Book revview - "Michael Curtiz" by Alan Rode

I just finished reading a biography of the director Michael Curtiz by Alan Rode and it struck me again how weird it was that someone who made one of the greatest gangster films of all time (Angels with Dirty Faces), one of the greatest melodramas of all time (Mildred Pierce), one of the greatest musicals of all time (Yankee Doodle Dandy), three of the greatest swashbucklers of all time (Captain Blood, Sea Hawk, Robin Hood), one of the greatest Elvis Presley films of all time (King Creole) and one of the greatest films of all time (Casablanca) never got the auterist love of Ford, Hawks, Hitchcock, Wilder, Losey, Corman or even Frank Tashlin... despite even having an identifiable visual style... Was he too much a company man? Too mainstream? Too rarely a writer? Didn't deal enough with "common themes" so auteurists could group his movies together? Went off the boil too much when baby boomer critics started to get into film? 

Maybe it's simply he died too soon - in the early 60s so wasn't around to give lots of interviews to adoring cineastes, like Ford and Hawks could.

Some random things I learned from the book:

* He was married to top screenwriter Bess Meredyth (who worked in Australia in 1919-20 writing films for Snowy Baker) who was responsible for the fact many of Curtiz's script notes were excellent - she supplanted his career to his, which was unfortunately typical of the time, but as she spent 20 odd years sitting in bed eating cream cakes all day in a house with heaps of servants giving the occasional script note I didn't feel too badly for her (I can think of at least a dozen writers off the top of my head who would leap at a job like this)
 
* He may have gone senile towards the end of his life... making St Francis of Assisi in 1960 he grew so frustrated with the progress of filming he pulled down his pants and did a shit during filming (I wondered what director might be driven to do something like that today and too my surprise I could think of about five... filmmaking can drive people mad)
 
* He got busted by Confidential magazine in a hotel room paying for two African Americans to have sex while he watched... I started wondering what other directors would have done that and actually came up with a fair few names rather quickly...


* He didn't realise how ill he was but his family did and elected not to tell him.
 
This is an excellent book - exhaustive but then there was lots to cover. I was familiar with the Errol Flynn stuff and the great Warners classics but not his early life in Hungary (he was friends with Korda, and was successful as a director almost immediately), or his early silent Hollywood films, or even the early 30s stuff. His star rose with Flynn. 

I also wasn't that familiar with his adventures in post war Warner Bros, when the studio declined after Hal Wallis left but Jack Warners' cost cutting kept it competitive. Curtiz made far less classics after the war but still did things like discover Doris Day, and turn out huge hits like White Christmas. It's a shame he never reunited with Flynn they could have used each other in the late 40s/50s.

A top ten is v easy to compile
1) Casablanca (1943)
2) Adventures of Robin Hood (1938)
3) The Sea Hawk (1940)
4) Captain Blood (1935)
5) Mildred Pierce (1945)
6) Angels with Dirty Faces (1938)
7) King Creole (1958)
8) Yankee Doodle Dandy (1943)
9) Dodge City (1939)
10) The Breaking Point (1950)