Mayhem Most British. Alfred Hitchcock: The Great Directors Retrospective



1899-1980

ALFRED HITCHCOCK

Alfred Hitchcock holds a very dear and special place in my heart, and I use the occasion of my birthday to express my thoughts about this Great Director. 

How I came to love Hitchcock wasn't, interestingly, via his films.  Rather, it was through his television program: Alfred Hitchcock Presents.  There was something both endearing and macabre about that rotund yet courtly gentleman introducing these twisted tales of murder and mayhem with the perfect British voice. 

I was highly influenced by Alfred Hitchcock Presents in my writing by working to have twists in them that were logical.  Sometimes my efforts failed spectacularly. I remember one particularly ghastly story where the murderer was in two locations at the same time! At least I didn't make the butler do it, but serves me write for mixing Hitchcock with Agatha Christie. 

Two of the best episodes from Alfred Hitchcock Presents are two of the few he personally directed.  Lamb to the Slaughter was a remarkably tight story where a mild-mannered housewife and expectant mother murders her husband with a large frozen leg of lamb when she wants to leave her for another woman.  Throughout the episode, the police always appear to come close to finding who done it, only to have her find a way out.  With the usual Hitchcockian twist, the murder weapon itself is served to the unsuspecting officers, much to her amusement.

Bang! You're Dead is a thriller in the good, traditional sense of the word.  It's a remarkably simple and straightforward story: a little boy in a cowboy outfit unwittingly has a real gun, fully loaded, with him.  There is a frantic search for the boy, who comes dangerously close to firing it at people. 

If one sees just Lamb to the Slaughter and Bang! You're Dead, you can see pretty much many of the themes in Hitchcock films.  In the first one, there's a fascination of bringing in the violent into a familiar and supposedly safe surrounding.  What could be more wholesome than the home, the family?  However, it's here where the most shocking acts of violence take place. 

In the latter, the suspense, the fear, comes not from a foreign source but something as mundane and sadly not-too-uncommon than a child playing with a weapon.  Again, a mixing of innocence with danger.  Note that in Bang! You're Dead, the fear comes from what could happen, not from what has happened.

Here, Hitchcock shows his hand, as it were.  He always argued that suspense and fear come from the anticipation of something rather than the actual act.  This is a lesson that is lost on many filmmakers today, especially given how 'torture porn' has become more popular.  People today don't seem to appreciate the waiting for something to happen: they want it now, and they want it explicit.  This is a terrible disservice because part of the fear and fun and greatness of a Hitchcock film comes from the anticipation.

Take one of his best films: Rear Window.  The whole film could be seen as a commentary of film viewing.  We go beyond being mere spectators and become full participants in the goings-on because we become wrapped in the story, one that we can relate to.  When the beauty faces danger, we are just as powerless as the hero, and we soon become just as terrified for her as he is.

I think Hitchcock could, more than any other director, manipulate the audience expertly.  He loved playing with our emotions and what we expect from the stories.  There are just so many examples.

Psycho: we expect it to go in a certain direction, and when we get a certain twist we're not only thrown for a loop but get something that is supposedly quite violent but if looked at carefully we see there wasn't all that much there.

Strangers on A Train: there is something in the idea of 'swapping murders' that is both gruesome and oddly attractive.  Granted, Patricia Highsmith always had a penchant for creating situations where the criminal had to find a way out and like Hitchcock, create a complex moral situation for the audience, they becoming tense to see how he gets out of it; with his adaptation of her novel, many become worried when the villain comes close to losing the key piece that will put the 'hero' in peril.  We should be hoping he does lose it, but because of Hitchcock's direction and the common factor of 'we've been in something like that', audiences sometimes forget he's the bad guy and actually want him to get at it.

Vertigo: I wrote that there was a strange sense of necrophilia in the film, and while I don't mean literally the idea that the dead can be brought back to life in some way, that we can hold on to a love that cannot die, is one many can relate to.  Curious that in both Vertigo and Rebecca, we have an obsession with a dead woman, beautiful, but dangerous.

Again and again, I find that for all the Master of Suspense title that is applied to him, there is also another running theme in Hitchcock films: the dangers of love.  You see it in Vertigo, you see it in Rebecca, and even in Notorious, one of my personal favorites.  Here, the danger comes from both love granted and love denied.

I've always argued that Notorious is not a thriller or a spy film, but a love story in the guise of a thriller or spy film.  It is the love Claude Rains grants to Ingrid Bergman that puts both in danger, and the love that Bergman is denied by Cary Grant that is more torturous than anything the Nazis can put her through. 

Again, Hitchcock plays with us in identification: Rains' character truly loves Bergman and, minus being a collaborator, he's really a nice guy.  He's nicer than Grant's Devlin, but while we might be put off at how casually he torments Bergman, we still should know he's the man for her. 

Alfred Hitchcock knows how to get at us, knows how to scare us.  Note what I think is his final Great Film: The Birds.  Here, it's the ultimate of another of his themes: the total loss of control.  We don't know why the birds have gone mad, why nature has declared war on us.  We only know that we are totally at its mercy.  It's how we interact with people, the end might say, that there might yet be hope.

In terms of visuals, I love Hitchcock.  In terms of story, I love Hitchcock.  In terms of cinema, I love Hitchcock. 

His is an extraordinary body of work. There is the silent The Lodger and his British films: the danger The Man Who Knew Too Much faces for his child, the confusion and danger an innocent man faces when wrapped up in the intrigue of The 39 Steps. There is his transition to America going on to the spookiness of the Gothic thriller Rebecca, the romance of Notorious and Spellbound, even the humor in North by Northwest or The Trouble With Harry (a black comedy, but a comedy nonetheless), concluding with The Birds, and I think few directors have ever achieved such a consistent level of quality in film.

I thought that his post-The Birds films weren't good, but I've had a mild reevaluation. While I think they are not as good, I found Family Plot a nice romp. However, the latter films aren't as well-remembered.  Part of it may be that he was trying to be 'modern' with the dumping of longtime composer Bernard Herrmann not helping: for example, he was trying to be more graphic in the depiction of murder, particularly in Frenzy, and the depiction (I'd say, brutalization) of women such as in Marnie. 

Still, my love and passion for Alfred Hitchcock is unabated and true.  Even the films that truly were bad in my view (Suspicion, Mr. & Mrs. Smith) I count as noble failures.  Of all the directors, it is Alfred Hitchcock that I turn to for inspiration.

With that, I close my Great Director retrospective for 2011: Twelve Directors in Twelve Months.  I'm sure there are many brilliant directors I left out, and note with rueful admission that of all the directors, only two are living (Werner Herzog and Martin Scorsese).  I might pick up more Great Directors next year: I'm certainly spoiled for choice.  I welcome all suggestions.

To explore all these great filmmakers both foreign and domestic has been a great joy for me.  I love cinema, I love movies, and I so admire those who can make truly memorable experiences, who can make art out of moving pictures, and who can tell great stories. 

I look forward to seeing who will join these illustrious men and hopefully more women in the ranks of The Great Directors. 

Gangster's Paradise. Martin Scorsese: The Great Directors Retrospective

Born 1942

MARTIN SCORSESE

It is accurate to say that Martin Scorsese is both one of film's Great Directors as well as one of its greatest fans.  He loves movies to where having a conversation with him is like, to coin a phrase, quoting Scripture to a nun.  One gets the sense that he could tell you everything about something as obscure as Doctor Goldfoot and the Bikini Machine or as out of the mainstream as The Saddest Music in the World. 

