25 Most Influential Directors

The following is my official entry in The Most Influential Directors Poll over at Michaël Parent's great movie blog Le Mot du Cinephiliaque.  We are asked to name the 10 directors we believe to be the most influential throughout film history but since I can never stop at just 10 (or at the very least have a really difficult time doing so) my list is the 25 most influential directors of all-time.  Take that conformity!

1) Alfred Hitchcock

From Spielberg to Scorsese to De Palma to Tarantino to Godard and Truffaut to Cronenberg to Fincher to Aronofsky to P.T. Anderson to Joe Dante, David Lynch and J.J. Abrams - all these filmmakers (and many many more) owe at least part of their styles and their careers to the Master of Suspense.  His use of colour and the way he moved (or did not move) his camera were highly influential on just about every director that came after him.

2) Jean-Luc Godard

Without Godard, there would not be modern cinema.  Nor for that matter would their be auteurs like Quentin Tarantino or Wong Kar-wai or  Lars von Trier.  More than mere hyperbole, Godard did actually change the way movies were made.  He wasn't alone in doing so (his fellow New Wavers, Truffaut, Rivette, Chabrol and Rohmer were part of this paradigm shift as well) but it was he who was first and foremost when the change in cinematic thinking came about.

3) D.W. Griffith

The originator of feature narrative filmmaking, Griffith set the way for many of the early cinema techniques that are now standard filmmaking fundamentals.  Chaplin called him "The teacher of us all" and Welles said of him "No town, no industry, no profession, no art form owes so much to a single man."  He may not have invented many of the techniques and film grammer he is credited for but he most certainly was the first one to perfect them.

4) John Ford

Perhaps not the creator of the American western but most certainly its perfectionist.  Working with a steadfast attitude and the eye of a poet (though he would never say anything of the sort, choosing instead to describe himself as such, "I'm John Ford.  I make westerns.") Ford gave us what the western was to become, until the revisionists came around, and even then Ford showed them how that was done as well.  Sure, he made other types of movies (and made them extremely well), but it is the western he will be remembered for.

5) Akira Kurosawa

One of those filmmakers highly influenced by early John Ford is that most western of Japanese directors, Akira Kurosawa.    He in turn would influence everyone under the sun.  Several of this master's films were remade in Hollywood and the Spaghetti Western was pretty much created from the ashes of his jidai-geki samurai films.  Even George Lucas took one of his films and turned it into one of the biggest blockbusters of all-time.  His Seven Samurai is still considered, by critics and directors alike, as one of the greatest films ever made.

6) Howard Hawks

The man who could make any movie in any genre.  Hawks made comedies, dramas, westerns, musicals, biblical epics, film noirs, action movies, war films, and made them all with that same determined steady hand that would make him one of the greatest and most revered Hollywood filmmakers of all-time - and probably the most eclectic as well.  Credited with creating the screwball comedy and with making both noir and westerns his own, Hawks is the spiritual grandfather of such directors as diverse as Robert Altman, Richard Linklater, John Carpenter and Quentin Tarantino.

7) Charles Chaplin

With an innate ability to make us both laugh and cry within a single scene, Chaplin gave comedy its heart.  While Keaton and Lloyd and others were the better gag writers of the time, it was Chaplin who would create characters and situations that could dig into a viewers subconscious better than anyone.  Highly influential on directors such as Woody Allen and Jacques Tati, Chaplin gave comedy both a new born modernism and a much needed humanism.

8) Jean Renoir

Upon the great directors death in 1979, Orson Welles wrote an article for the L.A. Times called "Jean Renoir: The Greatest of all Directors" - this should say it all.  Renoir, son of the artist Pierre-Auguste Renoir, is one of those filmmakers one can call Earth-shattering.  Changing the views of how cinema should be made, Renoir was a master of Poetic Realism in film and had a huge impact on every generation that came after him.

9) Ernst Lubitsch

A director not often cited in such lists as this but a director that damn well should be.  Bringing a European flair to the early sound comedies of Hollywood (the Lubitsch Touch it was called) Lubitsch had a certain way of making innuendo sound so classy.  The implementation of the production killed may have killed this style of elegant comedy but its influence is long-lasting.  If Chaplin gave comedy its heart, Lubitsch gave it its sophistication.

