Director’s loner hero has gotten lost in crowd

In “The Killers,” Lee Marvin points his gun at a deadly blond trying to talk her way out of a jam. Bleeding from a gunshot wound, Marvin has no patience for any more lies. “Lady,” he growls. “I just haven’t got the time.” Pow. Down goes the dame.

Don Siegel made movies about professional tough guys. Cop or killer, GI or bank robber, his heroes are loners and outsiders who don’t fit anywhere in polite society. Siegel is best known as the director of “Dirty Harry,” the Clint Eastwood revenge thriller that began a cycle of vigilante dramas after it became a hit in 1971.

Even though he worked with a variety of stars, including Steve McQueen, Henry Fonda, Richard Widmark and Robert Mitchum, much of his nearly 50-year career was spent laboring in obscurity, making taut B-movie thrillers and a host of TV pilots.

The director, who died in 1991, finally gets his due this summer with a three-week retrospective of his films presented by the UCLA Film and Television Archive at the James Bridges Theater. The fest opens Wednesday night at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences with a screening of Siegel’s influential 1956 thriller, “Invasion of the Body Snatchers.” The evening begins with a conversation between writer-director Curtis Hanson and Eastwood, who made five films with Siegel, including three being shown in the series -- “Dirty Harry,” “The Beguiled” and “Escape From Alcatraz.”

I suspect Siegel is out of fashion these days because his hero -- the loner who lives by his own code, contemptuous of priggish bureaucrats or rigid rule-makers -- has largely disappeared from the screen and, for that matter, from the culture at large. For half a century, the solitary hero was a compelling literary archetype, made popular by Ernest Hemingway as well as hard-boiled detective writers like Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett. You get a similar sense of wee-hours isolation from the paintings of Edward Hopper and the songs of Frank Sinatra, which are full of the same brooding loners you see in Siegel’s films. It’s hardly a coincidence that the most exalted sport of the Solitary Guy era was boxing, a pastime ruled by Siegel-like violence. Find any photo of early-’60s heavyweight champ Sonny Liston and you’ll see the same baleful stare McQueen or Marvin display in his Siegel film.

Where have all these cool, impassive men gone? When you catch a glimpse of them on screen today, as in the wonderfully laconic exchanges between Eastwood and Morgan Freeman in “Million Dollar Baby,” they feel like transmissions from a far, faraway galaxy. Today’s culture, awash in cellphones and instant messaging, celebrates connectedness, not solitary pleasures. The youth culture heroes are glib showboats and self-mythologizing narcissists, be it Eminem, Terrell Owens or the showbiz strivers on “Entourage.” The loner thing is passe -- everyone has a posse.

“You get the impression that we’re frightened by the whole idea of a solitary man today,” says film historian David Thomson. “His chronic suspiciousness has turned into hostility. Instead of walking his own path like a cat, he’s become a tiger who preys on people. The mystique is gone. If Lee Marvin was around today, people would probably think he was a psychopath.”

Siegel’s movies are drenched in darkness and shadows. Today’s craving is for the spotlight. On reality TV, no one is ever alone -- it’s a genre devoted to nonstop chatter. The movie icons of the summer, “Mr. & Mrs. Smith,” are hired killers, a favorite Siegel trade, but they yak more in the first five minutes of the movie than Eastwood does in all of “Dirty Harry.”

The disappearance of the loner has its roots in other changes in the culture. In Siegel’s heyday, the movies were still geared to adults. Today they are, relentlessly, aimed at kids, who prefer comic-book fantasy to searing crime drama. It’s not just the movies; it’s also the actors who play the parts. Today’s stars, such as Johnny Depp, Orlando Bloom, Leonardo DiCaprio and Tobey Maguire, are boyish wisps -- Lee Marvin would wolf them down in one bite.

Hollywood has also embraced the cult of likability and happy endings, ingredients in short supply in Siegel films. Movies today want winners, people who triumph over adversity or embrace their inner selves. Filled to the brim with unsavory characters, “The Killers” would never survive a focus group, much less the horrified studio brass, who’d fret, “Who’s the audience going to root for?”

