Eighty years ago, as a twentysomething Robert Aldrich saw the inside of his first film studio, a debuting director two years younger was making what has long been held to be the greatest film of all time. The lot belonged to RKO and the film being made there by Orson Welles was Citizen Kane (1941). But the newcomer completing the picture may not be so readily familiar. As the latest entry in Cinema Paradiso's Instant Expert's Guide reveals. however, Robert Aldrich is one of Hollywood's most seriously underestimated talents.
By and large, American critics didn't get Robert Aldrich and his modest place in the annals of Hollywood history meant that the makers of Feud - the 2017 mini-series about the rivalry between Joan Crawford (Jessica Lange) and Bette Davis (Susan Sarandon) - could depict him as a scheming, unprincipled hack, who would say and do anything to get his movie made. The character is marvellously played by Alfred Molina, but he bears no relation to the pugnacious, but deeply moral film-maker who made classic contributions to nearly every major film genre. Indeed, Aldrich was a fearless exposer of the élite into which he had been born, with his acute sense of liberal irony prompting him to cast a critical pall over national character traits and debased notions of the American Dream that his knee-jerk patriotic peers celebrated with an entrenched sense of entitlement.
The Silver Spoon Years
Robert Burgess Aldrich was born in Cranston, Rhode Island on 9 August 1918 to newspaper publisher Edward Aldrich and his wife, Lora. Aldrich's grandfather, Nelson, was a self-made millionaire, whose 30-year term as a Republican senator earned him the nickname, 'The General Manager of the Nation'. His uncles all held high-powered posts, with Winthrop Aldrich following a stint as president of the Chase Manhattan Bank by becoming US Ambassador to the United Kingdom. Moreover, his Aunt Abigail married into the Rockefeller family (which owned Standard Oil) and Aldrich's cousin, Nelson, would go on to serve as Vice-President to Gerald Ford between 1974-77.
Raised by his father after Lora died when he was 13, Aldrich was taught to fear no one in striving to surpass the attainments of his relations. At Moses Brown School, he captained the football and athletics teams and was voted class president. But he failed to secure a place at Yale and devoted more time to booking jazz bands than to his economics studies at the University of Virginia. Indeed, he would drop out without graduating after deciding to enter the movie business and persuaded Uncle Winthrop to use his influence to land him a $25 per week job as a production clerk at RKO. Dismayed by the 23 year-old's decision and his left-wing insistence on starting on the bottom rung, the Aldrich family cut him off without a dime.
On arriving at RKO in May 1941, Aldrich set about familiarising himself with all aspects of film-making. Having been invalided out of the Air Force Motion Picture Unit with an old football injury after Pearl Harbor, he rose steadily through the ranks as those not in reserved occupations were called up for war service. He took his first credit as second assistant director on Robert Stevenson's Joan of Paris (1942), a tale of the French Resistance with Michèle Morgan in the title role. Over the next couple of years, Aldrich worked in this capacity on seven further features and Cinema Paradiso users can see how he fared on Irving Reis's The Falcon Takes Over (1942) and William A. Seiter's A Lady Takes a Chance (1943), which respectively starred George Sanders and John Wayne and Jean Arthur.
Showing Some Enterprise
Aldrich later claimed that he picked up more useful skills making shorts with comedian Leon Errol than he could ever have learned at film school. On leaving RKO in 1944, his apprenticeship continued as a first assistant director at United Artists, where his initial assignment paired him with exiled French auteur Jean Renoir on The Southerner (1945). The following year saw him learn from two masters of the action picture, William A. Wellman on The Story of G.I. Joe and Lewis Milestone on The Strange Love of Martha Ivers (both 1946). His biggest break came, however, when he was offered a contract by The Enterprise Studio, which had been founded by actor John Garfield after his unhappy experience as a contract player at Warner Bros.
Although Garfield headlined both Robert Rossen's boxing saga, Body and Soul (1947), and Abraham Polonsky's New York gangland noir, Force of Evil (1948), it was the latter who exerted the greater influence on Aldrich. Having earned an Oscar nomination for his script for Body and Soul, Polonsky filled his directorial debut the kind of character contradictions that would recur in Aldrich's oeuvre. 'I guess you have a weakness for a certain kind of character,' Aldrich would later concede. 'It's the same character in a number of pictures that keeps reappearing, characters that are bigger than life, that find their own integrity in doing what they do the way they do it, even if it causes their own deaths.' Key to Aldrich's screen world was 'the struggle for self-determination, the struggle for what a character wants his life to be'. He told one interviewer, 'I look for characters who feel strongly enough about something not to be concerned with the prevailing odds, but to struggle against those odds.'
