Total Film's 100 Greatest Directors Ever: 1. Alfred Hitchcock

I honestly don't know where I'd rate Welles. Citizen Kane is considered the greatest film of all time, although I'm not a big fan of it.

I consider The Trial and Touch of Evil as his masterpiece's. He might be though, outside of Hitchcock, the most influential director that's ever lived, so that's saying something.

 

He's influential for the wrong reasons.

 

F for Fake is his best movie, an absorbing documentary about frauds. At one point, Welles says to the camera, and he laughs as he says it, "I started at the top and have been working my down ever since," which is true.

 

He could have added that he was nearly entirely responsible for his situation, too.

 

Everyone seems to be burying him, the guy was a genius. You can't discount what he accomplished.

 

I'm a much bigger fan of Welles than both Rogue and Zaz, I think he was a genius and nowhere was that genius more on display than Citizen Kane. However...

I agree with the quote of Welles from F is for Fake and with Zaz when he says Welles was entirely responsible for working his way down to the bottom, ending up as huckster for cheap wine.

I'm a big proponent of people taking responsibility for their actions, which is a cousin of the karma concept that "we reap what we sow." Perhaps the greatest performance Orson Welles ever gave was as the misunderstood, maligned, mistreated artist. The fact is that he was an arrogant, extravagent, irresponsible egomaniac who upset people enormously, and it was usually the people who could help him. He didn't just bite the hand that fed him, he defecated on it and generally infuriated people.

As a contrast, look at Spielberg. He also had his world-beater debut in his mid-twenties and he parlayed it into a succession of almost non-stop hits and memorable motion pictures. Spielberg's first feature Sugar Land Express wasn't a financial success, but it was produced by two powerful men in the industry who were in good favor with Universal. (They had made The Sting the year before, so they were hot properties.) They felt Spielberg did a very good job of directing the film, and it was on time and on budget and he was a pleasure to work with. Universal and the producers then gave him the chance to direct Jaws and he paid them back with a gigantic hit. The rest is history. Plus when he DID make mistakes and go overboard, he learned from them. Contrast that to Welles.

Spielberg knew how to work with the power brokers of Hollywood and build himself into a force to be reckoned with. He played his cards right so he could enjoy a long career of filmmaking on his own terms.

Welles was a genius talent but as an industry politician, he was a complete moron. A strange sort of cinematic idiot savant. As in most walks of life, it's great to have talent and ability to do your job, but the ability to get along reasonably well with other people goes along way too. No matter what business you're in, you are still in the people business.
Good advice for Orson would have been: When you're in a hole, stop digging.

By coincidence with this post, several days ago I changed my signature below. As it happens, it very much relates to the career of Orson Welles.

 

I don't enjoy slagging Welles, and I will admit that I used to buy the 'misunderstood genius' bit. Until I saw "Touch of Evil" and "The Lady from Shanghai" both of which are pretty terrible. (A great crane shot does not a great movie make). Also Simon Callow's biography will give you some idea of how much of a fabulist Welles was. I don't object to this in particular--a lot of directors like storytelling--but when they substitute it for achievement, I *do* object to it. Especially as a lot of directors took Welles as their model. Welles was capable of good work, but if the film was bad, it was easier for him to blame the suits, and then take bows for the good things. For example, when asked, he claimed that Mankewicz wrote everything to do with 'Rosebud' in "Kane" because he considered it cheesy. But in fact Mankewicz wrote the whole script, with Welles helping to shape it in the development stages. That's how the best directors generally work (unless they are also scriptwriters). Most of them don't take a writing credit for it, however--Hitchcock didn't--but Welles did.

I will note that Welles' only grandchild is bipolar. He may have *had* no control, that still doesn't make this a great career.

 

F for Fake is so layered its hard to tell when Welles is being at all serious. But he does seem to understand by that point that he's responsible for his downward trajectory. I mean, by the early seventies I think Welles knew, at least some of the time, that he was a difficult and intractable person.

 

Yes, he was. I assume from your description that he had self-knowledge enough to know this on some level. A sad thing, because he *did* have great talent, just not for everything. Hitchcock and Ford, for two examples, assembled a group of talented people that they worked with each film--Hitchcock when he fell in with Lew Wassermann, who liked and trusted him and didn't interfere, and Ford because he had an independent unit nearly everywhere he worked. This would have benefited Welles, but he was never one to see how it could be done instead of railing because it couldn't be done his way. First among equals suits some; but Welles didn't believe he had any equals, unfortunately. Perhaps he was right, but it was sad, truncated career, not unlike that of Michael Cimino.

 

5 Francis Ford Coppola

The godfather

?Anything you build on a large scale or with an intense passion invites chaos,? said the great lost beard of new Hollywood. He started out small, mind. Plucked from film school by Roger Corman in ?62, on $90 a week, Coppola shot the shocker Dementia 13 in Ireland. Cheap axe-ploitation? Sure, but it kick-started his eclectic career, which sprawls from the claustrophobic intensity of The Conversation to the sun-drunk Finian?s Rainbow. Isolation is a key theme, possibly because at nine, this son of a concert flautist fell ill with polio and had to be kept indoors. After the grandiose Godfather films, excess consolidated his myth and almost destroyed him, financially in the case of One From The Heart and physically in the case of Apocalypse Now. ?My film is not a movie,? Coppola said. ?It?s not about Vietnam. It is Vietnam.?

Picture perfect The Godfather: Part II. A journey into the heart of darkness."

