sidney lumet search and destroy etc

The wife appears in the scene where Max and family is at home and everyone screams out the window.

The back of her head.

And also, almost every performance in it is great. Holden is crusty but benign. Dunaway plays hysterical as well as Gene Wilder, except cold as a media executive's tit. Robert Duvall is what you might call a "screamer." ("WE'VE GOT A BIG FAT BIG-TITTED HIT!") The whole thing is hilarious.

You guys hate this movie? Really?

It is one of my very favorite movies, actually. I don't think it's messy at all. Compared to something like Weekend, which does feel a bit messy, or some other films that I like a lot from the late 60s/70s that are messier and more chaotic. Network feels very controlled to me.

The romance side plot doesn't work at all. Holden getting involved with Dunaway makes zero sense.

Also, there is a painful amount of expositional dialogue.

"I took this job with your personal assurance that you would back my autonomy against any encroachment. But ever since CCA acquired control of UBS ten months ago..."

The romance side plot doesn't work at all. Holden getting involved with Dunaway makes zero sense.

Eh, it makes perfect sense to me - she's young and hot, and he's a guy.

honestly, it strikes me like the early television plays that owe a lot to the theater, which is the writer's background, right?

xp He's old and hot, you forgot to mention.

so what about it doesn't make sense to you?

She's completely insane, and he's not.

Also, you have to admit, radio play or not, some of that dialogue is labored.

She's completely insane, and he's not.

She is also successful and flatters him immensely.

As far as the dialogue goes, I think it works in its context. Maybe if you gave examples, I'd concede that some of it is, but I can't think of any off the top of my head.

I just gave one! The writing often breaks through and reveals itself as having been written. It's not exactly clumsy, because it's consistently like that, but I do cringe at certain lines.

I suppose it's the whole movie in abstract when Dunaway looks at Holden over dinner and, bug-eyed and hyperactive, asks "What sort of script do you think we can make out of this?"

xp - yeah, i have no problem with that. Granted, there are more streamlined ways of presenting the same information that make more use of the potential of the various facets of cinema to do so. I think the theatrical-style exposition in the dialog calls attention to the era of television that the movie is, in a sense, mourning.

That's definitely an angle on the movie that hadn't occurred to me.

rip

Can't say he didn't live a full life as a movie director.

RIP

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/10/movies/sidney-lumet-director-of-american-classics-dies-at-86.html

Huge. Love Dog Day, The Verdict, and Long Day's Journey Into Night, also Serpico and Prince of the City a little less so. (Mixed feelings on Network.) Amazing how many major directors have died during the past calendar year.

Before The Devil Knows You're Dead was a good one to go out on.

As a director, only usually as good as his material (i.e. Network's script, The Wiz's tunes). Don't know what he was like as a person.

RIP. Don't forget 12 Angry Men!

I've never watched The Iceman Cometh, which I home-taped years and years ago. I think that's #1 on my to-do list.

oh my. (particularly sad about that last crappy film.)

I would argue that his craft, esp the direction of the actors, gave Chayefsky's goddamn reactionary sermonizing a human dimension in Network.

I thought Before The Devil was terrible: lots of shouting, which was par for the course for Lumet when his Magic Gift for actors departed him. On the other hand, Night Falls on Manhattan is an underrated little film, despite Andy Garcia's misbegotten accent.

I didn't like Before the Devil either, but then I got caught up in some scene on TV one night, not even realizing it was Devil till I checked. So maybe it's worth a second look, I don't know.

Well, Lumet is the kind of non-auteurist director who is only as gd as the script he's working from - ie Frank Pierson's screenplay for DDA is really brilliant, so poignant and multilayered, while Paddy Chayefsky's screenplay for 'Network' is yes, vulgar and clumsy.
― Andrew L (Andrew L), Thursday, February 26, 2004

As a director, only usually as good as his material (i.e. Network's script, The Wiz's tunes).
― scissorlocks and the three bears (Eric H.), Saturday, April 9, 2011

Same point, seven years apart. This is the "Raising Kane" debate--isn't this more or less true of any director, though?

this is a great scene: beautifully staged, esp with the bank tellers being thrilled at being part of a media event. Too bad he didn't fuck it up with some self-regarding camera gyrations.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G9gHNl8UNq4&feature=related

http://historical-images.encore-editions.com/44-van-vechten-collection/500/400787-portrait-of-sidney-lumet.jpg

RIP

I forgot about Network jeez. Before The Devil knows was pretty bad, but heck, the man'd done enough great movies.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gTDhgR3p12w

My fave shot from this

Neat trick to isolate Begley: you see Lee J. Cobb go over to the window in the first second of that clip, then the shot reverses angle and Cobb disappears for the rest of the scene. (I spent the whole clip wondering where Cobb was, and only caught him when I went back to the beginning.)

uh, did we know one of his 3 wives was Gloria Vanderbilt?

Ah man, Dog Day Afternoon is one of my all-time faves. Love Network, Serpico and 12 Angry Men as well.

86 is not a bad age, he lived his life fully it seems. RIP.

deathtrap is pretty fun

I forgot that I was an extra in one of his films -- Daniel. The scene was a socialist rally on behalf of the neo-Rosenberg characters, shot in Union Square, presided over by Ed Asner. I had a circa 1950 hat. Don't remember his direction, except it was given by megaphone.

Anyone read this?

http://lehmannfilms.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2009/10/making-movies-sidney-lumet-paperback-cover-art.jpg

Yeah, it's pretty terrific -- the best thing he did in twenty years.

BTDKYD isn't terrible but the fractured chronology kills all possible tension (see also Vantage Point)

http://mubi.com/notebook/posts/3119

From that link:
http://s3.amazonaws.com/auteurs_production/post_images/4140/lumet2.jpg?1302434653

I don't think I remember subway seats w/ fabric, but I do recall the small electric fans mounted on the car walls.

From the NYT Last Word interview, I don't remember "Wyoming" from DDA.

Wonderfully unpretentious in that video piece - must find myself a copy of Making Movies.

When I posted a list many years ago of my favorite films of the '90s, I had Q&A in a group of 10 runners-up. When I watched it again a couple of years later, some of it seemed very shrill; it didn't hold up as well as I'd remembered, although Nolte's performance mostly did.

^^^ my feeling too

Making Movies is a great book. He's such a likeable presence.

Joe Morgenstern on Lumet.

Of the many things we discussed, the oddest was dishwashers. There’s a scene in “Rachel Getting Married” in which the father of the bride has a dishwasher-loading competition with the bridegroom that seems to be about efficiency but is really about control. The scene, Jenny said, had been inspired by a similar contest she witnessed as a child between her dad and the director/choreographer Bob Fosse.

Pete Hammond's remembrance

Matt Seitz: "Just because you don't instantly notice what directors are doing doesn't mean they aren't doing anything."

http://www.salon.com/entertainment/movies/film_salon/2011/04/09/sidney_lumet_appreciation