To be fair, any number of directors could be classified as quintessentially American. There is the shining humanism of John Ford, the political posturing and questioning of Oliver Stone and Michael Moore, even the capitalist excess of Michael Bay. Below are four directors that may not immediately come to mind as proto typically American filmmakers. The films of these four auteurs are devoid of flag waving or chest thumping, neither used as soap boxes nor monuments. These are directors that could only exist because of America, who bypass stereotypes to create images and characters entrenched in our nation’s culture, employ history as a fulcrum for contemporary ideas, and explore alternative renderings of classical American themes.

Jim Jarmusch

The Ohio born independent film auteur Jim Jarmusch specializes in characters who view America through an ironic detachment. Though this post modern iconoclasm of the country is dry and edgy, it’s never dispassionate. Beginning with Stranger Than Paradise, his black and white tone pieces play like love letters to the open road, elucidating a worldview more conducive with poetry than with documentation. The trio of escaped convicts crossing the wilderness in Down By Law move beyond loner isolationism to oddball brotherhood. The wounded accountant of Dead Man passes through the West–and the Western genre–like a specter crossing over to the land of the dead. Traversing the United States is merely a portal to self discovery. Jarmusch’s early anthology films apply an outsider’s outlook to the splendor of American pop culture–the Japanese couple obsessed with Elvis in Mystery Train, the cabbies and passengers in New York, Los Angeles, and three foreign lands appropriating the inveterate symbol of American transportation in Night on Earth. And underscoring them all is the director’s affinity for the most American of musical genres–blues and rock–made explicit by his casting of legendary musicians Tom Waits, John Lurie, and Joe Strummer, among others.

David Lynch

Perhaps no other American director is more fascinated by Americana than David Lynch. His Midwestern sensibility combined with a surrealist lens fashions him as a pitch perfect director for deconstructing the underbelly of American institutions. The Kincaid level kitsch of Blue Velvet’s postcard vision of suburbia, complete with Roy Orbison blaring on the soundtrack, is merely a glossy veneer painted over a small community no less vile and perverse than the big city. Whereas the big city dreams of Mulholland Dr.’s ingénue expose a soul shattering Hollywood spiral uncommon to the small town sheltered. But like all of the symbols of the United States’ enticing grip over the uninitiated, the epistemological heart of America resides in the open road, a magical expanse where legends can be made (Wild at Heart), a new identity formed (Lost Highway), and cross country reconciliation mythologized (The Straight Story).

Terrence Malick

Very few countries other than the United States have a past as customizable for visual and narrative storytelling. Throughout Terrence Malick’s career, it is almost as if the Texas born filmmaker has been quietly charting the course of American history on film. His intimate renderings of characters as the centers of their own universes contrast exquisitely with their statuses within history. The legendary Pocahontas and John Smith of The New World live inside of time, unaware of how history will perceive them as do the prosaic figures in the early 1900’s of Days of Heaven and World War II of The Thin Red Line. His first film Badlands and his most recent film The Tree of Life capture the nostalgic 1950’s landscape at opposite ends of the spectrum–the perversion of a country’s movie star icons through violent self awareness and the obscure navigation of childhood filtered through conflicted innocence, respectively. The allure of life on a grand scale attracts Malick to the demythologization of fashionable tropes of identifiable American eras, where history is just an alternative course to spiritual enlightenment.

Martin Ritt

Martin Ritt’s early foray into moving pictures began with television until he became egregiously suspected of having communist sympathies during the Red Scare. Ritt abandoned the small screen and emerged not as a filmmaker spurned but as a filmmaker invigorated. His response was less a vehement social outcry and more a proclamation of identity–1957’s Edge of the City about a union dock worker under pressure from his corrupt boss. His subsequent collaborations with silver screen icon Paul Newman–the actor practically a symbol of the rugged yet vulnerable Hollywood visage–reinforced the virile American leading man while redefining his context in society, most famously in Hud, which updated the cowboy as a hard drinking, misogynistic, free loading relic. Ritt’s social consciousness colored his films more as untold stories intended to educate than polemics designed to proselytize. Be it the black boxer up against a white paradigm in The Great White Hope, the black sharecropping family of Sounder, or the underrepresented titular textile worker of Norma Rae, Ritt saw American identity as intrinsic and irrevocable.

Curiously, with all the bold, ambitious, fresh talent storming into Hollywood in the 1960s/1970s – directors who’d cut their teeth in TV like Sidney Lumet and John Frankenheimer; imports like Roman Polanski and Peter Yates; the first wave of film school “film brats” like Francis Ford Coppola and Martin Scorsese — one of the most popular genres during the period was one of Old Hollywood’s most traditional:  the Western.  But the Western often wrought at the hands of that new generation of moviemakers was rarely traditional.

During the Old Hollywood era, Westerns typically had been B-caliber productions, most of them favoring gunfights and barroom brawls over dramatic substance, and nearly all adhering to Western tropes which ran back to the pre-cinema days of dime novelist Ned Buntline.  With the 1960s, however, the genre began to change; or, more accurately, expand, twist, and even invert.

To be sure, there would still be Westerns revolving around familiar Western myths, with some Old Hollywood directors – energized by the upscale refurbishing New Hollywood was giving the genre — turning in some of their most entertaining work i.e. Howard Hawks and El Dorado (1966), and Henry Hathaway with The Sons of Katie Elder (1965) and True Grit (1969).  There were also somewhat younger directors – like Burt Kennedy and Andrew V. McLaglen — who followed in their elders’ footsteps, finding there was still plenty of box office mileage left in the traditionalist iconography of a swaggering John Wayne – albeit one bloated and craggy with middle age – duking it out with sneery Bad Guys in the likes of The War Wagon (1967), The Undefeated (1969), and Chisum (1970).

But among the new blood coming into the industry, there were those who saw in the venerable old form the potential to expand its dramatic reach and heft (George Roy Hill’s Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, 1969), to inject an unprecedented level of realism and honesty (Sidney Pollock’s Jeremiah Johnson, 1972), to peel back the myths and find the less-then-legendary underside of the legendary Old West (Arthur Penn’s Little Big Man, 1970).  They discovered in the Western a pliability allowing the use of the mythic setting of the American frontier as a vehicle to comment on such contemporary subjects as racism (Pollock’s The Scalphunters, 1968), war (Robert Aldrich’s Ulzana’s Raid, 1972), the dehumanizing corporatization of the American spirit (Robert Altman’s McCabe & Mrs. Miller, 1971).

In the vanguard of those who re-energized the Western by utterly revamping it stood Sam Peckinpah.  Although he would essay other genres over the course of his career, his most potent vehicles were usually Westerns, and his most monumental contribution:  The Wild Bunch (1969).

Born in Fresno in 1925, Peckinpah had often spent time on his grandfather’s ranch, and grew up hearing stories about his family’s forays into lumber, ranching, hauling borax, and wagon-making during what was then a not-too-distant era when northern California had still been very much a vestigial part of the Old West.  Peckinpah would draw on those stories and that upbringing to give his Westerns – even at their most romantic – a sense of authenticity and a flavor few other Western moviemakers have matched.  At the same time, Peckinpah’s Westerns – among the genre’s finest – cast often controversial reflections of a troubled present day, with a recurring theme throughout his Westerns, both period and contemporary, being that of, according to critic Kathleen Murphy, “…the American Dream profaned…going, gone rotten…”

Peckinpah first made a name for himself as a maestro of the genre in 1950s television, first by writing and directing for such popular series as Gunsmoke, Have Gun Will Travel, and Zane Grey Theater, then by creating the hit series The Rifleman, followed by the critically-lauded – if short-lived — The Westerner.  He moved to features with the little-noticed The Deadly Companions (1961), but followed with one of the acknowledged classics of Western cinema:  Ride the High Country (1962).

Peckinpah did significant but uncredited re-writing of N. B. Stone, Jr.’s original High Country script, infusing it with his own sense of the West, and an eye for unique details as in a bizarre horse vs. camel race early in the movie, but most especially in his portrait of the rowdy, slapdash mining town of Coarsegold, a muddy tent city whose only permanent structure is the saloon/brothel.  Peckinpah’s touch is also in the rustic yet graceful dialogue (“I just want to go into my house justified,” says aging lawman Joel McCrea ruminating on his encroaching mortality), and the poignant little human moments like McCrea excusing himself from a room so no one can see him pull on spectacles to read a letter.  Still, the invigorating rough patina Peckinpah brought to the movie braced what was essentially a gentle and respectful core story; High Country was not an overturning of Western traditions, but a salute to their passing.

Peckinpah began to show a more openly revisionist hand with his flawed but nevertheless intriguing Major Dundee (1964), co-written with Harry Julian Fink and Oscar Saul.  Charlton Heston is a Union cavalry officer guilty of some unspecified misstep on the Civil War battlefields in the east, now punitively assigned to the lowly job of overseeing a prisoner of war camp amid the New Mexico wastelands.  To redeem himself, Heston assembles a motley collection of volunteers, including several of his Confederate prisoners, for an unauthorized pursuit into Mexico after an Apache raider.

Dundee is a complete inversion of the quietly dignified cavalrymen of John Ford’s West of a generation before.  Dundee is an arrogant, condescending, hubristic, inflexible, unforgiving egotist, a man Peckinpah conceived as one who “…kept failing in what he was doing” in a self-aggrandizing, self-destructive quest the director likened to that of Ahab chasing his white whale.

The Wild Bunch would provide Peckinpah with his breakout commercial success, and also push him to the fore as one of the most controversial directors of the time.  With The Wild Bunch, co-written with Walon Green from a story by Green and Roy N. Sickner, Peckinpah severed all ties with the Westerns of old, and created a period piece that – as much as any other movie of the time – captured the moral chaos and dislocation of the late 1960s.

It is the early 1900s, a time of transition for the West.  Men on horseback carrying six-guns stand side-by-side with “horseless carriages”  and heavy machine guns.  Under the beginning credits, a squad of soldiers commanded by William Holden rides into a Texas border town heading for the railroad office.  On the surrounding roofs, a scruffy, rotten-toothed gang of ambushers wait.  The credit sequence ends with a tight close-up of Holden’s half-lit, weathered face as he turns to his men lining up the office staff and customers at shotgun point.  “If they move,” he snaps icily, “kill ‘em!” Freeze frame, the deep thrum of the final note of Jerry Fielding’s title music, the credit “Directed by Sam Peckinpah,” and the moral compass of the movie takes the first of many freewheeling spins with this revelation that the “soldiers” are a band of notorious outlaws in disguise, and the repellant bushwhackers actually represent the law; a posse commissioned by the railroad.

A temperance march comes down the street in front of the railroad office.  Tipped to the ambush by the clumsiness of the posse, the Bunch intends to use the passing parade to cover their escape.  Peckinpah builds to the coming detonation with brilliant skill:  the music of the temperance band – “Shall We Gather at the River” – grows louder as the marchers near; on the rooftops, the posse waits in almost pre-orgasmic expectation, grinning, embracing and kissing their rifles; in the railroad office, weapons are cocked, eyes narrow, as the Bunch wait for the right moment.  On the soundtrack, underneath the growing volume of the temperance band, Fielding’s score introduces an almost imperceptible swell, and then comes the sound of a heartbeat, growing faster as the crucial instant comes.  The marchers pass by the office, Holden shoves out a hostage to draw fire, a flash cut to two of the band members turning at the noise, and then one of the most violent action sequences in commercial cinema ensues.

As the town’s Main Street sinks into a chaotic mix of gunfire, running bodies, dust and spurting blood, any doubt about who the Good Guys might be is removed:  there aren’t any.  There are only two forces in opposition with the innocent townspeople caught in the crossfire between them.

Throughout the remainder of the movie, Peckinpah challenges the audience to sympathize with his group of violent outlaws, making no attempt to soften their edges or make them more ingratiating:  they kill without compunction, steal with little thought as to whom they’re stealing from, they quarrel amongst themselves sometimes to an almost lethal extent.  One moment bringing their utter self-interest into bold relief comes when, having been contracted by a thief-in-uniform Mexican general to steal American Army rifles for a fee of $10,000, a Mexican member of Holden’s Bunch – a Villa sympathizer (Jaime Sanchez) – balks at going along, protesting, “Would you steal guns to kill your mother or your father?” Holden replies drolly:  “Ten thousand cuts an awful lot of family ties.”

Yet, in spite of themselves, the Bunch do gain the viewer’s sympathy.  Outlaws they may be, but they are also the last vestiges of an American West which, however brutal and lawless it may have been, was also a place of a kind of left-handed honor, of frontier independence, of undoubted courage.  There’s an undeniable poignancy to their plight; last of the Old West outlaw bands, they are like gasping fish floundering from one puddle to another at the bottom of a drying pond as their world evaporates around them.

Even in their violence – ruthless, merciless, cold-blooded – there is an odd strain of honorability.  They kill out of necessity, as opposed to the bounty-lusting posse hunting them who seem to relish the spilling of blood…any blood.  Following the opening shoot-out, the bounty hunters pick over the dead for boots and valuables and quarrel over credit for kills, while one of their number squeals, “This is better than a hog-killin’!”  When two of them (Strother Martin and L. Q. Jones) squabble over possession of a corpse, Martin dares Jones to dig the bullet out of the body “…and see if it ain’t my ought-six.”

The Bunch stand apart from the Mexican general Mapache (Emilio Fernandez) and his little army as well.  The federales are no more than banditos in uniform who have stripped the countryside clean and spend their time engaged in constant debauchery when not indulging in the entertainment of torture.  When Holden jokingly compares Mapache’s thievery to the Bunch’s own, one of the Bunch – an insulted Ernest Borgnine – repudiates the connection:  “Not so’s you’d know it, Mr. Bishop, but we ain’t nothin’ like him!  We don’t hang nobody!”

It was, however, not such dramatic subtleties, nor the inversions and overturnings of Western tropes which drew the most attention from the critical community at the time of The Wild Bunch’s release.

The debate about the growing quantity and quality of movie violence had grown more vociferous and heated as on-screen acts had grown more brazen and graphic.  Psycho, in 1960, had offered up the butchering of a nude Janet Leigh, while 1964’s The Killers had ended with Lee Marvin coldly gunning down Angie Dickinson, and Point Blank three years later had Marvin tossing a nude John Vernon to his death from a penthouse terrace.  There had been The Dirty Dozen (1967) and its story of twelve felons trained by the Army to be more efficient killers before being unleashed to carry out a massacre of high-ranking German officers and their mistresses.  Bonnie and Clyde (1967) had featured a succession of increasingly brutal gun battles climaxing with the slow motion death ballet of the titular couple falling beneath a hail of machine gun fire.  The Wild Bunch took screen violence – and the debate over it – to still another level.

From the outset of the Bunch shoot, Peckinpah – ever a provocateur – had bragged, “We’re going to bury Bonnie and Clyde!” By the end of the first day’s shooting of the opening massacre, he had exhausted the company’s stock of blank ammunition and fake blood.  When the “squibs” used to blow out the windows on the railroad office failed to sufficiently impress him, dynamite charges were used instead.  Equally dissatisfied with the squibs used to simulate bullet impacts on his actors, Peckinpah demonstrated the effect he wanted by shooting a real gun at a mock-up human target.  Thereafter, the special effects crew experimented with larger-caliber squibs loaded with blood and small pieces of meat.  Peckinpah had the effects crew squib his actors front and back to give the impression – a first in movie violence – of bullets completely piercing a human body.

He was motivated by more than indulgent morbidity, his personal experience here again coming to bear on what he was trying to attain on-screen.  There was an image he’d never forgotten from his youth hunting deer in the Sierra Nevada foothills, a memory of his first kill and the erupting spray of blood on white snow.

Escalating the visual impact still more was his decision to film these most brutal acts in slow motion.  It was not a new device; the great Japanese director Akira Kurosawa had used slow motion as long ago as his 1954 classic Seven Samurai to extend and solemnize the exquisite horror of a mortally struck swordsman momentarily wavering on his feet before collapsing in death.  A fan of Samurai, Walon Green had hoped to recapture that same, frozen moment of entrancing horror by incorporating the concept into his initial solo draft of The Wild Bunch screenplay.  However, the effective mix of real-time and slow-motion in the film was worked out between Peckinpah and chief editor Lou Lombardo.

For some critics, Peckinpah’s perceived obsession with taking screen violence to a new extreme was the creative freedom of 1960s cinema taken to an indulgent, repugnant extreme.

But others saw hypocrisy – or denial – in such a stand.  Over the course of Bunch’s nearly three-month shoot, both Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert Kennedy had been assassinated, there were race riots in several cities, and outside the Chicago convention hall where the 1968 Democratic convention was taking place, club-wielding policemen waded into ranks of anti-war protesters while the Vietnam War ground bloodily on.  Said Bonnie and Clyde director Arthur Penn, “You had to be an ostrich with a neck two miles long buried in the sand not to see we were living in a violent time…”

In 1994, Warner Bros. decided on a limited re-release of The Wild Bunch to commemorate the film’s 25^th anniversary.  As the studio was issuing a new director’s cut of the film, Bunch had to be re-submitted to the MPAA for a new rating.  Though it had originally been released with an R-rating in 1969, after reviewing the new print, the MPAA slapped the film with an X (Warners would opt for releasing the new print without a rating).

Superficially, nothing about the new rating made sense.  Time was supposed to ameliorate the impact of controversial films; not amplify them.  Released in 1969 with an X-rating, Midnight Cowboy, for example, would be re-rated R in 1971.  Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange (1971) was also originally released with an X which was later stepped down to an R.

Certainly, more graphically violent and gorier movies had been released since 1969, from a torrent of R-rated slasher flicks and gorefests like the Friday the 13^th and various Living Dead films to such upscale mainstream releases as Die Hard 2 (1990; Bruce Willis stabs a villain through the eye with an icicle), Total Recall (1991; Michael Ironside plummets to his death after an elevator severs both his arms), and Silence of the Lambs (1991; featuring a disembodied head in a jar, a partially skinned female corpse, a grotesque posing of an eviscerated policeman, and serial killer Anthony Hopkins escaping detention by wearing the sliced-away face of one of his guards – the movie would win the Best Picture Oscar, and Hopkins take the Best Actor prize for his performance as serial killer “Hannibal the Cannibal”).

So, if not for Peckinpah’s elaborately choreographed mayhem, why the X?  It could only have been for the movie’s power, its dramatic gravitas still intact after 25 years; that all the shooting and bloodletting wasn’t just empty action, but actually meant something — a rarity by the 1990s, and even more rare today.

In a 2004 documentary on Peckinpah, critic Elvis Mitchell remarked on the re-rating business and The Wild Bunch’s ability to disturb and provoke decades after its debut, saying this very quality made it everything a movie should be:  “something that contains the weight and the cultural resonance of its time.  It’s supposed to be a statement, a signature.”

In retrospect, one could see how lucky Peckinpah had been.  He had come along at just the right time, able to make one of the most provocative movies ever released into American cinema’s commercial mainstream at a time when studios were up for such gambles, and the mass audience was hungry for movies which told them something – even unpalatable, disturbing somethings – about themselves and the world they lived in.

It says something about how we, the audience, have changed since then.  Immersed in numbing escapism, we sit with fingers in our ears, stretching our necks – as Arthur Penn had said – to bury our heads deep in the sand, rearing up mightily offended when unpleasant real-world truths leak through.

There are certain films that seem to sustain on a life of their own. There is a pulse that beats consistently throughout, constantly reminding us of the fragility of life. We feel as though the dramas of life are being shown to us in their natural environment, as the images dance, oblivious to the watching eye.

There is a man who has mastered such cinematic poetry. His name is Terrence Malick.

From the beginning, in the dusty, foolish love story of Badlands, it is clear that not only are we dealing with a brilliant visual artist but we are also dealing with a director who is intent on knocking off the rust that tends to gather on humanity, and show life, and emotion in a pristine state, cleared of the presumptions gathered in film medium as to what any character should or shouldn’t do. For Malick, it is never about ‘right or wrong’ or ‘good vs evil’; his films have more to do with the moments when one realizes there is very little difference between the two. Hidden there in the blurred lines of moral ambiguity lies our strongest doubts and worst failures. It is there that Malick’s films dwell.

It is best to look at Malick’s career, to this point, in two halves. His first two films, Badlands and Days of Heaven possess the erratic energy of youth. It’s obvious that as a young filmmaker he has a certain visual flair, but he also has an astute attention to detail that enhances his character’s graceful arcs. There is an enthusiasm charging through both films, of artistic exploration. It feels as though we are watching the maturation of a great director happen right before our eyes as he toys with different ideas.