His fascination for film, his love of film, has earned him a rare credit: a filmmaker embraced by both the intellectual and the Average Joe.  Regardless of your status or education, everyone has at least one Martin Scorsese film they love.  I think he is able to do so because he is first, a master craftsman.  Every shot serves the story while still having a great visual flair.  This pleases the intelligentsia.  His stories, for the most part, are about the netherworld of criminals, those operating on the margins of society.  Here, a regular guy can gain a passion for the stories he tells. 

He had a great eye, starting from his youth.  Asthma kept him within the confines of his Little Italy home, where Marty started observing the people in his neighborhood.  His eye was trained to observe, to note what worked and didn't work in movies.  His parents took him to see films as a way to get him out of the house, and within the spectacles of DeMille, the neo-realism/fantasy of Fellini, and directors as varied as Billy Wilder and William Wyler, Scorsese could observe a wide world of cinema.

His career as an editor also was of great service.  He knew how to pace a story, keep things moving and keep a structure in the story.  Once he went into directing, he told his stories, and those usually involved the seedy side of the Italian-American experience.

Scorsese didn't popularize the modern gangster/mobster film, but starting from Mean Streets right on down to The Departed, Scorsese specializes in the depiction of the criminal world, where loyalty comes into conflict with legality.  Goodfellas I think is the best example of this quandary.

You have Henry Hill, who is really a despicable person: unapologetic about being a criminal, so much so that he tells us that being a 'ganster' has been his life's goal.  However, Hill has a love for the people he's surrounded himself with, until his paranoia gets the better of him even if it is warranted.  By the time he, shall I say, goes rogue, we end up caring about his plight but also thinking he's a sleazy character.

Curiously, one of the things I dislike about film, the reliance of voiceover, works in Goodfellas, primarily because it provides us with more than one voiceover without being overbearing.  That, and because Scorsese never made it an easy way to tell us the story.  He actually used the visuals, particularly the way he thrusts the camera at us, to give us the information we need.

Again and again, Scorsese brings us people we should dislike, but his mastery of storytelling is such that we cannot help but at least be mesmerized by them.  Take Jake LaMotta from Raging Bull.  Just in the opening, where we see Robert DeNiro shadow-boxing in slow-motion while Pietro Mascagni's intermezzo from Cavalleria Rusticana played, we see the beauty of boxing married to the violence of the sport; the stark black-and-white cinematography only enhanced the beauty as well as the seamy nature of LaMotta's life story. 

Again, we have another story of someone we shouldn't like and probably wouldn't if we had to be around him for long, but by the end, when we see this once-great fighter reduced to being this fat pseudo-comic at a sleazy club, we end up feeling great sorrow and sadness for this guy.

While Scorsese is most identified with the mobster/gangster film, he isn't above trying new genres.  Who would have thought the man behind Taxi Driver (a great film that I still cannot bring myself to watch again simply because it freaked me out so) would tackle something as dainty as Edith Wharton's The Age of Innocence?  Let's face it: innocence itself isn't something one associates with Scorsese, let alone costume dramas from the Gilded Age.  It would be like watching a Merchant/Ivory production of Underboss: Sammy the Bull Gravano. However, Scorsese is not a filmmaker to be sidelined to one genre. 

One thing that is a constant in Scorsese's films are how he uses music.  He has a passion for the Rolling Stones' Gimme Shelter, but if one sees a Scorsese film like Goodfellas, note just how songs set the mood for the scene without overpowering the scene or making the song gratuitous. 

Every song appears to not just fit into the scene but be perfectly natural to it, from Henry's aspirations being underscored with Tony Bennett's Rags to Riches, through The Crystals' Then He Kissed Me in that amazing tracking shot of Henry and Karen going to the Copacabana right on through Eric Clapton's Layla feeding Henry's "triumph" in the Witness Protection Plan (the finale shot I though I nice nod to the ending of The Great Train Robbery). 

He has had the desire to explore more stories, from the spiritualism of Kundun, a biopic on the Dalai Lama, to Howard Hughes' various manias in The Aviator.  Now, he's going to go into 3-D with Hugo, based on the book The Invention of Hugo Cabret.  Throughout all his work, he has remained a stalwart in film preservation, knowing that what influenced him will influence future filmmakers and the desperate need to save our historic film heritage. 

One story I can tell about a Scorsese movie I haven't seen involves perhaps his most controversial film: The Last Temptation of Christ.  When it came out, the film was highly controversial, and the priest railed and thundered so passionately against The Last Temptation of Christ that I was completely scared away from seeing it.  In fact, I'm still a bit scared to see it.  Therefore, I'm in no position to say whether it's good or bad, but I can say that I don't know I would see it: the idea of our Savior having sex, even in a fantasy sequence, may be far too much for my Evangelical heart to take. 

I also wasn't thrilled by Shutter Island.  I was frustrated with it and while I recognize I'm in the minority on this, I stand by my view that the story was so obvious (and Leonard DiCaprio's accent so fake) that I could never get into it. 

Still,  nothing takes away from Martin Scorsese being a true genius.  Perhaps his Best Director Oscar for The Departed was a way to honor his body of work, but he was long overdue.

Martin Scorsese loves film.  It's been a passionate affair between Marty and the camera, and like all Scorsese films, it's been an amazing thing to behold.

With that, I wish a Happy Birthday to Martin Scorsese, and welcome him among the Great Directors.

A Ray of Light. Satyajit Ray: The Great Directors Retrospective

1921-1992

SATYAJIT RAY

Few things from my childhood I can recall emotionally, but one that I can is watching the Academy Awards.  The year: 1992.  I had no real interest in who won or lost; truth be told I didn't have a clear idea of what these awards meant, only that it was something on television.

Audrey Hepburn comes to present a special award.  I didn't know who she was, but I thought even at her age, she was particularly beautiful.   She was going to give an Honorary Oscar to Satyajit Ray.  I loved the way she said that name.  After a few remarks, we got to see a short film about his films.

Perhaps it is blasphemy to say this, but it was to my mind a bit like how Paul had the scales fall from his eyes at the end of the sequence.  I can say that I had never seen anything like that footage before in my life.  As a Hispanic kid from Texas, I obviously wasn't watching Indian films.  However, by the end of that sequence, I sat with my mouth opened, stunned at the sheer genius that I had just been shown. 

In short, I was simply amazed by the visual majesty and power of Satyajit Ray's films.  I will never forget the final clip: the King of Ghosts tells two men their dreams will come true.  The camera pulls back to reveal this demon-like creature sitting before a star that lit up in sequence while he chanted in a strange voice and moved his neck left right left right.  I later learned this was from the film Goopy Gyne Bagha Byne (translated extremely loosely as The Adventures of Goopy & Bagha).  I later saw more of Goopy Gyne Bagha Byne, and what I saw amazed me: the Ghost Dance--a daring montage of various dances in all styles that is visually stunning.

I can't say to be an expert on Ray or know many of his films, but I do know that visually, he melded the uniqueness of the Indian culture with the sensibilities of the Western film.  Ray did bring a humanity to his stories, touching on the shared connection between those of varied cultures to where the stories be the comic or tragic were things a person outside the subcontinent could relate to.

