Walter Mirisch
December 1–31, 2006

For more than sixty years, legendary Hollywood producer Walter Mirisch (American, b. 1921) has created films that are at once entertaining, profound, and profitable. His extraordinary contribution to the industry has led to eighty-four Academy Award nominations and twenty-eight Oscars, including three for Best Picture—for The Apartment (1960), West Side Story (1961), and In the Heat of the Night (1967)—as well as to the presidency of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences and the Academy’s two highest honors, the Irving G. Thalberg Memorial Award and the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award (bestowed in 1978 and 1983 respectively).

Mirisch first made his mark as head of production at Monogram Studios, later known as Allied Artists, in the late 1940s and mid-1950s. In 1957, he and his brothers Harold and Marvin formed an independent company, the Mirisch Corporation. Offering unparalleled creative autonomy and generous profit sharing, the Mirisches nurtured the careers of directors such as Hal Ashby, Blake Edwards, Norman Jewison, John Sturges, Billy Wilder, and Robert Wise, and actors such as Charles Bronson, Jack Lemmon, Shirley MacLaine, Joel McCrea, Steve McQueen, Sidney Poitier, and Peter Sellers.

For the next quarter century, the Mirisch Corporation produced a wide-ranging array of films—more than sixty-five for United Artists and five for Universal Pictures: Westerns, wartime melodramas, and thrillers that break with genre conventions, such as Anthony Mann’s Man of the West (1958) and John Sturges’s The Magnificent Seven and The Great Escape; sophisticated comedies with sparkling wit and antic humor, including Billy Wilder’s Some Like It Hot and The Apartment, and Blake Edwards’s The Pink Panther and The Party (1968); such lavish musicals as Robert Wise and Jerome Robbins’s West Side Story that have since entered the canon; and provocative examinations of race and class in America, most notably Norman Jewison’s In the Heat of the Night and Hal Ashby’s The Landlord (1970). The exhibition, which features some of Hollywood’s most cherished and enduring films, opens on December 1 with a screening of In the Heat of the Night introduced by Walter Mirisch.

Organized by Joshua Siegel, Assistant Curator, Department of Film. Special thanks to Lawrence. A. Mirisch, Frank Mazzola, and Harrison Engle for their help in organizing the exhibition.

In the Heat of the Night. 1967. USA. Produced by Walter Mirisch. Directed by Norman Jewison. Screenplay by Sterling Silliphant, based on the novel by John Ball. With Sidney Poitier, Rod Steiger, Warren Oates. In the same year that race riots left Detroit and Newark in ruins, Mirisch produced this simmering murder melodrama about racial tension in the Deep South, winning five Academy Awards, including Best Picture and Best Actor (Steiger). A redneck Mississippi police chief, trying to solve a murder, clashes with a proud African American homicide detective from up north. Mirisch Corporation/United Artists. 109 min. Preceded on December 1 by Tribute to Walter Mirisch: The Magnificent Mirisches. 2004. USA. Produced and edited by Frank Mazzola, in association with Lawrence A. Mirisch. 10 min.
Friday, December 1, 6:30 (introduced by Walter Mirisch) (T2); Saturday, December 23, 5:00 (T1)

West Side Story. 1961. USA. Produced by Robert Wise. Directed by Robert Wise and Jerome Robbins. Screenplay by Ernest Lehman, based on the Broadway musical by Robbins, Arthur Laurents, Stephen Sondheim, Leonard Bernstein. With Natalie Wood, Rita Moreno, George Chakiris. Winner of 10 Academy Awards, including Best Picture, this modern-day retelling of Romeo and Juliet transforms New York City into a glorious musical stage set, from the Saul Bass title sequence and famous opening helicopter shots to the tenement streets of Robbins’ brilliantly balletic song sequences. Mirisch Pictures/United Artists. 151 min.
Saturday, December 2, 3:00 (T1); Sunday, December 10, 2:00 (T2)

Man of the West. 1958. USA. Directed by Anthony Mann. Screenplay by Reginald Rose. With Gary Cooper, Lee J. Cobb, Julie London. Mann’s last major western is his most powerful and influential. Jean-Luc Godard felt it to be a virtual reinvention of the genre, with the classical compositions and mythic archetypes of Westerns by John Ford and Howard Hawks giving way to the pessimism, moral irresolution, and sheer blind brutality that would become hallmarks of the Vietnam-era Western. As Link Jones, the upright citizen unable to escape his outlaw past, Cooper was never more haunting or anguished. Ashton Productions, Inc./Walter M. Mirisch Production. 95 min.
Saturday, December 2, 6:00; Friday, December 22, 6:15. T1

Some Like It Hot. 1959. USA. Produced and directed by Billy Wilder. Screenplay by Wilder, I.A.L. Diamond. With Marilyn Monroe, Tony Curtis, Jack Lemmon. The first of Mirisch’s eight collaborations with Wilder is still the paragon of the comic burlesque, with some of the most uproarious one-liners and gags ever written for the screen. Curtis and Lemmon, on the run from mobster George Raft after witnessing the St. Valentine’s Day massacre, masquerade in drag in an all-girl band, with Curtis falling hard for Marilyn Monroe’s Sugar Kane and Lemmon fending off the advances of millionaire fop Joe E. Brown. A Mirisch Company Presentation/United Artists. 121 min.
Sunday, December 3, 1:00; Monday, December 18, 6:00. T1