The irascible director feuded with countless studio executives and had constant run-ins with meddling producers. When he couldn’t get McQueen to cry for a key scene in “Hell Is for Heroes” (which screens Aug. 4), he slapped him in the face before rolling the cameras. Eastwood, who considers the director his mentor, says Siegel used anger to fuel his creative drive.

“Don was always bitching about producers, saying, ‘What the hell do they know about anything?’ ” Eastwood told me recently. “Don somehow forgot that on most of our pictures together, he was the producer. I’d say, ‘Don, you’re the producer-director, so who are you going to get mad at?’ And before long, Don would be mad at the production manager or someone else. He just had to be angry.”

This flammability found its way into Siegel’s films. Even though action films are far more explicit today, it’s hard to imagine any sequence as menacing as the opening to “The Killers,” in which Marvin and his partner, played by Clu Gulager, show up at a home for the blind, wearing sunglasses, looking for a man they’ve been hired to kill. Even the romance in Siegel films is rancorous or, at best, bittersweet. Also in “The Killers,” when Angie Dickinson tries to sweet talk her race-car driver lover, played by John Cassavetes, after she’s crossed him, Cassavetes tells her, “If I’d known you were coming, I’d have set fire to the place.” In “Charlie Varrick,” Walter Matthau is a small-town bank robber whose wife is mortally wounded while driving his getaway car. Preparing to dispose of the car with her corpse still in it, he pauses to gently kiss her goodbye before setting a charge for the dynamite.

These sort of gripping moments have earned Siegel a loyal following among filmmakers. Sam Peckinpah was an early disciple, working on six Siegel films as a dialogue director. Cassavetes was a huge admirer, acting in a string of Siegel films and seeking Siegel’s counsel when he began directing. Jean-Luc Godard is also a devotee, his 1965 film “Alphaville” clearly influenced by “Body Snatchers.” Quentin Tarantino’s “Reservoir Dogs” owes a big debt to Siegel’s “The Killers,” which also screens Aug. 4. It’s impossible to watch Tom Cruise as a hired killer in Michael Mann’s “Collateral” without seeing echoes of Siegel’s “The Lineup,” (screening July 27) with Eli Wallach as a hit man retrieving a cache of drugs.

When Lee Tamahori, director of “Once Were Warriors,” was a boy in New Zealand, he fell in love with American action directors, notably Siegel. “When I’m making a film and find myself in a tight spot, I often think, ‘What would Don Siegel do?’ ” says Tamahori, whose favorite Siegel film, “Charlie Varrick,” screens Aug. 7. “When we were making ‘Warriors,’ I told my cinematographer, ‘No one’s going to see this if it’s a Ken Loach [message] movie.’ So it’s shot and edited like a Siegel-style action film.”

Siegel has never achieved the cult-hero status of a Nicholas Ray or Sam Fuller, perhaps because he saw himself as a skilled craftsman, not an artist. Although his heroes are taciturn loners, they are also professionals, dedicated to their craft, whether it is robbing a bank or catching a crook. “Madigan,” a 1968 thriller that costars Henry Fonda as a New York police commissioner, offers such a nuanced portrayal of the complexities of running a big-city police department that it will be introduced by Los Angeles Police Chief William J. Bratton when it screens at UCLA on Aug. 6.

“Don was a loner in Hollywood himself,” says Richard Tuggle, who wrote “Escape From Alcatraz.” “He made B movies, he didn’t win awards, he didn’t do the party circuit, so he wasn’t accepted into the system. And that took him to characters that were outside the system themselves. Don was like a lot of men who grew up during the Depression. He had an admiration for people who’d made it on their own.”

In his day, Siegel suffered, not quietly, from studio meddlers who forced him to put an optimistic ending on “Body Snatchers,” inspiring him to often describe his tormentors as “the pods.”

As Siegel once told an interviewer: “The situation of working at a major studio is so hopeless that if you don’t make a game of it, you’d go crazy. I just try to do something better than they want me to do.”

He succeeded with ease. His solitary heroes may be out of fashion, but they haven’t lost their punch.

“Too often today we see pictures and say, ‘Why did someone want to make that movie?’ ” says Hanson. “You never thought that way about a Siegel film. We live in an era where films are products, but with Don they were the opposite. They were always personal.”