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misspaddylee's number one movie rule: All film noir are crime drama, but not all crime drama are film noir.
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Robert Siodmak (8 August 1900 - 10 March 1973) was a German-born, American film director. He is best remembered as a thriller specialist and for a series of stylish, unpretentious Hollywood films noirs he made in the 1940s.
Siodmak (pronounced SEE-ODD-MACK) was born in Dresden, Germany, the son of Rosa Philippine (née Blum) and Ignatz Siodmak. His parents were both from Jewish families in Leipzig (the myth of his American birth in Memphis, Tennessee was necessary for him to obtain a visa in Paris during World War II). He worked as a stage director and a banker before becoming editor and scenarist for Curtis Bernhardt in 1925 (Bernhardt would direct a film of Siodmak's story "Conflict" in 1945). At twenty-six he was hired by his cousin, producer Seymour Nebenzal, to assemble original silent movies from stock footage of old films. Siodmak worked at this for two years before he persuaded Nebenzal to finance his first feature, the silent chef d'oeuvre, "Menschen am Sonntag" ("People on Sunday") in1929. The script was co-written by Billy Wilder and Siodmak's brother Curt Siodmak, later the screenwriter of "The Wolf Man" (1941). It was the last German silent and also included such future Hollywood artists as Fred Zinnemann, Edgar G. Ulmer, and Eugen Schufftan. His next film--the first at UFA to use sound--was the 1930 comedy "Abschied" for writers Emeric Pressburger and Irma von Cube, followed by "Der Mann, der seinen Mörder sucht," another comedy, yet quite different and unusual, a likely product of Billy Wilder's imagination (remade a noir, "DOA," in 1950). But in his next film, the crime thriller "Stürme der Leidenschaft," with Emil Jannings and Anna Sten, Siodmak found a style that would become his own.
With the rise of Nazism and following an attack in the press by Hitler's minister of propaganda Joseph Goebbels in 1933 after viewing "Brennendes Geheimnis" ("The Burning Secret"), Siodmak left Germany for Paris. His creativity flourished, as he worked for the next six years in a variety of film genres, from comedy ("Le sexe fable" and "La Vie Parisienne" ) to musical ("La crise est finie," with Danielle Darrieux) to drama ("Mister Flow," "Cargaison blanche," "Mollenard"--compare Gabrielle Dorziat's shrewish wife with that of Rosalind Ivan's in "The Suspect"--and the superb "Pièges," with Maurice Chevalier and Erich Von Stroheim). While in France, he was well on his way to becoming successor to Rene Clair, until Hitler again forced him out. Siodmak arrived in Hollywood in 1939, where he made 23 movies, many of them widely popular thrillers and crime melodramas, which critics today regard as classics of film noir.
Beginning in 1941, he first turned out several B-films and programmers for various studios before he gained a seven-year contract with Universal Studios in 1943. The best of those early films are the thriller "Fly by Night" in 1942, with Richard Carlson and Nancy Kelly, and in 1943 the touching weepie "Someone to Remember," with Mable Paige in a signature role. As house director, his services were often used to salvage troublesome productions at the studio. On Mark Hellinger's production "Swell Guy" (1946), for instance, Siodmak was brought in to replace Frank Tuttle only six days after completing work on "The Killers." Siodmak worked steadily while under contract, overshadowed by high profile directors, like Alfred Hitchcock, with whom he had been often compared by the press.
At Universal, Siodmak made yet another B-film, "Son of Dracula"(1943), the third and best in a trilogy of Dracula movies (based on his brother Curt's original story). His second feature, and first A-film, was the Maria Montez/Jon Hall vehicle, "Cobra Woman" (1944), made in garish Technicolor (Montez's cobra dance alone is worth the price of admission).
