Sidney lumet

He loved the cinema. He is noticeable in each of his films, even in the least accomplished ones. Sidney Lumet was a daring director, and his works are nonetheless marvelous classicism. You care about his characters, and you believe the dilemmas they face. “Prince of urban cinema”, we could say, paraphrasing the title of one of his best films, he has approached the police and judicial system in an ever new way, with the necessary ethics that should be his backbone. Verdict? A great filmmaker.

Sidney Lumet was born on June 25, 1924 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA. Although he is without a doubt a filmmaker linked to New York City, as much or more than Woody Allen himself , the vast majority of his movies take place in the Big Apple. Son of the actor Baruch Lumet and the dancer Eugenia Wermus, he also developed his artistic interest at an early age, since at the age of four he walked on the stage of the Yiddish Art Theater in New York. In the 1930s he was acting on Broadway, he was one of the urchins in “Dead End”, the Sidney Kingsley play . At fourteen he appeared in a film, …One Third of a Nation… , where he was the son of Sylvia Sidney .. Clearly his interests as a teenager were acting, so in 1947 he joined a group of actors dissatisfied with the Actor’s Studio Method, who were acting off-Broadway, including Yul Brynner . and Eli Wallach .

Meanwhile, a new medium threatened the empire of cinema: television. And Lumet was interested in the thing. With experience of how actors handled themselves on stage, the young artist got a position at CBS, and from 1951 he gained valuable experience in live television shootings of the Danger and You Are There series , so he was he considers himself one of the filmmakers of the so-called “television generation”, to which Delbert Mann and John Frankenheimer , Martin Ritt and Arthur Penn also belong . He would not leave the small screen until 1960, and would still return to it many years later, with the series The Courts of Center Street.. He finally opted for telling stories, rather than interpreting them as an actor. For him, being a director was “the best job in the world.”

For her feature film debut, Lumet couldn’t have gotten off to a better start.12 Merciless Men (1957) combined the best of his theatrical experience with actors, with a stupendous cinematographic sense that made the best of the stage of a room where a jury, apparently convinced of the guilt of the man they are to judge, sees his judgment questioned. position for the only one of the twelve components, wonderful Henry Fonda , who is not so clear about things. The filmmaker gave the bell by winning the Golden Bear at the Berlin Festival, in addition to being nominated for an Oscar in the categories of film, director and screenplay.

Starting out so heavy weighs, and his following films,Stage Struck (1958) andThat Kind of Woman (1959), did not measure up. More interesting was a string of films with a solid literary base, plays by authors of enormous prestige:Snakeskin (1959) -based on the play by Tennessee Williams , with Marlon Brando , Anna Magnani and Joanne Woodward- ,View from the Bridge (1961) -by Arthur Miller , with Raf Vallone- ,Long Journey into Night (1962) -by Eugene O’Neill , with Katharine Hepburn and Ralf Richardson-. Having acquired the security with these titles, he launched into the adaptation of a novel,The Pawnbroker (1964), about a Jew locked in on himself in his New York pawnshop, who, a victim of Nazi persecution, has lost his connection with human beings. Rod Steiger did a splendid job, and Lumet explored his own Jewish roots through this character. He would later adapt Anton Chekhov inThe Seagull (1968) and Peter Shaffer inEquus (1977).

Lumet’s filmography is extensive, more than 40 titles, and some are more interesting than others. As he himself explains in his indispensable and highly entertaining book “This is how movies are made”, sometimes the simple reason that he couldn’t stand still was enough to make a movie, he had to make movies, even if a project didn’t convince him one hundred percent. one hundred.

In his films there is a clear interest in telling human stories, almost always urban, with well-defined characters, where they face important troubles and moral dilemmas, sometimes in a heartbreaking way, with psychological and often physical violence. Of course, the films that look at the legal, police and judicial system stand out in his cinema, with the desire for justice and the many corruptions involved. They are great titles, in addition to 12 Angry Men ,The offense (1972),Serpico (1973),Dog Afternoon (1975),The Prince of the City (1981),Final Verdict (1982),A place nowhere (1988),Night falls on Manhattan (1997),Find me guilty (2006), and his latest film,Before the devil knows you’re dead (2007). And they affect in the same direction, but with more debatable results,Super Coup in Manhattan (1971),District 34: total corruption (1990) andGlory (1999) .

The director takes risks and is sometimes wrong. And, best of all, he admits it. He knows that sometimes he has made films of little interest, and his only excuse -which he does not pretend to be- is that he needed to tell a story with the camera. One of his most failed titles is clearlyThe Magician (1978), his African-American remake ofThe Wizard of Oz , with Michael Jackson . It wasn’t very funny either.Family business (1989), one of family thieves, orA Stranger Among Us (1992), a thriller in Jewish settings with Melanie Griffith .

His adaptation of Agatha Christie gives an idea of ​​Lumet’s off-road capacity Murder on the Orient Express (1974), one of his most popular films; eitherNetwork. An implacable world (1976), sharp criticism of the world of television and the ambitions it arouses; the media issue, in fact, was already part of Dog Afternoon , based on a true event. The prison film during World War II is remarkableThe hill (1965), and although it failed,The group (1966) is a good attempt to paint a group of women of the same generation.

Curiously, the prizes resist him. He has been nominated for an Oscar four times for best director, and once for screenwriting, but he only received the honorary Oscar in 2005; Seventeen of his actors have been Oscar nominated, with awards going to four for Peter Finch (posthumous), Faye Dunaway , and Beatrice Straight for Network , and Ingrid Bergman for Murder on the Orient Express . He, too, has gone empty-handed four times at Cannes, though in return he had a Silver Shell at San Sebastian for Snake Skin .

Lumet has been married four times: to actresses Rita Gam and Gloria Vanderbilt, to Gail Lumet Buckley, mother of his two daughters, and to Mary Gimbel. His offspring Jenny Lumet has carried on in the family’s film tradition; In addition to being an actress in three of her father’s films, she was the screenwriter for the estimable filmRachel’s Wedding (2008), directed by Jonathan Demme .