On Saturday, April 9, 2011 at 8:43:05 AM UTC-7, Mr. Hole the Magnificent wrote:

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/10/movies/sidney-lumet-director-of-american-classics-dies-at-86.html?_r=1&hp
Sidney Lumet, Director of American Film Classics, Dies at 86
By ROBERT BERKVIST
Published: April 9, 2011
Sidney Lumet, a director who preferred the streets of New York to the
back
lots of Hollywood and whose stories of conscience - "12 Angry Men," "Serpico," "Dog Day Afternoon," "The Verdict," "Network" - became
modern
American film classics, died Saturday morning at his home in
Manhattan. He
was 86.
His stepdaughter, Leslie Gimbel, said the cause was lymphoma.
"While the goal of all movies is to entertain," Mr. Lumet once wrote,
"the
kind of film in which I believe goes one step further. It compels the spectator to examine one facet or another of his own conscience. It stimulates thought and sets the mental juices flowing."
Social issues set his own mental juices flowing, and his best films
not only
probed the consequences of prejudice, corruption and betrayal but
also
celebrated individual acts of courage.
In his first film, "12 Angry Men" (1957), he took his cameras into a
jury
room where the pressure mounted as one tenacious and courageous juror
(Henry
Fonda) slowly convinced the others that the individual on trial for
murder
was in fact innocent. (Justice Sonia M. Sotomayor of the United
States
Supreme Court said the film had an important influence on her law
career.)
Almost two decades later, Mr. Lumet's moral sense remained acute when
he
ventured into satire with "Network" (1976), perhaps his most acclaimed
film.
Based on Paddy Chayefsky's biting script, the film portrays a
television
anchorman who briefly resuscitates his fading career by launching on-
air
tirades against what he perceives as the hypocrisies of American
society.
The film starred William Holden, Faye Dunaway and Peter Finch as the commentator-turned-attack-dog whose proclamation to the world at large
- "I'm
mad as hell and I'm not going to take this anymore!" - became part of
the
American vernacular.
"Network" was nominated for 10 Academy Awards, including best film and
best
director, and won four, including best actor (Mr. Finch), best actress
(Ms.
Dunaway), best original screenplay (Chayevsky) and best supporting
actress
(Beatrice Straight.)
Yet for all the critical success of his films and despite the more
than 40
Academy Award nominations they drew, Mr. Lumet himself never won an
Oscar,
though he was nominated four times as best director. (The other
nominations
were for "12 Angry Men," "Dog Day Afternoon" and "The Verdict.")
Only in 2005 did the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences
present him
with an honorary Academy Award. Manhola Dargis, writing in The New
York
Times, called it a "consolation prize for a lifetime of neglect."
In 2007, in an interview that was videotaped to accompany this
obituary
online, Mr. Lumet was asked how it felt to win an Academy Award at
long
last. He replied, "I wanted one, damn it, and I felt I deserved one."
That he was more a creature of New York than of Hollywood may have
had
something to do with his Oscar night disappointments. For Mr. Lumet,
location mattered deeply, and New York mattered most of all. He was
the
quintessential New York director.
"Locations are characters in my movies," he wrote. "The city is
capable of
portraying the mood a scene requires."
He explored New York early on in "The Pawnbroker" (1964), the story of
a
Holocaust survivor (Rod Steiger), numbed and hardened against humanity
by
the horrors he has endured, who deals with racketeers in his Harlem
pawnshop
until his conscience is reawakened by a vicious crime on his doorstep.
The city loomed large in Mr. Lumet's several examinations of criminal
justice system. Police corruption particularly fascinated him,
beginning
with "Serpico" (1973). The film, based on a book by Peter Maas, was
drawn
from a real-life drama involving two New York City police officers,
David
Durk and Frank Serpico, who told David Burnham, a reporter for The New
York
Times, that they had ample evidence of police graft and corruption. Publication of their story led to the mayoral appointment of a
commission to
investigate the charges and ultimately to major reforms. Both the book
and
the film concentrated on Detective Serpico, played by Al Pacino, and
his
efforts to change the system. Mr. Pacino's performance brought him an
Oscar
nomination.
