Old Directors

[Roger Ryan]

Bergman with Fanny and Alexander and Kurosawa with Tokyo Story are two directors that come to mind who have had graceful final films- Huston as well, to a certain extant.

Actually, "Madadayo" is Kurosawa's final film ("Tokyo Story" is an Ozu film from the early 50s).

I find all three of Kurosawa's final works ("Dreams", "Rhapsody In August" and "Madadayo") to be worthy efforts. Certainly it looked like Huston was going to peter out with films like "Phobia", "Victory" and "Annie", but then he rallied with three excellent projects ("Under The Volcano", "Prizzi's Honor", "The Dead") before expiring. Personally, I think "The Dead" is one of his greatest films period.

It really does seem that only the filmmakers who worked in mainstream Hollywood have the biggest problems turning out quality work late in life. Some of Bunuel's best work came after he turned 60. Altman was responsible for equal parts good and bad throughout his career. Woody Allen, however, does seem to have abandoned all attempts at quality control just to keep working (and he admits it).

[Alan Brody]

I thought Woody Allen's Match Point was a good film, but he does appear to have lost the ability to be funny. Most of his later comedies have been busts; the only even semi-funny film he has made in recent years was Hollywood Ending. But as Jonathon Rosenbaum has said, even alternating comedy with serious drama, people have always known pretty much what to expect from a Woody Allen film. Same with Altman even though, as you said, his film career was wildly uneven. I mean, how could the guy that made pieces of trash like OC & Stiggs and Quintet turn around a few years later and turn out Vincent and Theo, The Player and Short Cuts? Producers also knew basically what to expect from Hitchcock too and that's mainly what differentiates him from Welles despite all their similarities. People never knew what to expect from Welles, and that bewidered people, especially the money people in Hollywood. I think that's mainly what made things so difficult for Welles.

[Skylark]

Re: Kurosawa - I had 'Rhaposdy in August' in mind, I had forgotten about 'Madadayo' - thanks Roger - I didn't realize 'Under the Volcano' was just prior to 'Prizzi's Honor' - a strong set of films indeed.

It really does seem that only the filmmakers who worked in mainstream Hollywood have the biggest problems turning out quality work late in life.

Good point.

This is really rough speculation, but I'd guess that if Welles had wanted to pursue the mainstream Hollywood route like Hitchcock - he'd probably have a similar output to Hitch's (assuming he had a partner as effective as Emma Hitchcock)i.e. imo - 50+ films with about a dozen gems and a lot of fun, quirky, finely crafted, not outstanding genre features).

As it stands, Welles has arguably an equivalent amount of outstanding films, but without the all the extra OK commercial thrillers - which is the way way Welles wanted it.

[tonyw]

[
This is really rough speculation, but I'd guess that if Welles had wanted to pursue the mainstream Hollywood route like Hitchcock - he'd probably have a similar output to Hitch's (assuming he had a partner as effective as Emma Hitchcock)i.e. imo - 50+ films with about a dozen gems and a lot of fun, quirky,..


You surely mean Alma Reville (Hitchcock) here?

[Skylark]

You surely mean Alma Reville (Hitchcock) here?

I surely do. Cherchez la femme. Thanks!

[Tony]

Mido:

I've never thougt of myself in the way you describe me:

"I cannot claim to speak for Tony, but I think the point he was making, in his inimitably unsentimental and brutally realistic fashion..."

but if it's true, I'll gladly accept this compliment (even though I probably don't write well enough to deserve it) as there's far too much sentimental, mushy, woolly-headed knee-jerk-reaction writing (typing?) present on most internet boards, whether they are about art or politics or indeed any subject.

So thanks!

Mido: I think it was you who wrote that if Topaz had never been made, nobody would miss it; I disagree! I think the whole sequence when the guy goes into the hotel and the agent is watching outside is perhaps the greatest such sequence (large set piece of suspense) in all of Hitchcock. And the shot where Vernon murders the woman, and the camera shoots from above, and the blood seeps out from her dress, is perhaps the single most elegant and beautiful murder shot in all of Hitch.

I actually don't mind the rest of the movie either; I think it's much better than its two predecessors, Torn Curtain and Marnie. But, of course its a long way from The Birds and Psycho to Topaz and Frenzy, but its also a long way from the early sixties to the late sixties, culturally speaking. In fact, as you well know, a cultural revolution was taking place after JFK's assassination.

[Terry]

One of my English Literature professors once posed the question "why do artists create their greatest work when they're young?" I thought at the time that the answer must be that old people suffer from aged grey matter and general physical decrapitude, which limits their mental abilities and amount of energy they have to act on a creative impulse. Since the professor was a sweet grey-haired lady, I mercifully kept my mouth shut.

Now that my teeth are longer, though I've hardly come to "old person stage," I find that lack of inspiration is the biggest culprit. I used to dabble in a few creative media, and having crafted a few artifices in each I thought were pretty much as good as I was capable of accomplishing, I found my need and desire to create completely dried up and I got on with practical matters, such as surviving in a capitalistic society and the daily drudgery that entails. I still dabble on occasion, but primarily out of boredom, and the results of that show my lack of burning inspiration. So is a waning flame of inspiration why the young artist's creation is preferential? What if that flame never wanes?

