The New Biographical Dictionary of Film: Completely Updated and Expanded (192 page)

The bypass was a success. He was doing beautifully, until an embolism took him off in an hour or so. The day after his death I got a postcard from him, saying his improvement was marked. He was the best friend I’ll ever have, and in a way I feel the movies are over now that he’s gone.

George Roy Hill
(1922–2002), b. Minneapolis, Minnesota
1962:
Period of Adjustment
. 1963:
Toys in the Attic
. 1964:
The World of Henry Orient
. 1966:
Hawaii
. 1967:
Thoroughly Modern Millie
. 1969:
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid
. 1972:
Slaughterhouse Five
. 1973:
The Sting
. 1975:
The Great Waldo Pepper
. 1977:
Slap Shot
. 1979:
A Little Romance
. 1982:
The World According to Garp
. 1984:
The Little Drummer Girl
. 1988:
Funny Farm
.

Forty before he directed, Hill sometimes seemed to be trying to look less than his age.
Butch Cassidy
is relentlessly smart but rootless. Based on a very funny script, it is unable to decide whether to parody or join in the Western legend. Its final frozen frame is the perfect expression of fissured purpose, as is its rather gloating “best photograph of the year” imagery. Hill had been an actor, a soldier, a playwright, and a director for TV before he got into movies. He hurried through a variety of genres without ever finding anything in them to anchor him. It is hard, therefore, to see his interest in Vonnegut’s
Slaughterhouse Five
as anything more than fashionable. With Tennessee Williams and Lillian Hellman, he proved incapable of making us forget the proscenium arch. But
The World of Henry Orient
was modestly charming and suggested the sense of humor that carried off the best jokes in
Butch Cassidy. The Sting
, too, was a shaggy dog story uneasily slowed by gangster realism and threadbare 1930s atmosphere. But it was a vast, easeful fantasy in the way that it let us believe an enterprising, attractive individualist could beat the system.

In the eighties, Hill made two literary adaptations—from John Irving and Le Carré—that fell flat:
The Little Drummer Girl
is scarcely coherent and way beyond Diane Keaton’s range.

Walter Hill
, b. Long Beach, California, 1942
1975:
Hard Times
. 1978:
The Driver
. 1979:
The Warriors
. 1980:
Southern Comfort; The Long Riders
. 1982:
48 HRS
. 1984:
Streets of Fire
. 1985:
Brewster’s Millions
. 1986:
Crossroads
. 1987:
Extreme Prejudice
. 1988:
Red Heat
. 1989:
Johnny Handsome
. 1990:
Another 48 HRS
. 1992:
Trespass
. 1993:
Geronimo
. 1995:
Wild Bill
. 1996:
Last Man Standing
. 1999:
Supernova
(credited as Thomas Lee). 2002:
Undisputed
. 2004:
Deadwood
(TV). 2006:
Broken Trail
(TV) Here is contemporary success without mercy, comfort, or irony. Passing lightly over details from the young Hill’s life—that he wanted to be a comic-book illustrator; that asthma kept him from the Vietnam War; that he felt “there is nothing more absurd than properly motivated characters”—one can survey the broken-down landscape of visual energy and commercial compromise, managed with a shrug that hopes to disguise irresponsibility as cool insolence.

There has always been something in movies to sustain Hill’s fear of motivation—just as there has always been a lot in craven, lazy, and half-baked writers that flinched from it. There is something inherently reasonable in Hill’s further description of his own movies: “I very purposely—more and more so every time I do a script—give characters no back story. The way you find out about these characters is by watching what they do, the way they react to stress, the way they react to situations and confrontations. In that way, character is revealed through drama rather than being
explained
through dialogue.”

That could be Fuller or Anthony Mann; it could be some exponent for painting or ballet; and it is a credo that comes alive from time to time in the delirious momentum of the entirely artificial
Streets of Fire
, a beautiful and entertaining fantasy. But the concentration on action in Fuller or Mann always led us into aspects of character or life that needed to be talked about, even if their characters were generally inarticulate. There is no drama without behavior, ideas, and experience—and sooner rather than later in Hill’s work, cliché and violence had to take their place. Thus his undoubted talent for action—his eye—has rarely regained the lightness of
Streets of Fire
. Brutal comedy, violence, human indifference seep in. Big movies are too large for such sparse ambition. Eventually boredom or self-loathing are likely in the underoccupied filmmaker. It may be significant that Hill was part of the team that made
Alien
and
Aliens
(as coproducer and cowriter), yet not their director. Is that because Sigourney Weaver became too motivated, or too real, in those pictures?

