With Leonardo DiCaprio & Martin Scorsese’s The Wolf of Wall Street attacking the box office, awards season, and cheap editorials nationwide, it’s as good a time as any to consider those very special working relationships between a director and star that transcend simple matters of repeated bouts of hiring and really, truly collaborate to add to the texture of one another’s art. But, since there are roughly a billion of these lists and I have only ten spaces to fill, I thought I’d throw my own spin on things and stick to older films. Specifically, my criteria was as follows – the collaboration had to begin before 1960, with no films made after 1970 in consideration, and they had to have made at least three films together (and, obviously, I had to have seen at least three of them). I fully admit such an exercise is fairly arbitrary, but what are you gonna do.
10.) Audrey Hepburn and Stanley Donen
I hesitated a bit on including these two, having fawned over their wonderful Charade only just last week, but, you know, what the hell. Donen was already a significant voice in American cinema by the time he first worked with Hepburn for their 1957 masterpiece Funny Face, but this was an important turning point for him. Though he started out with the remarkably forward-thinking On the Town, his films had been marked by a sort of casual sexism, more egregious in Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, but often as simple as not providing much for the women to do except fall in love with a man. Funny Face, and Hepburn, changed that – she was a fully-developed, completely independent woman with ideals and interests all her own, going along on a fashion shoot only because the trip to Paris would provide her access to an intellectual community she worshipped. Cary Grant was playing a supporting role to her, rather than the other way around, by the time of Charade, and 1967’s woefully overlooked Two for the Road had her starring alongside Albert Finney as a supremely complex, varied, compelling woman in a film far more incisive and adventurous than the supposed wave of New Hollywood films that had begun that very year.
9.) Marlene Dietrich and Josef von Sternberg
Josef von Sternberg already had himself firmly entrenched in Hollywood by the time Tinseltown took notice of Dietrich in their 1930 German film, The Blue Angel. In it, you can see everything that was to come from their collaborations – the eroticism mixed with regret and spite, the dense atmosphere filled with sin and despair, all marks of von Sternberg’s silent films but made all the more potent by her presence. The women in his previous films were the types worth giving it all up for; one look at Dietrich, and you know you’d do the same, but it wouldn’t be worth it. She’d destroy you. She wasn’t a femme fatale because she could engineer a man’s downfall; it was just in her nature. By even their second film together (her first American feature), Morocco, she had the complete possession of self that all great movie stars do. Imagine what came after.
8.) James Cagney and Roy Del Ruth
Roy Del Ruth didn’t make Cagney a star – that’d be William Wellman and The Public Enemy – but he knew exactly what to do with him once he was. In their first collaboration, Blonde Crazy (released the same year as Public Enemy), both coasted along on Cagney’s considerable charm (his frequent “hello honnnnney!” greeting to costar Joan Blondell is infectious); when they got to 1932’s Taxi!, Cagney’s as natural a leader as they come, fast and loose and dancing his way into rooms; by the time of 1933’s Lady Killer, Cagney is completely unleashed, wildly maniacal and drunk on the pure exuberance of movie stardom. Cagney was an electric, captivating performer, and nobody knew better how to bottle his lightning than Del Ruth.
7.) Maurice Chevalier and Ernst Lubitsch
Lubitsch didn’t repeat stars too often once he reached the prime of his career, but in the early, wild days, he and Maurice Chevalier were on one hell of a roll together. Between 1929 and 1934, they made four films together (plus French-language versions of two of them produced simultaneously with their American counterparts), each and every one a magnificent achievement. Lubitsch, one of the few directors who seemed hardly to have missed a beat transitioning from silent to sound, made films with the grace of musicals even when there wasn’t a song to sing, so when I note that there were plenty in these films, that should give some indication of the delight and pure euphoria of The Love Parade, The Smiling Lieutenant, and especially One Hour With You and The Merry Widow. Chevalier was one of those rare talents who could create cinema just by stepping in front of the camera, a not insignificant talent in a day in which most musical numbers were static medium shots, and the sheer excitement he exhibits at what they could get away with back then is contagious every step of the way. The “Lubitsch Touch” gets spoken of a lot, with good reason, but that feeling of lightness was just as much Chevalier’s doing back then.
6.) Rock Hudson and Douglas Sirk
The real genius of a guy like Douglas Sirk is that he wasn’t afraid to throw in a little cheapness to offset the grandiose melodrama of it all. A film like The Tarnished Angels or Written on the Wind would, now, and often then, be an overly-lavish affair scrubbed free of anything too earthy and raw. Not so with Sirk. His characters were messy, lurid, raw nerves too open to care much how they came across. Rock Hudson, not a talented enough actor to hide his insecurity, his attempts at dignity, the fakery of his own acting, emboldened Sirk’s films (including the two mentioned above, as well as Magnificent Obsession and All That Heaven Allows, among others) by giving us equally uncertain protagonists, guys who attempt to manufacture a facade but who fall apart at the slightest affront to it. The man could communicate more with silences than most others with monologues. What better subject for the movies.
