The New Biographical Dictionary of Film: Completely Updated and Expanded (394 page)

In David Lean, Spiegel found his ideal director: a man who could spend several million dollars without revealing an inch of himself or without unsettling an audience.
Lawrence of Arabia
is moronic history based on a tidy conception of character analysis that horribly glamorizes a legend;
The Bridge on the River Kwai
is portentous with a capsule message of futile war—as if war were not a useful, profitable, and enjoyable occupation for many; while
On the Waterfront
is a shameless piece of Stanislavskyan barnstorming in which Spiegel and Kazan glossed over union racketeering and the subtleties in informing.

It is the sham gravity that offends. If only Spiegel showed a trace of humor, frivolity, or awareness of his own ponderous earnestness. As it is, the one truly penetrating film he produced in later years,
The Chase
(66, Arthur Penn), he chose to take from Penn in an attempt at doctoring. Still, the violence in
The Chase
hurts, while that in Spiegel’s other films is artificial.
The Chase
will last;
Lawrence
and
Kwai
only prove the misplaced faith of respectable taste. Yet Spiegel probably expected the opposite and went on in this drab spirit: “They may cost a lot. But none of the money is wasted. All my pictures can be reissued again and again. They stand up pretty well, and they retain their residual values, both financial and prestige-wise.”

From the University of Vienna, Spiegel went to America selling Palestinian cotton. While there, he lectured on drama and was briefly hired by MGM to advise on foreign-language versions. He was fired and went to Universal. In 1929, they sent him to Berlin to work on German productions for them. There is little record of what he did then or until he reappeared in America early in the war, so shy of his name that he called himself S. P. Eagle. He produced
Tales of Manhattan
(42, Julien Duvivier), but did not surface again until after the war when he produced
The Stranger
(46, Orson Welles) for RKO. John Huston was involved on that film in an uncredited writing capacity. He and Eagle formed Horizon Pictures, which produced: the risible
We Were Strangers
(49, Huston); the excellent
The Prowler
(51, Joseph Losey); the hammy
The African Queen
(51, Huston).

After that Eagle/Spiegel produced independently, usually for release through Columbia:
Melba
(53, Lewis Milestone);
On the Waterfront
(54, Elia Kazan);
End as a Man
(57, Jack Garfein);
The Bridge on the River Kwai
(57, David Lean);
Suddenly Last Summer
(59, Joseph L. Mankiewicz);
Lawrence of Arabia
(62, Lean);
The Night of the Generals
(67, Anatole Litvak);
The Happening
(67, Elliot Silverstein);
Nicholas and Alexandra
(71, Franklin Schaffner); and, with ravishing cast, distinguished scenarist and director, yet leaden effect,
The Last Tycoon
(76, Elia Kazan), suspiciously like the vain hope of a big dealer to justify his business with a tasteful mix of art and philosophy—and brutally silly as a result.

Steven Spielberg
, b. Cincinnati, Ohio, 1947
1971:
Duel
. 1974:
The Sugarland Express
. 1975:
Jaws
. 1977:
Close Encounters of the Third Kind
. 1979:
1941
. 1981:
Raiders of the Lost Ark
. 1982:
E.T., the ExtraTerrestrial
. 1983: an episode from
Twilight Zone—the Movie
. 1984:
Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom
. 1985:
The Color Purple
. 1987:
Empire of the Sun
. 1989:
Always; Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade
. 1991:
Hook
. 1993:
Jurassic Park; Schindler’s List
. 1997:
The Lost World: Jurassic Park; Amistad
. 1998:
Saving Private Ryan
. 2001:
A.I
. 2002:
Minority Report; Catch Me If You Can
. 2004:
The Terminal
. 2005:
War of the Worlds; Munich
. 2008:
Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull
.

