Sidney Lumet, who died on April 9 aged 86, was the most durable of a distinguished group of film-makers that emerged from the "golden years" of American television in the late 1950s.
Sidney Lumet with his second wife, the heiress Gloria Vanderbilt Photo: AP
He made more than three dozen films, far more than such contemporaries as Robert Mulligan, John Frankenheimer and Franklin Schaffner, who shared the same background. Indeed, he was such a frenetic worker that Paul Newman called him "the only man who could double-park outside a whorehouse".
Lumet's direction helped Peter Finch, Faye Dunaway and Beatrice Straight win Oscars in Network (1976), and Ingrid Bergman win her third Academy Award for Murder on the Orient Express (1974). He was twice named director of the year by his peers in the Directors' Guild of America – for his first film, 12 Angry Men (1957) and for his adaptation of the Eugene O'Neill play, Long Day's Journey into Night (1962).
In critical circles, the jury remained out on Sidney Lumet almost to the last. Widely acclaimed for such films as Serpico (1973) and Dog Day Afternoon (1975), he baffled many by his eclectic choice of subject and artistic inconsistency. It was difficult to reconcile the gritty realism of his best work with the frivolity of The Wiz (1978), an all-black musical with Diana Ross based on The Wizard of Oz, or Deathtrap (1982), a stagy thriller about rival playwrights starring Michael Caine and Christopher Reeve.
He was at his best with scripts relating to the police force, especially when they touched on corruption. He tackled it first in Serpico in 1973 and returned to it with even greater impact in Prince of the City (1981) and Q&A (1990). Police work figured prominently, too, in one of his last films, Close to Eden (1992) (also known as A Stranger Among Us), and Dog Day Afternoon.
He was also drawn to Jewish themes. Close to Eden was set largely among the Hasidic community in New York; in The Pawnbroker (1965), Rod Steiger played a survivor of a Nazi concentration camp; Bye Bye Braverman (1968) was an ill-judged attempt at Jewish humour; and Daniel (1983) dealt in fictionalised form with Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, who were executed for passing atomic secrets to Russia.
Lumet was also strongly attracted to theatrical subjects. He filmed Tennessee Williams's Orpheus Descending as The Fugitive Kind in 1960; Arthur Miller's A View from the Bridge in 1961; Eugene O'Neill's Long Day's Journey into Night in 1962; an adaptation of Chekhov's The Seagull in 1968; and Peter Shaffer's Equus in 1977. Few of these were entirely successful, though Lumet believed the O'Neill adaptation to have been his best work and misunderstood by critics, who dismissed it as "canned theatre". "They didn't know cinema technique from a hole in the wall," Lumet complained. "There was more sheer physical technique in that movie, in its editing and camerawork, than anything you are likely to see for 20 years."
Many of Lumet's finest films were set and shot in New York, which he tried to promote as an East Coast alternative to Hollywood. He regarded Los Angeles as "a company town, not fit for human habitation," and never filmed there. But West Coast studios continued to back him because he delivered the goods on time and within budget.
This discipline was a product of his training in television, where there was no time for self-indulgence. Unless an actor fluffed his lines, he would often accept a flawed take, trading perfection for spontaneity. Dog Day Afternoon, in which bank robbers Al Pacino and John Cazale seem to be acting almost on instinct, was a rich and rewarding example of this. Serpico, less so.
Lumet, who had taken over the direction of the film when John Avildsen fell out with the producer Dino de Laurentis, brought in the 130-minute film under schedule in a little over 10 weeks. It worked as a satire, and there was plenty of grit in the setting and dialogue. But the film never captured the poisonous paranoia of Frank Serpico's experience, the narrative ambled to accommodate Pacino's performance, and many scenes were so flat and badly-lit they ought to have been re-shot.
Such uneven production encouraged accusations of sloppiness, of accepting the mediocre in the interests of the profit and loss account. Lumet did nothing to dispel these criticisms. "If you're a director," he insisted, "then you've got to direct. I don't believe that you should sit back and wait until circumstances are perfect."
