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The subject of this chapter is the Oscar-winning film All Quiet on the Western Front. After discussion of why the Laemmle family’s Universal Studios wanted to make film of Erich Maria Remarque’s celebrated novel, the chapter considers the screenplay adaptation, casting of Lew Ayres in leading role, the revolutionary sound design, influence of Sergei Eisenstein’s montage technique, reception and political reaction to the film in the United States, and changing attitudes towards World War I. The final section focuses on the hostile reception of the film in Germany, where it was used by the Nazi leaders, especially Joseph Goebbels, for propaganda purposes, and how the film’s global renown changed Milestone’s life.

Works from the interwar and immediate post–World War II period, when everyone in Britain was supposed to be thoroughly disillusioned with the conflict, demonstrate that in fact the narrative of the war was still at this point hotly disputed, and remained so through the late 1950s. Memoirs, treatises, novels, general histories, and polemics all took different attitudes toward the war, and the truce was an important part of this contested narrative: some dismissed it as a mere curiosity, while others contended that the cease-fire signified an important moral about the conflict.

The introduction explores reasons for the relative scholarly neglect of Lewis Milestone and his films: his diverse body of work, his troubles during the Blacklist period, the serious nature of most of his films, his difficulty getting along with studio bosses, his distaste for the “star system,” changing Hollywood tastes. It provides an overview of his career, from the silent to the sound era, and his huge early success with All Quiet on the Western Front, which came to haunt him in later years. Milestone was drawn repeatedly to the theme of war, especially its impact on ordinary soldiers. Also discussed is how Milestone’s life embodies the “rag-to-riches” American dream of millions of immigrants.

This chapter looks at Erich Maria Remarque’s novel All Quiet on the Western Front, which focuses on a generational subset for whom the past barely exists in memory and the future is inconceivable—a predicament in which war itself becomes a kind of Ithaca, the only home to which the adolescent soldier has any intimate or tangible connection. Narrator Paul Bäumer and his schoolfellows inhabit a No Man’s Land of their own: they are young but have lost hope; they feel old but have no yesteryear; they are refugees whose yearning is without shape or object. Whatever images of home they had when they enlisted, whatever plans for the future, were too nebulous, too lacking in resilience to compete with war’s intensity, its ubiquity and noise. The chapter shows that, despite its apparent pessimism, All Quiet was envisaged as a first step towards finding the ‘way back’ and pointing out ‘the road onward’, and that writing the book was itself a form of nostos.