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. In Sarris’s book, the titles were in plain text, with key films of a director’s oeuvre in italics; here all titles are in italics, with key films also in bold; I’m sure that Sarris would do it that way, too, if he were writing the book today. My slightly refined categories will be, in ranking order, Future Pantheon, The Near Side of Paradise, Lightly Likable, Working Stiffs, Cable Ready, Send in the Clowns, Foreign Trade, Producers as Auteurs, Actors Turned Directors, Strained Seriousness, More Less Than Meets the Eye, The Writers, 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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M. Night Shyamalan (6 August 1970, Mahe, Pondicherry, India -)
Ranking: Lightly Likable

Praying with Anger (also writer, 1992); Wide Awake (also writer, shot in 1995, released in 1998); The Sixth Sense (also writer, 1999); Stuart Little (writer only, 1999); Unbreakable (also writer, 2000); Signs (also writer, 2002); The Village (also writer, 2004); Lady in the Water (also writer, 2006); The Happening (also writer, 2008); The Last Airbender (also writer of this adaptation, 2010).

M. Night Shyamalan shares certain high profile characteristics with his idols, Alfred Hitchcock and Steven Spielberg: Shyamalan often inserts himself physically into his movies as an actor, an elongated version of the Hitchcock cameo (Shyamalan even cast himself in the lead role of his first, semi-autobiographical), and also like the Master of Suspense Shyamalan started out making dramas but only found success when he turned to the thriller genre. Like Spielberg, Shyamalan is fond of the tracking shot that rolls in onto the face of a person standing in wonderment or fear of something off camera, and he arranges to always have a small child as a central component of his plots. Also like Spielberg, Shyamalan takes what is normally B movie material and gives it an A level treatment, with big stars, good camera work, and a generally realistic presentation. And like his more modern contemporary Cameron Crowe (”Show me the money”; “You complete me”), Shyamalan has at times the knack for writing a phrase that enters the cultural vocabulary (”I see dead people,” from The Sixth Sense).

But perhaps the director Shyamalan most resembles is William Castle. Each of Shyamalan’s post straight drama films has a gimmick of sorts and Shyamalan is not shy about promoting the hell out of each film, a process that can sometimes backfire, as in the case of Lady in the Water, during which the director allowed the excellent reporter Michael Bamberger onto his set and into his home for a revealing book called The Man Who Heard Voices: Or, How M. Night Shyamalan Risked His Career on a Fairy Tale. The book unintentionally confirmed some of the worst excesses Shyamalan’s critics deplored and the resulting coverage proved to be both the type of halo bruiser and precise depiction of how movies are made that Lillian Ross’s 1952 book Picture was about the making of The Red Badge of Courage and its director John Huston. Like Castle’s products, Shyamalan’s films all to often deliver less than they promise, and it maybe that like Castle, Shyamalan’s true artistry is in self-promotion.

The consistent theme in MNS’s movies, though, is not the trick or surprise ending, but instead, the interesting thematic turn of someone thinking he is saving someone when in fact it is really he who is being saved. Dr. Malcolm Crowe (Bruce Willis) in The Sixth Sense thinks he is helping the little boy, Cole Sear (Haley Joel Osment), but it is really the kid who is rescuing Crowe from the delusion that he is still alive, while in Unbreakable, David Dunn isn’t just being revealed as as superhero, it is also Elijah Price being exposed as a supervillain. In Lady in the Water, Cleveland Heep isn’t saving Story, she is rescuing Heep; depending on how clearly this narrative twist is treated defines how successful Shyamalan’s movie is going to be, on an aesthetic level.

