Lumet's Range Extends Beyond New York
Director Sidney Lumet is, in the words of the critic David Thomson, "one of the stalwart figures of New York filmmaking." Appropriately, Film Forum's three-week retrospective of Mr. Lumet's films, which kicks off today, features new and archival prints of the director's canonical five-borough stories. "The Pawnbroker," "12 Angry Men," "Serpico," "Dog Day Afternoon," "Network" (playing this weekend in a ravishing new print highlighting Owen Roizman's photography), and "Prince of the City" form the core of a body of Gotham-set work arguably rivaled only by the locally made pictures of Martin Scorsese and Woody Allen.
And yet Mr. Lumet's directorial hallmarks — a keen sensitivity to the storytelling voodoo of lens choices and lighting, and an almost supernatural flair for casting roles and cultivating performances, have graced more than two dozen features set in such pointedly non-New York locales as Istanbul ("Murder on the Orient Express") and Boston ("The Verdict"). Further, though he is renowned for his gritty treatment of headline-based source material, the 22 films selected by Film Forum's programmer, Bruce Goldstein, encompass adaptations of revered 20th-century theater works by Anton Chekhov, Tennessee Williams, Eugene O'Neill, and Arthur Miller. And though Mr. Lumet's name is synonymous with Al Pacino's non-"Godfather" acting triumphs of the 1970s, he has worked twice as many times with Sean Connery. Film Forum's retrospective is a reminder that the director's career has been long, fruitful, and varied.
In order to take full advantage of British tax breaks and other production incentives, American film producers of the 1960s set up satellite production imprints in England. This not only helped to support an expatriate American filmmaking community that included such varied artistic visionaries as Stanley Kubrick and Larry Kramer (to cite the Bronx-born contingent alone), but it created a revolving door of American directors seeking to broaden their creative horizons and pay the bills by taking work abroad.
Mr. Lumet's 1965 American-British co-production "The Hill" was shot on location in Spain. For the film, Mr. Lumet, who is now 83, reworked a standard-issue test of wills between jailer and jailed into a vivid and harrowing hate triangle among a rebellious soldier played by Mr. Connery, a martinet played by Harry Andrews, and a sadistic guard played by Ian Hendry. In concert with the cinematographer Oswald Morris — a frequent John Huston collaborator and one of the unsung innovators of motion picture photography — Mr. Lumet infused what was originally a stage play with a muscular camera craft and gutsy visual brio that rivals the similarly tough and smart 1960s camera audacity of fellow live-television graduate John Frankenheimer and permanent British relocater Kubrick.
In the opening moments of "The Hill," Mr. Lumet's mobile black-and-white frame crawls up the titular towering dirt mound alongside one of the prisoners regularly sent up and down its shifting sides in the heat of the sun. As the con's body gives out, he falls back down toward fenced-in terra firma, and the camera glides up away from the hill and slowly out through the prison gates. It's a brilliant example of ham auterism and a confident directorial imagination literally taking flight.
For 1966's domestic adaptation of Mary McCarthy's best seller "The Group," Mr. Lumet and the cinematographer Boris Kaufman hatched a quite different and considerably more subtle visual scheme. Working in color, they infused "The Group," a soapy chronicle of the turbulent personal and professional lives of eight Vassar graduates on the eve of World War II, with a nostalgic, subdued patina recalling commercial art and other pop culture iconography of the era during which the film is set.
At Film Forum, "The Hill" is co-billed with another British-produced stage adaptation starring Mr. Connery. But 1973's "The Offense," an acute character study illustrating the dehumanizing nature of institutionally sanctioned violence, is a far less heroic and more ambiguous affair than Messrs. Lumet and Connery's first collaboration. Shot in and around Bracknell, Berkshire, which was then undergoing "new town" development via the British government's problematic attempt to create cheap postwar housing, "The Offense" is shaped around three one-act conversations: Mr. Connery's burnt-out case cop and an accused pederast, the cop and his wife at home, and the cop and a superior (Trevor Howard) surveying the extent of the damage from a brutal lapse in judgment earlier in the film.
Shot in a skillfully suffocating style, "The Offense" uses a British setting to thematically capitalize on American cinema's then-current yen for terse on-screen violence with a clarity rivaled only by Sam Peckinpah's Britian-set "Straw Dogs." And, like the other films Mr. Lumet made prior to his iconic New York moral gothics, "The Offense" demonstrates the evolving brilliance of an uncompromising journeyman of American cinema who, though based in New York, is creatively at home wherever he goes.
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