During the late 1910s, Erich von Stroheim was known to film audiences as “The Man You Love to Hate,” thanks to a string of performances as Germanic villain stereotypes in films like The Hun Within (1918). By 1919, though, von Stroheim (who had worked briefly for D.W. Griffith) had started to write and direct the films in which he appeared. His first film, Blind Husbands, demonstrated the skillful editing and careful attention to detail that von Stroheim had learned from Griffith. It also revealed von Stroheim as a relentless perfectionist who stubbornly insisted on bringing his unique artistic vision to the screen. Along with his unsparing themes of sexual and physical degradation, this uncompromising attitude made von Stroheim the man studio executives loved to hate—and nobody hated von Stroheim more than Irving Thalberg. As a production assistant at Universal, Thalberg had fired von Stroheim from Merry-Go-Round (1922). But Thalberg’s master stroke was still to come. In 1924, when the Goldwyn Company merged with Metro Pictures and Louis B. Mayer Productions to form MGM, Thalberg became von Stroheim’s boss just as von Stroheim was putting the finishing touches on his fifth film, a nine-hour epic that he had carefully whittled down to a five-hour, two-part masterpiece. Thalberg took the film away from von Stroheim and handed it to editors who had read neither the script nor the novel it was based on. The release version, at just over two hours, is all that remains of von Stroheim’s vision—a series of glimpses of what might have been the greatest film ever made.
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Few directors in the history of film have had so much influence based on so little output as the French pioneer Jean Vigo. Born in 1905 to militant anarchist parents, Vigo lost his father early in life and spent much of his youth in hospitals and boarding schools. After attending the Sorbonne, he began work in the growing film industry and eventually bought a camera of his own. This led to his first two projects, the short films À propos de Nice (1930) and Taris, champion de natation (1931). In both films, Vigo imprinted an innovative and original style on ordinary subject matter. In 1933, he wrote and directed Zéro de Conduite, a scathing semi-memoir about a revolt at a French boarding school. The film was banned in France, and Vigo was accused of being “anti-French.” A year later, he completed his first feature-length film, but the Gaumont studio recut it without his advice or consent. Jean Vigo died just two weeks later, at the age of 29.
By the late 60’s, Peter Bogdanovich was already well on the way to becoming a first-rate film scholar. He had long been obsessed with movies, and he was publishing criticism and essays in major magazines. One of his biggest influences was the work of French critics and directors like Francois Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard, the leading proponents of what came to be called the auteur theory. It wasn’t long before he was taking a stab at being an auteur himself; in 1968, he produced, wrote, directed, edited, and acted in a movie called Targets. Three years later, with his big-budget debut, he would emerge as one of the leading lights of Hollywood’s own New Wave, but the film remains the masterpiece he has never topped.
Swedish auteur Ingmar Bergman’s obsession with life’s unfathomable questions began at an early age. The son of a strict pastor, Bergman developed the love/hate relationship with God that would eventually define his life and career. Combining his crisis of faith with his towering talent as a writer and director, he has forged a body of work as profound as it is prolific. His films are distinguished by an astonishing beauty that coexists with intense and unflinching emotional honesty. In 1957, Bergman took a passage from the Book of Revelation and a story about a particularly high-stakes chess game and turned them into one of the most unforgettable films of all time.
Fresh from his success with such films as M.A.S.H. and McCabe and Mrs. Miller, director Robert Altman was one of a number of remarkably talented directors gaining attention in the early ’70s. In 1975, he unveiled the film that would become his undisputed masterpiece. With its huge ensemble cast of twenty-four actors, natural-sounding overlapped dialogue, intricately interwoven plot threads, and brief but pointed cameos, it was a potent allegorical collage that came to define Altman’s unique style.
The early career of Orson Welles was prodigious in every sense of the word. By his twentieth birthday, he was acting on stage and in radio productions like The Shadow. In 1937, he founded the Mercury Theatre with John Houseman; a year later, the company broadcast an adaptation of H.G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds as a Halloween prank. The broadcast caused a sensation when thousands of listeners were convinced that a Martian invasion was actually underway. Welles was subsequently lured to Hollywood after RKO Radio Pictures promised him creative control over his first feature. In 1941, at the age of 25, he produced, directed, co-wrote and starred in what is widely considered to be the greatest film ever made.