shows us where the money is and who is carrying it. It is the one stretch of the film in which the director is plainly the man who made *All Quiet on the Western Front* thirty years earlier. We sat up, and we had been waiting the better part of ninety minutes to do so. Milestone came to directing from the cutting room, having worked as an editor and assistant director in Hollywood in the early 1920s, and he said later that "the cutting room was an excellent place to learn the rudiments of direction." It shows. His films are built on montage, on tracking shots and on a documentary plainness that owed something to Soviet cinema, and they are about groups rather than stars: soldiers, newspapermen, ranch hands. He began directing features in 1925, had an early success with *Two Arabian Knights* (1927), and then made *All Quiet on the Western Front* (1930), the film everything else he did is measured against. *The Front Page* (1931) and *Of Mice and Men* (1939) followed, adaptations that kept the detachment of their sources rather than warming them up. That is the Milestone the histories describe, and we have not yet reviewed him at his height. What we have reviewed is the late work, and it is a different case. By 1960 he was being handed a Rat Pack picture, and *Ocean's Eleven* is a star vehicle for men who would rather be doing their nightclub act. Harry Brown and Charles Lederer's script has a clean military idea, treat the Strip like an enemy position, and Milestone plainly understands it; he also spends most of two hours letting Frank Sinatra and friends stand about in rooms before he is allowed to use it. The tone never settles. A heist needs the fear of capture and a Rat Pack film cannot permit it, and the director who solved harder problems than that in 1930 does not solve this one. We scored it 55, and the twenty good minutes are the reason it was not lower. His final feature, *Mutiny on the Bounty* (1962), was a troubled production and is remembered as a disappointment; we have not reviewed it and will not judge it here. What the late credits suggest is a craftsman whose method needed an ensemble and a subject, and who was given, at the end, a cast that arrived with its own act. He said in 1969 that making the same kind of film over again would bore him, and on the evidence he was never in danger of it. Go to the blackout in *Ocean's Eleven*: the man who made *All Quiet on the Western Front* is in there for twenty minutes, and then the floor show comes back on. ## Biography Lewis Milestone was a Russian-born American film director. Born Lev Milstein on 30 September 1895 in Kishinev, Russian Empire, he immigrated to the United States around 1913 and became a naturalised citizen. He served in the US Army Signal Corps during the First World War before entering the film industry as an assistant editor and director in the early 1920s. Milestone directed his first feature in 1925 and received Academy Awards for Best Director for *Two Arabian Knights* (1927) and *All Quiet on the Western Front* (1930), the latter also winning Best Picture. Other notable films include *The Front Page* (1931), *Of Mice and Men* (1939), *A Walk in the Sun* (1945) and *The Strange Love of Martha Ivers* (1946). He also directed and produced *Ocean's Eleven* (1960) and directed *Mutiny on the Bounty* (1962). He worked in television from the mid-1950s and died in Los Angeles on 25 September 1980. *Sources: en.wikipedia.org, catalog.afi.com, imdb.com, britannica.com, rottentomatoes.com.* ## On Fi1m (1) - *Ocean's Eleven* (1960), Fi1m 55, Director, Producer — [page](https://film.one/film/oceans-eleven-1960.md) ## Complete filmography (63) Every credit, newest first. Titles without a page can be requested for review on the HTML page. - *The Boots on the Western Front* (2026), Director - *The Richard Boone Show* (1963), series, Director - *Arrest and Trial* (1963), series, Director - *Mutiny on the Bounty* (1962), Director - *Ocean's Eleven* (1960), Director, Producer — Fi1m 55, [page](https://film.one/film/oceans-eleven-1960.md) - *Pork Chop Hill* (1959), Director - *Suspicion* (1957), series, Director - *Have Gun, Will Travel* (1957), series, Director - *Armored Attack!