As I study more of Ray's films, from Charulata to The Apu Trilogy, I see the craftsmanship in his work.  I look forward to exploring this fascinating filmography.

This sadly is how I remember Ray: an old man, clutching his Oscar, on his literal deathbed.  Better late than never I suppose.  Even from what little I know of Satyajit Ray, I think him among the best filmmakers we've had.

Continue exploring The Great Directors with me as I continue to expand on those filmmakers who have shaped cinema in the United States and around the world.

Go West Young Man. John Ford: The Great Directors Retrospective

1894-1973

JOHN FORD

He's quintessentially American, yet a true Irishman at heart.  The career of John Ford is one any filmmaker envies, as his extraordinary output. 

Now, where exactly does John Ford's genius lie?  I think it's in the fact that he was able to make films that were both intelligent and popular, never playing down to audiences but most importantly, trusting them to not only follow the story but care about the characters and the situations they were in, both serious and comic.

Let's look at just a few of his extraordinary films, and start with the obvious: the Western.  Ford is the man who has shaped the idea of what the Wild West was like for Americans and the world than any other director.  A central part of the myth-making by Ford was in his selection of Monument Valley, Arizona and Utah as the background to many of his films.  Here, in this sparse landscape, we see the visual theme Ford kept coming back to: the smallness of man against the massiveness of nature.  The characters in Ford's films were ones that struggled against great odds, either from nature or from man's actions himself.

I think two of the Westerns he made with John Wayne show that Ford knew how to make a picture that worked on two levels: an emotional one and an intellectual one.  The first is Stagecoach.  While it's a curious thing that the story of disparate people thrown together appears almost as a cliche today, Stagecoach may have been the first one to have that plot, at least certainly the best one to have that scenario.  Even in the characters themselves, we have stereotypes: the drunk doctor, the hooker with a heart of gold, the outlaw as the good guy.  In Stagecoach, Ford tells the overall story of the adventures the group, including an exciting climatic chase across the desert, while also keeping their individual stories interesting and never losing focus of them as individuals and as part of a larger story.

The second Ford/Wayne Western I'd look at is The Searchers, as intense a story as ever made.  As all great films, The Searchers works on those two levels.  One can watch it as an adventure story: Ethan Edwards (Wayne) and his adopted nephew Martin (Jeffrey Hunter) are on a search to recover Ethan's niece Debbie (Natalie Wood), his brother's daughter. 

However, while it is possible to end watching The Searchers at that, one can't really finish The Searchers without thinking it a strong meditation of one man's whole way of life ending.  The character of Ethan is not someone a person would like: he is racist, holding an intense dislike for Martin because he's part-Native American and he's come to his brother's home after fighting for the Confederacy.  That fear that Debbie may end up being 'one of them' is one of the driving forces that keeps him on his desperate hunt to 'save' her. 

There is, however, more to Ethan.  He is a complex character.  Within him is a righteous fury for vengeance, and in many respects he is the mirror image of his antagonists.  However, there is still a spark of humanity, a need to genuinely protect and love that is in conflict with his need to take life (and in one scene, even take from the afterlife).  Despite how horrid Ethan is, at the end of The Searchers you feel a great sadness for him, a sorrow that he is the one condemned.  Above all else, The Searchers puts to rest the idea that John Wayne could not act: his Ethan is one of the great performances on film, a truly complex and conflicted individual whom you can't love but you can't hate either. 

Ford is primarily remembered as a director of Westerns; in fact, at a famous Directors Guild meeting where the issue of loyalty oaths during the Red Scare of the 1950;s was at its peak, Ford began his remarks by saying, "My name is John Ford.  I make Westerns" as if anyone in that room, even his nemesis Cecil B. DeMille didn't know who John Ford was.  However, his output showed he was really a master of all trades.  If we look at some of his non-Western films, you'll also see some extraordinary films.

First, we see Ford's genius in The Grapes of Wrath.  In 1940, when Depression audiences wanted primarily escape from the troubles of the world, Ford put it out there for all of them to see.  The film has never lost its power or relevance which now, in the time of the Great Recession, is worth considering.  Audiences then and now can find themselves in the Joad family, the struggles they endured: from losing the farm they'd had for generations right on down through Henry Fonda's beautiful closing speech, a truly haunting moment in film.

We also see it in his homage to his homeland: The Quiet Man.  This is a bit of a departure for Ford in that its a pretty simple, straightforward story:  an ex-prizefighter going back to Ireland, land of his birth, and falls in love with his rival's sister.  In The Quiet Man we get a love letter to Eire and something rarely associated with John Ford: a flat-out comedy.  It's a funny film, full of whimsical Irish characters.  Is it misogynistic or cliched?  Well, as I believe Martin Scorsese pointed out, we aren't meant to take it seriously.

What puts John Ford at the top ranks of all directors is that he knew what would work both visually and story-wise.  His grand vision of the American West is now so iconic that we couldn't picture the frontier any differently than in the canvas he painted for us.  When we think the West, we think Monument Valley, we think the cavalry riding out into battle or into the sunset. 

However, as grand as the visuals in a John Ford picture may be, Ford understood what more than a few current filmmakers don't or have forgotten: great visuals will not help if we don't have a story to back them up.  I go to one of my personal favorites in the John Ford canon: 3 Godfathers. 

One of the great things about 3 Godfathers is that the symbolism of the Three Not-So-Wise Men comes across without being overt.  Three bandits come across a dying woman and her child, and they promise to bring her child to safety but by doing so, they will have to meet the law.  While there is action, there is also in 3 Godfathers a story of redemption as the three bandits risk so much for a child, showing the humanity that lies within each person.  We even get a bit of comedy whenever the bandits bicker about the child's full name.

For me, the most moving moment is when one of the bandits (John Wayne), is struggling to move ahead, overwhelmed by exhaustion.  He keeps moving because someone, a total innocent, pushes him on, as do the voices of his compatriots.  Who says there can't be tenderness and true heart in a John Ford picture?  In 3 Godfathers, and in many of Ford's films, he can have the action or romance an audience would want, but not give up on the story. 

Finally, as for the myth of the West Ford created, he knew it was a double-edged sword.  In Fort Apache, Ford doesn't shy away from presenting the truth: that hatred and stupidity cost American lives and ushered the near-annihilation of the Native Americans.  However, here and in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, also made it clear that we also need to 'print the legend', that sometimes history is messy and ugly, and that we need things to believe in. 

John Ford made Westerns, some of the best and most enduring and influencial.  However, John Ford made some of the greatest films in any genre: the tragedy of The Grapes of Wrath, the humor of The Quiet Man, the conflict within man in The Searchers, the tender reflections of youth against the harshness of adulthood in How Green Was My Valley.   John Ford made films.  He made Great Films.  He is and will remain a Great Director.

There are more Great Directors from the past and present, with more to come. 

A Guinness Toast. David Lean: The Great Directors Retrospective



1908-1991

DAVID LEAN

It is yet another curious turn of history that one of the greatest film directors was not allowed to watch films as a child.   David Lean was a master of both intimacy and grandness, a man who made the story paramount and trusted the audience to keep up with him.