Schindler makes pots and pans; he then buys the lives of Jews who would otherwise die in camps. The numbers are precise—as in any serious business. And so, in one year, 1993, Steven Spielberg delivered to the screen
Jurassic Park
and
Schindler’s List
, enamelware and human flesh, if you like.
Jurassic Park
, it seemed to me, was shoddy, foolish in plot and characters, and nearly immediately forgettable. It was also, for a while, the biggest grossing film of all time; the numbers are precise, if growing still.
Jurassic Park
is a superb producer’s coup according to the principle “Show them something they’ve never seen.” And in its comprehensive revelation of a lifelike, or movielike, fluency for unreal, unborn things it may prove more influential than any film since
The Jazz Singer
.

Schindler’s List
is the most moving film I have ever seen. That does not mean it is faultless. To take just one point: the reddening of one little girl’s coat in a black-and-white film strikes me as a mistake, and a sign of how calculating a director Spielberg is. For the calculating reveal themselves in those few errors that escape. I don’t really believe in Spielberg as an artist: I don’t believe that much soul or doubt is there, or that much heartfelt trust in the organic meaning of style. But
Schindler’s List
is like an earthquake in a culture of gardens. And it helps persuade this viewer that cinema—or American film—is not a place for artists. It is a world for producers, for showmen, and Schindlers. The closest
Schindler’s List
comes to art may be in aiding Steven Spielberg to back into the upheld coat of his own mysterious, brilliant, actorly nature. The film works so well because he is Schindler, and 1993 has been his 1944.

From the mid-1970s, there was an accepted wisdom that Spielberg was the junior mechanic as movie director. It grew out of the interest in cars and trucks in his first two films; a motorized shark in the third; and some of the most elaborate special effects ever organized in
Close Encounters
. Even Spielberg himself acknowledged the prominence of smooth-working parts in his films, and looked forward to smaller, more intimate, and by implication, more humane pictures. He had nothing to be ashamed of, even if he uttered the regrettable industry homily of appreciating “movie ideas that you can hold in your hand”—as opposed to those that dwell in your mind.

The rivalry of car and truck in
Duel
is a vivid allegory of the common man facing an enigmatic threat of terror and destruction. The motorcades of
Sugarland Express
never obscure the frantic emotions of a redneck mother blind to all but the need to retain her child. The mechanical shark in Spielberg’s hands was a wittier version of the truck in
Duel
, and the means to an authentic pop art
Moby Dick
. And
Close Encounters
had a flawless wonder, such that it might be the first film ever made. Its laboratory effects and its models are all harnessed to an unusual plot structure, a view of personal stories that is remarkably detached for American pictures but never cold, and a kind of inquisitive awe for the unknown that transcends the paranoia and melodrama so widespread in science fiction.
Close Encounters
is a tribute to the richness of the ordinary human imagination. The inevitable comparison of
Star Wars
and
Close Encounters
reveals Lucas as a toymaker, and Spielberg as an admiring explorer of the mind’s power.

The son of an electrical engineer and computer expert, Spielberg began making 8mm films in high school with his father’s camera. At that time he lived in Phoenix, Arizona, and he learned from and commandeered his father’s hobby.
Firelight
was a twenty-one-hour epic, according to its maker, anticipating some of the themes and images brought to fruition in
Close Encounters
. He took a degree in English at California State College, Long Beach, but was always working on movies.
Amblin’
was a short that won prizes and earned a release with
Love Story
—early evidence of Spielberg’s ability at drawing together good luck and commercial acumen.

He moved into TV and quickly won a reputation as an efficient director—the height of TV’s needs. He worked on the pilot for
Night Gallery
and contributed episodes to
Columbo, Marcus Welby, The Name of the Game, The Psychiatrist
, and
Owen Marshall
. On that basis, he did
Duel
as a movie-of-the-week for ABC. Its impact was such that it got a theatrical release outside America. Deservedly so, for it stands up as one of the medium’s most compelling spirals of suspense. The ordinariness of the Dennis Weaver character and the monstrous malignance of the truck confront one another with a narrative assurance that never needs to remind us of the element of fable. The ending is unsatisfactory, partly because the rest of the film is so momentous, but also because sheer skill needed more philosophy for a fitting resolution.

