Sidney Lumet, 1924-2011

Directing 1975's Dog Day Afternoon, with John Cazale and Al Pacino (backs to camera) and Carol Kane.

I interviewed Lumet for the DGA Quarterly in 2007; we had about an hour and a half, we used two hours, and we could have gone on another two without flagging. If it was one of the best interviews I ever did, that was due more to the subject than to me. I commented to people after speaking with him that he had the energy of someone 25 years younger; that wasn't true. He had the energy of someone 40 years younger. God knows he had a lot more energy than I did at the time. 

As excited as he was that Before The Devil Knows You're Dead was garnering the attention it was, he was caught a little off-guard by all the brouhaha. It was a production that had come together quickly, due to happenstance, and he was delighted to have done it, but he had other films to make, damn it, projects that he'd been aspiring to realize for a while, and going on the road and the festival circuit to flog Devil was keeping him from getting behind the camera. His ardor, the almost palpable need he projected during portions of our talk to get started again, blew me away. 

He was terrifically self-aware without being self-conscious. He didn't consider himself an intellectual at all and gloried in having catholic tastes without gloating about it. He had a fantastically non-hierarchical mindset, and a refreshingly open approach to technology. His work in television and theater had gifted him with what ended up being an almost innate understanding of genres and the kind of approach/touch any given piece of material needs. He felt he didn't have the right touch for the middlebrow farce/elegy of Bye Bye Braverman in 1968, but had become seasoned enough by 1974 to give a frothy piece of semi-kitsch like Murder on the Orient Express the correct set of stresses. His three-film run with Sean Connery sees that legendary performer give two of his most committed (in The Hill and The Offense) and one of his most delightfully insouciant (outside of a Bond picture) performances (The Anderson Tapes). Yes, I did leave out Family Business just then,and yes, Lumet was frank with me about precisely how and why that picture didn't work.

The interview I did with him is here, and you'll note that among the many things he's candid about, one of them is money. About the choices he made as a director, he said, "Sometimes you want to stretch. Sometimes you want to buy a house. They're all legitimate. As long as you don't try to kid yourself." There, in those terse words, I think, is a kernel of what made Lumet who he was. He lived, functioned, and made films in the world, the world we live in, not in the exalted far-off fantasy land that any number of puling mediocrities who make a show of turning up their noses at "paycheck gigs" insist their favorite artists inhabit. He understood the making of art not just as a calling, but as a way of life, and of living, and of making a living, and he did not deplore any of it. Living on "the edge," or living "well;" he understood both. Some of the most convincing moments of Devil, which sadly was to be his last film, are in a faux-antiseptic high-rise Manhattan apartment, the drug dealer's den where Philip Seymour Hoffman's character frequently drops in to drop out. The prickly dread that atmosphere evokes is very direct, very real, very how-to-bottom-out-in-New-York-City. That Lumet, in his 80s, still had his antennae up to the extent that he could recreate such a very specific sense of place, both physical and psychic, is a great testimony to his gifts as an artist and his backbone as a human being. 

Comments

[Brian Dauth]

CAT ON A HOT TIN ROOF a poorer play than LONG DAY'S JOURNEY into night? Tennessee at his best (which CAT represents) is the equal to O'Neill at his best. I have always thought of those two plays forming a quartet with Albee's A DELICATE BALANCE and Shepherd's BURIED CHILD -- all plays about the dysfunction of the American family as it relates to the secrets and lies a family structures itself around. AUGUST: OSAGE COUNTY may be a newer play making the group a quintet, but I have to live with it a while longer.

As for MotOE: it is a fine film and is more than defensible.

n.b.: When I post of CAT as a play, I am referring to Tennessee’s original version, not the Broadway version produced under pressure from Elia Kazan, or the final travesty that is Richard Brooks’ screenplay, each sorry step a de-queering of Tennessee’s masterpiece.