I first came to know David Lean through his epic films: Lawrence of Arabia and Bridge on the River Kwai.  What I found fascinating about those films is that he was able to put a remarkably intimate story within the grandness of the camera frame. I've often said that Lawrence of Arabia is an epic film about one man's soul.  Even with T.E. Lawrence in the center of the film, the central question of just who Col. Lawrence was is never really answered.  At one point in the film, when Lawrence has reached the Suez Canal after having crossed the Sinai, a motorcycle comes from across the channel.  The rider asks, "Who are you?" repeatedly, while Lean moves in for a close-up of Peter O'Toole's face, this one question without a response. 

Bridge on the River Kwai is another small story wrapped within an epic setting.  Actually, you have at least two stories: that of Alec Guinness' Colonel Nicholson and William Holden's Commander Shears.  It's curious to me that neither of them are purely heroic.  When I first saw the film, I had great admiration for both men.  When I saw it a second time, I was horrified at especially Colonel Nicholson.  This was a man who became so wrapped up in his Britishness (duty, efficiency) that he lost sight of the fact that he gave in on his principles and did exactly what his Japanese captors had wanted from him all along.

In a curious way, Nicholson's arch rival, Colonel Saito (Sessue Hayakawa) is not a monster but is just as unwitting as Nicholson.  He too becomes so enamored of building that damn bridge he forgets he is Nicholson's captor, not collaborator (although collaborator is the absolutely perfect term for what is going on). 

With Shears, he is certainly more interested in living for himself than for dying for some cause, but something about his instinct to live is now off-putting.  He has no interest in the fact that this bridge will help the enemy and that it should be destroyed.  Bridge On the River Kwai is an extremely complex film in terms of whom to side with: we would normally think Nicholson was heroic in how he stands for his principles and thinks of his men, but in the end we see the man's pretty bonkers.

Lean just got such brilliant performances out of his casts, especially his good-luck charm, Alec Guinness.  Guinness appears in six Lean films either as the star or as a secondary character.  I don't think the collaboration between Guinness and Lean has been given as much discussion as that of John Wayne & John Ford, James Stewart & Frank Capra or Toshiro Mifune & Akira Kurosawa.  However, they worked so well together, and I think it is because both of them loved the craft of storytelling; in short, both of them valued the power of the spoken word over the sheer visual spectacle.

Now, as I look back at David Lean, trying to get at the same question he asks, "Who are you?", I find that after Lawrence of Arabia, his productivity slowed to a crawl.  After his epic, there were only three films: Doctor Zhivago, Ryan's Daughter, and A Passage to India.  Zhivago was to be his epic romance, this great love story, which curiously would have been a departure for him after the manly heroics of Bridge and Lawrence.  I know a lot of people think Zhivago is this brilliant, romantic epic, but to my mind I found it cold, slow, and terribly dull.  I've managed to see it only once without falling asleep at it, but no matter how often I try to get through it again I end up nodding off at least once. 

There are brilliant things within Zhivago: the music is among the best ever written for film, Tom Courtenay's evolution from the idealistic revolutionary Pasha to the cold-blooded Bolshevik Strelnikov is a mesmerizing performance, and Freddy Young's cinematography is still first-rate.  However, I kept wondering while watching whether or not Lean actually understood the story.

It's suppose to be a love story between Zhivago and his mistress, Lara, but in a curious way the situations appeared to overwhelm them.  Somehow, the romance was swallowed up in the Russian Revolution.  For me, the film goes on forever, and Yuri is such a wimp, and worse of all, it has that damn voice-over thing I detest in films (courtesy of Guinness as Zhivago's half-brother, and frankly I kept wondering how having a half-brother didn't appear to faze our gentle Yuri).  In short, I found Doctor Zhivago to be pretty hollow and hopelessly long for the story it was attempting to tell.

Doctor Zhivago was not critically acclaimed in its release, and despite the public acclamation for the film Lean was devastated.  That is a pity: lesser filmmakers continue making abysmal movies without worrying about what critics say.  Maybe he felt that if critics loved his work, then it must be good.  I think that even the best director, the best writer, the best actor can have an off performance, and you're never going to bat a thousand. 

My puzzlement comes from the fact that Lean could make an intimate love story: the underappreciated Summertime.  The doomed romance between lonely American spinster Katherine Hepburn and Italian lover Rossano Brazzi has humor, sadness, and a touch of redemption and hope at the end.  Anyone who sees Summertime can see that Lean could make romantic movies, but I think here, we can see how scope (or in this case, Cinemascope) made the difference.  Summertime is a small film (relative to the story and the location), while Zhivago goes all over the place (in almost every way).  The former stays pretty grounded in the characters: they are human, believable.  The latter goes overboard in providing this grand canvas that tries to make each character iconic.

Still, for better or worse Doctor Zhivago is beloved for its "romance" (side note: I think this is the beginning of any film where two people jump into bed be considered a 'romance'), but it also was the decline of David Lean as a filmmaker.  He could still make great films, but somehow he couldn't bring himself to put his work out there for the professional critics to look over.  I think he stopped trusting his audience (whether it was critics or a thinking public).  Maybe he just got tired of making films.  I can't say anything about Ryan's Daughter (though something about having Robert Mitchum playing an Irishman appears...just odd) but I do remember enjoying A Passage to India (especially Dame Peggy Ashcroft's performance, which won her a well-deserved Best Supporting Actress Oscar).  Granted, when I saw it I was ridiculously young (I think I was about seven or eight when I saw it), so to be honest, I didn't understand it.  I liked it, just didn't understand the whole trial business.  I think it's a film worth revisiting.

I find to my surprise that David Lean made a total of 16 films, which is a remarkably small output given his reputation and status among the greats.  However, let's look at some of those films: Brief Encounter, Oliver Twist, David Copperfield, Great Expectations, Hobson's Choice, Summertime, Bridge on the River Kwai, Lawrence of Arabia, A Passage to India: truly some of the best films made (and two Best Picture winners, something that Alfred Hitchcock and Steven Spielberg, at least as of this writing, never accomplished). 

I don't include Doctor Zhivago because I think it's a dull, lifeless film (although with some beautiful elements in it), but it is usually put up there among the greats (I don't know why, but there it is).  In short, David Lean has made some of the most influential, important, and simply best films made by anyone.  It is sad that after being remarkably productive from the forties to the sixties, it dropped off after Zhivago.  There were many reasons: personal, financial, creative, but one does wonder what David Lean could have made of the life of the Mahatma, rather than what Sir Dickie made. 

Still, I love the David Lean films I've seen (except for Zhivago).  He made films that are both great and grand but that also had a lot of thought to them.  It wasn't just spectacle, but intellect, that pushed many of his films, and which is why David Lean still makes films interesting. 

There are more of The Great Directors Retrospective, which will grow over time.

The Welles Of Discontent. Orson Welles: The Great Directors Retrospective



1915-1985

ORSON WELLES

When I think of Orson Welles, it is a tragedy that his true genius has been obscured by his girth.  Of all the great filmmakers, the case of Orson Welles is perhaps, the saddest. Few directors have created such a powerful debut, yet few have had an equally powerful descent into, not so much obscurity as parody.

To my mind, when I think of Welles I think of Icarus.  He flew too close to the sun and ended up crashing into the sea.  Welles reached the greatest heights, but then he fell, slowly, steadily, due to circumstances both exterior and interior, only to crash as a punchline and a man of many guest shots. 

