Movies Til Dawn

Here's a brilliant sequence from Sam Peckinpah's "Cross Of Iron" (1977) which, when compared to what was actually scripted, beautifully shows exactly what a great director does with a screenplay that they didn't write. Although Peckinpah was a writer (for awhile) before he became a director, it's clear that he feels little fidelity with the shot-by-shot pacing, description and general dramatization of legendary screenwriter Julius Epstein's attempt at this particular sequence. Indeed, far from struggling with what Epstein--in a script at one time known as "Sergeant Steiner"--wrote, Peckinpah both discards it and takes the most important elements of it and endeavors to create something wildly more ambitious than the writer initially conceived of.  Peckinpah keeps the moral (and in many ways the most important) conflict at center stage while simultaneously(Christ knows how) developing an arresting, visually brilliant and strikingly poignant actio...

So much of Otto Preminger's persona was severe and forbidding--the shiny bald skull, the tantrums, the thick Vienesse accent, the unrelenting work ethic--that I can't help but put him in the Jack Webb bin, which is to say that the more I think of it, the more Preminger's act seems to be a highly evolved form of comedy. Otto the Terrible was, in fact, a warm-hearted family man who clearly enjoyed his own persona and didn't mind sending it up here and there. I'm not saying that he wasn't really monstrous--clearly he could reduce co-workers to a dithering shambles of their former selves--but merely that he was his own best creation. Comedy is noticebly absent from his canon--his one straight up attempt, "Skidoo", was a notorious flop when it was released in 1968. The film is a collision course between old Hollywood (Preminger and his stars, who include Jackie Gleason, Carol Channing, George Raft, Groucho Marx, Peter Lawford, Mickey Rooney) and the h...