Director's Spotlight: Sidney Lumet

I haven't forgotten about my Director's Spotlight series, just hadn't done anything about it until now.

One of the forgotten about, or under discussed great filmmakers, Sidney Lumet had a 50 year career of brilliance in cinema. Starting with his seminal film 12 Angry Men, often considered one of the great movies ever made, through to his 2007 crime masterpiece Before the Devil Knows You're Dead, Lumet worked consistently and prolifically. His films are still talked about and revered today, 10+ years after his last movie. Even his book, Making Movies (alongside the epic interview classic Hitchcock/Truffaut, my favorite book about filmmaking) is still talked about today. George Clooney has said that he re-reads Making Movies before each movie he directs so that he has the guidance he needs. So it's odd that Lumet himself doesn't come up in more discussions of the greatest filmmakers of all time. So let's change that!

I think because Lumet adapted his visual style and even his editing for each movie based on what the story needed, it's sometimes thought that there's no "Lumet style", in the auteur tradition. But I think the more of his films you see, the more you realize that you can feel Lumet's style even if it doesn't stylistically feel redundant or repetitive. He carved out his own style, but I love the chapter in Making Movies where he talks about the style/substance dilemma. He talks about how as a filmmaker you must change your style for each film because each story needs a different thing. If you can use the same style in each movie then you're just making the same movie over and over again. So I find it fascinating that he essentially set himself up for it to be difficult for people to recognize a "Lumet style" which might be what's holding him back from being higher on the lists of the greatest filmmakers in cinema history.

The man made a ridiculous amount of movies in seemingly every genre, so there's a lot of ground to cover here. It could be intimidating for newcomers. It also seems like he worked with seemingly every great actor out there, often multiple times. Few directors could claim as many greats wanting to work with them: Al Pacino, Marlon Brando, Henry Fonda, Paul Newman, Sean Connery, Ingrid Bergman, Dustin Hoffman, Albert Finney, Robert Duvall, Faye Dunaway, River Phoenix, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Sophia Loren, Christopher Plummer, Katherine Hepburn, James Mason, Rod Steiger, Walter Matthau, Vanessa Redgrave, you could go on and on. There are so many I didn't list it's crazy.


Anyway, my ratings of his work would look something like this:

1. Dog Day Afternoon - 10/10
2. Before the Devil Knows You're Dead - 10/10
3. The Pawnbroker - 10/10
4. Network 9/10
5. The Verdict - 9/10
6. Long Day's Journey Into Night - 8/10
7. Running on Empty - 8/10
8. Prince of the City - 8/10
9. The Hill - 8/10
10. Serpico - 8/10
11. 12 Angry Men - 7/10
12. Murder on the Orient Express - 7/10
13. Night Falls on Manhattan - 6/10
14. Guilty as Sin - 5/10
15. A Stranger Among Us - 5/10
16. Family Business - 4/10
17. Gloria - 4/10
18. The Wiz - 3/10