What director wouldn't want his debut film to be hailed as the greatest film ever made?  Such was Orson Welles' fortune when Citizen Kane debuted.   The critics went wild, and with good measure: Citizen Kane is the standard to which all film is held to.   It is simply a film that changed everything, and I figure Welles must have thought highly of the praise Citizen Kane received, and it was one more thing that people praised him for. 

In retrospect, I wonder if Welles ever thought that perhaps making 'the greatest film ever made' meant that every other film he would make could ever match it, let alone top it.  According to Peter Bogdanovich, theater impresario Billy Rose told Welles to quit films.  "You'll never top it," he was warned.

Icarus takes flight.

Welles fought long and hard to get Citizen Kane released despite the smear campaign by the inspiration for Charles Foster Kane: William Randolph Hearst.  He had put so much into it: his directing, his acting, his writing (along with Herman Mankiewicz), that to see it brought down would not have just been intellectually immoral, but would probably have wounded Welles on a personal level.  However, I digress to wonder what would have happened if Welles had tackled The Magnificent Ambersons first. 

Certainly Hearst wouldn't have bothered with Orson Welles as a person or artist.  RKO would not have disemboweled the film (he did have full artistic control in his contract, a rarity in Hollywood).  It might have ended up the way Welles would have wanted it to have been seen, not the way the studio thought it should have been.  It might have all been different in terms of his career (i.e. allowed him to have a more productive one). 

Instead, there was an arrogance to Welles, that he thought he could take on one of the most powerful men in the world and strip him bare for all the world to see.  Hearst could have tolerated this upstart making fun of him and showing him to be a bitter old man, but by mocking his mistress Marion Davies (in the character of talentless shrewish drunk Susan Alexander) and worse, by throwing Hearst's alleged pet name for her special part (Rosebud) all over the film, it was waving a red flag in front of a bull.

Icarus comes too close to the sun.

While Welles survived the campaign against him by Hearst, the cost was exceptionally high.  The power Hearst had over a frightened and cowered Hollywood cost Citizen Kane all the awards it deserved: certainly Best Picture, Bernard Herrmann for his memorable score*,  and Gregg Toland for his innovative cinematography went without an Oscar because the Academy members were taking out their anger about all the problems Citizen Kane had caused them on the nominees.   In fact, out of nine nominations it received only one Oscar: Best Original Screenplay (and according to the documentary The Battle Over Citizen Kane, that Oscar was more for Mankiewicz than for Citizen Kane itself).

Kane had proved such a headache for RKO that for Welles' next film, The Magnificent Ambersons, they weren't about to let him run wild again.  Thus, when he left for South America to film the documentary It's All True, the bigwigs saw The Magnificent Ambersons and decided to 'improve' it (or make it more to their idea of a movie).  It should be mentioned that Welles left for South American BEFORE finishing editing The Magnificent Ambersons, and thus, giving RKO the entry it needed.  In the end, the final film, while still extremely impressive, was not what Welles imagined.  To add insult to injury, It's All True was left incomplete, and some of the footage Welles shot (including color footage of Rio de Janiero's Carnaval) was eventually dumped into the Pacific Ocean.

Now with The Magnificent Ambersons in all but ruins (or at least not to Welles' standards), we see that through a series of bad timing and bad decisions (from both executives and Welles himself), we watch the promise that was Orson Welles slowly fade.

The wax begins to melt and Icarus' wings slowly disintegrate. 

Welles could make a film that fit the standards of the time.  Take The Stranger, for example.  Here, he was under strict orders to make a film on time, on budget, and to not deviate from the script.  The result: a box office hit with critical acclaim.  However, Welles soon started chasing his own ideas, pushing the medium that he described as "a very expensive paint box".  His films became visually revolutionary and stunning but perplexing if one went by the actual plot.

Two good examples of this are The Lady From Shanghai and Touch of Evil.  Both those films have some extraordinary visuals: in the former, the funhouse closing scene where a chaotic shootout ensues, and in the latter, an amazing opening sequence done in one continuous take.  However, few people can say they actually understand what is going on.  One gets the sense that Welles was more interested in what he could do with the camera than what the story was actually about.  I figure if he were here, he'd give me a good argument that he did care about the story, but both films are at times confusing. 

By failing with The Lady From Shanghai, Welles now effectively went into exile.  It was one thing to be a genius, but it was another to be a genius that kept failing financially.  He did manage to film MacBeth for Republic Studios (best known for making B-Westerns), but perhaps in hindsight having the characters speak with Scottish accents doomed the project.  Even now, most Americans don't like hearing such broad accents in their films, but in post-WWII America it would have been almost laughable.  In Europe, he made Othello (although because no one wanted to finance his films, he took two years to actually film it because he had to work as an actor to get the finances to put it all together).  It was beloved in Europe, but not in his homeland.

However, there appeared to be hope for Welles.  He was given one last chance at redemption, or rather a final opportunity to show he could make a good American film that could make money.  That would be Touch of Evil.  In retrospect, having Charlton Heston as a Mexican is perhaps one of the worst casting choices in all film history (side note: as a Mexican-American, I have always thought that Heston's make-up was far too exaggerated to be anywhere close to realistic to where it borders on blackface), but to his credit Heston talked Universal Studios into letting Welles direct. 

Touch of Evil is a brilliant film, especially a tour de force opening that as envisioned by Welles is audacious and sheer genius, but the released version was a disaster financially and yes, a perplexing plot.  Heston himself went on to call it 'the greatest B-picture ever made'.  The failure of Touch of Evil is not Welles' fault: again, the studio took it out of his hands and decided to 'improve' it.  However, by then, it was simply too late.  Orson Welles as a director in American was finished. 

Icarus descends into the waters.

How it all came to end for Welles from the brilliance of Citizen Kane to ending up selling Paul Masson wine (my friend Fidel Gomez, Jr. did a dead-on impression of the line, "We will sell no wine...before its time") is tragic.  Part of it was that Welles was truly ten-to-twenty years ahead of his time.  He clearly loved film and knew the potential to make true art out of cinema.  As a result of taking chances, the money men feared they would not get a return on their investment and always meddled to get it more in tune with their ideas of popular tastes. 

However, part of Orson Welles' fall was the fault of Orson Welles.  His stubbornness, his ego, his inability to see himself as wrong alienated people who could have helped him.  He was a genius, but a genius who at times did not play well with others.  I look on the example of Don Quixote.  I never understood why Welles didn't simply write an actual script.  By filming things without setting them down, it only led to confusion and disorganization.  In short, Don Quixote doesn't make any sense, and while there are beautiful moments the final product is not a good film. 

It also didn't help that he became an object of ridicule.  His weight became a punch line, and to a whole generation of viewers, he was just a fat man who performed magic tricks on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson. 

Orson Welles' brilliance as a director is up there, on the screen.  Citizen Kane alone is enough to enshrine him in the pantheon of the greats.  Mercifully for us, he managed to create more extraordinary films: The Lady From Shanghai, The Magnificent Ambersons, Touch of Evil, F For Fake, Chimes at Midnight.  I confess to also enjoying The Man Who Saw Tomorrow (yes, he didn't direct this film, but since it was the first film with Orson Welles that I saw, not counting his cameo in The Muppet Movie, it holds a special place in my heart).

