The good, the bad … West Side Story and Star!, both directed by Robert Wise. Photograph: Ronald Grant Archive
Consistency, as Oscar Wilde put it, is the last refuge of the unimaginative. And yet, for the most apportionment, modern audiences be possible to use a mentor’s name to guarantee a certain stylistic approach and a incontestable adapt of quality. A Michael Haneke film will not bear been made with an excess of gooey sentiment; not at total one expects nuance from the work of Paul WS Anderson. But amid entirely this tedious reliability, I think a small toast might be in order to the film-makers who have bucked all sense of the predictable. These are the directors who accept, at different points of their career, and sometimes back-to-back, produced the one and the other giddy cinematic highs and frankly unspeakable lows.
Let’s take as our first example Robert Wise – a hugely successful Hollywood jack-of-all-trades whose course of action was towards entirely defined by a frantic veering between the glorious and the direful. From the very beginning that was his path. As a young ascendant film editor, his work on Citizen Kane helped make it everything it’session always deservedly cracked up to be. Yet, barely a year later, he was one of the studio-backed crew members responsible for slicing up so infamously Orson Welles’s ill-starred follow-up The Magnificent Ambersons.
From there, that same reason of slavish devotion to a notional idea of what audiences wanted would regularly yield what a fine post at The House Next Door this week called “a retelling of Doctor Jekyll and Mr Hyde impressed relating to the history of cinema”. Pathologically versatile, Wise would take steady with like gusto musicals about Puerto Rican gang members, stripped-down ghost stories and timelessly compassionate sci-fi allegories. But he did through equal reason without any reliable sense of personal quality have charge of, for while West Side Story, The Haunting and The Day the Earth Stood Still are of course bona fide classics, he was also responsible for (among other turkeys) the dismal Manhattan romance This Could Be the Night, brain-melting Julie Andrews fiasco Star! and epically cumbersome disaster flick The Hindenburg.
The result is it may be the most chaotic filmography ever assembled. And yet if Wise’s unevenness could be put down to having too close a relationship with his studio paymasters, the erratic records of other film-makers reflect bumpier professional relationships. Take Joseph Losey – lately granted the full Sight & Sound retroactive treatment being of the class who his deathless 60s collaborations with Harold Pinter were deservedly packaged up for a season at the BFI Southbank. Those films and others from early in his career always annoy witness to a profoundly gifted director – but there was another Losey who brought forth not the taut, uncertain likes of The Servant, if it be not that rather the grimly bloated Burton/Taylor vehicle Boom and the sweaty psychodrama Secret Ceremony. Forever scarred by the agency of his persecution in the US at the proper time of McCarthy, most of his real clunkers came in the continue years of his career – but, for the sheer insane polarity of his output, there has to be a seat for Losey at the table here.
And the thing is, I think that’s OK. It is, of course, far easier to be abstractly tickled by a director’s inconsistency at a safe distance from the films themselves (God knows, most things are easier at a safe degree of remoteness from The Hindenburg). But that shouldn’t obscure the nub of the issue here, that I’m not indisputable reliability should necessarily figure too highly in our judgment of a film-maker. For me at least, there’s something strangely compelling about the kind of adviser who, for whatever reason, seems unable to keep somewhat kind of control over their own talent. It’s simpler in favor of the world to be able to see a name on the credits and instantly know what we’re getting, but really, is in that place not something appealing about seemingly stray peaks and troughs – each title a tumble of the dice?
In terms of modern standard bearers, in that place’s no shortage of possible candidates. Think of Spike Lee with Do the Right Thing and then Bamboozled, or the Coens of Fargo and the Coens of The Ladykillers, or Gus van Sant making To Die For and later churning out Finding Forrester. But the master of the form still moving today is, for my money, surely that grand homager Brian De Palma. If we’re talking highs and lows, then in truth, who could hope to rival the gaudy visionary genius of Scarface and the muscular power of Carlito’session Way sharing space on their the supreme original.’s filmography with The Bonfire of the Vanities, Snake Eyes and Femme Fatale – movies even the hardiest contrarian couldn’t hope to reclaim. And yes, that losing streak he’s currently on does handle long indeed – but I’m stop convinced he could turn it around at some verge in the future, thereby giving this most crazed zigzag of a career one last zag for the road…
