Zinnemann @ 100.

"It's not that [Fred] Zinnemann, who would turn 100 years old today, didn't make quite a few good and great films and at least one bona fide classic, but is there something you can point to as a Zinnemannesque film the way you might say Hitchcockian or Hawksian?" asks Edward Copeland. "Not really. He simply was a solid, workman-like director who ended up making movies worth watching far more often than he made clunkers." So begins an overview encompassing 14 features.

"Zinnemann became a crucial test case - and cause celebre - for the evolving auteurist theory in the 1960s, as [Andrew] Sarris wrote: 'I will not trade one shot of Orson Welles for the entire oeuvre of Fred Zinnemann,'" recalls Emanuel Levy. "Talk to young and current critics today about Zinnemann's status as a filmmaker, and you'll get the following pejorative adjectives: plodding, uninspired, humorless, and emotionally distant - if they remember who he is."

That said, "Zinnemann, even more so than William Wyler, was the 'perfect' Oscar director. As noted, two of his films won Best Picture: From Here to Eternity and A Man for All Seasons, and four were Oscar-nominated: High Noon, The Nun's Story, The Sundowners and Julia.... No less than 18 actors were nominated for work a Zinnemann film.... With their "sensitive" subjects and issues, humanistic orientation, and middlebrow sensibility. Zinnemann's movies were perfect "Oscar material." His films display good deal of consistency in their narrative concerns and moral dilemmas. Asked to describe the kinds of stories that attract him, he said: 'I just like to do films that are positive in the sense that they deal with the dignity of human beings and have something to say about oppression.'"

Marking the Austrian's centennial in the German-language papers: Christoph Egger (Neue Zürcher Zeitung), Michael Omasta (Freitag), Bert Rebhandl (Berliner Zeitung) and Hanns-Georg Rodek (Die Welt).

Posted by dwhudson at April 29, 2007 4:41 AM