He has the added benefit of being a first-rate actor: going from Citizen Kane through small parts in such films as A Man For All Seasons and especially The Third Man.  His voice is one of the greatest (even if you do end up thinking of The Brain from Pinky & The Brain). 

In the final analysis, Orson Welles is one of the great directors not because he made the greatest film ever made, but because he made so many good films despite so many great obstacles.  He might still surprise us even after his death: The Other Side of the Wind may yet be completed and released, so we might see one more Film by Orson Welles.

He created some extraordinary images on film, and paid a heavy price for it.  He commented that he had wasted too much time on things unrelated to actually making a film.  "It's been 2% movie-making and 98% hustling", he said about the difficulties of financing his projects (some alas, never to be completed).  Still, what we do have of his work is a great legacy, one which all future filmmakers would be wise to study, appreciate, and draw from.

Orson, where did it all go wrong?

*Herrmann did win an Oscar for his score for The Devil & Daniel Webster which was nominated the same year.  It is impossible to say whether this was an award for both The Devil & Daniel Webster and Citizen Kane, but one can wonder...

To learn more and to see the full Great Directors Retrospectives, click on the link. 

The Border Between Fantasy & Reality Is The Imagination. Federico Fellini: The Great Directors Retrospective

1920-1993

FEDERICO FELLINI

I can't think off the top of my head of another director who made the unreality of cinema come as fully alive as Federico Fellini.  I confess that the first film I saw of his (8 1/2) I did not like.  It was a little too weird, too bizarre, for me to take it all it.

I suppose in retrospect it is instructive that I did not warm to Fellini immediately.  It gave me a chance to grow in my appreciation, and moreover, to grow as a person.  Off the bat Fellini can be rather difficult to grasp: of the Great Directors he certainly is the one most fascinated by the power of the visual, dreamlike quality a film can have.  His world is one where fantasy and reality overlap, blend, and sometimes become indistinguishable. 

My journey into loving Fellini was an arduous one.  As I stated, 8 1/2 just left me puzzled, but in my defense I was a bit too young mentally to grasp it all.  I finished it in film class and thought, "What the hell was that?"  In this case, I might have been missing the forest for the trees.  I spent too much time focusing on details: the crazy woman screaming about her youth in his harem, that fat woman rolling about the beach, and not enough on the overall story: a creative being retreating into his own dream world while the real world was colliding with him. 

I was encouraged by my friend Fidel Gomez, Jr. (who may or may not be dead) into giving Fellini another try, but with the caveat that I might try for early Fellini, where he was a little more traditional in his film-making (note I said 'a little more', because even in some of those films he still had those Felliniesque touches).  With that, I went first to La Dolce Vita (the one where Jesus flies over Rome, as I called it). 

I loved it: the insane world of celebrity and the man who is both attracted and repelled by it, who wants to create something good but finds himself too enraptured by all the decadence around him to truly free himself from that world.  I got the symbolism: Anita Ekberg, that blatant object of desire, dancing in the Trevi Fountains,  Marcello being unable to hear or understand the girl at the beach: it was a devastating and brilliant and mad portrait of a man being something he knew he shouldn't be.

From there, I floated, on my own, to I Vitelloni.  Here, I found perhaps not a kindred spirit, but someone whom I could understand.  I too felt the frustration of a small town, of men who figure there's a world beyond their home but who are still figuring out how to get there.  Strange, but I related to these guys, to their hopes and struggles, up to a point: I've never impregnated anyone, but I digress. 

However, this time I began to admire, even love, some of those cinematic moments I found so frustrating in 8 1/2.  The film ends with one of the men leaving the town via train, but we see each of his friends, still at home, asleep, and watch them as if we were leaving them at the station.   I was simply entranced by the ending, which to my mind signaled the beginning of Fellini's Felliniesque world.

I then went over to La Strada, and finally admitted to myself that Fellini was a genius.  It was grounded in reality but there was also a sense of wonder and magic within it.  I think this was due to his wife Guilietta Masina's beautiful and haunting performance as Gelsomina, the innocent who sees joy even within the harsh world she finds herself in.  At the end, I came close to tears; perhaps I did cry, but am too proud to admit it publicly.

Whimsy marked with despair: such is the stuff of life.

Now, while I have learned to love Fellini, I also still fear him.  Some of his later films appear to my mind too bizarre, too flat-out weird, as if he's trying too hard to be fantastical.  Fidel, a great admirer of Fellini, always mocked me for my overall impression of Federico Fellini's later period: he always thought my use of the word "Decadent" was in itself funny.  It is one thing to have one foot in reality, another in fantasy.  It is another to go so much into fantasy that you are not grounded in anything other than the Master's Dreams. 

I still fear Roma, I still fear Satyricon, I still fear Amarcord, I still fear Intervista,  I even fear Ginger & Fred.  I did have the chance to see it on Turner Classic Movies, but it was shown rather late, and I was concerned that it would be too weird for such a late hour.    My fear increases every time I see a film with his name as part of the title: Fellini's Roma, Fellini Satyricon, Fellini's Intervista, Fellini's Casanova. 

This to me does not signal a great film: it signals a self-consciously weird one, a film that is trying too hard to be outrageous, to be flamboyant, Avant-garde, dare I say, decadent?   8 1/2 or La Dolce Vita or Juliet of the Spirits may be fantastical, visually splendid,  even a bit nutty compared to the somberness of someone like a Ingmar Bergman or the gritty realism of a Martin Scorsese.   However, at least I found them coming close to a semblance of reality. 

In fairness, I shouldn't judge the latter films of Fellini without seeing them and giving them a fair chance.  I will see them and perhaps I will find that I really had nothing to fear.

We also should take a few other things into consideration: that some of Fellini's greatest work was not just a result of his vivid and brilliant imagination, but with the people he surrounded himself with.  First, there is his wife Guilietta: her sweet face made those films even more funny or heartbreaking, depending on what she was doing.  Second is the music by Nino Rota; from the tragic score for La Strada to the free and wild one of La Dolce Vita and right through the best score of a Fellini movie: 8 1/2 from Saraghina's seductive dance through the closing circus, Rota was as important to the success of Fellini's movies as Fellini himself. 

In short, I can best sum up my views of Federico Fellini thus: after watching 8 1/2 in college I swore never to watch it again.  Go forward five to seven years: I decide to have my best friend Gabe watch 8 1/2 to see for himself what a loon he was and compare it with Nine, the musical it was based on. 

His view was that it was interesting but with a few things he didn't get.  Mine?  I had fallen in love: hopelessly and totally and utterly and absolutely, with Federico Fellini and his Wonderful World.  It truly was as if I'd seen 8 1/2 for the very first time.  I finally GOT IT!  I once was blind...

The list of Great Directors keeps growing and I encourage you to visit my other retrospectives and make your own discoveries. 

Ready For His Close-Up. Cecil B. DeMille: The Great Directors Retrospective

1881-1959

 CECIL B. DeMILLE

If any director followed the maxim, 'the bigger the better', it was Cecil B. DeMille. I will be frank: I enjoy his films, from the silent epic The King of Kings down to the splashy circus epic The Greatest Show on Earth to the opulent epic The Ten Commandments.  DeMille, if nothing else, was consistent in his film-making.