His first all-out noir was "Phantom Lady" (1944), for staff producer Joan Harrison, Universal's first female executive and Alfred Hitchcock's former secretary and script assistant. A classic, however flawed, it showcased Siodmak's skill with camera and editing to dazzling effect, but no more so than in the iconic jam-session sequence with Elisha Cook Jr. in throes on the drums. Following the critical success of "Phantom Lady," Siodmak directed "Christmas Holiday" (1944) with Deanna Durbin and Gene Kelly (Hans J. Salter received an Oscar nomination for best music). Beginning with this film, his work in Hollywood attained the stylistic and thematic characteristics that are evident in his later noirs. "Christmas Holiday," adapted from a W. Somerset Maugham novel by Herman J. Mankiewicz, was Durbin's most successful feature, which she considered her only good film (and that Mankiewicz said was among his work in the 40s of which he was most proud). Siodmak's use of black-and-white cinematography and urban landscapes, together with his light-and-shadow designs, formed the basic structure of classic noir films. In fact, he often collaborated with cinematographers, such as Nicholas Musuraca, Elwood Bredell, and Franz Planer, to achieve in his films the Expressionist look he had cultivated in his early years at UFA (for "Christmas Holiday," he instructed Bredell in the use of deep-focus photography, which Gregg Toland had perfected for "Citizen Kane"). During Siodmak's tenure, Universal made the most of the noir style in "The Suspect," "The Strange Affair of Uncle Harry" and "The Dark Mirror," but the capstone was "The Killers" in 1946, Burt Lancaster's film debut and Ava Gardner's first dramatic, featured role. A critical and financial success, it earned Siodmak his only Oscar nomination for direction in Hollywood (his German production "The Devil Strikes at Night" ("Nachts, wenn der Teufel kam"), based on the true story of serial killer Bruno Lüdke, was nominated for Best Foreign Language Film in 1957). While still under contract at Universal, Siodmak worked on loan out to RKO for the thriller "The Spiral Staircase," which he edited freely, without taking screen credit. For 20th Century Fox and producer Darryl F. Zanuck, he directed, partly on location in New York City, the crime noir "Cry of the City" in 1948, and in 1949 for MGM he tackled its lux production "The Great Sinner," but the prolix script proved unmanageable for Siodmak who relinquished direction to the dependable and bland Mervyn LeRoy. On loan out to Paramount in 1949, he made for producer Hal B. Wallis his penultimate American noir "The File on Thelma Jordan," with Barbara Stanwyck at her most fatal--and sympathetic. That she can be both is owed entirely to Siodmak who saw in this film a thematic link with "The Suspect" and "The Strange Affair of Uncle Harry," with the failed lovers of these films and significantly their tragic conclusions (ten years later he addressed the same theme in "The Rough and the Smooth"). Perhaps his finest American noir--although not his last--is "Criss Cross" that was to reunite him not only with Lancaster, but also "The Killers" producer Mark Hellinger, who died suddenly before production began in 1949. Working without the hands-on control of Hellinger again, Siodmak was able to make this film his own as he could not the earlier film. Yvonne De Carlo's working-class femme fatal (a high mark in her career) completes the deadly triangle, along with Lancaster and Dan Duryea: the archetype of doomed attraction central to all Siodmak's noirs, but the one he could fully express to its nihilistic conclusion.
Siodmak immersed himself in the creative process and genuinely loved working with actors; in fact, he was considered an actor's director, discovering Burt Lancaster, Ernest Borgnine, Tony Curtis, Debra Paget, Maria Schell, Mario Adorf, and skillfully directing actresses, such as Ava Gardner, Olivia de Havilland, Dorothy McGuire, Yvonne de Carlo, Barbara Stanwyck, Geraldine Fitzgerald, and Ella Raines.[1]
He directed Charles Laughton (a close friend) and George Sanders, actors with indelible personas, and got from both perhaps the unlikeliest, most natural and under-played performances of their careers. He managed with Lancaster to capture a youthful vulnerability--despite the actor's age (he was 33)--that, watching him in "The Killers," surprises us even today. He accomplished the impossible and got a believable, dramatic performance from Gene Kelly who never before or since looked so (intentionally) frightening on screen. But above all, it must be acknowledged, he made audiences sit up and notice Ava Gardner and her potential to ruin men.
Before leaving Hollywood for Europe in 1952, following the problematic production "The Crimson Pirate" for Warner Bros. and producer Harold Hecht, his third and last film with Burt Lancaster (Siodmak dubbed the chaotic experience "The Hecht Follies"), Siodmak had directed some of the era's best films noirs (twelve in all), more than any other director who worked in that style. However, his identification with film noir, generally unpopular with American audiences, may have been more of a curse than a blessing.
He often expressed his desire to make pictures "of a different type and background" than the ones he had been making for ten years. Nevertheless, he ended his Universal contract with one last noir, the disappointing "Deported" (1951) which he filmed partly abroad (Siodmak was among the first refugee directors to return to Europe after making American films). The story is loosely based on the deportation of gangster Charles "Lucky" Luciano. Siodmak had hoped Loretta Young would star, but settled for the Swedish actress Marta Toren.
Those "different type" of films he had made--"The Great Sinner" (1949) for MGM, "Time Out of Mind" (1947) for Universal (which Siodmak also produced), "The Whistle at Eaton Falls" (1951) for Columbia Pictures (Ernest Borgnine's debut and Dorothy Gish's return to the screen)--all proved ill-suited to his noir sensibilities (although in 1952 "The Crimson Pirate," despite the difficult production, was a surprising and pleasing departure--in fact, Lancaster believed it was inspiration for the tongue-in-cheek style of the James Bond films).
The five months he collaborated with Budd Schulberg on a screenplay tentatively titled "A Stone in the River Hudson," an early version of "On the Waterfront," was also a major disappointment for Siodmak. In 1954 he sued producer Sam Spiegel for copyright infringement. Siodmak was awarded $100,000, but no screen credit. His contribution to the original screenplay has never been acknowledged.