He was born in Philadelphia on June 25 1924, the son of Baruch Lumet and Eugenia Wermus, who emigrated to America and became pillars of the Yiddish Art Theatre in New York in the 1920s and 1930s. Sidney grew up on Manhattan's Lower East Side and in Brooklyn, making his acting debut at the age of five at the Yiddish Art Theatre and in radio. Between 1931 and 1932 the family, including Sidney, featured in a Yiddish radio serial, The Rabbi from Brownsville, for which they collected a combined weekly salary of $35.
At the age of 11 Sidney Lumet made his Broadway debut in Dead End (1935), written by family friend Sidney Kingsley. He also played the young Jesus in Max Reinhardt's production The Eternal Road (1937), and again in Maxwell Anderson's Journey to Jerusalem. The play One Third of a Nation (1939), an exposé of slum landlords, was subsequently filmed and was Lumet's only screen appearance as an actor.
During these years he was educated at the Professional Children's School, which many juvenile actors attended, progressing to Columbia University in 1942 to study Dramatic Literature. He dropped out after only one term, however, to enlist in the Army Signal Corps, in which he saw service as a radar mechanic in India and Burma.
Returning to New York after the war, he set up his own drama school in opposition to the Actors' Studio, home of "the Method", which he regarded as pretentious. The breakthrough in Lumet's career came in 1950, when his friend Yul Brynner, then a director with CBS, asked him to join the network as an assistant director. Between 1951 and 1953 Lumet directed some 150 instalments of the series Danger and isolated episodes of I Remember Mama and You Are There. Later he directed for Playhouse 90, Kraft Television Theatre and Studio One. Lumet regarded these years as an ideal training ground. "It would take 20 films," he estimated, "to acquire what I learned from on-the-spot television."
These were vintage years for US television and the transfer of Marty to the big screen in 1955 persuaded Hollywood that the small screen was a cheap and untapped source of new talent. Two years later, it led to Lumet's first film, 12 Angry Men.
Set almost entirely in one room, where 12 jurors deliberate a murder case, the story turns on one individual (Henry Fonda, dressed symbolically in white) persuading his 11 colleagues to change their minds and return a verdict of not guilty. Apart from Fonda and Lee J Cobb, few of the actors were widely known. But from Jack Warden, EG Marshall, Ed Begley, Martin Balsam and the rest, Lumet coaxed ensemble playing of complete conviction. The film gave the impression of eavesdropping on real life, and the claustrophobic atmosphere was reinforced by a skilful use of lenses and lighting to make the ceilings and walls seem to close in on the jurors.
For Lumet it was a spectacular start, winning the top prize at the Berlin Film Festival and a sheaf of Oscar nominations. His career, however, instantly stalled. Stage Struck (1958), a remake of Katharine Hepburn's Oscar-winning 1933 movie Morning Glory, and That Kind of Woman (1959), in which Sophia Loren has to choose between Tab Hunter and George Sanders, were merely marking time.
In television and on Broadway, though, he continued to attract acclaim. His stage production of Albert Camus's play Caligula (1960) was much admired, as was an Emmy award-winning version of Eugene O'Neill's The Iceman Cometh, with Jason Robards.
Between 1960 and 1962, Lumet concentrated in film on strongly-cast literary adaptations – Marlon Brando and Anna Magnani in The Fugitive Kind; Raf Vallone as Arthur Miller's troubled longshoreman in A View from the Bridge; and Jason Robards, Katharine Hepburn, Ralph Richardson and Dean Stockwell as O'Neill's tortured Tyrones in Long Day's Journey into Night.
