For One Week Only: Women Directors – 5. Barbara Loden & the Seventies

16 Monday Nov 2015

Tags

Barbara Kopple, Barbara Loden, Catherine Breillat, Chantal Akerman, Elaine May, For One Week Only, Gillian Armstrong, Independent, Jane Arden, Joan Micklin Silver, Liliana Cavani, Lina Wertmüller, Margarethe von Trotta, Safi Faye, Sarah Maldoror, Wanda, Women directors

Introduction

After a long period where female directors were working outside the mainstream and making experimental movies, the Sixties had started to see more women making movies that were accessible to a wider audience. This new generation of women directors wanted to tell stories that featured strong female characters, and as they garnered more and more recognition within the industry, so they also gained awareness with the general movie-going public. One movie, and its director, showed exactly what could be done on a small budget, and how powerful a story could be when told simply, and without resorting to accepted ideas about how a movie should look and feel.

Barbara Loden (1932-1980)

Loden began her career as a model and pin-up girl, but in the Fifties she decided to study acting and by the decade’s end she was appearing on Broadway. She was discovered by Elia Kazan who cast her in a minor role in the Montgomery Clift movie Wild River (1960). She followed it with Splendor in the Grass (1961) in which she played Warren Beatty’s wayward sister. Further movie roles failed to come along, and she did some work in television, but in 1964 she won a Tony award for her performance in Arthur Miller’s After the Fall (playing a fictionalised version of Marilyn Monroe). She continued with theatre roles, though in 1966 she was cast opposite Burt Lancaster in the movie version of The Swimmer. However, a dispute between the director Frank Perry and the producer Sam Spiegel over her scene with Lancaster – Loden apparently out-performed her more experienced co-star with ease – led to Perry being fired and several of the movie’s scenes being re-cast and re-shot. Loden’s role went to Janice Rule and it’s her performance that is seen in the finished movie.

In 1967 she married Kazan, and the following year appeared in the unsuccessful Fade-In (1968) with Burt Reynolds. At first she decided to go into semi-retirement, but out of the blue she wrote, directed and starred in a movie that was so innovative and so emotionally detailed (despite the main character’s disaffection with her life) that it took critics and audiences alike by surprise. The movie was Wanda (1970), and at that time it was one of the few American movies directed by a woman, independently or through a studio, to be released theatrically.

Loden’s tale of a coal miner’s wife who hooks up with a petty criminal was filmed in a cinéma vérité style that matched its melancholy subect matter; it’s so haunting at times that the viewer’s sympathy for Wanda is assured from the start. It’s an incredibly matter-of-fact movie, without a false note to it anywhere, and in all three capacities – writer/director/actress – Loden is supremely confident in what she’s doing, and the movie casts an hypnotic spell that’s hard to shake. You root for Wanda even though you know her life is heading in a downward spiral and the likelihood of her being saved is slim, but Loden’s pessimistic outlook allows for hope as well. It’s a fine line that Loden treads but she proves more than up to the task.

Her efforts were rewarded when Wanda won the International Critics’ Prize at the 1970 Venice Film Festival. Rightly regarded as a masterpiece of independent movie making, Wanda cemented Loden’s place in cinema history, but instead of following it up, she withdrew altogether from making movies and returned to the semi-retirement she’d begun two years before (some say Kazan expressed doubts about Wanda that led Loden to question her ability). Eventually she made two short movies, The Frontier Experience and The Boy Who Liked Deer (both 1975), but they proved to be the final projects that Loden worked on. In 1978 she was diagnosed with breast cancer, and she died two years later.

Loden’s impact on the women directors who followed her can’t be stressed enough. Although she only made one movie, and even though it went virtually unseen for the best part of forty years before being restored for the 2010 Venice International Film Festival, it’s a touchstone movie that is as influential now as it was in 1970. Loden was an assured actress who could be glamorous and confident on screen, but her real talent lay behind the camera, dissecting the lives of ordinary people who are trying to find their place in Life. Whatever the reasons for her not making any more movies, ultimately they’re unimportant, because in Wanda she left us something very special indeed.

The Seventies

The new decade saw an increase in the presence of women directors across the globe. In America, Elaine May began her directing career with A New Leaf (1971), and after making two short movies, Joan Micklin Silver came to prominence with Hester Street (1975). They were followed by Barbara Kopple, a documentarian who won an Oscar for her first movie, Harlan County, USA (1976). In the UK, feminist filmmaker Jane Arden became the first British female director to gain a solo credit on the movie The Other Side of the Underneath (1972). Down Under, after spending most of the decade making shorts and a documentary, Gillian Armstrong broke into the mainstream with My Brilliant Career (1979) (it was also the first Australian movie to be directed by a woman in forty-six years).