Polonsky also taught Aldrich how to use neo-realist or noirish settings to expose the greed, ambition, lust and treachery that would drive a character on either side of the law to do whatever it took to survive or secure their own ends. However, such socio-political barbs drew the ire of the House UnAmerican Activities Committee. Despite his left-leaning views, Aldrich never joined the Party, although he made no secret of his admiration for his bosses at Enterprise: 'I think anybody with any brains in 1936 to '40 would have been a Communist. They were the brightest, they were the quickest, they were the best, and you found working with people of that persuasion more stimulating, more exciting.'
Risking the prospect of being blacklisted, Aldrich continued to work with such fellow travellers as Lewis Milestone (Arch of Triumph, 1948 & No Minor Vices, 1948), John Berry (who directed some uncredited scenes in Max Ophüls's Caught, 1948), Joseph Losey (The Prowler & M, both 1951) and Jules Dassin, with whom Aldrich made the 1952 short, The Trio, for the Masters of Music series.
In the face of the HUAC onslaught, Enterprise was doomed. But Aldrich had sampled the benefits of independent production and spent the next decade working towards controlling his own output. At the start of the 1950s, however, he was still an assistant and grateful for gigs like being Lewis Milestone's assistant on his John Steinbeck adaptation, The Red Pony (1949). Studio hopping to stay employed, Aldrich would also join with Ted Tetlaff on The White Tower (1950), and Charles Lamont on Abbott and Costello Meet Captain Kidd (1952) before getting the chance of a lifetime to study Charlie Chaplin in action on both sides of the camera in Limelight (1952), which is available from Cinema Paradiso on high quality DVD and Blu-ray. His most significant alliance in this period was forged while shooting William Goldbeck's Western, Ten Tall Men (1951), as it brought Aldrich into contact with Burt Lancaster (whose career path can be followed in one of Cinema Paradiso's Getting to Know articles).
Shaking Up the System
In December 1951, Irving Allen and Albert Broccoli (the future producer of the James Bond franchise) formed Warwick Productions and announced that Aldrich would direct its first outing, The Gamma People, with Dick Powell. Much to Aldrich's frustration, however, the project stalled and, recognising that he was not getting any closer to directing in the movie business, the 34 year-old sidestepped into television to boost his prospects.
Relocating to New York in 1952, Aldrich had to learn how to apply cinematic techniques to live broadcasts and he churned out over 30 shows in reasonably quick succession. The majority were made back in Hollywood, where he had licence to experiment with lighting and composition, particularly on China Smith (1952-55), which starred Dan Duryea as a soldier of fortune based in Singapore.
The small-screen gambit paid off, as Aldrich was hired by MGM to direct Edward G. Robinson in the baseball drama, The Big Leaguer (1953), although he was well aware that nobody had exactly been holding their breath to see this genial quickie. He had acquired a taste for calling the shots, however, and lured China Smith star Dan Duryea and the show's cinematographer Joseph Biron, editor Michael Luciano and production designer William Glasgow to join him in an unofficial feature spin-off entitled, World For Ransom (1954).
He was certainly pleased with the outcome: 'It was an interesting picture, bits and pieces stolen from different directors, with a variety of styles and techniques. It was thievery in the night, but for 10 days' work, it was pretty good.' But he couldn't have imagined that it would prompt Harold Hecht and Burt Lancaster to recruit him for his first colour feature, Apache (1954). Aldrich later joked that he had been hired because he was 'young, ambitious, eager and inexpensive'. However, he made such a muscular job of showing how a proud warrior named Massai (Lancaster) refuses to accept that Geronimo (Monte Blue) has been defeated by the US Cavalry that the picture grossed $6 million and Aldrich was invited to direct Lancaster and Gary Cooper in Vera Cruz (1954).
Set in 1866, this Mexican Western follows mercenaries Joe Erin and Benjamin Trane, as they travel south of the border in search of adventure and agree to help Countess Duvarre (Denise Dared) transport a consignment of gold to the forces bolstering the detested Emperor Maximilian. Charting Trane's crisis of conscience, Vera Cruz set the template for Aldrich heroes to switch sides after having an epiphany and realise that he will have to resort to baser tactics than his foes if he is to prevail.
