Greatest American Directors of the Studio Era

Famed for reworking classic genres, he took the cynicism, paranoia and fatalism of film noir and turned the amp up higher than anyone ever imagined it could go. With the fall of the Code drawing nigh, he established the very particular “grand guignol” genre, as per his use of legendary A-list actresses in sensational, naturalistic horror films. Ultimately, the triumph of his classic war picture The Dirty Dozen allocated him the establishment of his own production studio for some time.

Have you ever spent Christmas without flipping past at least a few seconds of It’s a Wonderful Life? Is there a soul who hasn’t heard of it? Even if you haven’t watched it all the way through, though I’m sure you have, you’ve seen enough brief stretches of it to assemble all the pieces together. So yes, you’ve seen it. And we owe this warm-hearted tradition to this producer/director of “Capra-Corn,” social Americana films as tribute to the idealistic common man battling against corruption. He wasn’t just a weepy soapboxer, though he was that to an often almost insufferable degree. He was also known for his fast-paced madcap comedies.

There is unfortunately a great deal of validity in accusing Ford and iconic on-screen collaborator John Wayne of largely contributing to the marginalization of Native Americans as savages who speak terrible English and have only the crudest survival skills. Regardless, there’s no denying Ford was a gifted, hard-wearing and prolific master of not only Westerns but working-class Irish and American period pieces. A pioneer of location shooting and the long shot, Ford’s films were held in veneration by his contemporaries, with Bergman, Welles and later Scorsese among those who have branded him as one of the supreme movie directors of all time.

Although this unconventional director’s hard-edged, bold, and tough tabloid-ish films films were not deemed great cinema in their times, they reaped critical admiration in the late 1960s. Fuller embraced his newfound respect, associating himself with the new generation of filmmakers. It was mainly the French New Wave who argued Fuller as a key stylistic inspiration. His visual style and pace were seen as patently American, and admired for their lively minimalism. Scorsese applauded Fuller’s talent for capturing action. A bit more recently, Tarantino and Jarmusch attributed Fuller as influential upon their work.

A trendy, resourceful, stylistic director of countless genres, from screwball comedy to noir, westerns to gangster pictures, war movies to literary adaptations, Hawks can step to one side and psychologically react to things from both slants at once. He grasps impressions and information, simultaneously conveying his own messages and agenda. Interaction is what it's all about for Hawks, a master of commerce, communication, and all such exchange.

For Hitchcock, recognized master of audience manipulation and calculating thrillers, no one inside the world of a Hitchcock film has authority or influence over it but Hitchcock. But it's also true that, generally, these substitute instigators also lack his humanism. As well, no description of a Hitchcock film is finished exclusive of observations of his camera and its distinctive imagery and composition. Hitchcock is far and wide branded as the Master of Suspense and possibly the most emulated director of all time.

A well-known director and storyteller of all genres, Huston continually opened up the visual outlook of his films all through his filmography. While most directors trust in post-production to smooth the ultimate piece, Huston actually molded his films while shooting them, making them both more sparing and more analytical, with little cutting required. The “Huston look” comes from his sense of what’s genuine to the eye and his down-to-earth feel for interaction.

Kazan introduced an untried new generation of raw young actors to movie audiences, including Marlon Brando and James Dean. Most distinguished for obtaining the paramount dramatic performances from his actors, he guided 21 different actors and actresses to Oscar nominations. He became one of the most deeply influential filmmakers of the 20th century, though a highly contentious one. His choice, if you can call it that, to testify before HUAC cost him the respect and friendship of many, but it was never able to take the impact of his gritty psychological dramas and prophetic social commentaries away from him.

Considered a progressive hero of a notably traditionalist social era, Kramer was a highly regarded producer and director who concentrated on social themes and issues in the 1950s and into the ‘60s. He was a filmmaker passionate not only about cinematic storytelling but about the impact those stories made on the moviegoer’s conscience. Without him, there would be no Judgment at Nuremberg or Inherit the Wind.

A ground-breaking abstract German Expressionist and ingenious early director of sinister films noir, he was also accountable for timeless and iconic precursors to the noir genre, which American studio heads would’ve done well to have kept in mind as he was helming the tapering end of the classical era of noir.

Doesn’t really count, as his first theatrical film was released in 1957 when the Code was crumbling and independent film was nigh. However, he carried over a sense of the “workhorse director” into the modern age of American movie-making, making something like fifty films in fifty years, electing to function to serve the material, not for the material to serve his idiosyncratic vision.

The inspired, profoundly humanistic and alas lesser known antidote to the gushing holier-than-thou corn of Frank Capra and the contrivances of Howard Hawks. It's extraordinary that a movie as real and unyielding as the crushingly bittersweet Make Way for Tomorrow was made by Hollywood in 1937. That very same year, this even-tempered artist leapt empty-handed into the void and came out the other side with The Awful Truth, a high-spirited, feather-hearted screwball comedy armed not with tigers and dinosaur bones or soapboxing and melodrama but merely the incomparably paradigmatic pairing of two effortlessly charming stars. Though the two pictures reach opposing ends of a spectrum, the scales balance with his warm, ingenuous touch.

Whereas producer-director sounds like a far-off call from lab and second unit labor at Warner Bros., Siegel internalized that hard-line technical work's effective discipline by the time more modern audiences began seeking more realism and grittier attitudes in movies. His shrewd and thrifty technique at the helm squeezed full advantage of his creative power. Point to Harry Callahan and Charley Varrick for characters who have whipped up some argument simultaneously while delivering the full-tilt gratifications required of testosterone-driven action thrillers, but point to Hell is for Heroes for an early example of Siegel's ability to juggle various wholly sympathetic and entertaining characterizations in what feels like a leisurely way throughout the backdrop of a taut, spare combat picture.

Accountable for being the editor-for-hire who scrapped more than half of the original version of The Magnificent Ambersons, the footage he cut never to be seen by anyone. But, you know. A job’s a job, right? Regardless, he became his own multitalented, adept veteran producer-director.

What separates Billy Wilder from the other film-making icons of his day is that an actor has a bigger chance of making a goofy face in one of his films than he or she does under the helm of Otto Preminger or William Wyler. In spite of his brazen sense of humor, he could enrapture a broad audience of common filmgoers with suspense or melodrama with a haunting movie like The Lost Weekend, a legal drama like Witness For the Prosecution, a noir like Double Indemnity or an eerie piece of meta-Hollywood like Sunset Boulevard. I believe that, while I've begun to consider him primarily a director of comedies, he learned a great deal from the apparent zeal of said classics. In an unprecedented surprise like The Fortune Cookie, a rubber-faced farce, he still takes his time and builds drama and moral dilemma that projects beyond the comfortable arm's-length distance of slapstick. Yet these curious instances of eyebrow-curling don't breach or sully the comic tone.