1938 – Sergei Eisenstein, D. Vasilyev – Following October in 1927, Sergei Eisenstein experienced a frustrating ten-year hiatus during which he completed no films. He was out of favor with Stalin and for a short time he worked at Paramount in Hollywood at the all-too-common trade of writing screenplays that went unproduced. His association with novelist Upton Sinclair, Sinclair…
1934 – Cecil B. De Mille – Charlton Heston tells a great story in his autobiography about working with Cecil B. De Mille on The Greatest Show on Earth. One day De Mille was instructing the assembled cast when he noticed one of the extras in the back whispering to her friend. De Mille imperiously called her down, wondered what she could possibly have to say that was more important th…
1935 – Cecil B. De Mille – Usually when a De Mille movie is bad, something still provides compensation—the exaggeration, the spectacle, even the bad taste can amuse. The Crusades may be one of the most hollow movies from a director who is all too often known for spectacle at the expense of character, pageantry without drama. The film centers on King Richard the Lionheart (Hen…
1987 – Steven Spielberg – Steven Spielberg's tale about a British boy who gets separated from his parents in Shanghai during World War II and winds up in a Japanese prison camp is an exquisitely made film. Based on the autobiographical novel by J.G. Ballard, it contains a number of powerful dramatic scenes, interesting performances by its cast, and the kind of visual artistry…
1960 – Otto Preminger – When a terrorist bomb blast damages the King David Hotel about two-thirds through the very lengthy Exodus, it wakes up the movie and leads to a somewhat less ponderous final hour. But then almost anything would be better than the heavy-handedness of the pre-intermission hours of Otto Preminger's epic based on Leon Uris' best-selling novel. It&#x…
1963 – Nicholas Ray – Some films, like Casablanca, illustrate the happy accident of filming just a day or two ahead of the writing of the script and somehow having the hectic process produce a masterpiece. Others, like 55 Days at Peking, show how risky and self-defeating such last-minute writing and plotting can be. The film focuses on a British ambassador (David Niven), an American…
1982 – Richard Attenborough – In some ways, it is surprising that Western audiences, especially American ones, embraced this biography of Gandhi as enthusiastically as they did. After all, this enigmatic, complex man stood firmly opposed to many twentieth-century Western beliefs. Mohandas Gandhi believed in returning to a simple, non-industrial village life instead of relying on the…
1944, 1946 – Sergei Eisenstein – A film pageant, the two parts of Ivan the Terrible are stunning in their visual beauty, static in their development. To accept the film on its own terms, one must modify some traditional expectations since director Sergei Eisenstein subordinates seemingly everything to the pictorial design. The actors—star Nikolai Cherkasov complained about so…
1987 – Bernardo Bertolucci – Bernardo Bertolucci's generally acclaimed biography of Pu Yi, who went from being an Emperor to an ordinary citizen of China, boasts some spectacular cinematography, costume design, and location filming inside the Forbidden City. Throughout the story, from the moment the boy Pu Yi (John Lone) assumes the throne, to his imprisonment and re-educatio…
1966 – Fred Zinnemann – Robert Bolt's celebrated play about Sir Thomas More and his clash with Henry VIII finds the right director in Fred Zinnemann, who specialized in films of conscience. More (Paul Scofield) sees the king's (Robert Shaw) desire to divorce Catherine of Aragon and marry Anne Boleyn in moral terms. The film sanitizes the Renaissance and its hero (as Mo…
1986 – Roland Joffe – Robert Bolt's distinguished career as a writer took in some of the screen's most impressive epics: Lawrence of Arabia, Doctor Zhivago, A Man for All Seasons, and Ryan's Daughter. Bolt's script for The Mission falls below the level set by his better screen work. The film, set in eighteenth-century South America, concerns the church an…
1975 – Robert Altman – Influencing both movies and television with its multiple plot lines, improvisation and hand-held cameras, Nashville is more than a moldy museum piece. Director Robert Altman departs from some of the assumptions of mainstream movies. He diminishes plot and focuses on the interesting recesses locked away in his characters. The people in his films—like the…
1994 – Patrice Chereau – In this age of restored- and director's-cut editions of films, the assumption seems to be that the more footage that can be put back in a film the better. Queen Margot is a film that found more appreciative audiences, however, when some judicious pruning cut its running time from 167 to 144 minutes. The film debuted at the Cannes Film Festival in 1994…
1981 – Warren Beatty – An intelligent and historical saga, Reds features Warren Beatty at the height of his Hollywood power. Beatty co-wrote with Trevor Griffiths (with an uncredited assist from Robert Towne and Elaine May), directed, and produced, as well as starred. Reds traces the lives of radical writers John Reed (Beatty) and Louise Bryant (Diane Keaton) from their meeting in P…
1934 – Josef von Sternberg – In his autobiography Fun in a Chinese Laundry, director Josef von Sternberg refers to The Scarlet Empress as “a relentless excursion in style.” If anything, that assessment understates the baroque qualities of this film supposedly based, as the opening titles claim, on the diaries of Catherine the Great. (For the record, historian Carolly E…
1993 – Steven Spielberg – Hailed as one of the best pictures of the year and winner of multiple Oscars, Spielberg's heart-wrenching adaptation of the book by Thomas Keneally is also one of the successful director's best films, a powerful drama with a depth of artistry on every level that serves the tragic subject matter well. Other films about the Holocaust have done a…
1954 – Akira Kurosawa – Seven Samurai is another masterpiece by Japanese director Akira Kurosawa. It tells of a small farming community in sixteenth-century Japan beset with marauding bandits. Kurosawa's inspired by the American western, especially the films of John Ford, and the Seven Samurai itself inspired the classic western The Magnificent Seven. The elders of the group …
1960 – Stanley Kubrick – Although Spartacus is probably Stanley Kubrick's least personal film, you can still recognize in this story of a slave-led rebellion in ancient Rome the director's continual interest in the idea of dehumanization. Kubrick inherited the directorial chores from Anthony Mann, who had a difference of opinion with star and executive producer Kirk Do…
Some historical epics, like Gandhi, adopt a biographical approach. In another attempt to bring an epic dimension to the story of a life, Richard Atten-borough directed Chaplin (1992), but the film's 144 minutes rush through the events of the great comedian's life all too quickly. If too many three-hour films would benefit from cutting an hour or so, Chaplin may be one of the rare cas…