Audiences responded positively, as the film racked up $9 million at the domestic box office. But Aldrich had no intention of becoming a Western director for hire and set up his own production company, The Associates and Aldrich, before signing a distribution deal with United Artists. The plan was to launch with The Way We Are, the story of an age-gap romance that Jack Jevne fronted for Jean Rouveroi, the wife of blacklisted writer Hugo Butler. However, Aldrich was forced to postpone the project (which he would revive as Autumn Leaves in 1956) and took advantage of Victor Saville's indisposition on the biblical epic, The Silver Chalice (1954), to adapt Mickey Spillane's controversial hardboiled thriller, Kiss Me Deadly (1955).
Scripted by A.I. Bezzerides and starring Ralph Meeker as private eye Mike Hammer, this seething exposé of Cold War paranoia reeks with the stench of corruption and cynicism that Aldrich equated with the Republican bid to unpick President Roosevelt's New Deal and to use strained relations with the Soviet Union to justify the intolerance and intimidation of McCarthyism. Using Ernest Laszlo's camera and Michael Luciano's jittery editing to suggest Hammer's prying intrusion into the lives of characters who are only slightly more reprehensible than himself, Aldrich sought to show the audience that heroes and villains aren't always easy to tell apart.
The infamous Pandora's Box finale has come to be seen as the culmination of the first phase of film noir and has gone on to influence the likes of Alex Cox's Repo Man (1984) and Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction (1994). Yet, many American critics failed to read between the lines and complained about the unprecedented levels of violence. But the young guns like Claude Chabrol and Jean-Luc Godard at Cahiers du Cinéma recognised a new approach to noir and hailed Aldrich as a talent to watch.
His sophomore effort as producer-director saw him turn on his former masters, as The Big Knife (1955) took a consciously mannered and bleakly humorous stab at the studio system. Playwright Clifford Odets had modelled actor Charlie Castle (Jack Palance) and studio chief Stanley Shriner Hoff (Rod Steiger) on John Garfield and Harry Cohn, as an act of revenge following a torrid time at Columbia. But Aldrich twisted the blade by accompanying the latter's entrances and exits with drumrolls borrowed from Adolf Hitler's Nuremberg rallies. He also employed long takes to entomb the characters in the stifling mise-en-scène and deservedly landed the Best Director prize at Venice.
Whatever Happened to Robert Aldrich?
In casting Joan Crawford in Autumn Leaves, Aldrich sought to prove that he was as capable of producing glossy melodramas with a simmering subtext as Douglas Sirk. However, the resulting Best Director prize at Berlin meant nothing to American audiences affronted by the film's assertion that they lacked emotional maturity and they gave it a wide berth. Undaunted, Aldrich returned to the flaws in the national character in Attack (both 1956), a study in anti-heroism set against the Battle of the Bulge, in which Lieutenant Joe Costa (Jack Palance) claims that Captain Erskine Cooney (Eddie Albert) is a bigger threat to the safety of his troops than the Nazis.
Adapted from Norman Brooks's play, Fragile Fox, this gritty war movie typified the clash of idealism and cynicism that characterised Aldrich's early work and nobody better embodied the fallibility, delusion and belligerence that frequently combined to create violent, angst-ridden outbursts of existential despair than Jack Palance. But the pair fell out during the making of Ten Seconds to Hell (1959), a Hammer co-production in which Palance plays a German POW who is ordered to defuse bombs across Berlin in the aftermath of the Allied victory. As a consequence, Aldrich's work lost its focal point and he spent the rest of the decade struggling to find funding for what often turned out to be mediocre pictures.
He hadn't helped himself, however, as Columbia boss Harry Cohn had fired him from The Garment Jungle (1957) for making the links between the rag trade and gangsterism seem like an HUAC allegory. Vincent Sherman completed the story, which sees Korean War veteran Kerwin Matthews return to New York to support the union that father Lee J. Cobb is trying to ban. Denied the chance to make Storm in the Sun with Joan Crawford, Aldrich sold Columbia the rights to 3:10 to Yuma, which was directed by Delmer Daves, and decamped to Europe to adapt Leon Uris's novel about the Greek resistance during the Second World War.