However, one idea, which has become somewhat of a signature, is the use of voice over, and early on it doesn’t always work.  At times a clear and present artistic vision feels somewhat muddled. For example, in Badlands and Days of Heaven the voice over ranges from poetic and thoughtful, to seemingly superfluous. It would seem in certain instances he uses a voice over when his visuals are all that is needed. In his second two films everything, including the voice over work is polished and nearly perfected.

The theme of the first two films is youth and beauty without age. Characters are outcasts too blinded by circumstances to weigh their innermost struggles, or measure their paths to and from wherever they may stand at any given moment. They are films driven heavily by Malick’s visuals, and the idea that life is a fleeting mess without direction, and it is the minute moments of love and belonging that are our keepsakes. Conversely the theme of the second two films is life everlasting. Each person carries the weight of contemplation on who they are and what will become of them. They are somewhat detached from their circumstances and lost in the struggle of being. The films, though are still driven by Malick’s breathtaking visuals, have the pervading idea that life moves through us, with us, and without us, and we are just a part of its waltzing tide.

After Days of Heaven Malick disappeared from filmmaking for twenty years, before finally returning to direct one of the more poetic and human war films to date, The Thin Red Line, and it is apparent immediately that there is a deeper meditative state to his work the second time around. Gone is the youthful enthusiasm, replaced with the careful wisdom of age. Both in The Thin Red Line and 2005’s The New World we see works that are more meticulous in construction both technically and thematically. He seems more sure of his voice, and his eye, which has always been sharp, has grown more patient, and nuanced. We begin to see beauty not just in the lush landscapes, but the muddy ugliness we often confront as well. He has mastered the art of using melodrama to enhance his very poignant and direct notes on emotion and life. Where his first two films have the energetic grace of a sprinter, the second two are more akin to the sturdy grace of a marathon runner, steady unwavering, and patient. Nowhere is his maturation more evident than in his use of voice over. They now fill his work like sleepy musings, adding a certain weight and bittersweet sorrow to each character, as they fumble with that blurred line of righteousness and triumph, doubt and regret, love and hate.

What can we expect from Malick’s next film, Tree of Life? Expect to find more characters who struggle with the uneasy grace of being human. People lost and found, but uncertain of where they ever were. Expect there to be no wall between the whimsy of our innermost trials and our material world. Expect more cinematic poetry from one of the great directors of our time.

James Merolla

Lucas and Spielberg are credited – and sometimes blamed – for launching, expanding, and perfecting the concept of the synergistic, merchandisable blockbuster franchise.  After their commercial breakouts in the late 1970s, their movies regularly dominated the all-time best box office performers list for most of the following decades, and even today, after such recent additions as Avatar (2009), Titanic (1997), The Passion of the Christ (2004), the Spider-Man, Pirates of the Caribbean, and The Lord of the Rings trilogies, and the Harry Potter series, as directors and/or producers Lucas’ and Spielberg’s names are still attached to almost one-quarter of the all-time top 100 box office hits (even after adjusting for inflation, Lucas/Spielberg still account for 20 of the top 100 earners).

Even this does not adequately measure their respective commercial muscle, omitting, as it does, the lesser but nevertheless notable movies associated with their production arms, as well as their expansions into animation, TV production, computer and interactive on-line games, and a variety of merchandising lines.  After over three decades at the top of the industry’s commercial pyramid, Lucas and Spielberg remain classic archetypes of the era, and the acknowledged maestros of the blockbuster game.

George Lucas and Steven Spielberg.  It’s nearly impossible to think of one without the other and, again, understandably so.  Colleagues, friends, sometimes collaborators, they are close in age, broke big about the same time, share a somewhat similar sensibility.  They are both “children of television,” much of the work they’ve directed and/or produced being inspired by – if not displaying an outright nostalgic affection for – the monster, science fiction, and war movies, the vintage serials, the cartoons and TV programs they viewed for hours on end as youngsters.  Star Wars (1977), Jaws (1975), Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), Twilight Zone:  The Movie (1983), Poltergeist (1982), 1941 (1979), the Indiana Jones films – just to name a few – all have their roots in the Saturday morning TV viewing of Lucas and Spielberg.  Their handle on popular culture has given them a preternatural instinct for material which will play for the mass audience, as well as the best way to portray that material.

A youthful passion for movies and moviemaking manifested itself as a technical proficiency impressive even at the start of the careers, and which has grown into a technical mastery few current moviemakers can match.  From their earliest days, they have pushed at the limits of moviemaking technology, looking for any new device or technique which can bring their imaginings to credible life on-screen, whether it’s shooting Jaws on location in the open waters off Martha’s Vineyard with an animatronic shark, resurrecting dinosaurs through the magic of CGI (Jurassic Park, 1993), or injecting actors into a wholly alien universe composed almost entirely of computer-generated imagery, and performing side-by-side with an equally unreal computer-manifested co-star (Jar-Jar Binks in Star Wars:  Episode 1 – The Phantom Menace, 1999).

They continue to get the kind of media attention few other directors and producers do, and have retained their marquee value longer than most on-screen stars in the business today.  Last year saw announcements for 2011 projects which will continue to demonstrate their on-going commercial potency.  Lucas announced yet another re-release of his Star Wars films, this time all six released in sequence with the – literally – added dimension of having been re-formatted for 3-D.  As for Spielberg, two theatrical features will be released within weeks of each other – War Horse and The Adventures of Tintin:  The Secret of the Unicorn – and the year will also see the debut of two Spielberg-produced TV series, Terra Nova and Falling Skies.

Yet, for all their commonalities, the announcements of their respective 2011 plans illustrate their vast, polar-opposite differences.  For all they share, their careers have followed two distinct, increasingly disparate arcs:  one that of a filmmaker who built on his early successes, and the other that of one seemingly trapped by his.

Lucas, for example, has been strikingly spare in his output.  The final installment in the Star Wars saga – Star Wars:  Episode III – Revenge of the Sith (2005), marked only Lucas’ sixth directorial credit, four of them Star Wars episodes.  As a producer, Lucas’ name has been attached to only 20 theatrical titles in 30 years, with most of them – other than the Star Wars and Indiana Jones films – box office flops.  When Lucas received the American Film Institute’s Lifetime Achievement Award in 2005, in light of his slim body of work the recognition was generally considered to be for Lucas’ technological contributions to moviemaking, and the impact of the Star Wars series.

Spielberg, on the other hand, seems to barely finish one project before he’s on to the next, having directed 25 features between 1974 and the present, and acted in some sort of producer’s role on several dozen more.  His production entities – Amblin and Dreamworks SKG – have turned out still more pictures on which he served no direct role, a wildly eclectic canon including the Shrek movies, Who Framed Roger Rabbit? (1988), the Back to the Future series, The Bridges of Madison County (1995), American Beauty (1999), Gladiator (2000), Cast Away (2002), Road to Perdition (2002), and House of Sand and Fog (2003).

The difference between the filmographies of the two men is not only the striking one of quantity, or even quality, but of breadth, and therein, perhaps, is the true measure of the creative difference between them.

George Lucas attended the film program at the University of Southern California with the goal of becoming “…a documentary filmmaker, cameraman, and editor…”  He was not interested in mainstream commercial cinema, wanting, instead, to concentrate on more abstract fare while professing little concern for making money in the business.  He came under the mentoring wing of Francis Ford Coppola who engineered Lucas’ first professional directorial assignment, an expansion of an award-winning short Lucas had shot at USC which would evolve into the feature THX 1138 (1971), a film which, in every frame, reflected the serious, near-abstract art house work Lucas had explored as a student.  Set in a dehumanizing, emotionally-constrained future, THX 1138 is deliberately opaque, brooding, constructed more poetically than along linear dramatic lines.  It is also as emotionally aloof as its striking, icy, white-on-white visuals, and, unsurprisingly, failed to connect with the mainstream audience.

The commercial failure of THX 1138 pushed Lucas to look for a more accessible, and, hopefully, commercial project.  He drew on his own teenage experiences to come up with American Graffiti (1973).  As warm-hearted as THX 1138 is cold, as bubbly with youthful experience as THX is deliberate and restrained, Graffiti easily connected with a young audience who – after years of Vietnam and Watergate – eagerly lapped up its loving portrait of a more innocent time, and simpler pleasures and pains.  Graffiti became a huge hit ($21.3 million domestic against a budget of $775,000), kicked off a national craze for 1950s nostalgia, and opened the door to Lucas for his first major production:  Star Wars (later re-dubbed, Star Wars:  Episode IV – A New Hope).

A record-breaking hit at the time ($215.5 million domestic against a $13 million budget), Star Wars not only cemented Lucas’ entrée into Hollywood’s major leagues, but his profits from the movie and the merchandising (for which he’d shrewdly retained control) bought him complete independence from Hollywood.  He self-financed The Empire Strikes Back (1980, although he turned the directorial chores over to Irvin Kershner), and afterward built a full-service, state-of-the-art production facility — dubbed Skywalker Ranch — far removed from Hollywood in northern California, set up his own production company (Lucasfilm), as well as Industrial Light and Magic, a special effects house which remains one of the premier movie technology laboratories today.  But, having done so, Lucas seemed at a loss of what to do with his newfound independence.

He walked away from directing claiming, “I’m never going to direct another establishment-type movie again,” although the one-time aspiring experimental filmmaker now found himself presiding over a production facility which seemed expressly designed for just that kind of work.  As a producer, he has, occasionally, husbanded the kind of serious moviemaking he aspired to as a student:  he acted as executive producer for the American release of Akira Kurosawa’s samurai epic Kagemusha (1980), as well as for the collage-like documentary Powaqqatsi (1988), and was also an uncredited producer on the noir homage Body Heat (1981) which marked the directorial debut of Lawrence Kasdan who had worked on the screenplays for Lucas’ The Empire Strikes Back and Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981).  But, other than the Star Wars and Indiana Jones titles, much of Lucasfilm’s scanty producer’s filmography consists of misfires like Willow (1988), Howard the Duck (1986), and The Radioland Murders (1994), along with mushy children’s fare like Twice Upon a Time (1983) and The Land Before Time (1988).

When Lucas did return to directing after an absence of 21 years, it was not to helm some against-the-commercial-grain individualistic effort, but yet another “establishment-type movie” – in fact, a series of them as he began turning out the second Star Wars trilogy.  Despite impressive box office, critics – and many fans of the original trilogy – considered them an artistic disappointment.

Lucas has often seemed uncomfortable with the more human elements of cinema, preferring, evidently, to immerse himself in the wonders of moviemaking technology, going as far as to remark, at times, that “actors are irrelevant.”  On the original Star Wars, the joke among the cast was how Lucas’ direction rarely went beyond, “Faster and more intense!”  To that point, critics generally consider The Empire Strikes Back as the most dramatically rewarding of the original three movies; a movie which Lucas neither directed nor wrote.  Even on the character-driven American Graffiti, Lucas seemed at a loss as to how to deal with his large ensemble cast, hiring a dialogue coach to work with the performers while he busied himself with camera set-ups.  When the second Star Wars trilogy began to hit screens, beginning with Star Wars:  Episode I – The Phantom Menace (1999), it appeared that all of his penchants – weakness with character and drama, technical mastery – had grown only more entrenched.  The New York Times’ A. O. Scott shared a common reviewers’ opinion in its judgment of Episode II – Attack of the Clones (2002) as a feature-length “action-figure commercial,” and that it was “…not really much of a movie at all, if by movie you mean a work of visual storytelling about the dramatic actions of a group of interesting characters.”

Attack of the Clones, while one of the top box office earners of 2002, would be the first Star Wars entry not to take the box office crown during its theatrical release, that honor going to the better reviewed, comparatively more flesh-and-blood Spider-Man.

Much of Lucas’ ancillary works are marked by an incessant recycling and merchandising of his limited core of films i.e.  two TV movies and a series featuring the Ewoks, the cuddle-toy cute creatures introduced in Star Wars:  Episode VI – Return of the Jedi (1983), two TV series based around a young Indiana Jones, Star Wars-based videogames, a long-running animated series, Star Wars:  The Clone Wars, and the constant re-releasing – in theaters and in various home entertainment formats – of the movie series.

Spielberg, on the other hand, for all his technical flash and embrace of effects technology, has always been a more humanistic filmmaker.

Spielberg had been attending California State College at Long Beach in the late 1960s when Sidney Sheinberg, then head of Universal’s television division, saw a short Spielberg had made and offered the 21-year-old student a directing contract.  The following year, Spielberg made his directing debut with the middle segment of a Twilight Zone-ish TV movie triptych penned by Rod Serling:  Night Gallery (1969).

In this, his maiden professional effort, Spielberg’s immediately recognizable visual fluency is every bit equaled by his ability to give emotional heat to the performance pas de deux between two veterans of mogul-era Hollywood which comprises the bulk of the piece:  Joan Crawford’s bitterly vindictive and selfish blind magnate willing to stop at nothing for the chance of a few hours sight, and noble but defeated Barry Sullivan, the doctor she blackmails into performing an illicit eye operation.

As Spielberg’s career advanced and his directorial projects became more elaborate and their settings more fantastic, Spielberg never let his technological mastery eclipse the human elements in his movies.  On Jaws, he had the original screenplay by the novel’s author Peter Benchley run through one set of rewriter’s hands after another for the major purpose of enriching the characters.  He tangled with screenwriter Paul Schrader over the first draft of the script which would evolve into Close Encounters of the Third Kind for the same reason, looking to see his sci fi fantasy populated with recognizably everyday characters.

Spielberg also knew how to get those carefully etched characters off the page and onto the screen:  nine performers have received Oscar nominations for their work in Spielberg’s movies as of this writing (vs. Lucas’ one).

And, where all but one title in Lucas’ slim filmography is set in a Never-Never Land of futuristic fantasy, much of Spielberg’s work – including his fantasies – is grounded in an amiable, recognizable, middle-class suburbia much like the neighborhoods in which the filmmaker spent his childhood.  Some of his most effective early works – Close Encounters, E.T.:  The Extra-Terrestrial (1982), and Poltergeist (which he produced but did not direct) – gain their power from cross-pollinating childhood fantasies of ghosts under the bed and alien visitors with equally vivid recreations of a comfortably familiar and banal suburban milieu.

- Next (part 2)

Sugarland represented a significant increase in complexity for Spielberg over his TV work both logistically and creatively.  Most of Duel had consisted of one truck, one car, a lonely stretch of road in the California desert, and one principal actor.  On his series work, major characters had long been established by the respective series’ stars, and the shows were shot on the studio back lot.  Sugarland, however, had action sequences involving dozens of police cars and helicopters, locations spread all across Texas, four principals and a host of supporting parts, and a challenging storyline gradually changing from the gently comic to the heartbreakingly tragic, and in which the most sympathetic characters – a young, married pair of minor felons on a cross-Texas quest to regain their son from foster care – are also the story’s “villains.”  Though the movie failed commercially (possibly suffering from being one of a glut of couples-on-the-run stories all opening over the same period i.e. The Getaway [1972], Badlands [1973], Thieves Like Us [1974]), reviewers enthusiastically agreed Spielberg had made an auspicious theatrical debut.

The Sugarland Express had been produced by one-time 20th Century Fox chief Richard Zanuck and his partner, David Brown.  When the duo acquired the rights to the novel Jaws, Spielberg asked on as director.  The unprecedented success of Jaws ($260m US v $8m budget) would do for Spielberg what Star Wars would do for Lucas two years later; buy him creative independence in Hollywood.

Soon after Jaws, Spielberg set up Amblin Entertainment, his own production company, so he could more easily initiate and maintain creative control over projects.  Amblin was a much different entity than Lucasfilm and the Skywalker Ranch.  Spielberg did not remove himself from Hollywood; his company was based in Los Angeles, and Spielberg kept strong ties with the company which had nurtured him through the early part of his career – Universal – and later with Warner Bros. where he forged a strong, personal relationship with Steve Ross, the then chief of Warners’ parent company, Warner Communications (later Time Warner).

Almost immediately, Spielberg became as prolific a producer as a director, spinning off projects of interest in which he had neither the time nor inclination to direct himself, and providing major breaks for new or up-and-coming directors like Robert Zemeckis (who cut his directorial teeth on I Wanna Hold Your Hand [1978] and Used Cars [1980] for Amblin), Joe Dante (Gremlins, 1984), and Barry Levinson (Young Sherlock Holmes, 1985).  By the mid-1980s, Spielberg was producing as many movies as he was directing.  Within eleven years after making The Sugarland Express, Spielberg had directed nine theatrical features (more than George Lucas has directed to date), and had produced another nine just since 1978.

The 1980s saw Spielberg creatively stumble.  His work seemed to waffle between a desire to move up to more adult themes (with the exception of The Sugarland Success, all of his movies prior to 1985 had been some sort of adventure or fantasy), and a fear of alienating the mass audience with stories darker and more troubling than the fare with which he’d come to be associated.

It was, in fact, a chronic fear.  On Sugarland, producer and director had reversed stereotypical roles in a debate over the tone of the movie with Spielberg pushing to compromise the picture with a more upbeat finish while Richard Zanuck argued to protect the integrity of the original tragic finale.  On Jaws, while Spielberg admirably wanted the principal characters to have more dimension, he also wanted them to be universally likeable, so both the obsessive shark hunter Quint (Robert Shaw) and snobby oceanographer Hooper (Richard Dreyfuss) were softened from their book versions.  And, while Spielberg may have enjoyed spinning out his fantasies in familiar milieus, he seemed uncomfortable with the more drab aspects of everyday existence.

With films like Jaws, Close Encounters, Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981, directed for producer friend Lucas), and E.T., that tendency was of little issue, but as Spielberg tried to change direction it hobbled his work.  He sanded off the more harsh and problematic edges of Toni Morrison’s novel The Color Purple for a milquetoasty 1985 adaptation; his 1987 adaptation of J.G. Ballard’s autobiographical novel, Empire of the Sun, inspired by Ballard’s childhood experiences under Japanese occupation during WW II, was generally considered inferior to John Boorman’s thematically similar Hope and Glory released that same year; Always (1989) was a woefully miscalculated remake of the bittersweet WW II fantasy A Guy Named Joe (1943), with Spielberg mistakenly assuming the milieu of airborne firefighters had the same gravitas as Joe’s self-sacrificing bomber pilots in combat against the Axis; and then there was Hook (1991), a misguided attempt to “adultify” Peter Pan with themes of menopausal re-evaluation as a long absent and now grown Peter (Robin Williams) returns to Never-Never Land.

Even though he seemed to have lost his creative way, Spielberg was still capable of turning in a moneymaker.  Despite predominantly negative reviews, Hook took in almost $120 million domestic, and was followed in 1993 by the empty-headed but technically amazing Jurassic Park which, with its U.S. take of over $357 million, was, for several years, the all-time box office champ.

Whatever inner governor had been holding Spielberg back creatively he finally managed to cast off – and do so with a vengeance – with 1993’s Schindler’s List, adapted by Steven Zaillian from Thomas Keneally’s bestselling novel which, in turn, was inspired by the true story of a playboy German industrialist (Liam Neeson) who, during WW II, rose to the occasion and saved hundreds of Jews from extermination.  Schindler is boldly shot in a dolorous black-and-white, and deals face-on with one of the grimmest chapters in human history.  It was, in light of its somber story, surprisingly successful commercially ($96 million US/$312 worldwide against a $25 million budget), and gained Spielberg a level of artistic legitimacy he’d been unable to achieve with his earlier work.

Schindler’s List also seemed to liberate something in Spielberg, and after the sequel The Lost World:  Jurassic Park II (1997), he turned out a string of pictures all marked, to some extent, with a new, more mature sensibility.  There was Amistad (1997), another true history piece, a noble – if unfocused – attempt to grapple with America’s history of slavery; and then the brutally demythologizing WW II adventure, Saving Private Ryan, the following year.  Even when he returned to the realm of science fiction and fantasy with Artificial Intelligence:  A.I. (2001) and Minority Report (2002), the moral simplicity of Close Encounters and E.T. was clearly gone.

A.I. was originally to have been a Stanley Kubrick project.  Kubrick had spoken with Spielberg about the possibility of working jointly, with Kubrick as producer and Spielberg in the director’s chair, but, ultimately, Kubrick felt the material leant itself better to the other director’s sensibilities and turned the property wholly over to Spielberg.

