Sidney Lumet: Apostle of Streetwise Cinema

In the 76-year history of the New York Film Critics, only two moviemakers have been honored with life achievement awards: Jean-Luc Godard and Sidney Lumet. The French director is of course the prickly master of movie modernism, but Lumet was something Gotham critics could appreciate: the primary apostle of streetwise cinema, the torch-bearer of ground-glass realism and, for a half-century, the ultimate chronicler of New York City in all its agita and chutzpah.

Though he shot films in Boston, Chicago, Toronto, London, Paris, and in Texas, New Mexico and Louisiana (but never in Hollywood), Lumet made his name investigating the rough edges of the city he grew up and old in. A fat fistful of his New York films — 12 Angry Men, The Pawnbroker, Bye Bye Braverman, Serpico, Dog Day Afternoon, Network, Prince of the City, Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead — could serve as a time-capsule of the American metropolis in its violent grandeur, its cunning, desperation and raw wit. Let Woody Allen send valentines to the upper-middle class of neurotic literati. Lumet’s films were more like ransom notes, third-degree confessions, anguished screams through the bars of a highrise window — from his Network — that “I’m as mad as hell and I’m not going to take this any more.”

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As driven, aggressive and purposeful as any of his film protagonists, Lumet directed 43 feature films from his 1957 debut, 12 Angry Men, to the 2007 Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead. Nominated four times for the Best Director Oscar, and receiving an honorary Academy Award in 2005, Lumet finally ran out of stories, clout and (the last to go) boundless creative energy. He died April 9, at 86, of lymphoma at his Manhattan home.

What Andrew Sarris wrote in The American Cinema of George Cukor, that his “filmography is his most eloquent defense,” applies equally to Lumet. If you add to his New York films his work in a wide variety of genres — powerful versions of Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night and Chekhov’s The Seagull, the anti-nuke parable Fail-Safe, the Brit cop film The Offense, the Agatha Christie all-star romp Murder on the Orient Express, the Boston-set courtroom drama The Verdict and the 1968 documentary King: A Filmed Record… Montgomery to Memphis — you’re likely to wonder: did one man direct all those movies? (Not to mention that rouged-up musical corpse The Wiz, with a 20-year-old Michael Jackson and Lumet’s own glamorous ex-mother-in-law, Lena Horne.)

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Part of the answer is that he worked with some of the finest writers in the endangered species of social drama. He made films from the works of Tennessee Williams, John Le Carre and Larry McMurtry; he shot scripts by Paddy Chayefsky, David Mamet, Herb Sargent and Gore Vidal, and by movie-scenario stalwarts Reginald Rose (12 Angry Men), Sidney Buchman ( The Group), Walt Salt and Norman Wexler (Serpico) and Frank Pierson (Dog Day Afternoon). They provided Lumet with fierce characters and the kind of fiery oratory that actors love to deliver. His job was to get the heat on-screen.

He so often succeeded because, when stars wanted to be actors, they came to Lumet. In just his first five films — 12 Angry Men, Stage Struck, His Kind of Woman, The Fugitive Kind and Long Day’s Journey into Night — he directed Henry Fonda, Lee J. Cobb, Sophia Loren, Marlon Brando, Anna Magnani, Joanne Woodward, Katharine Hepburn, Ralph Richardson and Jason Robards. Later, he freed Sean Connery from his James Bond indenture (in five pictures); he unleashed Al Pacino’s holy madman (in Serpico and Dog Day Afternoon); he steered Peter Finch, Faye Dunaway and Beatrice Straight to acting Oscars in Network. He got Richard Burton to sober up for Equus and Michael Caine to play a bisexual killer in Deathtrap. For Murder on the Orient Express he persuaded a dozen top stars — including Connery, Ingrid Bergman (who won an Oscar), Lauren Bacall, John Gielgud, Anthony Perkins, Richard Widmark and Vanessa Redgrave — to work for peanuts just because it would be a lark to be among one another, and because Sidney asked them to.

He knew actors because he was practically born one. Lumet started at four in his father Baruch’s Yiddish theater troupe on the Lower East Side and appeared in the original stage production of Sidney Kingsley’s Dead End when he was 11. After World War II service in India and Burma he joined the fledgling Actors Studio, only to be tossed out. So he started his own company, and at 22 was a director on Broadway. Yul Brynner, then a director, got him into live TV drama; in a 2005 Turner Classic Movies interview with Robert Osborne, Lumet recalled the blessing of being in an infant medium — “Nobody knew what they were doing, so there was nobody to say No.” Building a renown for goading actors toward self-revelation, he caught the attention of Fonda, who was producing a movie version of Rose’s jury-room TV play 12 Angry Men. For the nameless jurors Lumet rounded up Lee J. Cobb, E.G. Marshall, Jack Warden, Jack Klugman, Ed Begley and brought sizzle to the confrontation of principal and prejudice.

