Fred Zinnemann: A director for all seasons | Daily News

Fred Zinnemann: A director for all seasons

Like the great William Wyler, Fred Zinnemann never committed himself to a particular style. Zinnemann’s foray into the American cinema coincided with a period of much change. Mass immigration had more or less ensured Hollywood a never ending supply of directors, actors, and scriptwriters, as well as cameramen and editors. Zinnemann, like Wyler, and the great Ernst Lubitsch, belonged to this generation.

None of his films are outstanding the way Stanley Kubrick’s or even Alfred Hitchcock’s works are: they are, as Andre Bazin and the Cahiers set would have noted, not a little justifiably, distinguishable by their lack of distinction. But they are interesting on their own, and great works of art. Certainly they are entertaining, and more often than not thrilling.

The son of Austrian Jews, Zinnemann originally wanted to be a musician: naturally, perhaps, given that he hailed from the country of Schubert, Haydn, Strauss, and Bruckner. Eventually he graduated with a law degree from the University of Vienna, in 1927.

One of Zinnemann’s last films, Julia, is about Vienna in the 1930s, before the onset of fascism. Zinnemann did not see the fascists invade Austria: harbouring a desire to study film, he persuaded his parents to allow him to enrol at the Ecole Technique de Photographie et Cinématographie, where he became a cameraman. Later he left for Berlin, before migrating to the US. His parents could not follow him: both were killed during the Holocaust.

Zinnemann’s films are perhaps more personal than Wyler’s, because they are more or less about outsiders forced to reckon with strange, unfamiliar, and hostile surroundings. In High Noon, perhaps his greatest work, a sheriff has to take measures on his own and fall back on his own wits after the town he has protected well refuses to come to his aid when they hear that an ex-convict is coming on the train to take revenge on him.

In From Here to Eternity, an introspective soldier is forced to conform to the rough life in the Marines, on the eve of the Pearl Harbour attack, eventually at the cost of his own life. In The Nun’s Story, which contains one of Audrey Hepburn’s best performances, the nun at the heart of the story is torn between her duty to her vows and her anger at the Nazi forces who ravage her home country and eventually destroy her family.

Like Wyler, Zinnemann worked with his actors, and built up a reputation as an actor’s director. He introduced quite a number of stars to the big screen: long before he shone as Stanley Kowalski in A Streetcar Named Desire, Zinnemann directed Marlon Brando in The Men, which established him as a star who was not afraid of mumbling and being incoherent and still passing himself off as the new hero of the new American youth.

High Noon was far from Gary Cooper’s debut, but it revived his career. Among the other actors he introduced, Frank Sinatra (From Here to Eternity, for which Zinnemann won an Oscar) and Paul Scofield (A Man For All Seasons, again for which he won an Oscar) stand out in particular. There were others: Montgomery Clift especially.

He crisscrossed several genres, not being afraid of experimentation if it got what he wanted. Thus from film noir to wartime romance, he moved to musicals (Oklahoma!) and historical epics (A Man For All Seasons), before moving to political thrillers (The Day of the Jackal, in its own way of the most criminally underrated in the genre). His last film but one, Julia, is a quiet and reflective meditation on anti-fascism, something he would have identified with well given his own encounters with Nazism through his parents’ deaths.

Though Pauline Kael did not take to it – Roger Ebert didn’t like it either – it remains one of the last great paens to anti-fascism from Hollywood’s Golden Age. If one sees its acting – Jane Fonda in an Oscar nominated role, and Vanessa Redgrave and Jason Robards in Oscar winning ones – and unconsciously draws parallels with the noir mysteries of the 1940s, it’s because the film is plainly from that era – and the director too.

The same can be said of The Day of the Jackal, which Ebert reviewed positively. Jackal is one of the best political thrillers out there. There’s hardly any dialogue – it reminds you of the great caper films of the 1950s and 1960s, especially Jules Dassin’s Rififi and Topkapi – which means you have to follow the action, for the clues hidden beneath a scene, to gain insights into the characters and their motivations.

The two relationships the anti-hero gravitates towards during the second half of the film – one of them with a rich heiress, another with a bohemian in Paris – never go anywhere. It’s only by reading between the lines , into the characters’ motives, that you understand why they develop, and how they are incidental to the larger drama in the story.

This kind of introspective thrillers you just don’t get today. It’s passé and classical and hence, by all accounts, bland. Yet in Zinnemann’s day it was considered daring, innovative, entertaining, and thrilling. Popular audiences did not react well to The Day of the Jackal, though it was a modest box-office hit. By then they had got used to a new generation of directors – the likes of Brian de Palma and William Friedkin – and a new kind of thriller – epitomised by de Palma’s Sisters and Friedkin’s The French Connection.

By the time of his death in 1997 – he was 89 years old, the last from his generation – even the generation he had contended against in the 1970s had evolved, to what it has become today. In his own way, Zinnemann was an enduring tribute to the American film’s potential, a testament to the abilities of certain directors to transcend their age. This quality he shared with William Wyler than with anyone else – undoubtedly a tribute to the enduring appeal of Hollywood’s Golden Age, and Age that was never to be ever again.


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