Siodmak's return to Europe in 1954 with a Grand Prize nomination at the Cannes Film Festival for his remake of Jacques Feyder's "Le grand jeu" proved a misstep, despite its stars, Gina Lollobrigida (two of them) and Arletty in the role originated by Françoise Rosay, Feyder's wife. In 1955, Siodmak returned to the Federal Republic of Germany to make "Die Ratten," with Maria Schell and Curd Jurgens, winning the Golden Berlin Bear at the 1955 Berlin Film Festival. It was the first in a series of films critical of his homeland, during and after Hitler, which included the remarkable "Nachts, wenn der Teufel kam," both thriller and social artifact of Germany under Nazi rule, shot in documentary style reminiscent of "Menschen am Sontag" and "Whistle at Eaton Falls," and in 1960, "Mein Schulfreund," an absurdist comedy, dark and strange, with Heinz Ruhmann as a postal worker attempting to reunite with childhood friend Hermann Goering. Between these films, and "Mein Vater, der Schauspieler" in 1956, with O. W. Fischer (the German Rock Hudson), he took a detour into Douglas Sirk territory with the sordid melodrama, "Dorothea Angermann" in 1959, featuring Germany's star Ruth Leuwerik. Later the same year he left Germany for Great Britain to film "The Rough and the Smooth," with Nadja Tiller and Tony Britton, yet another noir, but much meaner and gloomier than anything he had made in America (compare its downbeat ending with that of "The File on Thelma Jordan"). He followed with "Katia" also in 1959, a tale of Czarist Russia, with twenty-one-year-old Romy Schneider, mistakenly titled in America "The Magnificent Sinner," recalling--unfavorably--Siodmak's other costume melodrama. In 1961, "L'affaire Nina B," with Pierre Brasseur and Nadja Tiller (again), returned Siodmak to familiar ground in a slick, black-and-white thriller about a pay-for-hire Nazi hunter, which could be argued was the start of the many spy themed films so popular in the 1960s. In 1962, the entertaining "Escape from East Berlin," with Don Murray and Christine Kaufman, had all the characteristic style of a Siodmak thriller, but was one that he later dismissed as something he had made for "little kids in America." His work in Germany returned to programmers like those that had begun his career in Hollywood 23 years earlier. From 1964-1965, he made a series of films with former Tarzan Lex Barker: "Der Schut," "Der Schatz der Azteken," and "Die Pyramide des Sonnengottes," all taken from the western, adventure novels of Karl May and made for little kids in both Germany and America.
His return to Hollywood film-making in 1967 to make the wide-screen western "Custer of the West" was another disappointment (it had been a project originally intended for Akira Kurosawa). With Robert Shaw in the title role and his wife Mary Ure as Mrs. Custer, it is the oddest of the Custer film biographies, yet interesting in its contemporary portrayal of Custer's anti-social individualism.
He ended his career with a six-hour, two-part toga and chariot epic, "Kampf um Rom" (1968), a more campy work (perhaps intentionally) than "Cobra Woman" had been. There was a brief and profitable foray into television in Great Britain with the series "O.S.S." (1957-58). Siodmak was last seen publicly in an interview for Swiss television at his home in Ascona in 1971. He died alone in 1973 in Locarno, seven weeks after his wife's death.
The British Film Institute ran a retrospective of his career in April and May of 2015.The Killers, Phantom Lady, Christmas Holiday, Cry of the City, Criss Cross- Director
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- Second Unit Director or Assistant Director
Jean Negulesco made his reputation as a director of both polished, popular entertainments as well as critically acclaimed dramatic pictures in the 1940s and 1950s. Born in Craiova, Romania, he left home at age 12, ending up in Paris. He earned some money washing dishes, which paid for his art tuition, on the way to fulfilling his dream of becoming a painter. World War I intervened, and he found himself in the French army working in a field hospital on the Western Front. Returning to Paris unscathed, he embarked on a more serious study of the arts, learning to paint under the guidance of his émigré compatriot Constantin Brâncusi (1876-1957), and subsequently returned home to Romania. Proving himself an adept pupil, Negulesco sold 150 of his paintings at his very first exhibition. Back in Paris by the early 1920s, he discovered another outlet for his creativity by working as a stage decorator.
