MOVIE REVIEWS : ‘Mavericks’ Looks at Visionary Directors

Is it self-conscious irony or a practical joke that “Hollywood Mavericks” (at the Monica 4-Plex)--a film whose raison d’etre is the celebration of the “personal” American movie director--lists no director in its own credits?

In this historically invaluable documentary we see such legendary figures as D.W. Griffith, Orson Welles, John Ford and Erich von Stroheim plus a dozen or so contemporary figures, like Martin Scorsese and David Lynch. We follow a consistent thesis, obviously descended from critic Andrew Sarris’ ” auteur theory”: that personal vision is the prerequisite of great moviemaking, that the best American directors are often those who buck the system or give their bosses plenty of hell.

But the directorless credits here feature coordinating producer Florence Dauman and co-writers Todd McCarthy and Michael Henry Wilson--and “interview director” Don McGlynn. I think it can be argued that, unlike the movies excerpted throughout “Mavericks,” there’s not enough unifying vision here.

“Mavericks” is assembled from recent interviews and archival footage, mostly from the American Film Institute, and there’s also no narrator; the directors tell their own stories. Inevitably, since Scorsese, Peter Bogdanovich and Paul Schrader are ex-critics and teachers, it falls to them to supply most of the commentary.

This they do with dispatch--Scorsese racing along in his familiar, mile-a-minute staccato rap, Bogdanovich looking a little wearier, sadder, closer to the elegiac spirit of the Ford movies he loved, and Schrader sounding strangely like a northern cousin of Truman Capote’s. These men are scholars as well as artists; film history is in good hands when they discuss it. But, since they’re caught in relatively casual conversation, nothing gets too sharp an edge or too fine a polish.

The term maverick is used a little loosely. Is it a moviemaker who worked totally outside the system? Obviously not. Someone who gave grief to his bosses? Possibly, although neither Lynch, Bogdanovich nor King Vidor come across as obstreperous. Someone who pursues a personal vision either inside or outside the system? That’s the core thesis and, though it will be uncongenial to all denigrators of “auteurism,” from Pauline Kael and Gore Vidal on down, there’s something poignant--Fordian?--about the way Dauman, Wilson and McCarthy try to meld all these disparate personalities into a single community of talent and rebellion.

There are lots of pungent personalities: pricelessly irascible, cigar-chewing Sam Fuller; the immaculate Josef von Sternberg, with his Oriental-villain demeanor, and Francis Coppola--who often looks a bit like a chef who’s worried that the kitchen might explode. But perhaps the four most memorable are Welles, Ford, John Cassavetes and Sam Peckinpah.

They’re all magnetic. Welles expounds with his usual mellow eloquence, Cassavetes grins devilishly as he anatomizes his obsession with love, and Peckinpah radiates astonishing “Wild Bunch”-level intensity in a clip lasting barely 10 seconds.

As for Ford--the director’s director, famous for reducing his interviewers to pudding--he gets and deserves the ultimate riposte. How, Bogdanovich asks, did he shoot the incredible land race in his 1926 “Three Bad Men”? Behind shades and his famous half-disgusted, what-a-dummy glare, Ford looks. He pauses. “With a camera,” he replies.