Often described as the greatest anti-war film ever made, All Quiet on the Western Front was also responsible for innovative use of crane shots and sideways tracking, as well as a single track sound system and integrated music – the art of film music being in its infancy at the time.

Ukranian-born Lewis Milestone became an American citizen at eighteen and served in the First World War as an assistant director of army training films, before becoming an editor and then a director in Hollywood.  All Quiet is without doubt his most memorable film, and its influence was still apparent nearly seventy years later, in Saving Private Ryan.

Milestone, who was also Oscar-nominated for The Front Page a year after All Quiet, returned to war pictures later in his career, with A Walk in the Sun and Pork Chop Hill being the best of them.  His philosophy was ‘to expose war for what it is and not to glorify it’.  Halliwell gave him this dedication in the Filmgoer’s Companion, with All Quiet offered as his most representative work:

‘For a handful of seminal films of the 30s and for devising a fast crabwise tracking shot which was much imitated.’