* (1957), Director - *The Widow* (1955), Screenplay, Director - *They Who Dare* (1954), Director - *Melba* (1953), Director - *The Oscars* (1953), series, Actor - *Les Miserables* (1952), Director - *Kangaroo* (1952), Director - *Schlitz Playhouse of Stars* (1951), series, Director - *Halls of Montezuma* (1951), Director - *The Red Pony* (1949), Director - *No Minor Vices* (1948), Director, Producer - *Arch of Triumph* (1948), Director, Screenplay - *The Strange Love of Martha Ivers* (1946), Director - *A Walk in the Sun* (1945), Director, Producer - *Guest in the House* (1944), Co-Director - *The Purple Heart* (1944), Director - *The North Star* (1943), Director - *Edge of Darkness* (1943), Director - *Know For Sure* (1941), Director - *My Life with Caroline* (1941), Director, Producer - *Lucky Partners* (1940), Director - *Of Mice and Men* (1939), Director, Producer - *The Night of Nights* (1939), Director - *The General Died at Dawn* (1936), as Reporter (uncredited) · Director - *Anything Goes* (1936), Director - *Paris in Spring* (1935), Director - *The Captain Hates the Sea* (1934), Director - *Hollywood on Parade No. B-1* (1934), Actor - *Hallelujah, I'm a Bum* (1933), Director - *Rain* (1932), Director, Producer - *Scarface* (1932), as Additional Editing - *Cock of the Air* (1932), as Bit - *The Front Page* (1931), as Undetermined Secondary Role (uncredited) · Director, Producer - *All Quiet on the Western Front* (1930), Director - *New York Nights* (1929), Director - *Betrayal* (1929), Director - *The Racket* (1928), Director - *The Garden of Eden* (1928), Director, Producer - *Two Arabian Knights* (1927), Director - *Fine Manners* (1926), Co-Director - *Fascinating Youth* (1926), as Lewis Milestone - *The New Klondike* (1926), Director - *The Cave Man* (1926), Director - *Seven Sinners* (1925), Director, Screenplay, Story - *Bobbed Hair* (1925), Writer - *The Teaser* (1925), Adaptation - *Dangerous Innocence* (1925), Writer - *The Mad Whirl* (1925), Treatment - *Listen Lester* (1924), Adaptation - *The Yankee Consul* (1924), Writer - *Where the North Begins* (1923), Editor - *Main Street* (1923), Assistant Editor - *Up and at 'Em* (1922), Story - *The Foolish Age* (1921), Assistant Director - *Fit to Win* (1919), Director ## Gallery - ![Lewis Milestone with his Best Comedy Director Oscar during the 1st Academy Awards (1929)](https://film.one/media/person/1079007/gallery-6a0f0e18cb6d.jpg) Lewis Milestone with his Best Comedy Director Oscar during the 1st Academy Awards (1929) — Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons (https://thumb.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/4/4c/Lewis_Milestone_Best_Comedy_Director_1929.jpg/1280px-Lewis_Milestone_Best_Comedy_Director_1929.jpg?utm_source=commons.wikimedia.org&utm_campaign=imageinfo&utm_content=thumbnail) - ![Lewis Milestone](https://film.one/media/person/1079007/gallery-d799d8f8fbad.jpg) Lewis Milestone — film studio publicity still. Original uploader was Wikiwatcher1 at en.wikipedia, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons (https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d6/Milestone1.jpg?utm_source=commons.wikimedia.org&utm_campaign=imageinfo&utm_content=thumbnail_unscaled) ## Awards ### Academy Awards — 2 won, 3 nominated - 1932: Best Director (nominated), for *All Quiet on the Western Front* - 1931: Best Director (nominated), for *The Front Page* - 1930: Best Director (won), for *All Quiet on the Western Front* - 1929: Best Director (Comedy Picture) (won), for *Two Arabian Knights* - 1928: Best Director (Comedy Picture) (nominated), for *Two Arabian Knights* *From Wikidata, which records wins more completely than nominations.* --- © Fi1m Ltd. Written by AI under a human editor; checked against sources before publication. Quote with attribution and a link to the canonical URL. Canonical: https://film.one/person/lewis-milestone