Hill was an assistant on
The Thomas Crown Affair
(68, Norman Jewison) and
Take the Money and Run
(69, Woody Allen). He wrote
Hickey and Boggs
(72, Robert Culp) as a story for two white men; he had Jason Robards and Strother Martin in mind, and “Hickey” came from Robards’s stage performance in
The Iceman Cometh
. Commerce made it the black-and-white pairing of Culp and Bill Cosby—a trick that Hill learned well enough for Nick Nolte and Eddie Murphy in
48 HRS
. He also did scripts for
The Getaway
(72, Sam Peckinpah), a singularly motivated action story;
The Thief Who Came to Dinner
(73, Bud Yorkin);
The Mackintosh Man
(73, John Huston) and
The Drowning Pool
(76, Stuart Rosenberg).

Hill admirers must look back on the nineties with regret.
Wild Bill
was a mess and a disaster, yet it had the makings of a fine interplay of fact and legend. It also had a hazy, umber-colored look that seemed to have soaked into the film stock for
Last Man Standing
—a remake of
Yojimbo
, set in rural and very dusty Texas that a two-year-old could have picked and predicted inside the first ten minutes (and then napped). Add to that the humiliation of
Supernova
—from which Hill removed his name—and you have a career coming to a standstill. His work on
Deadwood
left no doubt about his quality. And, in retrospect,
The Long Riders
seems like a lesson in how to rebuild the territory of the West.

Arthur Hiller
, b. Edmonton, Canada, 1923
1963:
The Flight of the White Stallions; The Wheeler Dealers/Separate Beds
. 1964:
The Americanization of Emily; This Rugged Land
. 1966:
Promise Her Anything; Penelope
. 1967:
Tobruk; The Tiger Makes Out
. 1969:
Popi
. 1970:
The Out-of-Towners; Love Story; Plaza Suite
. 1971:
The Hospital
. 1972:
Man of La Mancha
. 1974:
The Crazy World of Julius Vrooder
. 1976:
W. C. Fields and Me; Silver Streak
. 1979:
The In-Laws; Nightwing
. 1982:
Author! Author!; Making Love
. 1983:
Romantic Comedy
. 1984:
The Lonely Guy; Teachers
. 1987:
Outrageous Fortune
. 1989:
See No Evil, Hear No Evil
. 1990:
Taking Care of Business
. 1991:
Married to It
. 1992:
The Babe
. 1996:
Carpool
. 1997:
An Alan Smithee Film: Burn, Hollywood, Burn
. 2006:
National Lampoon’s Pucked
.

Long before 1971, the filmgoer might have safely given up Arthur Hiller. What is authorship if it is not the capacity to make a dozen consistently impersonal and unexciting movies? To which, in 1970, was added the irrelevant commercial success of
Love Story
, a film only justified by its deflation at the end of
What’s Up, Doc?
But in 1971, there emerged, under Hiller’s name,
The Hospital
, a most despairing comedy and a witheringly accurate portrait of the lunacy of attempting a benevolent act. It is easy to point out that
The Hospital
has a scurrilous script by Paddy Chayefsky, which flies like a vulture round the noble wreck of George C. Scott. Nothing in it smacks of direction, but not many films of its year were as entertaining or touching. Had it been a first film, we might have cherished high hopes. But a dull first dozen, and the immediate reversal to type with
Man of La Mancha
indicates only that even a trimmer has his day. Rod Steiger was his W. C. Fields: a brilliant impersonation in a film that studiously avoids the contrasts of the man and his surreal refusal to seem a comedian.
Silver Streak
is a heartless and uncommitted running of a great old locomotive—one of the first worthless train movies.

Among the later films,
Teachers
is the most engaging: it has a little of the institutional gallows humor remembered from
The Hospital. Making Love
was announced as a breakthrough—it had a married man character who found he was gay—but the picture was hushed and reverent about its own daring, and it lacked any bold or challenging actors. As one of his titles suggests, Hiller is the kind of director who gets pictures done on time, on budget, without troubling or threatening anyone.