Mr. Lumet returned to the theme in 1981 with "Prince of the City," for
which
he shared screenwriting credit with Jay Presson Allen. Based on the
book by
Robert Daley, the film dealt with an ambitious detective (Treat
Williams)
who goes undercover to gather evidence for an investigative commission
and
who winds up alienated and alone after being manipulated into
destroying the
lives and careers of many of those around him. Even the teeming
cityscape
has turned barren.
Mr. Lumet focused on criminals, rather than police, in "Dog Day
Afternoon"
(1975), telling the story (again based on fact) of a botched attempt
to rob
a Brooklyn bank. Mr. Pacino again starred, this time as Sonny, the
leader of
an amateurish gang of bank robbers whose plans go awry and who winds
up
taking hostages and demanding jet transport to a foreign country. It
turns
out that Sonny, although he has a wife at home, had planned the
robbery to
pay for his boyfriend's sex-change operation. In 2009 the film was
added to
the National Film Registry by the Library of Congress.
New York, or at least a fantasy version of it, was even the backdrop
for Mr.
Lumet's most uncharacteristic film, "The Wiz," his 1978 musical
version of
the "The Wizard of Oz" starring Michael Jackson and Diana Ross.
Roundly
panned, it was also a box-office failure.
By the time he finished shooting "Night Falls on Manhattan" in 1996,
Mr.
Lumet had made 38 films, 29 of them on location in New York City. That
film,
written by Mr. Lumet and based on another Daley novel, "Tainted
Evidence,"
once again looked at the justice system as it moved from a shootout
with
drug dealers into a revealing courtroom trial.
The courthouse was one of Mr. Lumet's favorite arenas for drama,
beginning
with "12 Angry Men." He returned to it again in "The Verdict" (1982),
with a
screenplay by David Mamet and a cast led by Paul Newman as a down-at-the-heels lawyer who redeems himself and his career when he represents a malpractice victim in a legal battle with a hospital.
But his concerns could also range more broadly, to issues of national survival itself. One of the most sobering films of the cold war era
was his
1964 adaptation of Eugene Burdick and Harvey Wheeler's novel, "Fail-
Safe," a
taut examination of the threat of accidental nuclear war with Henry
Fonda as
the president of the United States and a young Larry Hagman as his Russian-speaking interpreter. The film concluded with a harrowing
suggestion
of an atomic blast on American soil, rendered as a series of glimpses
of
ordinary life - children playing, pigeons taking wing - simply
stopping. The
scenes were from the streets of New York.
Sidney Lumet was born on June 25, 1924, in Philadelphia. His father,
Baruch,
an actor, was born in Poland and moved his family to New York when
Sidney
was a baby and joined the Yiddish Art Theater. By the time he was 4,
Sidney
was appearing onstage with his father, and he went on to make his
Broadway
debut in 1935 as a street kid in Sidney Kingsley's "Dead End." He
appeared
in several more Broadway shows, including Maxwell Anderson's "Journey
to
Jerusalem" in 1940, in which he played the young Jesus.
After wartime service as a radar technician in the Far East, Mr.
Lumet
returned to New York and started directing Off Broadway and in summer
stock.
His big break came in 1950 when he was hired by CBS and became a
director on
the television suspense series "Danger." Other shows followed,
including the
history series "You Are There."
His career soared in 1953 when he began directing original plays for
dramatic series on CBS and NBC, including "Studio One," "Playhouse 90"
and
"Kraft Television Theater," eventually adding some 200 productions to
his
credits. He also returned to the theater to direct Albert Camus's
"Caligula," with Kenneth Haigh as the Roman emperor, and Shaw's "Man
and
Superman," among other plays.
