Saturday, April 09, 2011
Sidney Lumet (1924-2011)
I want you to get up right now. I want you to stand up, out of your chairs. I want you to get up, go to your window, open it and shout, "I'm as sad as hell. Sidney Lumet has died." One of the all-time great film directors, whose debut in 1957, 12 Angry Men, earned him his first Oscar nomination, and who 50 years later still was capable of producing as great a film as Before the Devil Knows You're Dead died today in New York at 86.
Lumet actually began his career as a child actor, making his first appearance on the Broadway stage in 1935 in the original production of Dead End. He'd act on Broadway multiple times until 1948 when directing for
television caught his eye. He only directed on Broadway three times. His direction for television began in 1951 and included both episodic television and the many live playhouse shows until the chance to direct 12 Angry Men as a feature came along in 1957. Its origins as a play clearly showed, but there was no point trying to open this tale up since the claustrophobia of that jury room heightened the drama and Lumet used to his advantage, as in the moment when they discuss the unusual knife the defendant had and that the victim was killed with and Henry Fonda suddenly whips out one of his own, tossing it so the blade sticks in the middle of the table. The film contained a great cast including, in addition to Fonda, Lee J. Cobb, E.G. Marshall and Jack Warden. In fact, of the 12 members of that jury, only Jack Klugman remains with us today.Lumet continued his television work, not directing another feature until 1959's That Kind of Woman starring Sophia Loren. The following year, he got more notice when Tennessee Williams adapted his own play Orpheus Descending into The Fugitive Kind which Lumet filmed with Marlon Brando and Anna Magnani. In 1962, Lumet made a film of another stage classic, Eugene O'Neill's Long Day's Journey Into Night, starring Katharine Hepburn as the opium-addicted Mary Tyrone.
In 1964, he filmed two of his most underrated movies: The Pawnbroker, featuring a great performance by Rod Steiger as the Jewish title character, a Holocaust survivor, who has given up on mankind; and Fail-Safe, a tense nuclear thriller starring Henry Fonda that got overshadowed by the satire of Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove which came out first the same year.
He kept quite busy for the rest of the 1960s and early '70s, directing The Hill, The Group, Bye Bye Braverman, The Sea Gull, The Appointment, Last of the Mobile Hot Shots, The Anderson Tapes, The Offence and Child's Play. In 1971, Lumet and Joseph L. Mankiewicz co-directed the documentary King: A Filmed Record...Montgomery to Memphis about Martin Luther King Jr.
Beginning in 1973, Lumet started what was the most creatively fertile and rewarding period of his filmmaking career, one that earned him four consecutive nominations from the Directors Guild. Starting with Al Pacino in Serpico, it was one of many times in Lumet's career he'd turn his lens on the issue of corruption among police. In 1974, he went in another direction, casting Albert Finney as Agatha Christie's famed Belgian sleuth Hercule Poirot and assembled an amazing cast for Murder on the Orient Express.
Then came the first of an amazing one-two punch with 1975's Dog Day Afternoon, one of Lumet's greatest achievements and a film I never tire of watching. With Al Pacino and John Cazale attempting to rob a bank and having it turn into a hostage situation and a media sideshow, it's a wonder. It brought Lumet his first Oscar nomination for directing since that initial one for 12 Angry Men. It's not only proof of what a great director Lumet could be but when they released the special two-disc DVD edition of the film, Lumet also showed that he's one of the few people who actually recorded DVD commentaries that were worth listening to, sharing many interesting details about the production of this great work which deftly blends the humorous, the tragic and the absurd.
He followed Dog Day up in 1976 with the incomparable Network. While much of the credit for this satirical and prescient masterpiece deservedly goes to Paddy Chayefsky's Oscar-winning script, Lumet's direction
shouldn't get short shrift. The way he filmed the chaos of the network control rooms and its overlapping dialogue and always found the right pacing for whatever craziness was going on. Also, as in Dog Day, Lumet didn't have a musical score. Except for the opening song in the 1975 film and the network news theme in Network, he eschewed any musical underscore. Neither film needed one. He also assembled some great visual compositions, such as the long view down the canyons of New York with windows open as far as the eyes could see with heads sticking out screaming "I'm mad as hell" to Ned Beatty and the lighting as he's at the end of that long conference table about to give Peter Finch his corporate cosmology speech. Brilliant. Lumet received his third directing nomination.Things got a little bumpy filmwise after that. Next came the adaptation of the play Equus followed by what many count as his biggest mistake: casting a too old Diana Ross as Dorothy in the big screen version of the Broadway musical The Wiz, which also featured Michael Jackson as the Scarecrow. Next came a rather lame Alan King-Ali McGraw romantic comedy (Yes, you read that correctly) called Just Tell Me What You Want.
