Movie Directors? Who Needs ‘Em?

John McDonough
Wall Street Journal, 25 March 2002

We journalists quickly learn that one of the privileges of a press card is the license it gives us to seek out people we’ve long admired from a distance, then prevail upon them to endure our questions in the name of publicity. That was how I came to corner Alexander Mackendrick a dozen years ago at the California Institute for the Arts, where he had set up the film program in the 1970s after making his last picture in 1967.

Mackendrick, who died in 1993 at the age of 81, was the man who directed the original Sweet Smell of Success, the cat-and-mouse tale of a Kane-like Manhattan gossip columnist and a small-time press agent who bullies and grovels with an impartial amorality. Originally a major flop that became, over time, a minor classic (and gains more fans every year), it has now been reinvented by Marvin Hamlish, Craig Carnelia and John Guare as a Broadway musical. Whether John Lithgow’s J.J. Hunsecker and Brian D’Arcy James’s Sidney Falco are a match for Burt Lancaster’s and Tony Curtis’s originals is for others to judge. Right now it’s Mackendrick I want to talk about.

For years two Mackendrick pictures had fascinated me. One was a gentle but hilarious British black comedy with Alec Guinness called The Ladykillers (1955), in which a deceptively sweet little old lady of proper Victorian character innocently kills a gang of bank robbers and walks off with their entire heist, blithely oblivious to the chaos she leaves in her wake. The other was Sweet Smell of Success, whose dialogue by Clifford Odets based on Ernest Lehman’s story still twitches and prowls with a creepy ambiguity and restless rhythm that amplify the menace of every shadow. One was courtly and Victorian, the other edgy and vulgar, a one-of-a-kind coupling of Wilder, Welles and Scorsese. When I first saw them in the late ’50s, I made no connection between the two.

A few years later, in college, I was reviewing movies for the school newspaper and had become alert to the invisible but all-powerful hand of the director-god. I delighted in decoding all the little bits of self-plagiarism and thematic variation that morph into a recognizable signature and turn a director into an ‘auteur.’ It seemed to work for everyone except Mackendrick.

If he had made nothing but subversive little British comedies, as he did at Ealing Studios in England before coming to America, or dark urban jungle films like Success, he would be as easy to peg as Hitchcock or Capra – and maybe as famous. But let it be said at once that, like the fictional Falco, Mackendrick was a man of many faces, not just one – none of them too pretty and all of them deceptive. Ladykillers and Sweet Smell of Success represented such a fundamental clash of style, sensibility and attitude, I could not imagine how they could have come from the same person, back to back. That was why I wanted to meet him.

Mackendrick escorted me into his office, which was a private chamber of contented clutter: storyboards for unmade films, cabinets buried under stacks of paper, dozens of Mackendrickisms posted on the walls: ‘Comedy plays best in the master shot,’ ‘Coincidence is exposition in the wrong place,’ and more.

“All this reminds me of how glad I am to no longer be in the situation where I must do what you’re asking me to do today, an interview,” he said, playing the curmudgeon a bit. Nonetheless, he wasted no time in setting me straight on my benighted notions about directors.

“After 20 years of teaching,” he said with the imperial assurance of John Houseman’s Professor Kingsfield, “I am convinced that there is no greater harm posed on young film students than the cult of the director. And I have dedicated myself to stamping it out. There are three words that make me positively livid when I go to the movies: ‘A film by …’ I feel the urge to rise up and rip them from the screen whenever I see them.”

“You have come to ask me how one director could make The Ladykillers and Sweet Smell of Success in the same lifetime. It is a naive question based on the silly notion that directors are authors. I could make those pictures back to back because the director makes no difference. Each was the product of its ensemble. Different writers: William Rose for Ladykillers, Clifford Odets on Success; different directors of photography, Otto Heller and James Wong Howe; different music, Boccherini and [Elmer] Bernstein; different actors, different locations. Same director? So what!

“The story of Sweet Smell of Success wasn’t mine. Most of the dialogue was by Odets and was total nonsense – and Clifford knew it. Of course it’s overwritten, he said. Don’t pay attention to the words. Play it fast. Play the situations, not the lines. I took his advice. What did I do? Very little.”

Perhaps, but like all directors, he put the pieces together. He shaped Falco and Hunsecker through Curtis and Lancaster. Right? No again, he said. He wanted Hume Cronyn as Hunsecker. (An intriguing road not taken, I thought to myself.) It was the studio that wanted Lancaster because he was a big star. Okay, but you directed him, I said.

“Come on,” he shrugged. “Everybody and nobody did it. What’s the most menacing element of Hunsecker on screen? Those thick spectacles, right. They were not there because of Lancaster, Odets or me. They were there because Jimmy Wong Howe found out when working with some props that if he put the light at a certain level, the heavy rims at the top would cast these strong shadows. Jimmy walked around during the entire shoot holding the light to make sure the shadows were under Burt’s eyes.”

Oddly enough, the one thing for which Mackendrick was willing to take credit was the one thing many consider the film’s one dead spot, Susan Harrison’s playing Hunsecker’s sister, the innocent ingenue of the piece. “Yes,” he said, “that was a view shared by Lancaster and [producer] Harold Hecht. But I admired her enormously and so did Odets. She gave a superb performance as a psychologically weak and damaged personality, cowering under her dominating brother. In the end she’s the only one who takes vengeance against him. She used her weakness to destroy him. The performance was brilliant and precisely what the part required.”

I finally asked whether there was any such thing as a Mackendrick touch. He smiled with a mix of indulgence and impatience. “That’s for critics, my natural enemies, not for me to talk about. The less conscious I am of that the better.”

Were there no worthwhile insights he ever got from a critic?

“Only once,” he admitted, “and it was a scary one. A British critic named Philip French once said that I make films about the innocent who, because of their innocence, become the destroyers of the mighty. I could hardly respond. He was absolutely right. Every damn one of my pictures, and even some I didn’t make, came down to that.”

So maybe there was a Mackendrick touch after all, though it’s just as well he never knew it when he was making films. He might have become a self-satisfied auteur.

As it turned out, the interview never was published, since a retired director has little about him to attract editors interested in matching the film ads to some nominally objective scribbling about whatever those ads are plugging. If I wasted his time, let this be my amends. He certainly didn’t waste mine, It’s good to be a journalist.

The Sticking Place

Movie Directors? Who Needs ‘Em?