Don Siegel

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Donald "Don" Siegel (born October 26, 1912 in Chicago , Illinois , † April 20, 1991 in Nipomo , California ) was an American film director and film producer .

His main films include the science fiction film Invasion of the Body Snatchers , the police film Just 72 Hours Left , the crime film Dirty Harry and the late-western The Shootist . He repeatedly worked with Clint Eastwood as the lead actor, who saw in Siegel an important mentor for his later directorial work.

Life

Don Siegel graduated from high school in England . After studying art in Paris , he went to Hollywood in the 1930s . From 1934 he worked for the Warner Brothers film studio , where he learned his trade in the editing department and as a second unit director. In 1945 he directed two short films for the first time . Both were awarded an Oscar , but, as Siegel stated in an interview in 1970, without anyone noticing, since an Oscar for a short film then only counted for the studio. In the late 1940s, after the film Night Unto Night , Siegel left Warner Brothers.

“Siegel was a small but important cog in the clockwork of the studio. He worked alone and largely independently, no director talked him into his work much. He worked on the assembly line and still remained an individualist. Although he helped save the studio a lot of money, Jack Warner didn't like him too much - like all free spirits. "

- Michael Hanisch : The last professional - Despite assembly line work at Warner Bros. always a solitaire: Don Siegel in "film-dienst"

As a result, Siegel shot primarily westerns and action-oriented thrillers as an independent director . For his directorial work in Terror in Block 11 (1954) he was nominated for the Directors Guild of America Award . His excursion into science fiction - genre with the Body Snatchers (1956) was an exception, but he referred to this in retrospect as his "probably the best movie." Siegel was known to the studios for working quickly and efficiently, with up to 55 changing camera positions per day.

Beginning with The Death of a Killer (1964), which was originally produced for television , Siegel made the films that are among his best known today, including Just 72 Hours (1968) and the controversial Dirty Harry (1971). Siegel worked frequently with Clint Eastwood and was a mentor to Eastwood when he began directing. The jazz musician Lalo Schifrin contributed the music to some of Siegel's films in the late 1960s and 1970s.

During his career, Siegel helped future directors Sam Peckinpah and Michael Reeves to get their first jobs in the film business. Eastwood, like his other mentor, Sergio Leone , dedicated his 1992 film Merciless to Siegel .

Siegel was married three times, to Viveca Lindfors , Doe Avedon, and Carol Rydall. The son Kristoffer Tabori , who was born in 1952 and later became an actor and director, emerged from the marriage with Lindfors, which existed from 1949 to 1954 . During their marriage to Avedon, which lasted from 1957 to 1975, the couple adopted four children. The marriage to Carol Rydall, a former assistant to Clint Eastwood, lasted from 1981 until Siegel's death in 1991.

Controversy

The controversial Dirty Harry , a vigilante police officer, considered Siegel's biographer Stuart Kaminsky to be "immoral", while critic Pauline Kael even spoke of "fascist Middle Ages". Film critic Peter Knight rated Siegel's telephone as a "straightforward Cold War film ". Allison pointed out that although Siegel has often been classified as right-wing and misogynistic, the director himself rarely took a moral or political position. John Baxter wrote about the hero-criminal-spectator relationship in Siegel's films:

“In his work, Siegel illustrates the implicit contract between criminals and society. We need criminals to realize our own violent fantasies. He finds evidence of this symbiosis in our legal system, an ineffective tool that we ourselves are sabotaging. His films mock these structures. The police violence in Just 72 Hours (1968) is corrupt. Terror in Block 11 and Escape from Alcatraz (1979) attack the prison system. Both Coogan's big bluff and Dirty Harry parody sociology , jurisdiction and the concept of rehabilitation. "

- John Baxter : Don Siegel

Another object of conflicting interpretations was Siegel's Die Demonischen , in which extraterrestrials take over the bodies of the inhabitants of a small Californian village and want to build a callous, purely utilitarian society. “You can literally feel the anti-communist paranoia of the post-war period, but at the same time you are tempted to interpret the film as a metaphor for the tyranny of the McCarthy era .” (David Wood, BBC ) Films have no political message: "I think that feature films should primarily entertain, and I don't want to preach."

One of Siegel's few open political commitments comes from a 1972 interview with the New York Times . "When you make a film that is on the safe side, you have a problem," said Siegel, insisting that Clint Eastwood, lead actor, and others. a. in Dirty Harry , who is conservative , but he himself takes a politically contrary stance: “I am a liberal . I sympathize with the left . ”At the same time he restricted,“ I don't make political films ”.

Filmography (selection)

Second unit direction

Director

producer

actor

literature

  • Frank Arnold, Michael Esser (ed.): Dirty Harry: Don Siegel and his films . Vertigo, Munich 2003, ISBN 3-934028-05-5 .

documentary

  • The Last of the Independents. TV documentary about Don Siegel by Thys Ockersen, Netherlands 1980

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Director of the second recording team, who mainly shoots action scenes and recordings in which the main actors do not appear.
  2. ↑ a b c d e Essay by Deborah Allison on Sensesofcinema.com, accessed March 22, 2013.
  3. ↑ prisma interview with Don Siegel on Prisma-online.de, accessed on March 22, 2013.
  4. ↑ film-dienst 22/02 p. 10 ff.
  5. ↑ Alan Lovell: Don Siegel. American Cinema. London 1975.
  6. ↑ Originally “camera set-ups”; since several settings can be rotated from one camera position , i.e. at least 55 settings per day.
  7. ↑ Interview with Clint Eastwood in the Guardian, October 7, 2003, accessed March 22, 2013.
  8. ^ Walter Mirisch: I Thought We Were Making Movies, Not History. University of Wisconsin Press, 2008, pp. 47-49.
  9. ^ Biography of Michael Reeves on the British Film Institute website , accessed March 22, 2013.
  10. ↑ Norma Stevens, Steven ML Aronson: Avedon: Something Personal . Spiegel & Grau, New York, 2017, ISBN 978-0-8129-9443-8 , page 169.
  11. ↑ Pauline Kael: The Current Cinema: Saint Cop. Article in The New Yorker, January 15, 1972. Quoted from: Jim Dobie's Magnum Fascist: Dirty Harry. Article on Examiner.com dated January 25, 2010, accessed March 23, 2013.
  12. ^ Peter Knight (Ed.): Conspiracy Theories in American History: An Encyclopedia. ABC-CLIO, Santa barbara 2003, pp. 256-257.
  13. ↑ Allison cited: John Baxter: Dirty Harry , in Tom Pendergast, Sara Perdergast (Eds.): International Dictionary of Films and Filmmakers: Films. St. James's Press, Detroit 2000.
  14. ↑ “The sense of post-war, anti-communist paranoia is acute, as is the temptation to view the film as a metaphor for the tyranny of the McCarthy era.” - Review by David Wood, BBC, 2001.
  15. ^ "[...] I feel that motion pictures are primarily to entertain and I did not want to preach." - Interview with Don Siegel in Alan Lovell: Don Siegel. American Cinema. London 1975.
  16. ↑ Peter B. Flint: Don Siegel, Whose Movies Herald Tough, Cynical Loners, Dies at 78 . New York Times, April 24, 1991, accessed March 23, 2013.
  17. ^ The New York Times Biographical Service. Volume 3, New York Times / Arno Press, 1972, p. 1083.
personal data
SURNAME Siegel, Don
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Siegel, Donald (real name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American director
DATE OF BIRTH October 26, 1912
PLACE OF BIRTH Chicago , Illinois , USA
DATE OF DEATH April 20, 1991
Place of death Nipomo , California