Lumet began to get his bearings again by going back to police corruption with 1981's Prince of the City, which earned him his first Oscar nomination in a writing category. The next year brought him his final nomination as a director for The Verdict, starring Paul Newman as an alcoholic lawyer seeking redemption. That same year, he made the fun adaptation of the play Deathtrap starring Michael Caine and Christopher Reeve.
The remainder of his career mixed some OK efforts with some really bad ones. He made Running on Empty, which earned River Phoenix an Oscar nominaton but did his best when going back to corruption in movies such as 1990's Q&A and 1996's Night Falls on Manhattan. In 2005, the Academy finally saw fit to award him an honorary Oscar, back when they still televised those events. At least he ended on a high note, with the really good 2007 film Before the Devil Knows You're Dead starring Philip Seymour Hoffman, Ethan Hawke and Albert Finney.
RIP Mr. Lumet.
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Labels: Brando, Caine, Chayefsky, E.G. Marshall, H. Fonda, Hawke, Jack Warden, K. Hepburn, Kubrick, Lee J. Cobb, Magnani, Mankiewicz, N. Beatty, Newman, O'Neill, Obituary, P.S. Hoffman, Pacino, River Phoenix, Tennessee Williams
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Friday, March 07, 2008
Centennial Tributes: Anna Magnani
By Josh R
Of the nearly 50 films that Anna Magnani made during her storied career, only a handful are available for viewing by the general public. I can therefore lay claim to having seen only but a fraction of her life's work (would that I could rectify the situation by being granted unfettered access to the vaults of Cinecitta Roma or the archives at UCLA). As it is, Magnani fans can only be grateful that many of her most celebrated performances remain readily accessible, given what a remarkable and singular talent she was, and what an impressive career she had.
While there is a fair argument to be made for the fiery yet tender leading lady as the cinema’s first truly naturalistic actress, it is also worth noting than no other performer from her country — not even the great Mastroianni — occupies a more important place in the history of global cinema. Italy’s cinematic output before the advent of the neo-realist movement had been negligible; Magnani was the face of that movement, and the impact of her work was immediate and far-reaching. She was the first Italian actor to achieve global stardom, with crossover success working in foreign productions and in other languages. These facts, while impressive, do not fully account for what qualified her as a pioneer, firing off the first and most penetrating shots in an ongoing campaign that, even now, is still being waged. In breaking the rules, she nearly succeeded in changing them.
Put simply, Anna Magnani was not beautiful, thin or young. She was over 40 by the time she achieved her widest stardom, with a Rubenesque figure, coarse features and a throaty voice. There was some precedent for this: Marie Dressler, a portly character actress of the early sound era with the countenance of a St. Bernard, had risen to the rank of leading lady and marquee attraction not before she was 60. Dressler was a star, to be sure, but envisioning her in a revealing negligee playing out a slow-burning, erotically charged seduction scene with some bare-chested, brawny buck 10 years her junior — say Lancaster, Brando or Franciosa — gives you some sense of how radically different Magnani was from anyone who’d come before, or many who have come since. Not even Italy’s premier sex symbol, Sophia Loren, ever exuded as much earthy sensuality, or expressed carnal desire as freely or as frankly as Magnani did. In The Rose Tattoo, Wild Is the Wind and a handful of other films, Anna Magnani was not only cast as an object of male desire; she was so persuasive to that end that she made slim, fine-featured young things like Marisa Pavan and Dolores Hart look pallid, prissy and frigid in comparison. In film after film, she was an irresistible source of fascination for the opposite sex, and why wouldn’t she be? Pretty girls are often no more than just that; passionate women are harder to forget.