In 1927, Negulesco took some of his paintings to New York in the hope of finding a wider audience. He liked it and decided to stay. Travelling across the US to California--all the while making money by painting portraits--Negulesco took years to arrive at his destination. In 1932, he was hired by Paramount Pictures (working for producer Benjamin Glazer) for his first job in the movie industry, as a sketch artist and technical advisor, notably designing the rape scene in The Story of Temple Drake (1933) without violating the Hays Code. Persuaded by an art critic, Elie Faure, to throw himself whole-heartedly into film work, Negulesco then financed and directed his own experimental project, "Three and a Day", starring Mischa Auer. Studio executives liked the picture and Negulesco advanced up the ladder to second-unit director, working on A Farewell to Arms (1932) and (on loan to Warner Brothers) The Sea Hawk. He served in diverse capacities during the remainder of the decade, including associate director, scenarist and original story writer. In 1940, he was approached by Warner Brothers and signed to a contract (until 1948) to direct shorts. Between 1941 and 1944, Negulesco turned out a string of shorts, generally of a musical nature and often featuring popular big bands, including those of Joe Reichman, Freddy Martin and Jan Garber.
Negulesco's road to directing feature films was a tortured one. He was replaced by John Huston two months into shooting The Maltese Falcon (1941) and suffered a similar fate with Singapore Woman (1941). His big break came when he landed the directing job for The Mask of Dimitrios (1944), a tale of international intrigue, based on the novel "A Coffin for Dimitrios" by Eric Ambler. The film was unusual in that it starred two character actors instead of romantic leads. The story, already convoluted by many flashbacks, was therefore not muddied further by built-in romantic angles not integral to the plot. The two films noir experts at the center of the action, Sydney Greenstreet and Peter Lorre, contributed greatly to the success of the venture. Likewise did Negulesco's experience as an artist, which had provided him with a keen eye for effective shots and the ability to set a scene to create atmosphere. Critic Pauline Kael aptly commented that the picture "had more mood than excitement". "The Mask of Dimitrios" was a financial boon for Warner Brothers and led to further assignments for its director.
Continuing in the same genre, Negulesco was tasked with two more films starring Greenstreet and Lorre, The Conspirators (1944) and Three Strangers (1946). He also directed John Garfield and Joan Crawford in the brilliantly moody melodrama Humoresque (1946). This picture was in many ways a victory of style over content. The maudlin tale of an up-and-coming young violinist and his stormy, ultimately, ill-fated relationship with an unhappily married alcoholic socialite, could have been hackneyed soap opera under a lesser talent. However, Negulesco not only elicited electrifying performances from his stars, but also gave the film an edgy look, as well as effectively juxtaposing the ghetto background of the Garfield character with the lush, high-society settings of Crawford's. Aided by Ernest Haller's photography, a bitingly clever screenplay conceived by Clifford Odets and Zachary Gold, and with Franz Waxman's lavish orchestration of music by Antonín Dvorák and Richard Wagner, "Humoresque" was another major hit with critics and public alike.
'Mood" was again at the center of the success pf Johnny Belinda (1948), the story of a deaf-mute who is raped, has a child and later kills her assailant. Negulesco tackled what was at the time a taboo subject in films (considered box-office poison) with restrained sentimentality. Bosley Crowther pondered in his review why Warners had undertaken the project in the first place, but gave both it and its director an excellent appraisal (October 2, 1948). Unfortunately, Warners did not concur and, though "Johnny Belinda" made the studio $4 million, Negulesco was unceremoniously fired. He did have the last laugh, however, being nominated for an Academy Award for Best Director and seeing his star, Jane Wyman, walking away with a Best Actress Oscar.
Between 1948 and 1958, Jean Negulesco became a contract director for 20th Century-Fox, a studio where he found the pace more to his liking. His first assignment was Road House (1948), another robust film noir with a good cast, headed by Ida Lupino and Richard Widmark. He then helmed the realistic war drama Three Came Home (1950), which enjoyed good reviews by both "Variety" and the "New York Times". After a brief interlude in England, directing the idiosyncratic comedy The Mudlark (1950) with Alec Guinness, Negulesco had a less successful outing with his version of the sinking of the Titanic (1953).
From 1953, Negulesco effectively reinvented himself as a director of more commercial, glossy entertainments, beginning with the expensively made and deliriously enjoyable comedy How to Marry a Millionaire (1953). With Marilyn Monroe at the peak of her career, this was also one of the first pictures to be shot in CinemaScope. Not necessarily a critical hit but a hugely popular success was the Oscar-nominated Three Coins in the Fountain (1954), which was filmed on location in Rome and became another major hit for its director. This was followed, in a similar vein, by the excellent all-star Woman's World (1954). Negulesco's variable output during the remainder of the decade ranged from the CinemaScope musical Daddy Long Legs (1955) to the colorful Boy on a Dolphin (1957), which introduced Sophia Loren to American audiences. Among Negulesco's notable failures during this period were The Rains of Ranchipur (1955) and The Gift of Love (1958).
In the late 1960s he moved to Marbella, Spain, to paint and to collect art. He made three more films after 1963, The Pleasure Seekers (1964), The Invincible Six (1970) and Hello-Goodbye (1970), which are best forgotten.