Among the highlights of Mr. Lumet's television years were a full-
length
production of Eugene O'Neill's play "The Iceman Cometh," with Jason
Robards
as the salesman Hickey and "12 Angry Men," which he directed for
television
before turning it into his first film.
Some of Mr. Lumet's early films had their origin in the theater. He
directed
Anna Magnani and Marlon Brando in "The Fugitive Kind" (1960), an
adaptation
of Tennessee Williams's play "Orpheus Descending"; he traveled abroad
to
film part of Arthur Miller's "View from the Bridge" (1962) in Paris,
with
Raf Vallone, Maureen Stapleton and Carol Lawrence, completing the film
on
the Brooklyn waterfront; and he returned to the world of O'Neill to
film
"Long Day's Journey Into Night" (1962), with Katharine Hepburn and
Ralph
Richardson as the tormented Tyrones. His 1968 adaptation of Chekhov's
"Sea
Gull," however, was generally deemed uneven despite a stellar cast
that
included James Mason, Simone Signoret and Vanessa Redgrave.
A trainload of stars turned out for Mr. Lumet's 1974 adaptation of
Agatha
Christie's "Murder on the Orient Express," a project that took him
abroad
again, this time to Britain, France and Turkey, to film the famous
whodunit
in which the detective Hercule Poirot (Albert Finney) must single out
a
murderer from a crowd of suspects that included Lauren Bacall, Ingrid Bergman, Sean Connery and John Gielgud.
There was a run of less than successful films, including "Running on
Empty"
(1988), with Judd Hirsch and Christine Lahti as '60s radicals still
in
hiding from the F.B.I. 20 years after participating in a bombing; the
police
drama "Q & A" (1990), with a screenplay by Mr. Lumet, about a racist
New
York detective (Nick Nolte); and "Critical Care" (1997), a satiric jab
at
the American health care system.
In 1995 Mr. Lumet published a well-received memoir, "Making Movies,"
in
which he summed up his view of directorial style: "Good style, to me,
is
unseen style. It is style that is felt."
In 2001 he returned to television as executive producer, principal
director
and one of the writers of a new courtroom drama for cable television,
"100
Centre Street" (the title was the address of the criminal court
building in
Lower Manhattan). The series, which ran for two seasons on A&E, had
an
ensemble cast with Alan Arkin as an all-too-forgiving judge known as Let-'em-Go
Joe.
The director seemed immune to advancing age. Before long, he was
behind the
camera again. "Find Me Guilty" (2006), which starred Vin Diesel, was
a
freewheeling account of the events surrounding the federal prosecution
of a
notorious New Jersey crime family.
And he marked his 83rd year with the 2007 release of his last feature
film,
"Before the Devil Knows You're Dead," the bleakly riveting story of
two
brothers (Philip Seymour Hoffman and Ethan Hawke) propelled by greed
into a
relentless cycle of mayhem. The film drew raves, and some critics
thought he
deserved a fifth Oscar nomination for his directing.
Mr. Lumet's first three marriages, to the actress Rita Gam, Gloria
Vanderbilt and Gail Jones, the daughter of Lena Horne, ended in
divorce. He
married Mary Gimbel in 1980. She survives him. Besides his
stepdaughter, Ms.
Gimbel, he is also survived by two daughters he had with Ms. Jones,
Amy
Lumet and Jenny Lumet; a stepson, Bailey Gimble; nine grandchildren
and a
great grandson. Mr. Lumet also had a home in East Hampton, on Long
Island.
Ms. Dargis called Mr. Lumet "one of the last of the great movie
moralists"
and "a leading purveyor of the social-issue movie." Yet Mr. Lumet said
he
was never a crusader for social change.
"I don't think art changes anything," he said in The Times online
interview.
"I think we are primarily camp followers. We're not in advance of
anything."
So why make movies?, he was asked.
"I do it because I like it," he replied, "and it's a wonderful way to
spend
your life."

(Youtube upload):

"Sidney Lumet interview on "Making Movies" (1995)"

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