10) Sergei M. Eisenstein

The greatest of the Soviet auteurs, Eisenstein chopped cinema up and turned it on its proverbial head.  A master at montage filmmaking and Eisenstein not only influenced many a future director (especially when it would come to editing) but also made it easier for many of the more experimental filmmakers to make their collective marks on cinematic history.  The careers of such directors as Alfred Hitchcock, Brian De Palma, Nicholas Roeg, Francis Ford Coppola and Oliver Stone (to name just a few) owe much thanks to Eisenstein.

11) Orson Welles

Many may be tempted to put Welles higher on the list than this (and I was too) but here he is at number eleven.  Making Citizen Kane, considered by many to be the greatest film ever made, Welles had a great influence on many younger filmmakers.  Unfortunately for Welles (and for us) Hollywood was not kind to this obvious master director and many of his later films were rarely seen until the cinephile boom of the 1960's.  Still though, he had a great influence on directors such as Martin Scorsese and Peter Bogdanovich, and more recently P.T. Anderson and (of course) Quentin Tarantino.

12) Fritz Lang

From his use of German Expressionism and dark themes, Lang was the perfect director to take up the mantle of Hollywood film noir master.  His unique style (partially based on his younger days in Germany's Weimar Cinema and partly on 19th century art) had a strong influence on many a director, including Godard, Rivette, Friedkin and Spielberg.

13) Stanley Kubrick

One of the most visually expressive directors ever, Kubrick is one of those filmmakers responsible for what modern cinema has become (the good parts!) and at the same time, showing what cinema could be in the future.  A cult director of sorts (but not the kind that conjures up memories of B-movie delights) Kubrick's films are fascinating works of ultra-modernist art and therefore has been a huge influence on many of today's younger directors - most notably Wes Anderson, Todd Haynes and P.T. Anderson.

14) Anthony Mann

If Ford invented the western, or at least perfected it, then Mann's psychological revisionaries of the genre re-invented the western and thus made room for the likes of Peckinpah, Leone and later Tarantino (and perhaps even Takashi Miike) when they would revolutionize the genre.  Blurring that line between good and evil in the iconography of the western, Mann made a series of these (mostly starring James Stewart) that would lead to the aforementioned revolution in the genre.

15) Ingmar Bergman

As diverse an influence on such diverse of filmmakers as Lars von Trier, Woody Allen and Terry Gilliam, Bergman was the epitome of what we now call arthouse cinema.  Giving his cinema a sense of austere surreality, Bergman could also be considered the epitome of acquired taste.   Whatever the case, the fact that Bergman is essentially the spiritual father of art cinema is what puts him on this list.

16) Martin Scorsese

So many directors today - Linklater, Tarantino, Wes Anderson, Fincher - owe a great debt to Scorsese just as he himself owes a great debt to past directors such as Kurosawa, Powell & Pressburger, Hitchcock, Nick Ray and Lang.  Being a sort of father to modern American cinema, Scorsese plays as not only an influence as a director but with his encyclopedic knowledge of film history, as a historian as well.

17) Federico Fellini

A mad man maestro of world cinema, Fellini's cinema was a mindfuck of storytelling.  His greatest masterpiece, 8 1/2, laid the groundwork for so many younger directors to follow.  From Gilliam to Greenaway to Nanni Moretti and Woody Allen, Fellini was a precursor to all the giddy oddities that these directors could come up with.

18) John Cassavetes

From younger contemporary Robert Altman to spiritual godson Jim Jarmusch to all those actor-turned-directors around today, Cassavetes is the true grandaddy of indie cinema - the real indie stuff.  With low budgets and a set team of recurring actors (including his wife Gena Rowlands), Cassavetes made the little look gigantic.

19) Billy Wilder

Chaplin created comedy, Lubitsch made it sing and Wilder gave it the chutzpah. What comic director, from Woody Allen to Whit Stillman, doesn't owe some sort of debt of gratitude to the man who is probably the best writer of comedy to ever work in Hollywood.  In my opinion, Some Like it Hot still stands as the best comedy of all-time.

20) David Lean

Personally I find David Lean to be one of the dullest filmmakers of all-time (and his masterpiece Lawrence of Arabia to be highly overrated) but this doesn't blind me from seeing his influence on everyone from James Ivory to Steven Spielberg (of course I am not a big fan of either of these directors either).  Nonetheless, the vast spaces of Lean's cinema (he did know how to shoot a scene though) make for a great influence on many.