Jean Negulesco reminisced about his Hollywood experiences in an autobiography in 1984, "Things I Did...and Things I Think I Did". He died in Marbella of a heart attack at the respectable age of 93.Road House, The Mask of Dimitrio, Nobody Lives Forever- Director
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Fritz Lang was born in Vienna, Austria, in 1890. His father managed a construction company. His mother, Pauline Schlesinger, was Jewish but converted to Catholicism when Lang was ten. After high school, he enrolled briefly at the Technische Hochschule Wien and then started to train as a painter. From 1910 to 1914, he traveled in Europe, and he would later claim, also in Asia and North Africa. He studied painting in Paris from 1913-14. At the start of World War I, he returned to Vienna, enlisting in the army in January 1915. Severely wounded in June 1916, he wrote some scenarios for films while convalescing. In early 1918, he was sent home shell-shocked and acted briefly in Viennese theater before accepting a job as a writer at Erich Pommer's production company in Berlin, Decla. In Berlin, Lang worked briefly as a writer and then as a director, at Ufa and then for Nero-Film, owned by the American Seymour Nebenzal. In 1920, he began a relationship with actress and writer Thea von Harbou (1889-1954), who wrote with him the scripts for his most celebrated films: Dr. Mabuse, the Gambler (1922), Die Nibelungen: Siegfried (1924), Metropolis (1927) and M (1931) (credited to von Harbou alone). They married in 1922 and divorced in 1933. In that year, Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels offered Lang the job of head of the German Cinema Institute. Lang--who was an anti-Nazi mainly because of his Catholic background--did not accept the position (it was later offered to and accepted by filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl) and, after secretly sending most of his money out of the country, fled Germany to Paris. After about a year in Paris, Lang moved to the United States in mid-1934, initially under contract to MGM. Over the next 20 years, he directed numerous American films. In the 1950s, in part because the film industry was in economic decline and also because of Lang's long-standing reputation for being difficult with, and abusive to, actors, he found it increasingly hard to get work. At the end of the 1950s, he traveled to Germany and made what turned out to be his final three films there, none of which were well received.
In 1964, nearly blind, he was chosen to be president of the jury at the Cannes Film Festival. He was an avid collector of primitive art and habitually wore a monocle, an affectation he picked up during his early days in Vienna. After his divorce from von Harbou, he had relationships with many other women, but from about 1931 to his death in 1976, he was close to Lily Latte, who helped him in many ways.The Big Heat, Human Desire, Beyond a Reasonable Doubt, The Blue Gardenia, While the City Sleeps, House by the River, Scarlet Street, The Woman in the Window- Director
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- Second Unit Director or Assistant Director
Anthony Mann was born on 30 June 1906 in San Diego, California, USA. He was a director and writer, known for El Cid (1961), Men in War (1957) and The Glenn Miller Story (1954). He was married to Anna, Sara Montiel and Mildred Mann. He died on 29 April 1967 in London, England.Raw Deal, He Walked by Night, T-Men, The Great Flamarion- Director
- Editorial Department
- Editor
The term "style over content" fits director Joseph H. Lewis like a glove. His ability to elevate basically mundane and mediocre low-budget material to sublime cinematic art has gained him a substantial cult following among movie buffs. The Bonnie & Clyde look-alike Gun Crazy (1950), shot in 30 days on a budget of $400,000, is often cited as his best film. This taut gangster flick about two gun-crazy sociopaths on a crime spree is impregnated with an electric atmosphere, zipping along at a breakneck pace. It has been likened to a "tone poem of camera movement" and described by Martin Scorsese as "unrelenting and involving". A master of expressive lighting, tight close-ups, tracking and crane shots and offbeat camera angles and perspectives, Lewis possessed an instinctive sense of visual style, which imbued even the most improbable of his B-grade westerns and crime melodramas. Significant peripheral detail was his stock-in-trade. He acquired these skills working as a camera assistant in the 1920's (his aptitude for the work may have been come from his optometrist father) and further honed them in the MGM editorial department in the early '30s. After that Lewis edited serials at Republic and served the remainder of his apprenticeship as second unit director. He was signed to a full directing contract by Universal in 1937.
During the next two decades, Lewis spent time at Columbia (1939-40, 1946-49), Universal again (1942), PRC (1944), MGM (1950, 1952-53) and United Artists (1957-58), reliably turning out a couple of pictures per year. While he helmed more than his fair share of horse operas, it was invariably his films noir which attracted the most attention. Pick of the bunch were two slick second features during his spell at Columbia, My Name Is Julia Ross (1945), about a diabolical murder plot involving Nina Foch in her first starring role; and So Dark the Night (1946), an offbeat psychological thriller with character actor Steven Geray well cast as a French detective who unwittingly investigates his own crimes. Another candidate for inclusion on any Lewis "best" list would have to be The Big Combo (1955), made for Allied Artists and boasting impressive camera work by John Alton. It marked the beginning of a new cycle of films in which violence became rather more accentuated (the film ran into censorship trouble for that reason) and where the villain (in this case, philosophizing racketeer Richard Conte) was rather more interesting and dynamic than the maniacally obsessive but dullish nominal hero (cop Cornel Wilde).