A.I. is a sci fi fairy tale, a futuristic Pinocchio (which the screenplay, by Spielberg from a screen story by Ian Watson adapting Brian Aldiss’ short story, “Supertoys Last All Summer Long,” references repeatedly), being the story of a robot boy, David (Haley Joel Osment), who longs to be a real boy so as to regain the love of the human mother (Frances O’Connor) who rejects him for her biological son.  Overlong, episodic, sometimes sluggish and heavy-handed, it’s an interesting debate as to whether or not Kubrick would have handled the rambling structure of the piece better than Spielberg.  By the same token, it’s worth arguing whether or not the more emotionally aloof Kubrick could have delivered the poignancy Spielberg brings to some of the movie’s more emotionally-laden scenes for, despite its flaws, the movie has moments of undeniable dramatic power.

A.I. is not a child’s fairy tale, but a fairy tale for adults about a child’s bruised soul.  David’s jealousy over his biological brother, his feelings of abandonment and loss, his horror at learning from his creator (William Hurt) that his “uniqueness” will be reproduced for mass consumption, and the longing carrying him through his long, often terrifying quest are frighteningly real, disturbing, and sometimes heartbreaking.  So, too, is the poignancy of the movie’s final scene, marked by a lyrical bittersweetness unthinkable in a Spielberg picture of 20 years earlier.

David has been recovered by alien explorers from a future ice age long after the human race has died out.  Having searched his memory, they are aware of his trials and offer him the possibility of a brief bit of happiness.  They can recreate his mother from a keepsake lock of her hair.  However, they warn, the recreation will last for only one day, after which she will sleep and never wake.  David takes the offer and the day spent alone with his mother in a replica of their home is an idyllic day of mother-and-child delights.  As the day ends and she turns to bed, David turns his back on his cybernetic immortality, curling up in an unending sleep with the mother who finally loves him.

Minority Report is more of a straight-up sci fi action thriller, and, as such, perhaps it even more clearly displays the new colors Spielberg had added to his palette, emotional colors which stand out starkly against the comparatively simple ambitions of Report’s futuristic fugitive story.  Minority Report (adapted from a Philip K. Dick story by Scott Frank and John Cohen) is a less artistically grandiose but more tightly-constructed thematic kin to Blade Runner (1982) in that it tries to retool noir for a sci fi context, taking a familiar story – a cop (Tom Cruise) is framed for a murder he didn’t commit – and giving it a World of Tomorrow twist (cops use psychics to apprehend criminals for crimes they have yet to commit).  Spielberg and cinematographer Janusz Kaminski find a modern-day visual counterpart to the light/shadow starkness of the classic noirs with a color-drained look of charcoalish harshness.  And, like the classic noirs, this visually abrasive scheme mirrors the rough-edged content; a hardboiled cop now desperately on the run, hiding out among the future’s demimonde, forever haunted – and somewhat twisted – by his guilt over the long-ago loss of his son snatched away at a public pool outing during an ever-so-brief moment of distraction.

In the early 21st Century, of the two men, Spielberg emerges as the more vital, more exploratory moviemaker.  In fits and starts, he has broadened his emotional range both as a director and producer.  While Spielberg’s various production brands have turned out an astounding amount of disposable, forgettable kiddie fodder, their output has also expanded to include such un-Spielbergian works as American Beauty, Collateral (2004), the matched pair of WW II stories Flags of Our Fathers and Letters from Iwo Jima (both in 2006), and the HBO WW II mini-series’ Band of Brothers (2001) and its Pacific war counterpart, The Pacific (2010).  He has not only maintained the creative collaborations he established in the earliest days of Amblin (Robert Zemeckis directed Cast Away [2000] for Dreamworks), but continues to offer opportunities for new directorial talent, giving TV director Mimi Lederer her theatrical feature break on The Peacemaker (1997) and Deep Impact (1998), and doing the same for stage director Sam Mendes with American Beauty and Road to Perdition.

At the top of his creative game, Spielberg continues his incredible output, moving from the sentimental escapism of The Terminal (2003) to his 9/11-referencing revamp of War of the Worlds (2005) to his disturbing take on the unending cycle of violence and revenge in the Middle East with Munich (2005), while wearing his producer’s hat for the blockbuster Transformers franchise, an upcoming fourth Jurassic Park, and a planned remake of the 1951 George Pal sci fier, When Worlds Collide.

Still, however accomplished Spielberg stands as a filmmaker, and however impressive his artistic growth may be, it is George Lucas’ stamp which is most indelible on the industry today.  Jaws may have given Hollywood its taste for the summer blockbuster, but Star Wars demonstrated the full potential of the present-day film franchise.  And, it is also the Lucas’ aesthetic which holds sway.

As far back as his earliest days as a feature director, Lucas had come to believe the most important parts of a movie were its opening five minutes and its climactic twenty, with everything in between no more than filler.  He felt simplistic characters and stories could be eclipsed by sufficient doses of fast-paced action.  There is hardly a big-budget thriller today which does not seem poured out of that mold.

And so Spielberg, the one-time wunderkind, becomes Hollywood’s Old Guard, one of the last few at the major studio level who believes in the antiquated idea that movies – even the most fantastic of adventures – should be about people.

- Bill Mesce

Previous (part 1)

Think of the hundreds – the thousands – of American-helmed movies set against the country’s great metropolises where the city sits inertly behind the action, as undistinguished and indistinguishable as a generic theatre backdrop.  Then compare them to the almost hallucinogenically surreal Los Angeles of John Boorman’s Point Blank (1967), Manhattan’s desperate, grubby demimonde in John Schlesinger’s Midnight Cowboy (1969), or the sun-burnished San Francisco of Bullitt — probably Yates’ best-remembered film.  It may very well have been their stranger-in-a-strange-land distance which gave these Brit émigrés the ability to appreciate what was so distinctive and unique about American locales in a way the inured natives couldn’t.

Yates and the others understood, as few filmmakers did (and do), the powerful interplay there could be between plot, place, and people; the idea that this story could only play out with these characters and only in this place.  And place – that feeling of there belonging to no other location – is one of the most intangible, ephemeral, and difficult sensations to conjure in cinema.

The car chase in Bullitt – still one of the classic sequences in American thrillers – wasn’t Yates’ most deft accomplishment in that film, but how he used so many tools to capture the San Francisco vibe.  William Fraker’s crisp, golden cinematography; Lalo Schifrin’s jazzy score; the terse and opaque Alan Trustman/Harry Kleiner screenplay; the hard, low-key performances led by a tight-lipped Steve McQueen as the eponymous well-dressed, Mustang-driving cop; the little fill-in touches like a corner market, a jazz club luncheon for the culturally smart set — Yates pulled it all together to create a San Francisco that was the quintessence of late 60s California cool.

Thank of how unmemorable Bullitt might have been had it adhered more closely to the Robert L. Pike’s source novel, Mute Witness, with Bullitt as an aging, nondescript, ice cream-loving, blue collar Boston cop.  Good or bad, it would’ve been a more familiar movie; more expected.  Bullitt is Bullitt because no other cop movie looks – or feels — like it.

What Yates managed with Bullitt was no fluke as he demonstrated four years later in the New York-set caper comedy, The Hot Rock, with screenwriting ace William Goldman adapting Donald E. Westlake’s novel. Yates held the comedy back from silliness, with him and his actors playing it straight so the laughs seemed to come not from constructed jokes but from a credible urban lunacy organic to the sprawling, chaotic character of an off-kilter Big Apple.  The Hot Rock is The Asphalt Jungle (1950) getting off at the wrong subway stop, its supposedly deft criminals now a step off their rhythm, stepping in dog doo-doo instead of the winner’s circle.  Only in New York, Yates seems to say, only in crazy, weird Gotham with its endless supply of loons, losers, and wannabes, could the supposed mastermind of a crack heist team get mugged while casing a joint for their next job.

After Yates had hit West Coast chic and East Coast nuttiness, he went for The Middle with Breaking Away, showing himself just as deft at capturing heartland Americana as Big City glitz.  Set in Bloomington, Indiana, Steve Tesich’s semi-autobiographical screenplay combined coming-of-age-awareness with sports-underdog-triumph for one of the all-time great American movies of adolescent passage.  For those who remembered Bullitt, Breaking Away seemed a surprising about turn for the director, but Yates nailed perfectly the petty prejudices of a little burg, its insularity and familiarity, and the supreme frustration of big dreams stuck in a small town.

But in no film did Yates get it down as well as he did in the film criminally absent from most of his obits:  the Boston-set crime flick, The Friends of Eddie Coyle (1973), with Paul Monash adapting the novel by one-time Boston criminal attorney George V. Higgins.  Eddie Coyle presages the Beantown noirs Ben Affleck would make his specialty 35 years later i.e. Gone Baby Gone (2007) and The Town (2010) , and no movie – with the possible exception of Martin Scorsese’s Mean Streets (1973) – has ever delivered so acutely and despairingly a gutter-level view of the penny-grubbing day-to-day at the bottom rungs of the Mob hierarchy.

Set against a naked-treed Massachusetts autumn rendered with beautiful bleakness by cinematographer Victor J. Kemper, Eddie Coyle has no master criminals, no elaborate heists, no car chases, no gunfights, no Last Capers.  There is only Robert Mitchum’s schlumpy Eddie Coyle (Yates, as good with actors as action, draws out one of the actor’s best late-career performances), being played by double-dealing Feds and bad guys further up the ladder as he frantically tries to hustle his way out from under a pending prison wrap, and make a few dollars to keep his family off welfare should he have to do the time.

Yates had too many fizzles in his resume to be considered a great director, but he turned out a number of films made great by his remembering and deftly capturing the idea that who we are and what we do comes very much from the place where we live.

- Bill Mesce

When the news of Blake Edwards’ passing at age 88 broke earlier this month, it stood to reason his obituaries would mandatorily lead off identifying him as the writer/director behind the “Pink Panther” movies and as a “master of sophisticated slapstick comedy.” After all, the “Panther” films may not have been his best work, but, in a career marked by as many flops as hits, they were his most recognized and consistently popular efforts with six films spanning 20 years (excluding 1993’s execrable post-Peter Sellers Son of the Pink Panther).

In the longer obits, it was nice to see his more sophisticated work also remembered like romantic comedy Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1961), another iconic rom-com for another decade in 10 (1979), his 2/3 brilliant and 100% brutal skewering of Hollywood in S.O.B. (1981), and an early turn at drama with Days of Wine and Roses (1962), still one of the most disturbing portraits of alcoholism in a studio film.

What wasn’t acknowledged – and, so long after the fact, might not even be remembered – is Blake Edwards’ role in bringing the element of cool to the big and little screen.

By the late 1950s, Edwards knew the stodgy, blocky 50s were giving way to a jet age/jet setting vision of something sleeker, smoother, tougher:  shoebox Chevys ceding the road to low-slung, bullet-shaped T-birds, poodle skirts surrendering to obscenely snug pencil skirts punctuated with sky-high stiletto heels, broad lapels and fat ties retreating in front of a narrower, more tapered look fitting like a second skin on suave yet diamond-hard Edwards heroes like Peter Gunn, Richard Diamond, Mr. Lucky.

Edwards had tapped into the chrome-sheathed vein of cool even before Sinatra & his Rat Pack turned Vegas into a private playground, before James Bond and Derek Flint did the same for much of the rest of the world, before Newman, before King of Cool McQueen.  On TV, Edwards’ footsteps would be followed by the globe-trotting antics (with studio back lots standing in for the globe) of the agents of U.N.C.L.E and I Spy, of The Saint and the light-fingered Alexander Mundy of It Takes a Thief, of the millionaire cop of Burke’s Law …but Edwards had already been there; he’d been the pathfinder.

Breakfast at Tiffany’s Holly Golightly (Audrey Hepburn) was New York cool, an aspiring socialite in Givenchy dresses who played outside social conventions to rub elbows with mobsters and princes; Mr. Cory (1957) was slum cool as Tony Curtis’ wannabe gambler romanced his way up the social ladder at a Wisconsin resort; and even amongst the hilarity of the original The Pink Panther (1963), David Niven’s jewel thief was the epitome of early 60s jet setting, skiing-in-Gstaad-summers-on-the-Riviera cool.

Edwards’  cool wasn’t just about fulfilling male persistently-adolescent fantasies – although that was undoubtedly part of its appeal.  It was a recognition that that 1950s air of innocence was falling away; an acknowledgment that the world was a bigger, more textured, more complicated, more violent and certainly sexier place than movies and TV had previously acknowledged.  To this day, the noirish jazz bounce of Henry Mancini’s “Peter Gunn Theme” still brings back the vibrancy of something new; the death of the lush, oozy orchestrals of Old Hollywood and the soft-edged sensibility that went with it, and the onset of something more dynamic, more carnal, more deadly.

Consider Edwards’ most popular TV venture, Peter Gunn (1956-61).  The popular image of private eyes before Gunn was one of work-a-day gumshoes like Bogart’s Sam Spade in The Matlese Falcon (1941), or rumpled two-suits-in-the-closet types like Dick Powell’s Philip Marlowe in Murder, My Sweet (1944).  They were nondescript men of modest means working out of nondescript offices scuffling from one hopefully paying job to the next.  Kiss Me Deadly’s (1955) strutting Mike Hammer (Ralph Meeker) was the exception, but managed it only by being an absolute and totally amoral heel.

But Craig Stevens’ Peter Gunn drove a cool car, lived in a cool apartment, wore cool clothes, dated cool-looking women and, instead of working out of some grubby office, picked up his calls at a cool jazz club.  He flashed neatly-creased five-dollar bills at his informants, knew how to mix a cocktail, seemed as at home with the very very rich as with the very very poor.

It wouldn’t be long before Edwards’ brand of cool – in fact, the whole concept of cool – became steamrollered by the tragedies and countercultural tides of the late 1960s.  The supposed sophistication of Peter Gunn and Mr. Lucky seemed paradoxically naïve and clueless as assassination piled on assassination, the Vietnam War grew from back page item to consuming the national consciousness, and cool was replaced by a proudly grubby look of long hair, tie-dyed T-shirts, and ragged jeans.

Edwards seemed at a loss as to how to respond to the new cultural milieu, and began turning out a string of clunkers like Darling Lili (1969) and The Tamarind Seed (1974).  He didn’t get his commercial feet under him again until he returned to the innocent, timeless fun of the “Panther” movies with The Return of the Pink Panther (1975).

That late 50s/early 60s brand of cool may seem quaint now, innocent in its own way, maybe even flat-out corny from a remove of forty-odd years.  But in an era of trashy Housewives from Wherever and the prime time cable cavorting of the spoiled rich, reality shows where teen pregnancy has become the aspiration of trailer park wannabe celebs, where hip-hop and pop stars brag about dragging their street cred into the Hollywood hills rather than graduating past it, there is something to be said for Blake Edwards’ cadre of cool dudes who knew a good wine from a bad, held the door for a lady stepping into their T-bird, and always knew the right fork to use.

- Bill Mesce

Throughout the 1960s-early 1970s, a combination of financial desperation, creative daring, and an adventurous movie-going public had produced a creative detonation in mainstream American movies not seen before or since.  Each year of the period seemed to bring at least one mightily ambitious visual experiment by a new contributor to the commercial movie scene, the “look” of that effort being as much a part of its identity as its characters and story.  One could pick no better representative of the trend than Stanley Kubrick, for no director of the time so extended the boundaries of mainstream commercial filmmaking, or what it meant to be a mainstream commercial filmmaker.

For the most part, Kubrick’s professional ascent was built on the taking of standard genres – the war story, science fiction tale, sword-and-sandal epic – and twisting them into shapes so singular that each Kubrick outing became an acknowledged one-of-a-kind classic.  Paths of Glory (1957) deglamorized war in the most emotionally brutalizing of fashions; Spartacus (1960) gave a bittersweet soulfulness to the sword-and-sandal epic as well as – finally — a dramatic heft to match the genre’s grand scale; Dr. Strangelove or How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love the Bomb (1964) turned the Cold War nuclear thriller into an acrid, black-humored joke; 2001:  A Space Odyssey (1968) vaulted the sci fi “space opera” from juvenile status to that of cinematic poetry; A Clockwork Orange (1971) dispensed with the awe and gadgetry of most futuristic fantasies and, instead, delivered a disturbing portrait of a graffiti-marred, violence-ridden dystopia; The Shining (1980) took Steven King’s haunted hotel novel and re-worked it into Hollywood’s first intellectual horror tale, a sensory – rather than narrative – rendering of a “rotten spot” in the spiritual fabric of the world where evil seeps into this existence through the psychological fault lines of its main character, the ambivalently depicted apparitions perhaps being only the psychotic delusions of its protagonist.

A one-time photojournalist, Kubrick had begun his career with a series of small-scale, independently-produced movies the most notable of which was the time-fractured caper thriller The Killing (1956).  Paths of Glory brought him to the attention of the majors, and the impressive critical and box office reception of Spartacus provided him with the latitude to initiate his own projects at the studio level.  After directing an adaptation of Vladimir Nabokov’s controversial novel Lolita (1962), Dr. Strangelove and 2001 followed demonstrating his ability to turn in pictures which, however idiosyncratic and intellectually demanding, still connected with the mainstream audience (with rentals of $21.5 million, 2001 was the 16th highest-grossing movie 1961-1970).

2001 was Kubrick – and major studio moviemaking – at its most courageous, the movie being a complete rejection of typical narrative mechanisms.  The story – which Kubrick wrote in collaboration with noted sci fi author Arthur C. Clarke – spans millions of years, from simian pre-humans to a future where mankind takes a quantum evolutionary leap into near-godhood, always under the tutelage of never-seen alien forces.  Within the grand scope of the story, the movie is virtually plotless, lacks any meaningful characters, and much of its sparse dialogue is intentionally banal and disposable.  Kubrick himself described 2001 as, “…a non-verbal experience…,” conveying its story in the same abstract, oblique manner of, say, a poem or piece of music; hinting, inferring, suggesting, but never explaining.  One academic perhaps best described the dynamic of 2001 in a comparison with the more conventional and light-hearted Star Wars (1977): “Star Wars is like rock ‘n’ roll; 2001 is like a piece of classical music, a ‘tone poem,’ like Also Sprach Zarathustra,” referring to the Richard Strauss composition which became the movie’s signature piece of music.

Kubrick continued to test non-traditional narrative forms throughout the remainder of his career, though he would not make another movie as non-linear as 2001 (although Vietnam War-set Full Metal Jacket [1987] would come close).  Still, his subsequent movies remained a cross-breeding of mainstream Hollywood and avant-garde film, with the narrative and emotional “information” in his films conveyed by visuals at least equal – if not superior – to the conventional mechanisms of plot, character, and dialogue.

After the success of 2001, then Warners production chief John Calley, intrigued by Kubrick’s growing artistic prestige (and also, no doubt, by the consistent returns of the director’s projects since Spartacus), offered the filmmaker a permanent home at the studio along with complete creative autonomy.  Kubrick was allowed to develop whatever projects he chose, take as long as he wanted to bring them to fruition – which ran years in some cases — and even dictate the details of the marketing campaigns for his releases.  Even amid Hollywood’s creative explosion of the 1960s/1970s, it was an investment of studio faith and largesse in a maverick talent on a scale yet to be equaled, producing some of the most unique high-profile releases ever turned out by a major studio:  A Clockwork Orange, period piece Barry Lyndon (1975), and The Shining. Although Calley left Warners in 1981, the studio continued to provide Kubrick a production home, giving him the opportunity to complete Full Metal Jacket, and erotic drama Eyes Wide Shut (1999), released just after the director’s death at age 70 of a heart attack.

Other filmmakers have had the box office muscle to demand the kind of autonomy Kubrick retained (DeMille, Hitchcock), or buy it for themselves through exemplary commercial success (Lucas, Spielberg), but Kubrick’s relationship with Warners remains unique because Kubrick and his work remain unique.  Warners/Kubrick was a one-of-a-kind wedding – an oddity from its first day – between an art house sensibility and the production capabilities of what remains one of the biggest production/distribution entities in the world; a daring partnership only made practical by a mass audience’s appetite for cinema that entertained by being challenging, even difficult.  It’s entirely possible, nay, probable, that such a partnership could only have happened when it happened, and is not likely to ever happen again.