Lady in the Water is further complicated by the consistent Shyamalan sub-theme of telling stories. Heep can’t just learn more about the mysterious ethereal woman who emerged from the apartment swimming pool, he has to enjoin all manner of complex re-tellers to tell him. Thus, he can’t get the lexicon of the water people directly from the old Korean woman, it has to be translated to him by her daughter. Shyamalan thinks he is honoring storytelling, but he is really putting impediments in its way. In a related subplot, the critic (Bob Balaban) must die because he doesn‘t convey stories, he merely interprets and judges them, which suggests that in real life Shyamalan is succumbing to the Frank Sinatra syndrome of taking the reviewers too seriously and fixating on them to the point of embarrassment (Bamberger reports on one fascinating if grotesque act of confrontation that Shyamalan engages in with an NYU film student). Finally, the theme of water occurs occasionally in Shyamalan’s films, sometimes as a benevolent force, sometimes as an impediment. The element has a special attraction for the writer-director, perhaps because of his religious sensibilities, though in his later films the religious themes or imagery seem to be cynical, crowd-pleasing grace notes. In addition, one can’t ignore Shyamalan the writer’s tendency toward howlers, major and minor, which Shyamalan the director than goes on to include in the film, such as the notion, pointed out by a perceptive colleague, that it is absurd for the water-phobic aliens of Signs to invade a planet that is 70 per cent liquid.

Adam Nayman in the Summer 2008 issue of Cinema Scope (not on line) cleverly points out another consistent feature of Shyamalan’s movies, his recourse to the isolated house or group. “So in The Happening, when Elliot concludes, ‘We’ve got to get away from other people,’ it’s more than a plot point: it’s the author’s rallying cry.”

With The Happening, Shyamalan returns to the sci-fi playing field of Signs and follows its pattern. There is a reasonably well known action star at the center (Mark Wahlberg as a high school science teacher), there is a family in crisis, there is an inexplicable “invasion,” and there is a small child in jeopardy. The Happening, however feels underwritten and undercooked. The Happening had the innovative publicity campaign advertising the film as Shyamalan’s first R rated film. The result, though, is grotesque scenes that fail to enliven a generally tepid experience. The film isn’t scary, and is highly repetitious, with Wahlberg and company on the run alternating with them arriving somewhere and having a mini adventure, followed by another trek through the fields and another stop. Wind blowing the trees hasn’t been made so ominous since Antonioni. Conveniently placed radios and televisions update the viewer on plot or technical points. What’s worse is that the director has overwhelmed the writer. There are numerous tracking or rolling in shots that are unnecessarily busy and attempt to infuse life into a static moment. Opportunities for character-building dialogue are squandered, and the rift that “threatens” the marriage between Wahlberg and Zooey Deschanel turns out to be remarkably trivial. The rift is alluded to so lightly that it’s possible to watch two thirds of the film and not realize that the couple even has a problem. It should be noted that, like Stephen King, one can usually find an antecedent to the film at hand somewhere hidden in ancient culture. Thus The Happening is an unacknowledged virtual, general remake of Cornel Wilde’s 1970 eco-thriller, No Blade of Grass. It is not an improvement.

Shyamalan is a director who knows how to orchestrate the complex machinery of movie making to return a slick product. Though his films aspire to some kind of vaguely Christian or mystical message, his theses are usually muted, making his films feel more superficial than they are apparently intended. It is even possible that Shyamalan includes religious imagery that might run contrary to his own beliefs if only to appeal to what he perceives to be the American movie going demographic. In addition, he tends to make his lead characters humble, flawed “everymen” (though an inconsistent variation in Unbreakable is that the Everyman is in reality a super-powerful mutant). Most of his films can be enjoyed on a surface level, but his world view has not yet clearly come to the fore, inhibited perhaps by his derivative visual style. Still, no final determination on Shyamalan’s status can be made until there is an explanation for the drastic dropping off of quality and sense between Unbreakable and the films after. The dark hints found in Vern’s review suggest a path for future research.

Why does David Raksin hate Alfred Hitchcock?

