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August 9, 1. 91. 8, Cranston, Rhode Islandd. December 5, 1. 98. Los Angeles, Californiafilmographybibliographyarticles in Sensesweb resources. The struggle for self- determination, the struggle for what a character wants his life to be. As early as 1. 95. Aldrich became No. Watch Edge of Seventeen movie online for free. One of the classics in contemporary American gay cinema, Edge of Seventeen recalls one high school. Les Grands Cr. This was certainly heady company for a new American director, not yet forty years old. Aldrich’s relatives included politicians and bankers – the Rockefellers were both – but the first and last favor he asked from any of them was when an uncle at Chase Bank helped him get his first job as a production clerk at RKO. From there he progressed through the ranks of assistant directors and graduated to directing television in the early 1. Although a lifelong liberal and the co- worker of many blacklistees, Aldrich’s only brief period as persona non grata in Hollywood was because of a disagreement with Harry Cohn on the Columbia project The Garment Jungle (1. Aldrich was active in the Directors Guild of America throughout his career and ultimately served as its president, overseeing the negotiation of a break- through contract in terms of creative rights in 1. Ironically for a director seldom regarded as an artist by American critics, Aldrich’s union activism on behalf of directors’ prerogatives alienated studio heads and cost him work at the end of his career. If there is a core to Aldrich’s worldview as expressed over the course of thirty feature films, it would simply be the oft- confessed proclivity for “turning things upside down.” Aldrich conforms to the traditional narrative requirements of heroes and villains, but within that he often skirts the issue of good and evil in favor of personal codes and moralities. He found himself as someone who knew that his idea of himself was why he existed; and that his self- esteem and respect for himself could never be jeopardized by any compromise that involved that deep portion of himself.” (2)Perhaps the best example of this process is Aldrich’s adaptation of Kiss Me Deadly (1. A quest for the Grail, in the sense that social historian Mike Davis describes as “that great anti- myth usually known as noir,” (3)Kiss Me Deadly is equally what Borde and Chaumeton call a “dark and fascinating close” (4) to the noir era, whose main character is an “anti- Galahad” in search of his “great whatsit.” This tension between myth and anti- myth, between hero and anti- hero, is the key to Aldrich’s work. Hammer is a radically different character than many who preceded and followed him in Aldrich’s work, equally unlike the defiant warrior Massai in Apache (1. Charlie Castle in The Big Knife (1. But all these characters inhabit the same cinematic milieu, a world where men’s greed for land, money and power challenge the individual to survive. As supporting characters remark, Massai cannot give up his fight and Charlie cannot sustain his; both are fatally imperiled by “doing what they do the way they do it.” From Aldrich’s earliest work, cynicism and idealism combined to create violent, angst- ridden outbursts of existential despair. Little wonder that such a thematic outlook should give Aldrich a cutting edge status with European observers. As a filmmaker, Aldrich always came straight on, usually with more visual style than Ray, more raw energy than Fuller, and more social consciousness than Losey. Aldrich’s films concentrate on the most basic situation: man attempting to survive in a hostile universe. Like most filmmakers, Aldrich uses and reuses such general devices as narrative tension between subjective and objective viewpoints and the frustration or fulfillment of the audience’s genre expectations. In order to survive, certain Aldrich heroes can be more consistently vicious, self- centered and cynical than any villain. Christina’s assessment of Hammer – “You’re the kind of person that has only one true love: you” – in Kiss Me Deadly is echoed in the admission by Zarkan in The Legend of Lylah Clare (1. I’m not sick, I’m in love! In following it, their behavior becomes even more extreme than either Hammer’s or Zarkan’s. Characters who are in narrative terms antagonists, like Joe Erin in Vera Cruz (1. Karl Wirtz in Ten Seconds to Hell (1. In films such as these, the presence of a ruthless pragmatism in one of the two principals would normally promise a clear- cut alignment into hero and villain, into Erin versus Ben Trane, Wirtz versus Eric Koertner, black versus white. The actual result is ambiguous. Each film is less than absolute in its definition of a moral man yet is absolute in its definition of morality. In Vera Cruz and Ten Seconds to Hell, the protagonist does finally defeat the antagonist; but the triumph is more societal than personal. In The Flight of the Phoenix (1. Too Late the Hero (1. As Major Reisman counsels the prisoner Wladislaw early in The Dirty Dozen (1. His fables about bands of outsiders remain remarkably