- Bill Mesce

By the late 1970s, the tremendous creative license the major studios under a new generation of production chiefs had granted the young tyros of the 1960s – Coppola, Scorsese, et al – had expired as each managed to deliver at least one, major, back-breaking flop.  For Scorsese, it had been the grim musical New York, New York (1977, $13.8 million U.S. vs. a budget of $14 million); Peter Bogdanovich turned out a streak of losers including period piece Daisy Miller (1974), comedy Nickelodeon (1976), and another disastrous musical, At Long Last Love (1975, $1.5 million U.S./$6 million cost); after the back-to-back hits of The French Connection and The Exorcist, William Friedkin delivered Sorcerer (1977, $6 million U.S. against a crushing $22 million cost); and Francis Coppola, after a string of commercial and/or critical home runs including The Godfather (1972), The Conversation (1974), The Godfather Part II (1974), and Apocalypse Now (1979), turned out One from the Heart (1982, an abysmal box office take of less than $500,000 against a bank-busting $26 million cost).

But perhaps the most emblematic failure of the auteur-centric trend of the period was Heaven’s Gate (1980), an ambitious epic Western written and directed by a Michael Cimino just coming off the triumph of The Deer Hunter (1978), a commercial hit which had won him Best Picture and Best Director Oscars.  The critically drubbed Heaven’s Gate cost a whopping (for the time) $35 million, grossed a mere $3.5 million U.S., permanently derailed Cimino’s career, and is widely considered responsible for sinking United Artists.

The director-friendly production chiefs of the 1960s/1970s were, for one reason or another, gone by the 1980s.  The major studios, under a new generation of more bottom line-oriented bosses, subsequently reasserted their authority over creative development and pointed their companies increasingly toward expensive, action/effects-driven spectacles trying to ape the success of movies like Star Wars (1977) and Jaws (1975).  As big-budget thrillers became more prevalent in studio release slates, the real auteur signature became, more often than not, that of the producer.

Five producers who exemplify the trend – and which have probably done the most to define the blockbuster form – are Steven Spielberg, Joel Silver, the team of Mario Kassar and Andy Vajna, and Jerry Bruckheimer.

After years of toiling in TV, and with one respected but commercially disappointing feature to his credit, it was a summer blockbuster – Jaws — which put Steven Spielberg’s career into high orbit.  Spielberg seemed to instantly grasp the commercial dynamic of the summer blockbuster.  As both director and producer (through his personal production company Amblin Entertainment, and, later, his DreamWorks SKG partnership formed in 1996 with Jeffrey Katzenberg and David Geffen), he has grown from pioneer to master of the form.

Over two-thirds of the movies Spielberg produced and/or directed between 1974’s The Sugarland Express and 1998’s Saving Private Ryan opened during the summer months to a collective domestic gross in the neighborhood of $5 billion, with his productions fueling his expansion into the whole gamut of blockbuster ancillaries including video games, merchandising, theme park rides, TV production, etc.  Amblin/DreamWorks releases over the years include Poltergeist (1982 with sequels in 1986 and 1988), Gremlins (1984 with a sequel in 1990), The Goonies (1985), Back to the Future (1985 with sequels in 1989 and 1990), Harry and the Hendersons (1987), Innerspace (1987), *Batteries Not Included (1987), Arachnophobia (1990), The Flintstones (1994), Casper (1996), Twister (1996), Small Soldiers (1998), The Mask of Zorro (1998 with a sequel in 2005), Galaxy Quest (1999), The Haunting (1999), Gladiator (2000), Shrek (2001 with sequels in 2005, 2007, and 2010), Seabiscuit (2003), House of Sand and Fog (2003), Flags of Our Fathers and Letters from Iwo Jima (both 2006), and Transformers (2007 with a sequel in 2009 and a third installment in the works).

Most of the action thrillers Spielberg or his production entities have turned out share a broad-stroked version of the moviemaker’s own sensibility; a mix of pop culture, B-movie nostalgia, Huckleberry Finnish juvenile adventure, and more than a small dose of Spielberg’s own middle class suburban outlook.  Spielberg productions often “quote” the movies and TV shows Spielberg and his generation of directors experienced as youths, sometimes overtly (big screen versions of The Flintstones, The Little Rascals, Casper the Friendly Ghost, remakes of 1963’s The Haunting [in 1999] and 1960’s The Time Machine [in 2002], The Mask of Zorro’s hearkening back to the swashbucklers of Old Hollywood, Gladiator’s resurrection of the sword-and-sandal epic), sometimes obliquely (the torrent of Hollywood inside jokes in Who Framed Roger Rabbit? [1988] and Gremlins, Galaxy Quest’s affectionate, thinly-veiled lampooning of the original Star Trek TV series).  They have also usually been built around a storytelling form Spielberg worked out with producer George Lucas on Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981), one in which the peaks and valleys of classic cinema drama have been replaced with a non-stop succession of ever greater climaxes – a template now de rigueur for the typical summer blockbuster.

Despite a few notable exceptions, much of Spielberg’s production output has been thrillers, often constructed with an eye toward the valuable audience of young males, avoiding real violence and indulging in a cloying, contrived sentimentality.  Despite occasional gems like Men in Black (1997) and Poltergeist, a goodly number of films put out under his banners have been dramatically flimsy projects which seem inspired by commerce more than a creative spark, often coming across as watered-down versions of Spielberg’s own work, i.e. The Goonies as a juvenile transposition of the Indiana Jones adventures by way of The Little Rascals; there’s more than a little bit of E.T.:  The Extra-Terrestrial (1982) in *Batteries Not Included.

Movies like Twister (1996), Deep Impact (1998), and remakes The Haunting and The Time Machine demonstrate all of Spielberg’s interest in state-of-the-art movie-making technology, but little of his storytelling heart, being pictures heavy on special effects, light on characterization and credible plot, and often falling back on arbitrary plot devices to move a story along i.e. the competing storm chasers in Twister. Until recently, Spielberg productions regularly reflected his own long-held aversion – one he seemed unable to overcome until such latter works as Schindler’s List and Saving Private Ryan – to dark and/or adult themes.

Upbeat, action-heavy, sentimental, youth-directed, effects-driven, and typically disposable are often the trademarks of “Spielbergian” presentations.

“I make action movies,” Joel Silver once flatly declared, “that’s what I do.” In his first 23 years as a producer, Silver produced 30 movies – most of them action thrillers – with an accumulated domestic gross of $2.5 billion.  If Spielberg-produced movies lean toward sweetness and light, Silver’s pull toward the tart and dark.  Silver productions have included Commando (1985), Jumpin’ Jack Flash (1986), Predator (1987, with a sequel in 1990), The Last Boy Scout (1991), Demolition Man (1993), Assassins (1995), Executive Decision (1996), Conspiracy Theory (1997), the remake House on Haunted Hill (1999), Swordfish (2001), the remake Thir13een ghosts (2001), Ghost Ship (2002), and Gothika (2003), but his signature products have been the Lethal Weapon, Die Hard, and Matrix franchises.

Unlike Spielberg, Silver rarely caters to the youngest viewers.  His movies are male adolescent, testosterone-addled, blood-spattered, shoot-‘em-up/hack-‘em-up fantasies, with plots which rarely make much sense and are engineered primarily to get a movie from one pyrotechnic set piece to the next.  Spielberg likes amazing effects; Silver goes for old-fashioned gunplay, but ladled on thickly.  “Automatic weapons have always been important in movies,” Silver has said, outlining his simple philosophy.  “Audiences want to see guys with more firepower.”  It’s a credo evident in such never-miss gun-blazers as Lethal Weapon’s LAPD detective – and one-time government assassin – Riggs (Mel Gibson), master-of-all-firearms NYPD detective John McClane (Bruce Willis) of the Die Hards, Arnold Schwarzennegger’s one-man army in Commando, Keanu Reeves and his downloaded weapons/hand-to-hand expertise in The Matrix films, and the behind-the-lines strike team in Predator — small as a squad but armed with a battalion’s worth of firepower.

Silver heroes are bigger than life, muscled macho men who can outshoot, outfight, and often out-bleed anyone else in the movie.  Think of muscle-bound Schwarzenegger in Predator heading one of the most sinewy casts in action movies:  Carl Weathers, Jesse Ventura, and Sonny Landham.  There’s Sylvester Stallone in Demolition Man squaring off against an equally steroidal Wesley Snipes, a pumped-up Bruce Willis in the Die Hards, and lion’s maned Mel Gibson in the Lethal Weapons. Even Silver’s version of Sherlock Holmes (2009) featured a more buff version of the deductive detective than had graced any previous rendering of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s intellectual hero.

If Spielberg’s productions often dollop out maudlin sentiment, there’s little room for sentiment, romance, or even sex in a Silver actioner.  Such elements might slow the action, or show the hero in a vulnerable state, both of which are intolerable in a Joel Silver thriller.  Early in the 1990s, Silver proclaimed the only practical role for women on-screen was “…either naked or dead.”

On the few occasions when a Silver thriller has had a female principal – Julia Roberts’ D.A. in Conspiracy Theory, Halle Berry’s terrorized mental patient in Gothika, brassy Whoopi Goldberg in Jumpin’ Jack Flash, Juliann Marguilies salvage ship First Mate in Ghost Ship, Renee Russo’s kick-boxing cop in Lethal Weapons 3 (1992) and 4 (1998) – there’s something tomboyish about them.  They’re the kind of tough-hided, one-of-the-boys women who never threaten the macho posturing of the heroes (but rather support it), and can participate as equals in all the adolescent mayhem.

Fast, loud, bloody, and not for children – these are Joel Silver’s trademarks.

Mario Kassar and Andy Vajna, who built their production company Carolco into a veritable blockbuster factory in the 1980s-1990s, set the still-standing standard for big-scale, star-powered, action-heavy, big-budget thrillers having produced – according to one entertainment writer – “…just about every big, dumb, loud, profitable action movie in town.”  Over its 13 years in business, Carolco released 29 titles with a cumulative domestic gross of $1.1 billion.

Though it’s little remembered, Carolco turned out a wide variety of releases, ranging from Holocaust drama Music Box (1989), to biopic Chaplin (1992), the Steve Martin comedy L.A. Story (1991), and Mel Gibson’s production of Hamlet (1990).  Still, the company’s fortunes rose and fell with its thrillers, and it was Carolco’s actioners which have had a lasting impact on the blockbuster form through pictures like First Blood (1982 with sequels Rambo:  First Blood, Part 2 in 1985, and Rambo III in 1988), Red Heat (1988), Total Recall (1990), Air America (1990), Terminator 2:  Judgment Day (1991), Basic Instinct (1992), Universal Soldier (1992), Cliffhanger (1993), Stargate (1994), Cutthroat Island (1995).

The larger-than-life sensibility rife throughout Carolco’s filmography was illustrated by the company’s preference for such over-sized leads as Sylvester Stallone (the Rambo and Cliffhanger movies), Arnold Schwarzenegger (the Terminator movies as well as Red Heat and Total Recall), and junior league musclemen like Jean-Claude Van Damm and Dolph Lundgren (Universal Soldier). It was also evident in the company’s penchant for directors more notable for their flair for grand scale action than for their dramatic prowess.  One Carolco veteran remembers the company having, at one time, a fleet of such directors simultaneously at work in the company’s “…very testosterone-charged…” offices including Renny Harlin (Cliffhanger), James Cameron (Terminator 2), Paul Verhoeven (Basic Instinct, Total Recall), and the writing/directing/producing team of Roland Emmerich and Dean Devlin (Universal Soldier, Stargate).

Fueled by the breakout success of their first hit – the aptly titled First Blood – Carolco went on a buying binge of talent, kicking off the age of inflated performer’s salaries and skyrocketing budgets.  Kassnar and Vajna were committed believers in the big-budget actioner and in beating the competition on-screen in much the same way as they’d beat it in talent acquisition:  by outspending.  Most Carolco thrillers were opulently produced movies little remembered for their dialogue or often inane plots, but marked with frequent jaw-dropping action set pieces.

Carolco was also one of the first companies to fully exploit blockbuster merchandising possibilities.  First Blood sequel Rambo:  First Blood, Part 2, for example, set the stage for a wave of title-related merchandise including Rambo action figures, Rambo bed sheets, and even a Saturday-morning Rambo cartoon series.

But in the 1990s, the company went bankrupt, tripped up by its own free-spending habits and some abysmally bad choices (i.e. Cutthroat Island which cost over $100 million but grossed only $10 million U.S.; and Showgirls, 1995, with a gross of $20.3 million against a budget of $45 million).  Still, the company’s template – expensive stars in costly, large-scale, action-heavy adventures – remains a standard blockbuster formula today.

Perhaps only Steven Spielberg’s and George Lucas’ name have as much value on a marquee as that of producer Jerry Bruckheimer.  Twenty-five percent of those buying a ticket to a Bruckheimer movie do so because of the producer’s name over the title; remarkable drawing power for a behind-the-scenes operator.  He may very well be the current crown prince of the blockbuster, having started with nothing a little over 40 years ago, but now ruling over one of the most successful production companies in Hollywood.  Even those who question the quality of Bruckheimer’s efforts – and they are legion – acknowledge his nose for hits.  In his 2002 memoir, What Happened?  Bitter Hollywood Tales from the Front Line, producer Art Linson writes that the prime responsibility of any film executive is to have a handle on “…what the audience wants.  Unfortunately, no one except Jerry Bruckheimer seems to know what that is.”

Bruckheimer’s explanation for his success is simple.  “I’m one of ‘them,’  he told Charlie Rose in a 2003 interview, referring to the general public.  A self-professed populist, he told Rose with neither humility nor braggadocio, “I’m in synch with the audience.”  The validity of Bruckheimer’s self-analysis is his box office track record.  In a winning streak extending back from his 2003 Charlie Rose interview to the 1980s, Bruckheimer’s fifty-odd productions to that point – produced first with partner Don Simpson, and then solo after Simpson’s 1995 death – had collectively earned $12.5 billion.  Better than 80% of Bruckheimer’s productions have been thrillers, among them Days of Thunder (1990), Bad Boys (1995 with a sequel in 2003), Crimson Tide (1995), Enemy of the State (1998), Pearl Harbor (2001), Kangaroo Jack (2003), National Treasure (2004 with a sequel in 2007), and such signature offerings as Beverly Hills Cop (1984 with a sequel in 1987), Top Gun (1986), Con Air (1997), Black Hawk Down (2001), and Pirates of the Caribbean:  The Curse of the Black Pearl (2003, with sequels in 2006 and 2007, and a fourth entry currently in the works).

A Bruckheimer blockbuster typically has a dose of Spielbergian gratuitous sentiment (convict Nicolas Cage protecting the doll intended for his daughter in Con Air; convict Sean Connery’s concern for his barely scene daughter in The Rock [1996]; Bruce Willis’ self-sacrifice so daughter Liv Tyler can live to marry protégé Ben Affleck in Armageddon [1998]), an inflating injection of Carolco-like scale (the average budget of a Bruckheimer thriller 1990-2007 was $108.4 million), a Joel Silver-sized body-count (one- and two-man armies triumph against overwhelming odds in Con Air, Top Gun, The Rock, Pearl Harbor, and both Bad Boys movies), and, of course, heavy doses of action.

Still, there are ways in which Bruckheimer’s thrillers are unique and distinctive even as they amalgamate the successful traits of other blockbuster strains.  More than any of his big-movie colleagues, Bruckheimer has been less committed to specific formulas and has shown an astoundingly acute sense of the affinities of the mainstream audience.  Mixed among the quip-laced, over-the-top action of The Rock, Gone in 60 Seconds (2000), Armageddon, Con Air, and the Bad Boys and Beverly Hills Cop movies are releases like the more brutally realistic Black Hawk Down, the family adventure Kangaroo Jack, a revamping of medieval legend in King Arthur (2004), the wry mix of camp and fantasy in the Pirates of the Caribbean series, as well as such non-thriller successes as the music-driven Flashdance (1983) and the true sports story Remember the Titans (2000).

Along with Bruckheimer’s willingness to maneuver so freely within the thriller category goes an adventurousness in casting against type for his action heroes.  At the time Tom Cruise starred in Top Gun, his biggest previous success had been the teen comedy Risky Business (1983), and his only action hero role had been in the fantasy flop Legend (1985); prior to starring in the cop thriller Bad Boys, one-time stand-up comedian Martin Lawrence’s biggest credit had been as the lead in the TV sitcom Martin, and co-star Will Smith’s previous credits included rap recording, starring in the sitcom Fresh Prince of Bel Aire, and the lead in the screen adaptation of John Guare’s stage drama, Six Degrees of Separation (1993); both Nicolas Cage and Johnny Depp had been actors with checkered box office records and associations with quirky comedies and heavy, sometimes bizarre dramas (such as Cage’s Leaving Las Vegas [1995], Wild at Heart [1990], and Moonstruck [1987]; and Depp’s Donnie Brasco [1997], Ed Wood [1994], and What’s Eating Gilbert Grape? [1993]) before Bruckheimer turned them into action thriller icons with Cage in The Rock, Con Air, remake Gone in 60 Seconds, and National Treasure, and Depp in the Pirates of the Caribbean series.

But Bruckheimer thrillers do have their standard features, most visibly the heavy troweling on of action and violence.  In the standard Bruckheimer action thriller, character and drama are secondary.  The producer’s usual development process pushes writers through several drafts before turning the screenplay over to “hired guns” to punch up specific scenes or to create particular pieces of action even if it means that, as a result, characters act inconsistently or speak with a different “voice” from one scene to the next, or that elements of the plot cease to make much sense.  The story for Crimson Tide, for example, was first drummed up by screenwriter Michael Schiffer and novelist Richard P. Henrick before it passed through the re-writing hands of Quentin Tarantino, Robert Towne, and Steve Zaillian.

One of the more egregious examples of the failings of the Bruckheimer process is in The Rock. Government officials agree to a press blackout of the crisis at hand (renegade U.S. soldiers hold hostages on Alcatraz Island while threatening to launch biochemical weapons at the city) even though Sean Connery has already left an impossible-to-miss tornado-like path of destruction through the city during a completely gratuitous car chase.

With so much physical action, dramatic lines and characters become, unsurprisingly, simple-minded.  Bruckheimer is a devout disciple of clear, unambivalent Good Guy vs. Bad Guy storytelling as he explained to The New York Times while promoting his 2004 summer entry, King Arthur: “It’s heroism, camaraderie, brotherhood.  (The knights) are fighting…for the moral high ground – all the kinds of themes I love.”  These Bruckheimer-treasured themes reach flag-waving peaks in the “pretty-boy jingoism” and “synethetic apple pie” of his military-themed projects:  Top Gun, Crimson Tide, Pearl Harbor, and Black Hawk Down.

More than the blockbusters of his big-budget peers, Bruckheimer’s thrillers also favor a similar visual look of quick edits and eye-entrancing cinematography, a look some have compared to being that of “…essentially MTV videos at feature film length.”  Bruckheimer has gravitated toward directors who share the same, strong, visual sense he himself developed first as a youngster interested in photography, and then during his first professional incarnation as a maker of TV commercials.  Bruckheimer’s most commercially successful collaborations have been with directors Tony Scott and Michael Bay (both began their careers in commercials and, in Bay’s case, music videos as well) who, between them, account for nine Bruckheimer-produced hits; the largest single block in the producer’s filmography.

Some consider Michael Bay the directorial yin to Bruckheimer’s producer’s yang.  Bruckheimer provided Bay with his big screen directorial debut with Bad Boys and produced all of the director’s subsequent features until 2005’s The Island. With Bay’s hyperkinetic visuals and a near-dismissive attitude toward character and plot, he seemed perfectly at home amid the action-drenched sci fi nonsense of Armageddon and the atavistic Pearl Harbor. The box office scoreboard of their relationship testifies as to how in synch Bay’s and Bruckheimer’s sensibilities were with each other and with the international action thriller audience:  with his five Bruckheimer-produced features, Michael Bay became the youngest director to reach the $1 billion mark in cumulative worldwide grosses.

There are still filmmakers that hearken back to that creatively audacious age of two generations ago.  Scorsese has managed to survive and turn out some of his most popular work, and there are a handful of new tyros who have managed to turn the blockbuster spectacle on its ear and produce something both spectacular as well as unique and personalized, like Christopher Nolan.

