As I looked at the schedule for today I noticed William Wellman’s name in there. The movie he directed that’s on the schedule today is Stingaree from 1934, starring Irene Dunne, Richard Dix, and Mary Boland. I’ve never seen Stingaree but that notwithstanding, I’ve always listed William Wellman as a favorite director, along with many others. I list him as a favorite because he directed movies that I love such as Wings, The Public Enemy, So Big, Night Nurse, A Star is Born, and Nothing Sacred. In point of fact, however, I have not seen at least half of the movies he directed. For every The High and the Mighty, which I have seen, there’s a Magic Town, which I haven’t. I’ve seen The Ox-Bow Incident, I haven’t seen Track of the Cat. Beau Geste, Story of G.I. Joe, Battleground? Yes. The Robin Hood of El Dorado, Reaching for the Sun, My Man and I? No. But does that matter? Do you have to see everything a director does to declare him or her a favorite? Would seeing a bunch of movies you don’t think are very good alter the fact that there are plenty of others by the same director that you think are great? No and no.
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Let’s take a second and look back at the movies directed by William Wellman that I listed above, which in and of itself is only a smattering of what I have seen by him (he directed over eighty movies, after all). I listed Wings, The Public Enemy, So Big, Night Nurse, A Star is Born, Nothing Sacred, The High and the Mighty, The Ox-Bow Incident, Beau Geste, Story of G.I. Joe, and Battleground. I’ve seen several more of Wellman’s movies but even if those eleven I listed were the only ones I’d seen, I think that would be enough to adequately understand that I like Wellman’s style. True, I may see all of those lesser known Wellman movies and decide he wasn’t that great after all but I think the chances of that are slim. I realize directors of the studio era couldn’t do a lot about assignment selection but I trust that Wellman, even with sub-par material, would make it watchable. And I think if you’re the director responsible for the eleven titles I’ve listed above, you’ve already made your case as a great director.
Look at another director I regularly list as a favorite, Michael Curtiz. He had over 170 director credits in his career! I can tell you right now, I have not seen even close to all of them nor will I ever. And yet, I’m confident in listing him as not only a favorite director, but a great director. But how can I do that if I only have a relatively small sample to work with? Just because I think Doctor X, Mystery of the Wax Museum, and Captain Blood are great doesn’t mean I’d feel the same way about The Perfect Specimen, Mountain Justice, and Gold is Where You Find It, three of his movies I haven’t seen. But there’s The Adventures of Robin Hood, Yankee Doodle Dandy, and Casablanca. Casablanca! And there are smaller, lesser celebrated films of his, like The Kennel Club Murders and Black Fury, both of which I think are terrific. Whenever I have seen a lesser celebrated or lesser known movie by Curtiz, I have always found them to be excellently paced and exciting. The camera moves, the shots pivot back and forth, the characters really connect to each other and sizzle onscreen. Curtiz had a gift and while I haven’t seen even close to everything he did, I’ve seen enough to know his talent.
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Besides, no artist ever creates one great work after another. Even if all you know by a certain artist is pretty good to great, that’s probably because you just haven’t seen all the stuff that was tossed out the window. One director that I list as a favorite whose oeuvre I have almost seen in its entirety is Stanley Kubrick. Except for the three shorts attributed to him in the fifties and the 1953 effort, Fear and Desire, I have seen every one of his movies from Killer’s Kiss to Eyes Wide Shut. I have not liked all of them but each one showed me something that told me the guy behind the camera not only knew what he was doing but was pretty damn good at it. For the record, I’m not a big fan of Spartacus, Lolita, or A Clockwork Orange, but none for the reason that I think they are badly done or directed in any way. They all fail for me in several small ways while they succeed for me in several other small ways that kind of balance out to a collective shrug. It happens. But the truth is, I don’t feel any more or less confident ranking Kubrick as a great or favorite director than I do Curtiz despite the fact that I have seen a far greater proportion of Kubrick’s movies.
Let’s go a little more extreme: Francis Ford Coppola. He’s a personal favorite despite the fact that I actively dislike or even hate many of his movies. It’s possible, in fact, that I dislike more of his movies than I like and somehow still can confidently call him both a favorite and a great. I think movies like Rumble Fish and Bram Stoker’s Dracula are absolute messes but fascinating in their messiness. I unapologetically love One from the Heart but concede that a part of that reason is because the movie is operatically false and indulgent. I think Apocalypse Now is a great movie and deserving of its high ranking on the Sight and Sound Poll (ranked in the international poll as the 14th greatest film of all time) and I think that it’s great because Francis Ford Coppola wadded subtlety up in a ball and flushed it down the toilet before the first day of shooting. In other words, even in the Coppola movies I think are bad or just don’t work, there’s something there special. Something that shows an artist behind the camera creating, just not having a good day of it. So while I think, and you may disagree, that Peggy Sue Got Married or Twixt are both pretty bad, I think they’re bad in a way that shows an artist crashing in a glorious fireball against his own ambitions. Hell, in Twixt he even grapples with his own son’s death… but it still doesn’t work. Nonetheless, fascinating. It’s movies like Jack and The Rainmaker that disappoint me far more with Coppola because they’re so dull and average.
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It’s possible for a director to have a fluke hit or an anomaly and never produce much else worth watching. But it’s rare to find directors with ten or twelve good to great movies to their credit and feel you still have to see them all just to make sure. I still haven’t seen every movie directed by Alfred Hitchcock. I’ve seen almost everything from 1934 on but plenty of his early period still eludes me. And there are quite a few films in his career that I have seen that do absolutely nothing for me, from Stage Fright to Torn Curtain to Topaz, but none of that overrides Notorious, Rear Window, or Psycho. Alfred Hitchcock is a great director and a personal favorite and I know that. So is William Wellman, Michael Curtiz, Stanley Kubrick, and Francis Ford Coppola. For most of them, I may have only seen a sampling, but when there are hundreds of thousands of movies out there to watch, a sampling is sometimes the best we can do.