consistent across generic lines. Attack!, Ten Seconds to Hell, The Flight of the Phoenix, The Dirty Dozen, Too Late the Hero, Ulzana’s Raid (1. The Longest Yard (1. Twilight’s Last Gleaming (1. Westerns – all isolate a group of men in a specific, self- contained and threatening universe. The core plots are diverse: soldiers behind enemy lines; a bomb disposal unit in post- World War II Berlin; passengers on a plane down in the Sahara; inmates of a prison; ex- convicts in a missile silo. Yet in each situation, the characters undergo the same, inexorable moral reduction. And often both the idealists and the cynics – the social extremists – perish. Usually, these conflicts are between men and nature and between men and other men. All three war films as well as The Flight of the Phoenix and Ulzana’s Raid have effectively no women characters at all. In The Longest Yard and The Choirboys (1. In the few films that do focus entirely on them, The Killing of Sister George (1. What Ever Happened To Baby Jane? Notably, Baby Jane and Sister George are performers, personas behind which some women retreat in a male- dominated society. Even more notably, Frennessey in World for Ransom (1. The Legend of Lylah Clare are also performers and bisexuals. For both, Lesbianism is an alternative to the men who love them obsessively and want desperately to control their behavior. The societal assumptions which make relationships between men and women so difficult are most clearly addressed – and left unresolved – in Hustle. The man is too alienated to make a commitment; the woman is forced to separate sex from love by working as a prostitute. For Aldrich, the gender of his protagonists was less important than their struggle: a film is only “. In theory, it was supposed to be metaphorical. In practice, it wasn’t that important.” (6) Beyond Westerns and war films, Aldrich’s films have a generic breadth matched by few other filmmakers. Aldrich’s work ranges widely from the self- described “classy soap opera” Autumn Leaves (1. Sodom and Gomorrah (1. Twilight’s Last Gleaming. In between, there are a few comedies and several noir films, as well as the occasional psychological melodrama and the neo- Gothic. There are prison pictures, cop pictures, sports pictures, and pictures about people who make pictures. The interior consistency of theme and style in Aldrich’s films resists classification according to genre. Erin and Wirtz recount their twisted, nearly identical histories in the context of an adventure Western and a return- from- the- war melodrama respectively. Zarkan is a retired film director, Hammer is a private detective: yet their self- love, their egocentric disdain for the lives and feelings of others, and their inability to rectify this attitude even when presented with second chances are traits which mark them as sibling personalities from radically different genre backgrounds. Aldrich’s visualization also transcends the conventions of genre. Strong side lighting, the camera placed in an unusually high or low position, foreground clutter, and staging in depth appear as frequently in his Westerns, war pictures, neo- Gothic thrillers, even in his television work, not just where they might be expected in a ’5. Kiss Me Deadly or the richly colored frames of a Hollywood melodrama like The Legend of Lylah Clare. Transmuting and expressing in sensory terms the physical and emotional make- up of the situation, of the characters caught in these frames, remains the basic dynamic of an Aldrich picture regardless of genre. Aldrich’s camera may capture a figure crouching behind a lamp, like Charlie Castle in The Big Knife, or lurking at the edge of a pool of light, like Lily Carver in Kiss Me Deadly. Grimacing faces or dark objects will suddenly intrude into the foreground of medium long shots, disturbing previously flaccid compositions, possibly in anticipation of a violent turn in plot events. Recurring high angle medium shots peer down from behind ceiling ventilators in every type of film, World for Ransom, The Angry Hills (1. Hush. Conversely, the hissing sound of man’s life leaking out in Kiss Me Deadly or a postmortem burst of gunfire in Attack! In a subjective manner, the characters sometimes “choose” to situate themselves within the frame. For the guilt- ridden Charles Castle, the lamps about the room have a symbolic value which unconsciously draw him back to them again and again. Or characters may be placed objectively: Lily Carver at the edge of the light in Kiss Me Deadly is simultaneously in a figurative darkness appropriate to her mental state. Even an off- beat, particular icon, such as a ceiling fan, can become a variable metaphor. In World for Ransom the slowly turning overhead blades in the room where Mike Callahan is interrogated by an underworld figure are not only a distracting influence at the frame’s center but cast multiple shadows on the surrounding walls. This de- focuses the reading of the shot away from the human figures to create a visual confusion equivalent to Callahan’s mixed emotions.
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