Despite starring Robert Mitchum, The Angry Hills (1959) turned out to be another disappointment and Aldrich all but disowned it after producer Raymond Stross order a re-edit. Aldrich's maverick approach had left him with few friends in Hollywood and he failed to bankroll either Anthony Quinn in Taras Bulba or John Mills in Cross of Iron, with alternative versions eventually being made by J. Lee Thompson in 1962 and Sam Peckinpah in 1977. Fortunately for Aldrich, Kirk Douglas was no lover of the studio system and he hired him to direct The Last Sunset (1961), which saw Douglas reunite with screenwriter Dalton Trumbo after they had shattered the blacklist by teaming openly on Stanley Kubrick's Spartacus (1960).
Jay Roach explored this deplorable period in American screen history in Trumbo (2015), which earned Bryan Cranston an Oscar nomination in the title role. But, despite a solid performance by Douglas as a roguish outlaw on a cattle drive with incorruptible lawman Rock Hudson, The Last Sunset failed to find an audience and Aldrich briefly took refuge in television before heading to Italy to try his hand at the peplum genre with Sodom and Gomorrah (1962), which cast Stewart Granger as the Israelite leader, Lot, who is tricked into a conflict with the Helamites by scheming Queen Bera (Anouk Aimée).
This Old Testament saga is discussed in Cinema Paradiso's Brief History of Films Set in the Classical World. But, while Aldrich couldn't claim it was a neglected masterpiece, his refusal to allow producer Joseph E. Levine to re-cut it sparked a protracted case in the Italian courts that resulted in directors being given increased rights over their work. Despite his victory, however, Aldrich had to face the sobering reality that he was a pariah whose best days appeared to be behind him.
Aldrich ups and downs
While filming his biblical epic in Africa, Aldrich received a parcel from a secretary containing a novel by Henry Farrell. It centred on the deteriorating relationship between onetime child star Baby Jane Hudson and her paraplegic older sister, Blanche. Securing the rights to What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?, Aldrich tasked Lukas Heller with writing the screenplay while he set about persuading ageing Hollywood divas Bette Davis and Joan Crawford to play the squabbling siblings. Much to her delight, Davis landed an Oscar nomination, while Crawford was snubbed. But Aldrich was also overlooked, as Norma Koch became the only one of the film's five nominees to triumph, for her black-and-white costumes.
Such was the impact of this gleeful slice of Grand Guignol - which is magnificently lampooned on French and Saunders: At the Movies (2005) - that Aldrich not only teamed Davis and Olivia De Havilland in Hush...Hush, Sweet Charlotte (1964), but he also produced Lee H. Katzin's Whatever Happened to Aunt Alice? (1969), which saw Geraldine Page and Ruth Gordon assume the 'Psycho-Biddy' mantle. The law of diminishing returns, however, meant that plans to make Whatever Happened to Dear Elva? were shelved.
Crawford had started shooting Charlotte, but was fired for feigning an illness that held up production. Aldrich sounded out Barbara Stanwyck, Loretta Young and Vivien Leigh before inviting De Havilland to join Davis for what he called 'cannibal time in Dixie'. Ultimately, Agnes Morehead landed the only Oscar nomination for acting, although the seven citations included nods for such Aldrich stalwarts as Biroc, Luciano, Glasgow, Koch and composer Frank De Vol.
When not pioneering the 'hagsploitation' sub-genre, Aldrich was busy seeking a winning formula to keep him afloat in changing times. He miscalculated in casting Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin with Anita Ekberg and Ursula Andress in the Rat Pack Western, 4 For Texas (1964), which had the misfortune to hit cinemas around the same time as Sergio Leone transformed the genre with A Fistful of Dollars. Aldrich hadn't enjoyed working with Sinatra, who bored easily on set and resisted attempts at making Zack Thomas anything other than a variation on himself. However, he found James Stewart much more to his liking on The Flight of the Phoenix (1965), an adaptation of an Elleston Trevor novel about a plane stranded in the Sahara Desert that anticipated all-star disaster movies like George Seaton's Airport (1970), Ronald Neame's The Poseidon Adventure (1972) and John Guillermin's The Towering Inferno (1974).