I figure that my enjoyment of DeMille is not on course with many of my more intellectual counterparts, who are quick to dismiss him and his films as bombastic, overblown, hammy, grandiose, and even bigoted. To my mind, this is a case of throwing out the baby with the bathwater: mixing whatever hatred they have towards his politics into a hatred for his films.

I think DeMille is a wildly underrated director, both in terms of style and impact.  Given that his primary interest was in entertaining audiences and giving the public what it wanted, he is trashed by the intelligentsia for not making films for them, exploring the deep and dark recesses of the human heart.  I think DeMille could have done so if he was interested in doing so.  However, I think DeMille had the goal of making films that would last, that would be watched again and again, and he has succeeded. 

Think on this: few directors serve as verbs.  There's Capraesque, Felliniesque, Spielbergian and Hitchcockian.  Add to that one more: a DeMille picture is quickly understood as being above all, a BIG picture, an event.  Now, while that epic quality of his pictures, especially in the latter period, has damaged his reputation among elites, the public at large, both during his lifetime and after, still love his movies because they are entertaining.

One thing people forget about Cecil B. DeMille is that he was one of the few directors to have a long career after the transition from silent to sound pictures.  Sunset Boulevard had it absolute right: there were three great directors working in silent pictures: D.W. Griffith, Cecil B. DeMille, and 'Erich Von Stroheim' (he could say Max Mayerling, but we all know whom he was actually referring to).  Which one of them was the only one still standing? 

It wasn't that DeMille was better than Griffith or Von Stroheim or more talented than them. I'd argue each was a genius in his own way, but it was because DeMille adapted the best of all three of them in two ways.  The first was to work with the studio bosses to retain as much artistic control as possible while still understanding that, for all his trappings of director-as-tyrant, he was still an employee.

This point is what killed Von Stroheim.  The second was to adapt to the advancing technology and make films the public would want to see.  This is what killed Griffith, who was too attached to making old-fashioned films and was never quite able to move on to sound.

DeMille may be unpopular because again and again, he kept going back to the past and especially The Bible for inspiration.  His big hit, The King of Kings, took direct quotations from the Gospels to make his biopic of Christ complete with color sequences, which show DeMille had some idea of where the future was heading.  He had a great hit not just because the life of Jesus is known by the majority of Americans, but because he took Preston Sturges' advice before Sullivan's Travels: DeMille made a religious film "with a little sex in it". 

I doubt Mary Magdalene was Judas Iscariot's lover, but by adding just a hint of decadence, DeMille manipulated audiences by introducing a sense of sin which Christ, in this case cinematically, could absolve.  He did it again with the original The Ten Commandments and its remake when the Children of Israel give themselves to wild abandon at the foot of Mount Sinai.  He did it once again with Samson and Delilah: that tale of the wanton woman seducing one of the judges of Israel.  As any good director knows, DeMille knew how to grab the audience's attention. 

Going back to The King of Kings, for all the trashing DeMille gets about not being able to direct actors, I would hold the scene where Christ (H.B. Werner) has a group of children before him.  A little girl asks him if he can heal, and He says yes.  The little girl promptly holds up her doll and asks Christ to heal her broken arm.  Jesus looks a bit embarrassed by this request, but cleverly grants her request in what I think is an especially tender and touching moment. 

Yes, there was a religious aspect to DeMille's pictures, and he may have been a devout Christian, rumors of mistresses notwithstanding.  I stand by my view that DeMille understood that for a predominantly Christian nation or at least one that is Christian by default, these subjects would get them into theaters.  I can't say one way or another, but I think DeMille had very few financial failures, so that's something to be said for his ability to understand an audience.

It wasn't all togas and crosses for DeMille.  He could make contemporary films (although one of them, The Godless Girl, seems to mix the sign of the cross with the sign of the times, and the original The Ten Commandments has a 1920's setting mixed with the Exodus story).   The one that has been vilified more than any is The Greatest Show on Earth.  Few films are hated for winning Best Picture, but almost all of them have at least one defender. 

When it comes to The Greatest Show on Earth, I ain't one.  I don't think it was the Best Picture nominated in 1952: I think it was The Quiet Man, followed by High Noon, followed by Moulin Rouge, THEN The Greatest Show on Earth, with Ivanhoe bringing up the rear. 

I will, however, stand up for The Greatest Show on Earth being great entertainment.  Having seen it twice, I think it captures the best of DeMille: telling a small story (the love triangle between the circus manager, the trapeze artist, and her male rival) in a large canvas with both secondary stories (Buttons the clown who never takes his make-up off and the tortured romance between the elephant trainer and his Muse) with lavish production numbers, culminating in an incredible train crash which in 1952 would have been spectacular and even now is still pretty good.  In a more formal review for The Greatest Show on Earth, I will speculate as to the myriad of reasons it won Best Picture, but I can't call it a lousy film because I was entertained by it. 

Here, and in his final film as a director, the remake of The Ten Commandments, we can see what made Cecil B. DeMille one of the greats in cinema.  He knew how to command and control audience emotion: how to excite them, how to entertain them, and how to hold their attention in spite of a very long picture.  He understood how to keep a moving picture moving: going from one scene to another by always having something going on. 

There is not much stillness in a DeMille film, and in a curious sort of way, modern directors could learn from him.  I am aware that most critics masturbate to No Country For Old Men, but without going into too much detail I felt many scenes were endless and dragged on.  It might do the Coen Brothers well to watch a DeMille picture to learn how to keep things moving.

As a side note, it's not my fault that The Greatest Show on Earth won.  It's not even Cecil B. DeMille's fault that it won.  Therefore both the film and its director should not be condemned for winning.

Now, I'd like to address this issue of DeMille being a bigot in his films.  This may be a case of people attaching his political conservatism to his films.  Yes, DeMille wanted members of the Directors Guild to take loyalty oaths during the McCarthy era, something I think was a terrible mistake.  However, in his films there isn't much if any evidence for the charges of bigotry.  The Crusades is not a diatribe against Islam but from what I understand remarkably respectful of it, especially for its time.  In the remake of The Ten Commandments, he hints that the Princess of Ethiopia and Moses may have romantic interests in each other: pretty daring stuff for 1956.  We also should remember that, despite DeMille's support for loyalty oaths, it was DeMille that broke the graylist against Edward G. Robinson and composer Leonard Bernstein by hiring them when no one else would. 

In short, Cecil B. DeMille was a far more complex person than his persona hints at, and that applies to his films.  I've always felt that the 1923 The Ten Commandments spoke to an era where people were becoming highly aware that their values in the Ten Commandments were slowly becoming subverted by the Jazz Age of speakeasies, gangsters, fast cars and faster women, and the need for speed & greed.  The idea of a 'godless tyranny' oppressing the Chosen People and having to fight for their freedom with God on their side might be the story on the screen, but in 1952 with the Cold War in full strength, could it be DeMille was making an allegory of current-day politics wrapped within a Biblical epic?  Perhaps DeMille was smarter than the elitist critics give him credit for... 

Cecil B. DeMille's influence is still being felt.  Steven Spielberg is probably the most DeMille-like director today.  He, like DeMille, has a dynamic and almost flawless ability to give people films that above all entertain.  Both are craftsmen in film-making, and it's no surprise.  Spielberg has been open how The Greatest Show on Earth was a primary influence in his decision to go into directing: a case of one genius influencing another. 

