George Stevens(1904-1975)
- Cinematographer
- Director
- Writer
George Stevens, a filmmaker known as a meticulous craftsman with a
brilliant eye for composition and a sensitive touch with actors, is one
of the great American filmmakers, ranking with
John Ford,
William Wyler and
Howard Hawks as a creator of classic
Hollywood cinema, bringing to the screen mytho-poetic worlds that were
also mass entertainment. One of the most honored and respected
directors in Hollywood history, Stevens enjoyed a great degree of
independence from studios, producing most of his own films after coming
into his own as a director in the late 1930s. Though his work ranged
across all genres, including comedies, musicals and dramas, whatever he
did carried the hallmark of his personal vision, which is predicated
upon humanism.
Although the cinema is an industrial process that makes attributions of
"authorship" difficult if not downright ridiculous (despite the
contractual guarantees in Directors Guild of America-negotiated
contracts), there is no doubt that George Stevens is in control of a
George Stevens picture. Though he was unjustly derided by critics of
the 1960s for not being an "auteur," an auteur he truly is, for a
Stevens picture features meticulous attention to detail, the thorough
exploitation of a scene's visual possibilities and ingenious and
innovative editing that creates many layers of meanings. A Stevens
picture contains compelling performances from actors whose interactions
have a depth and intimacy rare in motion pictures. A Stevens picture
typically is fully engaged with American society and is a chronicled
photoplay of the pursuit of The American Dream.
George Stevens was nominated five times for an Academy Award as Best
Director, winning twice, and six of the movies he produced and directed
were nominated for Best Picture Oscars. In 1953 he was the recipient of
the Irving Thalberg Memorial Award for
maintaining a consistent level of high-quality production. He served as
president of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences from 1958 to
1959. Stevens won the Directors Guild of America Best Director Award
three times as well as the D.W. Griffith
Lifetime Achievement Award. He made five indisputable classics:
Swing Time (1936), a
Fred Astaire-Ginger Rogers
musical; Gunga Din (1939), a rousing
adventure film;
Woman of the Year (1942), a
battle-of-the-sexes comedy;
A Place in the Sun (1951), a
drama that broke new ground in the use of close-ups and editing; and
Shane (1953), a distillation of every
Western cliché that managed to both sum up and transcend the genre. His
Penny Serenade (1941),
The Talk of the Town (1942),
The More the Merrier (1943),
I Remember Mama (1948) and
Giant (1956) all live on in the front rank
of motion pictures.
George Cooper Stevens was born on December 18, 1904, in Oakland,
California, to actor Landers Stevens and
his wife, actress Georgie Cooper, who ran
their own theatrical company in Oakland, Ye Liberty Playhouse. Cooper
herself was the daughter of an actress,
Georgia Woodthorpe (both ladies'
Christian names offstage were Georgia, though their stage names were
Georgie). Georgie Cooper appeared as Little Lord Fauntleroy as a child
along with her mother at Los Angeles' Burbank Theater. George's
parents' company performed in the San Francisco Bay area, and as
individual performers they also toured the West Coast as vaudevillians
on the Opheum circuit. Their theatrical repertoire included the
classics, giving the young George the chance to forge an understanding
of dramatic structure and what works with an audience. In 1922 Stevens'
parents abandoned live theater and moved their family, which consisted
of George and his older brother John Landers Stevens (later to be known
as Jack Stevens), south to
Glendale, California, to find work in the movie industry.
Both of Stevens' parents gained steady employment as movie actors.
Landers appeared in
Little Caesar (1931),
The Public Enemy (1931) and
Citizen Kane (1941) in small parts.
His brother was Chicago Herald-American drama critic Ashton Stevens
(1872-1951), who was hired by
William Randolph Hearst for his
San Francisco Examiner after Ashton had taught him how to play the
banjo. An interviewer of movie stars and a notable man-about-town,
Ashton mentored the young Orson Welles, who
based the Jedediah Leland character in
Citizen Kane (1941) on him. Georgie
Cooper's sister Olive Cooper became
a screenwriter after a short stint as an actress. Jack became a movie
cameraman, as did their second son.
Stevens' movie adaptation of "I Remember Mama," the chronicle of a
Norwegian immigrant family trying to assimilate in San Francisco circa
1910, could be a mirror on the Stevens family's own move to Los Angeles
circa 1922. In "Mama", the members of the Hanson family feel like
outsiders, a theme that resonates throughout Stevens' work. Acting was
considered an insalubrious profession before the rise of
Ronald Reagan's generation of
actors into the halls of power, and being a member of an acting family
necessarily marked one as an outsider in the first half of the 20th
century. Young George had to drop out of high school to drive his
father to his acting auditions, which would have further enhanced his
sense of being an outsider. To compensate for his lack of formal
education, Stevens closely studied theater, literature and the emerging
medium of the motion picture.
Soon after arriving in Hollywood, the 17-year-old Stevens got a job at
the Hal Roach Studios as an assistant cameraman; it was a matter of
being in the right place at the right time. Of that period, when the
cinema was young, Stevens reminisced, "There were no unions, so it was
possible to become an assistant cameraman if you happened to find out
just when they were starting a picture. There was no organization; if a
cameraman didn't have an assistant, he didn't know where to find one."
As part of Hal Roach's company, Stevens
learned the art of visual storytelling while the form was still being
developed. Part of his visual education entailed the shooting of
low-budget westerns, some of which featured
Rex. Within two
years Stevens became a director of photography and a writer of gags for
Roach on the comedies of Stan Laurel and
Oliver Hardy.
His first credited work as a cameraman at the Roach Studios was for the
Stan Laurel short
Roughest Africa (1923). Stevens
was a terrific cameraman, most notably in Laurel & Hardy's comedies
(both silent and talkies), and it was as a cameraman that his aesthetic
began to develop. The cinema of George Stevens was rooted in humanism,
and he focused on telling details and behavior that elucidated
character and relationships. This aesthetic started developing on the
Laurel & Hardy comedies, where he learned about the interplay of
relationships between "the one who is looked at" and "the one doing the
looking." Verisimilitude, always a hallmark of a Stevens picture, also
was part of the Laurel and Hardy curricula;
Oliver Hardy once said, "We did a lot of
crazy things in our pictures, but we were always real."