But, for the most part, the true cinema artist – the auteur – has been pushed out of the mainstream, relegated to the ever-dwindling art house circuit.  It was a perfect storm of circumstances which brought auteurism and the mass audience together for one of the most memorable eras in American commercial cinema; circumstances that, like an alignment of the planets, is not likely to happen again.

- Bill Mesce

From the 1960s into the 1980s, one by one, the legendary studios of old –  MGM, United Artists, Warner Bros., Paramount, Columbia, 20^th Century Fox — were gobbled up by conglomerates, some of which had had almost no previous interests in the entertainment business, such as Paramount’s acquirer, Gulf + Western (a motley collection of properties ranging from Caribbean sugar companies to auto parts), and Kinney National Service (a hodgepodge of funeral homes and parking lots which bought up Warner Bros.).  This corporatization of the major studios – the once mighty fiefdoms of the old moguls subjugated by invaders with little or no practical or emotional affinity for movies – is often viewed disparagingly as a sea change signaling the end of the grand Old Hollywood; the Hollywood of Gable and Garland, of Casablanca (1942) and Gone with the Wind (1939).

Factually, however, that Hollywood had been dying for years.  Nearly all of the major studios were in desperate financial shape by the 1960s having been losing audience steadily since the end of World War II.  In 1945, weekly attendance had stood at 80 million, but by 1950 –  when there were less than 4 million US TV households to cannibalize movie-going – the weekly numbers had already plummeted to 55 million.  By the mid-60s, weekly attendance had fallen below 20 million (attendance would not bottom out until 1971 at 16 million).  Though swelling TV ownership would later accelerate the erosion of attendance numbers, the underlying problem was the legendary movie moguls –  MGM’s Louie Mayer, Columbia’s Harry Cohn, Warner’s Jack Warner, et al — who’d been running the majors for two generations or more, were growing older and increasingly out of touch with a movie-going audience growing significantly younger.

The relentlessly southbound numbers had forced the studios to sell off their back lots for their real estate value, cut loose their vast pools of salaried talent and craftsmen, MGM had famously auctioned off the contents of its property and wardrobe departments including such treasured and iconic items as Judy Garland’s ruby shoes from The Wizard of Oz (1939), and finished one major – RKO — as a production entity.  By the 1960s, most of the moguls had either been shown the door or sidelined within their own organizations.  All that in mind, the studio buy-ups, in retrospect, seem less a desecration than a form of corporate Darwinism sweeping away the sclerotic remnants of Old Hollywood.

In its stead, with the new owners came a remarkable collection of production executives at nearly every one of the major movie companies.  As a class, the new production chiefs were young, ambitious, as naturally inclined by their own tastes as the dire situation of their respective studios to take risks on new talents and provocative material.  Most notable and representative of the breed were John Calley at Warner Bros., Paramount’s Robert Evans, and Richard Zanuck at 20th Century Fox.

Calley had been a movie producer (The Americanization of Emily [1964], The Cincinnati Kid [1965] among others) before being offered the top production job at Warner in 1969.  He was a radical change from the prior generation of studio exec:  laid back, informal, with an art house aesthete’s taste for movies from the likes of Akira Kurosawa, Francois Trauffaut, and Federico Fellini.  Before Calley, moviemaking at the studio had been a producer-driven affair, but Calley re-directed Warner along a more auteurist path favoring directors, particularly those with a break-from-the-pack storytelling style.

Among Calley’s strengths was an ability to understand and recognize the commercial needs of the business while still providing the opportunity for creatively ambitious moviemakers to deliver a more personalized form of mainstream cinema.  As an example of the former, Calley was not above pumping out a string of undistinguished, modestly-budgeted sequels to Warner’s 1971 hit Dirty Harry; a cost-efficient formula all but guaranteeing the studio a return.  He also moved the studio into the post-Star Wars (1977) big-budget movie franchise game with the first – and still one of the best – comic-book inspired blockbusters, Superman:  The Movie (1978).

At the same time, Calley also offered one of commercial cinema’s few true auteurs – Stanley Kubrick – an incredibly liberal production arrangement, giving Kubrick a studio home, license to pursue whatever projects he chose at his own pace, and complete control over every aspect of his films including marketing.  Kubrick’s arrangement with Warner – which extended through A Clockwork Orange (1971), Barry Lyndon (1975), The Shining (1980), Full Metal Jacket (1987), and Eyes Wide Shut (1999) – became the envy of mainstream directors everywhere.

Under Calley, Warner turned out an admirable and successful blend of the popular (The Towering Inferno [1974], Hooper [1978]), the disturbing (Deliverance [1972]), the lyrical (Jeremiah Johnson [1972], Barry Lyndon), the provocative (Dirty Harry, A Clockwork Orange), the artistically daring (Mean Streets [1973], McCabe & Mrs. Miller [1971], THX 1138 [1971]), and the prestigious (All the President’s Men [1976]).  It was also under Calley that the studio saw its biggest hit up to that time with the screen adaptation of William Peter Blatty’s 1971 best-selling supernatural thriller novel, The Exorcist (1973), which turned in rentals of a then-astounding $88.5 million on a $10 million budget.

Robert Evans, who took over production at Paramount in 1966, offered a striking contrast to Calley.  Flashy and self-promoting, there is little to say about Evans he hasn’t already said himself in his1994 autobiography, The Kid Stays in the Picture, as well as in the 2002 documentary of the same name.

Evans had made his money in sportswear, his only background in the motion picture industry having been a short, unsuccessful stint as an actor in the 1950s.  However, like Calley, he was passionate about movies, and showed himself to be a canny executive with an uncanny gut instinct for the box office.  Evans managed to completely reverse Paramount’s faltering fortunes with a mix of the commercially popular and aesthetically impressive, among them Love Story (1970), The Odd Couple (1968), Rosemary’s Baby (1968), Romeo and Juliet (1968), Goodbye Columbus (1969), and The Godfather Parts I & II (1972 & 1974).

As the son of the legendary Darryl Zanuck, Richard Zanuck had been raised in the movie industry.  When his father — who’d quit 20^th Century Fox in 1956 after 23 years as the studio’s top exec — resumed charge of Fox in 1962, Zanuck the elder hired Zanuck the younger as head of production (Dick Zanuck would later be elevated to the office of company president).

Neither an art house aficionado like Calley, nor a self-promoting seat-of-the-pants exec like Evans, Zanuck was something of a hybrid, a blend of Old and New Hollywood sensibilities.  Richard Zanuck’s Fox was just as likely to turn out a piece of Old Hollywood treacle like The Sound of Music (1965) as it was a counter-culture classic like the marijuana-flavored anti-war black comedy M*A*S*H (1972), or the tongue-in-cheek convention-busting Western Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969), or high-risk gamble Planet of the Apes (1968).  And, as one might expect from a production exec standing between Hollywood’s two creative poles, there were also those projects which blended the two sensibilities.  If Zanuck’s Fox was going to make a grand scale period epic, then it would be in the shape of an allusion to the country’s then current embroilment in Southeast Asia in The Sand Pebbles (1966); if it was going to turn out a rather simply plotted police procedural, it would do so after injecting an unprecedented near-documentary warts-and-all authenticity into The French Connection (1971).

One of the salient characteristics of that generation of production chiefs was their willingness to open their respective studios to promising though relatively unproven talent.  Martin Scorsese had only directed one low-budget thriller for B-movie king Roger Corman before John Calley acquired Scorsese’s independently produced Mean Streets and hired him to direct Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore (1974); with the exception of his Oscar-winning screenplay for Patton (1970), Francis Ford Coppola’s box office track record as both a writer and director could only be judged underwhelming prior to Robert Evans’ tapping him to work both chores on The Godfather; TV director Franklin J. Schaffner had directed just one underperforming feature before tackling Planet of the Apes for Richard Zanuck.

The flood of new talent that came into the industry under the aegis of the new studio chiefs wasn’t limited to young directorial tyros.  Along with them came an equally significant collection of writers, craftsmen, and actors who helped change the substance, look, and even the sound of movies for a generation.

Among the screenwriters were Stirling Silliphant who’d served his apprenticeship as a TV writer and producer before winning an Oscar for the screenplay of In the Heat of the Night (1967); novelist-cum-screenwriter William Goldman who won Oscars for his work on Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and All the President’s Men; and Robert Towne, another Corman graduate, who turned out such 1970s classics as Chinatown (1974) and The Last Detail (1973).  There were cinematographers like Conrad Hall (Butch Cassidy), William Fraker (Bullitt, 1968)), Haskell Wexler (American Graffiti, 1973), John Alonzo (Chinatown), master of the New York milieu Owen Roizman who was nominated for an Oscar on only his second feature (The French Connection), and the legendary Gordon Willis whose work on Klute (1971), The Parallax View (1974), and The Godfather movies did for the color thriller what Nicholas Musuraca had done for black-and-white noirs a generation earlier.  There were editors like William Wolf who shattered acts of violence into a hundred jarring fragments (The Wild Bunch, 1969), and Scorsese’s editorial right hand Thelma Schoonmaker (Raging Bull, 1980); and sound designer Walter Murch who turned intricately interlaced layers of distorted audio into an encrypted murder conspiracy in The Conversation (1974), and a form of musique concrete during the classic helicopter attack sequence in Francis Coppola’s Vietnam War epic, Apocalypse Now (1979).

Even the music of the movies changed with the jazz flavors of Lalo Schifrin (Bullitt, Dirty Harry) and Dave Grusin (Three Days of the Condor, 1975), minimalist Michael Small (The Parallax View, Marathon Man [1976]), and the premier composer of the 1960s/1970s, Jerry Goldsmith, whose work included the all-percussion score for Seven Days in May (1964), the lush, soaring The Blue Max (1966), the haunting trumpet voluntaries of Patton (1970), and the breakthrough atonalities of Planet of the Apes.

The performing ranks changed, too.  There was still room for the square-jawed good looks of a Robert Redford and a Paul Newman, but the new directors, in their search for a grittier, more realistic look sanctioned by the new production chiefs, opened leading roles to the kind of faces which, a generation earlier, might have been relegated to supporting character roles i.e. Robert DeNiro, Gene Hackman, Dustin Hoffman, Richard Dreyfuss, Robert Duvall, Elliott Gould, Roy Scheider, et al.  The rebelliousness and discontent of the young audience was simpatico with the self-possessed, subversive spirit of an impish Jack Nicholson, or a hip, cool, anti-hero like James Coburn.  There were still other actors striking a fresh, minimalist chord, their clean, low-key performances demonstrating an understanding of how little it took to fill the big screen, and which fit neatly into an evolving genre of lean, stark thrillers i.e. Charles Bronson, Clint Eastwood, Lee Marvin, and, for a time, one of the most successful of the bunch, Steve McQueen.  McQueen could very well have been the poster boy for the breed, flipping through a script and judging, “Too many words, too many words.  I’ll give you a close-up that’ll say a thousand words.”

Within the welcoming – and protective — arms of the new production chiefs, this unique blend of above- and below-the-line talent was responsible for one of the most creatively daring and artistically productive periods in American commercial cinema.  Look at any roster of memorable American films – the National Film Registry, the American Film Institute’s “100 Best” lists, “The A List:  100 Essential Films” compiled by the National Society of Film Critics, etc. – and one of the largest blocks, if not the largest, is typically comprised of films from the 1960s-1970s.

But streaks, by definition, end.  Early triumphs earned this generation of filmmakers increasing creative license and, along with it, bigger budgets to spend on their personal visions.  But, total freedom and blank checks fostered a lethal combination of hubris and indulgence, and, one after another, the wunderkind began turning out expensive flops.  The execs who had brought them into the studio fold and had greenlit those pocket-draining failures were held to account.

By the late 1970s, the age of the Hollywood auteur – as well as their production chief patrons – was coming to an end.

“The producer is like the conductor of an orchestra. Maybe he can’t play every instrument, but he knows what every instrument should sound like.”

Zanuck

The producer can be an enigmatic presence in the film making process. It is a role that is hard to define and thus, rarely recognised with the same reverence as a director or an actor. Yet a producer builds the framework for a film; their duties ranging from finding a screenplay and director, setting budgets, handling distribution and marketing, and playing a significant role in casting and crew. It is the director who then gives flesh and blood to a film’s skeleton, but it is the producer who gives it the kiss of life.

Robert Evans, as head of production for Paramount studios from 1966 to 1975, oversaw an impressive string of artistically and commercially successful movies including; Chinatown, The Odd Couple, The Italian Job, True Grit, Love Story, Harold and Maude, The Conversation, Romeo and Juliet, Rosemary’s Baby, and The Godfather.

Evans possessed a creative streak and a belief in irreverence, not afraid to force re-edits, re-writes of the musical score, change casting, and delay releases until he was satisfied with a movie. This led to frequent clashes with directors and studios; rarely did one of his productions pass without incident, acrimony or near disaster.

Despite this, he was no autocrat. Always a collaborator at heart, he believed passionately in the importance of the director, and helped facilitate the arrival of a new wave of directors and writers in the late sixties/early seventies, including Francis Ford Coppola, Hal Ashby, Roman Polanski, and Robert Towne.

Immaculately dressed, tanned, with a deep smooth confident baritone voice that was always ready with a compliment, Evans buzzed around the honey of success. Opportunity always had a way of finding him, but only because he was ready to seize it when it arrived.

After early attempts to make it in the acting world, via radio and TV, he became a self-made millionaire in his mid-twenties, launching one of the first companies to manufacture ladies pants.

His first break in cinema came when Norma Shearer, the widow of legendary producer Irving Thalberg, spotted him as he lay by the pool at the Beverly Hills Hotel, and asked him to play her husband in a biopic starring James Cagney. He agreed to audition, stating, “Cagney’s the one guy I’ve wanted to meet”. He got the part and in a further stroke of luck was spotted again not long after, by producer Daryl Zanuck in a New York restaurant, who cast him in the lead for The Sun Also Rises. A petition against Evans’ casting was overturned by Zanuck, who uttered the infamous line, “the kid stays in the picture”. Evans later commented this was the moment he wanted to be a producer not “some half assed actor shitting in his pants waiting for approval”.

With money from his clothing business, Evans set up a production company and began buying up film options of best-selling books. An expert in self-promotion, Evans held a press conference where he showed off his new film properties, paraded film star Alain Delon as the lead in Chevalier, and although unconfirmed, announced Delon’s co-star would be Bridget Bardot. Peter Bart, a New York Times journalist, was impressed by Evans, and wrote up a review in praise of his new production company and the bravado he exuded.

Charlie Bludhorn, whom had just bought out a debt ridden Paramount Studios at bottom value with his Gulf and Western company, read this article and summoned Evans to his New York office. After giving Evans a position as head of Paramount’s European production in London, he quickly brought him back to Hollywood where he was handed the keys to Paramount. This move was too much for many inside the industry; here was a man who had never produced a film before and was seen as nothing more than a ladies man with a tan. One critic in Life magazine described him as, “too good looking, too rich, too young, too lucky and too damn charming”.

Evans immediately brought in Bart, the New York Times journalist, to read scripts for him and be his right hand man. As they watched the films that Paramount had in post-production, they both agreed the studio was making the wrong films; over-elaborate musicals, old-fashioned westerns, and light comedies. Evans and Bart both felt that the future laid in finding the best new directors. To illustrate this belief, Evans, when faced with a room full of distribution managers, drew a line down the middle of a blackboard which said on one side, “Don’t tell me what to make” and “I won’t tell you how to sell” on the other.

Evans understood that ownership was everything in Hollywood, and had the studio pay advances to authors to write new books, which Paramount would later own the movie rights to. This proved lucrative, as books such as Love Story, The Godfather and Rosemary’s Baby all became bestsellers.

Evans decided upon Roman Polanski to direct Rosemary’s Baby, who was then relatively unknown outside of Europe. Having seen his earlier films, Evans saw his potential and convinced the studio to take a gamble. Polanski’s slow methodical way of directing soon had the film way behind schedule and the studio wanted to fire Polanksi, but Evans called their bluff by offering his resignation if they did so. A further complication arose when Frank Sinatra, then Mia Farrow’s husband, insisted she withdraw from the film so she could appear in his own film (ironically the film was The Detectives which Evans had bought and sold to 20^th Century Fox) or he would divorce her. Farrow was ready to walk but Evans, an expert at flattering the egos of Hollywood stars, set up a screening of the first rough cut and whispered promises of Oscars in her ear which kept her onboard. Sinatra had his lawyer deliver the divorce papers on set.

Once released, Rosemary’s Baby was both a critical and box office success, and was quickly followed by Zeffirelli’s popular adaptation of Romeo and Juliet. Despite this upturn in Paramount’s fortunes, the Board of Directors still felt the company was not worth future investment. Faced with studio closure, Evans filmed a soliloquy, directed by Mike Nichols, where he laid out the plans for Paramount’s renaissance.

Taking this film reel under his arm on the red eye to New York, he headed straight to the Gulf and Western building where he was met by a cold boardroom, occupied by cardboard cut outs of stiff collared grey men. He offered his immediate resignation but insisted that they watch his film first. They agreed, the lights went down and he rolled the film. A crackle and pop, the first frames of blank negative, then Evans appeared on the screen of a boardroom movie set. Evans, dressed in rich casual wear of sixties California, with a twee soundtrack playing in the background, delivered a speech encompassing the best-selling books they owned and the films they had in production, including; Harold and Maude, The Odd Couple, Love Story and The Godfather.

Evans describes it as his best acting performance, and although saccharine, it remained persuasive enough to keep Paramount studios in production and for him to keep his job.

After the success of Love Story - a personal victory for Evans who supervised the editing and the last minute addition of the soundtrack -Paramount went from being ninth place in the studio rankings to number one, where it stayed for four consecutive years.

The biggest achievement of Evans tenure at Paramount was undoubtedly The Godfather. Evans’ influence was as disruptive as it was helpful to the production; he initially refused Coppola’s casting of Brando and Pacino, which caused months of delays in pre-production. When the film was finished and finally shown, Evans turned to Coppola and said; “you shot a great film. Where the fuck is it – in the kitchen with your spaghetti?”. He insisted that footage was restored to the film making it half an hour longer. Evans went further, as he postponed the big Christmas release of the movie to everyone’s disbelief and stepped into the editing room himself.

Coppola and Evans to this day dispute each other’s role in the making of The Godfather, with Coppola denying Evans’ input in the final edit. Whatever the truth holds, the result of their mutual resentment produced one of the great epics of American cinema. As Evans himself has said; “success breeds strange bedfellows”.

Subsequent to the release of The Godfather, Evans discovered his wife Ali McGraw had been having an on-set affair with Steve McQueen in The Getaway, a film he insisted she make with him. Evans – bewitched by cocaine, which was cascading through the Hollywood hills – became a more quixotic character; cocooned in his beloved Woodland home living in his pyjamas. He stopped engaging with the other studio executives, to the point he was barely involved in production of The Godfather II.

However, by now Evans’ track record had gained him some influence at Paramount. Emulating his great hero Zanuck, Evans had his lawyer Sidney Korshak, the dark angel of Hollywood, negotiate a deal whereby he could produce one film a year under his own name and remain head of Paramount. The first film to be made under this contract was Chinatown, a complex tale of incest and corruption written by Robert Towne. Nobody at Paramount understood the script and warned Evans away from making this his first film. Ignoring their advice, he put Polanksi at the helm and brought together Jack Nicholson and Faye Dunaway.

The production was again turbulent. Polanski barred Towne from the set after endless arguments over the script, including the downbeat finale which Towne brandished “immoral”. Dunaway and the director fought throughout the filming until the set was eventually closed down. Evans used his favourite trick; he offered them both the choice between aRolls Royce or an Oscar nod. Filming soon recommenced.

Evans reached his mountain peak at the Oscars in 1974, with Chinatown garnering eleven Academy Award nominations. With The Godfather II and The Conversation, Paramount had a total of forty-three nominations. Although Chinatown was the favourite for best film, The Godfather II won, and pointedly, Coppola forgot to mention Evans.

After the Oscars, Evans was demoted in a Studio re-shuffle. Although he retained his rights to make independent films, and continued to produce further hits with Marathon Man, Urban Cowboy and Black Sunday, he was now being overtaken by the rapacious momentum of the blockbuster generation, with films such as Jaws and Star Wars.

By the 1980’s the flame of success burnt less brightly for Evans, and was virtually extinguished by his coke addiction, the huge commercial failure of The Cotton Club (which reopened old feuds with Coppola), bad drug deals, and his name attached to a murder case, of which he was later cleared of any involvement in. The 80’s couldn’t end soon enough and the 90’s did herald a return to film production and an acclaimed autobiography, aptly named, The Kid Stays in the Picture.

