Tribute to veteran director
WITH the death of Sidney Lumet earlier this month, aged 86, the world has lost one of the greatest Jewish filmmakers.
Lumet was born in Philadelphia on June 25, 1924 to Yiddish theatre actor Baruch Lumet and his wife, dancer Eugenia Wermus, and moved to New York City when he was four, making the city his primary home for the rest of his life.
Lumet was married four times: to actress Rita Gam, heiress Gloria Vanderbilt, African-American journalist Gail Jones and Mary Gimbel. Lumet had two daughters with Jones, who herself was the daughter of famed singer Lena Horne.
Lumet began his career as a child actor on the New York stage and radio in the 1930s. He had a big break in his adult acting career when he replaced Marlon Brando in Ben Hecht’s 1946 Zionist play A Flag is Born.
Lumet studied acting with Sanford Meisner, then formed his own acting troupe, but later observed that had “I stayed in acting, the best I could hope for was getting the part of the little Jewish kid from Brooklyn who got shot down … and then Clark Gable would pick me up with tears in his eyes.”
Instead, Lumet turned to directing, and crafted some of the most notable films of the past 50 years, starting with 12 Angry Men in 1957, about a jury that is slowly swayed into changing its decision. Lumet was well known for being an “actor’s director” and the actors who appeared in his films read like a “who’s who” of stars: Peter Finch, Faye Dunaway and Beatrice Straight all won Oscars for their performances in Network (1976), and Ingrid Bergman won her third Oscar for Murder on the Orient Express (1974).
Acting Oscar nominations for Lumet films also include Al Pacino for Serpico and Dog Day Afternoon, Rod Steiger for The Pawnbroker, Paul Newman and James Mason for The Verdict, Jane Fonda for The Morning After and River Phoenix for Running on Empty.
Lumet never had the sort of acclaim that many other directors have had, in part because so many of his films have been adaptations and he has ranged so widely, working in theatre, television and film.
Lumet kept returning to a number of favourite themes, particularly police dramas such as Serpico, Prince of the City and Q & A
In 1993, film scholars David Desser and Lester Friedman declared Lumet to be one of the four most significant American-Jewish film makers (along with Allen, Mel Brooks and Paul Mazursky) and termed his films “celluloid haggadahs”.
Lumet’s 1965 Holocaust drama The Pawnbroker was one of the most significant Jewish films of the 1960s.
His film Daniel (1982), based on the Doctorow novel, told the story of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. The 1992 film Close to Eden (also known as The Stranger Among Us) was a murder mystery set in New York’s Chassidic community. Lumet’s other significant Jewish film was the bittersweet Bye, Bye Braverman (1968), in which a quartet of New York Jewish intellectuals mourn their dead friend.
Although Lumet received four Best Director Oscar nominations, his only Academy Award was a Lifetime Achievement honour at the 2005 awards ceremony.
Lumet’s most recent film, Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead, a crime drama made when he was aged 82, was released in 2007 to extensive critical acclaim, but limited box office success.
REPORT: Don Perlgut
PHOTO: Director Sidney Lumet (left) and actor Philip Seymour Hoffman on the set of his last film, Before The Devil Knows You’re Dead, released in 2007.
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