From a lighting cameraman, Stevens advanced to a director of short
subjects for Roach at Universal. Within a year of moving to RKO in
1933, he began directing comedy features. His break came in 1935 at
RKO, when house diva Katharine Hepburn
chose Stevens as the director of
Alice Adams (1935). Based on a
Booth Tarkington novel about a young
woman from the lower-middle class who dares to dream big, the movie
injected the theme of class aspiration and the frustrations of the
pursuit of happiness while dreaming the American dream into Stevens'
oeuvre. Before there was cinema of "outsiders" recognized in the late
1970s, there were Stevens' outsiders, fighting against their
atomization and alienation through their not-always-successful
interactions with other people.
Stevens created his first classic in 1936, when RKO assigned him to
helm the sixth Astaire-Rogers musical,
Swing Time (1936). Stevens' past as a
lighting cameraman prepared him for the innovative visuals of this
musical comedy. Through his control of the camera's field of vision,
Stevens as a director creates an atmosphere that engenders emotional
effects in his audience. In one scene Astaire opens a mirrored door
that the scene's reflection in actuality is being shot on, and being
keyed into the illusion emotionally introduces the audience into the
picture, in sly counterpoint to
Buster Keaton's walk into the screen in
his _Sherlock, Jr. (1924)_ . Stevens' use of light in "Swing Time" is
audacious. He freely introduces light into scenes, with the effect that
it enlivens them and gives them a "light" touch, such as the final
scene where "sunlight" breaks out over the painted backdrop. The film
never drags and is a brilliant showcase for the dancing team. Rogers
claimed it was her favorite of all her pictures with Astaire.
Stevens' next classic was the rip-roaring adventure yarn
Gunga Din (1939), based on the
Rudyard Kipling poem. Though no longer
politically correct in the 21st century, the picture still works in
terms of action and star power, as three British
sergeants--Cary Grant,
Victor McLaglen and
Douglas Fairbanks Jr.--try to put
down a rampage by a notorious death cult in 19th-century colonial
India.
Having learned his craft in the improvisational milieu of silent
pictures, Stevens would often wing it, shooting from an underdeveloped
screenplay that was ever in flux, finding the film as he shot it and
later edited it. With filmmaking becoming more and more expensive in
the 1930s due to the studios' penchant for making movies on a vaster
scale than they had previously, Stevens' methods led to anxiety for the
bean-counters in RKO's headquarters. His improvisatory crafting of
"Gunga Din" resulted in the film's shooting schedule almost doubling
from 64 to 124 days, with its cost reaching a then-incredible $2
million (few sound films had grossed more than $5 million up to that
point, and a picture needed to gross from two to 2-1/2 times its
negative cost to break even).
Studio executives were driven to distraction by Stevens' methods, such
as his taking nearly a year to edit the footage he shot for "Shane."
His films typically were successful, though, and in the late 1930s he
became his own producer, earning him greater latitude than that enjoyed
by virtually any other filmmaker with the obvious exceptions of
Cecil B. DeMille and
Frank Capra. He made three significant
comedies in the early 1940s:
Woman of the Year (1942), the
darker-in-tone
The Talk of the Town (1942)
(a film that touches on the subject of civil rights and the miscarriage
of justice) and
The More the Merrier (1943)
before going off to war.
Joining the Army Signal Corps, Stevens headed up a combat motion
picture unit from 1944 to 1946. In addition to filming the Normandy
landings, his unit shot both the liberation of Paris and the liberation
of the Nazi extermination camp Dachau, and his unit's footage was used
both as evidence in the Nuremberg trials and in the de-Nazification
program after the war. Stevens was awarded the Legion of Merit for his
services. Many critics claim that the somber, deeply personal tone of
the movies he made when he returned from World War II were the result
of the horrors he saw during the war. Stevens' first wife, Yvonne,
recalled that he "was a very sensitive man. He just never dreamed, I'm
sure, what he was getting into when he enlisted." Stevens wrote a
letter to Yvonne in 1945, telling her that "if it hadn't been for your
letters . . . there would have been nothing to think cheerfully about,
because you know that I find much [of] this difficult to believe in
fundamentally."
The images of war and Dachau continued to haunt Stevens, but it also
engendered in him the belief that motion pictures had to be socially
meaningful to be of value. Along with fellow Signal Corps veterans
Frank Capra and
William Wyler, Stevens founded Liberty
Films to produce his vision of the human condition. The major carryover
from his prewar oeuvre to his postwar films is the affection the
director has for his central characters, emblematic of his humanism.
Stevens' second postwar film,
A Place in the Sun (1951),
was his adaptation of
Theodore Dreiser's "An American
Tragedy," updated to contemporary America. Released three years after
his family film
I Remember Mama (1948), it
features an outsider, George Eastman, trapped in the net of the
American Dream, the pursuit of which dooms him.
Sergei Eisenstein had written an
adaptation for Paramount of "An American Tragedy" (the title a sly
reversal of "The American Dream"), but Eisenstein's participation in
the project was jettisoned when the studio came under attack by
right-wing politicians and organizations for hiring a "Communist", and
the U.S. government deported Eisenstein shortly afterward. His script
was unceremoniously dumped, and
Josef von Sternberg eventually made
the picture, but his vision was so far from Dreiser's that the old
literary lion sued the studio. The film was recut and proved to be both
a critical and box-office failure.
Alfred Hitchcock maintained
that it was far easier to make a good picture from a mediocre or bad
drama or book than it was from a good work or a masterpiece. It
remained for George Stevens to turn a literary masterpiece into a
cinematic one--a unique trick in Hollywood. What was revolutionary
about "A Place in the Sun," in terms of technique, is Stevens' use of
close-ups. Charlton Heston has pointed
out that no one had ever used close-ups the way Stevens had in the
picture. He used them more frequently than was the norm circa 1950, and
he used extreme close-ups that, when combined with his innovative,
slow-dissolve editing, created its own atmosphere, its own world that
brought the audience into George Eastman's world, even into his embrace
with the girl of his dreams, and also into the rowboat on that fateful
day that would forever change his life. The editing technique of
slow-lapping dissolves slowed down time and elongated the tempo of a
scene in a way never before seen on screen.