[Kent Jones]

Brian, AUGUST: OSAGE COUNTY? And Snoopy said in PEANUTS, "-sigh-"

DANIEL is an interesting case. It's been a while since I've seen the film or read the novel, but I remember both fondly.

I think it's important to acknowledge Andrzej Bartkowiak and Boris Kaufman in this discussion. Kaufman shot almost everything from '57 through '66, including 12 ANGRY MEN, THE FUGITIVE KIND, LONG DAY'S JOURNEY, and STAGE STRUCK (now there's an overlooked Lumet movie I like a lot - my DEATHTRAP). Bartkowiak shot 11 Lumet films from the early 80s through the early 90s, everything but RUNNING ON EMPTY, including THE VERDICT, DANIEL, Q&A, the beloved DEATHTRAP, and PRINCE OF THE CITY (their first film together), one of the most visually powerful and logistically complex films Lumet ever made. He worked with a lot of gifted DPs - Roizman, Kemper, Ornitz - and some great ones: Oswald Morris, James Wong Howe, Carlo di Palma, Gerry Fisher, Freddie Young, and Geoffrey Unsworth (on MURDER ON THE ORIENT EXPRESS). But he had special relationships with Kaufman (as did Kazan) and Bartkowiak.

[Brian Dauth]

Kent: I said I have to live with the play longer. I saw it in previews and liked it. I need to see a revival production to see how it holds up.

Lumet's work with Oswald Morris is incredible and moves seamlessly into the Bartkowiak years. EQUUS may be the rare movie that brings the primarily novelistic technique of the unrealiable narrator into film.

[Oliver_C]

Might Andrzej Bartkowiak be the cinematographer-turned-director who exhibits the largest chasm between the quality of his former and latter efforts? Even more so than Freddie Francis?

[Dan Callahan]

Kent, I also very much like "Stage Struck," and part of the pleasure of it is that the cast is so over-qualified for the small story it tells: Fonda, Christopher Plummer, Joan Greenwood. I seem to remember a party scene where the camera careens drunkenly through the space at one point.

I'm also fond of the opening train scene between Sophia Loren and Tab Hunter in "That Kind of Woman": they have surprisingly intense chemistry with each other, and that must be due to Lumet's careful direction.

I love at least ten of Lumet's movies; looking through his filmography, he does seem to have distinct periods of inspiration, and this must have had to do with his collaborators. With all due respect, though, sitting through a bad Lumet film, and there are more than ten, certainly, makes you never want to watch a movie again. I find it hard to believe that the man who made the perfect "Long Day's Journey" could so bungle "The Seagull."

[Kent Jones]

"sitting through a bad Lumet film...makes you never want to watch a movie again"

Now that sounds a little harsh. I'm sure you've struggled through. As we all have after sitting through bad movies by Hawks, Ford, Walsh, and so on.

I don't know about the drunkenly careening camera, but there's beautiful Technicolor location footage of Manhattan in the 50s. As for the story, I don't know what makes it smaller than any number of other Fonda, Greenwood or Plummer movies.

[jbryant]

Oliver: Someone might see your Bartkowiak and raise you Jan De Bont (except for SPEED). I've seen only two of Bartkowiak's directorial efforts, CRADLE 2 THE GRAVE and ROMEO MUST DIE, and while they're not great movies by any means, I thought they looked great and moved well. Respectable enough genre stuff. But yeah, they fall short of THE VERDICT or PRINCE OF THE CITY. :) I see he's gone back to the DP chair this year for Joel Schumacher's TRESPASS.

I quite like some of Freddie Francis' films, too, especially PARANOIAC.

[Kent Jones]

Oliver, there are precious few examples like Nicolas Roeg, plenty worse than Bartkowiak. I mean, have you ever seen WINDOWS? Or CLAN OF THE CAVE BEAR? Or FM? And I agree with jbryant - Freddie Francis made some good movies. He may never have directed one as good as MAN IN THE MOON or THE STRAIGHT STORY, but few have.