As either ally or enemy – and sometimes both – Evans presided over Paramount for a unique period in American cinematic history. He was able to coax, infuriate and charm actors, directors and writers, to make the best work of their careers. In the end they had their plaudits, and Evans, he had a thousand framed pictures of their smiling faces stood next to him, adorned along the walls of his Woodland home.

- Thomas Jarvis

Film School Rejects recently posted a list of the best — and worst — movie collaborations between directors and their spouses. It seems those capricious movie gods have decreed that for every Oscar-winning gem like Fargo (Joel Coen directs Frances McDormand) there must be a farrago like Guy Ritchie’s Swept Away, starring his then-wife Madonna. Then there’s the cinematic mismatch between the luminous Julianne Moore and her husband, Bart Freundlich, whose talents as a writer/director are, to put it bluntly, limited.

Stéphane Audran in Le Boucher.

No-one, though, could accuse Claude Chabrol of stunt casting or undue uxorial influence in making his second wife Stéphane Audran the leading lady in many of his films, including Le Boucher, La Rupture, and Juste avant la nuit. The veteran French director, who died on 12 September, was one of the founding members of the Nouvelle Vague, though he wasn’t regarded as an innovator in the same way that François Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard were.

Que La Bête Meure

Chabrol was also known as “the French Hitchcock”, an epithet that was probably unavoidable for a man who worked so often and so effectively in the genre of suspense. Like Hitchcock, Chabrol’s output was prolific, from 1958′s Le Beau Serge, to Bellamy (2009) starring Gérard Depardieu. But if you relish the slick set pieces that distinguish some of Hitch’s best-known films — the Mount Rushmore sequence in North by Northest, Kim Novak’s fatal plunge in Vertigo, or the Statue of Liberty climax to Saboteur — you might find Chabrol a bit low-key. As far as I know, none of his movies feature a struggle to the death on the Eiffel Tower or any other Parisian landmarks.

What I love about Chabrol is that he wasn’t a studio-bound director — he was a master at capturing the look, the sound and the feel of provincial France, in his stories of betrayal, sexual transgression and violent death. The masterful opening scene of Que La Bête Meure (1969) shows a boy walking through a peaceful Breton town just moments before he’s mowed down in a fatal hit-and-run incident. The lovely village of Trémolat in the Dordogne is as central to the Le Boucher (1970) as Audran’s cool blonde headmistress, who brings out the Cro-Magnon man in Popaul (Jean Yanne) — with fatal consequences. Their bizarre mating ritual does feature some classic Hitchcockian black humour, including a moment when the lovestruck butcher turns up in the classroom to present her not with a fragrant bouquet, but a neatly wrapped leg of lamb.

Stéphane Audran (Chabrol’s wife at the time) and Jacqueline Sassard as chic lesbians,in Les Biches

If things had been different, you could imagine the Audran of the 50s and 60s appearing opposite Cary Grant or James Stewart in To Catch a Thief or Rear Window. She certainly had the looks and the screen presence to rival any of Hitch’s leading ladies of the period. But though Chabrol trades on her capacity for leading men astray in films like Les Biches, La Femme Infidèle and Les Noces Rouges, he doesn’t objectify the women in his films to the same degree that Hitchcock does.

When I first saw Chabrol’s L’Enfer (1994) I had no idea that he was working from a screenplay abandoned by another great French director, Henri-Georges Clouzot, 30 years earlier. It’s not his best work, but François Cluzet and Emmanuelle Béart bring a physical intensity to their deteriorating relationship that, by the end, is almost frightening to watch. As jealous husband Paul, the increasingly unhinged Cluzet looks like a cross between Robert De Niro and Dustin Hoffman, while Béart’s performance suggests an accomplished character actress trapped inside the body of a temptress.

Chabrol, who also notched up more than 50 writing credits, adapted novels by leading crime writers including Georges Simenon (Betty) and

La Cérémonie

Patricia Highsmith (Le cri du hibou). But it is his 1995 Ruth Rendell adaptation, La Cérémonie, that best exemplifies his ability to turn class tension and domestic unease into unimaginable carnage. Isabelle Huppert and Sandrine Bonnaire, play the unlikely partners in crime who wreak revenge on the bourgeois family of Jacqueline Bisset and Jean-Pierre Cassel. The climax of the film shows the unsuspecting family enjoying a cosy evening watching Mozart’s Don Giovanni on TV, while two very disturbed women indulge in some Clockwork Orange-style mayhem. It’s both horrifying and oddly comic. If you only ever watch one Chabrol film, make it this one.

Susannah Straughan

There have always been moviemakers who operated just outside the major studio spotlight; showmen, hucksters, exploiters working on small budgets.  Before the advent of home video and the multiplex, they could sometimes be found hand-carrying their single print from one movie house to another.  Post-World War II, many of them found small, survivable niches specializing in the kinds of material – mostly horror, chillers, and science fiction – which could always find a ready home with the burgeoning youth audience.  There were some whose ability to spin their thread-bare, pulp fiction-caliber productions into a small but lucrative box office return was so exceptional they came to be looked upon as masters of cinema’s minor leagues, maestros of the “B”-movie.  Among them were producers like William Allan and Sam Katzman, writer/producer/director William Castle, directors Edgar G. Ulmer and Bert I. Gordon, producing partners James H. Nicholson and Samuel Z. Arkoff, and the man often referred to as the King of the Bs, writer/producer/director Roger Corman.

Corman has outlasted everyone in his generation of drive-in/grindhouse circuit peers and is still turning out films today (Syfy channel will soon be premiering his latest: Sharktopus). The sheer bulk of his output – over 300 movies produced since the 1950s of which he’s directed more than 50 – has kept his oldies alive for generation after generation of connoisseurs of low-budget thrills. Last year, Corman received the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences’ Governor’s Award in recognition of a half-century-long career consistently marked with “…ingenuity, boundless energy and a deep love of movies.” Next week, at the Fantastic Fest in Austin, Corman – along with his wife, Julie — will receive a Lifetime Achievement Award.  In less flowery language than that of the Motion Picture Academy, Fantastic Fest’s announcement may actually hit closer to the heart of every Corman aficionado, saluting him for “…(making) sure audiences have a blast at the cinema every time.”

Corman became as famous – if not more so – for those who made movies with or for him then for his own work.  In pictures he directed as well as produced from the late 1950s onward, serving their Hollywood apprenticeships on titles like Boxcar Bertha (1972), The Wild Angels (1966), Dementia 13 (1963), Teenage Caveman (1958), and The Little Shop of Horrors (1960), could be found what would become the most prominent talents of a generation of American cinema including actors Jack Nicholson, Robert DeNiro, Sylvester Stallone, Peter Fonda, Robert Vaughn, Bruce Dern, screenwriter Robert Towne, and directors Francis Ford Coppola, Nicolas Roeg, Monte Hellman, Jonathan Demme, Peter Bogdanovich, Ron Howard, Joe Dante, and Martin Scorsese.

Corman had begun dabbling in movies in the early 1950s, but his career only began in earnest when he hooked up with legendary schlock producers Sam Arkoff and James Nicholson who were heading a company which became American International Pictures.  Throughout the latter 1950s, Corman ground out an incredible number of low-budget movies for AIP, most of them sci fi and horror titles.  From 1955, when he joined AIP, through 1959, he directed and/or produced no less than 34 movies, many boasting more bombast in their titles than in their skimpy productions i.e. The Beast with a Million Eyes (1956), Saga of the Viking Women and Their Voyage to the Waters of the Great Sea Serpent (1957), Attack of the Crab Monsters (1957), and She Gods of Shark Reef (1958).  Corman’s incredible profligacy was maintained through an efficient production formula film historian Joel Finler describes as “…a sixty-minute running time, a ten-day shooting schedule, a minimal crew, an even more minimal cast (and) a monster in a rubber suit…”  He shaved still more dollars off budgets by casting hungry young beginners (i.e. Jack Nicholson in The Little Shop of Horrors), and past-their-peak “B”-players like Boris Karloff, Vincent Price, and Peter Lorre.  To inflate the production values of The Masque of the Red Death (1964), he cadged sets leftover from Paramount’s opulent Becket (1964).

His economic shooting style remains the stuff of legend.  He rarely invested time in his actors, relying, instead, on the craft of the veterans who headlined his better work.  Boris Karloff, who top-lined several of Corman’s 1960s horror films, would remember, “If you asked (Corman) about advice on a scene he’d say that’s your pigeon” while whirlwinding the crew through an incredible number of camera set-ups.

His speed in shooting could be blinding.  The Little Shop of Horrors was shot in an amazing two-and-a-half days.  He would often rush straight from one production into another to take advantage of locations and cast already in place from the previous shoot.  In one instance, having Karloff on hand after shooting The Raven (1963), Corman quickly ran the actor through two days’ filming on The Terror (1963) using the very same Raven sets.  Karloff would remember Corman hurrying his crew through the Terror shoot “…two steps ahead of the wreckers…” bringing down the Raven sets (Corman had been in such a rush on The Terror that it wasn’t until he’d begun to assemble his footage he realized the movie didn’t make any sense; solving the problem in typical Corman fashion, he called back two of his supporting actors and shot them in close-up – the sets having been struck by then – while they delivered blocks of exposition explaining the plot).  It’s worth pointing out, however, there was a method in Corman’s rapid-fire madness.  To carry out his short schedules, pre-production was meticulous and thorough, so much so that as quickly as the shoots were executed, they were rarely rushed.

Despite the short schedules, acting ranging from the hammy to the amateurish, and often slapdash plots, what elevated Corman from among so many other grind-‘em-out “B” purveyors was his ability to still turn out movies with a sense of visual flair.  As Corman’s directorial hand grew more sure, he was even able to pull off his monster movies without the benefit of a monster.  In The Beast with a Million Eyes (1955), there is no beast – just an invisible force.  Not of This Earth (1957) managed a genuinely creepy feel in its story of a vampire-like alien though the threat was nothing more than “B” actor Paul Birch in a business suit and sunglasses.  His cinematic fluency and self-assurance grew project by project, and he became more playful with his material, working an ironic and often humorous social commentary into his movies.  At a time when one low-budget horror movie seemed indistinguishable from the next, Corman became a drive-in circuit auteur, a cult hero to the teenagers who were AIP’s primary target audience.

By the 1960s, Corman was confident enough in both his ability and his rapport with his young audience to convince AIP it was time for an upgrade.  With bigger budgets, a gallery of a higher class of fading stars i.e. Karloff, Lorre, Basil Rathbone, Ray Milland, Lon Chaney, Jr., and perennial Corman leading man Vincent Price, Corman embarked on the work for which he is probably most fondly remembered, a series of movies inspired by the literary work of Edgar Allan Poe:  The House of Usher (1960), The Pit and the Pendulum (1961), The Premature Burial (1962), Tales of Terror (1961, an anthology movie using Poe’s “The Case of M. Valdemar,” “The Black Cat,” and “Morella” as source material), The Raven, The Haunted Palace (1963), The Masque of the Red Death, and The Tomb of Ligeia (1964), of which Masque is generally considered the best of the lot.

Some of Corman’s Poes, like Masque, actually pillaged a number of Poe stories, while most took little more than the title and possibly a dramatic “hook” (as in The Pit and the Pendulum) from their source material.  Still, to some extent, they usually managed to capture some semblance of Poe’s feel for the macabre, and for a malevolence lying not in the supernatural or in bizarre creatures, but within the human psyche.

There are usually no monsters in Corman’s Poe movies, other than the one manifesting itself in some fatal flaw in their central characters.  In The Pit and the Pendulum and The Haunted Palace, the protagonist is haunted (supernaturally?  psychologically?) by the actions of a morally corrupt ancestor.  In The Premature Burial, tragedy arises from Ray Milland’s obsessive fear of being buried alive.

The most dramatically ambitious of Corman’s Poes is The Masque of the Red Death. Price plays Satan-worshiping Prince Prospero whose castle is an isolated island of safety in a land scourged by a plague called The Red Death.  His fellow noblemen allow Prospero to debase and toy with them to gain the safety of his castle, but Prospero reserves his greatest amusement for his attempts to corrupt a virginal village girl (Jane Asher) pleading for mercy on behalf of her father and fiancé whom Prospero has imprisoned.  The screenplay, by Charles Beaumont and R. Wright Campbell, paints Prospero as more than a simple sadist or despot; as an essayist in a self-justifying malignant sophistry.  When the village girl brings up belief in God, Prospero sneers back:

Prospero: Believe?  If you believe you are gullible.  Can you look around this world and believe in the goodness of a god who rules it?  Famine, pestilence, war, disease and death…They rule this world.

Francesca: There is also love and life and hope.

Prospero: Very little hope I assure you.  No.  If a god of love and life ever did exist…he is long since dead.  Someone…something rules in his place.

Corman’s use of color (Masque’s cinematographer was future director Nicolas Roeg) is, at times, stunning.  Prospero takes Francesca on a tour of several small apartments, each done completely in a single color:  purple, black, yellow, etc.  A macabre story is attached to each, the most unsettling one perhaps being that attached to the room of bright yellow.  Prospero tells of a woman held prisoner there until the sight of sunshine became repugnant to her.

While Corman’s movies could hardly be considered classic cinema – or, often, even among the best of their respective genres – what continues to impress is how much dramatic muscle and directorial flair he could bring to his projects despite all their restrictions and even his own artistic limitations.  A good example is one of his better contemporary sci fi efforts, X – The Man with the X-Ray Eyes (1963).  Again, the “monster,” as such, is the protagonist, in this case Ray Milland’s surgeon experimenting with a chemical compound endowing him with X-ray vision.

Corman and screenwriters Robert Dillon and Ray Russell throw an AIP-typical sop to the young audience with a scene at a student party and a bevy of teen dancers revealed in the buff thanks to Milland’s enhanced vision, but the cheap jokes and titillation are soon left behind.  An accidental killing puts Milland on the run through a series of Les Miserables-like episodes as he looks for some safe haven in which he can make enough money to continue researching some way to control the visual ability which is devouring him.  He can’t sleep as he sees through his closed eyelids and on through the floors of the apartments above him.  Trying to rest, his vision is plagued by a strange light – God, he wonders, or far-off suns?  He sees “cities of the dead,” his x-ray powers stripping buildings of their concrete shells and their inhabitants of their flesh.

He takes a job as a carnival mental act to make money, eventually allowing himself to be exploited by a crude midway barker (Don Rickles) who sets him up in a slum office as a “healer.” In one of those pithy dramatic moments Corman consistently included in his pictures, Milland asks the sweaty hustler what Rickles would want to see had he Milland’s power, and gets the repugnant answer:  “All the naked women my eyes could bare!”

In the movie’s disturbing final scene, Milland, pursued by police, drives off into the Nevada desert and crashes.  He staggers into a religious revival tent meeting, his eyes now completely turned a necrotic black.  He speaks of visions of far off worlds smashing together.  The evangelist preacher proclaims them false visions:  “If thy eye offend thee, pluck it out!” The preacher’s disciples join in the chant – “Pluck it out!  Pluck it out!” – and Milland, with a pained cry, plunges his fingers into his eyes and tears them out.

Corman did not expand the genres in which he worked, and few – if any – of his titles could be considered among the best of their kind.  He quite consciously walked a line between mercenary commerce and creative craftsmanship.  According to Corman alumnus Jonathan Demme, Corman – with no self-consciousness at all – referred to himself “…as being 40% artist and 60% businessman…”.  At the same time, there can be seen, in his work, a clear delight in moviemaking.  “My prime goal,” Corman has said, “was to make movies and have a good time doing that…” while trying to do the best possible job no matter how little money or time he had to work with.

Existing successfully between economic necessity and his own modest creative ambitions, Corman proved budget has, at best, only a tenuous connection to good movie-making; that one could interweave entertainment with the threads of the occasionally, intelligently provocative.  He trusted his instincts and his adolescent audience – perhaps the most fickle, least serious-cinema-minded of ticket-buyers – and turned out a succession of surprisingly entertaining and stylish fantasies, often turning what should have been disposable and forgettable teen fodder into–  according to film historian John Baxter — “…the picturesque and the profound…”.  In the process, he often displayed a creative audacity rarely scene among the work of his more upscale confreres.

There are two timely justifications for revisiting the career of Clint Eastwood at this particular moment. The most obvious is the premiere of Eastwood’s latest directorial effort, Hereafter, at the Toronto International Film Festival earlier this month. The other is his appearance on the Beloit College Mindset List for the Class of 2014 which came out in August.

Beloit College has issued its Mindset List each August since 1998. They describe it as “…a look at the cultural touchstones that shape the lives of students entering college (in the fall)…” According to an Associated Press story on the issuance of the most recent list, the idea behind it “…is to remind teachers that cultural references familiar to them might draw blank stares from college freshmen born mostly in 1992.”

This year’s list includes items like:

“Item #15. Colorful lapel ribbons have always been worn to indicate support for a

cause…

“Item #28. They’ve never recognized that pointing to their wrists was a request for the

time of day…

“Item #68. They have never worried about a Russian missile strike on the U.S….”

And, more to the point, Item #12: “Clint Eastwood is better known as a sensitive director than as Dirty Harry.”

The AP story emphasized this last point, speaking with one Seattle 18-year-older who said of Eastwood, “I know he directed movies, but I also know he’s supposed to be sort of bad-ass.”

To Eastwood fans of a certain age, that this one-time movie bad-ass is now a regular feature of the film festival circuit accompanying sensitive directorial efforts like Hereafter, Million Dollar Baby (2004), Changeling (2008) et al, and is among one of the most respected filmmakers in mainstream films, is nothing short of mind-boggling.

Sort of bad-ass? Indeed, back before the Class of 2014 was born, he was considered one of the baddest bad-asses on the big screen.

* * * * *

With an early curriculum vitae including stints as a logger and gas station attendant, and then, eventually, bit parts in movies like Tarantula (1955) and Revenge of the Creature (1955), there is little from the beginning of Clint Eastwood’s career portending the eminent status he would be granted as a director with Unforgiven (1992), cement with Mystic River (2003), and entrench with Million Dollar Baby and the bookend pieces, Flag of Our Fathers (2006) and Letters from Iwo Jima (2006).

Eastwood’s movie career began as a contract player for Universal in the 1950s, but his first major break – and minor star status – came with his casting as a regular on the popular Western TV series, Rawhide. He stepped up to the big screen when Italian director Sergio Leone, looking for an American actor as a “hook” to gain U.S. distribution for his “spaghetti Westerns,” cast Eastwood as The Man With No Name in three increasingly popular oaters, A Fistful of Dollars (1964), For a Few Dollars More (1965), and The Good the Bad and the Ugly (1966). The Leone successes led to offers of leads in American movies, though they were often B-caliber actioners such as Hang ‘Em High (1968), and Where Eagles Dare (1968), which rarely did little more than milk the laconic gunman persona Eastwood had established in his Italian features. However, with the breakout success of Dirty Harry (1971), Eastwood finally took a place among the ranks of major action stars, and quickly began to exploit the power of his newly bankable status by negotiating for his first feature directorial effort (Eastwood had initially tried his hand at directing on Rawhide), the psychological thriller Play Misty For Me (1971), a critically well-received story of a stalker’s obsession which essentially presaged Fatal Attraction 16 years later.

As actor and director, Eastwood early on displayed an admirable tendency to use his growing commercial value as a consistently popular action hero to – in effect – cross-collateralize creative risks both behind and in front of the camera, resulting in a body of work (much of it made through his Malpaso production company) which, while often dominated by routine action thrillers of one sort or another, was salted with a wildly eclectic mix of more personal endeavors. In terms of sheer creative guts if not quality, Eastwood’s against-type projects showed more nerve than evidenced in the oeuvres of talent of greater critical standing.