I think it was Bosley Crowther who said of Chimes that it was "the work of an old man slowing down." Um, unless my basic math skills have departed along with the trillions of brain cells I killed in college, Chimes was released when Welles was 50. Which meant that he was actually in his late 40s when he shot it and edited it. Is being in your late 40s "old?" To a three year old it is. Was Bosley Crowther three years old when he wrote the review? What sort of name is "Bosley Crowther?" To my midwestern sensibilies, that sounds like a fanciful character name from the works of Mervyn Peake or H. P. Lovecraft. Anyway, Chimes is hardly the work of an old man, in physique or in spirit. That must just be a matter of opinion, as so many things (if not all) regarding the reception of any work of art (or any work purpoted to be a work of art) are.

Welles told Peter B something about how the greatest work was done by artists when they were young and when they were old, that middle age was the enemy of art, just as the middle class was the enemy of society. Perhaps Orson would be happy today, as the middle class seems to be on it's way out (under the doorframe, it seems to me.) Welles lamented that old artists were denied the chance to create, and that their best work was accomplished in their 70s and 80s, for however long as a person's health continued.

Someone in their 70s and 80s still sounds like a candidate for an old person to me. So Welles as an Old Director can be confined to what he did when he was 70. Or when he was 69, since he thought he was actually 70 that year. Prior to then, his films fall into the "middle age enemy of art" category, including Chimes, Fake and TOSOTW. His only Old Director films, that I know of or have seen anything from, are The Dreamers, the Abu Khan section of The Magic Show, and The Spirit of Charles Lindburgh.

Lindburgh seems to me little more than most Youtube vids with someone sitting in front of the camera of their computer, staring into the lens, and babbling for a few moments. The little more would be that the person babbling was Orson Welles, and that tends to be more interesting at least in my opinion. The other two Old Director projects I find quite interesting though. Dreamers has a lovely delicacy, even through the "Nth-generation VHS-tape bootleg fuzz and colour-wash" I have to view it through. And Abu Khan is quite funny and charming. Truly funny I think, compared with the humour in Orson's Bag from the 1960s which seemed to me to be very forced, dispirited and disillusioned (is Tailors funny or is it shamefully painful?)

Anyway, some very promising snippets from Old Director Welles. I've also recently been fascinated with Kurosawa's films. Since he called his mentor Kajiro Yamamoto by the respectful nickname "Yama-san," and since I've been blown into next week by Kurosawa's films, I've been calling him "Kuro-san," though I think "Sensei" is much more appropriate. Kurosawa's Old Director films started when he was 70 with Kagemusha, and on through Ran, Dreams, Rhapsody in August, and Madadayo. Kagemusha seems to be his most Kubrickesque film, one of clinical precision and abject coldness and distancing in terms of the characters. Though Kubrick was a younger man when he made his cold and distanced films, like 2001 or The Shining, and as an old man his Eyes Wide Shut had characters much closer to the lens, as it were. Eyes is his only Old Director film, and great it is. I'm glad to see the proper version has finally been released in the US.

Of Kuro-san's other Old Director films, I found Ran to be utterly stunning, Dreams to vacillate between vignettes which fascinated or bored me to death (my favourites were the segment on Van Gogh and the end segment at the watermill village,) Rhapsody in August was suprisingly lively and dense with shots compared with Dreams (though Americans don't like having their noses rubbed in the radioactive ashes of Nagasaki. At the French premiere of Rhapsody someone is said to have shouted "who started the war, anyway?" My hope is that someone retorted "people like you." Anyway, I quite liked Rhapsody, though the ending with the ironic musical counterpoint didn't work for me,) and Mah-die-die-yah was pleasure from start to finish, with the middle-aged businessmen rampaging and giggling around like adolescents in the midst of getting away with doing something naughty being quite wonderful.

So I think Kurosawa's flame hadn't waned as an Old Director, and neither had Welles' or Kubrick's. I can't speak for Hitchcock as I haven't seen his later films. I think I prefer, however, Kuro-san's Young Director and Middle-aged Director films. They seem to channel more emotion, at least they channel it out of me. And I didn't even like Rashomon, by the way. I was expecting a study of imperfect memory, not a visualization of people lying. Nor did I care for Yojimbo, which is an absudist farce on the Western genre, but pretty well done for all that. For my money, my favourite Kurosawa films (that I've seen) are Drunken Angel, Stray Dog, Ikiru, Seven Samurai, The Lower Depths, High and Low, and Red Beard. They've also added Toshiro Mifune and Takashi Shimura to my list of All Time Favourite Actors.

Kurosawa seems a very Wellesian director. And Welles seems a very Kurosawian director. I don't know if their works informed one another or if they were simply comparable talents and intellects who were both obsessed with John Ford. Welles said he hated seeing films by other directors. I've read Kurosawa loved watching films by other directors. However it came to be, The Lower Depths seems greatly Wellesian and Chimes seems greatly Kurosawian. Roger Ebert has recently called Kurosawa "the greatest of all directors" and Ikiru his greatest film. I think he may be right. Welles bettered Kurosawa in terms of frame composition, they were comparable in terms of camera movements and blocking/choreography of the actors, Welles probably won the editing contest for even attempting things like Fake and TOSOTW, they were comparable directors of actors (though thankfully AK didn't go in the radical direction Welles did for awhile in the 1940s. Glenn Anders in Shanghai, anyone?) and Kurosawa certainly won in the screenwriting department, nearly always co-writing his screenplays with two other people (demoting himself to being only a junior writer on his own films and letting another trusted voice tell him when the script was no good or going astray. Welles might have benefitted from that arrangement as well. Clear story lines and strong dialogue were never his strong point.) Anyway, two of the creme de la creme they were, and their work continues to be.