
Originally Posted by
MacLeod
It's very easy to bring to mind the directors of your favourite dozen movies, but less easy to go beyond that and think about directors who you like despite their lesser works.
So, do I like the works of John Houston? Or do I just happen to like The African Queen, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre and The Maltese Falcon? Or Humphrey Bogart?
Yesterday, I watched Hitchcock's The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956) and decided that there was too much about it that irritated, though there were some pleasures. In fact, working my way through a Blu-Ray boxed set of his Hollwood movies, I'm increasingly of the opinion that his moral ambiguities (Stewart drugging Day, and the obsessive Scottie in Vertigo) are despicable.
Ridley Scott has a great visual sense (Alien, Legend, Black Rain), but Prometheus and its sequel are examples of such stupid story-telling!
Michael Curtiz (Casablanca, The Adventures of Robin Hood) and Raoul Walsh (White Heat, They Died With Their Boots On, and The Naked and The Dead, are two of my favourites from the golden era, but they made so many that I've not seen - how would I know which are their lesser works to judge them by?
Two whose movies I have enjoyed are Michael Mann (Last of the Mohicans, Heat, Collateral) and Peter Weir (Picnic at Hanging Rock, Witness and Master and Commander), who are not prolific at all and not, apparently active.
It's difficult not to conclude that the "auteur theory" is grossly overrated. Watch enough of some directors' movies, and common themes and approaches emerge, but as they often work with the same writers, editors and cinematographers, that's hardly surprising. So, do I like the directors? Or is it just that my story interests coincide with theirs?