Yes

by Joe Murray

Created on: July 30, 2008   Last Updated: August 04, 2008

Like athletes, some directors seem to gather momentum and peak somewhere in the middle of their careers. Others, like Frank Capra and Billy Wilder, directed consistently successful, if work-a-day, films throughout their lives. And still others, like Orson Welles and Stanley Kubrick, peak early. Kubrick rarely faltered except for a few arty experiments. And Welles once said of himself, "I started at the top, and worked my way to the bottom," a statement that, given Welles' prolific film career, afforded him a moment of uncharacteristic modesty.

Driven by that extra reservoir of energy and an inner incandescent fire, the great and the successful seem to peak because the gamut of their best years exceeds such extraordinary expectations that their latter work usually compares poorly with it.

The two most conspicuous standouts are Alfred Hitchcock and Richard Lester.

Two of Hitchcock's earliest films, "The 39 Steps" (1936) and "The Lady Vanishes" (1938), are now considered classics. But his interim work was surprisingly uneven until the '50s, when he directed a string of indisputable hits: from "Rear Window" (1954), through "The Trouble With Harry" (1955; Hitchcock's personal favorite and Shirley MacLaine's film debut), to the enigmatic "The Birds" (1963). Hitchcock couldn't seem to fail when he was between 55 to 64 years of age. Then, his work began to gradually decline.

"Marnie" (1964), though technically polished, was an anemic shadow of the director's earlier style. "Torn Curtain" (1966) was pedestrian and ordinary. Except for a memorable overhead staircase shot of a Castro-like revolutionary on a black-and-white chessboard tiled foyer, "Topaz" (1969) was an ambitious failure. "Frenzy" (1972) looked like a hand-held student project, as it seemed to suffer from poor camera placement, an unusual plight since Hitchcock liked to storyboard all his films. And "Family Plot" (1976) seemed rooted to Universal's dingiest part of the lot like the Earth-bound cardboard story-line that plagued it. Uncharacteristic for any director of note, "Plot" was just awful. But Universal was eager to squeeze every bit of box office potential out of Hitchcock they could before he passed on. Alfred Hitchcock died four years later, at 81.

Richard Lester was a child prodigy from Philadelphia who earned a B.S. in clinical psychology; he started directing television at age 20 (in 1952), kicked around Europe in his early 20s playing guitar off-grid for tips, and settled in England to collaborate with Peter Sellers for hit British TV comedy, "The Goon Show," in 1958.

Lester proved himself a master at playful invention with his first two Beatles' films, "A Hard Day's Night" (1964) and "Help!" (1965), through "The Three Musketeers" (1974;
both this film and "The Four Musketeers" were filmed simultaneously), to the morose but unusually realistic riff on Ian Fleming's James Bond in "Cuba" (1979) in which a balding Sean Connery plays a British "military consultant" hiring himself out to the Batista regime in pre-revolutionary Cuba. But Lester's best years were between 32 to 42 years of age. His next film, "Finders Keepers" (1984), looks like it was phoned in.

Woody Allen seems another exception to the rule of peak. Though most cite his first directorial breakthrough as "Take the Money and Run" (1969), the better "Bananas" (1971) started a comedic hit-making streak through the '70s earning him an Oscar for "Annie Hall" (1977), which was arguably not as good as the transcendental "Manhattan" (1979). His last memorable comedy, "A Midsummer Night's Sex Comedy" (1982), fills a period in which Allen was 34 to 47.

It was then he turned increasingly introspective and started making more "serious" films, spanning the dark "Shadows and Fog" (1992) to the mordant "Match point" (2004). Though some might compare Allen's more recent work with less charity than his comedies, others would say that his current work is merely different. But Allen summed it up best in "Stardust Memories" (1980) in which Allen the director is assessed by space aliens on a lonely hillside during one of his own film retrospectives: "Don't get me wrong. We like your movies," assures the alien, "especially the early funny ones."

Robert Zemeckis is another case of a promising director who lost sight of his earlier inventiveness. Zemeckis began with one of the best, and most underrated, comedies of the '80s with "Used Cars," whose plot is exactly what the title says. His last noteworthy film was the breathtaking "Castaway" (2000), after which he descended into a digital slough; the motion-capture technology in "Polar Express" (2004) and "Beowulf" (2007) rendered the actors as digitally enhanced avatars whose movements were a little too fluid and wooden (you achieve both at once?), whose eyes were lifeless and creepy, and through whose mouths delivered dialogue that rarely ascended above the level of comic book pulp. Through Zemeckis, Hollywood seems to be saying "Why paint with a brush, when you can use a sledgehammer." Zemeckis' peak - until he proves otherwise - 28 to 48.

Stanley Kubrick's only two movies that were mildly disappointing were "Barry Lyndon" (1975), an arty experiment filmed mostly by candlelight; and his incomprehensibly disjoint "Eyes Wide Shut" (1999), in which all the New York City locations were shot entirely in England. But, dying that same year at 71, Kubrick didn't live long enough go bad.

Even that self-styled "bad boy" of Hollywood, Orson Welles, never really worked his way to the bottom, but, after "Citizen Kane" (1941), maintained a prolific directing career (from 26 to 47 years of age), though either on a shoestring ("Touch of Evil," 1958) or in the foreign market; though "Othello" (1952) and Kafka's "The Trial" (1962) were considered "unsatisfactory," the imagery of both films are striking. However, since Welles eschewed the mainstream, Hollywood was a little afraid of him. Despite this, Welles enjoyed a rich acting career until well into the end of his life at 70, an accomplishment few would consider a failure.

Perhaps, it might be argued, that great artists, far from declining beyond their peak; just succeed far beyond the expectations of later work which, by any other standard, would be considered merely above average.

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