Background
Robert Aldrich was born on 9 August 1918 in Cranston, Rhode Island, United States.
director producer screenwriter
Robert Aldrich was born on 9 August 1918 in Cranston, Rhode Island, United States.
The decline in Aldrich, in the sixties especially, was a sad thing to behold. Distinct talent is no sure defense against the pressures of vulgarization and commerce, to say nothing of the talent’s urge toward sensationalism. In other words, the politique des auteurs—of which Aldrich w'as once a test case—is an uncertain basis for assessing careers, more revealing of the movie-mad, would- be auteurs who invented it than of real battlers like Aldrich. Aldrich had great hits in the sixties: Baby Jane, The Dirty Dozen, and Sister George were box-office payoffs for a man who had striven earlv to be his owm producer. It w'as in exactly that period that a talent like Nicholas Hay vanished, unable to string projects together. But the contrast between, say, Kiss Me Deadly and The Grissom Gang, or Attack! and The Dirty Dozen, shows the woeful sacrifices that can come from keeping in work.
Kiss Me Deadly is still one of the best, and most surprising, American films of the 1950s, a lucid transformation of pulp Spillane into a vicious, insolent allegorv of violence, corruption, and forbidding futures in America.
There was the visual slovenliness that had overtaken the feverish, trapped imagery of the fifties. Melodrama and hysteria were always there in Aldrich, but Baby Jane, Sweet Charlotte, and Sister George are horribly calculated, smirking exploitations of sub-Gothie emotional horror. They are humorless, overheated films, harsh to their actresses, and only rarely achieve a kind of hysterical poetry—the close of Baby Jane is an eerie moment that caught the madness in American emotionalism. But The Dirty Dozen succumbed to the complacent strength Lee Marvin was prone to. Compare Marvin in that and Emperor of the Norih Pole with the ravaged sensi-tivity of Jack Palance in The Big Knife and Attack!, and the subtle disowning of Ralph Meeker’s Ham-mer in Kiss Me Deacllj. (Compare Aldrich’s Marvin with The Killers or Point Blank.)
His worka also include The Southerner (45, Jean Renoir); The Story of G.I. Joe (45, William Wellman); The Private Affairs of Bel-Aini (47, Albert Lewin); Body and Soul (47, Robert Rossen); Arch of Triumph (48, Lewis Milestone); Force of Evil (48, Abraham Polonsky); The White Tower (50, Ted Tetzlaff); The Prowler (51, Joseph Losey); M (51, Losey); Limelight (52, Charles Chaplin).
The Associates and Aldrich was set up in 1955, and he had his own studio for a few years on the booty of The Dirty Dozen. But he had to sell it after a series of flops, and found himself back in the jungle again, suffering cuts from the interesting Twilight's Last Gleaming, and ending his life on a run of coarse, disagreeable movies. Ilustle. though, was closer to the old style and his feeling for pain, a bleak cop/prostitute picture that paired Burt Reynolds’s masochism with the lofty glamour of Catherine Deneuve.
Then there is Ulzana’s Raid—a sequel to Apache, one of the best films of the seventies, and a somber adjustment of the Western to the age of Vietnam. Burt Lancaster has become the weary scout helping the cavalry track down a rogue Apache in a movie that uses terrain and loyalty as interactive metaphors. From a fine Alan Sharp script, Ulzana’s Raid is austere and fatalistic. It is the one film in which Aldrich seems old and wise.