There was, for example, his departure from cool, dead-shot San Francisco loner cop Dirty Harry Callahan with his portrayal of less assured New Orleans detective Wes Block in Tightrope (1984), a single father pondering his own repressed sexual kinks as he tracks a serial killer through the city’s demimonde; he played broadly against type (co-starring with an orangutan, no less) as a happy-go-lucky bare-knuckle boxer in the loopy comedy Every Which Way But Loose (1978) and its sequel, Any Which Way You Can (1980); Eastwood poked gentle fun at his Western persona in Bronco Billy (1980), playing the star of a cheesy modern-day traveling Wild West show whose deep, dark secret is that he is really a shoe salesman from New Jersey; and then there was his doomed hillbilly crooner bonding with his runaway nephew on a cross-country trek in the Depression era drama, Honky Tonk Man (1982). His willingness to occasionally try significant departures from his commercially proven personas comes from a Zen-like simplicity of purpose he explained in a 2004 interview with British journalist Michael Parkinson where he discussed his decision to do Every Which Way But Loose against his agent’s advice and after having done a series of action thrillers: “… they said, ‘That’s not you,’ and I said, ‘Well, what is me? I don’t know’.”

Similarly, while his directorial credits prior to 1992 show a preponderance of routine actioners like Dirty Harry sequel Sudden Impact (1983), Heartbreak Ridge (1986), The Eiger Sanction (1975), The Gauntlet (1977), and The Rookie (1990), among them are also Bird (1988), his brooding biography of jazz great Charlie Parker; Honky Tonk Man and the Capra-esque Bronco Billy; and White Hunter, Black Heart (1990), with Eastwood also starring as a John Huston-like movie director in a story inspired by Huston’s carryings-on during the production of The African Queen (1951). Still, for all his genre dabbling and occasional genre inversions, a number of box office successes and the occasional critical tip-of-the-hat, by the mid-1980s Eastwood’s directorial reputation was that of a solid but unexceptional craftsman generally known for turning out the same kind of action thriller fare which had launched his career, but often failing to live up to the creative promise of Play Misty For Me. With a streak of disappointing or middling returns for The Dead Pool (1988), Bird, Pink Cadillac (1989), White Hunter, Black Heart, and The Rookie, and with Eastwood approaching 60, there was even some question as to whether or not he had passed his box office peak.

The best mile markers of Eastwood’s career through Unforgiven are his self-directed Westerns. Westerns had launched his big screen career, and they usually demarcated phases of his Hollywood passage. As well, Eastwood is as much a part of Western movie iconography as he is a part of the Dirty Harry-like rogue cop genre; considered by some as much a Western standard as John Wayne. His lanky frame, trademark squint, laid-back and often terse way with dialogue, an acting style the late actor Richard Burton described as “dynamic lethargy,” has always provided a natural fit for the saddle.

Play Misty For Me had made a bigger impression with critics than at the box office, so, understandably, for his second directorial effort, Eastwood fell back on what had, to that point, proven to be one of his more reliable commercial vehicles: the Western, with High Plains Drifter (1973) (Misty had a domestic gross of about $10 million vs. $19 million for The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, and $36 million for Dirty Harry. Drifter did about $14 million domestic).

Eastwood has always counted Sergio Leone and Dirty Harry director Don Siegel as the two greatest influences on his directorial career, but it is Leone’s spirit which dominates High Plains Drifter. The Italian director’s operatic style is stamped all over the movie, from the near-surreal imagery Eastwood concocts with cinematographer Bruce Surtees (Largo, a collection of raw-finished and half-built buildings with a bare toehold on strip of desert shore alongside a lifeless lake, painted a Satanic red at Eastwood’s order, the town’s “Welcome” sign amended to read, “Welcome to Hell”), to Dee Barton’s ethereal soundtrack (channeling Leone’s usual composer, Ennio Morricone), to the dramatic histrionics (snarling pit bull Bad Guys; spineless and transparently conniving Largo elders), and especially in the movie’s rather obvious morality tale (by Shaft scribe Ernest Tidyman and an uncredited Dean Reisner) about a — literally — avenging angel gunfighter come to town. This broad stylization and overt symbolism makes Drifter – like Leone’s movies — something of a kabuki Western, but it is a tone that fits the Twilight Zone-ish, not-quite-real-not-quite-unreal feel of the picture.

The Outlaw Josey Wales, coming just three years later, represents a substantial change for Eastwood. His career more firmly established, he begins to experiment, leaning away from Leone and more toward a Don Siegel aesthetic in attempting a story (Phil Kaufman and Sonia Shernus adapting Forrest Carter’s novel, Gone to Texas) more naturalistic and true-to-life (priming him for such subsequent life-sized projects as Bronco Billy and Honky Tonk Man). Eastwood is Josey Wales, a neutral Southern farmer during the Civil War who joins a Confederate guerilla band after raiders aligned with the Union (“Redlegs” for the identifying stripe on their trousers) torch his farm and slaughter his family. At the end of the war, Wales and the other guerillas prepare to lay down their arms at an arranged surrender only to be ambushed by the Redlegs. Wales escapes and winds his way west dogged by bounty hunters and a Redleg posse.

In contrast to High Plains Drifter’s aggressive visuals of a sun-baked hell, under the hand of Eastwood again working with Bruce Surtees, Josey Wales is a more visually subdued, often pastoral piece, set first among the quiet greens of Southern farmland, then moving on to the Western spaces. This is not the bleached-bone West of Drifter, but a softer-hued expanse, a limbo land with islands of promise for the cast-off and on-the-run. Eastwood’s eye here eschews Leone’s visual hysteria in favor of Siegel’s low-key approach; clean, straightforward visuals, letting the story, the characters, and the scenery speak for themselves within a relaxed frame, adding only sparingly the smallest of visual flourishes. Josey Wales’ strongest moments are its quietest: the “orphan” Wales’ gradual assembling an ad hoc family of fellow drifters (an aged Native American highwayman; a Native American woman liberated from sexual slavery; a pair of stranded lady settlers); the plain language eloquence of Wales’ face-to-face meet with Indian chief Will Sampson to strike a deal for peaceful coexistence; and especially in a melancholic coda where a wounded Wales finds himself face-to-face with the guerilla leader (John Vernon) he mistakenly assumed had arranged his unit’s massacre, each pretending not to recognize the other as they obliquely strike a peace and recognize that, finally, “The war’s over.”

Whether it was by inclination or for box office insurance, The Outlaw Josey Wales still regularly strays into the shoot-‘em-up Eastwood formula first staked out in the Leone movies. Like clockwork, Wales constantly bumps into a bounty hunter (more often, bounty hunters) or his Redleg pursuers, delivers a zingy this-means-war one-liner or two (“Dyin’ ain’t much of a livin’,” he says, trying to dissuade one gunman from taking him on), there’s a fast draw, a blaze of gunfire and Wales – no matter how badly outnumbered – emerges victorious, intact, and unmoved (after killing one pair of would-be assassins, he punctuates the episode by disdainfully spitting a large gob of tobacco juice on one corpse’s forehead). The movie seems caught between two poles: a routine Eastwood exercise in body counts on the one hand; a mournful, ruminative Western ballad on the other.

Eastwood would not venture another Western for 12 years, but when he did, there was more than a little gumption involved, for in those post-Heaven’s Gate (1980) years simply making any Western was an act of daring, let alone one as retro as Pale Rider (1985). The Eastwood/Surtees combine takes Rider’s visuals beyond those of Josey Wales, pushing for a greater texture, testing the camera’s tolerances for shadow, particularly in the dim natural light schemes of the movie’s interiors (perhaps a test run for the dark palette of Bird). Eastwood and Surtees manage a visual authenticity – that hardest of screen sensations to capture: the feel of a place — in Pale Rider which Michael Cimino couldn’t match in Heaven’s Gate with five times Eastwood’s budget. One can almost smell the dankness and raw wood and mud chinking of the cabin household of struggling small miner Michael Moriarity and his wife Carrie Snodgrass; feel the damp chill of a strip mine where ore is blasted out from open rock face with water cannons.

But, as visually striking as Pale Rider is, to the same degree so is it dramatically pallid. The screenplay by Michael Butler and Dennis Shryack is nothing more than a re-hashing of Shane – and not a particularly imaginative rehashing — which also cuts and pastes from earlier Eastwood works. Eastwood’s nameless gunman (his clerically-garbed character known only as, “Preacher”) is just another – and by now, tired – variant on his Leone era Man With No Name, and his role of other-worldly avenger is a lift from his own High Plains Drifter. Pale Rider is so painfully familiar that from its opening moments, the audience is simply marking time to the predictable Eastwood-defeats-a-small-army finale. Still, perhaps Eastwood understood the importance of Western rituals to Western fans – or at least Eastwood fans: Pale Rider was a respectable performer, with a domestic gross of $41.4 million against a lean $6.9 million budget.

In the years following, Eastwood seemed stalled. Much as Pale Rider had been an unimpressive rehash of Shane, Heartbreak Ridge was a similarly uninspired reworking of The Sands of Iwo Jima (1949). He reached far afield from his usual beat with Bird and White Hunter, Black Heart, but while the first gained him a fair measure of critical respect, both performed abysmally at the box office. A return to the action genre with The Rookie seemed a tired pro forma effort. Then came an offering some would come to consider to be among the best American movies of the last few decades as well as one of the all-time classic Westerns: Unforgiven.

When compared to Eastwood’s previous work, the artistic maturity of Unforgiven is startling. Though one can easily see Eastwood’s technical prowess evolve over the course of his directorial career, there’s been less of a discernible evolutionary line in his handling of drama. His previous directorial effort – The Rookie, released just two years earlier – is pedestrian in every way; Eastwood turning out a by-the-numbers Eastwood actioner long after the appeal of the formula has waned. On the other hand, everything about Unforgiven is fresh, yet assured, as if coming from another part of Eastwood’s movie-making soul where it had been percolating for years and was only just now ready to appear fully formed. Said Rolling Stone at the time, Unforgiven was, “A polished piece of rawhide revisionism, it’s antiromantic, antiheroic and antiviolent…if it’s not recognized right away as a classic, it will be.”

There is much about Unforgiven which feels a product of aspects of Eastwood’s moviemaking process now honed to a fine edge. By 1992, Eastwood had established a work pattern that was, according to a 60 Minutes profile, “…a study in efficiency, consistently bringing his films in ahead of schedule and under budget”; budgets which, from the outset, nearly always fell below the blockbuster era’s vertiginous median. On the set, director Eastwood rarely devotes more than two takes to a scene. Generally working with the same crew time and again, the consequent familiarity produces shoots that are surprisingly speedy and economical. Director Sam Mendes (American Beauty [1999]; Road to Perdition [2002]) would, 12 years after Unforgiven’s release, still marvel in an interview with Charlie Rose at how Eastwood could turn out a movie of such quality after a shoot of only five weeks or so – unheard of for most major studio productions whose shoots routinely run into months.

Yet the shoots themselves, for all their speed, are easygoing, in part because of Eastwood’s own laid back, even-toned manner. Along with a crew familiar with Eastwood’s needs, what also comes into play is the cast preparation which goes on beforehand. In a 2003 interview, Eastwood himself explained the process as it worked on Mystic River, saying how most of his directing of the actors happened long before filming. As each member of the cast was brought on to the project, Eastwood would discuss the material, then send them to Boston – the story’s locale – to get a feel for the neighborhoods in which the story played out. He also arranged meetings for the cast with Dennis Lehane, author of the novel upon which the movie was based. Said Eastwood, “….by the time we started everyone was really well schooled on what they wanted to do…”

Nor does Eastwood allow himself to be distracted by the non-essential. If the weather takes an unwanted turn, an effect doesn’t come off, an actor fumbles a prop or a move, Eastwood either incorporates the unexpected into the scene providing a sense of spontaneity for his actors, or drops the element altogether.

Having established a system composed of talent Eastwood could trust – crew members with a long, established working relationship with him; actors who already know what is expected of them — Eastwood comes to a shoot like the designer of a finely engineered car whom only ever has to lightly lay his fingertips on the wheel on occasion to get the car to go where he wants it. That “light touch on the wheel” manifests itself on-screen as what Sam Mendes described as “certainty”; a visual economy which says Eastwood knows exactly what he needs to tell his story, and has put a team together who knows how to give it to him.

This presents on-screen in visuals which – while never bland – are simple and clean. The camera in Unforgiven almost never moves rapidly, generally avoids zooms and pans, rarely moves in for extreme close-ups giving his actors room to interact, and allows beats for Jack N. Green’s autumnal cinematography to bring something to every scene. Dialogue-heavy scenes play out at a natural rhythm with minimal interruption by cuts or distracting camera moves.

The two most significant differences elevating Unforgiven far beyond Eastwood’s previous attempts at heavier dramatic fare are the principal actors, and David Webb Peoples’ Oscar-nominated screenplay.

Prior to Unforgiven, Eastwood vehicles – whether directed by the actor or not – were populated with second tier performers, some of which, like Geoffrey Lewis (Every Which Way But Loose; Any Which Way You Can; Pink Cadillac [1989]), John Vernon (Dirty Harry; The Outlaw Josey Wales), Bill McKinney (Thunderbolt and Lightfoot [1974]; The Gauntlet [1977]; Bronco Billy; The Outlaw Josey Wales), and John Mitchum (Dirty Harry; Magnum Force [1973], The Enforcer [1976]; The Outlaw Josey Wales), were part of a John Ford-like stock company Eastwood regularly drew on to fill supporting parts. While many of Eastwood’s “company players” were quite fine performers, they also, unfortunately, often gave Eastwood’s pictures – especially his more “serious” dramatic efforts like Honky Tonk Man and White Hunter, Black Heart — a B-caliber air. Unforgiven marked the first time Eastwood surrounded himself with actors of comparable stature – Gene Hackman, Morgan Freeman, and Richard Harris – an ensemble which gives the picture a dramatic gravitas Eastwood’s earlier serious efforts never managed.

The real strength of the movie, though, is David Webb Peoples’ screenplay. At first, Unforgiven offers all the elements of another Eastwood-as-avenger yarn: Eastwood is a retired gunman turned failing pig farmer who, out of economic necessity, takes up his gun again to become one of a trio trekking to the far-off town of Big Whiskey, Wyoming, in pursuit of a bounty on a pair of cowboys who mutilated a prostitute. Peoples’ plot is a twisting, turning, eel-like thing, though, worming away from genre-conditioned expectations to deliver, in the words of Entertainment Weekly reviewer Chris Willman, “…a compelling sermon on how even the best-intentioned justice gets messy and inexact.” “In this film,” says Eastwood, “the punishment never fits the crime.” Unforgiven is unconventionally structured, defying the oft applied Hollywood canard that every scene should propel a movie’s plot forward. Instead, Unforgiven digresses, it pauses for throw-away scenes and sub-stories having little or no connection to the central plot, it switches focus between its two principals (Eastwood’s gunman William Munny and Gene Hackman’s autocratic Big Whiskey sheriff, Little Bill) and follows them off on tangents, even shifting emphasis from the plot which kicked off the movie to the spun-off tale of vengeance that concludes it. The movie plays, then, less like the typical Hollywood construct than a disease vector study, tracing the virulent, corrupting toxicity of the movie’s initial, priming act of violence as it passes by contact randomly — but naturally — from one character to another, killing souls as lethally as people as it goes along. There is, by the movie’s end, no vindicating act, no resolution restoring the scales of justice, no catharsis, no uplifting epiphany, nothing even remotely resembling triumph. Instead, the innocent have died along with the guilty, and there has been little clear demarcation between the Good Guys and the Bad Guys, between victims and victimizers. Often, characters are both. Peoples says, “I have a hard time being on anybody’s side in anything. I’m inclined to see everybody’s point of view,” which makes Unforgiven one of the most provocative of morality plays; one in which it becomes nearly impossible to divine rightness of action, of how to do good without also doing harm. “(It’s) easy to imagine,” wrote Willman, “the ‘bad guys’ killed by Eastwood (in Unforgiven) as heroes in some other movie.” “The world of Unforgiven,” said Rolling Stone, “is a complicated world. It’s an adult world: It’s a world where violence doesn’t solve any problems, it just changes the problem.”

Eastwood’s gunman William Munny sums up the movie’s ethos with one of Unforgiven’s signature lines. As wannabe gunslinger The Schofield Kid (Jaimz Woolvett) tries to drown his self-disgust over his first killing with liquor, he tries to ease his conscience by the idea that the man he’d killed “…had it comin’.” Eastwood’s scarred and time-ravaged face looks out at the messenger carrying the whores’ bounty toward them and says, “We’ve all got it comin’, Kid.”

Unforgiven was as un-Hollywood a major studio Western as had appeared on big screens since The Wild Bunch (1969). It also marked a maturing in the sensibility of its star and director. “(It’s) the first time,” Eastwood would say at the time of the movie’s release, “I’ve…been able to interpret it in a way that death is not a fun thing.” The Eastwood persona of old – the Dirty Harry-esque avenger who “…just ‘removed’ …” the opposition was gone.

Unforgiven – with its acclaim and awards – announced a new stage in Eastwood’s career. He was no longer an actor/director, but a director/actor, and a “serious” director at that.

He came to seem to prefer being behind the camera rather than in front of it. Eastwood’s turn as an aging Secret Serviceman – one of his best performances – in the Wolfgang Petersen-directed In the Line of Fire (1993) was, as of this writing, his last time in front of the camera on an actor-for-hire basis. He was no more than a supporting player in A Perfect World (1993), and didn’t appear at all in Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil (1997), or Mystic River. Regularly, now – learning one of the lessons of Unforgiven – his movies would be cast with an eye toward dramatic heft, i.e. Kevin Costner and Laura Dern in A Perfect World; Meryl Streep in The Bridges of Madison County (1995); Kevin Spacey and John Cusack in Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil; Gene Hackman, Ed Harris, Scott Glenn, Laura Linney, Judy Davis, and E.G. Marshall in Absolute Power (1997); James Woods and Anthony Zerbe in True Crime (1999); Tommy Lee Jones, James Garner, Donald Sutherland, David Cromwell, Marcia Gay Harden, and William Devane in Space Cowboys (2000); and Jeff Daniels and Angelica Huston in Blood Work (2002). Yet, by the time of Blood Work, one might have been inclined to wonder whether or not Unforgiven had been a fluke, or, at the very least, Eastwood’s come-and-gone creative peak.

Eastwood’s directorial craftsmanship was as solid as ever, and he would turn out major commercial successes with Bridges and Space Cowboys. And, there is something memorable in each effort even if the whole was often less than the sum of its parts: Kevin Spacey’s magnetic performance as a snobby, gay, antique dealer in Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil; sparkling scenes between Eastwood and Ed Harris in Absolute Power, and with James Woods and Denis Leary in True Crime; capturing the heartbreak of the last hours of a family’s death row vigil in True Crime; bare-bottomed Tommy Lee Jones, James Garner, Donald Sutherland and Eastwood gamely playing their ages as a quartet of decrepit astronauts assembling for one, last mission in Space Cowboys; Eastwood inverting his macho image as a retired FBI agent who has received a heart transplant, his face twisting in fear as he covers up his scarred chest when fists start flying in Blood Work; distilling the syrup out of novelist Robert James Waller’s The Bridges of Madison County with the help of screenwriter Richard LaGravenese to turn out a rare, grown-up romance for a grown-up audience featuring grown-up characters.

Yet the sensibility of Unforgiven – morally complex, dramatically provocative and resonant – only arose in fleeting moments. His post-Unforgiven resume reads like that of one of the studio contract directors of the mogul era; disparate, eclectic, executing with equal polish whatever the studio chiefs hand his way. Only here, Eastwood was the studio, and the disparate, eclectic choices were his own and, after Unforgiven, disappointing. Despite William Goldman’s Herculean efforts at streamlining David Balducci’s unfocused thriller novel about murder and the White House, Absolute Power’s picture of the upper echelons of government is painfully naïve and simplistic, paling next to any random episode of TV series, West Wing; Blood Work’s tale of a taunting serial killer is a tired hike down an already too-familiar Silence of the Lambs (1991) path; True Crime’s race-against-time story of a crusading reporter trying to save a man unjustly convicted of murder is a creaky throwback to the newspaper dramas of the 1930s.

Nowhere does Eastwood show his limitations as a director more clearly than in the failed adaptation of John Berendt’s non-fiction book, Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil. Eastwood and screenwriter John Lee Hancock are at a loss as to how to handle Berendt’s deftly-sculpted collection of what at first seem random tales of the Savannah elite and not-so-elite, disparate threads which slowly coalesce into an account of a scandalous sex-and-murder trial. Eastwood and Hancock respond to the challenge by force-fitting Berendt’s material into more conventional, straight-forward form – including a contrived romance for its narrator hero — that costs the story much of the book’s unique charm and enrapturing mystique.

