Tonight on TCM (late tonight) a classic from James Whale airs and it’s one of my favorites. No, it’s not Frankenstein, The Invisible Man, The Bride of Frankenstein or even Old Dark House. It’s The Man in the Iron Mask and it’s an excellent adaptation of the famous story by Alexandre Dumas though it’s rarely thought of when one thinks of Whale’s career as a director. That’s because even though Whale did more non-horror movies than he did horror, he is associated with horror far more than any other genre. Other non-horror classics he directed are Waterloo Bridge in 1931 and Showboat in 1936, both excellent versions of those stories. Still, it’s the horror movies that stick. But if I had to rank the best non-horror Whale movie, it would be The Man in the Iron Mask, which may or may not have to do with the fact that I love pretty much any version of Dumas’ work brought to the screen. But it also has to do with Whale’s skill behind the camera and and, sometimes, picking a director’s greatest movie outside that director’s associated genre can be an interesting exercise in understanding the director’s talents.
John Ford is associated with westerns (hell, he even said so himself – surely you know the quote) even though he made more movies that weren’t westerns than most directors make movies period. But since some of those westerns are Stagecoach, My Darling Clementine, and The Searchers (and I’m leaving off many other all-time great westerns he directed), Ford tends to be associated with the genre. So if someone asked me to name my favorite John Ford that wasn’t a western, it would be tough because all my favorite Fords are westerns. And although many of his non-westerns are classics, like The Grapes of Wrath, How Green was My Valley, or The Quiet Man, they’re not my favorites. No, my favorite non-western Ford is, and I’ll probably get some guff for this, The Hurricane. I simply love that movie and still consider it the best disaster movie out there. The actual hurricane sequence, done with a mix of miniature work and full scale stunt work, is pretty amazing but, I’ll admit it, I like the whole soap opera story too. It really is the prototype for all the melodramatic disaster movies that followed decades later.
Martin Scorsese’s name is almost synonymous with the gangster movie. Whether it’s small time hoods in Mean Streets or the big time killers of Goodfellas, Scorsese is connected to crime. Even in movies like Raging Bull, there’s a definite element of organized crime present, fixing the fights. But let’s face it, at this point, Scorsese has done much more non-gangster related cinema than not. From Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore to Hugo, Scorsese has a long and varied career, but I’d have to put my favorite non-gangster Scorsese as King of Comedy. But wait, you say, that still has crime, in the form of a demented lead character kidnapping his idol. True, it does. In that case, I’ll go with his documentary, My Voyage to Italy, as good a primer on post-war Italian cinema as you likely to ever see. Scorsese has done a few documentaries at this point and this is his best.
Alfred Hitchcock was known as the Master of Suspense and it’s true, most of his movies deal with suspenseful elements. However, with Hitch, it’s not so easy. It’s not like his suspenseful films have a lot of connecting threads. Sure, The Lady Vanishes, Spellbound, Strangers on a Train, and North by Northwest are all very suspenseful but vastly different as well. One might even list Psycho as the movie that stands out from the rest of Hitchcock because it’s a pure horror film and that, along with The Birds, are the only two times he did outright horror. But what we probably mean with Hitch is no sense of the macabre whatsoever which leaves us with such unpopular choices as Champagne (1928) or Strauss’ Great Waltz (1934), done just before he finally permanently settled into doing the suspense films he’s known for, directing The Man Who Knew Too Much a year later. Permanently, that is, except for Mr. and Mrs. Smith, with Carole Lombard and Robert Montgomery. But the fact is, I don’t really like that one much either. I think this is why most people point to The Trouble with Harry as an example of a Hitchcock comedy, because it stands out enough from the rest of his work to count as different than his other movies but stays true to his strengths at the same time. In other words, with Hitch, I can’t really pick one outside of his normal mode that I really like. I guess he’s a good argument that sometimes a director has to stick with what they do best.
Many directors changed their associations early on. Steven Spielberg was known for action/adventure/sci-fi at first but quickly moved into many other genres, too many to link him to any specific one anymore. Woody Allen started out as a comedy director only but has now done so many dramas, including thrillers, that he’s hardly thought of as a director of only comedy. Other directors, like Howard Hawks and Michael Curtiz, wore so many genre hats the tougher thing with them is to try and find the movie types that do dominate their catalog. Still other directors leave a limited choice: Favorite George Lucas directed movie that isn’t sci-fi or a space opera? American Graffiti because, well, that’s it (it’s also his best movie). I’m not sure what Carol Reed’s type of movie is but I know Oliver! falls outside of it, somehow, and so that’s got to be the choice there. Federico Fellini falls more into an early Fellini type and a later Fellini type than a genre type. Same with Bergman. Kurasawa has the period pieces and the modern day movies but neither seems to be his type, so to speak, and so it’s hard to pick a movie for any of them. Still, it can be done because we associate the director with a style even if not with a genre. And when they step outside that style, it can be just as instructive of their talents as when they stay firmly inside it.