In partnership with The Film Foundation, Turner Classic Movies is proud to bring you this exclusive monthly column by iconic film director and classic movie lover Martin Scorsese February 2016.
FEBRUARY IS ALWAYS OSCAR® MONTH ON TCM. This year, they've decided to program according to degrees of separation and closeness--in other words, Robert Ryan is in Bad Day at Black Rock at 3:30pm and Battle of the Bulge at 5pm, co-starring with Robert Shaw, who is also in The Sting at 8pm, and so on. I looked at the line-up of the 300+ programmed pictures and, as a thought exercise, decided to see which directors turned up most frequently. John Ford? He made 6. So did Billy Wilder and George Stevens. John Huston and Vincente Minnelli made 7, and so did William Dieterle, a name that is not quite as well known today as the others. George Cukor and William Wyler made 8, and so did Michael Curtiz, the man who made Yankee Doodle Dandy and Casablanca, and is perhaps a little better known now than Dieterle.
And whose name appears the most? Surprisingly, with ten pictures, it's Mervyn LeRoy. When you consider all of these directors and the range of the pictures included here, you have an interesting snapshot of Hollywood history. Among these ten directors, four of them (Curtiz, Dieterle, Wilder and Wyler), like many other directors of their era, were European emigrés. Curtiz and Dieterle were workhorses at Warner Bros. for most of their careers, making biographies of everyone from Benito Juarez to Louis Pasteur to Cole Porter, along with adventure films, melodramas, patriotic war pictures, musicals, adaptations of Shakespeare and Hugo...you name it. Their individual outputs are astonishing. LeRoy worked alongside them at Warners before he left for MGM, and his career is roughly parallel to theirs. Just to give you an idea of how prolific these men were: in 1932, they directed six pictures each, and all of them are good. John Ford averaged about three films a year in the '30s. Cukor, Stevens and Wyler started a bit later, and they had different kinds of careers: they were prolific but they weren't workhorses, and each became known fairly quickly as exclusively A-picturemakers. Wilder, Huston and Minnelli came in a decade later, and they had different kinds of sensibilities--Minnelli was brought in from Broadway, and Wilder and Huston were among the first of the writer-directors.
All of the pictures made by these men reflected the shock and tragedy of the war, and the growing unease of life back home in the late '40s and throughout the '50s. (Ford, Stevens, Wyler and Huston actually went to war, and the experience really changed them as moviemakers and as people, as Mark Harris describes in his invaluable book Five Came Back.) As the old studio system was coming apart, Curtiz and LeRoy remained prolific, but most of their pictures seemed less in tune with the moment, a little old-fashioned. Dieterle, who was apparently tainted by the red scare but never officially blacklisted, moved back to Germany in the late '50s. Wilder and Cukor and Huston made it into the '80s and I think that of them all, Huston was the one who adapted best to the times--the vast shifts in production and taste and practice. If you consider them from this angle, taken altogether, the 73 films made by these directors that are included in this year's Oscar® salute (73 and ½ counting Minnelli's episode of The Story of Three Loves) tell the story of Hollywood moviemaking.
