Introduction
As a fan and disciple of The American Cinema: Directors and Directions, 1929 - 1968, Andrew Sarris’s standard anatomization of Hollywood directors, I return to it again and again for insight and succor. Unfortunately, the book has a cut off date of 1968, consequently containing no rankings and summaries for Martin Scorsese, Oliver Stone, Terrence Malick, and scores of other directors who emerged since Sarris’s book came out.

Modestly, I hope to rectify that situation. Over the next several months, I propose to issue forth brand new director summaries and evaluations, geared for adaptability into Sarris’s template. With a slight refiguring of Sarris’s categories, these new director filmographies and summaries should slip easily into Sarris’s book, physically, though perhaps not aesthetically. As with Sarris’s book, titles will be in plain text, with key films of a director’s oeuvre in italics. My slightly refined categories will be, in ranking order, The Pantheon, The Near Side of Paradise, Lightly Likable, Working Stiffs, Cable Ready, Send in the Clowns, Foreign Trade, Producers as Auteurs, Actors Turned Directors, Less Than Meets the Eye, Flashes in the Pan, and finally, Subjects for Further Research. Rankings are tentative, for the most part, because these are living directors whose full careers may eventually modify their final rankings. Fellow fans of American Cinema are encouraged to print out this dispatches and paste them into a scrapbook that can sit on the shelf next to Sarris’s book.

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James Foley (1953 - xx)
Ranking: The Near Side of Paradise

Reckless (1984), Madonna video “True Blue” (1986); Madonna video “Live to Tell”; At Close Range (1986), Who’s That Girl? (1987), After Dark, My Sweet (1990; also screenplay), Madonna music video “Papa Don’t Preach” (1990), Twin Peaks Episode 2.17 (1991), Glengarry Glen Ross (1992), Two Bits (1995), Fear (1996), The Chamber (1996), Gun (episode, “The Shot” 1997), The Corruptor (1999), Confidence (2003), Hollywood Division (2004 TV movie), Perfect Stranger (2007), Man and Wife (2008).

Has any directorial career begun as inauspiciously as James Foley’s, yet advanced or improved so dramatically? He is the opposite of Carol Reed, evolving from a base beginning to helming some of the finest films soleils and arguably the best adaptation of a David Mamet play. Nevertheless, Reckless , an “other side of the tracks” teen romance, did establish one consistent facet to Foley’s practice, an interest in young, up-and-coming actors. Reckless was not just Foley’s first film, but Aidan Quinn’s. His next movie, At Close Range , featured an early performance by Sean Penn, paired significantly with Christopher Walken, and later he helped shape the screen persona of Mark Wahlberg ( Fear .

But then Foley fell into the world of Madonna, unable to consolidate her auspicious big screen debut in Desperately Seeking Susan with the later Who’s That Girl? , and in fact turning her into a big screen joke, a status she has been unable to shake. Foley also directed the video for her hits “True Blue” and “Papa Don’t Preach.” But he shook that off, and rebounded with After Dark, My Sweet , one of the first films soleils (and one of the few Jim Thompson adaptations that really understands the author), followed by one of Foley’s most beloved films, Glengarry Glen Ross , with the all male casting coup of Lemmon, Pacino, Baldwin, Spacey, Harris, Arkin, and Pryce all in one movie, doing beautiful work (especially Pacino). What’s curious is how, ultimately, Glengarry Glen Ross is, on a thematic level, in fact, at variance with the rest of his movies.

But then it’s possible that ultimately Foley is “better” with male actors than female actors (or at least pop stars). Yet even in his music video for “Papa Don’t Preach” Foley explores a theme that is consistent throughout most of his films, which is the loyalty demanded of children by their parents. It’s present in Foley’s illustrations designed to accompany the Madonna song, in embryonic form in Reckless, and there in some of his stronger films, such as in At Close Range, in which a son attempts to offer kameradschaft-level loyalty to his father; in the trifling, bucolic and TV movie-ish Two Bits , wherein a boy attempts to honor his grandfather by acting as a go-between; in Fear, in which a father (William Petersen) copes with his daughter’s straying from the fold with the worst possible choice; in Confidence , the late film soleil in which the family is replaced by a team of con men; and even in the recent Perfect Stranger , in which the key to the mystery of Halle Berry’s character resides in a long-ago pact between a mother and daughter. Such consistency across a relatively broad array of films harks back to the studio directors who were able to invest something, anything, personal into the projects handed to them. Of course, it is a different world now, but the values of professionalism that Foley brings to his diverse yet unified projects never goes out of fashion.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 23rd, 2007 at 12:58 pm and is filed under Reel Politique - Film columnist DK Holm. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.