A somewhat more sustained career than Welles, but a similar trajectory. Two very great movies, the first two "Godfathers"; a very good one "The Conversation"; a breakdown during "Apocalypse Now", which was essentially never finished. Thereafter, it gets rather grim, as if Coppola's spark had gone. Perhaps it has, if the theory that he had a severe breakdown during "Apocalypse Now" is true; he recovered but whatever made him a great director had been blunted. One bio of him that I read was incredibly depressing, because his subsequent films began to follow a bad pattern: he'd start without a finished script, incomplete casting, and inadequate financing, and the film would turn into a disaster ("Cotton Club" anyone?) Sound familiar? Or the films were just not as interesting as his first ones ("Jack", "Peggy Sue", etc.).

Great natural talent, but like Welles, Coppola wanted to operate outside the studio system, though he was director that probably required the structure to fire his creativity. There are still flashes, and his films are never as awful as those of Welles in his late period. And he didn't flame out as completely as Cimino did just a decade later. But still, not the career he might have had.

 

And he didn't flame out as completely as Cimino did just a decade later. But still, not the career he might have had.

Right on the money.

Speaking of money, I read somewhere that during some of Coppola's low points in the 80s and 90s, he had to go to his now enormously wealthy former apprentice George Lucas and borrow money to keep him afloat. That had to be embarassing. Since Lucas owed Francis his career, he gave him some non-interest loans to help him out.

 

The Godfather and The Godfather Part II alone make him a contender for "Greatest Director Ever." The fact that he also helmed The Conversation and Apocalypse Now, in the same decade, no less, is approaching overkill.

 

He was simply not designed to be a suit, as Zoetrope proved; when he had a studio of his own, he found out why it wasn't as easy as it looked.

 

Probably the best director of the 1970's. The first two Godfathers are perfect in almost every way. The Conversation put paranoia on film that works stupendously. And Apocalypse Now is still the best Vietnam movie in my eyes, even if it isn't trying to be. After the 70's, The Godfather part 3 was the only great movie he made. A shame that such a great director couldn't continue his greatness the way Spielberg did.

 

"Godfather 3" is not a great film, IMO.

 

I can't watch the closing montage or Al Pacino and agree with you. Sofia Coppola doesn't give a great performance, and the film is slammed as one of the worst. This is a fabulous film, Andy Garcia is brilliant, as well as the rest of the old Godfather ensemble(Talia Shire, Diane Keaton). This is no where near the brilliance of the first two Godfathers, I agree, but they are two all-time classics of cinema. I believe it is a great movie.

 

I certainly would agree on it being a movie made by a great director--yes, you can tell that. But things didn't go entirely right.

 

Coppola's not the greatest director ever, but I'll go along with the sentiment that he's the best of the 1970s.

GFIII was excellent in my opinion. Sofia was a disaster, but I sometimes think she's used as an excuse to trash the film unjustly. The Academy thought enough of it to nominate it as Best Film and nominate Garcia for Supporting Actor.

Put it this way:

GFI & GFII = Michael Jordan (no explanation necessary)

GFIII = Scottie Pippen (good in its own right, but has an impossible standard to live up to)

 

It is the same argument as we had about Welles, as already stated. Does a brief period of incredible brilliance still land you on the list of the greatest ever (top five?!) when you spent the vast majority of your career making complete trash? I say no.

The first two Godfather films are undeniable masterpieces. The third one drags in places, has a lot of non-actors (Coppola, Hamilton, etc) and is not the film it could have or should have been. But Pacino's performance is great in and the basic premise, that of giving Michael Corleone a particularly brutal taste of redemption, is a good one. And the sequences that take place during Cavalleria Rusticana are just great. It's just Coppola back on form again.

Yeah, he had a good run. But The Rainmaker? Jack? The Outsiders? I've seen these movies; they're awful, they're just awful.

 

I think the question is all about does "so and so's" 1 great movie equal or surpass some one's else's 3 or 4 movies great or good movies.

For Coppola I say no.

 

The Rainmaker is not "awful." It's not even bad. I like it and think of it as a good film.

Also, Coppola gave us Sofia Coppola, who gave us Lost in Translation, and that alone is worth a lot.

 

The Rainmaker is very good. Much better than most courtroom dramas of the last 20 years. Certainly better than any other Grisham film I've seen.

With Coppola, it's not just "a couple" of "great" films. It's several of the greatest films ever made. The Godfather, The Godfather Part II, Apocalypse Now, and The Conversation all represent very highest echelon of American cinema. And even Coppola's failures, like One from the Heart, are technically proficient and usually more interesting than another filmmaker's best work.

And Tetro is a top-notch piece of work, so maybe he's got more left in the tank.

 

Five is a little high, I agree, but top 15 at the least. I don't think everyone is realizing his accomplishments. The Godfather trilogy! Apocalypse Now! The Conversation! I mean, for the Godfather part 1 alone he should be considered one of the greatest, but he made four or five other films that are equally magnificent.

 

But "Apocalypse Now" was never finished--to some extent true of every film Coppola wrote from then on. And he obsessively tinkers with the Godfathers to the extent that I wish that he would just give it a rest. Something's off; I don't know what, but something.

 

The Rainmaker is a potboiler. Every twist is highly telegraphed and its one of the most predictable movies I've ever seen. It is well acted and has a high sheen on it. But from the guy who directed The Godfather, I expect a heck of a lot more than even a 'very good courtroom drama.' And the fact that it's one of the best courtroom dramas of the past twenty years says more about the sorry state of courtroom dramas than about the quality of The Rainmaker.