The Landlord. 1970. USA. Produced by Norman Jewison. Directed by Hal Ashby. Screenplay by Bill Gunn. With Beau Bridges, Lee Grant, Louis Gossett, Jr. This slyly subversive look at race and class in America is one of the major rediscoveries of the exhibition. Mirisch and United Artists gambled $2 million on Ashby, who won an Oscar for Best Achievement in Film Editing for Norman Jewison’s In the Heat of the Night, as director of this trenchant—and timely—comedy about a rich white kid who buys a Brooklyn tenement and tries to have the black tenants evicted, only to find himself drawn into their starkly different lives. A Mirisch Production Company/United Artists. 110 min.
Sunday, December 3, 3:15 (T1); Wednesday, December 6, 6:00 (T2)

The Pink Panther. 1963. USA. Produced by Martin Jurow. Directed by Blake Edwards. Screenplay by Maurice Richlin, Edwards. With Peter Sellers, David Niven, Robert Wagner, Claudia Cardinale. Sellers introduces one of cinema’s most original and enduring comic creations: Inspector Clouseau, the bungling French detective who never gets his man. The film’s bedroom scene, with suave international jewel thief Niven carrying on an affair with Clouseau’s wife right under his nose, is a paradigm of impeccably timed farce. The Mirisch Company/United Artists. 114 min.
Friday, December 15, 6:15; Wednesday, December 20, 8:15. T1

The Party. 1968. USA. Produced and directed by Blake Edwards. Screenplay by Edwards, Tom Waldman, Frank Waldman. With Peter Sellers, Claudine Longet, Marge Champion. The first of Edwards’s wickedly satirical attacks on Hollywood (followed by 10 and S.O.B.), with Sellers as a disaster-prone Indian actor who wreaks havoc on a studio chief’s lavish party. Edwards choreographed the film’s hilariously anarchic set pieces, by turns farcical and slapstick in the go-for-broke manner of the Marx Bros.’s Duck Soup, with the kind of extremely long takes that have become all-too rare in contemporary comedy. The Mirisch Corporation/United Artists. 99 min.
Friday, December 15, 8:30; Wednesday, December 20, 6:15. T1

The Apartment. 1960. USA. Produced and directed by Billy Wilder. Screenplay by Wilder, I.A.L. Diamond. With Jack Lemmon, Shirley MacLaine, Fred MacMurray. Winner of five Academy Awards including Wilder’s trifecta—Best Screenplay (with Diamond), Best Picture, and Best Director—this masterful, bittersweet comedy of winners and losers in contemporary America follows a kindhearted but naïve company man (Lemmon) who dubiously moves up the corporate ladder by letting executives use his apartment for their philandering ways, only to run afoul of the smarmy über-boss (MacMurray) when they fall for the same elevator girl (MacLaine). The Mirisch Company/United Artists. 125 min.
Monday, December 18, 8:30; Saturday, December 23, 2:15. T1

The Magnificent Seven. 1960. USA. Executive Producer: Walter Mirisch. Produced and directed by John Sturges. Screenplay by William Roberts. With Yul Brynner, Steve McQueen, Charles Bronson, James Coburn, Robert Vaughn, Eli Wallach. Sturges and Robert’s immensely exciting adaptation of Kurosawa’s chambara epic The Seven Samurai was an enormous box office success and launched the careers of McQueen, Bronson, Coburn, and Vaughn. A motley band of professionals  comes to the rescue of a Mexican village terrorized by a bandit thief and his murderous gang. A major influence on the “Spaghetti Westerns” of Sergio Leone, Tonino Valerii, and others. The Mirisch Company/United Artists. 138 min.
Friday, December 22, 8:15; Sunday, December 24, 5:30. T1

Wichita. 1955. USA. Produced by Walter Mirisch. Directed by Jacques Tourneur. Screenplay by Daniel B. Ullman. With Joel McCrea, Vera Miles, Lloyd Bridges. Of the countless Wyatt Earp retellings, this is one of the most exciting and stylish, yet regrettably one of the least known. Tourneur biographer Michael Henry Wilson detects an anti-romanticism in the film’s direction and in McCrea’s performance, an emphasis less on rugged individualism and heroics than on ideals of community and democracy. Mirisch and McCrea would create five more films together, and remain lifelong friends. Allied Artists. 81 min.
Saturday, December 23, 2:00 (T2); Sunday, December 31, 4:00 (T1)

The Great Escape. 1963. USA. Directed by John Sturges. Screenplay by James Clavell, W.R. Burnett. With Steve McQueen, James Garner, Richard Attenborough, Charles Bronson. Thrilling from beginning to end, The Great Escape details the ingeniously planned, massive breakout of Allied POWs from Stalag Luft III, a German maximum-security camp. Screenwriters Clavell (Shogun, King Rat) and the great Burnett (Little Caesar, The Asphalt Jungle) combine finely rendered historical fact with pure Hollywood invention. The Mirisch Company/United Artists. 172 min.
Saturday, December 23, 7:30; Sunday, December 24, 2:15. T1

Same Time, Next Year. 1978. USA. Produced by Walter Mirisch. Directed by Robert Mulligan. Screenplay by Bernard Slade, based on his play. With Ellen Burstyn, Alan Alda. An underappreciated comedy of the 1970s, following the decades-long affair between the neurotic George, a New Jersey accountant, and Doris, a California housewife, who ditch their spouses and kids each year for a weekend tryst at the seaside inn where they first fell in love in 1951. Both actors are at the top of their game, and Burstyn earned an Oscar nomination for this return to her Tony Award–winning stage role. The Mirisch Corporation/Universal Pictures. 119 min.
Saturday, December 30, 3:30; Sunday, December 31, 5:45. T1

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