Eastwood came closest to Unforgiven’s dramatic accomplishments with the half-brilliant A Perfect World, also scripted by John Lee Hancock. In what was, at the time, brazen casting, Eastwood took Kevin Costner – then coming off a streak of squeaky clean Good Guy roles – and had him play viciously against type as escaped felon Butch Haynes who takes eight-year-old Phillip (T.J. Lowther) hostage with him on a rambling road trip across Texas. The story could easily have tipped into treacle, a bonding story between surrogate father and surrogate son that, in typical Hollywood fashion, results in the moral rehabilitation of the hard-boiled Haynes, but the movie refuses the trap of audience-satisfying sentimentality. As Hancock discretely alludes to Haynes’ own scarred childhood, the convict’s role doesn’t so much develop into that of protective father figure as much as Haynes’ living out the fantasy of a childhood he never had through young Phillip. Hancock adroitly walks a dramatic high wire in the Haynes/ Phillip plot, balancing between moral lights and darks until in the movie’s climax, the story tumbles into a hellish blackness. While sheltering in the home of a family of sharecroppers, Haynes’ past dysfunctions are triggered, and, in one of the most chilling scenes Eastwood has ever put on film, the felon prepares with practiced efficiency to murder the farmer in front of his wife and son. As a scratchy country tune plays and repeats on an ancient turntable, Haynes binds the man with duct tape, then his wife and child, then seals the family’s eyes shut before turning to Phillip – and in a horrifying corruption of the father/mentor role Haynes has flirted with – tells Phillip he can either watch or leave; “You’re old enough to decide for yourself.” Eastwood and Hancock deliver, wrote Film Comment’s Kent Jones, “…the ultimate life lesson: that the same person can be nice and frightening, wise and murderously crazy, all at once.”

But, the movie is crippled with a parallel story; the pursuit of Haynes by Texas Ranger Red Garnett (Eastwood). Where the Haynes/Phillip story is bold and complex, the chase is strictly formula; a few cheap jokes, stereotypically sun-glassed government killers, and the sentiment so neatly avoided on one side of the movie is here tripping up the tale of a Texas Ranger with a burdened conscience and a past connection to Haynes.

But then, in 2003 came Mystic River, a movie some critics have hailed as one of the best American films in years; to some, in decades.

All of the certainty and assurance marking Unforgiven is back in full force in Mystic River; in its text (adapted from Dennis Lehane’s acclaimed novel by Brian Helgeland who had shared an Oscar with Curtis Hanson for adapting James Ellroy’s similarly layered neo-noir, L.A. Confidential [1997]), its visuals, and its powerful ensemble of principals (Sean Penn, Tim Robbins, Kevin Bacon). Though a modern-day dramatic thriller, Mystic… takes on many of the same themes of Unforgiven and mines still deeper into their core, particularly that of the toxic quality of violence. When one of three childhood friends is abducted and abused, the incident leaves all three scarred; emotional fault lines which, decades later, fracture in a dominoes-fall series of compounding tragedies Eastwood describes as “…an unraveling.” And, also like Unforgiven, Mystic is a devastating attack on the Hollywood revenge myth; according to Entertainment Weekly’s Jeff Jensen, how “…the aching need for justice and closure can cloud wisdom and curdle compassion.” Instead, Mystic resurrects Unforgiven’s thesis that violence is an uncontrollable demon, and that, as William Munny tells a dying Little Bill, “Deserve’s got nothin’ to do with it.”

On balance, one might argue Clint Eastwood is not a great director, but a director capable of great movies. Still, in this — his latest, post-Unforgiven incarnation — even in his weakest work, he is a standard bearer for a kind of mainstream movie-making that has become exceedingly rare at the major studio level; one driven not by spectacle, effects, or action, not breathlessly paced, but carried by drama and characters Eastwood aspires to reflect some real aspect of the Everyman, whose stories unspool with an unhurried dignity. Wrote one French critic of Eastwood after Mystic River’s screening at the 2003 Cannes film festival, “(He’s) a director who has placed himself in the grand Hollywood tradition so cruelly neglected by American cinema.” His protagonists from Unforgiven on are flawed, limited, often haunted characters, fallible, and still more poignantly, often aware of their fallibilities.

There’s a lovely scene in True Crime (another example of his ability to instill memorable moments in routine projects) between Eastwood – as a burned-out, divorced, ex-alcoholic reporter trying to get his career back on track – and Denis Leary, his supervising editor who has discovered Eastwood has been having an affair with his wife. No shouting, no histrionics; just two pained and awkward men who realize this is a situation made of their own failings, and who can’t find the words to indict (Leary) or to apologize (Eastwood).

His work since Mystic River evidences a filmmaker unafraid to challenge himself: first came the heart-breaking Academy Award-winning boxing drama, Million Dollar Baby in 2004; in 2006, his depiction of the brutal Battle of Iwo Jima from both the American and Japanese sides with Flag of Our Fathers and Oscar-nominated Letters from Iwo Jima respectively, the latter brazenly filmed almost entirely in Japanese; 2008’s Gran Torino which turned his tough-guy, narrow-minded Dirty Harry persona on its ear; the South African-set sports drama Invictus (2009); and his latest, Hereafter, possibly his most spiritual film to date.

It is worth pointing out that there’s many a director who has been more qualitatively consistent and more stylistically expansive than Eastwood, yet has never turned out a movie as memorable as Unforgiven, or Mystic River, or Million Dollar Baby, or Letters from Iwo Jima. His post-Unforgiven works represent a welcome throwback predating an era in American cinema Eastwood once described as being one in which “…there’s an awful lot of people hanging on wires and floating across things and comic book characters…”

- Bill Mesce

By 1950, Hitchcock had already become a force in commercial American cinema.  By the end of the decade, he was the premier maker of big studio suspense pictures, advancing his position enough to become a recognizable brand, seen as synonymous with the thriller genre with his name on a marquee as familiar to moviegoers as those of the stars in his movies.  The same circle of French critics who had developed the concept of film noir were so impressed with Hitchcock’s mastery of cinematic vocabulary they included him in their pantheon of Hollywood auteurs as a moviemaker with a unique, idiosyncratic style imprinting a personal vision on even his most commercial movies.

Hitchcock, however, had a more humble view of his work, denying auteur status for himself:  “When I’m asked how I feel about Truffaut and other French critics describing me as a metaphysician and so on, I can only say that it’s very nice…(but) all these ‘philosophical’ theories hold no water at all.”  He was, in his own eyes, not an artist but an entertainer.  His material was generally populist, his movies – particularly in the 1950s – increasingly directed toward the box office mainstream.

His commercial instincts were as acute as his aesthetic ones.  Of the eleven pictures he made 1950-1959, two – North by Northwest (1959) and Rear Window (1954) — were among the 60 top performing pictures of the decade.  Understandably, it is his work from the 1950s and early 1960s – his most popular films – with which he is usually identified, but, in fact, his career went through several evolutionary cycles.

In his native England, though he made a variety of films, even during the earliest years of his career Hitchcock had begun gravitating toward thrillers.  With their restrictive budgets, his English work doesn’t have the big studio high gloss of his later Hollywood films, but he was already demonstrating a unique technical expertise, and many of his recurring themes and tropes – well-mannered villains, accused innocents, ordered worlds tipping into chaos – had emerged.  American producer David O. Selznick brought Hitchcock to the U.S. for a string of – ironically – English-set mysteries including the gothic romance/mystery Rebecca (1940) and the courtroom suspenser The Paradine Case (1947).

His strongest work during his early Hollywood years, however, was done out from under Selznick’s legendary controlling hand where Hitchcock could more fully express himself in more thematically noir-ish works like Rope (1948) and, one of his best films, Shadow of a Doubt (1943).  Set in a small, sun-kissed town beautifully detailed by Our Town playwright Thornton Wilder (working with Sally Benson and Alma Reville from Gordon McDonell’s story), Shadow is full of the moral muddles which are the noir trademark as a teenaged girl (Teresa Wright) begins to suspect the charming, worldly uncle (Joseph Cotton) she idolizes and who has come for a visit might be a serial killer.

Hitchcock’s career took yet another turn in the early 1950s as he cast off the gloomy airs of his noirs to embrace color and the wide screen, and even dabble with 3-D in Dial M for Murder (1954).  There was a simultaneous change in the dramatic substance of his work as well as he leaned away from the real world moral confusion and unease of Shadow of a Doubt toward stories with an almost escapist affirming moral clarity.  His Good Guys were unquestionably good, his Bad Guys – despite their unctuous charm – inarguably bad, and clearly defined good – with rare exemption – triumphed over equally well-defined evil.  He cared little for the interior lives of his characters, and he had little interest in stories reflecting or responding in any fashion to the circumstances of the world around him.

That said, there were noteworthy exceptions.  The starkly shot I Confess (1953) deals with the intriguing moral conundrum of a priest (Montgomery Clift) who hears the confession of a murderer, but then, bound by the strictures of the confessional, is unable to defend himself when falsely accused of murder; James Stewart’s ex-cop turned private eye in Vertigo (1958) is straight out of the noir mold of damned and haunted souls, tormented by his failure to stop a woman’s suicide, then trying to “resurrect” her in the woman he meets years later who resembles the dead woman, finally discovering he’s been a dupe in an elaborate spouse murder scheme and ultimately losing the woman he’s become obsessed with a second time; Hitchcock shot the gritty docudrama The Wrong Man (1956) in bleak black-and-white on the locations where the true story of a musician (Henry Fonda) wrongly accused of robbery had played out; behind Rear Window’s front story of a photojournalist confined to his Manhattan apartment with a broken leg who suspects one of his neighbors of murdering his wife is a subtext of urban isolation, with Hitchcock (working from John Michael Hayes’ elegant adaptation of a Cornell Woolrich story) flitting about several independent stories playing out around an apartment building’s inner court, all told in vivid non-verbal vignettes framed by apartment windows – a compassionate mosaic of human loves, frustrations, and loneliness.

As a rule, however, the credibility of the elements which catalyzed his plots, and the reasoning of his characters and their actions were of little importance to him.   For Hitchcock, what he referred to as “the MacGuffin” – a bit of microfilm (North by Northwest), an assassination plot (The Man Who Knew Too Much, 1934 remade in 1956), an incriminating bit of evidence (Strangers on a Train, 1951) – was, in his own words, “…the least important…” part of the plotting.  To the director, it was nothing more than a spark to get the suspense machinery moving and provide a venue for him to indulge his considerable technical gifts.  The other noirs of that time were all about human frailty and foible, but Rope is less about the psychology of two young thrill killers than it is about Hitchcock’s virtuoso display of technique in filming the entire picture in a single take (although Hitchcock’s ambition was to shoot Rope in one take, film magazines at the time could only hold ten minutes of film, so the director choreographed the shooting to be done in ten takes with some object blocking the camera to conceal each cut as the magazines were changed, giving the movie the appearance of being filmed in a single 80-minute shot).

Double Indemnity (1944) and The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946) – two prototypical noirs – have simple spouse murder schemes triggering elaborate webs of moral, emotional, and psychological repercussions.  Conversely, Hitchcock’s Strangers on a Train (1951) offers an elaborate spouse murder scheme with little emotional resonance at all, and Rear Window conceals the banality of its spouse murder with an impressive studio recreation of the interior court of a Manhattan city block and Hitchcock’s dexterity at moving from one peripheral vignette to another.

He preferred plots which twisted and turned and looped back on themselves not in any organic, natural, or even credible progression, but in ways which managed to deliver his heroes into artfully crafted peril.  Strangers on a Train and Vertigo involve enormously elaborate methodologies to accomplish what adulterer John Garfield managed in Postman with a simple conk on Cecil Kellaway’s head.  The espionage/chase plot of North by Northwest was so tangled, even bewildered leading man Cary Grant publicly confessed during shooting, “…I still can’t make head or tail of it!”

Hitchcock’s stories deal regularly with murder, kidnapping, assassination, extortion, and assorted other misdeeds, but in an abstract, undisturbing way.  He could compose a violent act for shock value i.e. North’s murder in broad daylight in the lobby of the United Nations; and/or for stylish visual effect i.e. the dying “Moroccan” in 1956’s The Man Who Knew too Much whose make-up comes off in James Stewart’s hands revealing the non-Arab spy beneath.  Yet, for all this mayhem, the acts of violence in Hitchcock’s movies are rarely violent.  There is little or no actual brutality, nor does witnessing bizarre murders seem to have any lasting emotional effect on the “civilian” protagonists regularly sucked into a Hitchcock movie’s intrigues.  There might be an initial moment of shock, but then the hero resourcefully moves on to the next bit of adventure with little thought to or reflection on the trail of bloodletting left behind.  Malevolent acts are simply another tool propelling the plot forward.

Any grim effects of violence are further undercut by the liberal exercise of a droll and often morbid comic sensibility.  Said screenwriter Ernest Lehman, who worked on several Hitchcock pictures including North by Northwest: “There had to be a certain amount of wit…No matter how melodramatic the goings-on were, the characters had to have a sense of humor…”

Characters were “designed” for function.  He cast his heroes with an eye toward the innate charisma – as well as box office appeal – of stars like Stewart and Grant which compensated for the fact that, on the script page, his heroes had little life outside the central plot.  Hitchcock heroes have labels – Farley Granger is a tennis pro in Strangers on a Train, Robert Cummings a thriller writer in Dial M for Murder, Cary Grant an ad agency executive in North – but other than sometimes supplying a plot device (Granger must desperately hurry the playing of a match in a race against time with the man that, at that moment, is framing him for a murder) there is little of substance to their identities.  Though the director often extracted compelling performances from leads and supporting performers alike – despite being accused of dismissing actors as “cattle” – actors and their characters were just parts in his “…elaborate machine…”

The exceptions are his villains, and here he seemed to delight in providing a breathing space he did not grant his heroes.  Yet – like his heroes – his villains are built for entertaining effect rather than believability:  well-spoken, charming, witty in a black comic way…all in all, wonderful cocktail company.  There is Robert Walker, the mother-oppressed psychopath of Strangers misanthropically popping a child’s birthday balloon; Ray Milland in Dial M never losing his suave urbanity even while being arrested for murder, pouring himself a drink and offering one to the “guests” placing him under arrest; James Mason, the elegant antique dealer/spy of North and his weary condescension in dealing with Cary Grant whom he’s mistaken for an American espionage agent – “Games, Mr. Kaplan?  Must we?” Mason’s silky, chatty spy is, said Ernest Lehman, a perfect example of the Hitchcock villain.  However murderous and manipulative he may be, he is, said Lehman, always “…a gentleman about it.”

In a Hitchcock profile, film critic Stephen Whitty pointed out that the director was often considered “…a cold, callow craftsman…” Yet even the director’s detractors have always agreed on his technical mastery of the medium, a skill matched by few – if any – directors in American cinema.  His unquestioned ability to capture the attention of an audience and subject them to exquisite constructions of suspense is best exemplified – from his work in the 1940s/1950s – by North by Northwest.  Typical of some of Hitchcock’s most entertaining pictures, North’s plot is one which trades logic for surprise.  Yet Hitchcock keeps the increasingly tangled threads of his plot moving through his suspense machine in so rapid and stylish a fashion one never gets a moment to question its improbabilities.

Cary Grant is an ad man mistakenly identified as an American spy by a ring of agents of an unnamed foreign power led by James Mason.  The spy Grant is supposed to be is, himself, a fiction created by the Americans to confuse the enemy.  Grant becomes romantically involved with Eva Marie Saint, Mason’s mistress who, it turns out, is also an American agent.  Grant’s interest in Saint threatens to expose the woman’s true identity which she can only protect by feigning antipathy toward the fate of Grant at the hands of Mason et al.  To save her, Grant pretends to be the non-existent spy the enemy agents have assumed him to be.

All the Hitchcock tropes are there:  unpredictable twists in the plot (Grant trying to locate the spy he’s been mistaken for only to discover the man doesn’t exist), black humor (Grant, cornered by Mason’s henchmen at an antique auction, escapes by bidding crazily to the point where the management has him escorted out by police), and a shocking murder or two.  North also contains some of the most memorable set pieces in the Hitchcock oeuvre: a climactic chase across the faces of Mt. Rushmore, and – one of the director’s most famous sequences – the crop duster scene.  It is this last which shows Hitchcock at his manipulative best.

Grant has been summoned to a meeting on a country road cutting across an expanse of empty fields.  There’s a sense of expectant threat, but Hitchcock goes to great pains to visually “explain” there is no place in such open country for a threat to conceal itself.  Grant watches first one car pass by from horizon to horizon, then another.  The shots are long, relaxed, bordering on the tedious for the purpose of putting the viewer at ease.  The first indication of lurking danger comes when a passing farmer points to a crop dusting plane flitting back and forth in the distance.  “That’s funny,” says the farmer.  “He’s sprayin’ where there ain’t no crops.” Soon, the plane evolves from background detail to hounding threat as the scene’s deliberately restrained pace gives way to rapid acceleration and lethal action.  Writes Louis Giannetti in his seminal work on film aesthetics, Understanding Movies: “Even with a visually uninteresting setting, Hitchcock’s mise-en-scene…is exemplary.”

Hitchcock’s creative direction veered yet again with two hits in the early 1960s.  Not only did the new work cut against the grain of his own preceding films, but they flouted most of the conventions of mainstream moviemaking at the time.

In Psycho (1960), Hitchcock turned away from the high gloss of most of his 1950s work.  Shot on a quick 36-day schedule in black-and-white with the unit from his Alfred Hitchcock Presents TV series, most of the story takes place at the decidedly non-exotic location of a seedy, back road motel.  Unusual for Hitchcock, the film is character-driven, erotic, overtly violent, and simply laid out, the story’s twists taking place not in a gimmicky plot but in the damaged psyche of shy motel manager Norman Bates (Anthony Perkins).  Hitchcock shocked audiences by killing off his presumed main character (Janet Leigh) early in the story, then daring viewers to sympathize with a mother-smothered serial killer.  Though it was reviled by critics at the time, Psycho was a tremendous success and, in time, would be reconsidered as one of Hitchcock’s best works.

He followed Psycho with The Birds (1963), his one, true horror film which pulls off the trick of being a monster movie without a monster.  Instead of some massive, stalking creature, Hitchcock finds menace in seemingly innocuous gatherings of birds.  Evan Hunter’s precisely constructed expansion of Daphne du Maurier’s short story lays out a favored Hitchcock paradigm:  an insulated, secure enclave of ordinariness – the seaside village of Bodega Bay – descending into fear and chaos as the avian threat escalates in meticulously crafted stages.  By the time Hitchcock was done with his audience, no one could ever look at birds sitting innocently on a phone wire the same way again.

Thereafter, Hitchcock’s career veered yet again, but this time with less than glowing results.  Going into the mid- and late 1960s, amidst the social turmoil of the time, the graphic on-screen violence of movies like Point Blank (1967), Bonnie and Clyde (1967), The Dirty Dozen (1967), and The Wild Bunch (1969), the in-the-street realism of movies like Mean Streets (1973) and the topical relevance of films like Fail-Safe (1964), Hitchcock’s work seemed out-of-step, stale and artificial.

He attempted two projects which uncharacteristically reflected real-world milieus:  the Cold War thriller Torn Curtain (1966), and Topaz (1969), an espionage tale set against the Cuban missile crisis.  The results were widely considered unimpressive.  The audience already had available to them James Bond derring-do at one end of the espionage thriller scale, and the informed real-world cynicism and Cold War weariness of John LeCarre (The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, 1965) and Len Deighton (The Ipcress File, 1965) at the other.  Measured against them, Hitchcock’s films seemed hollow and forced.

He would have one more late-career hit with Frenzy (1972), a surprisingly graphic story of a serial sex murderer on the loose in London, but it was clear The Master’s heyday was over.

Still…

Most of Alfred Hitchcock’s pictures – particularly those from his 1950s/early 1960s peak — remain entertaining and exciting decades later.  This may come, paradoxically, from their oft-criticized emotional aloofness.  There are no topical matters to date them, no provocative elements or wincing brutality to alienate or distance an audience.  Emotionally superficial, morally simplistic, yet wonderfully crafted, they remain perpetually untroubling, reassuring, and infinitely entertaining.  They are confections, set in a real-but-unreal Hollywood realm which, because of its very unreality, remains a timeless and eternal place of fantasy and fable.  Hitchcock had been right:  he had, after all, been nothing more than an entertainer…but a Masterful one.

- Bill Mesce