But Fail Safe (1964), a nuclear nightmare thriller, suffered from comparison with Stanley Kubrick's Dr Strangelove, whose gallows humour made rivals seem conventional, and for the next 10 years Lumet's career languished. This period included a strident tale of army brutality starring Sean Connery (The Hill, 1965); a vacuous adaptation of Mary McCarthy's novel, The Group (1966), about eight Vassar graduates in the 1930s; a leaden John le Carré spy thriller, The Deadly Affair (1967), with James Mason; and a near-parody of European art films, The Appointment (1969), with Omar Sharif and Anouk Aimée.
The revival in Lumet's critical and commercial fortunes began in the mid-Seventies, as he concentrated on grimy police procedural dramas. These were notable for the authentic tawdriness of their settings; yellowing linoleum, strip-lighting, scratched institutional paintwork and row upon row of steel desks. No effort was spared to make characters unattractive. The cops had pot-bellies and dripped sweat; their faces were pasty and unshaven, their suits cheap and their shoes worn. The language was sleazy to match.
The look might have suggested documentary, but a Lumet drama was invariably shaped to convey a moral message. He considered cinema the "last and only medium in which it is possible to tell a story of conscience outside the printed word" and was fascinated by the thin line that divides the policeman from the criminal, legal conduct from illegal.
This sometimes brought him criticism that he was "anti-cop", but he reacted indignantly to such charges. "I'm not," he said. "Their lives are sheer hell, absolute hell. Cops like these movies because they're honest." Such verismo gloss became Lumet's trademark. But he did not try to take it too far. "We are doing drama and everything that implies," he said. "Including fakery."
His best and most popular work were two films in which Al Pacino gave bravura performances. In Serpico, Pacino is a New York cop who goes undercover to expose corruption in the force; Dog Day Afternoon sees him play a New York homosexual who mounts a bank robbery to pay for his lover's sex-change operation. Network, a scorching parody of US television, seemed to confirm the recovery.
Again Lumet proved unable to sustain it. For every Prince of the City (1981) and The Verdict (1983) – powerful studies of venality in the police and legal systems – he delivered banal comedies such as Garbo Talks (1984), in which a Jewish mother dying of cancer expresses a last wish to meet Greta Garbo, and frazzled media satires such as Power (1986), in which Richard Gere misuses his marketing skills to "sell" politicians.
Running on Empty, about American radicals on the run and the effect on their children's education, was a partial return to form, but Close to Eden pleased almost nobody. A tale of faith and ritual wrapped up in the guise of a police thriller, it was rejected by critics and public alike.
Among the best of his latter films were Q&A (1991), about a bad cop bought to book for "justifiable homicide", and Night Falls On Manhattan (1997), with New York beset by hundreds of bad cops and thousands of bent politicians. Perhaps the best of all, however, was his last film, the chronologically complex crime drama Before the Devil Knows You're Dead (2007), starring Albert Finney and Philip Seymour Hoffman. The film was hailed as one of the films of the year by many critics and served as a timely reminder of Lumet's undoubted talents.
In 1995, Sidney Lumet published a guide to direction under the title Making Movies. He was married four times: first to the actress Rita Gam, secondly to socialite Gloria Vanderbilt (1956-63), thirdly to Gail Jones (1963-78), daughter of Lena Horne, and fourthly (from 1980) to Mary Gimbel. With his third wife he had a daughter, Jenny Lumet, who featured in his film Q&A; with Mary Gimbel he had two further daughters.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/culture-obituaries/film-obituaries/8440445/Sidney-Lumet.html
Many of Lumet's finest films were set and shot in New York, which he tried to promote as an East Coast alternative to Hollywood. He regarded Los Angeles as "a company town, not fit for human habitation," and never filmed there. But West Coast studios continued to back him because he delivered the goods on time and within budget.
This discipline was a product of his training in television, where there was no time for self-indulgence. Unless an actor fluffed his lines, he would often accept a flawed take, trading perfection for spontaneity. Dog Day Afternoon, in which bank robbers Al Pacino and John Cazale seem to be acting almost on instinct, was a rich and rewarding example of this. Serpico, less so.