Stevens' mastery over the art of the motion picture was recognized with
his first Academy Award for direction, beating out
Elia Kazan for that director's own
masterpiece,
A Streetcar Named Desire (1951)
and Stanley Donen and
Gene Kelly for THEIR masterpiece,
An American in Paris (1951),
for the Best Picture Oscar winner that year (most observers had
expected "Sun" or "Streetcar" to win, but they had split the vote and
allowed "American" to nose them out at the finish line. MGM's publicity
department acknowledged as much when it ran a post-Oscar ad featuring
Leo the Lion with copy that began, "I was standing in the Sun waiting
for a Streetcar when . . . ").
Stevens' theme of the outsider continued with his next classic,
Shane (1953). The eponymous gunman is an
outsider, but so is the Starrett family he has decided to defend, as
are the "sodbusters", and even the range baron who is now outside his
time, outside his community and outside human decency.
Giant (1956), Stevens' sprawling three-hour
epic based on Edna Ferber's novel about
Texas, also features outsiders: sister Luz Benedict, hired-hand
transformed into millionaire oilman Jett Rink, transplanted Tidewater
belle Leslie Benedict, her two rebellious children and eventually her
husband Bick Benedict, a near-stereotypical Texan who finally steps
outside of his parochialism and is transformed into an outsider when he
decides to fight, physically, against discrimination against Latinos as
a point of honor. The Otto Frank family and their compatriots in hiding
in
The Diary of Anne Frank (1959),
American cinema's first movie to deal with the Holocaust, are
outsiders, while Christ in his
The Greatest Story Ever Told (1965)--subtle,
complex and unknowable--is the ultimate outsider.
The Only Game in Town (1970)--Stevens'
last film with
Elizabeth Taylor, his female
lead in "A Place in the Sun" and "Giant"--was about two outsiders, an
aging chorus girl and a petty gambler.
Stevens' reputation suffered after the 1950s, and he didn't make
another film until halfway into the 1960s. The film he did produce
after that long hiatus was misunderstood and underappreciated when it
was released.
The Greatest Story Ever Told (1965),
a picture about the ministry and passion of Christ, was one of the last
epic films. It was maligned by critics and failed at the box office. It
was on this picture that Stevens' improvisatory method began to take a
toll on him. It took six years from the release of "Anne Frank," which
had garnered Oscar nominations for Best Picture and Best Director,
until the release of "Greatest Story." There had been a long gestation
period for the film, and it was renowned as a difficult shoot, so much
so that David Lean helped out a man
he considered a master by shooting some ancillary scenes for the
picture. The film has a look of vastness that many critics
misunderstood as emptiness rather than as a visual correlative of the
soul. Stevens' script is inspired by the three Synoptic Gospels,
particular the Gospel According to St. John. John stresses the interior
relation between the self and things beyond its knowledge. Though
misunderstood by critics at the time of its release, the film has
become more appreciated some 40 years later. Stevens is a master of the
cinema, and is fully in command of the dissolves and emotive use of
sound he used so effectively in "A Place in the Sun."
His last film,
The Only Game in Town (1970),
also was not a critical or box-office success, as
Elizabeth Taylor's star had
gone into steep decline as the 1970s dawned.
Frank Sinatra had originally been slated
to be her co-star, but Ol' Blue Eyes, notorious for preferring one-take
directors, likely had second thoughts about being in a film directed by
Stevens, who had a (well-deserved) reputation for multiple takes. His
filmmaking method entailed shooting take after take of a scene during
principal photography from every conceivable angle and from multiple
focal points, so he'd have a plethora of choices in the editing room,
which is where he made his films (unlike
John Ford, famous for his lack of
coverage, who had a reputation of "editing" in the camera, shooting
only what he thought necessary for a film).
Warren Beatty, typically underwhelming in
films in which he wasn't in control, proved a poor substitute for
Sinatra, and the film tanked big-time when it was released, further
tarnishing Stevens' reputation.
In a money-dominated culture in which the ethos "What Have You Done For
Me Lately?" is prominent, George Stevens was relegated to has-been
status, and the fact that he had established himself as one of the
greats of American cinema was ignored, then forgotten altogether in
popular culture. Donald Richie's 1984 biography "George Stevens: An
American Romantic" tags Stevens with the "R" word, but it is too
simplistic a generalization for such a complicated artist. Stevens'
films demand that the audience remain in the moment and absorb all the
details on offer in order to fully understand the morality play he is
telling. James Agee had been a great admirer
of Stevens the director, but Agee died in the 1950s and the 1960s was a
new age, an iconoclastic age, and George Stevens and the classical
Hollywood cinema he was a master of were considered icons to be
smashed. Film critic Andrew Sarris, who
introduced the "auteur" theory to America, disrespected Stevens in his
1968 book "The American Cinema." Stevens was not an auteur, Sarris
wrote, and his latter films were big and empty. He became the symbol of
what the new, auteurist cinema was against.
The Cahiers du Cinema critics attacked Stevens by elevating
Douglas Sirk. Sirk's
Magnificent Obsession (1954),
so the argument went, was a much better and more cogent exegesis of
America than "Giant," which was "big and empty" as was the country they
attacked (though they loved its films). The point of iconoclasm is to
smash idols, no matter what the reason--and Stevens, the master
craftsman, was an idol. However, to say "Giant" was empty is absurd. To
imply that George Stevens did not understand America is equally absurd.
"Giant" contains what is arguably the premier moment in America cinema
of the immediate postwar years, and it is an "American" moment--the
confrontation between patrician rancher Bick Benedict and diner owner
Sarge (Robert J. Wilke). Many critics
and cinema historians have commented on the scene, favorably, but many
miss the full import of it.
The film has been built up to this climax. Benedict has shared the
prejudices of his class and his race. All his life he has exploited the
Mexicans whom he has lived with in a symbiotic relationship on HIS
ranch, giving little thought to the injustice his class of overlords
has wrought on Latinos, on poor whites, or on his own family. His wife,
an Easterner, is appalled by the poverty and state of peonage of the
Mexicans who work on the ranch and tries to do something about it. Her
idealism is echoed in her son, who becomes a doctor, rejects his
father's rancher heritage, and marries a Mexican-American woman, giving
his father an Anglo/Mexican-American grandson.
While out on a ride with his wife, daughter, daughter-in-law and her
child, they stop at a roadside diner. Sarge, the proprietor, initially
balks at serving them because of the Latinos in their party. He backs
down, but when more Latinos come into his diner, he moves to throw them
out. Benedict decides to intervene in a display of noblesse oblige, and
also out of family duty. Sarge is unimpressed by Benedict's pedigree,
and a fight breaks out between the hardened veteran--recently returned
from the war, we are meant to understand--and the now aged Benedict.