The composer of the score for Laura and numerous other movies is on record as finding Hitchcock an “arrogant and dreadful person to so many people, ruthless and cruel … Hitchcock owed [Herrmann] everything, and [Hitchcock] had the loyalty of an eel,” as he said in the excellent one hour documentary Music of the Movies: Bernard Herrmann (part of a three or four part series). Puzzled by the vehemence and frankness of his statement, I looked up Raksin’s name in the indexes of all the likely Hitchcock books, and found no citations. Raksin never scored a Hitchcock movie, so his opinion is of unknown origin beyond his observations concerning the career-diminishing Herrmann-Hitchcock contre-temps. Yet somehow his contrary views didn’t find their way into Donald Spoto’s The Dark Side of Genius: The Life of Alfred Hitchcock, published in 1983, a quasi muckraking bio that served as a companion to the author’s earlier book, The Art of Alfred Hitchcock: Fifty Years of His Motion Pictures, from 1976 (revised in 1991), at one time the longest and most sympathetic analysis of the director’s films. Dark Side came as a shock to some readers because of its salacious details about Hitchcock’s private conduct and the revelations about his harassment of Tippi Hedren, among other of his leading ladies. Raksin’s views are compatible with those found in Spoto’s biography concerning his treatment of collaborators.

Now, Mr. Spoto offers a third volume, Spellbound by Beauty: Alfred Hitchcock and His Leading Ladies (Hutchinson, 256 pages, $40, 978-0091797232, currently available only in England). At once it is both a thumbnail version of Dark Side, and an updating, with information and comments which, as he says, some interviewees requested he hold back for various reasons during their or others’ lifetimes. Some passages are identical between the two books, such as the description of the agonies earlier actors before Tippi Hendren went through (The Dark Side, page 459, Spellbound page 177), but much of it is new, such as Diane Baker’s quotes on Marnie, and the anecdote about Hitchcock suddenly lunging at To Catch a Thief’s Brigitte Auber for a lip-lock at a “friendly” lunch. In keeping with the subtitle, with each film covered Spoto goes on to say what happened to the film’s main starlette (the “future” of Madeleine Carol is among the most interesting).

The portrait of Hitchcock is much like the one put forth in Dark Side, only darker. He comes off as an overgrown adult adolescent hiding behind, yet tortured by, his weight, cold and impersonal to real human beings while inwardly conjuring fantasies about his leading ladies, some of whom he fell in love with pathetically (Ingrid Bergman, Hedren), a foul mouthed lecher trapped in a marriage blanc who would sometimes throw himself physically on his stars (Karen Black was once a surprisingly cheerful victim), a money-grubing credit hog who directed his publicists to perpetuate an apparently mythical image of the director as an artist who privately visualized the movie in advance without collaborators and who became more withdrawn and unhappy as he aged, even shown weeping at his desk because Lew Wasserman, the head of Universal, didn’t visit the director in his elaborate lot office complex.

It appears that Mr. Spoto is of two minds about Hitchcock, admiring the artist but deploring aspects of the human being. But what one wants from a biography writer is a reconciliation of contrary impulses. At one point he writes, in justification for both Hitchcock’s failings and his own exposure of them, that, “It is precisely this complex of elements that gives the life and character of Alfred Hitchcock such poignancy; that must evoke our compassion; and that in some marred, marvelous way for the better, still shares something of our common humanity. Were that not so, it would be impossible to explain his enduring worldwide popularity and his legacy of sleek entertainments. [page 144]”

What the reader is going to wonder, especially one who is a fan or student or admirer of Hitchcock, is what to do with all this information. How does it help us appreciate the films themselves? How do I take Marnie, now knowing his conduct with Hedren and Auber and Black? In Dark Side, Spoto goes on to say that after the break with Hedren he lost all interest in Marnie, which resulted in terrible process shots and other laughable effects that diminish the effect of the film, and he mocks critics who wrote themselves into pretzel prose to justify such sloppy work on the screen, alluding to without naming such critics as Robin Wood, whose “defense” of the process shots is in reality quite clever.

