Actors and directors have distinct career tracks much of the time. If they’re a big star, like Cary Grant, they have a type of role that works well for them, and they stick to it throughout their career. For directors, it’s often the same thing. But sometimes, perhaps even as a result, I tend to lose track of directors’ late career. It has never felt like something that was by design but maybe it is. I began thinking about it recently when I read Richard Brody’s piece in The New Yorker on director’s late movies often being better than their earlier efforts. In the piece, he is reminded of something he once said: “If you think that someone’s first or second film in a long career is their best, you don’t really like their work. Artists grow.” It’s one of those statements that sounds clever and thoughtful at first glance but runs into problems with deeper analysis. After all, artists grow in many different ways and perhaps onwards and upwards is not always the direction their growth takes.
The obvious case for a lot of people of a cinema artist who did do his best work right out of the starting gate would be Orson Welles. His first theatrical release, Citizen Kane, is still regularly considered one of the two or three greatest films ever made, depending on which list you’re looking at. Of course, the strange thing is, I happen to agree with Brody here because, despite finding Kane absolutely magnificent, I find Touch of Evil even better. I find it a fuller, richer experience than his earlier work even though I find that earlier work still pulsing with a cinematic energy rarely seen in anyone else’s work.
But Touch of Evil is mid-career for Welles, not late career. Late career for Welles would be Falstaff (Chimes at Midnight), The Deep, and F for Fake. I love Falstaff, have never seen The Deep, and am only rather lukewarm on F for Fake. His late mid-career work, The Trial, is more of a favorite than any of those but what strikes me even more is how, when thinking about all of this, I realized I often miss a lot of a director’s late career work. I only saw F for Fake and Falstaff for the first time within the last five to seven years.
It’s something that happens across the boards for me and I don’t know if it’s because I think art is a young man’s game or I’m just lazy but early Vonnegut, I’ve read. Late Vonnegut, I haven’t. Early Dylan, I’ve listened to, late Dylan, as in anything after 1980, I haven’t. I hear he’s done great stuff since the sixties but I haven’t had the desire to listen to it to find out. It’s the same with movies. Take Alfred Hitchcock. As recently as 2010, I had still not seen Topaz, Torn Curtain, or Frenzy. I finally saw all three, begrudgingly, that year because I was writing up a birthday post on him and didn’t really like a one of them, not even Frenzy. I felt it was the best of the three but still, nothing like Shadow of a Doubt or Notorious or Psycho or Vertigo. Of course, as Brody himself points out, those are pretty late in his career too just by virtue of the fact that his career was so long that a movie made almost twenty years before his last one could still be considered late career. I think Hitchcock’s mid-career, like Welles, was his best period.
But when I look at other directors, I see the same thing happening with my viewing record of their later works. Howard Hawks late career is one in which I have only seen a couple, if we take late fifties to 1970 to be his late career. Those two would be Rio Bravo and Hatari. I have not seen his last four films. Yes, I’m admitting that right here for all to see. I have not seen Rio Lobo. Nor El Dorado, Red Line 7000, or Man’s Favorite Sport. Maybe it’s because I didn’t particularly care for Hatari, I don’t know, but nothing has ever compelled me to check out those specific titles.
Elia Kazan’s last four films are America, America, The Arrangement, The Visitors, and The Last Tycoon. Haven’t seen one of them. Amarcord is the latest Fellini movie I’ve seen. If I hadn’t seen Fanny and Alexander, the latest Bergman for me would be The Serpent’s Egg. Jean-Luc Godard has directed at least fifty movies since the seventies but except for a couple of exceptions, I pretty much check out after Sympathy for the Devil from 1968. Why?
Well, starting in the seventies, I had a few directors I followed rather passionately. Martin Scorsese was one of them and by the early nineties, starting with Casino, his movies stopped exciting me. From there to Kundun and Bringing Out the Dead and Gangs of New York and on, nothing he’s done has really appealed to me in any meaningful way. Another was Woody Allen. He had me up through Deconstructing Harry. After that, starting with Small Time Crooks and Matchpoint, which everyone else but me seemed to like, he lost me. Honestly, I’ve only seen one movie of his in the last ten years. The other was Francis Ford Coppola and he zoomed off the map for me pretty fast. I loved everything up to and including the much maligned One from the Heart but after that, starting with the rather stale The Cotton Club, the banal The Outsiders, and the confused Rumble Fish, I got off the boat. And so I think the reason I pass on so many late career movies is because I have had too many experiences where the late career movies never matched up to the earlier work.
I guess I accept Brody’s obvious premise, artists grow, because who wouldn’t? Of course they grow. But at a certain point, the growth decelerates and they start backtracking. I think there are some exceptions, of course. Even though I am not a particular fan of his work, I believe Steven Spielberg has honestly gotten better and better with each passing year. Something like Bridge of Spies is a far more confident and complete work than much of his earlier dramatic efforts. And there are obvious exceptions in the other direction, like Welles’ famous Citizen Kane debut. But for the most part, I think artists reach a zenith before an inevitable decline and I think that zenith, usually the midpoint of their career, is where their work really shines. I think Welles’ best work was Touch of Evil, Wyler’s The Letter, Hawks’ Red River, Kazan’s On the Waterfront, Fellini’s La Dolce Vita, Bergman’s Persona. I lose track of their later careers and I think it is by choice. I think I want to stop watching before everything starts to slip away.