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Lumet was well equipped to fill all the roles of a movie director: field-marshal, picture-painter, script surgeon and psychiatrist. Two years after 12 Angry Men, he got a handful in Brando (whom, a decade before, he had replaced in Ben Hecht’s Israel agit-prop play A Flag Is Born). For Osborne, Lumet recalled how Brando would “test the director. He’d give you two takes. In one of them he’d be working really fully — by that I mean on an internal level. And in the other one, the outside form would be identical but he’d be doing nothing inside. And he’d watch and see which one you’d print. And if you printed the wrong one you’d had it.”

He knew how to get more out of Brando — and less from Rod Steiger in The Pawnbroker. “Rod came to you pouring 10 quarts into a five-quart can,” Lumet told Osborne. “It was always too much… And that, by the way, is a much better problem for a director than an actor who doesn’t bring you enough.” Under Lumet’s strict guidance, Steiger was able to give his portrayal of a Holocaust survivor in Harlem a kind of heroic simmering, lending surprise and impact to the pawnbroker’s final explosion when, in fury and remorse, he impales his hand on a spindle — one of the most plausibly shocking moments in ’60s films.

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Lumet’s work is full of these privileged moments: like the great scene in Long Day’s Journey — just a few seconds, really — when Hepburn, as a drug-addled mother, hears her son (Dean Stockwell) say he needs to leave home for medical treatment of his consumption. At this dreadful news she slaps the boy and, instantly horrified by her action, shouts, “No!” and hugs him for forgiveness. It’s the instant switch in emotional vectors that gives the exchange its poignancy. Similarly, in Dog Day Afternoon, Pacino’s bank robber, who for most of the movie has been a study in bantam bombast, turns soft and pensive while dictating a letter to the boyfriend he wanted to get a sex-change operation. “To my darling wife Leon…”, the letter begins; Pacino’s tenderness trumps the incongruous humor and makes the moment an epiphany of mad, doomed love.

Like any director who believes in some form of the Method, Lumet could overvalue declamatory acting. He’d let Pacino spume, or Magnani rave (in The Fugitive Kind), because anything shouted was thought to be truer, and acuity took a back seat to intensity. In part this was emblematic of the New York style, where anyone from a corrupt cop to a guy on jury duty is supposed to express himself at 10-plus volume. But when character and style were in synch, this high-volume, highwire acting — say, Pacino’s funny, scary “Attica! Attica!” anthem in Dog Day — is right on the mark. In Network, Finch, as a TV news anchorman whose ratings skyrocket when he goes raving mad on the air, was a lunatic parody that turned into prophesy, prefiguring Glenn Beck by about 35 years. “It’s not satire,” Lumet and Chayefsky would say of their film. “It’s sheer reportage.”

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Somehow, Lumet found time to marry actress Rita Gam, socialite Gloria Vanderbilt and Horne’s daughter Gail. (Mary Gimbel, his fourth wife of 31 years, survives him.) By his own account, though, the workaholic was no doting dad. As he told Osborne, “I’m very aware of … what my obsessions have cost my children.” But his two daughters appreciated their father’s business enough to go into it: Amy Lumet worked as a sound editor, and Jenny Lumet wrote the screenplay for the 2008 dramedy Rachel Getting Married. That film came out a year after Lumet’s swan song, Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead — which, in its comically misanthropic portrayal of lust, greed and family betrayal, marks the director’s vigorous farewell to the city he loved to cauterize.

Making good films or not-so, hits or flops, Lumet defined his work less by elegant camerabatics than by a corrosive intelligence, an attention to behavioral detail and an indefatigable verve. While some directors took years to hatch a film, he in his long prime did one or two projects a year. “All I want to do is get better,” he said, “and quantity can help me to solve my problems. … If I don’t have a script I adore, I do one I like. If I don’t have one I like, I do one that has an actor I like or that presents some technical challenge.” He left masterpiece-making to others; Lumet was just a moviemaker, one who turned most all his films into scintillating dispatches from the urban warfront.

But one thing Sidney Lumet could never do was to make a movie of the life of Sidney Lumet. He enjoyed his work too much — plenty of chutzpah, not enough agita.

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