Bick first holds his own and Sarge crashes into the jukebox, setting
off the song "The Yellow Rose of Texas" while he recovers and then sets
out to systematically demolish Mr. Bick Benedict, the overlord. As the
song plays on in ironic counterpoint, shots of his distraught daughter
and other family members are undercut with the cinematic crucifixion of
Bick Benedict, the overlord, by the former Centurion. After Sarge has
finished thrashing Benedict, he takes a sign off of the wall and throws
it on Benedict's prostrate body: "The management reserves the right to
refuse service to anyone". This is not only America of the 1950s, but
America of the 21st century. For just as Sarge is defending racism, he
is also defending his once-constitutional right to free association, as
well as exerting his belief in Jeffersonian-Jacksonian democracy in
thrashing a plutocrat. This is a type of yahooism that
Bruce Catton, in his Pulitzer Prize-winning
history of the Civil War, attributed to the rebellion. There had always
been a very well developed strain of reckless, individualistic violence
in America, frequently encouraged, ritualized and sanctified by the
state. The diner scene in "Giant" could only have been created by a man
with a thorough knowledge of what America and Americans were (and
continue to be). Sarge will try to accommodate Benedict, who has
stepped out of his role as racist plutocrat into that of paternalistic
pater familias, just as the sons of the robber barons of the 19th
century--who justified their economic depravities with the doctrine of
social Darwinism--did in the 20th century, endowing foundations that
tried to right many wrongs, including racism, but Sarge will only go so
far. When he is stretched beyond his limit, when his giving in is then
"pushed too far," he reacts, and reacts violently.
This scene sums up American democracy and the human condition in
America perhaps better than any other. America is a violent society, a
gladiator society, in which progress is measured in, if not gained by,
violence. Yes, Sarge is standing up for racism and segregation (a huge
topic after the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court ruling
outlawing segregation), but he is also standing up for himself, and his
beliefs, something he has recently fought for in World War II. The
ironies are rich, just as the irony of American democracy, which
excluded African-Americans and women and the native American tribes
from the very first days of the U.S. Constitution, is rich. This is
America, the scene in Sarge's diner says, and it is a critique only an
American with a thorough knowledge of and sympathy for America could
create. It is much more effective and philosophically true than the
petty neo-Nazi caricatures of
Lars von Trier's
Dogville (2003), who are cowards.
Characters in a George Stevens film may be reluctant, they may be
hesitant, they may be conflicted, but they aren't cowardly.
Another ironic scene in "Giant" features Mexican children singing the
National Anthem during the funeral of Angel, who in counterpoint to
Bick's son, his contemporary in age, is of the land, to the manor born,
so to speak, but lacking those rights because of the color of his skin.
Angel had gone off to war, and he returns to the Texas in which he was
born on a caisson, in a coffin, starkly silhouetted against the Texas
sky as the Benedict mansion had been earlier in the film when Leslie
had first come to this benighted land. Angel, who had experienced
racial bigotry due to his birth into poverty on the Benedict ranch, had
fought Adolf Hitler. He is the only hero in
"Giant," and his death would be empty and meaningless without Bick
Benedict's reluctant conversion to integration through fisticuffs.
The great turning points in American cinema typically have involved
race. The biggest, most significant movies of the first 50 years of the
American cinema death with race:
Uncle Tom's Cabin (1903),
Edwin S. Porter's major movie before his
The Great Train Robbery (1903)
and the first film to feature inter-titles;
The Birth of a Nation (1915),
D.W. Griffith's racist masterpiece--which
was a filming of a notorious pro-Ku Klux Klan book called "The
Clansman"--in which a non-sectarian America is formed in the linking of
Southern and Northern whites to fight the African-American freedman;
The Jazz Singer (1927), in
which a Jewish cantor's son achieves assimilation by donning blackface
and disenfranchising black folk by purloining their music, which he
deracinates, while turning his back on his Jewish identity by marrying
a Gentile; and
Gone with the Wind (1939), the
greatest Hollywood movie of all time--in which the Klan is never shown
and the "N" word is never used, although the entire movie takes place
in the immediate post-Civil War South--a sweeping, romantic masterpiece
in which a reactionary, ultra-racist plutocracy is made out to be the
flower of American chivalry and romance.
Stevens' "Giant" was a major film of its time, and remains a motion
picture of the first rank, but it was not the cultural blockbuster
these movies were. Yet it more than any other Hollywood film of its
time, aside from Elia Kazan's rather
whitebread
Gentleman's Agreement (1947)
and Pinky (1949), directly addresses the
great American dilemma, race, and its implications, and not from the
familiar racist, white supremacist point of view that had been part of
American movies since the very beginning. Those attitudes had been
rooted in the American psyche even before the days of
The Perils of Pauline (1914)
serials (simultaneously serialized in the white supremacist Hearst
newspapers), in which many a sweet young thing was threatened with
death or--even worse, the loss of her maidenhead--by a sinister person
of color (always played by a Caucasian in yellow or brown face).
A 1934 "Fortune Magazine" story about the rosy financial prospects of
the Technicolor Corp.'s new three-strip process contained a startling
metaphor for a 21st-century reader: "Then - like the cowboy bursting
into the cabin just as the heroine has thrown the last flowerpot at the
Mexican - came the three-color process to the rescue." It was this
endemic, accepted racism that Stevens challenged in "Giant," which is
at the root of America's expansionist philosophy of manifest destiny,
and which was at the root of much of the southern and western
economies. Those who died in World War II had to have died for
something, not just the continuation of the status quo. It was a direct
and knowing challenge to the system by someone who thoroughly knew and
thoroughly cared about America and Americans.