The daughter of an Italian father and an Egyptian mother, she was brought up in the slums of Rome — that she displayed such a keen understanding of the hard-edged survival instincts of working class women was the product of firsthand experience. She began her career as a singer, performing in nightclubs. By the late 1930s, she was almost as famous as Piaf was in France; their backgrounds and career trajectories were strikingly similar. She made many poor, time-marking films before being cast by Vittorio De Sica in Teresa Venerdi, the film that launched her acting career in earnest. Roberto Rossellini’s Open City, in which she was the aching soul of a war-ravaged Rome, paved the way for international stardom. For that film, she received the best actress award from the National Board of Review — the first time any major American prize had been bestowed upon a foreign language performance. She worked for Rossellini again as the peasant woman convinced she is carrying the child of Christ in L’Amore, which cast her opposite the young actor who had also written the film’s screenplay, Federico Fellini. In Bellissima, directed by Luchino Visconti, she was tough, testy and ultimately heartbreaking as the stage mother determined to get her tiny daughter into films. The scene in which she observes, unnoticed, as her daughter’s screen test is being mercilessly ridiculed by studio executives showed how effortlessly she could segue from forceful bravado to quiet humiliation and despair. While Magnani was almost always cast as hardy, hearty women, she invariably managed to locate the fragile, wounded soul beneath the armor; audiences were always provided glimpses of the nagging self-doubts, irrational fears and easily bruised feelings that can reduce even the toughest of cookies to a state of naked vulnerability.
The world took notice, and a somewhat reluctant Magnani found herself a sought-after commodity on the international scene. She was the tempestuous star of a commedia del arte troupe in The Golden Coach, giving a grandly operatic performance; the film’s director, Jean Renoir, declared her to be “the greatest actress (he’d) ever worked with”. A star struck Tennessee Williams wrote The Rose Tattoo, a raucous comedy-drama about an Italian widow coming to terms with her late husband’s infidelity, specifically for her. Magnani declined the invitation to appear in the stage version, fearing her English wasn’t up to the task; her decision to opt out effectively launched the career of the unknown actress chosen to replace her. While Maureen Stapleton earned much praise (and a Tony) for her Broadway triumph, by the time the film version was being cast, Magnani had decided to reclaim the property. As Serefina Della Rose, her volcanic fits of fury were juxtaposed with moments of aching tenderness and grief — not even the clowny showboating of Burt Lancaster could derail her intensity, and the raw emotionalism of the performance was astonishing. She won the Oscar for the film, but the American career never really took off; not many scripts were being written with middle-age women with heavy accents in mind. She was very good — actually, too good — for the pulpy Wild Is the Wind, which brought her a second best actress nomination. If George Cukor seemed at a loss for how to temper the hamminess of Anthony Quinn, he didn’t allow it to upset the balance of the film too badly, and Magnani’s scenes with Anthony Franciosa generated more erotic heat than her ones with Lancaster had. Sidney Lumet cast her opposite Brando in The Fugitive Kind, a reworking of Williams’ Orpheus Descending — the film, while a flop, actually was better overall The Rose Tattoo, and featured a performance by Magnani that was, in some ways, superior. Her failure to receive an Oscar nomination for that film is somewhat baffling in retrospect, considering how a lean a year 1959 was for leading ladies; but Magnani lacked the transformative abilities of Marion Cotillard, Charlize Theron and Nicole Kidman, and Oscar voters tune out when actors don’t exhibit enough range. As great as she was in The Fugitive Kind, some critics carped that, since her arrival in Hollywood, she’d been giving the same performance over and over again.
The Hollywood phase of her career behind her, she returned to Italy, probably somewhat relieved to get away from the type of films that were inclined to view her as an exotic; Magnani was too salt-of-the-earth to be considered anything of the kind, least of all by herself. Mario Monicelli’s The Passionate Thief provided her with a rare foray into the realm of comedy, while Pier Paolo Passolini’s Mamma Roma, in which she played a streetwise prostitute trying to give her teenage son a better life, was deemed too controversial to be released in the United States until 1995 (it’s not hard to see why). She was outstanding in a film that didn’t shy away from revealing her capacity for ruthlessness, or wondering how quickly unabashed, unapologetic sexuality can pave the way to madness. Stanley Kramer’s The Secret of Santa Vittoria was a reunion with an unrepentantly florid Anthony Quinn, allegedly a comedy, and definitely a mistake.
While Magnani got a late start in the world of film, her death from pancreatic cancer at the age of 65 was sadly premature. The conventionally pretty girls born around the same time had ceased to be interesting by the time they reached middle age; but at the age of 40, Anna Magnani was only getting warmed up. In her 70s, or even in her 80s, she might well have retained her ability to generate heat.
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Labels: Brando, Cotillard, Cukor, De Sica, Fellini, Lancaster, Lumet, Magnani, Nicole Kidman, Renoir, Tennessee Williams
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