Lumet, who had taken over the direction of the film when John Avildsen fell out with the producer Dino de Laurentis, brought in the 130-minute film under schedule in a little over 10 weeks. It worked as a satire, and there was plenty of grit in the setting and dialogue. But the film never captured the poisonous paranoia of Frank Serpico's experience, the narrative ambled to accommodate Pacino's performance, and many scenes were so flat and badly-lit they ought to have been re-shot.
Such uneven production encouraged accusations of sloppiness, of accepting the mediocre in the interests of the profit and loss account. Lumet did nothing to dispel these criticisms. "If you're a director," he insisted, "then you've got to direct. I don't believe that you should sit back and wait until circumstances are perfect."
He was born in Philadelphia on June 25 1924, the son of Baruch Lumet and Eugenia Wermus, who emigrated to America and became pillars of the Yiddish Art Theatre in New York in the 1920s and 1930s. Sidney grew up on Manhattan's Lower East Side and in Brooklyn, making his acting debut at the age of five at the Yiddish Art Theatre and in radio. Between 1931 and 1932 the family, including Sidney, featured in a Yiddish radio serial, The Rabbi from Brownsville, for which they collected a combined weekly salary of $35.
At the age of 11 Sidney Lumet made his Broadway debut in Dead End (1935), written by family friend Sidney Kingsley. He also played the young Jesus in Max Reinhardt's production The Eternal Road (1937), and again in Maxwell Anderson's Journey to Jerusalem. The play One Third of a Nation (1939), an exposé of slum landlords, was subsequently filmed and was Lumet's only screen appearance as an actor.
During these years he was educated at the Professional Children's School, which many juvenile actors attended, progressing to Columbia University in 1942 to study Dramatic Literature. He dropped out after only one term, however, to enlist in the Army Signal Corps, in which he saw service as a radar mechanic in India and Burma.
Returning to New York after the war, he set up his own drama school in opposition to the Actors' Studio, home of "the Method", which he regarded as pretentious. The breakthrough in Lumet's career came in 1950, when his friend Yul Brynner, then a director with CBS, asked him to join the network as an assistant director. Between 1951 and 1953 Lumet directed some 150 instalments of the series Danger and isolated episodes of I Remember Mama and You Are There. Later he directed for Playhouse 90, Kraft Television Theatre and Studio One. Lumet regarded these years as an ideal training ground. "It would take 20 films," he estimated, "to acquire what I learned from on-the-spot television."
These were vintage years for US television and the transfer of Marty to the big screen in 1955 persuaded Hollywood that the small screen was a cheap and untapped source of new talent. Two years later, it led to Lumet's first film, 12 Angry Men.
Set almost entirely in one room, where 12 jurors deliberate a murder case, the story turns on one individual (Henry Fonda, dressed symbolically in white) persuading his 11 colleagues to change their minds and return a verdict of not guilty. Apart from Fonda and Lee J Cobb, few of the actors were widely known. But from Jack Warden, EG Marshall, Ed Begley, Martin Balsam and the rest, Lumet coaxed ensemble playing of complete conviction. The film gave the impression of eavesdropping on real life, and the claustrophobic atmosphere was reinforced by a skilful use of lenses and lighting to make the ceilings and walls seem to close in on the jurors.
For Lumet it was a spectacular start, winning the top prize at the Berlin Film Festival and a sheaf of Oscar nominations. His career, however, instantly stalled. Stage Struck (1958), a remake of Katharine Hepburn's Oscar-winning 1933 movie Morning Glory, and That Kind of Woman (1959), in which Sophia Loren has to choose between Tab Hunter and George Sanders, were merely marking time.
In television and on Broadway, though, he continued to attract acclaim. His stage production of Albert Camus's play Caligula (1960) was much admired, as was an Emmy award-winning version of Eugene O'Neill's The Iceman Cometh, with Jason Robards.
