The next decade brought further turmoil to Remarque's life. Long a seeker of affluence, he bought a Lancia convertible and dressed the part of the bon vivant. In 1930, he ended his formal marriage to Jeanne; the two remained together, however, and moved to Casa Remarque in Porto Ronco, on Switzerland's Lake Maggiore.
It was during this year that Remarque made his first move toward cinema with Universal Studio's black-and-white version of All Quiet, which used a 930-acre ranch in Irvine, California, for its battlefield setting. Starring Slim Summerville, 2,000 extras, and unknown actor Lew Ayres as Bäumer, the film, featuring real howitzers, land mines, and flamethrowers, received Academy Awards for best picture and for direction. In addition, scriptwriters Del Andrews, Maxwell Anderson, and George Abbott, as well as photographer Arthur Edeson, who melodramatically concludes with a close-up of Paul's hand clutching at a butterfly when he is hit by a sniper's bullet, also received Academy Awards. Labeled by critics as an American landmark and a major coup for Universal, the film was touted by the National Board of Review and named picture of the year by Photoplay. Variety magazine commented that the League of Nations should "buy up the master-print, reproduce it in every language to be shown to every nation every year until the word war is taken out of the dictionaries." The movie reached vast audiences and caused the growing Nazi party great concern. In the early 1930s, Hitler youth, prodded by propagandist Goebbels, rattled German movie audiences by overrunning theatres, releasing white mice, and tossing beer bottles and stink bombs. Within weeks, the movie was banned.