After suffering a heart attack in 1953, Lewis began to reduce his workload. His cinematic curtain call was the low-budget western Terror in a Texas Town (1958), characterized by deliberate and fluid camera movement and some neat touches, like the hero (Sterling Hayden) sporting a harpoon for the climactic final showdown. The idea of successfully uniting the townsfolk against the tyranny of arbitrary rule was also intended as a veiled attack on McCarthyism. With the credits shot through the spokes of a wagon wheel, "Terror" was a fitting finale to Lewis's career.
He spent a few more years directing episodic TV westerns (including several of the better episodes of The Rifleman (1958)) and finally retired in 1966. When not addressing aspiring directors on the lecture circuit, he spent his remaining decades in leisure pursuits, in particular sailing and deep-sea fishing aboard his much-loved 50-foot trawler "Buena Vista".The Big Combo, Gun Crazy, My Name is Julia Ross- Director
- Editor
- Editorial Department
Edward Dmytryk grew up in San Francisco, the son of Ukrainian immigrants. After his mother died when he was 6, his strict disciplinarian father beat the boy frequently, and the child began running away while in his early teens. Eventually, juvenile authorities allowed him to live alone at the age of 15 and helped him find part-time work as a film studio messenger. Dmytryk was an outstanding student in physics and mathematics and gained a scholarship to the California Institute of Technology. However, he dropped out after one year to return to movies, eventually working his way up from film editor to director. By the late 1940s, he was considered one of Hollywood's rising young directing talents, but his career was interrupted by the activities of the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), a congressional committee that employed ruthless tactics aimed at rooting out and destroying what it saw as Communist influence in Hollywood. A lifelong political leftist who had been a Communist Party member briefly during World War II, Dmytryk was one of the so-called "Hollywood Ten" who refused to cooperate with HUAC and had their careers disrupted or ruined as a result. The committee threw him in prison for refusing to cooperate, and after having spent several months behind bars, Dmytryk decided to cooperate after all, and testified again before the committee, this time giving the names of people he said were Communists. He claimed to believe he had done the right thing, but many in the Hollywood community--even those who came along long after the committee was finally disbanded--never forgave him, and that action overshadowed his career the rest of his life. In the 1970s, as his directing career ground to a halt, Dmytryk recalled some advice once given him by Garson Kanin, and returned to academic life, this time as a teacher. From 1976 to 1981 he was a professor of film theory and production at the University of Texas at Austin, and in 1981, was appointed to a chair in filmmaking at the University of Southern California, a position he held until about two years before his death. During his teaching career, he also authored several books on various aspects of filmmaking, as well as two volumes of memoirs.Cross Fire, Murder, My Sweet, Cornered- Director
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- Actor
Nicholas Ray was born Raymond Nicholas Kienzle in 1911, in small-town Galesville, Wisconsin, to Lena (Toppen) and Raymond Joseph Kienzle, a contractor and builder. He was of German and Norwegian descent. Ray's early experience with film came with some radio broadcasting in high school. He left the University of Chicago after a year, but made such an impression on his professor and writer Thornton Wilder that he was recommended for a scholarship with Frank Lloyd Wright, where he learned the importance of space and geography, not to mention his later love for CinemaScope. When political differences came between the seasoned architect and his young protégé, Ray left for New York and became immersed in the radical theater.
He joined the Theatre of Action , which is where he met his good friend Elia Kazan, and later the Group Theatre. Times were tough and money was tight, but Ray loved the bohemian lifestyle of the close-knit group and enjoyed one of the happiest times of his life. Anybody who met him always noted his intellect and amazing energy. During this period he, along with his fellow Theater Group members, was also active in Socialist/Communist movement (which curiously went unnoticed during the Red Scare). In January 1937, Ray was put in charge of local theater activities by the Department of Agriculture's Resettlement Administration and moved to Washington with his wife Jean Evans, who was pregnant with his first child, Anthony. He also, along with Alan Lomax, traveled around the south and recorded folk musicians for the Library of Congress. The collaboration proved worthy, and in the early 40s Lomax and Ray were hired by CBS to produce a regular evening slot, headed by Woody Guthrie. In between this time Ray divorced his wife. Ray soon met John Houseman, who would become a very close friend. Houseman asked Ray to produce shows for the Overseas Branch of the Office of War Information, which ended quickly due to political pressures. Meanwhile, Ray's good friend of the Group Theatre days Elia Kazan had been called to Hollywood to make his feature film debut A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (1945), and hired Ray to be his assistant, where Ray was first introduced to filmmaking. Houseman called Ray back to New York where Ray made his live TV debut with the enormously popular Sorry, Wrong Number (1946), plus some other radio work.
