Background
Rudolph Mate was born on 21 January 1898 in Cracow, Malopolskie, Poland.
director producer cinematographer
Rudolph Mate was born on 21 January 1898 in Cracow, Malopolskie, Poland.
Educated in Vienna and Budapest, and a soldier in the First World War, Maté became an assistant to Alexander Korda in 1921, in Hungary.
He went to Germany, first as an assistant to Karl Freund, then as director of photography on Der Kaufmann von Venedig (23, Peter Paul Felner); Pietro der Korsar (24. Arthur Robison); Mitgiftjager (26, Gaston Ravel); Die Hochstaplerin (26, Martin Berger); and Unter Ausschluss der Oeffentlichkeit (27, Conrad Wiene). He had also assisted on Carl Dreyer’s Mikael (24), and in 1928 he went to France to be Dreyer’s cameraman on La Passion de Jeanne d'Arc and Vampyr (32), where he experimented to obtain a ghostly image. He also photographed Le Petit Babouin (32, Jean Cremillon), Die Abenteuer des Konigs Pansole (33, Alexis Granowsky), Lilioin (33, Fritz Lang), and Le Dernier Milliardaire (34, René Clair).
In 1935, he went to America and worked for twelve vears as a lighting cameraman: Metropolitan (35, Richard Boleslavsky); Navy Wife (35, Allan Dwan); Dante’s Inferno (35, Harry Lachman); Professional Soldier (35, Tay Garnett); Dodsworth (36, William Wyler); Come and Get It (36, Wyler and Howard Hawks); Our Relations (36. Lachman); A Message to Garcia (36, George Marshall); Stella Dallas (37, King Vidor); Outcast (37, Robert Florey); Blockade (38, William Dieterle): Trade Winds (38, Garnett); Love Affair (39, Leo McCarey); Foreign Correspondent (40, Alfred Hitchcock); The Flame of New Orleans (40, Clair); My Favorite Wife (40, Garson Kanin); To Be Or Not To Be (42, Ernst Lubitsch); The Pride of the Yankees (42, Sam Wood); Sahara (43, Zoltán Korda); Cover Girl (44, Charles Vidor); Tonight and Every Night (45, Victor Saville); Gilda (46, Vidor); Down to Earth (47, Alexander Hall); and The Return of October (48, Joseph H. Lewis).
As a director. Maté is a minor but distinct entertainer, working in a variety of genres with a sure sense of narrative and great visual clarity. He did good thrillers—The Dark Past, Union Station, and Second Chance (Mitchum, Darnell, and Palance)—but he had the humor necessary for The Black Shield of Falwortli and reveled in the primeval forest explored by Lewis and Clark (or Fred Mac.Murrav and Charlton Heston) in The Far Horizons. The Violent Men is a brutal range war. including Barbara Stanwycks denial of crutches to a crippled Edward G. Robinson as his ranch burns around him.
His best film was D O.A., a waking nightmare, wickedly clever in its plot (by Russell Rouse and Clarence Greene), and with several assets that testify to the director’s eye—the rise of Edmond O'Brien’s panic, the jazz club, the headlong run down Market Street, Neville Brand’s leer, and that supreme noir shot where poison glows in the dark.
Action, landscape, and atmosphere always appealed to Maté more than content or character, but he was a reliable source of pictorial adventure throughout the 1950s, unhappy in anything more or less than swift action. Nonetheless, he remains a proficient director and an outstanding photographer, witness to the gulf between the two roles. Nothing in his own films is as gorgeous as Rita Hayworths dance in Gilda, as foreboding as the images of Foreign Correspondent, or as creative as the veiled grayness of Vampyr and the devotional close-ups of Jeanne d’Arc. But D O.A. is a picture Dreyer would have liked.