George Stevens:a Filmmakers Jo

 

 

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The documentary George Stevens: A Filmaker's Journey is an essential for classic movie fans. Clammed with clips from his movies and details of his life from boyhood - playing with a camera - it leads a trail of a man who was one of Hollywood's greatest directors.

When the son of a director makes a film about his father, you have certain expectations. Bias, yes, but also insight and facts that are otherwise unknown. George Stevens Jnr provides us with his father's behind the scenes footage and also the World War 2 film he shot of D-day, the liberation of Paris, and Dachau, since he was in the special coverage unit. (The war footage is actually badly edited, or is it that the material is still subject to the censorship of the military?, and accompanied by a Hollywood-type saccharine score by Carl Davis). Jnr tells us that he was bequeathed his father's memorabilia, yet when it comes to covering his Hollywood career, we get hardly anything new. Even the behind the scenes home movies are mostly tedious images of the actors waving to the camera. So then we are left with the movies Snr made, complemeted by present day interviews with some of the actors involved. Of these, Katharine Hepburn is particularly entertaining. George Stevens is admired in the same way as John Ford, a point driven home by iconic profile stills of Snr in a cowboy hat. Like Ford, Stevens style was simple. He boasted that he could manage any genre, though he never tried a thriller, and his contemporaries Howard Hawks, William Wyler or John Huston were just as versatile and also managed to add some individuality. So there hangs an air of suffocating self-importance to the films we see. What is interesting is that this air evolved. His career in Hollywood began as a cameraman and gag writer for Laurel and Hardy, and Hal Roach. The story of how he overcame the blue eyes of Stan Laurel that the camera didn't register is the promise of detail unfulfilled. And the action of Gunga Din looks fun. Hepburn may have hit upon the reason for Stevens loss of humour. She comments that she had fierce arguments over his abandoning comedy, which she felt was his true gift, and turning to more serious subjects, though Jnr makes the point that it was his war experience which contributed to this decision. I guess after Dachau, nothing is funny anymore. Jnr also tells us that his father watched Triumph of the Will alone in a screening room and then said it was the most influential of his life. (Interpret that as you may). What is mentioned in this doco but passed over quickly is Snr's notorious reputation for shooting multiple takes of the same scene at different angles, so that he could make decisions when editing, which the studios balked at because of the cost of film exposed. (In this way, he was the opposite of Hitchcock, who shot so that the film could only be edited one way - ie the way Hitch had storyboarded it.) However all this seems worth it when you consider the one-take long-shot of The Way You Look Tonight from the Astaire/Rogers Swing Time (a lesson in how to shoot a dance number), and the beautiful extreme closeups of Elizabeth Taylor and Montgomery Clift in A Place in the Sun. Millie Perkins from The Diary of Anne Frank tells us that during their shoot, Stevens always wore dark sunglasses and treated the actors in the way he wanted them to perform. Since they were all meant to be frightened, that doesn't sound too positive. Luckily for Perkins, her character was to be loved. The perceived failure of The Greatest Story Ever Told also deprives us of anything of his later film, The Only Game in Town, though the discussion of his disagreement with Cecil B DeMille over Joseph L Mankiewicz and the Directors Guild during McCarthyism is fascinating.

When the son of a director makes a film about his father, you have certain expectations. Bias, yes, but also insight and facts that are otherwise unknown. George Stevens Jnr provides us with his father's behind the scenes footage and also the World War 2 film he shot of D-day, the liberation of Paris, and Dachau, since he was in the special coverage unit. (The war footage is actually badly edited, or is it that the material is still subject to the censorship of the military?, and accompanied by a Hollywood-type saccharine score by Carl Davis). Jnr tells us that he was bequeathed his father's memorabilia, yet when it comes to covering his Hollywood career, we get hardly anything new. Even the behind the scenes home movies are mostly tedious images of the actors waving to the camera. So then we are left with the movies Snr made, complemented by present day interviews with some of the actors involved. Of these, Katharine Hepburn is particularly entertaining. George Stevens is admired in the same way as John Ford, a point driven home by iconic profile stills of Snr in a cowboy hat. Like Ford, Stevens style was simple. He boasted that he could manage any genre, though he never tried a thriller, and his contemporaries Howard Hawks, William Wyler or John Huston were just as versatile and also managed to add some individuality. So there hangs an air of suffocating self-importance to the films we see. What is interesting is that this air evolved. His career in Hollywood began as a cameraman and gag writer for Laurel and Hardy, and Hal Roach. The story of how he overcame the blue eyes of Stan Laurel that the camera didn't register is the promise of detail unfulfilled. And the action of Gunga Din looks fun. Hepburn may have hit upon the reason for Stevens loss of humour. She comments that she had fierce arguments over his abandoning comedy, which she felt was his true gift, and turning to more serious subjects, though Jnr makes the point that it was his war experience which contributed to this decision. I guess after Dachau, nothing is funny anymore. Jnr also tells us that his father watched Triumph of the Will alone in a screening room and then said it was the most influential of his life. (Interpret that as you may). What is mentioned in this doco but passed over quickly is Snr's notorious reputation for shooting multiple takes of the same scene at different angles, so that he could make decisions when editing, which the studios balked at because of the cost of film exposed. (In this way, he was the opposite of Hitchcock, who shot so that the film could only be edited one way - ie the way Hitch had storyboarded it.) However all this seems worth it when you consider the one-take long-shot of The Way You Look Tonight from the Astaire/Rogers Swing Time (a lesson in how to shoot a dance number), and the beautiful extreme closeups of Elizabeth Taylor and Montgomery Clift in A Place in the Sun. Millie Perkins from The Diary of Anne Frank tells us that during their shoot, Stevens always wore dark sunglasses and treated the actors in the way he wanted them to perform. Since they were all meant to be frightened, that doesn't sound too positive. Luckily for Perkins, her character was to be loved. The perceived failure of The Greatest Story Ever Told also deprives us of anything of his later film, The Only Game in Town, though the discussion of his disagreement with Cecil B DeMille over Joseph L Mankiewicz and the Directors Guild during McCarthyism is fascinating.

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