One almost pines for a time when one didn’t know so much about celebrities. Since the 1970s, perhaps starting with the Polanski case, the media and the celebrities themselves, such as Robert Evans in his memoir, are much more open about their hedonism, bragging about their drug use and sexual liaisons, creating a chasm between the image on the screen and the reality of human conduct. In the end, it is better to know the truth, if it is knowable at all, but there is a general diminishment of the achievement of Hollywood when the values of the filmmakers are so at variance with their real views, and readers are confronted with an inundation of sordid stories and neurotic behavior. As movies improve by being more realistic, the artists themselves grow less tolerable.

As an addendum to Dark Side, Spellbound by Beauty is a breezy read. well written and organized. Some of the photographs included were new to me, including one of Kim Novak obviously nude in bed during the shooting of Vertigo. And his occasional critical observations are intriguing, such as Spoto’s pointing out that Vertigo, North by Northwest, and Psycho form a trilogy of films in which a central character is absent or doesn’t exist. As a briefer version of his massive bio, the book might appeal to readers with limited time, and Hitchcock enthusiasts will probably buy it pro forma, as this writer did. I expect, however, that Hitchcock partisans in the critical community, at whom Spoto takes occasional potshots, will be poised to attempt to refute or minimize his take on Hitchcock the man.

Anthony Mann’s cinematic career neatly subdivides into four phases. Mann, like Ray and Preminger, among the directors he is often linked, came from the theater. There, he was spotted by David O. Selznick who hired him to scout for actors and direct screen tests. A stint at Paramount as an assistant director followed, and Mann broke into directing with the film Dr. Broadway at Paramount, commencing phase one, a string of B films, including My Best Gal, Strangers in the Night, and The Great Flamarion. This phase overlaps with his noir phase which includes low budget films made for so called poverty row studios such as Eagle-Lion and PRC, and including Strange Impersonation, Raw Deal, and T-Men. From that good work he transitioned to higher budgets and more prestigious actors in a string of westerns and other films in collaboration with James Stewart, unofficially collaborating with Hitchcock and Richard Quine in defining the Stewart persona in the post-war era (there is some overlap here, too, as The Furies is as much noir as western). Mann’s final phase, more or less, was as a director of epics, an artistic trap that other “auteurs” had fallen into, including Hawks and Ray.

Based on a novel by Niven Busch, and scripted by Charles Schnee (with silent collaboration from Mann), The Furies concerns the almost incestuous relationship between widowed landowner Temple (”T. C.”) Jeffords (Walter Huston), a bombastic force of nature, the “top man on God’s green earth,” and his daughter, the masculinely named Vance (Barbara Stanwyck, in a role anticipates her work in Samuel Fuller’s 40 Guns, and even the series High Chaparral). Jefford’s son is the ineffectual Clay (John Bromfield), whose sartorial outlandishness in the book summarizes his psychology more explicitly, and he vanishes from the movie after about 55 minutes.

Vance ends up torn between two men, her childhood love, Juan Herrera (Gilbert Roland), part of a family that squats on the ranch, and gambler Rip Darrow (Wendell Corey), who not only resembles T. C. but who is one of the few men whom T. C. hasn’t “spoiled” her for. Complications ensue when T. C. shows up with a potential new wife, Flo Burnett (Judith Anderson), and are further complicated when Vance tosses a pair of scissors in her face.

There is more to the story, much more, and the plot, if the viewer is totally unfamiliar with it, is agreeably unpredictable. Like many movies of the 1950s it’s really about money, business, and deals. The suspense rests less on gun fights than on signing contracts. The Furies eventually tracks the competition between father and daughter for control of the ranch. And like the other psychological westerns, it is filled with un-self-aware neurotics. T. C. takes as his second wife a woman who looks remarkably like his daughter, as Jeanine Basinger points out in her book on Mann, but Mann makes sure you get the point via a pointed two shot; meanwhile, Vance is drawn to a man who physically resembles dad. Like Raoul Walsh’s neurotic Pursued, and King Vidor’s Shakespearean Duel in the Sun, also both based on novels by Busch, The Furies prepared the way for other “mature” psychological westerns such as High Noon and The Searchers.