He set an even more enduring trend with The Dirty Dozen (1967), a gung-ho war adventure inspired by a bestseller by E.M. Nathanson and starring Lee Marvin that spawned three sequels, Andrew V. McLaglen's The Dirty Dozen: Next Mission (1985) and Lee H. Katzin's The Dirty Dozen: The Deadliest Mission (1987) and The Dirty Dozen: The Fatal Mission (1988). With a premise borrowed from Akira Kurosawa's The Seven Samurai (1954) - which was reworked in Hollywood as John Sturges's The Magnificent Seven (1960) - its reach can also be felt in more recent pictures about hand-selected bands of ne'er-do-wells embarking upon odds-stacked assignments like Quentin Tarantino's The Hateful Eight (2015).
Yet, as protests spread about the Vietnam War, Aldrich was accused of abandoning the pacifist sentiments of Attack in order to make a quick buck from exploitation violence. He protested, however, that the scene in which footballer-turned-actor Jim Brown runs the gamut to toss grenades into petrol-soaked German defences was a reference to the use of napalm against the North Vietnamese. European critics also picked up on the point that war brings out the worst in people no matter what their moral compass. They also insisted that Aldrich's focus on anti-authoritarian survivors and the recurring theme of characters being prone to the savagery of a cruel world made him an auteur.
Regardless of the unpopularity of the war in South-East Asia, The Dirty Dozen made such a handsome profit that Aldrich was able to purchase the old Mary Pickford studio that had occupied 201 North Occidental Boulevard since 1913. It also afforded him a newfound creative freedom and he opted to mark his return to the place where he had filmed The Big Knife by taking another satirical swipe at the studio system in The Legend of Lylah Clare (1968), which starred Peter Finch and Kim Novak in a story derived from the relationship between Josef von Sternberg and Marlene Dietrich, who also is the subject of one of Cinema Paradiso's Getting to Know articles.
Swinging Sixties audiences felt old-time Tinseltown was a little passé, however, and the picture lost money. Aldrich's chances of recouping his losses by adapting Frank Marcus's play, The Killing of Sister George (1968), took a hit when it became the first film to receive an X rating under the new American rating system that had ironically been introduced to give film-makers more latitude in discussing adult topics. In spite of a Golden Globe-nominated performance from Beryl Reid, as the fading TV star whose romance with younger lover Susannah York is heading towards the rocks, the critics claimed that Aldrich had little understanding of women, let alone lesbianism, and complained that his prying camerawork cheapened a delicate comedy of manners.
Having failed in his bid to raise money for a feature by starring Peter Finch in a -minute abbreviation entitled The Greatest Mother of Them All (1969), Aldrich decided to cut his losses and make another war movie. The story of a reconnaissance mission to the New Hebrides in 1943, Too Late the Hero had been in development since 1959. But the tide had turned against combat pictures and, despite Michael Caine and Cliff Robertson being supported by a grand cast of British dependables, the project lost almost $7 million and cost Aldrich his studio.
A Director Out Of His Time?
Struggling to impress his partners at ABC Pictures, Aldrich turned to James Hadley Chase's controversial novel,No Orchids For Miss Blandish, which had been filmed by St John Legh Clowes in 1948. Cinema Paradiso users can see Linden Travers in the title role on both high-quality DVD and Blu-ray, as well as The Grissom Gang (1971), which saw Aldrich tweak the plot by having Kim Darby use her sense of social superiority to outwit the sadistic gangster who had abducted her. Given Aldrich's privileged background, this can only be seen as a comment on the bluebloods who had disowned him. But, while it makes for intriguing viewing 50 years on, the film lost nearly $4 million and returned Aldrich to the ranks of jobbing directors.
Not for the first time in his career, he owed an upswing in his fortunes to Burt Lancaster. He agreed to play McIntosh in Ulzana's Raid (1972), in which a veteran army scout is detailed to accompany a rookie lieutenant (Bruce Davison) on his mission to return a Chiricahua war party to its reservation in Arizona. As we saw in the Cinema Paridiso article, 21 Reasons to Love Modern Westerns, Hollywood had been presenting Native American characters in a more positive light since the early 1950s. But Aldrich and screenwriter Alan Sharp went one step further by denouncing the founding American principal of the Manifest Destiny as a colonialist apologia that was still be used to justify campaigns like the ongoing one in Vietnam.
With Westerns losing their grip on the national imagination, Ulzana's Raid only did modest business. But it restored Aldrich's critical reputation and he continued to show how the powerful protect their position with brutality regardless of the resentment it may cause in both Emperor of the North (1973) and The Longest Yard (1974). Set during the Great Depression, the former pits hobo Lee Marvin against Ernest Borgnine's sadistic conductor on the Oregon, Pacific and Eastern Railroad, while the latter sees troubled NFL star Burt Reynolds build a team for a game against a crack squad of guards managed by Eddie Albert, the disciplinarian warden of Citrus State Prison.