George Stevens died of a heart attack on March 8, 1975, in Lancaster,
California. He would have been 100 years old in 2004, and in that year
he was celebrated with screenings by The Academy of Motion Picture Arts
and Sciences, London's British Film Institute, and the Museum of Modern
Art in New York. His legacy lives on in the directorial work of fellow
two-time Oscar-winning Best Director
Clint Eastwood, particularly in
Pale Rider (1985), which suffers from
being too-close a "Shane" clone, and most memorably in his masterpiece,
Unforgiven (1992).
brilliant eye for composition and a sensitive touch with actors, is one
of the great American filmmakers, ranking with
John Ford,
William Wyler and
Howard Hawks as a creator of classic
Hollywood cinema, bringing to the screen mytho-poetic worlds that were
also mass entertainment. One of the most honored and respected
directors in Hollywood history, Stevens enjoyed a great degree of
independence from studios, producing most of his own films after coming
into his own as a director in the late 1930s. Though his work ranged
across all genres, including comedies, musicals and dramas, whatever he
did carried the hallmark of his personal vision, which is predicated
upon humanism.
Although the cinema is an industrial process that makes attributions of
"authorship" difficult if not downright ridiculous (despite the
contractual guarantees in Directors Guild of America-negotiated
contracts), there is no doubt that George Stevens is in control of a
George Stevens picture. Though he was unjustly derided by critics of
the 1960s for not being an "auteur," an auteur he truly is, for a
Stevens picture features meticulous attention to detail, the thorough
exploitation of a scene's visual possibilities and ingenious and
innovative editing that creates many layers of meanings. A Stevens
picture contains compelling performances from actors whose interactions
have a depth and intimacy rare in motion pictures. A Stevens picture
typically is fully engaged with American society and is a chronicled
photoplay of the pursuit of The American Dream.
George Stevens was nominated five times for an Academy Award as Best
Director, winning twice, and six of the movies he produced and directed
were nominated for Best Picture Oscars. In 1953 he was the recipient of
the Irving Thalberg Memorial Award for
maintaining a consistent level of high-quality production. He served as
president of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences from 1958 to
1959. Stevens won the Directors Guild of America Best Director Award
three times as well as the D.W. Griffith
Lifetime Achievement Award. He made five indisputable classics:
Swing Time (1936), a
Fred Astaire-Ginger Rogers
musical; Gunga Din (1939), a rousing
adventure film;
Woman of the Year (1942), a
battle-of-the-sexes comedy;
A Place in the Sun (1951), a
drama that broke new ground in the use of close-ups and editing; and
Shane (1953), a distillation of every
Western cliché that managed to both sum up and transcend the genre. His
Penny Serenade (1941),
The Talk of the Town (1942),
The More the Merrier (1943),
I Remember Mama (1948) and
Giant (1956) all live on in the front rank
of motion pictures.
George Cooper Stevens was born on December 18, 1904, in Oakland,
California, to actor Landers Stevens and
his wife, actress Georgie Cooper, who ran
their own theatrical company in Oakland, Ye Liberty Playhouse. Cooper
herself was the daughter of an actress,
Georgia Woodthorpe (both ladies'
Christian names offstage were Georgia, though their stage names were
Georgie). Georgie Cooper appeared as Little Lord Fauntleroy as a child
along with her mother at Los Angeles' Burbank Theater. George's
parents' company performed in the San Francisco Bay area, and as
individual performers they also toured the West Coast as vaudevillians
on the Opheum circuit. Their theatrical repertoire included the
classics, giving the young George the chance to forge an understanding
of dramatic structure and what works with an audience. In 1922 Stevens'
parents abandoned live theater and moved their family, which consisted
of George and his older brother John Landers Stevens (later to be known
as Jack Stevens), south to
Glendale, California, to find work in the movie industry.
Both of Stevens' parents gained steady employment as movie actors.
Landers appeared in
Little Caesar (1931),
The Public Enemy (1931) and
Citizen Kane (1941) in small parts.
His brother was Chicago Herald-American drama critic Ashton Stevens
(1872-1951), who was hired by
William Randolph Hearst for his
San Francisco Examiner after Ashton had taught him how to play the
banjo. An interviewer of movie stars and a notable man-about-town,
Ashton mentored the young Orson Welles, who
based the Jedediah Leland character in
Citizen Kane (1941) on him. Georgie
Cooper's sister Olive Cooper became
a screenwriter after a short stint as an actress. Jack became a movie
cameraman, as did their second son.
Stevens' movie adaptation of "I Remember Mama," the chronicle of a
Norwegian immigrant family trying to assimilate in San Francisco circa
1910, could be a mirror on the Stevens family's own move to Los Angeles
circa 1922. In "Mama", the members of the Hanson family feel like
outsiders, a theme that resonates throughout Stevens' work. Acting was
considered an insalubrious profession before the rise of
Ronald Reagan's generation of
actors into the halls of power, and being a member of an acting family
necessarily marked one as an outsider in the first half of the 20th
century. Young George had to drop out of high school to drive his
father to his acting auditions, which would have further enhanced his
sense of being an outsider. To compensate for his lack of formal
education, Stevens closely studied theater, literature and the emerging
medium of the motion picture.
Soon after arriving in Hollywood, the 17-year-old Stevens got a job at
the Hal Roach Studios as an assistant cameraman; it was a matter of
being in the right place at the right time. Of that period, when the
cinema was young, Stevens reminisced, "There were no unions, so it was
possible to become an assistant cameraman if you happened to find out
just when they were starting a picture. There was no organization; if a
cameraman didn't have an assistant, he didn't know where to find one."
As part of Hal Roach's company, Stevens
learned the art of visual storytelling while the form was still being
developed. Part of his visual education entailed the shooting of
low-budget westerns, some of which featured
Rex. Within two
years Stevens became a director of photography and a writer of gags for
Roach on the comedies of Stan Laurel and
Oliver Hardy.
His first credited work as a cameraman at the Roach Studios was for the
Stan Laurel short
Roughest Africa (1923). Stevens
was a terrific cameraman, most notably in Laurel & Hardy's comedies
(both silent and talkies), and it was as a cameraman that his aesthetic
began to develop. The cinema of George Stevens was rooted in humanism,
and he focused on telling details and behavior that elucidated
character and relationships. This aesthetic started developing on the
Laurel & Hardy comedies, where he learned about the interplay of
relationships between "the one who is looked at" and "the one doing the
looking." Verisimilitude, always a hallmark of a Stevens picture, also
was part of the Laurel and Hardy curricula;
Oliver Hardy once said, "We did a lot of
crazy things in our pictures, but we were always real."
