Review: 'The Essential Directors: The Art and Impact of Cinema's Most Influential Filmmakers'

The auteur theory tends to get overstated when examining the very collaborative art of filmmaking. Nevertheless, the most distinctive directors do tend to have the final say when it comes to the look and philosophy of the films they manage. Anyone with a rudimentary knowledge of cinema could identify a film that, say, Fritz Lang, Stanley Kubrick, or Steven Spielberg directed from just a single carefully selected still frame. Other very famous directors, such as Robert Wise and Billy Wilder, are less identifiable by visual style than they are by point of view (Wise: optimistic; Wilder: pessimistic). Plus, directors have flashy jobs that require a certain gregariousness, or at least a big mouth. Hunching over a typewriter like Robert Towne or adjusting a lens like Gregg Toland is not as attention-getting as DeMille shouting through a megaphone in his jodhpurs.

Sloan De Forest's new book The Essential Directors: The Art and Impact of Cinema's Most Influential Filmmakers celebrates these most celebrated people to work behind the cameras. Like other volumes published in Turner Classic Movies' series of film studies, The Essential Directors consists of short entries each with a bit of background history, a bit of critical assessment, a few recommendations for representative works, and lots and lots of fabulous photos. More so than the series' volumes on horror films and summer movies I've reviewed here on Psychobabble, The Essential Directors refuses to rock the boat too much with its selections, mostly only straying from the household-name canon to acknowledge that white men didn't always helm movies with entries on Oscar Micheaux, Lois Weber, Dorothy Arzner, Ida Lupino, and Elaine May. Consequently, those are among the book's most interesting and informative entries. De Forest could have diversified his selection a lot more if he did not limit himself to directors who worked in Hollywood before 1975, but I guess that would have been outside the scope of TCM's programming.

366 Days at the Drive-In: Day 307

The Date: August 2

The Movie: Metropolis (1927)

What Is It?: For sheer ambition and purpose, Metropolis was unmatched by any other silent sci-fi feature. Fritz Lang takes a hard look at a future crushed by capitalistic control while the working class toils to keep the fat cats fat. It’s a political message relevant in any era, and the elaborate design and special effects are equally timeless.

Why Today?: On this day in 1976, Fritz Lang dies.

Review: 'The Big Heat' Blu-ray

Cruelty is to be expected in film noir. Maybe a big ox gets rough with a woman. Maybe a femme fatale leads a patsy to his doom by his prick. However, few of the classics are as up front about their cruelty as Fritz Lang’s The Big Heat is. Looking and acting more like a sitcom dad than a grizzled anti-hero, Glenn Ford enters the film as doting family man and upright police sergeant Dave Bannion. After getting sucked into a hellish underworld writhing with dirty cops and sleazy thugs, Ford finds his oasis of a home life shattering by murder. He then begins to resemble the criminals who destroyed his happiness more than he resembles Ward Cleaver.

Lang, renowned for phantasmagoric expressionistic masterpieces such as M and the Dr. Mabuse trilogy, holds back his wilder impulses for completely calculating purposes. What could go wrong when Bannion is merrily tucking his adorable daughter into bed under bright lighting as a jolly tune whistles away on the soundtrack? The horror that breaks this scene is all the more horrific for the preceding images and sounds of serene domesticity. Ford gives a great against-type performance as Bannion—and there are also brilliant supporting turns from Jeannette Nolan as the widow of a cop who committed suicide (maybe) and Lee Marvin at his sleaziest as a mobster’s right-hand scuzzbag— but I think we can all agree that The Big Heat belongs to Gloria Grahame. Recalling Miriam Hopkins’s similarly crushing performance in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Grahame’s Debby Marsh transitions from a charmingly fun-loving gal to utterly devastated being, but unlike Hopkins’s Ivy, Debby fights back like Charles Bronson. The Big Heat is extraordinary for the meaty, stereotype-smashing roles it allows its women, and Grahame is unforgettable in this film.

The Big Heat may not be one of Fritz Lang’s most visually imaginative films, but it is beautifully shot with Charles Lang’s deep contrast black and white photography. Twilight Time’s new blu-ray looks absolutely fabulous. The presentation is perfectly organic, and I don’t think I noticed a single scratch, spec, or flaw in the picture. The disc comes with two director appreciations: a pretty in-depth eleven-minute one from Michael Mann and a more basic six-minute one from Martin Scorsese, who, as I do, tends to remember the film as being more expressionistic than it actually is, probably because its splatter of grotesque images are the ones that linger longest on the brain. Get it on Twilight Time films.com here.

366 Days at the Drive-In: Day 59

The Date: November 28

The Movie: The Big Heat (1953)

What Is It?: Fritz Lang takes film noir to its darkest extremes with this tale of a widowed cop who channels his grief into bringing down the crime syndicate responsible for his wife’s death. The divine cast includes Glenn Ford, Lee Marvin, Jeanette Nolan, Carolyn Jones, and serial scene-stealer Gloria Grahame.

Why Today?: On this day in 1923, Gloria Grahame is born.