Background
Harold Becker was born on 25 September in New York, New York, United States.
Harold Becker was born on 25 September in New York, New York, United States.
Twelve films in thirty' years hardly amounts to character or consistency. But there are plenty of virtues here. Becker can tell a complicated story, even if complexity is all you get. He can handle actors and let big stars have their set pieces.
In The Boost, he delivered one of the rare films about ordinary people and money. Elsewhere, he has seemed just as happy in competently dealing with the everyday melodrama that exists only in the movies. He helped bring Al Pacino back to the scene with Sea of Love, and made that a wry, grubby glamorization of the police, no matter that The Onion Field had seemed concerned to reproduce the impossible realities of the job. And James Woods was way out of the ordinary in that picture. Malice is silly trickery', but City Hall is nearly an authentic study in local politics.