From a lighting cameraman, Stevens advanced to a director of short
subjects for Roach at Universal. Within a year of moving to RKO in
1933, he began directing comedy features. His break came in 1935 at
RKO, when house diva Katharine Hepburn
chose Stevens as the director of
Alice Adams (1935). Based on a
Booth Tarkington novel about a young
woman from the lower-middle class who dares to dream big, the movie
injected the theme of class aspiration and the frustrations of the
pursuit of happiness while dreaming the American dream into Stevens'
oeuvre. Before there was cinema of "outsiders" recognized in the late
1970s, there were Stevens' outsiders, fighting against their
atomization and alienation through their not-always-successful
interactions with other people.
Stevens created his first classic in 1936, when RKO assigned him to
helm the sixth Astaire-Rogers musical,
Swing Time (1936). Stevens' past as a
lighting cameraman prepared him for the innovative visuals of this
musical comedy. Through his control of the camera's field of vision,
Stevens as a director creates an atmosphere that engenders emotional
effects in his audience. In one scene Astaire opens a mirrored door
that the scene's reflection in actuality is being shot on, and being
keyed into the illusion emotionally introduces the audience into the
picture, in sly counterpoint to
Buster Keaton's walk into the screen in
his _Sherlock, Jr. (1924)_ . Stevens' use of light in "Swing Time" is
audacious. He freely introduces light into scenes, with the effect that
it enlivens them and gives them a "light" touch, such as the final
scene where "sunlight" breaks out over the painted backdrop. The film
never drags and is a brilliant showcase for the dancing team. Rogers
claimed it was her favorite of all her pictures with Astaire.
Stevens' next classic was the rip-roaring adventure yarn
Gunga Din (1939), based on the
Rudyard Kipling poem. Though no longer
politically correct in the 21st century, the picture still works in
terms of action and star power, as three British
sergeants--Cary Grant,
Victor McLaglen and
Douglas Fairbanks Jr.--try to put
down a rampage by a notorious death cult in 19th-century colonial
India.
Having learned his craft in the improvisational milieu of silent
pictures, Stevens would often wing it, shooting from an underdeveloped
screenplay that was ever in flux, finding the film as he shot it and
later edited it. With filmmaking becoming more and more expensive in
the 1930s due to the studios' penchant for making movies on a vaster
scale than they had previously, Stevens' methods led to anxiety for the
bean-counters in RKO's headquarters. His improvisatory crafting of
"Gunga Din" resulted in the film's shooting schedule almost doubling
from 64 to 124 days, with its cost reaching a then-incredible $2
million (few sound films had grossed more than $5 million up to that
point, and a picture needed to gross from two to 2-1/2 times its
negative cost to break even).
Studio executives were driven to distraction by Stevens' methods, such
as his taking nearly a year to edit the footage he shot for "Shane."
His films typically were successful, though, and in the late 1930s he
became his own producer, earning him greater latitude than that enjoyed
by virtually any other filmmaker with the obvious exceptions of
Cecil B. DeMille and
Frank Capra. He made three significant
comedies in the early 1940s:
Woman of the Year (1942), the
darker-in-tone
The Talk of the Town (1942)
(a film that touches on the subject of civil rights and the miscarriage
of justice) and
The More the Merrier (1943)
before going off to war.
Joining the Army Signal Corps, Stevens headed up a combat motion
picture unit from 1944 to 1946. In addition to filming the Normandy
landings, his unit shot both the liberation of Paris and the liberation
of the Nazi extermination camp Dachau, and his unit's footage was used
both as evidence in the Nuremberg trials and in the de-Nazification
program after the war. Stevens was awarded the Legion of Merit for his
services. Many critics claim that the somber, deeply personal tone of
the movies he made when he returned from World War II were the result
of the horrors he saw during the war. Stevens' first wife, Yvonne,
recalled that he "was a very sensitive man. He just never dreamed, I'm
sure, what he was getting into when he enlisted." Stevens wrote a
letter to Yvonne in 1945, telling her that "if it hadn't been for your
letters . . . there would have been nothing to think cheerfully about,
because you know that I find much [of] this difficult to believe in
fundamentally."
The images of war and Dachau continued to haunt Stevens, but it also
engendered in him the belief that motion pictures had to be socially
meaningful to be of value. Along with fellow Signal Corps veterans
Frank Capra and
William Wyler, Stevens founded Liberty
Films to produce his vision of the human condition. The major carryover
from his prewar oeuvre to his postwar films is the affection the
director has for his central characters, emblematic of his humanism.
Stevens' second postwar film,
A Place in the Sun (1951),
was his adaptation of
Theodore Dreiser's "An American
Tragedy," updated to contemporary America. Released three years after
his family film
I Remember Mama (1948), it
features an outsider, George Eastman, trapped in the net of the
American Dream, the pursuit of which dooms him.
Sergei Eisenstein had written an
adaptation for Paramount of "An American Tragedy" (the title a sly
reversal of "The American Dream"), but Eisenstein's participation in
the project was jettisoned when the studio came under attack by
right-wing politicians and organizations for hiring a "Communist", and
the U.S. government deported Eisenstein shortly afterward. His script
was unceremoniously dumped, and
Josef von Sternberg eventually made
the picture, but his vision was so far from Dreiser's that the old
literary lion sued the studio. The film was recut and proved to be both
a critical and box-office failure.
Alfred Hitchcock maintained
that it was far easier to make a good picture from a mediocre or bad
drama or book than it was from a good work or a masterpiece. It
remained for George Stevens to turn a literary masterpiece into a
cinematic one--a unique trick in Hollywood. What was revolutionary
about "A Place in the Sun," in terms of technique, is Stevens' use of
close-ups. Charlton Heston has pointed
out that no one had ever used close-ups the way Stevens had in the
picture. He used them more frequently than was the norm circa 1950, and
he used extreme close-ups that, when combined with his innovative,
slow-dissolve editing, created its own atmosphere, its own world that
brought the audience into George Eastman's world, even into his embrace
with the girl of his dreams, and also into the rowboat on that fateful
day that would forever change his life. The editing technique of
slow-lapping dissolves slowed down time and elongated the tempo of a
scene in a way never before seen on screen.