Dame Wendy Hiller
(1912–2003), b. Bramshall, Cheshire, England
Acting in films over the space of six decades, Wendy Hiller was nominated for an Oscar three times. Still, she would no doubt reckon that her best work was on the stage she preferred. Perhaps the truth is rather that because she was never quite glamorous, a lot of shallow filmmakers missed the chance to work with a great actress:
Lancashire Luck
(37, Henry Carr); nomination for her Eliza opposite Leslie Howard in
Pygmalion
(38, Gabriel Pascal); as
Major Barbara
(41, Pascal); enchanting and brilliant in
I Know Where I’m
Going
(45, Michael Powell);
Outcast of the Islands
(51, Carol Reed);
Single Handed/Sailor of the King
(53, Roy Boulting);
Something of Value
(57, Richard Brooks);
How to Murder a Rich Uncle
(57, Nigel Patrick); winning the supporting actress Oscar in
Separate Tables
(58, Delbert Mann); the mother in
Sons and Lovers
(60, Jack Cardiff);
Toys in the Attic
(63, George Roy Hill); nominated again for
A Man for All Seasons
(66, Fred Zinnemann), playing More’s wife; Mrs. Micawber in
David Copperfield
(70, Mann);
Murder on the Orient Express
(74, Sidney Lumet);
Voyage of the Damned
(76, Stuart Rosenberg);
The Cat and the Canary
(78, Radley Metzger);
The Elephant Man
(80, David Lynch);
Making Love
(82, Arthur Hiller); in William Trevor’s short story
Attracta
(83, Kieran Hickey);
The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne
(87, Jack Clayton);
The Countess Alice
(92, Moira Armstrong).

Sir Alfred Hitchcock
(1899–1980), b. London
1922:
Number Thirteen
(uncompleted). 1925:
The Pleasure Garden
. 1926:
The Mountain Eagle; The Lodger
. 1927:
Downhill; Easy Virtue; The Ring
. 1928:
The Farmer’s Wife; Champagne; The Manxman
. 1929:
Blackmail
. 1930:
Elstree Calling
(codirected);
Juno and the Paycock; Murder
. 1931:
The Skin Game
. 1932:
Rich and Strange; Number Seventeen
. 1933:
Waltzes from Vienna
. 1934:
The Man Who Knew Too Much
. 1935:
The Thirty-nine Steps
. 1936:
The Secret Agent; Sabotage
. 1937:
Young and Innocent
. 1938:
The Lady Vanishes
. 1939:
Jamaica Inn
. 1940:
Rebecca; Foreign Correspondent
. 1941:
Mr. and Mrs. Smith; Suspicion
. 1942:
Saboteur
. 1943:
Shadow of a Doubt; Lifeboat
. 1944:
Bon Voyage
(s);
Adventure Malgache
(s). 1945:
Spellbound
. 1946:
Notorious
. 1947:
The Paradine Case
. 1948:
Rope
. 1949:
Under Capricorn
. 1950:
Stage Fright
. 1951:
Strangers on a Train
. 1952:
I Confess
. 1954:
Dial M for Murder; Rear Window
. 1955:
To Catch a Thief; The Man Who Knew Too Much
. 1956:
The Trouble with Harry
. 1957:
The Wrong Man
. 1958:
Vertigo
. 1959:
North by Northwest
. 1960:
Psycho
. 1963:
The Birds
. 1964:
Marnie
. 1966:
Torn Curtain
. 1969:
Topaz
. 1971:
Frenzy
. 1976:
Family Plot
.

The critical dogfights over Hitchcock’s status were fought at a crucial time, in the early 1960s, to assert the value of his greatest works—
Rear Window, Vertigo, North by Northwest, Psycho
, and
The Birds
. And these films are without equal for the way they adjust the cinematic image to our expectations. They are deeply expressive of the way we watch and respond to stories. Their greatness is often employed to explain the nature and workings of cinema. Thus Hitchcock became a way of defining film, a man exclusively intent on the moving image and the compulsive emotions of the spectator.