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Sidney Lumet
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RUNNING ON EMPTY, directed by Sidney Lumet, is the moving tale of a young man whose parents were political agitators in the 1960s. Ever since, the family has been changing locations, changing their names, and hiding from the FBI.
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Sidney Lumet has been making movies for 50 years, and though his track record is spotty, the man who directed Serpico, Dog Day Afternoon and Network generally deserves the benefit of the doubt. (Insert your own Wiz, Morning After or Gloria quip here.) His latest, Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead, stars Philip Seymour Hoffman and Ethan Hawke as brothers, and Albert Finney as their dad. It features a robbery gone wrong; it takes place primarily in New York City. And it has Marisa Tomei, often in very little clothing. In short, it’s highly promising. So why is it so bad?
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Sidney Lumet entered movies with that film classic, earning Oscar nominations for himself, for Reginald Rose (who was adapting and expanding his hour-long teleplay) and for Best Picture of 1957. He brought it in under budget, too—in 19 days of shooting!—and although it never made a dime, it remains one of his most prestigious achievements. Not the least of its distinctions is that it was his first Manhattan melodrama—Lumet is Woody Allen’s equal in depicting the many sides and shades of New York City life—but what’s tricky about this first time out is he did it without ever leaving the room, triumphing over a single-set handicap by contriving visual variety with his cameraman, Boris Kaufman.
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Sidney Lumet was born in Philadelphia on June 25, 1924, to dancer Eugenia Wermus Lumet and Yiddish stage actor Baruch Lumet. Sidney he made his stage debut at the age of four, in a New York Yiddish Art Theater production featuring his father. Young Sid studied at New York's Professional Children's School and made his Broadway debut at 11 as one of the original DEAD END kids. Four years later, he made his first feature film appearance acting opposite Sylvia Sidney in ONE THIRD OF A NATION.
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Sidney Lumet was born in Philadelphia and grew up during The Great Depression. His family moved every year because it was cheaper to pull up stakes than sign a new lease. His parents were entertainers on the Yiddish stage and Lumet became a child actor on radio in New York City.
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Lumet returned to the NYC police milieu for "Q & A" (1980), picking up his first solo screenwriting credit adapting the Edward Torres novel. Unfortunately, the gritty, graphic, well-acted story bogged down as it approached its predictable conclusion. He inhabited similar terrain, though less successfully, with "A Stranger Among Us" (1992), which (mis)cast Melanie Griffith as a NYC cop who goes to live among Brooklyn's Hasidic community to uncover a murderer. The farfetched finale made it one of Lumet's least satisfying cop dramas, and it does not really belong alongside "Serpico" or "Prince of the City" as it did not deal with the larger issues of innocence lost and police corruption. He provided a better movie with "Night Falls on Manhattan" (1997), which seemed to pick up where "Prince of the City" left off, depicting the ethical compromises of middle-aged cops who are not inherently bad. Again solo scripted by Lumet, it depicted a compromise with evil at the end, leaving some people cold, but one wonders if it would have sizzled more with another actor instead of Andy Garcia in the lead role.
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Sidney Lumet