Who were the Greatest Movie Directors? (Video)

By N.S.

The title of the re-posted video below—“seven film directors who changed cinema forever”–makes no sense to me. The point is artistic excellence. Note, too, that Walt Disney was not a director. However, there are, nonetheless, some excellent choices on the original gangsta’s, oops, original poster’s list.

1. D.W. Griffith (1875-1948);
2. Charles Chaplin;
3. Walt Disney;
4. John Ford;
5. Alfred Hitchcock;
6. Akira Kurosawa; and
7. Steven Spielberg.

I’ll take his Charlie (1889-1977), Ford (1894-1973), Hitch (1899-1980) and Kurosawa (1910-1998), and add David Lean (1908-1991) and William Wyler (1902-1981). However, I can’t come up with a clean choice for #7.

(Walt Disney (1901-1966) was a producer, and he didn’t even take a producer’s credit for his masterpieces, e.g., Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, (1937); Fantasia, (1940); and Bambi, (1942).)

Fritz Lang (1890-1976) and Frank Capra (1897-1991) each made four Top 100 pictures, but each also had a dramatic fall-off in his career. All of the Jew Lang’s Top 100 masterpieces were collaborations with his Nazi wife, novelist-screenwriter, Thea von Harbou (1888-1954). When they split and he fled Nazi Germany, he was half a man, and made mostly mediocre work (ditto for von Harbou).

(Lang: Dr. Mabuse, The Player (1922); Dr. Mabuse, Part II (also 1922); Metropolis (1927); and “M” (1931). Capra: It Happened One Night (1934); Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (1936); Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939); and It’s a Wonderful Life (1946).)

Capra was the dominant director of the 1930s, in large part due to Robert Riskin (1897-1955), who was the dominant screenwriter of the decade. After It’s a Wonderful Life, Capra was all washed up, and re-made old pictures. Similarly, Lang was the dominant director of the 1920s and early 1930s in the German-language world, because von Harbou was and remains the greatest screenwriter in German history.

David Lean made one masterpiece after another.

At first, he was a “coward”--a proponent of “Britishness,” which some observers claim was invented by Noel Coward (1899-1973), followed by a brief period of Dickens adaptations: This Happy Breed (1944); Brief Encounter (1945); Great Expectations (1946); and Oliver Twist (1948).

He then alternated, for a time, between women’s pictures (sometimes on behalf of his then wife, actress Ann Todd) and macho stories: The Passionate Friends (1949); Madeleine (1950); The Sound Barrier (1952); and Summertime (1955).

Lean then hit his peak, combining macho topics with cultural clashes, and even identity switches, with The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957) and Lawrence of Arabia (1962).

He enjoyed critical acclaim and box office success with the mediocre Doctor Zhivago (1965), which won four Oscars, but had a bomb with Ryan’s Daughter (1970), whose hostile critical reception threw him into a years-long funk. (One report said that Robert Bolt (1924-1995), of Lawrence and A Man for All Seasons (1966), then the world’s highest-paid screenwriter, was obsessed with doing an adaptation of Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, and Lean let him have his way.)

Lean then made a comeback, with the minor masterpiece A Passage to India, an adaptation of Forster's eponymous novel, but with the homosexual subplot excised.

Brief Encounter is on my Top 100 list; The Bridge on the River Kwai and Lawrence of Arabia are tied for eighth.

At one point (1938-1942), Willi Wyler made six straight masterpieces:

Jezebel (1938); Wuthering Heights (1939); The Letter (1940); The Westerner (1940); The Little Foxes (1941); and Mrs. Miniver (1942)

And then, in 1946, after wartime service as an aerial photographer and documentary maker that left him deaf in one ear, and almost deaf in the other one, he made the greatest picture of all time:

The Best Years of Our Lives.

“Tonight, in Honor of Memorial Day Weekend, TCM Will Present the Greatest Sound Picture Ever Made, William Wyler’s The Best Years of Our Lives (1946), Starring Myrna Loy, Fredric March, and Dana Andrews, with a Screenplay by Robert E. Sherwood, Shot by Gregg Toland, and with a Moving Score by Hugo Friedhofer”

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