In Europe, female directors seemed to be everywhere as the decade drew on. Even though she had begun her career in the Sixties it wasn’t until the release of The Night Porter (1974) that Liliana Cavani came to the attention of a wider audience. Her fellow Italian, Lina Wertmüller, also started her career in the Sixties, but also didn’t find fame and a wider audience until the release of The Seduction of Mimi (1971). Germany’s Margarethe von Trotta made two movies with Volker Schlondorff, including the hugely influential The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum (1975), before she made her first solo feature The Second Awakening of Christa Klages (1978). In France, Catherine Breillat began her often controversial directing career with A Real Young Girl (1976), and in neighbouring Belgium, Chantal Akerman secured her position as one of the most influential female directors working at the time with Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975).

In Africa, Senegalese movie maker Safi Faye became the first female Sub-Saharan director to have a movie commercially distributed. The movie was Letter from My Village (1975) and it gained her international recognition. In Angola, Sarah Maldoror’s examination of the Angolan struggle for liberation, Sambizanga (1972) was a powerful movie that showed the tragedies caused by war, and the despair those tragedies trigger.

As the decade drew to a close, the establishment of so many different women directors from all around the globe had the sense of “At last!” about it. It wouldn’t be long before female directors began to be heard from in South America and the Middle East as well, and they would bring even more ways of telling stories and entertaining audiences. In the Eighties the ratio of women directors to their male counterparts would still be minimal, percentage-wise at least, but they would definitely enjoy as much commercial and critical success as their male colleagues, a situation that had been long overdue. And as they headed into the Nineties, those barriers were lowered even further. Women directors were here, and they were here to stay.

For One Week Only: Women Directors – 2. Ida Lupino

07 Saturday Nov 2015

Posted by dullwood68 in Movies

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

Actress, Career, Collier Young, Director, Elmer Clifton, Hard Fast and Beautiful, Ida Lupino, Independent, Movies, Never Fear, Nicholas Ray, Not Wanted, On Dangerous Ground, Outrage, Producer, Screen Directors Guild, The Bigamist, The Filmakers, The Hitch-Hiker, The Trouble With Angels, Warner Bros., Women directors

Introduction

The Golden Age of Hollywood, regarded as the years between 1928 and 1943, was also the period in which there was only one female director working in Hollywood, and that was Dorothy Arzner. Although she never made a movie that was a complete box office and/or critical success, Arzner was respected by her male peers, and worked with some of the biggest stars of the era. But she made her last feature in 1943, after which there were no female directors working in Hollywood. Until 1949 that is…

Ida Lupino (1918-1995)

Ida Lupino’s importance as a female director can’t be downplayed. Although she only made eight movies (two of which she didn’t receive an on-screen credit for), Lupino’s rise from studio starlet to challenging actress – at Warner Bros. she was often suspended for refusing roles she was offered – to respected director came about by a strange combination of happenstance and good/bad luck.

During the occasions when she was suspended, Lupino would spend her free time observing other directors as they worked on set, and also how movies were edited. To her it seemed as if everyone else was “doing the interesting work” on a movie while she sat around bored between takes. She learnt the basics of directing throughout the Forties, but still didn’t attempt to get a directing job. When she left Warner Bros. in 1947, it was to become a freelance artist, and while she continued to work as an actress, she and her husband, Collier Young, formed a production company called The Filmakers.

In 1949, she and Paul Jarrico collaborated on a script for the company’s first production, a (for the time) searing drama about pregnancy out of wedlock and the psychological impact on the young mother when she gives up her baby. The movie was called Not Wanted and it was to be directed by Elmer Clifton. But when Clifton suffered a heart attack part way through filming, Lupino stepped in to finish the movie (Lupino refused a screen credit out of respect for Clifton). The result was a controversial movie that drew attention to the problem of unwed mothers, garnered a huge amount of public debate, and made people aware of Lupino’s role behind the camera.

