Sidney Lumet, the great American-Jewish director known for his gripping, cerebral movies, is the subject of a tribute at the Jerusalem Cinematheque starting September 4, to mark the year that would have been his 100th birthday.
The son of parents who were actors and directors for the Yiddish theater, he started out as an actor himself before he moved behind the camera. Always known as an actor’s director, many stars – including Al Pacino, Henry Fonda, Paul Newman, and Faye Dunaway – gave their best performances in Lumet’s movies, about half of which were adaptations of plays.
He started out doing filmed plays for television. But in 1957, his first movie for the big screen, 12 Angry Men, made him a star director. The 12 men are jurors, and the tagline for the movie – “Life is in their hands, death is on their minds… It explodes like 12 sticks of dynamite!” – gives a sense of its charged theatricality.
Set in the jury deliberation room, the jurors debate the case of a young man charged with killing his father. It looks like an open-and-shut case and an inevitable guilty verdict, with everyone in agreement except for juror no. 8, played by Henry Fonda in one of his best performances.
Although typical jury deliberations can wear down the holdout, you don’t wear down Fonda so easily. The rest of the top-notch cast includes Jack Klugman (from TV’s The Odd Couple), Lee J. Cobb (On the Waterfront), and Martin Balsam (A Thousand Clowns, All the President’s Men). This is the classic liberal movie showing how miscarriages of justice can take place, but which puts a great deal of faith in the jury system.
Another great issue-oriented movie by Lumet is Fail Safe (1964). It’s like a dramatic version of the black comedy Dr. Strangelove and asks the question: If a technical malfunction sends US planes to carry out a nuclear attack on Russia, can an all-out nuclear confrontation be averted?
Fonda is on hand again, this time as the president, and the supporting cast features Walter Matthau and Larry Hagman (Dallas). This is one of those movies I used to watch till the end whenever I caught part of it on TV, but it really should be seen from beginning to end on the big screen.
Marlon Brando rocked a snakeskin jacket as a drifter in Lumet’s 1960 adaptation of Tennessee Williams’s The Fugitive Kind, with Anna Magnani and Joanne Woodward playing two women who vie for his affections rather dramatically.
Lumet’s career spanned decades
LUMET IS one of the few directors who made successful movies for several decades, and for many, his best was Dog Day Afternoon. The 1975 fact-based drama tells of a married man (Al Pacino), who stuck up a Brooklyn bank to pay for a sex-change operation for his male lover, taking the whole staff hostage. It’s a classic anti-hero drama, with Pacino as a frustrated but caring man pushed to desperation. He would have taken home the Oscar for his performance but was up against Jack Nicholson, who won for One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. It was quite a year.
Legendary actor John Cazale, who died of cancer at age 42 and who played Fredo in The Godfather series, portrayed Pacino’s sidekick. Carol Kane, currently starring as a bat mitzvah student in Between the Temples, played one of the hostages. Like most of Lumet’s movies, Dog Day Afternoon is suspenseful from start to finish.
Lumet also directed Pacino in one of his other great 1970s roles, as the title character in Serpico, also a fact-based drama, about a New York City cop who pays a steep price when he blows the whistle on his corrupt colleagues.
Lumet’s other huge hit from the 1970s was Network (1976), featuring an anchorman (Peter Finch), who cracks up on television, ranting “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore!” That movie, a remarkably prescient critique of the ratings-driven media, also starred Dunaway as an ice-cold executive who realizes that more money can be made by keeping this lunatic on the air than taking him off, and William Holden as a less craven TV honcho.
Lumet’s winning streak as a director continued into the 1980s, when he made The Verdict, in which Newman gives one of his best performances. Here, he is an alcoholic Boston lawyer who seeks redemption by taking on a malpractice case against a hospital run by the Catholic church. David Mamet was one of the writers of this intense courtroom drama.
The tribute features several of Lumet’s lesser-known movies. These include two with Sean Connery, The Hill (1965), about a World War II military prison in North Africa ruled by sadistic guards, and The Offence (1973), another tense crime drama about a British police investigator who snaps when interrogating the suspect in a child molestation case.
Equus (1977), one of Lumet’s rare missteps, is an adaptation of the hit play by Peter Shaffer, featuring Richard Burton as a psychiatrist investigating why a stable worker blinded several horses. The film failed to capture the excitement of the play.
Lumet’s final movie, Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead (2007), wasn’t one of his best, veering into melodrama in a tale of two down-on-their-luck brothers (Ethan Hawke and Philip Seymour Hoffman) who come up with a plan to rob their parents’ jewelry store. But like almost all his movies, it features wonderful performances.
For the full schedule, visit jer-cin.org.il.