Robert Burgess Aldrich

Director Robert Aldrich (1918-83) was indeed one of the great iconoclasts of our time, cinematic and beyond. Aldrich began by honing his craft as assistant to many regarded directors; Charlie Chaplin, Jean Renoir, Abraham Polonsky and Lewis Milestone to name a few. He was a revered enough figure in America, but his stock in Europe was far more substantial, particularly as a result of the veneration of his magnum opus noir moment with 1955's Kiss Me Deadly by a noted circle of French cineastes.

The mass and wide appeal of Aldrich's extremely rough edged action films had been largely to a male audience and his,was a universe that oozed testosterone from every pore (sans a few rare form forays into the world of female grotesques in The Killing of Sister George and What Ever Happened To Baby Jane)? The mark of his vision, is it's signature brand of cynicism; the choices people make aren't usually connected to morality or scruples, motives are unquestionably self-serving and the distinction between the heroes and the villains, is near well impossible to discern. While his films indeed did encompass a hyper variety of genres - including some ground breaking Western efforts - it would be the genres of crime and thrillers that would be Aldrich's calling card, and also host his most personal works.

                     You can snog me but it may prove fatal.



The frenetic Kiss Me Deadly, perhaps his greatest film noir, but it is by no means the solitary one. His second release, World for Ransom (1954), is a slightly disenchanting silver screen telling of Dan Duryea's television series China Smith, and dealt (in a perfunctory sense) with the kidnapping of a nuclear physicist in the Far East. His first fully achieved films would follow in the same year, the Westerns, Apache and Vera Cruz, the latter would serve as a blueprint for Sergio Leone to follow in his sojourn to the spaghetti Western. Kiss Me Deadly exploded the following year and Aldrich's credentials as a director of extreme cinema were truly consolidated. The prolific one would turn out The Big Knife also in the year 1955, a noir-inflected melodrama that centered on the venality of Hollywood with an unflinching Jack Palance as an embittered matinee idol and Rod Steiger as a martinet studio boss. Autumn Leaves (1956) is a quite bizarre noirish entry, a Joan Crawford 'weepie,' noted for one act of startling violence - Cliff Robertson striking the helpless Crawford with a typewriter - (ouch, who said writing ain't dangerous)?

                              Sister act



Aldrich's independent voice meant that he had an affinity to work for himself or as last resort, for the smaller studios. When Columbia brought the director aboard in 1957 for The Garment Jungle, a pro-union noir about the garment industry, he would actually be replaced midway through filming, for the simple fact that he refused to soften the script (and serious accolades to this man for his lack of pandering)! His most noteworthy successes came with the psycho-dramatic train-wreck; What Ever Happened To Baby Jane (1962) and his nihilist action entry, 1967's The Dirty Dozen. Hustle (1975), co-produced and starring Burt Reynolds was another number from the eleven o'clock hour and one that could give Polanski's Chinatown (released only a year prior to Hustle) a veritable run for the moolah in terms of a hat tipping to noir.

                      It's Winters in Palance's Palace. A scene from the very serrated  Big Knife 





The Big Knife (1955)

Made in the same year as Sunset Boulevard, this is a less subtle satire on the perils and woes of Hollywood stardom. Jack Palance is Charlie Castle, an inebriated film star flustered with his career, who direly wants to leave show business behind. Rod Steiger is an absolute dynamo as Stanley Shriner Hoff, the megalomaniac/studio boss that loves him, erm loathes him, and is willing to move any such mountain to stop him. The beauty of Aldrich in this production and all his others, was that he allowed his actors complete, full reign, here with Clifford Odets play, which was an historic one to boot. Cinematographer extra-extraordinaire  Ernest Laszlo's dizzying camera-work completes the scene, and adds yet another layer of anguish to it's already heady mix.




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                                                   Do the Hustle...



Hustle (1975)

A slightly ungainly script, but one with the requisite noirish mood of despair and disillusionment. Phil Gaines (Burt Reynolds) is a Californian cop investigating the homicide of a young woman, while her mourning yet violent father breathes down his neck. The evidence seems to point in the direction of a corrupt attorney, Leo Sellers (played by Eddie Albert), who also has a connection with Gaines's lover, the sassy streetwalker Nicole (Catherine Deneuve). Ultimately, Gaines's attempt to fix his own small part of a corrupt world ends with tragedy and tears.