There have been several variations on this sporting showdown theme, starting with Dick Clement's Porridge, the 1979 feature spun-off from the classic BBC sitcom (1975-77) that the director had scripted with Ian Le Frenais. Switching the scene to Occupied Paris, John Huston put a Nazis vs The Allies spin on the big match in Escape to Victory (1981) and the round ball came in for a further kicking from Vinnie Jones and his fellow inmates in Barry Skolnick's The Mean Machine (2001). Four years later, Peter Segal performed the old switcheroo in reclaiming the storyline for the gridiron fraternity by casting Burt Reynolds as the warden yanking the chains of Adam Sandler and Chris Rock in The Longest Yard (2005).
The critics were lukewarm about Aldrich's original, with many missing the fact that Albert bugging Reynolds was a Watergate reference. But audiences love an underdog story and Aldrich scored his biggest commercial hit since The Dirty Dozen, which, of course, The Longest Yard resembled. Wisely, he decided to harness Reynolds's box-office clout for Hustle (1975), Indeed, they even formed their own RoBurt company to make a neo-noir sleeper that sees LAPD detective Phil Gaines (Reynolds) struggle to maintain his objectivity while investigating a homicide case involving hooker Nicole Britton (Catherine Deneuve). With hissable supporting turns from Eddie Albert and Ben Johnson, this typically Aldrichian diatribe on the corruption of authority and the misuse of power has been compared by some shrewd commentators to Roman Polanksi's Chinatown (1974).
Around this time, Aldrich was elected president of the Directors Guild of America. He took the post seriously and almost caused a strike in securing reforms to the way the studios handled fees and credits. In fighting his corner, however, Aldrich made powerful enemies in the new corporate Hollywood and he found it increasingly difficult to get his pictures made. For the last time, enter Burt Lancaster.
In his fourth role for Aldrich, Lancaster plays US Air Force general Lawrence Dell, who is so disillusioned with President David Stevens (Charles Durning) and his conduct of the war in Vietnam that he steals nine Titan missiles and threatens to detonate them unless he gets the truth. As the seconds tick away, General Martin McKenzie (Richard Widmark) is dispatched to neutralise the threat. Adapted from Walter Wager's 1971 novel, Viper Three, Twilight's Last Gleaming (1977) is by far Aldrich's most pessimistic picture. Combining elements of Stanley Kubrick's Dr Strangelove, Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964) and John McTiernan's Die Hard (1988), it challenges the agenda of the military-industrial complex and feeds into the same sense of dismay that informed such post-Watergate thrillers as Alan J. Pakula's The Parallax View (1974) and Sydney Pollack's Three Days of the Condor (1975).
Sadly, this is where our Aldrich journey ends, as none of his final three features is currently available for rental on disc. This is a shame, as even the adaptation of The Choirboys (1977) that prompted bestselling author Joseph Wambaugh to have his name removed from the credits isn't entirely without interest. The same goes for The Frisco Kid (1979), which pairs Gene Wilder and Harrison Ford in a comic Western, and.. .All the Marbles (1981), which follows a female wrestling troupe managed by Peter Falk in a manner that bears similarities with Mathieu Amalric's burlesque saga, On Tour (2010).
Aldrich died of kidney failure at the age of 65 on 5 December 1983. Several appreciations suggested that he had been a man out of his time since the mid-1960s, as he had failed to realise that his darkly nuanced depiction of heroes and villains as flipsides of the same coin no longer chimed in with the binary attitudes of countercultural radicalism, which tended to see things in terms of right or wrong. His focus on a white male world somewhat skews our own view, as Aldrich was certainly no feminist and mostly consigned Native and African American actors to secondary roles.
He could be crass, coarse and boorish, but he was also an acute student of human nature who was able to apply his insights across the generic range. Moreover, he was a survivor, who bypassed the strictures of the Production Code and anticipated the depiction of violence that would become commonplace in the blockbuster era. There's no question, he had flaws. But there's only been one Robert Aldrich and we're unlikely to see anyone quite like him again. If you've not seen his work before, follow the Cinema Paradiso links. You won't regret it.
