Michael Curtiz

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Michael Curtiz
Born 24 December 1886
Budapest, Austria-Hungary (now Hungary)
Died 10 April 1962
Hollywood, California, USA

Michael Curtiz (December 24, 1886 - April 10, 1962) was a Hungarian-American film director. He directed at least 50 films in Europe and a further hundred in the US, among the best-known being The Adventures of Robin Hood, Casablanca, Yankee Doodle Dandy and White Christmas. He thrived in the heyday of the Warner Bros. studio in the 1930s and 40s, where he gained a reputation for efficient competence, but also for being difficult to work with. He was less successful from the late 1940s onwards, when he attempted to move from studio direction into production and freelance work, but he continued working until shortly before his death. While several of his works, such as Casablanca and Mildred Pierce, are highly regarded by film critics, opinion is still divided as to what extent his body of work is united by a personal style of his own.

Contents

[edit] Life

[edit] Early life

Curtiz was born Manó Kertész Kaminer to a Jewish family in Budapest, Hungary (then Austria-Hungary). He claimed to have been born on December 24, 1886. Both the date and the year are open to doubt: he was fond of telling tall stories about his early years, including that he had run away from home to join the circus and that he had been a member of the Hungarian fencing team at the 1912 Olympic Games, but he seems to have had a conventional middle-class upbringing. He studied at Markoszy University and the Royal Academy of Theater and Art, Budapest, before beginning his career as an actor and director as Mihály Kertész at the National Hungarian Theater in 1912.[1]

Details of his early experience as a director are sparse, and it is not clear what part he may have played in the direction of several early films, but he is known to have directed at least one film in Hungary before spending six months in 1913 at the Nordisk studio in Denmark honing his craft. On the outbreak of the First World War he briefly served in the artillery of the Austro-Hungarian Army, but he had returned to film-making by 1915. In that or the following year he married for the first time, to the actress Lucy Doraine. The couple divorced in 1923.

Curtiz left Hungary when the film industry was nationalised in 1919, and soon settled in Vienna. He made at least 21 films for Sascha Films, among them the Biblical epics Sodom und Gomorrha (1922) and Die Sklavenkönigin (1924). The latter, released in the US as Moon of Israel, caught the attention of Jack Warner, who hired Curtiz for his own studio with the intention of having him direct a similar film for Warner Bros. (Noah's Ark, which was eventually produced in 1928). Curtiz's second marriage, to another actress, Lili Damita, lasted only from 1925 to 1926. When he went to America, Curtiz left behind at least one illegitimate son, for whom he ceased paying child support.[2]

[edit] Career in the US

Curtiz arrived in the United States in 1926 (according to some sources on the fourth of July, but according to others in June);[3] he took on the anglicised name 'Michael Curtiz'. He had a lengthy and prolific Hollywood career, with directing credits on over 100 films in many genres. During the 30s, Curtiz was often credited on four films in a single year, although he was not always the sole director on these projects. In the pre-Code period Curtiz directed such films as Mystery of the Wax Museum (shot in two-strip Technicolor) and The Kennel Murder Case with William Powell as Philo Vance.

In the mid-30s, he began the highly successful cycle of adventure films starring Errol Flynn that included Captain Blood (1935), The Charge of the Light Brigade (1936), The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938) and Santa Fe Trail (1940).

By the early 1940s Curtiz had become fairly wealthy, earning $3,600 per week and owning a substantial estate, complete with polo pitch.[4] One of his regular polo partners was Hal Wallis, who had met Curtiz on his arrival in the country and had established a close friendship with him. Wallis' wife, the actress Louise Fazenda, and Curtiz's third wife, Bess Meredyth, an actress and screenwriter, had been close since before Curtiz's marriage to Meredyth in 1929. Curtiz was frequently unfaithful, and had numerous sexual relationships with extras on set; Meredyth once left him for a short time, but they remained married until 1961, shortly before Curtiz's death.[5] She was Curtiz's helper whenever his need to deal with scripts or other elements went beyond his grasp of English, and he often phoned her for advice when presented with a problem while filming.[6]

Prime examples of his work in the 1940s are The Sea Wolf (1941), Casablanca (1942) and Mildred Pierce (1945). During this period he also directed the pro-Soviet propaganda film Mission to Moscow (1943), which was commissioned at the request of president Franklin D. Roosevelt in order to aid the wartime effort.

While Curtiz himself had escape Europe before the rise of Nazism, other members of his family were not so lucky. His sister's family were sent to Auschwitz, where her husband and three children died. Curtiz paid part of his own salary into the European Film Fund, a benevolent association which helped European refugees in the film business establish themselves in the US.[7]

In the late 1940s, he made a new agreement with Warners under which the studio and his own production company were to share the costs and profits of his subsequent films. These films did poorly, however, whether as part of the general decline in the film industry in this period or because Curtiz, "had no skills in shaping the entirety of a picture".[8] Either way, as Curtiz himself said, "You are only appreciated so far as you carry the dough into the box office. They throw you into gutter next day".[9] The long partnership between director and studio descended into a bitter court battle. After his relationship with Warners broke down, Curtiz continued to direct on a freelance basis from 1954 onwards. His final film, The Comancheros, was released less than a year before his death from cancer on 10 April 1962. He is interred in the Forest Lawn Memorial Park Cemetery in Glendale, California.