In the same year, Lupino co-wrote, co-produced and directed Never Fear, another drama, but this time about an aspiring dancer who contracts polio. It was a modest movie, effective in its way, and enough for the Screen Directors Guild to offer her membership in 1950, which she accepted, becoming only the second female director in its ranks (after Dorothy Arzner). Her acceptance within the industry as a director was rapid though well-deserved, and Lupino continued to make challenging social dramas that cemented her reputation and were successful both commercially and critically.

Lupino’s attraction to “difficult” subject matters was confirmed with the release of Outrage (1950), about the rape of a young woman and the problems that arise because she doesn’t tell anyone what’s happened to her. It shows Lupino still learning her craft as a director, but also growing in confidence, and her decision to tackle such a topic is entirely laudable: it’s a movie that Hollywood would never have made at the time, and which was only possible because of Lupino’s independence from the studio system. (By coincidence, Akira Kurosawa tackled the same subject, but from a different angle, in the same year’s Rashômon.)

Lupino’s next movie seemed, at first glance, to be a step back from the powerful social dramas she’d already made, but Hard, Fast and Beautiful (1951) was a deceptively intriguing look at female jealousy and longing as experienced by the mother of a tennis prodigy. It features a great performance from Claire Trevor, and shows that Lupino was entirely capable of making the subtext of a movie more interesting than the main storyline. It was also Lupino’s first time directing a movie that was written by someone else.

Lupino’s next directorial stint was filling in for Nicholas Ray when he fell ill during the filming of film noir thriller On Dangerous Ground (1951), a movie Lupino had a role in. It’s a measure of Lupino’s regard within the industry at that time that she was asked to do this, and though it’s difficult when watching the movie to work out which scenes she shot specifically, that in itself is a tribute to Lupino’s skill as a director in that she was able to mimic Ray’s idiosyncratic style of directing.

The film noir approach of On Dangerous Ground may well have prompted Lupino to seek out a similar project for her next movie as a director. If so, the result was perhaps her most well-received movie yet, the tense and menacing The Hitch-Hiker (1953). With its claustrophobic car interiors and bleak desert vistas, Lupino’s strong visual style served as a compelling background to the psychological battle occurring between fishermen Edmond O’Brien and Frank Lovejoy, and psychotic William Talman (never better). It may be a short movie, a lean seventy-one minutes, but it’s one of the most compelling crime dramas of the Fifties, and Lupino’s grip on the material is so assured that her increasing skill behind the camera can no longer be questioned.

With audiences and critics alike impressed by The Hitch-Hiker, their response to Lupino’s next movie should have been even more emphatic, but despite being widely regarded now as her masterpiece, The Bigamist (1953) was coolly received. And yet it’s a movie that addresses its subject matter head on and is still as uncompromising in its approach even today. It was a first for Lupino in that she directed herself – as the object of the main character’s bigamous relationship – but her confidence as a director ensures that each character gets the screen exposure they need. The ending is particularly impressive, and has an emotional impact that is as unexpected as it is effective.

Sadly, Lupino’s short career as an independent producer/director came to an end after The Bigamist. Budgets had always been tight, and though Lupino was always well prepared and planned ahead on all her movies, the returns on her movies weren’t enough to keep The Filmakers going. Fortunately, in 1952, Lupino had been approached by Dick Powell who had started up a television production company called Four Star Productions; he wanted her to replace Joel McCrea and Rosalind Russell after they’d dropped out. Lupino began working in television in earnest, and it wasn’t until 1966 that Lupino made what would be her final movie as a director, The Trouble With Angels. A comedy about the students at an all-girls’ school who challenge the nuns that run it (including, ironically, Rosalind Russell), the movie received a mixed to negative reaction, but viewed today holds up remarkably well. Afterwards, Lupino continued acting and directing in television until her death, and along the way took supporting roles in horror movies such as The Devil’s Rain (1975) and The Food of the Gods (1976) (as many of her contemporaries did in the Seventies).

Lupino’s importance in the history of women directors is due to the fact that she did it all by herself: she founded the production company to make the movies she wanted to make, she wrote (at first) the screenplays for those movies, and she tackled topics that her male peers would have run a mile from (or just not been allowed to make). If she couldn’t completely undermine the conservative values of the time, it was enough that she challenged them and held a mirror up to some of the more uncomfortable social issues of the day. She was a tough, determined director who didn’t short change her audience, and she achieved industry and public approval on her own terms, as well as long-lasting respect. And more importantly, she helped inspire a new generation of female movie makers, a generation that would tackle many of the same issues Lupino had, and with the same sense of propriety.