Sugarland Express
is another epic of the road—raucous, feverish, and based on an actual incident. What makes its quest and journey so touching is the treatment of the central characters. They are not self-aware, enlightened, or stereotyped, and the movie never patronizes them. Goldie Hawn’s wife is an untidy, vibrant woman, a robust departure from the social gentility that usually encloses Hollywood women. She is genuinely vulgar, but is never mocked because of it.

Jaws
is Spielberg’s most old-fashioned film, and the occasion on which he was under most commercial pressure. But, like Coppola on
The Godfather
, Spielberg asserted his own role and deftly organized the elements of a roller coaster entertainment without sacrificing inner meanings. The suspense of the picture came from meticulous technique and good humor about its own surgical cutting. You have only to submit to the travesty of
Jaws 2
to realize how much more engagingly Spielberg saw the ocean, the perils, and the sinister beauty of the shark, and the vitality of its human opponents. The terror of his films is healthy and cathartic because his faith in the unknown is so generous and sensible and his trust in the plain man’s ingenuity and pluck so precise.

Close Encounters
is as close to a mystical experience as a major film has come, but it is the mysticism of common sense. I don’t think Spielberg believes in UFOs or specific answers in the universe. But he believes in man’s vision and the determination that trusts its own experience more than official versions of the truth. The Dreyfuss character is no fanatic; he is another ordinary man whose life is disrupted by what he believes in. The way his domestic life is violated by increasing obsessiveness gives the film the flavor of surrealism. But the characters are smaller than the happenings that inspire them. Smallness never diminishes them. There is no violence to oppress them, only an invitation to the highest flights of fancy. The movie could have been naïve and sentimental—it was inspired by Disney—but Spielberg never relinquishes his practicality and his eye for everyday detail. It is extraordinary that so big and popular a film should have such a slender dramatic thread, and that the central marriage should be permitted to break up without apology, adultery, or the promise of reunion. It is the essence of Spielberg’s attitude that when Dreyfuss and Melinda Dillon embrace, it is not as lovers brought together by plot, but as fellow believers.

At first sight, the Spielberg of the eighties may seem more an impresario—or a studio, even—than a director. Yet he directed seven films in the decade, including the Indiana Jones trilogy, the phenomenon of
E.T.
, and
Empire of the Sun
(a fine work, rather “explained” by
Schindler’s List
), an adaptation of J. G. Ballard’s book about childhood in Shanghai after the Japanese invasion.
Empire of the Sun
was among Spielberg’s boxoffice failures, and there are signs that he writes failure out of history. Yet it combines the life of a child with the momentous world of adults in a way scarcely attempted in his other films. So busy, so enterprising, Spielberg had time for three flat-out bad films—
The Color Purple, Always
, and
Hook
(warning enough to any critic who seems ready to categorize Spielberg as a master of control and market forces).

At the same time, he became a producer, a tireless master of many ceremonies, and many of them simultaneous. Even
E.T
. feels calculated—to these eyes, it is not as inspired or involuntary as the wondrous
Poltergeist
(82, Tobe Hooper), on which Spielberg was producer, author of the story, and reshooter. Some argue that
Hook
was personal; I found it maudlin, fussy, and misjudged. Could it be that Spielberg’s judgment smothers the vestiges of personal expression he can muster? Or is it that he is truly most himself when satisfying the enormous audience? He is a tycoon such as few can comprehend. He has done astonishing things; he has become vital to the business. And like Schindler, he has made us all think deeply about the nature of business. As a director, he took a rest after 1993—and then came back with a new, improved
Jurassic Park, Amistad
, and
Saving Private Ryan
, all in the space of a couple of years.
Ryan
changed war films: combat, shock, wounds, and fear had never been so graphically presented; and yet there was also a true sense of what duties and ideas had felt like in 1944. I disliked the framing device. I would have admired a director who trusted us to get it without that. Never mind—
Ryan
is a magnificent film. Which is very much more than I could say for
A.I.
, which seemed to me far too self-conscious in its thinking. Indeed, I suspect that, for all his power with futuristic technology, Spielberg’s mind was made in the forties and fifties. There were worse times to be raised.