21) Woody Allen

I suppose the same argument that one makes for Billy Wilder, one can surely make for Allen.  A great writer of comedy (though perhaps no longer in his hey day) Allen is an obvious influence on filmmakers such as Albert Brooks, Whit Stillman and Edward Burns.  Just his long streak of great films (w/o exception, from 1973 through 1989 the man directed sixteen well-made, important films in a row) should be enough to insure inclusion on this list.

22) Yasujiro Ozu

Much more Japanese in his approach to cinema than his higher ranked younger contemporary Kurosawa, Ozu made quiet, delicate films that splashed around with the love and collectiveness of family and duty and honour.  Influencing not only his fellow countrymen like Takeshi Kitano and Kiyoshi Kurosawa, and neighbour Hou Hsiao-hsien from Taiwan, but also Americans like Jarmusch and Finns like Kaurismaki.

23) Elia Kazan

The man who gave us acting - method acting.  Kazan and his New York School which in turn gave us Brando, Steiger, Dean, Monroe and others, is responsible for the maturation of acting in American cinema.  This quite outspoken director (he named names!) is a major influence on the likes of Scorsese and Coppola as well as many of his contemporaries such as Cassavetes and Fuller.

24) Michael Powell & Emeric Pressburger

This pair, known collectively as The Archers, are way up there on my list of great filmmakers.  In a six year period they made six of the greatest films ever made.  Their influence probably isn't quite as high as my personal admiration of their talents, but Scorsese say he has gotten everything from these two men, so who am I to argue.  Coppola is a big fan as well.

25) Steven Spielberg

By a few years, Spielberg is the youngest director on this list (and the only bona fide baby boomer) so his influence doesn't reach quite as far as others, but the influence is definitely there.  I cannot say I am much of a fan (though I do greatly respect him as a filmmaker) but others - such as Dante, Zemeckis and Stephen Sommers (yeah I know, not the greatest of the pantheon) - do love the man's work.  And I suppose pretty much inventing the blockbuster (for better or for worse) gets him this last spot on the list.  And I do really like Jaws.

There are others I probably should have included on the list, but even I have to stop somewhere.  These sad exclusions are Francois Truffaut, Buster Keaton, Vittorio De Sica, Michelangelo Antonioni, Roman Polanski, George A. Romero, William Castle, Mario Bava, Nick Ray, Satyajit Ray, Ida Lupino, Luchino Visconti (one of my personal all-time favouruites!), John Huston, Frank Capra, Andrei Tarkovsky, F.W. Murnau, Vincente Minnelli, Francis Ford Coppola, Alice Guy Blache, William A. Welmman, Kenji Mizoguchi, Shohei Imamura, Peter Bogdanovich, Walt Disney, Carl Dreyer, Robert Altman, Cecil B. DeMille and Rene Clair (those latter three being my most regretted omissions).  Of course there are younger directors such as David Fincher, Darren Aronofsky, Wes Anderson, P.T. Anderson, Wong Kar-wai, Chris Nolan, Richard Linklater, Lars von Trier, The Coen Brothers and Quentin Tarantino that one day will be on a list such as this.

Well that is my list.  Perhaps I would change much of it tomorrow, switching certain directors around on a critical whim (in fact I did make several changes as I was finalizing my draft) but for right now, on this date, these are my choices for the Most Influential Directors of All-Time.

My 10 Favourite Things About Vincente Minnelli's The Cobweb

**Spoilers ahead, for those who worry about such things**

1) Since it is a visual medium, I suppose one should begin with the look of the film.  Minnelli, always known for vivid filmmaking, directs no differently here.  With a fluid, never pushy but always provocative camera, Minnelli makes the lurid goings-on in The Cobweb, as they say, sing with a cinematic beauty all its own.  Combine Minnelli with long-time collaborators such as Art Directors Preston Ames (An American in Paris, The Band Wagon, Gigi) and Cedric Gibbons (The Bad and the Beautiful, The Band Wagon) and cinematographer George Folsey (Meet Me in St. Louis, The Clock, uncredited on The Band Wagon) and you have an elaborately stylized (though unobtrusively so) delectable motion picture.

2) The fact that The Cobweb is basically a melodrama about the miscommunication of buying curtains for a mental hospital is quite the plot line.  Not only is such a story intriguingly convoluted in execution,  but also surprisingly fluid in outcome.  I cannot say how close this is to William Gibson's novel, but it is almost as if Minnelli took a screwball comedy plot and twisted it into serious melodrama.