Stevens' mastery over the art of the motion picture was recognized with
his first Academy Award for direction, beating out
Elia Kazan for that director's own
masterpiece,
A Streetcar Named Desire (1951)
and Stanley Donen and
Gene Kelly for THEIR masterpiece,
An American in Paris (1951),
for the Best Picture Oscar winner that year (most observers had
expected "Sun" or "Streetcar" to win, but they had split the vote and
allowed "American" to nose them out at the finish line. MGM's publicity
department acknowledged as much when it ran a post-Oscar ad featuring
Leo the Lion with copy that began, "I was standing in the Sun waiting
for a Streetcar when . . . ").
Stevens' theme of the outsider continued with his next classic,
Shane (1953). The eponymous gunman is an
outsider, but so is the Starrett family he has decided to defend, as
are the "sodbusters", and even the range baron who is now outside his
time, outside his community and outside human decency.
Giant (1956), Stevens' sprawling three-hour
epic based on Edna Ferber's novel about
Texas, also features outsiders: sister Luz Benedict, hired-hand
transformed into millionaire oilman Jett Rink, transplanted Tidewater
belle Leslie Benedict, her two rebellious children and eventually her
husband Bick Benedict, a near-stereotypical Texan who finally steps
outside of his parochialism and is transformed into an outsider when he
decides to fight, physically, against discrimination against Latinos as
a point of honor. The Otto Frank family and their compatriots in hiding
in
The Diary of Anne Frank (1959),
American cinema's first movie to deal with the Holocaust, are
outsiders, while Christ in his
The Greatest Story Ever Told (1965)--subtle,
complex and unknowable--is the ultimate outsider.
The Only Game in Town (1970)--Stevens'
last film with
Elizabeth Taylor, his female
lead in "A Place in the Sun" and "Giant"--was about two outsiders, an
aging chorus girl and a petty gambler.
Stevens' reputation suffered after the 1950s, and he didn't make
another film until halfway into the 1960s. The film he did produce
after that long hiatus was misunderstood and underappreciated when it
was released.
The Greatest Story Ever Told (1965),
a picture about the ministry and passion of Christ, was one of the last
epic films. It was maligned by critics and failed at the box office. It
was on this picture that Stevens' improvisatory method began to take a
toll on him. It took six years from the release of "Anne Frank," which
had garnered Oscar nominations for Best Picture and Best Director,
until the release of "Greatest Story." There had been a long gestation
period for the film, and it was renowned as a difficult shoot, so much
so that David Lean helped out a man
he considered a master by shooting some ancillary scenes for the
picture. The film has a look of vastness that many critics
misunderstood as emptiness rather than as a visual correlative of the
soul. Stevens' script is inspired by the three Synoptic Gospels,
particular the Gospel According to St. John. John stresses the interior
relation between the self and things beyond its knowledge. Though
misunderstood by critics at the time of its release, the film has
become more appreciated some 40 years later. Stevens is a master of the
cinema, and is fully in command of the dissolves and emotive use of
sound he used so effectively in "A Place in the Sun."
His last film,
The Only Game in Town (1970),
also was not a critical or box-office success, as
Elizabeth Taylor's star had
gone into steep decline as the 1970s dawned.
Frank Sinatra had originally been slated
to be her co-star, but Ol' Blue Eyes, notorious for preferring one-take
directors, likely had second thoughts about being in a film directed by
Stevens, who had a (well-deserved) reputation for multiple takes. His
filmmaking method entailed shooting take after take of a scene during
principal photography from every conceivable angle and from multiple
focal points, so he'd have a plethora of choices in the editing room,
which is where he made his films (unlike
John Ford, famous for his lack of
coverage, who had a reputation of "editing" in the camera, shooting
only what he thought necessary for a film).
Warren Beatty, typically underwhelming in
films in which he wasn't in control, proved a poor substitute for
Sinatra, and the film tanked big-time when it was released, further
tarnishing Stevens' reputation.
In a money-dominated culture in which the ethos "What Have You Done For
Me Lately?" is prominent, George Stevens was relegated to has-been
status, and the fact that he had established himself as one of the
greats of American cinema was ignored, then forgotten altogether in
popular culture. Donald Richie's 1984 biography "George Stevens: An
American Romantic" tags Stevens with the "R" word, but it is too
simplistic a generalization for such a complicated artist. Stevens'
films demand that the audience remain in the moment and absorb all the
details on offer in order to fully understand the morality play he is
telling. James Agee had been a great admirer
of Stevens the director, but Agee died in the 1950s and the 1960s was a
new age, an iconoclastic age, and George Stevens and the classical
Hollywood cinema he was a master of were considered icons to be
smashed. Film critic Andrew Sarris, who
introduced the "auteur" theory to America, disrespected Stevens in his
1968 book "The American Cinema." Stevens was not an auteur, Sarris
wrote, and his latter films were big and empty. He became the symbol of
what the new, auteurist cinema was against.
The Cahiers du Cinema critics attacked Stevens by elevating
Douglas Sirk. Sirk's
Magnificent Obsession (1954),
so the argument went, was a much better and more cogent exegesis of
America than "Giant," which was "big and empty" as was the country they
attacked (though they loved its films). The point of iconoclasm is to
smash idols, no matter what the reason--and Stevens, the master
craftsman, was an idol. However, to say "Giant" was empty is absurd. To
imply that George Stevens did not understand America is equally absurd.
"Giant" contains what is arguably the premier moment in America cinema
of the immediate postwar years, and it is an "American" moment--the
confrontation between patrician rancher Bick Benedict and diner owner
Sarge (Robert J. Wilke). Many critics
and cinema historians have commented on the scene, favorably, but many
miss the full import of it.
The film has been built up to this climax. Benedict has shared the
prejudices of his class and his race. All his life he has exploited the
Mexicans whom he has lived with in a symbiotic relationship on HIS
ranch, giving little thought to the injustice his class of overlords
has wrought on Latinos, on poor whites, or on his own family. His wife,
an Easterner, is appalled by the poverty and state of peonage of the
Mexicans who work on the ranch and tries to do something about it. Her
idealism is echoed in her son, who becomes a doctor, rejects his
father's rancher heritage, and marries a Mexican-American woman, giving
his father an Anglo/Mexican-American grandson.
While out on a ride with his wife, daughter, daughter-in-law and her
child, they stop at a roadside diner. Sarge, the proprietor, initially
balks at serving them because of the Latinos in their party. He backs
down, but when more Latinos come into his diner, he moves to throw them
out. Benedict decides to intervene in a display of noblesse oblige, and
also out of family duty. Sarge is unimpressed by Benedict's pedigree,
and a fight breaks out between the hardened veteran--recently returned
from the war, we are meant to understand--and the now aged Benedict.