Both, curiously, have been criticized for being too popular, for making films that aren't considered deep.  I would argue those criticisms of DeMille and Spielberg are wildly off the mark.  Each, in their way, is a deeper and stronger director than they've been given credit for.

I find myself in an odd position.  I'm one of the few people who is an open Champion of Cecil B. DeMille as a director and filmmaker.  I think by and large he made great films, and that a lot of the bashing against him isn't based on the films themselves but on what people think of him personally.  I don't care about a performer's politics, though I am always concerned that his/her politics will overshadow their work and advise to keep their political activities to a minimum.  I judge the film itself, and when it comes to Cecil B. DeMille, I have yet to be bored by any of them.

I end with this: Cecil B. DeMille is a genius, a titan of film-making, and I hope that in time, he will be spoken of in the same way people speak of Herzog or Bergman or Lynch or the Coens.

Please visit more of my growing retrospective on The Great Directors.   

This Is What America Is To Me. Frank Capra: The Great Directors Retrospective

1897-1991

FRANK CAPRA

America is a nation of immigrants; we all take pride in our ancestral heritage but also have a great love for the land of our birth or naturalization. Americans simply love America: not just the physical territory but the idea of America, the land of opportunity where one can come from nothing, flee repression and find a land that guarantees you nothing except the chance to have life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

It would take an immigrant to capture on celluloid what we Americans can't quite verbalize, a Son of Italy to shape what we think of as authentically American. Few directors have such an abounding and unapologetic love for America as Frank Capra, and few have captured the joys and contradictions of the nation as Capra has.  In short, what we think of as 'American': the small-town boy makes good, the goodness of our neighbors, the hope to move up, was from the work of an immigrant.

One simply cannot ignore Capra's immigrant background when it comes to his film-making.  Capra came to the United States from Sicily at age six, so his childhood was shaped by his memories of both his native land and those of an American upbringing.  Unlike other foreign-born directors who came to America as adults (say Hitchcock), Capra was of an age where the hopes that every immigrant come to America with were solidly grafted onto his soul.  He took it for granted that anyone can come and make of him/herself a success, namely because he did so.  This lent his films a spirit of optimism, of what good ol' American know-how can do to make the country and the world a better place.

Take his first Best Picture winner (It Happened One Night).  Capra had established the ground rules for screwball comedy: fast-paced witty conversation and two people from different worlds that end up falling in love.  Here, the average man (the Clark Gable character) is the hero, and this was tonic in the times of the Depression. 

It's Capra's celebration of the man and woman in the street (from Mr. Deeds Goes to Town and Meet John Doe to It's A Wonderful Life) that makes him more than beloved: it makes his films ones that stand the test of time.  Capra is the first major talent to tackle the ordinary lives of ordinary Americans and find the nobility within them.  Capra heroes from Longfellow Deeds and "John Doe" to Jefferson Smith and George Bailey are ordinary men who struggle against such things as deception and fraud, not armed with guns but with something more dangerous to the power elite: the truth and individual courage. 

Take Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.  Here, our young Senator isn't calling for armed insurrection against the corruption he comes across.  Instead, he uses the weapons within his power, namely the filibuster, to stop the rot he sees taking place in the hallways of power.  Jefferson Smith is not stupid or even naive, but instead someone who has not been corrupted by cynicism.  We the audience identify with him and his struggle because like Capra, we believe in the goodness of our country and its institutions.  This is why we identify so powerfully to Jefferson Smith's plight that when it looks like he is 'licked', we are agonized ourselves. 

I think this is part of Capra's genius: the ability to have us identify with the characters.  Like George Bailey, who among us hasn't had secret or in his case, not-so secret, dreams that remain unfulfilled but who realize that our lives in the end have been pretty good?  Those things like honesty, personal courage, family: the things that we value are the things Capra holds up to us in his films and holds up as models for us. 

This ability to identify with the average man (you and me) is best captured in the documentary series Why We Fight.  There were many men drafted in World War II who didn't have a great understanding of how the world grew into conflict; until the bombing at Pearl Harbor, there were many Americans who considered the wars on both their shores to be 'over there' and thus, unimportant to their lives.  The seven parts that comprise Why We Fight put the struggle against Fascism/Nazism/Japanese aggression in a context that could be understood. 

For example, in Prelude to War, the comparison is made between Nazi Germany and the United States.  In a famous scene, we see how 'the church' or religion if you prefer was the last obstacle to total Nazi domination of Germany.  "The Word of God and the Word of Fuhrers cannot be reconciled.  Then God MUST GO", thunders narrator Walter Huston, and in a brilliant sequence we see a stained-glass window smashed with rocks, to reveal an image of Adolph Hitler behind it.  In a time where religion was more dominant and respected, and with the shorthand of the stained-glass window serving as the symbol of faith, the idea of 'our' faith (whatever it was) at risk by barbarians was a call to arms.

Again, it is Capra's brilliant ability to make his movies projects to where we identify with those on the screen that makes us care about what we see on the screen.  At the heart of Capra films is a sense that good will triumph, that the 'common' man was truly extraordinary, and that you and I have worth outside whatever wealth we have outside our bank accounts. 

Those themes: the importance of family, faith (religious and personal) and the decency of the 'common' man and how he (I can't think of a Capra film where women were the protagonists) will triumph come again and again in his films.  Again and again, the celebration of what it is to be American is at the core of Capra's genius, as well as to why his films are still seen by the public at large.

This isn't to say Frank Capra wasn't a craftsman when it came to his films.  He could, like Hitchcock, manipulate audiences with his imagery: the conclusion of It's A Wonderful Life as George runs through the streets of Bedford Falls is not just iconic, but a confirmation of that character's epiphany and transformation from a bitter man driven to despair to one who has reaffirmed his desire to live. 

As a side note, I don't understand why the phrase "Capra-esque", which I take to denote an optimistic view of American life, is so dismissed.  Capra at heart was telling us that things will get better if we work at them, and rally around the truly important things: family, honesty, personal courage despite great pressure to conform.  These are positive qualities, and I agree up to a point with director William Friedkin, who stated that he prefers Capra's America, even though it's gone. 

I don't know if it is completely gone: certainly the sense of community has lessened, and people today are more cynical.  However, we time and again gravitate to Capra's world, because in his films the genuine love he had for country comes through.

Sadly, he made no films after 1961's Pocketful of Miracles.  He lived another thirty years, and yet his career ended, I think because the way he looked at the world and the world he celebrated was disappearing.  Capra would not fit in to the world of hippies, free love and rampant drug use.  One senses that Capra understood that his worldview would no longer play in Peoria.  He could have made more films: at 64 he could have gone on to a few more, but Capra's America was slowly fading from existence.  Maybe Friedkin was right. 

We still have the films, glorious paens to America and as how we see it.  In his films, America and Americans are celebrated: their honesty, their ingenuity, their pride in the working-class.  We see that in perhaps Capra's best-known and loved film: It's A Wonderful Life; we have an Italian-American family moving from Potter's Field to their new home courtesy of the Bailey Brothers Building & Loan.   That must have been an extremely personal moment for Capra, and belies the idea that he was not an auteur. 

In short, Capra-esque or its more dismissive cousin, Capra-Corn, is a positive thing.

Please visit The Great Directors for other Icons of Cinema.