In 1946 Houseman lent Ray the novel "Thieves Like Us" by Edward Anderson, and Ray fell in love with it; he was familiar with the Depression-era south. He worked hard at the adaptation, and though uncredited for the screenplay, Ray actually contributed a large amount to it. There was never any question of Ray directing the film, and under the sympathetic eyes of producers Houseman and Dore Schary, who was well-known for giving first-time writers and directors breaks, Ray enjoyed possibly the only truly happy film making experience of his career. The film stars Farley Granger and Cathy O'Donnell as young, naive lovers trying to let their love blossom while running from the law. The film is remembered today for Ray's unique use of the camera (this was one of the first times a helicopter was used to shoot action), a fast pace, and above all, his extreme empathy for society's outsiders. Sadly, the film was shelved for two years due to Howard Hughes's takeover of RKO, and the film was released to a single theater in England to great reviews before it was finally released in the U.S.
Ray was eager to go back to work and quickly accepted a project without thinking. That film was A Woman's Secret (1949), which Ray probably would've turned down had he though twice about going back to work, as it bears little of his fingerprints. The film is only memorable because it is where Ray met actress Gloria Grahame, who became his second wife. Ray referred to the film as "a disastrous experience, among other things because I met her." When she became pregnant, Grahame divorced her husband and married Ray, because they thought it was the right thing to do. The same day that she became divorced, Ray and Grahame were wed in Las Vegas, but their marriage was over before it even started; Grahame spent their honeymoon alone while Ray gambled away nearly $40,000 in one night. Though RKO's publicity department alleged that Grahame and Ray met after Grahame's separation and that their son Timothy was born nearly 4 months premature, certain obvious truths contradict that statement. The marriage was disastrous; the two separated a year later and their attempt at professional friendship ended when Ray caught Grahame in bed with his son by Jean Evans. They divorced in 1952. Although They Live by Night (1948) was still unreleased in the US at this time, several Hollywood stars had their own private screening rooms and the film was seen by several important people.
One such person was Humphrey Bogart, who was so impressed with the debut that he invited Ray to direct his first independent production, Knock on Any Door (1949), for a loan-out at Columbia. Though Bogart was initially puzzled by Ray's intensely emotional style of directing, the two had a lot in common and became good friends. The film became a modest success, but Ray had misgivings and later said, "I wish Luis Buñuel had made The Young and the Damned (1950) before I made Knock on Any Door (1949), because I would have made a hell of a lot better film." Indeed, though the subject (juvenile delinquents) is close to Ray's heart, the film is too perhaps too polemic for its own good. Back at RKO, Ray was obliged to make films close to Howard Hughes's heart but not to his own. Despite Ray's leftist views and previous association with the Communist Party, his friendship with Hughes benefited Ray for the better during the Red Scare, and Ray remained untouched, but was morally and contractually obligated to make films he had no care for, such as Born to Be Bad (1950), which starred Hughes' one-time lover, Joan Fontaine, and Flying Leathernecks (1951), a blatant pro-war film that went against Ray's politics. Ray also did uncredited touch-up work to film such as Roseanna McCoy (1949), The Racket (1951), Androcles and the Lion (1952), and Macao (1952) during his years at RKO. Though Ray had his misgivings on their last collaboration, Bogart must have been impressed with Ray because he was optioned for a second loan-out at Columbia. Based loosely on a novel by Dorothy B. Hughes, In a Lonely Place (1950) tells the story of a violent screenwriter who falls in love with a fellow Hollywood burnout while he is under investigation for a murder of a girl he barely knew. The story was changed drastically from the source novel and shaped to better suit Bogart, and the result is considered one of Bogart's best and most complex performances. Despite their marital problems, Ray insisted on casting Gloria Grahame for the role of Bogart's lover because he knew she was right for the role, and Grahame was praised for her work as well.
A critically acclaimed film at the time of its release but something of a box-office disappointment, In a Lonely Place (1950) has gained a reputation over the decades as a classic example of both film noir and existential, heartbreaking romance. Before his contract was finished at RKO, Ray was at least able to make two memorable films: On Dangerous Ground (1951) was a complex cop drama that again featured expressionistic camera moves (hand-held cameras were used, a rarity for the 1950s) and a look into a violent protagonist, and The Lusty Men (1952), a film about the complexity of coming home was disguised as a rodeo movie. It is considered an underrated work of both Robert Mitchum and Ray. After he left RKO, his first project was the pseudo Western Johnny Guitar (1954), which he never liked and hated making (mostly because of Joan Crawford) despite its box-office success. Today the film has gathered a cult status (Martin Scorsese is a big fan), and during this period the French New Wave directors began to take note of this American auteur; Jean-Luc Godard in particular idolized Ray and once stated that "the cinema is Nicholas Ray." In September of 1954, Ray wrote a treatment to "The Blind Run," about three troubled teenagers who create a new family in each other. This would form the basis for his most popular and influential film, Rebel Without a Cause (1955). After some re-writes, Ray started shopping for a lead actor. After a trip to the Strasberg Institute in New York proved fruitless, he learned that Elia Kazan had recently discovered a New York stage actor for his latest film, but he wasn't recommending him; even after Ray saw a rough cut of this actor's latest film he still wasn't sure.
