A comprehensive retrospective of films by Don Siegel (1912–1991), an American
master of the genre film, opens Friday, May 3 at The Museum of Modern Art. The
most extensive program of Siegel's work ever assembled, DON SIEGEL features
thirty-four of the director's thirty-six feature films, as well as seldom-seen
shorts and television episodes, all marked by an unpretentious intelligence and
singularity of vision.
The series opens with Siegel's acclaimed prison dramas, Riot in Cell Block
11 (1954), which features Neville Brand in his acting debut, and Escape
from Alcatraz (1979), which stars Clint Eastwood. It closes on Thursday,
June 6 with rare screenings of Flaming Star (1960), with Elvis Presley
in his finest screen role, and the 1957 classic Baby Face Nelson. Not
seen in theaters for more than two decades, this revelation film features a
chilling performance by Mickey Rooney as the brutal Prohibition-era gangster.
Few American directors in the postwar era have worked with the same assurance
and economy as Siegel. He learned his craft in the 1930s and early 1940s as the
creator and head of the montage department at Warner Bros. Montages for such
films as The Roaring Twenties (1939), They Drive by Night (1940),
Yankee Doodle Dandy (1942), and Casablanca (1942) demonstrated
his gift for conveying the passage of time, changes in character, and shifts in
tone simply and concisely.
By the late 1940s Siegel had become a director of low-budget feature films,
neglected by critics at home but hailed as an auteur by Cahiers du
Cinéma critics Jean-Luc Godard and François Truffaut. The
versatile, no-nonsense Siegel could direct any action genre, from the gangster
film (The Killers, 1964, and Baby Face Nelson) and film noir
(Private Hell 36, 1954, and The Lineup, 1958) to the war film
(Hell Is for Heroes, 1962) and the Western (Duel at Silver Creek,
1952, and Flaming Star).
His early Riot in Cell Block 11 is a tough, unsentimental prison drama
cited by Robert Bresson as an influence on A Man Escaped (1956),
while Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) has become a much-imitated
science fiction classic, praised as American cinema's most compelling parable
about Cold War hysteria. The trademark Siegel protagonist—a beleaguered,
fiercely independent outsider—appears often in these and other films.
Violence permeates Siegel's work, either held tenuously at bay or unleashed
with a vengeance. The anti-heroes of his policiers are cops who, sensing that
the traditional codes of justice have been violated or have become outmoded,
are tempted to become vigilantes and renegades. Siegel cast Charles Bronson,
Michael Caine, Steve McQueen, Robert Mitchum, Burt Reynolds, John Wayne,
Richard Widmark, and, most notably, Clint Eastwood (who appeared in five Siegel
films, including The Beguiled, 1971, Escape from Alcatraz, and
Dirty Harry, 1971) to play his brooding and morally complex
protagonists.
Siegel's often controversial innovations and subversions of many stylistic and
thematic conventions resonate today in the films of Eastwood and Quentin
Tarantino, James Cameron and Kathryn Bigelow, and in the sophisticated
characterization and terse storytelling of such television shows as
Homicide and NYPD Blue.
Don Siegelwas organized by Joshua Siegel, Curatorial Assistant, Department of
Film and Video, The Museum of Modern Art.
