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Robert Aldrich: Director Robert Aldrich
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Branching out into TV directing in the early '50s, including the China Smith series starring Dan Duryea, Aldrich got his chance at feature directing with sports programmer The Big Leaguer (1953), starring Edward G. Robinson. Following this inauspicious debut with more TV work, Aldrich shot the low-budget spy thriller World for Ransom (1954) with much of the China Smith crew and star Duryea during the series' break. Aldrich finally broke out of TV and B-movies when Burt Lancaster's company, Hecht-Lancaster, hired the promising director (and erstwhile employee) to helm the Technicolor A-Western Apache (1954). Featuring Lancaster as pacifist brave Massai, Apache trenchantly yet lyrically questioned Western myths of race and violence, despite a happy ending foisted on Aldrich by nervous United Artists execs. Apache became Aldrich's first hit, and Lancaster and Aldrich re-teamed for the more expansive SuperScope Western Vera Cruz (1954). Starring Lancaster and Gary Cooper as rivals seeking Mexican gold, Vera Cruz was humorously cynical as well as picturesque and violent, with Lancaster's gleeful villain anticipating the '60s and '70s Western antiheroes.
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Synopsis: One of the best films by often-underrated director Robert Aldrich, this stark, brutal Western is ... an effective allegory of America's involvement in the Vietnam War. Set in Arizona during the late 1880s, the film begins with experienced scout McInRead More
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Director Robert Aldrich's last film, All the Marbles stars Peter Falk as a "win-at-all-costs" type manager of a ladies tag-team wrestling combo. These girls are good and Falk wants them great. And he doesn't really care what they've got to do to get there. (This film's "R" rating is not for Raunchy, but it could be for "Revealing.") Following sort of a Rocky theme, this film finds our ladies tag team climbing its way to the top of the women's wrestling world where they face off against the world's best. ~ All Movie Guide
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The Robert B. Aldrich Award was established in 1984 to recognize extraordinary service to the Directors Guild of America and to its membership. Robert Aldrich served as DGA President from 1975-1979. Past recipients include Robert E. Wise, Elliot Silverstein, George Sidney, Sheldon Leonard, Gilbert Cates, George L. Schaefer, Larry Auerbach, Milt Felsen, Jack Shea, Gene Reynolds, John Rich, Burt Bluestein, Max A. Schindler, Daniel Petrie, Delbert Mann, Martha Coolidge, Arthur Hiller, Tom Donovan and Edwin Sherin.
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In a collection of interviews, Aldrich discussed his political views which ran counter to his privileged family background, related to the Rockefellers. If film was to do more than entertain, it allowed Aldrich to speak on behalf of those people for whom the American Dream seemed elusive. In Hustle, the ever nostalgic Reynolds mentions John Garfield as a favorite actor. Aldrich was an Assistant Director on Body and Soul and Force of Evil, and stayed a lifelong friend of writer-director Abraham Polonsky. Throughout Hustle, there is repeated dialogue on how easily people can be bought and sold - one of the characters is named Leo Sellers. Like the earlier films that Aldrich worked on as an assistant, Hustle is about people trying to maintain their sense of integrity in the face of easy financial gain.
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Aldrich understood, as did his fellow independent Otto Preminger(13), the value of publicity, image, and profile. Preminger and Aldrich were prodigious interview-givers; they cannily manipulated the new auteurist climate to present themselves as the filmmaker-hero. Both men constructed larger-than-life public personae for themselves into which they fitted their film projects: both politically liberal and anti-censorship, Preminger took the high end of the market with large, serious subjects and a cerebral mien (Exodus, USA 1960, for example). Aldrich took the other end, often the lower end, never underestimating the market value of sex and violence (Preminger was never a comfortable action director). The second type of images of Aldrich is located here, among the many publicity photos of him on set or on location, very physically showing his actors exactly how he wants them to kick and punch each other.
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Director Robert Aldrich