Between 1960 and 1962, Lumet concentrated in film on strongly-cast literary adaptations – Marlon Brando and Anna Magnani in The Fugitive Kind; Raf Vallone as Arthur Miller's troubled longshoreman in A View from the Bridge; and Jason Robards, Katharine Hepburn, Ralph Richardson and Dean Stockwell as O'Neill's tortured Tyrones in Long Day's Journey into Night.
But Fail Safe (1964), a nuclear nightmare thriller, suffered from comparison with Stanley Kubrick's Dr Strangelove, whose gallows humour made rivals seem conventional, and for the next 10 years Lumet's career languished. This period included a strident tale of army brutality starring Sean Connery (The Hill, 1965); a vacuous adaptation of Mary McCarthy's novel, The Group (1966), about eight Vassar graduates in the 1930s; a leaden John le Carré spy thriller, The Deadly Affair (1967), with James Mason; and a near-parody of European art films, The Appointment (1969), with Omar Sharif and Anouk Aimée.
The revival in Lumet's critical and commercial fortunes began in the mid-Seventies, as he concentrated on grimy police procedural dramas. These were notable for the authentic tawdriness of their settings; yellowing linoleum, strip-lighting, scratched institutional paintwork and row upon row of steel desks. No effort was spared to make characters unattractive. The cops had pot-bellies and dripped sweat; their faces were pasty and unshaven, their suits cheap and their shoes worn. The language was sleazy to match.
The look might have suggested documentary, but a Lumet drama was invariably shaped to convey a moral message. He considered cinema the "last and only medium in which it is possible to tell a story of conscience outside the printed word" and was fascinated by the thin line that divides the policeman from the criminal, legal conduct from illegal.
This sometimes brought him criticism that he was "anti-cop", but he reacted indignantly to such charges. "I'm not," he said. "Their lives are sheer hell, absolute hell. Cops like these movies because they're honest." Such verismo gloss became Lumet's trademark. But he did not try to take it too far. "We are doing drama and everything that implies," he said. "Including fakery."
His best and most popular work were two films in which Al Pacino gave bravura performances. In Serpico, Pacino is a New York cop who goes undercover to expose corruption in the force; Dog Day Afternoon sees him play a New York homosexual who mounts a bank robbery to pay for his lover's sex-change operation. Network, a scorching parody of US television, seemed to confirm the recovery.
Again Lumet proved unable to sustain it. For every Prince of the City (1981) and The Verdict (1983) – powerful studies of venality in the police and legal systems – he delivered banal comedies such as Garbo Talks (1984), in which a Jewish mother dying of cancer expresses a last wish to meet Greta Garbo, and frazzled media satires such as Power (1986), in which Richard Gere misuses his marketing skills to "sell" politicians.
Running on Empty, about American radicals on the run and the effect on their children's education, was a partial return to form, but Close to Eden pleased almost nobody. A tale of faith and ritual wrapped up in the guise of a police thriller, it was rejected by critics and public alike.
Among the best of his latter films were Q&A (1991), about a bad cop bought to book for "justifiable homicide", and Night Falls On Manhattan (1997), with New York beset by hundreds of bad cops and thousands of bent politicians. Perhaps the best of all, however, was his last film, the chronologically complex crime drama Before the Devil Knows You're Dead (2007), starring Albert Finney and Philip Seymour Hoffman. The film was hailed as one of the films of the year by many critics and served as a timely reminder of Lumet's undoubted talents.
In 1995, Sidney Lumet published a guide to direction under the title Making Movies. He was married four times: first to the actress Rita Gam, secondly to socialite Gloria Vanderbilt (1956-63), thirdly to Gail Jones (1963-78), daughter of Lena Horne, and fourthly (from 1980) to Mary Gimbel. With his third wife he had a daughter, Jenny Lumet, who featured in his film Q&A; with Mary Gimbel he had two further daughters.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/culture-obituaries/film-obituaries/8440445/Sidney-Lumet.html
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