3) Gloria Grahame.  Never really considered a great beauty (even though she was) Grahame nonetheless exuded sexuality in many of her roles.  Sultry and vixenish, with an alluring come-hither pout, Grahame seemed like the kind of girl who would go batshitcrazy at any moment - and often did in her roles (even in Oklahoma! she was the wildchild) - but the kind of girl you would be okay dealing with such antics as long as those voluptuous lips kept pursing in your direction.  This is exactly what the actress does in The Cobweb.  Provocative and steamy, her full hips swiveling like a fertility goddess on ecstasy (the kind of girl no one wants to take home to mother), Grahame's unfulfilled hospital administrator's wife is the very guts of Minnelli's movie.  She may not be the lead (she received fourth billing officially) but it is she that either holds the film together or tears it apart - or holds it together then tears it apart.  Grahame would move on to more wholesome roles later in her career (after divorcing hubby Nick Ray when he found her in bed with his thirteen year old son from a previous marriage - the same thirteen year old she would nine years later make her fourth and final husband) but I definitely prefer her as the sexy, potentially batshitcrazy wife in The Cobweb.

4) The dialogue in this film, adapted from the novel by John Paxton who also wrote the screenplays for Murder My Sweet, Crossfire, Pickup Alley and The Wild One, is pure melodrama - and thus pure trash, but trash in the most positive way.  Full of double entendre and juicy, campesque dialogue, The Cobweb is brilliantly subversive and convoluted to a delightful delirium.

5) John Kerr (playing the part originally meant for James Dean - and playing it in a manner that one might expect from Dean himself) makes a stunning debut as patient Stevie Holte.  We first meet him during the opening credits as he is seen running across fields and streams until he is picked up by Gloria Grahame.  He is obviously an escapee from the hospital run by Grahame's husband (Richard Widmark) and plays it aloof, while at the same time concocting a fantasy that Grahame's petulant, neglected wife is actually hitting on him - a story he proudly (or defiantly) boasts to Widmark in their next session..  Kerr's sudden outbursts and manic cries of desperation at his own mental instability give the film a vibrant, dangerous centerpiece, where all the other characters can spoke off from - whether they know it or not.  Kerr's Stevie is grounded though by fellow patient and extreme introvert and agoraphobic Sue Brett, played (also in her film debut) by the intense and lovely Susan Strasberg.  It is Stevie who is there at the beginning and it is his image that Minnelli ends his film with.

6) Those eyes.  That voice.  That look that can destroy a man where he stands.  Lauren Bacall.  In one of her finest performances (possibly even her best), Bacall plays Dr. Meg Rinehart, an idealistic caregiver and art therapist who has just recently lost her husband and son in a car accident.  Standoffish, as only Bacall can play it, Meg becomes the love interest of Widmark's character and thus the enemy of Grahame's.  Probably the most stable character in the bunch (and she treads along the precipice as well) Bacall sort of stabilizes the group dynamic as it were.  Pauline Kael said of the movie "By the mid-50's, nobody was surprised that the new variant of Grand Hotel was an expensive, exclusive looney bin."  It is Bacall's Meg Rinehart (though other characters may claim it is they who do such) that keeps this loony bin from falling into shambles.  And did I mention that voice?  Those eyes?

7) Since he keeps getting mentioned, I suppose we should discuss Richard Widmark.   He is the lead after all.       Widmark, who has always been more of an on-the-edge kind of character actor (his performance in one of my all-time favourites, Pickup on South Street is one for the ages) who has played some rather less-than-scrupulous characters.  I suppose here he is just as on-edge as elsewhere, but here he is also the supposed voice of reason behind it all.  The man who must figure everything out before it comes crashing down on him and everyone around him.  Probably a strange casting choice, but Widmark works here as the man in way way way over his head.  Yet he has, as they say, a heart made of gold.  Still there are some moments of a sense of creeping dread laid out on the actor's face that makes the already anti-horror thing Minnelli has going, a deeper despairing creature.  Yeah, that's right, Widmark does that!

8) As the opening credits end and we see Gloria Grahame's car slow down to pick up the wandering John Kerr, a title comes up on the screen.  It scrawls across the screen as a cursive warning.  "The trouble began" it reads - and that it does.  The fact that Minnelli puts this warning there is a bit odd, but more than a bit tantalizing.  Then, as the film ends and everything is alright again (for the most part) , we are given the antidote to this first warning.  Scrawling its cursiveness across the screen we now get "The trouble was over." - and indeed it is.

