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Though not as consistent as Martin Scorsese or Stanley Kubrick, Sidney Lumet is nevertheless a master of cinema. Lumet, who is known for his technical knowledge and his skill to get first-rate performances from his actors, has made over 40 movies. His films are often emotional, but seldom overly sentimental. Lumet often tells intelligent, complex stories. He is politically left-leaning and often t ...  show all 

Though not as consistent as Martin Scorsese or Stanley Kubrick, Sidney Lumet is nevertheless a master of cinema. Lumet, who is known for his technical knowledge and his skill to get first-rate performances from his actors, has made over 40 movies. His films are often emotional, but seldom overly sentimental. Lumet often tells intelligent, complex stories. He is politically left-leaning and often treats socially relevant themes in his films, but he doesn't want to make political movies in the first place. Most of his films are shot in New York. Some of them ("The Serpico (1973)", "Dog Day Afternoon (1975)", "Prince of the City (1981)", "Q & A (1990)" are atmospherically comparable to the tough films of Martin Scorsese. Born on June 25, 1924, in Philadelphia as the son of the actor Baruch Lumet and the dancer Eugenia Wermus Lumet, he made his stage debut as a child actor at the age of four at the Yiddish Art Theater in New York. He played many roles on Broadway in the 1930s (like "Dead End"). Then he got a film role in "One Third of a Nation (1939)". In 1947 he founded an off-Broadway group of actors including Yul Brynner and Eli Wallach. The group consisted of former members of Lee Strasberg's Actors Studio, who had become unsatisfied with Strasberg's concepts. In 1955 Lumet made his stage directing debut. In 1950 Lumet began working at CBS. He became an important TV director. He directed about 150 episodes of the crime series Danger (1952) and 26 episodes of "You Are There" (1953)". Also later, in 1960, when he was a feature film director, he still directed successful teleplays. Lumet made his widely praised feature film debut with the great, brilliantly directed courtroom drama "12 Angry Men (1957)", which won the Golden Bear at the Berlin Film Festival and earned Academy Award nominations for Picture, Director and Adapted Screenplay. The film takes almost entirely place in a jury room. In several Lumet films you can find the motif of the closed space. Lumet's second and third film, "Stage Struck (1958)" and "That Kind of Woman (1959)", are considered less important. (I haven't seen them yet.) Lumet directed Marlon Brando in the imperfect, but good "Fugitive Kind (1959)", an underrated, financially unsuccessful adaptation of Tennessee Williams's "Orpheus Descending". Afterwards he directed the French-Italian Arthur Miller adaptation "The Vu du pont (1961)" ("A View From the Bridge"), which is considered a solid film. (I haven't seen it up to now.) The first half of the 1960s was one of Lumet's most artistically successful periods. "Long Day's Journey Into Night (1962)", a masterful, brilliantly photographed adaptation of the Eugene O'Neill play, is one of several Lumet films about families. The movie earned Katharine Hepburn, Ralph Richardson, Dean Stockwell and Jason Robards deserved acting awards in Cannes and Hepburn an Oscar nomination. Lumet's next film, "Fail-Safe (1964)", a good drama about the Cold War (a bit too America-centered for my taste), suffered a little from comparison to Stanley Kubrick's great, thematically equal satire "Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964)", which was released short before. Afterwards Lumet directed the masterful drama "Pawnbroker (1964)" about a Holocaust survivor who lives in New York and can't overcome his experiences in the Nazi concentration camps. Rod Steiger's unforgettable performance as the pawnbroker earned an Academy Award nomination. Sidney Lumet's intense study "The Hill (1965)" about inhumanity in a military prison camp was excellently directed and had superb performances by Sean Connery (with whom Lumet has made five films up to now) and Harry Andrews, among others. Lumet made the soapy, overly talky, but watchable drama "The Group (1966)" about young upper-class women in the 1930s, and the good spy thriller "The Deadly Affair (1966)" (with a very fine cast including James Mason , Maximilian Schell and Simone Signoret). The late 1960s were a rather unsuccessful period in Lumet's body of work. The comedy "The Bye Bye Braverman (1968)" and the Chekhov adaptation "Sea Gull (1968)" got mixed reviews. "The Appointment (1969)" and "The Last of the Mobile Hot Shots (1970)" were disappointing. Lumet and Joseph L. Mankiewicz directed the Oscar-nominated documentary film "King: A Filmed Record... Montgomery to Memphis (1970)" about Martin Luther King. Lumet's "Anderson Tapes (1971)" (starring Sean Connery), an unsual, but good caper movie, was a box-office hit. After the flop "The Child's Play (1972)" Lumet directed the British film "Offence (1973)", an interesting, a little bit slow-moving character study. Sean Connery delivered a fine performance in this worthwile, but commercially unsuccessful movie. The fine cop thriller "The Serpico (1973)", with a fascinating Al Pacino, was the beginning of the most successful phase of Lumet's career. The film was the first of his films about police corruption in New York City. Al Pacino won the Golden Globe, and the picture earned 2 Oscor nominations. After the less acclaimed "Lovin' Molly (1974)" Lumet's British adaptation of Agatha