MOVIE REVIEW : THE DRAMA IN HIS LIFE AND MOVIES

Director George Stevens might not seem the most gripping subject for biography. Taciturn, seemingly impassive (he never denied rumors--utterly unfounded--that he came from one or another tribe of American Indians), he was content to let his films carry the drama in his life.

Yet through the compassion and the film-making skills of his son, George Stevens Jr., the life and work that unfold in “George Stevens: A Filmmaker’s Journey” (Friday at the Cineplex) are the real stuff of drama, a deeply American life with a shadow of sadness over its last third and with more that is profoundly moving than the best novel.

Watching Katharine Hepburn with her pungent recollections of first working with Stevens, or hearing the stories of Frank Capra, Fred Zinnemann, Joel McCrea or John Huston, you get the feeling that this is how films were really made--or not made--during Hollywood’s heyday: on the whim of a suddenly powerful star, on the flip of a coin (or even two flips), on old loyalties or old enmities.

If you never knew anything about Stevens’ films, about “Giant” or “A Place in the Sun” or “Gunga Din” or “Shane,” “A Filmmaker’s Journey” would still be compelling as a character study of a thoughtful man whose life, and work, were changed forever by war.

If you have even a particle of interest in movies or their makers, these intimate, sometimes hilarious stories--of stubbornness and faith, of meticulous preparation and spur-of-the-moment invention, of holding off a frantic front office and clinging to a clear inner vision--are articles of inspiration.

Stevens Jr. has chosen his interviewees--actors, writers, producers, fellow directors and Army cronies--from all phases of his father’s life. Yet he (with supervising editor Susan Winslow and editor Catherine Shields) will cut ruthlessly away from interviews, even from such subjects as Warren Beatty or Joseph L. Mankiewicz or Douglas Fairbanks Jr., when pictures with words behind them will tell the story better. The result is action, not simply the most fascinating talking heads in films.

We are behind the scenes as Stevens stages “Gunga Din,” his first dramatic action film--with Stevens’ own 16-millimeter footage of the melee, and producer Pandro Berman’s recollections of the director going dangerously and confidently over budget, and staving off studio executives his own way.

Hepburn, ironic and self-deprecating (and brilliantly photographed), talks about “the usual classiness of new stars” that led her to hesitate about choosing Stevens for “Alice Adams.” A generous clip from the Booth Tarkington tragicomedy shows us why, under Stevens’ meticulous direction, Hepburn’s performance as this poignant social climber became one of her great early successes.

Increasingly, the films mirror the man behind them. Director Alan Pakula dissects Stevens’ daringly deliberate pacing of the breakfast scene in “Woman of the Year,” which is played off Spencer Tracy’s unbelieving but impassive Irish mug. As Hepburn, frantic to prove to husband Tracy that she can cook too , ricochets from overflowing waffle iron to spring-loaded toaster to volcanic coffee percolator, Tracy’s owlish deadpan reflects Stevens’ own weathered watchfulness.

(Actually, this studied stoicism hid the soul of an impassioned poet: In “A Place in the Sun,” Stevens’ enormous, black-and-white selective close-ups of Elizabeth Taylor and Montgomery Clift create probably the most intensely romantic love scenes of the American cinema. And it affected professionals as deeply as matinee audiences. John Huston says fervently: “I lived the material; I didn’t comment on it, I was in the material.”)

World War II divided Stevens’ work forever. He was part of Eisenhower’s special film unit in Europe, and we see Stevens’ private 16-millimeter footage of D-Day and of Dachau, of the liberation of Paris and strafing in the streets. The shots of Stevens himself (and quotes from his diary) reveal an idealist wracked by what he has seen, and by his own horrified reaction to the skeletal survivors of the camps. To find himself capable of turning away from these pitiful fellow men was “a fierce” self-discovery.

Stevens’ wartime color footage looks strange, until we realize that this is the first time we have seen real scenes from World War II in color--it was indelibly stamped by the black-and-white newsreels of the day.

The film’s pronouncement that the man who returned from the war “would not make comedies again” is a little exaggerated. (You might call “I Remember Mama,” a gentle family comedy, and his last, “The Only Game in Town,” which the documentary prefers to ignore, certainly intended a desperate humor at times.) But there is no doubt that Stevens’ postwar films, “A Place in the Sun,” “Shane,” “Giant” and “The Diary of Anne Frank,” and his personal heartbreaker, “The Greatest Story Ever Told, “ were cut from more sober cloth and are the cornerstone of his reputation as a great American director.

There is a sense of movement in this last body of work, toward what the Museum of Modern Art said Stevens had become: “a spokesman for his country and his decades. His work as he moved from craftsman to artist, from romantic to realist, reflects the course of America, and those assumptions, both social and philosophical, upon which it is based.”

George Stevens Jr. has made a film which at the same time honors a decent man and his work and goes straight to the heart of the film-making passion.