9) Oscar Levant, actor and composer (and great in both An American in Paris and The Band Wagon), plays the charmingly crazy Mr. Capp in The Cobweb.  The fact that this would be the great Levant's final performance combined with the fact that he is basically playing himself (the role was styled toward Levant's own real-life psychosis that would come to take over his life) his performance is that much more resonating to watch.  He is the comic relief of the film but at the same time he is one of the saddest, most tragic figures floating around the set.  Farewell Mr. Levant.

10) Saving the best for last.  It had been twenty-two years since the great Lillian Gish had graced the MGM sound stages.  Making her triumphant return, Gish plays Victoria Inch, the cold-hearted, no-nonsense financial officer of the institute.   Her fights with Widmark, Bacall, Grahame and Charles Boyer (sadly left off this top ten list) are loud and boisterous and always from the heart of the character (perhaps it isn't nearly as cold as I alluded to earlier).  Gish would follow this film up with her spectacular mother hen role in The Night of the Hunter.  Kael said Gish was the closest The Cobweb had to a star performance, and no matter who it is she is up against in the film - even Widmark's metaphorical muzzling of her character or Grahame's explosive phone conversation (the two actresses, though both integral to the crosscutting plot and strange curtain calling, never actually share screen time) - it is Gish, and her everlasting power as an actress that wins the day.

*******

Since I left him out of the post (for the most part) here is one last image, via a lobby card costarring Miss Grahame, of Mr. Charles Boyer, playing the inevitable aged rapscallion in The Cobweb.  Think of it as number eleven.

My Quest to See the 1000 Greatest: Some Came Running (1958)

Some Came Running is #579 in  

My Quest to watch the 1000 Greatest Films

Screened 01/31/11 on DVD

Ranked #412 on TSPDT

*There be spoilers ahead for those who care about such things.

Besides being historically noteworthy as being the first film to put Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin together on film, Vincente Minnelli's Some Came Running is a swirling, decadent masterpiece of Cinemascope moviemaking.  And I am not alone on this, as Martin Scorsese, in his doc My Personal Journey Through American Cinema, calls the final carnival scene one of the best uses of Cinemascope he has ever seen.   I concur Mr. Scorsese (in case you needed my validation).

I got a copy of this film on DVD well over a year ago, but kept putting it off and putting it off and putting it off, deciding instead to watch many other movies in the meantime (probably a good 500 in the interim).  I know at least one of my critical compatriots, Glenn Kenny, whose great blog is named after the Minnelli film and whom I must assume likes said film quite a bit, would probably be disappointed by my procrastination on this movie (if he actually knew I had procrastinated) but I do believe the wait was, as they say, well worth the wait.

Coming across as subtly as can be at first glance (beautiful but quietly disarming) and climbing higher and higher as the film progresses, like the crescendo of Bolero or White Rabbit (to use two vastly different yet surprising similar cultural references), finally leading to the aforementioned Scorsese-liked Cinemascopic finale, where are the intricate threads and weaving microcosms of the plot come crashing together in a heady, metrocolor boom.  A scene homaged by (of course) Brian De Palma in Blow Out.

And as for the acting, we already knew Sinatra could act (his performance in both From Here to Eternity and The Man With the Golden Arm proved that) but this was the one that proved it about his Rat Pack pal Dino as well.  With this and his followup, Howard Hawks' Rio Bravo (one of this critic's favourite films), Martin proved how good of an actor he could be.  Unfortunately he never - to my knowledge - did any other great acting work.  This performance, and the character's insistence on never removing his hat, was enough to inspire Godard's similar take in Le Mepris.

Then there is Shirley MacLaine.  One of her first films (just two years before her standout turn in Billy Wilder's The Apartment) MacLaine would garner her first Oscar nomination for the role, but only after Sinatra (and here be the spoilers and hence your final warning of such) told Minnelli to "Let the kid take the bullet.  Maybe she'll get an Oscar out of it."  She would have to wait another twenty-five years to finally win that Oscar (for a much lesser film btw), but it did draw her the first of her eventual five Best Actress nominations.

A film well worth my completely happenstance wait, Some Came Running is a wonder to behold, both for its visual succulence and classic storytelling - and for that remarkable crash boom bang ending.