5.) Harriet Andersson and Ingmar Bergman
From the start of his career, Ingmar Bergman worked with tremendous female actors (Maj-Britt Nilsson, from several of his earlier films, rarely gets her due in making resonant some of his young-man musings), and would continue to do so until his final film, which costarred probably his most widely-regarded partner, Liv Ullmann. But it’s the work he did with Harriet Andersson that I most treasure. Both made their first huge mark on international cinema with 1952’s sexy Summer with Monika, and she continued to be a fascinating contributor in Sawdust and Tinsel, A Lesson in Love, and Smiles of a Summer Night as the decade rolled on. Then they reached Through a Glass Darkly, a film that summarizes Bergman as well as anything he’s ever done, and which calls on Andersson to play schizophrenia as, potentially, a way of seeing into the spiritual world. Many films have explored this sort of psychosis/enlightenment duality. Few give us a character as thoroughly-constructed as Karin. An outlet for all of Bergman’s fears, uncertainties, pride, hope, and faith, she created the path by which he’d move out of his earlier intellectual period and into one of unbridled emotional expression for those same concerns.
4.) Ingrid Bergman and Roberto Rossellini
Roberto Rossellini was well established as a major figure in international cinema by the time he first started working (and sharing a life) with Ingrid Bergman – in fact, it was through his films that she fell for him. No surprise then that their artistic contributions should be marked with such extraordinary passion and emotional urgency, so beautifully constructed dramatically and thematically and yet unafraid of cutting loose on a tangent that feels born entirely from the gut. Few screen actresses were ever as willingly vulnerable as she, and fewer directors have understood so well how to represent that inner life. Far from being showy or ostentatious, their melodramas are simply, to distort a bit from that beloved war-time playwright, the life of the soul.
3.) John Wayne and John Ford
Forty years is a long time to build a body of work, and John Wayne and John Ford’s is staggering, overflowing from classics at every seam. Stagecoach. The Searchers. The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. She Wore a Yellow Ribbon. The Quiet Man. A dozen more. Ford famously (supposedly) said of Wayne’s performance in Howard Hawks’ Red River, “I never knew the big son of a bitch could act!” But he did. Or he must have, instinctively. Sure, maybe Wayne couldn’t “act” like a Laurence Olivier, but he was perfect for Ford, and Ford for him. Each knew the value of caricature, of playing something in a slightly heightened or artificial way, and through that finding the needed emotional resonance. Wayne was a big guy, but he didn’t dominate the screen because of his size – he did because of his spirit.
2.) Hideko Takamine and Mikio Naruse
Still, sadly, relatively unknown in the West, Naruse is picking up steam thanks to The Criterion Collection and their Hulu channel, on which you can see over a dozen of his films, including those he made with Takamine, two of which – When a Woman Ascends the Stairs and Floating Clouds – should be listed among the very best cinema has ever had to offer. Delving deep into the ramifications of everything Japan lost during World War II, his films explore the wounds people carry while desperately trying to look ahead, even when there’s little to hope for. Among his many supremely capable stars, Takamine stands out most, playing women who are undoubtedly victims of numerous awful circumstances yet who themselves bear central weaknesses that will undo the possibility of permanent redemption, significantly deepening the familiar tropes of postwar tragedy.
1.) Cary Grant and Howard Hawks
You could say, perhaps, that there were actors better than Cary Grant, directors better than Howard Hawks. But, boy, it doesn’t feel that when when in the thralls of their films. Throughout their five films together – Bringing Up Baby, Only Angeles Have Wings, His Girl Friday, I Was a Male War Bride, and Monkey Business – Hawks never quite gave Grant the same guy to play (which should lay to rest the suggestion that Grant only ever played himself; and yet), accenting and diminishing various parts of everything that made him such a wonderful actor. His characteristic charisma, for instance, was used to cover jealousy or regret. His balletic physical skills used to punch up nerdier characters. Always contrasts, always insights, but more than anything, always funny, even when he was deadly serious.
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4 thoughts on “Top 10 Classic Star/Director Collaborations”
Shelley Duvall and Robert Altman.
Spike Lee and Denzel Washington
Martin Scorcese and Robert De Niro
Martin Scorcese and Leonardo DiCaprio
Tim Burton and Johnny Depp
Just noticed you said “classics”…oops…in that case…
Frank Capra and Jimmy Stewart
Sergio Leone and Clint Eastwood
John Huston and Humphrey Bogart
Alfred Hitchcock and Carey Grant
Billy Wilder and Jack Lemmon
Akira Kurosawa/Toshiro Mifune
Kenji Mizoguchi/Kinuyo Tanaka
Yasujiro Ozu/Setsuko Hara
Billy Wilder/Jack Lemmon
John Ford/John Wayne
That’s all I have for now.