When a Director Strays . . . and Gets Lost

In the hotly awaited film of “Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil,” John Cusack plays a big-city journalist who finds himself a stranger in a strange land, chronicling the colorful eccentrics of Savannah, Ga.

But according to many critics, Cusack’s character isn’t the only fish out of water in “Midnight.” He’s got good company in Clint Eastwood, whose straightforward direction has struck some viewers as the antithesis of John Berendt’s baroque novel.

Observed the Los Angeles Times’ Kenneth Turan: “Though Eastwood can do wonders as a director, his minimalist tendencies are better suited to containing overripe material like ‘The Bridges of Madison County.’ ”

The New York Times’ Janet Maslin agreed.

“Eastwood . . . touches all the bases necessary to a screen version, but he doesn’t catch the material’s particular allure. . . . For all the film’s handsome aerial shots and its architectural detail, these postcard images seldom seem as animated as even the book’s casual description.”

Big Clint isn’t the first director to strike out when playing against his perceived strengths. For decades, Hollywood’s mightiest powers have had their off days--usually when deciding to stretch.

“Directors think they can do anything,” says Nick Redman, an Oscar-nominated filmmaker and regular contributor to the Directors Guild of America magazine. “No director wants to be typecast into a certain genre, and the feeling among many is, the more different kinds of film you can direct, the more versatile your abilities.

“This is, of course, very good and can have positive results. But it can just as easily produce some of the all-time jaw-dropping moments of cinema.”

No movie genre has brought a great filmmaker to his knees more often than the musical. Master of suspense Alfred Hitchcock scored an early misfire with 1933’s “Waltzes From Vienna,” a syrupy biopic of Johann Strauss Jr. Hitchcock later called the result the low ebb in his career, and star Jessie Matthews was even less charitable, calling Hitch “out of his depth” and the film “perfectly dreadful.”

Nearly half a century later in 1982, another portraitist of humanity’s dark side slapped on an ill-fitting happy face, as John Huston assumed the director’s chair of “Annie.” Only its producer, Ray Stark, could fathom why the maker of “The Maltese Falcon” and “The Treasure of the Sierra Madre” was hired to direct a chirpy family musical; the final film, wrote Time magazine’s critic, suggested “Oliver!”--told from the viewpoint of Fagin.

Just two years later, Sir Richard Attenborough, auteur of the glacially paced “Gandhi,” was deemed the right man to bring the kinetic energy of “A Chorus Line” to the screen. Reviewing the disastrous outcome, Leonard Maltin inquired: “What can you say about a musical in which all the singing and all the dancing is mediocre?”

An equal chorus of disapproval met such would-be tune-fests as Peter Bogdanovich’s “At Long Last Love” (featuring a crooning Burt Reynolds and Cybill Shepherd), Robert Altman’s “Popeye” and Sylvester Stallone’s “Saturday Night Fever” follow-up “Staying Alive,” with its Broadway sequence “Satan’s Alley”--described with refreshing honesty in the film as a journey through hell.

(To be fair, a few dramatic filmmakers proved surprisingly adept when they tried their hand at a musical, most notably “Frankenstein’s” James Whale, who brought moody power to 1936’s “Show Boat.” Sir Carol Reed’s “Oliver!” and William Wyler’s “Funny Girl” were also critical and popular hits--although both aged directors were nearly deaf when they made their movie musical debuts.)

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Great comedians have also tripped up, at least commercially, when tackling the hallowed realm of drama. At the height of his popularity in 1923, Charles Chaplin wrote and directed the sophisticated romantic triangle “A Woman of Paris,” starring his protegee Edna Purviance. It was Chaplin’s first box-office flop.

In 1942, writer-director Preston Sturges--hot off “The Lady Eve” and “The Palm Beach Story”--paved his first step toward career suicide by making “Triumph Over Pain,” a somber bio of the inventor of anesthesia (played by Joel McCrea). A desperate Paramount Pictures shelved the film for two years, rechristened it “The Great Moment,” and released it overseas as a comedy, with the tag, “Hilarious as a whiff of laughing gas!”

Another directorial sand trap: the horror/sci-fi genre. John Boorman (“Deliverance”) suffered a career meltdown helming one of the ‘70s biggest bombs, “Exorcist II”; John Frankenheimer (“The Manchurian Candidate”) fared almost as badly with the eco-mutant creature feature “Prophecy”; John Huston hit a pre-”Annie” low with the Canadian slasher tale “Phobia”; and Stanley Donen (“Singin’ in the Rain”) stumbled on the “Star Wars” bandwagon with 1979’s “Saturn 3”--which pits Farrah Fawcett against a robot named Hector.

Aging directors are particularly vulnerable to misfired efforts at hipness. Not content with a career that included “Laura” and “Anatomy of a Murder,” Otto Preminger baffled moviegoers young and old with 1968’s “Skidoo”--an incoherent gangster farce starring Frankie Avalon, Carol Channing, Groucho Marx and Jackie Gleason. More recently, Arthur Penn (“Bonnie and Clyde”) alienated his most ardent admirers with “Penn and Teller Get Killed”--his last feature credit to date.

Still, some harebrained marriages of director and material have struck gold. A Shirley Temple movie directed by John Ford? Why not--and “Wee Willie Winkie” remains a charmer 60 years later. A screwball comedy directed by Alfred Hitchcock? “Mr. & Mrs. Smith” may not be Hitch’s finest hour, but it’s no “Waltzes From Vienna”--and it’s wittier than most current comedies. (Next month, filmgoers can pass judgment on another intriguing marriage of opposites: Martin Scorsese’s bio of the Dalai Lama, “Kundun.”)

But before Oliver Stone runs out and makes a musical--something he almost did with “Evita”--he and other filmmakers should take a last, sober look at the risk factor. Try, say, a video triple feature of Brian De Palma’s “The Bonfire of the Vanities,” Franco Zeffirelli’s “The Champ” and Sidney Lumet’s “The Wiz.”

“Directors should try to do whatever they feel passionately drawn to,” Nick Redman says. “But bear in mind that their particular abilities usually make them perfect for one or two genres.

“I personally would love to have seen a musical directed by Sam Peckinpah. But if Peckinpah had directed ‘The Sound of Music,’ it wouldn’t be the film we know and love today.”