Curtiz was always extremely active: he worked very long days, took part in several sports in his spare time, and was often found to sleep under a cold shower.[10] He was dismissive of actors who ate lunch, believing that "lunch bums" had no energy for work in the afternoons. The flip side of his dedication was an often callous demeanour: Fay Wray said that, "I felt that he was not flesh and bones, that he was part of the steel of the camera".[11] He was not popular with most of his colleagues: "he was known as an arrogant, driving perfectionist".[12] He reserved most of his venom for subordinates rather than his stars, frequently quarelling with his technicians and dismissing one extra by saying, "More to your right. More. More. Now you are out of the scene. Go home".[13] Bette Davis refused to work with him again after he called her a "goddamned nothing no good sexless son of a bitch", and he had a low opinion of actors in general, saying that acting, "is fifty percent a big bag of tricks. The other fifty percent should be talent and ability, although it seldom is". Nevertheless, he did not offend everyone: he treated Ingrid Bergman with courtesy on the set of Casablanca, while Claude Rains credited him with teaching him the difference between film and theater acting, or, "what not to do in front of a camera".[14]

Curtiz had a lifelong struggle with the English language and there are many anecdotes about his failures. He bewildered a set dresser on Casablanca by demanding a 'poodle', when he actually wanted a puddle of water. David Niven liked Curtiz's phrase "bring on the empty horses" (for "bring on the horses without riders") so much that he used it for the title of his autobiography.

[edit] Criticism

Curtiz's work has received relatively little attention from film critics: his phenomenal productivity and the variety of his output seem to make him the antithesis of the auteur theory. However these characteristics were typical of the studio system within which Curtiz worked rather than being unique to him; as Aljean Harmetz argues, "nearly every Warner Bros. picture was an exception to the auteur theory".[15] Curtiz can be seen as the ultimate studio director, who excelled at direction on set but was out of his depth when he tried to take greater control of a picture, as with his work from the late 40s onwards. Harmetz states that, "Curtiz's vision of any movie... was almost totally a visual one", and quotes him as saying, "Who cares about character? I make it go so fast nobody notices".[16]

Sidney Rosenzweig argues that Curtiz did have his own distinctive style, which was in place by the time of his move to America: "high crane shots to establish a story's environment; unusual camera angles and complex compositions in which characters are often framed by physical objects; much camera movement; subjective shots, in which the camera becomes the character's eye; and high contrast lighting with pools of shadows".[17] This style was not purely visual, but had the effect of highlighting the character's relationship to his environment; often this environment was identified with the fate in which the character was trapped.[18] This entrapment then forces the "morally divided" protagonist to make a moral choice. While Rosenzweig accepts that almost every film involves such moral dilemmas to some extent, it is Curtiz's directorial decisions which place the element center stage in his films, albeit at an emotional rather than an intellectual level.[19]

[edit] Awards

Curtiz received four nominations for the Academy Award for Best Director: before Casablanca won in 1944, he was nominated for Yankee Doodle Dandy in 1943, and for Angels with Dirty Faces and Four Daughters in 1939. Captain Blood came second as a write-in nomination in 1936.

[edit] Select Hollywood filmography

Preceded by:
William Wyler
for Mrs. Miniver		 Academy Award for Best Director
1943
for Casablanca		 Succeeded by:
Leo McCarey
for Going My Way

[edit] Notes

  1. ^ Rosenzweig p. 5.
  2. ^ Harmetz p. 122.
  3. ^ Rosenzweig p. 6 states July 4; Harmetz p. 63 states June.
  4. ^ Harmetz p. 76.
  5. ^ Harmetz p. 121.
  6. ^ Harmetz p. 123.
  7. ^ Harmetz p. 221.
  8. ^ Harmetz pp. 191, 332.
  9. ^ Harmetz p. 332.
  10. ^ Harmetz p. 188.
  11. ^ Harmetz p. 126.
  12. ^ Rosenzweig p. 7.
  13. ^ Harmetz p. 124.
  14. ^ Harmetz p. 190.
  15. ^ Harmetz p. 75.
  16. ^ Harmetz pp 183-4, 184.
  17. ^ Rosenzweig pp. 6-7.
  18. ^ Rosenzweig p. 158.
  19. ^ Rosenzweig pp. 158-159.

[edit] References

  • Harmetz, Aljean. Round Up the Usual Suspects: The Making of "Casablanca". Orion Publishing Co, 1993.
  • Rosenzweig, Sidney. Casablanca and Other Major Films of Michael Curtiz. Ann Arbor, Mich.: UMI Research Press, 1982.

[edit] External links

Persondata
NAME Curtiz, Michael
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Manó Kertész Kaminer
SHORT DESCRIPTION Hungarian-American film director
DATE OF BIRTH 24 December 1886
PLACE OF BIRTH Budapest, Austria-Hungary (now Hungary
DATE OF DEATH 10 April 1962
PLACE OF DEATH Hollywood, California, USA
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