by Alain Silver
Great Directors (Senses of Cinema)
The struggle for self-determination, the struggle for what a character wants his life to be...I look for characters who feel strongly enough about something not to be concerned with the prevailing odds, but to struggle against those odds.(1)
The critical reputation of Robert Aldrich, scion of the Eastern establishment and graduate of the best finishing schools in Hollywood, burst out of Europe with la politique des auteurs. As early as 1957, Aldrich became No. 7 of the "Les Grands Créateurs du Cinéma" series of director monographs published by the Belgian Club du Livre du Cinéma, which followed studies of Robert Bresson, John Huston, Jean Renoir, Vittorio De Sica, Luis Buñuel, and Marcel Carné. 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 1950s. 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 (1957). 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 1978. 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 didn't divide the world up into good and evil," Abraham Polonsky said of Aldrich, "he didn't see it that simply. 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 (1955). 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 (1954) and the tormented Charlie Castle in The Big Knife (1955). 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. "I guess you have a weakness for a certain kind of character," Aldrich readily admitted; "It's the same character in a number of pictures that keeps reappearing, characters that are bigger than life, that find their own integrity in doing what they do the way they do it, even if it causes their own deaths." (5) Although they are culturally quite different, both Massai and Charlie Castle appealed to Aldrich because of their idealistic struggle. 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 (1968): "I'm not sick, I'm in love...with me." Others like Massai in Apache, Joe Costa in Attack! (1956), and Phil Gaines in Hustle (1975) are driven by an irreducible and essentially idealistic personal code. 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 (1954) and Karl Wirtz in Ten Seconds to Hell (1959), reflect on and try to explain their compulsive destructiveness by telling essentially the same story: learning from and eventually murdering a father figure who had taught them to look out for number one.
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 (1966) and Too Late the Hero (1970), the moral distinctions among the members of a group are so finely drawn that the chance or haphazard manner deciding which of them live and which die constitutes the pervasive irony of the films. As Major Reisman counsels the prisoner Wladislaw early in The Dirty Dozen (1967), innocence or guilt, reward or condemnation, are purely matters of circumstance. "You only made one mistake," he says, pausing by the cell door and grinning back at the man sentenced to death, "you let somebody see you do it."
In this sense, Aldrich is a rigorous determinist. 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 (1972), The Longest Yard (1974), and Twilight's Last Gleaming (1977), adventure films, war films, and 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.
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