Christie's whodunit "Murder on the Orient Express (1974)" was another success, a very good, exquisitely photographed film with a well-playing all-star cast (including Albert Finney, Lauren Bacall, Sean Connery and Ingrid Bergman). The movie earned 6 Oscar nominations. Ingrid Bergman won her third Academy Award. Then Sidney Lumet directed the hit "Dog Day Afternoon (1975)", a complex masterpiece about a bank robbery in New York City. Pauline Kael called it "one of the best "New York" movies ever made." The film starred a wonderful Al Pacino and earned 6 Academy Award nominations (including Picture, Director and Pacino) and won the Academy Award for Frank Pierson 's Original Screenplay. Lumet's following film is one of his most famous: the media satire "Network (1976)". It earned 10 Academy Award nominations (including Picture and Director) and won in four categories (Best Actor Peter Finch, Best Actress Faye Dunaway, Best Original Screenplay by Paddy Chayefsky, Best Supporting Actress Beatrice Straight). Sidney Lumet won the Golden Globe for his direction. Lumet won Los Angeles Film Critics Association Awards for his direction in "Dog Day Afternoon (1975)" and "Network (1976)". Both pictures won LAFCA awards for Best Picture too. Lumet's overly naturalistic adaptation of Peter Shaffer's stage play "Equus (1977)" earned Oscar nominations for the actors Richard Burton and Peter Firth and for Peter Shaffer's screenplay. The musical "Wiz, The (1978/I)" earned four Oscar nominations, but was a critical and commercial misfire. The strange comedy "Just Tell Me What You Want (1980)" featured a fine 'Alan King ' performance and had funny moments, but was uneven nonetheless. Lumet won the New York Film Critics Circle Award for his great direction in "Prince of the City (1981)", one of his best and most typical films. It's a film about police corruption, but not a redo of "Serpico (1973)". Starring a powerful Treat Williams, it's an extraordinarily multi-layered film. In his highly informative book "Making Movies" (1995) Lumet describes the film in the following way: "When we try to control everything, everything winds up controlling us. Nothing is what it seems." It's also a movie about values, about friendship and about drug addiction. The film is (like "Serpico (1973)") based on true events. Lumet himself and Jay Presson Allen adapted Robert Daley's book "Prince of the City". Their screenplay earned an Academy Award nomination. The picture, Lumet and Treat Williams earned Golden Globe nominations. After his less important, but entertaining thriller "Deathtrap (1982)" Lumet directed another masterful courtroom drama (after "12 Angry Men (1957)"): "Verdict (1982)", starring Paul Newman , James Mason , Jack Warden and Charlotte Rampling. The picture, Lumet, Newman, Mason and David Mamet's Adapted Screenplay earned well-deserved Academy Award nominations. The following film in Lumet's filmography is the controversial drama "The Daniel (1983)" with Timothy Hutton, the adaptation of E. L. Doctorow's "The Book of Daniel" about two young people whose parents were executed for alleged espionage. I haven't seen the film yet, but Lumet writes in "Making Movies": "Despite its critical and financial failure, I think it's one of the best pictures I've ever done." Afterwards Lumet's reputation fell a bit. The comedy "Garbo Talks (1984)", which I haven't seen up to now, is considered a watchable film. "Power (1986)" and "Morning After (1986)" (which earned Jane Fonda an Oscar nomination) were too uneven and a little too pretentious to be successful. But then Lumet made another real masterpiece: "Running on Empty (1988)". Although it is one of his less-known films, I tend to call it Lumet's best one. It's thematically similar to "Daniel (1983)". In "Running on Empty (1988)" a family is on the run from the FBI, because the parents (played by Christine Lahti and Judd Hirsch) committed a bomb attack on a napalm laboratory in 1971 to stop the war in Vietnam. The son (played by River Phoenix) gets into an inner conflict: He loves a girl (Martha Plimpton) and wishes to stay with her and to study music. But that would destroy the family, and Danny knows that his parents need him. The film features magnificent performances by all the actors. River Phoenix earned a well-deserved Oscar nomination for his extraordinarily moving performance. Christine Lahti won the LAFCA award for her equally excellent interpretation. Naomi Foner's screenplay won the Golden Globe and earned an Oscar nomination. The film earned four other Golden Globe nominations as well (Picture, Director, Lahti and Phoenix). After the entertaining, well-acted, but still disappointing gangster comedy "Family Business (1989)" (with Sean Connery, Dustin Hoffman and Matthew Broderick ) Lumet directed the underrated cop thriller "Q & A (1990)" with fine performances by Nick Nolte, Timothy Hutton, Armand Assante and others. Though a bit constructed at times, "Q & A (1990)" is still a very good and complex film about corruption and racism. In the beginning of the 1990s Lumet directed two unsatisfying films: "Stranger Among Us, A (1992)", which is basically an average variation on Peter Weir's "Witness (1985)", and the rather sterile courtroom thriller "Guilty as Sin (1993)". But he had a sort of comeback with his imperfect, but fascinating crime drama "Night Falls on Manhattan (1997)", which is thematically similar to "Serpico (1973)", "Prince of the City (1981)" and "Q & A (1990)". In 1993 Sidney Lumet received the D. W. Griffith Award of the Directors Guild of America.  hide