Seeing some of the tragic omissions in the Greatest Director competition sparked off this idea. There are a number of directors who have directed some absolute classics, but for whatever reason, tend to get missed out when it comes to talking about the "great directors". As a case in point, I present Michael Curtiz, who directed, among others, Angels With Dirty Faces, Mildred Pierce, and Casablanca, all of which are now seen as classics, though their director is more or less forgotten.

Any others that come to mind?

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Mildred Peirce was a fabulous movie. Quite heavy for the time it was made.

I'd like to add the director of The Passion of Joan of Arc, Carl Theodor Dreyer.

He accomplished many things during the filming of this movie, wich was shot over a period of six months and in sequence. He used strange camera angles, and constant close-ups something not too common for the time it was made (1928). Some of the camera angles he achieved by digging trenches around the scene, for example: the burning at the steak is mostly shot with the camera looking up at her. Additionally, there was no make-up used on the actors because he wanted to do practically the whole film in close-ups, heightening the emotion the audience felt. Her emotion wasn't acted much of the time. It was said Dreyer would do terrible things to upset her, just to capture the emotion in her face. Maria Falconetti never acted in another film.

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Andrei Tarkovsky. He's a Russian director who did the orignal Solaris and Andrei Rublev. His films always involve very metaphysical themes, and he manages to pull off some very memorable images. His early work explored the ideas of film being able to manipulate time, or as he put it "sculpting time". He later tried to create films that followed Aristotle's rules of drama.

On a side note, speaking of Dreyer, a while back on the Rotten Tomato boards, there was actually a guy trying to tell everyone what a funny coincidence it was that the three greatest filmmakers of all time, Truffaut, Dreyer, and Tarkovsky, were all Catholic.

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I don't know how it escaped me until just now, but John Sturges isn't on our list and personally I think he is a better director than a lot of those in the competition

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One problem with that theory--Dreyer wasn't Catholic.


Kenji Mizoguchi
Robert Bresson
Ernst Lubitsch
Preston Sturges

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“It’s got good actors, and that spells good acting.”

Yep, they laid into him pretty quickly for that little oversight. That, and while he was trying to defend his statement, he called Hitch**** and Orson Welles amateurs. It was very entertaining.

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A journey into a wondrous land of imagination. Next stop, the Twilight Zone!

Michael Powell

The poor guy had his entire career ruined by Peeping Tom and he had so much talent.

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"Nothing is Written."

To be fair it wasn't the film per se that ruined him so much as the press' reaction to it...the film itself is a very scary and disturbing study of a psychopath..but so is Psycho and that never did Hitchc0ck's career any harm. It has since been hailed as a classic it truly is, However, contemporary reviews like "The only really satisfactory way to dispose of Peeping Tom would be to shovel it up and flush it swiftly down the nearest sewer. Even then the stench would remain" didn't help it's popularity with the public..and it's subsiquent ban by the then rather stuffy BBFC (back when the 'C' stood for 'Censorship' and not 'Classification' ) killed it ( and Powell's career) off completely

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I could see, though, how someone might have the impression he was Catholic after watching some of his films.

Going back to e's original nomination, Curtiz, I think part of the reason he's is not considered among "greats" is that he directed so damned many films, which complicates things for critics in a number of ways:

1. there are so many films that his body of work is almost impossible to critically process

2. Curtiz worked in the classical studio style, and worked in a variety of genres, making it difficult to gleen a "directorial personality," thereby making it difficult to fit his work into "auteur theory" criticism.

3. For every great film, there's a problematic one, a mediocre one (or two, maybe three).

It's much easier to canonize someone who has fewer films (Terence Malick anyone?)


Also Nicholas Ray was mentioned in the other thread, I think.

Great movies:

The Live By Night
In a Lonely Place
Rebel Without a Cause
the brilliantly weird Johnny Guitar

Also see:

Bigger Than Life
The Lusty Men
Wind Across the Everglades
On Dangerous Ground
Knock on Any Door

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“It’s got good actors, and that spells good acting.”

Fair point, but none of those things stopped, for example, Howard Hawks or Frank Capra, or even Nicolas Ray, getting a much higher degree of critical recognition. Admittedly, as regards your first point, Curtiz produced far, far more films than either, with an astonishing 172 films to his credit, but many of those (especially the early Hungarian silents) don't survive today, so it's not quite such a handicap as regards a critical overview of his career.

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