Robert aldrich

Born in Cranston, Rhode Island, United States, on August 9, 1918, Robert Burgess Aldrich was the son of a newspaper editor and grandson of a member of the United States Senate. His mother convinced him to study Economics, but left him convinced that he could make his fortune as a film professional.

He got a contract with RKO, where he first works as a cashier in the production department. He soon rose to assistant director and production manager on films by William A. Wellman , Mervyn LeRoy and Lewis Milestone , and also Robert Rossen , Charles Chaplin and Joseph Losey , with whom he was closely associated, to the point that when they were questioned by the Committee on Un-American Activities, Aldrich would have been subpoenaed if he hadn’t managed to get out thanks to his family connections.

In the early 1950s, he directed episodes of television series, until MGM hired him to shoot his first feature film, The Big Leaguer , with Edward G. Robinson as a real baseball player. The actor Burt Lancaster liked his work very much , who was looking for a director for a film that he was going to launch with his independent company, Hetch-Lancaster. So he hired him to direct the excellent western Apache , with the great actor playing a Native American. It was so successful that the company turned to Aldrich again for Veracruz , also of the same genre, where Lancaster teamed up with Gary Cooper and the Spanish Sara Montiel.

Although he would return to the western sometime ( The Rabbi and the Gunslinger , Ulzana’s Revenge ), he seeks new airs in his next work, The Deadly Kiss , a B-series film noir with a shocking beginning, with a desperate woman trying to stop a car on the street. highway. It adapts a novel by the specialist in the genre Mickey Spillane , starring her most charismatic character, detective Mike Hammer, who after picking up the aforementioned girl will try to help her escape from the thugs she is fleeing from.

Married in 1941 to Harriet Foster, he had four children with her (Adell, Guillermo, Alicia and Kelly) who also work in the film industry. After divorcing in 1965, the director was related to the model Sybille Siegfried.

After founding his own production company, The Associates & Aldrich Company, he launched The Pruner , with which he won the Silver Lion for director in Venice, and which delighted European critics, including the staff of Cahiers du cinéma. With Autumn Leaves, he won the Silver Bear in Berlin, but he was fired before finishing Beasts of the City , which was a turning point in his career, because due to a lack of economic prospects, he ended up directing Sodom and Gomorrah , a peplum in Italy. far below his talent.

He quickly got back into shape with the extraordinary What Happened to Baby Jane? , an unusual mix of black comedy and psychological horror, with two screen greats, Joan Crawford and Bette Davis , as an elderly movie star and her sister, a former child prodigy. It was so successful that Aldrich soon after made a film in the same vein again with Bette Davis and the same writers, Lullaby for a Corpse , about an estranged woman who tries to keep her house when it is going to be expropriated. .

Aldrich excelled in the field of mission impossible commandos during World War II, as seen in The Dirty Dozen , an emblematic film title for male audiences, which barely concealed its criticism of military officers (“Killing generals could become a habit for me”, said the character of Charles Bronson ). They are in the same line Attack , Betrayal in Athens and Commando in the China Sea .

After The Flight of the Phoenix (1968) , which did not obtain the expected collection, Aldrich’s career plummeted, especially after the X rating of his film The Murder of Sister George , about an actress in low hours, where he showed openly the lesbian relationship of the protagonist with her girlfriend, whom she tormented. Nor did the great  Emperor of the North , with Lee Marvin as a homeless man in the Great Depression.

In the last years of Aldrich’s professional work, he only swept with The Bonebreaker , due to the great popularity of Burt Reynolds , who played the leader of a group of prisoners facing their guards in an American football game. Other of his films would have deserved better recognition, like the wonderful Missile Alert , which criticized the government’s performance in the Vietnam War.

Robert Aldrich said goodbye to the cinema in 1981 with Hook Girls , with Peter Falk as the manager of a team of wrestling fighters. He passed away two years later, as a result of a kidney condition.