Robert Aldrich

Robert Aldrich (born August 9, 1918, Cranston, Rhode Island, U.S.—died December 5, 1983, Los Angeles, California) was an American director who earned his reputation with realistic and socially conscious films that were often marked by violence. His notable movies included the classics What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962) and The Dirty Dozen (1967).

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Early work

Aldrich was born into a prominent banking family. He attended the University of Virginia, but during his senior year in 1941 he left to take a job at RKO as a production clerk. Soon he was assisting Edward Dmytryk, among others, on B-films for the studio. In 1945 he began freelancing as an assistant director, and he later worked for such notables as Lewis Milestone, William Wellman, Jean Renoir, Robert Rossen, and Charlie Chaplin. Aldrich then gravitated to television, directing episodes of The Doctor and Four Star Playhouse.

Aldrich’s first feature film, Big Leaguer (1953), was a rather clumsy baseball drama with Edward G. Robinson and Vera-Ellen. He subsequently signed a contract with United Artists, and his first film for the studio was the box-office hit Apache (1954), with Burt Lancaster as a Geronimo-like protagonist. Aldrich’s success continued with the western Vera Cruz (1954), which starred Lancaster and Gary Cooper as soldiers of fortune in 1860s Mexico. None of these movies, however, could have prepared critics and moviegoers for Kiss Me Deadly (1955), one of the great film noirs and perhaps the genre’s grittiest. Aldrich’s genius was taking something that had already gone too far—Mickey Spillane’s best-selling paperback mystery—and exaggerating it even further, with Ralph Meeker well cast as the ruthless private eye Mike Hammer.

The box-office success of his early work enabled Aldrich to form his own production company, and in 1955 its first film, The Big Knife, was released. Based on a play by Clifford Odets, this scathing look at the moviemaking industry offers a memorable group of loathsome producers, egomaniacal actors, spineless agents, betrayed wives, and amoral starlets as embodied by Rod Steiger, Jack Palance, Ida Lupino, Wendell Corey, and Shelley Winters. Aldrich next directed the thriller Autumn Leaves (1956), in which Joan Crawford portrayed a spinster typist who marries a much-younger man (played by Cliff Robertson) only to learn that he is schizophrenic.

In 1956 Aldrich returned to action fare with Attack, a World War II drama about a platoon of U.S. soldiers battling incompetent officers and the enemy during the Battle of the Bulge. The cynical film featured a notable cast that included Palance, Lee Marvin, and—in a clever bit of casting against type—Eddie Albert as a cowardly captain. Aldrich had almost completed The Garment Jungle (1957) when he was fired from the production for refusing to tone down the script’s frank portrayal of New York’s crime-infested garment industry; Vincent Sherman finished the drama. Aldrich next directed the World War II films The Angry Hills (1959), with Robert Mitchum as a war correspondent, and Ten Seconds to Hell (1959), which featured Palance and Jeff Chandler as German demolitions experts. Both movies received tepid responses from critics and moviegoers.

The 1960s

Aldrich opened the decade with The Last Sunset (1961), a dialogue-heavy western in which Kirk Douglas played a philosophical outlaw who ends up on a cattle drive with the sheriff (Rock Hudson) who has been chasing him. He then helmed the biblical epic Sodom and Gomorrah (1962), with Stewart Granger and Pier Angeli heading the international cast. After this string of little-seen films, Aldrich experienced something of a career resurgence with the Grand Guignol classic What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962). A vicious black comedy featuring Bette Davis and Crawford, the picture was hailed for its high camp and became a major hit. Its success led to Hush…Hush, Sweet Charlotte (1964), with Davis joined by Olivia de Havilland, Agnes Moorehead, and Joseph Cotten in a surprisingly effective thriller. The Flight of the Phoenix (1965) was exciting in its own right, a survival yarn set in the Sahara desert. Although the film is long, its tension rarely lags. The superlative cast included James Stewart, Richard Attenborough, and Peter Finch.

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In 1967 Aldrich directed perhaps his best-known film, The Dirty Dozen. The much-imitated World War II adventure centres on a group of military convicts who are coerced into attempting a suicide mission (blowing up a chateau used as a retreat by Nazi officers) in exchange for commutation of their sentences. While the tough-guy cast—which included Marvin, Jim Brown, John Cassavetes, Charles Bronson, Donald Sutherland, and Telly Savalas—and extreme violence earned much of the focus, the film was also noted for showing the dark side of the military and war. The Dirty Dozen became one of the biggest hits of the decade and is generally considered a classic. Moviegoers, however, largely ignored Aldrich’s next films. The Legend of Lylah Clare (1968), which offered a harsh look at Hollywood, was widely panned, though it later developed a cult following for its campiness. The controversial The Killing of Sister George (1968) is an adaptation of the Frank Marcus play about an aging soap opera actress (Beryl Reid) who fears she is losing both her television role and her young lesbian lover (Susannah York). Although well made, the film initially received an X rating, which doomed its commercial prospects.

The 1970s

Too Late the Hero (1970) marked Aldrich’s return to the more comfortable terrain of World War II, but the film was a critical and commercial disappointment. The ultraviolent crime drama The Grissom Gang (1971), an adaptation of James Hadley Chase’s No Orchids for Miss Blandish (1939), received a similar response, despite being the director’s most blackly humorous work since Baby Jane. Ulzana’s Raid (1972), however, was one of Aldrich’s best films. The western, which drew parallels with the Vietnam War, starred Lancaster as a veteran scout who has to rely on the help of a cavalry officer (Bruce Davidson) to capture a band of Apaches led by the wily Ulzana. Emperor of the North Pole (1973) was nearly as fine, a violent hymn to the railroads and the men who ride them, legally and otherwise. The film, which was set during the Great Depression, features Marvin and Keith Carradine as hoboes who battle a sadistic railroad guard (Ernest Borgnine).

In 1974 Aldrich scored another major box-office hit with The Longest Yard. The comedy-drama starred Burt Reynolds as Paul Crewe, a former professional quarterback who earns a prison sentence for impulsively destroying his girlfriend’s car. Crewe gets a chance for redemption when he leads the prisoners’ football team against a squad of tough prison guards. Aldrich then directed Reynolds in the neo-noir Hustle (1975), with the actor playing a cynical cop who falls for call girl (Catherine Deneuve). After the antiwar polemic Twilight’s Last Gleaming (1977), Aldrich helmed several forgettable films, including The Frisco Kid (1979), in which Gene Wilder portrayed a rabbi in the Wild West and Harrison Ford appeared in a supporting role. More amusing was the popular comedy …All the Marbles (1981), with Peter Falk as the unprincipled manager of a pair of women wrestlers. Faced with declining health, Aldrich subsequently retired from directing.