It was only when Ray met 24-year-old James Dean at a party did he realize that this hot new talent would be perfect for the role of Jim Stark, a troubled youth whose world is unraveled in a 24-hour period. Ray and Dean formed a very close bond during filming, with Ray allowing Dean to improvise and even direct to his liking. The rest of the cast came together with the talents of two fifteen-year-olds: Natalie Wood (to whom Ray was rumored to have made advances) and Sal Mineo; as well as smaller roles, which Ray cast based on weeks of bizarre, improvised auditions as well as interviews with the actors. Filming was a wild ride, but it paid off; Mineo and Wood were both Oscar-nominated in the supporting acting categories, and Ray received his only Oscar nomination, for the screenplay.
Ray and Dean planned to make more movies after this, but Dean's death would never make that possible, and at least they left movie audiences with one great film. Ray loved working with younger actors and wanted to only make movies about them, but first he made Hot Blood (1956), based on research that his ex-wife had compiled about gypsies. During a stay in Paris Ray read an article called "Ten Feet Tall," about a teacher whose life fell apart because of a Cortisone addiction. Ray was fascinated by this and empathized with teachers' low pay at the time. Star and producer James Mason played Ed Avery, a family man whose life takes a nightmarish turn when he becomes addicted to Cortisone. Though a critical and financial disaster, today Bigger Than Life is considered Nicholas Ray's masterpiece and very ahead of its time. The French magazine Cahiers du Cinema named it one of the 10 best films of the 50s. In fact, the magazine was a huge admirer of Ray, and frequently would acclaim Ray's films for their style and substance while American critics dismissed them, adding to Ray's cult status as a director. Ray continued to make films, but his health started to become a problem on the set of Wind Across the Everglades (1958), and Ray was fired, with most of his footage discarded.
In the 1960s, he was invited to make two big-budget films in Spain, the Biblical epic King of Kings (1961) and 55 Days at Peking (1963), where he suffered a heart attack brought on by years of heavy drinking and smoking, not to mention stress. This sadly brought his Hollywood career to a premature finish. After his heart attack, he tried many times to direct again, but no projects made it off the ground. In addition, Ray was frequently using drugs and immersing himself in the chaos of the 1960s and the hippie generation. He did not direct again until the satirical porn short Wet Dreams (1974). Also in the 1970s, he became a teacher at New York University (one of his students was Jim Jarmusch), and despite his eccentricity, he connected with his students and together they made We Can't Go Home Again (1973), half documentary and half fiction. With the help of his friend Wim Wenders, he completed his last film, Lightning Over Water (1980), which was supposed to be about a painter dying of cancer and trying to sail to China to find a cure, but instead it became a sad documentary about Ray's last days.
Nicholas Ray died on June 6th, 1979 of lung cancer, but before his death he left the world some of the most painfully realized and contemporary motion pictures ever put on celluloid, and shared a fully realized vulnerability that will never be duplicated. Thirty years after his death, the cinema still is Nicholas Ray.They Live by Night, On Dangerous Ground, In a Lonely Place- Director
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Phil Karlson entered the film industry while a law student at Loyola Marymount University in California. He got a job at Universal Pictures as a prop man, then worked pretty much any job they threw at him, from being an assistant director on several Bud Abbott and Lou Costello films to directing short subjects. He finally got a shot at features in 1944. Although he initially worked for low-budget studios like Monogram (where he shot several Bowery Boys and Charlie Chan entries) and Eagle-Lion, his films even then were marked by his penchant for short, tight scenes and sudden bursts of action. He made his mark in the 1950s with a series of tough, realistic, violent crime films noted for their gritty location shooting and Karlson's almost fanatic attention to detail. As good as those films were, though, Karlson was never able to capitalize on them and raise himself out of the B-picture mire, and he was stuck making things like The Young Doctors (1961), Kid Galahad (1962) and a pair of the repugnant Matt Helm films with Dean Martin, until he hit it big with Walking Tall (1973), his biggest commercial success (and which, since he owned a large part of the picture, made him rich).99 River Street, Kansas City Confidential, The Brothers Rico, Scandal Sheet