Bick first holds his own and Sarge crashes into the jukebox, setting
off the song "The Yellow Rose of Texas" while he recovers and then sets
out to systematically demolish Mr. Bick Benedict, the overlord. As the
song plays on in ironic counterpoint, shots of his distraught daughter
and other family members are undercut with the cinematic crucifixion of
Bick Benedict, the overlord, by the former Centurion. After Sarge has
finished thrashing Benedict, he takes a sign off of the wall and throws
it on Benedict's prostrate body: "The management reserves the right to
refuse service to anyone". This is not only America of the 1950s, but
America of the 21st century. For just as Sarge is defending racism, he
is also defending his once-constitutional right to free association, as
well as exerting his belief in Jeffersonian-Jacksonian democracy in
thrashing a plutocrat. This is a type of yahooism that
Bruce Catton, in his Pulitzer Prize-winning
history of the Civil War, attributed to the rebellion. There had always
been a very well developed strain of reckless, individualistic violence
in America, frequently encouraged, ritualized and sanctified by the
state. The diner scene in "Giant" could only have been created by a man
with a thorough knowledge of what America and Americans were (and
continue to be). Sarge will try to accommodate Benedict, who has
stepped out of his role as racist plutocrat into that of paternalistic
pater familias, just as the sons of the robber barons of the 19th
century--who justified their economic depravities with the doctrine of
social Darwinism--did in the 20th century, endowing foundations that
tried to right many wrongs, including racism, but Sarge will only go so
far. When he is stretched beyond his limit, when his giving in is then
"pushed too far," he reacts, and reacts violently.
This scene sums up American democracy and the human condition in
America perhaps better than any other. America is a violent society, a
gladiator society, in which progress is measured in, if not gained by,
violence. Yes, Sarge is standing up for racism and segregation (a huge
topic after the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court ruling
outlawing segregation), but he is also standing up for himself, and his
beliefs, something he has recently fought for in World War II. The
ironies are rich, just as the irony of American democracy, which
excluded African-Americans and women and the native American tribes
from the very first days of the U.S. Constitution, is rich. This is
America, the scene in Sarge's diner says, and it is a critique only an
American with a thorough knowledge of and sympathy for America could
create. It is much more effective and philosophically true than the
petty neo-Nazi caricatures of
Lars von Trier's
Dogville (2003), who are cowards.
Characters in a George Stevens film may be reluctant, they may be
hesitant, they may be conflicted, but they aren't cowardly.
Another ironic scene in "Giant" features Mexican children singing the
National Anthem during the funeral of Angel, who in counterpoint to
Bick's son, his contemporary in age, is of the land, to the manor born,
so to speak, but lacking those rights because of the color of his skin.
Angel had gone off to war, and he returns to the Texas in which he was
born on a caisson, in a coffin, starkly silhouetted against the Texas
sky as the Benedict mansion had been earlier in the film when Leslie
had first come to this benighted land. Angel, who had experienced
racial bigotry due to his birth into poverty on the Benedict ranch, had
fought Adolf Hitler. He is the only hero in
"Giant," and his death would be empty and meaningless without Bick
Benedict's reluctant conversion to integration through fisticuffs.
The great turning points in American cinema typically have involved
race. The biggest, most significant movies of the first 50 years of the
American cinema death with race:
Uncle Tom's Cabin (1903),
Edwin S. Porter's major movie before his
The Great Train Robbery (1903)
and the first film to feature inter-titles;
The Birth of a Nation (1915),
D.W. Griffith's racist masterpiece--which
was a filming of a notorious pro-Ku Klux Klan book called "The
Clansman"--in which a non-sectarian America is formed in the linking of
Southern and Northern whites to fight the African-American freedman;
The Jazz Singer (1927), in
which a Jewish cantor's son achieves assimilation by donning blackface
and disenfranchising black folk by purloining their music, which he
deracinates, while turning his back on his Jewish identity by marrying
a Gentile; and
Gone with the Wind (1939), the
greatest Hollywood movie of all time--in which the Klan is never shown
and the "N" word is never used, although the entire movie takes place
in the immediate post-Civil War South--a sweeping, romantic masterpiece
in which a reactionary, ultra-racist plutocracy is made out to be the
flower of American chivalry and romance.
Stevens' "Giant" was a major film of its time, and remains a motion
picture of the first rank, but it was not the cultural blockbuster
these movies were. Yet it more than any other Hollywood film of its
time, aside from Elia Kazan's rather
whitebread
Gentleman's Agreement (1947)
and Pinky (1949), directly addresses the
great American dilemma, race, and its implications, and not from the
familiar racist, white supremacist point of view that had been part of
American movies since the very beginning. Those attitudes had been
rooted in the American psyche even before the days of
The Perils of Pauline (1914)
serials (simultaneously serialized in the white supremacist Hearst
newspapers), in which many a sweet young thing was threatened with
death or--even worse, the loss of her maidenhead--by a sinister person
of color (always played by a Caucasian in yellow or brown face).
A 1934 "Fortune Magazine" story about the rosy financial prospects of
the Technicolor Corp.'s new three-strip process contained a startling
metaphor for a 21st-century reader: "Then - like the cowboy bursting
into the cabin just as the heroine has thrown the last flowerpot at the
Mexican - came the three-color process to the rescue." It was this
endemic, accepted racism that Stevens challenged in "Giant," which is
at the root of America's expansionist philosophy of manifest destiny,
and which was at the root of much of the southern and western
economies. Those who died in World War II had to have died for
something, not just the continuation of the status quo. It was a direct
and knowing challenge to the system by someone who thoroughly knew and
thoroughly cared about America and Americans.
George Stevens died of a heart attack on March 8, 1975, in Lancaster,
California. He would have been 100 years old in 2004, and in that year
he was celebrated with screenings by The Academy of Motion Picture Arts
and Sciences, London's British Film Institute, and the Museum of Modern
Art in New York. His legacy lives on in the directorial work of fellow
two-time Oscar-winning Best Director
Clint Eastwood, particularly in
Pale Rider (1985), which suffers from
being too-close a "Shane" clone, and most memorably in his masterpiece,
Unforgiven (1992).