That Mann is not as esteemed or well known among the public as Ford or Hitchcock is almost criminal, but probably due to the fact that he toiled almost exclusively in the groves of genre has sustained his anonymity. He’s like the perfect filmmaker: a great director of actors, shaper of screenplays, an eye for decor and location, and visually dynamic, especially in collaboration with John Alton. His films are sublime studio productions but graced with physical and psychological realism. His career arc resembles Elmore Leonard’s in reverse, moving from mysteries to westerns, from the closed and dark to the open and bright, though Mann brought elements of each to the other.

Fortunately, film critics tend to be wild about Mann, and Basinger’s book about about Mann is excellent, and was recently reprinted and updated. As Basinger points out, though there isn’t much written about Mann, but she directs the reader to two essays that are available on line can be found at Brights Lights, one of the few film websites that posts print-magazine level essays, that is, basically, publishable writing.

The Furies is not a “perfect” film or a perfect Mann film, as Basinger and in his yak track, Jim Kitses readily admit, while remaining fond of the film. It’s got too much subplot, and has an odd, chunky structure for a “classical” Hollywood film (a major character isn’t introduced until more than 40 minutes in, for example). Yet paradoxically The Furies is richer for being flawed. The story is more ambitious and sweeping than the more chamber piece films Mann would go on to do with Stewart, especially The Naked Spur, and it offers greater insight into Mann’s various and consistent concerns, such as ambiguous heroes and the tyranny of money. It’s probably not the best film to serve as an introduction to Mann’s work, but the Criterion disc in general is.

The Criterion Collection’s box set of The Furies (a single-sided, dual-layered disc, black and white, full frame, English mono, spine No. 435) comes packed. There is an audio commentary track by Jim Kitses, whom Basinger praises as the best writer on Mann in his book Horizons West. Kitses emphasizes the blend of genres that constitute The Furies. He also likens it to The Taming of the Shrew.

In addition, there is a 1967 BBC interview (about 15 minutes) with Mann, as he embarked on shooting A Dandy in Aspic, during which production Mann died. The interview is conducted by Movie critic and later writer-director Paul Mayersberg, and Mann comes across like a somewhat toned down T. C. Jeffords; this followed by a nine minute archive interview with Walter Huston, staged in the 1930s, a somewhat useless novelty; a video interview (about 18 minutes) with Mann’s daughter from his first of three marriages, Nina. Her main point concerns the moral ambiguity of Mann’s main characters. She also reveals that Mann, whose origins up to now were mysterious, was raised on a Theosophical commune until he was 13, and notes some autobiographical elements that Mann inserted in his films, including The Furies; the theatrical trailer; and finally a photo gallery of about 35 screens featuring on-set photos.

In addition, there’s a 40-page booklet with cast and crew, chapter titles, DVD credits, along with an essay by Robin Wood, which weirdly doesn’t generate excitement about seeing the film. Also, Wood doesn’t mention Greek mythology and theater from which the title obviously derives instead preferring to stress Mann’s interest in King Lear, variations on which Mann revisited throughout the 1950s, according to Wood (officially, The Furies is the name of T. C.’s ranch). Mann, by the way, according to the Cahiers interview, thought he was making a remake of Dostoyevsky’s The Idiot. This is from an also included 1957 Cahiers Du Cinema interview with Mann, in which one is startled to read him saying that women don’t really fit into the western template, which is odd given that the very film on the DVD has a woman as the central character. In addition there is a separate reprint of Niven Busch’s source novel, which, on the basis of a quick skim, was changed in certain significant ways on its way to the screen.

The Criterion Collection’s edition of The Furies hits the street on Tuesday, June 16, and retails for $39.95.

Just a few years ago it seems that the critical community was all up in arms about what they dubbed “torture porn,” their label for horror films with an emphasis on helpless people receiving a going over from madmen or -women. More sympathetic writers sociologized the trend as a reflection of current affairs, vague mixed feelings about Abu Graib, for example, but for the most part the reviewers lashed out at these films, among them the two Hostels, Captivity, and the Saw series, for their callousness and crudity and pandering to what was perceived as the masses appetite for torture.

Now, in the wake of its May 30th opening, the new horror film The Strangers has received an unusually positive flow of reviews, despite its falling under the general umbrella of so-called torture porn. Starting with the New York Times, and including such diverse forums as at the Village Voice, the Los Angeles Times, and even the usually acerbic, or at least refreshingly tough, Slant, all praised this first feature by youngster Bryan Bertino. It turns out, culling praise from these reviews, that for a horror film to succeed with the reviewers, it must be discreet in its terrorizing, it must have good actors playing complex characters rather than stick figures, it must emphasize creepiness over blood, and the film is more successful if the sound effects track plays the role of an additional character. Only Roger Ebert, while also praising the neophyte’s command of his craft, suggested that there might be something evil about The Strangers.

The Strangers is technically accomplished as far as it goes, the way an episode of a TV anthology horror series might happen to be innovative, or like Spielberg’s Duel, clever on a limited budget. Though there is an attempt to characterize the two main characters, James Hoyt (Scott Speedman) and Kristen McKay (Liv Tyler), as sympathetic, we really don’t know too much about them. They have left a wedding party, where James asked Kristen to marry him, but she has refused. Like an Antonioni movie, The Strangers opens post-argument, as the couple arrives at James’s father’s isolated vacation house. In the course of the film’s trim 90 minute running time, the couple are assaulted by three masked visitants, two of them women. We never see their faces, or learn their motivation, so they remain strangers. Instead they just make their presence noisily felt, by banging loudly on doors and slowly sliding the tips of kitchen blades across table tops.

As most reviewers have pointed out, The Strangers, intentionally or not, is evocative of a recent French horror film, now out on DVD, called Them (Ils), in which a group of feral children terrorize a couple in similar circumstances, as well as of last year’s Vacancy, and Michael Haneke’s two Funny Games films, which also proffer a bleak view of human self defense against organized evil. As a home invasion film, the roots of The Strangers stretches back to The Desperate Hours, Key Largo, or The Petrified Forest, though these are crime films. The appeal is to the idea of a safe, sacred space unexpectedly dominated by strangers with no respect for the owners’ values. Most serial killer horror films, like Halloween, are essentially home invasion movies in their own way, but the horror films like those of the 1970s, and which are obviously an influence on Bertino, worked hard at providing motivation for the implacable killer, often as a surprise twist at the end. We learn nothing about this film’s strangers except that they practice horrible randomness. Text at the film’s start indicates that the story is based on real events, but though the date of these events is given as February 11th, 2005, in reality Bertino, according to hints in interviews, was probably thinking of the Sharon Tate murders by the Manson gang, a subject he has been obsessing on since he read Vincent Bugliosi’s book as a kid. If so, this is a stripped down vision of what might have gone on in the minds of both victims and perpetrators.

If The Strangers has any real or lasting appeal (it made $21 million its opening weekend), it will of course be on DVD, where, as if in some kind of William Castle promotion, the viewer is seeing the film in a vulnerable context that replicates that in the film itself. Why would people want to submit themselves to such nerve racking thoughts? Over the weekend, desperate for something entertaining to view to fill some time, I grabbed the DVD of The Towering Inferno off the unviewed shelf. I was actually shocked at how this 1974 film reveled in the horrible fates of some characters, and looked up Pauline Kael’s review, collected in her book Reeling, where she, to her credit, expressed a similar shock and disgust. I must be getting squeamish in my old age. In any case, for me the virtue of horror films has always been that, unique to most genres except noir, horror films offer the director more freedom to explore visual experiments. The Strangers actually sheds that opportunity, in order to concentrate, as in the torture porn movies, on the slow tormenting of victims. If someday Bertino really does do an adaptation of the events at the Tate-Polanski house, I might be interested, if he can balance the horror with some human truths and insights into those terrible events.