The man on the podium was short and stocky, grizzled and growling, with a chewed cigar in one hand and an elegant conductor’s baton in the other. One contemporary newspaper described him as looking “more like a fight promoter than a musician.” Yet whenever that baton began to sway and the Paramount orchestra began to play, magic was birthed into the world, magic that sounded like this:

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That’s a beautiful melody titled “The Call of the Faraway Hills,” and it was written for the movie Shane by one of Hollywood’s premier musical talents, the composer Victor Young. He was, in the words of his colleague and best friend, the equally great composer Max Steiner (King Kong, Gone with the Wind, Casablanca, The Searchers), “a very, very talented composer, excellent orchestrator, and wonderful violinist” whose seemingly endlessly inventive stream of lush melodies during a two-decade career as head of Paramount Pictures’ music department came to define Hollywood film scoring.

Born the poor son of a Chicago opera singer in 1900, a chance encounter with an old violin at the age of five (and his mother’s fateful decision to have the instrument re-stringed for him to play with) turned him into a child prodigy. When his mother died a few years later, both Victor and his sister were sent to live with their grandparents in Poland, where they attended the Imperial Conservatory in Warsaw. Both graduated with honors and played in orchestras all across Europe, but came back to America in the wake of the Bolshevik Revolution and postwar economic strife in Eastern Europe (at one point a starving Victor, impounded in a German prison, played a three-hour concert for the guards on his violin in exchange for a simple bowl of soup). (more…)

Pop quiz: what do the following movies have in common?

Gone with the Wind (1939), Star Wars (1977), The Sound of Music (1965), E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial (1982), The Ten Commandments (1956), Titanic (1997), Jaws (1975), Doctor Zhivago (1965), The Exorcist (1973), Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1939), 101 Dalmatians (1961), The Empire Strikes Back (1980), Ben-Hur (1959), Avatar (2009), Return of the Jedi (1983), The Sting (1973), Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981), Jurassic Park (1993), The Graduate (1967), Star Wars: Episode I — The Phantom Menace (1999), Fantasia (1941), The Godfather (1972), Forrest Gump (1994), Mary Poppins (1964), The Lion King (1994)

If you said they all made scads of money, bravo — they are the top twenty-five domestic box-office champions of all time (adjusted for inflation, of course).

But consider another similarity: surprisingly few of them relied on established A-list movie stars — the most famous, the highest paid — for their moneymaking prospects. Gone with the Wind had Gable, yes. The Sting had Newman and Redford. The Godfather, Brando.

As for most of the rest, they either featured no A-listers at all, or used them before they became bonafide movie stars. In fact, many of those pictures can take credit for sending now-famous actors into the celestial Hollywood firmament in the first place. Gone with the Wind made Vivian Leigh known to the world. The Ten Commandments did it for Charlton Heston. The Graduate, Dustin Hoffman. The Godfather, Al Pacino. Star Wars, Harrison Ford. Mary Poppins, Julie Andrews. (more…)

When King Vidor first stepped onto the set of The Champ, he was filled with a rare sense of freedom. Frances Marion’s script was unusually simple, focused squarely on a pair of immensely sympathetic protagonists and their relationship. All the key moments, plot twists and emotional climaxes were spelled out on the page, with no false conflicts or manufactured drama to complicate the works. Vidor realized that having such a tight screenplay “would relieve me as a director — now I didn’t have to worry about the story, worry about how I will wrap this up and keep it all together. I could concentrate on little details, touches and things.”

Touches and things. As we learned last week, Vidor equated silent films to ballet: operatic makeup, overwrought facial expressions, stylized movements, and the action punctuated by an enormous symphonic orchestra that — because the players and their instruments were live in the theater — sounded as amazing as today’s very best surround-sound systems. With the advent of synchronous dialogue, all of this vanished — people now wanted to hear actors talk, of all things! Now, rather than mounting a sort of grand operatic ballet, Vidor found himself helming something more akin to a stage play, and the change was jarring and disheartening. How could a director recapture the emotional magic of old, using mere dialogue?

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Toward the end of the filming of The Wizard of Oz (1939), the picture’s director, Victor Fleming, was suddenly called away to salvage another production that was careening off-track at the studio, Gone with the Wind. The “Oz” portions of the movie, filmed in spectacular Technicolor, were already finished. But the “Kansas” sequences bookending the picture — including the all-important scene showing Judy Garland singing “Over the Rainbow” on her Depression-era farm — had yet to be shot.

The studio heads called in a oft-used master craftsman named King Vidor to handle the job, and he proceeded in a few weeks to capture on celluloid some of our culture’s most beloved images.

Who was this “King Vidor”?  If you’re a modern conservative movie lover with some smattering of knowledge about classic Hollywood, you may have heard that strange name without really knowing or caring about its import. It sounds vaguely European — perhaps even fake? — and hardly evokes the same smile of recognition as Ford, Hitchcock, Hawks, Wilder. It seems to belong more with names like Curtiz, Lubitsch, Cocteau, Kurosawa — foreign-sounding, arty-farty names, ones only a geeky film aficionado could love.

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In an industry notorious for wasteful pretentiousness — directors shooting a hundred takes, crews taking all day to light a single shot, gazillions spent on the latest effects — Hal Needham was a rebel. Directing? “There is no magic to it, you know. All you have to do is look through the camera and see if it’s got the lens on it that you want. . . I don’t really think it’s that tough.” Cinematography? “We’re not doing Gone with the Wind or Fiddler on the Roof. It’s action/comedy. . .don’t give me none of this artsy-fartsy stuff, just shoot the film.” Expensive locations? “I like to get outside whenever I can. I think it gives a film energy to be outside. . . and beauty.”

And so Smokey and the Bandit was made fast and loose, outside, on a low budget. In Reynolds’ words, they worked “lightning quick,” with first-time director Needham “reigning over crew and camera with instincts that made him, in my humble opinion, the best action director in the business.” The entire film was shot on location in the South. “We moved all over Georgia. . . It was a screwy chase picture, but Hal’s fun, outlaw, hell-bent-sensibility made it sparkle.” (more…)

Looking back at The Karate Kid (1984), which turned twenty-five years old this week, a thought keeps recurring.

Wow. . . Avildsen made it work twice.

John G. Avildsen is, in some ways, a director of little distinction when compared with well-known marquee names like Spielberg, Scorsese, Nolan, and Tarantino. The vast majority of his movies are utterly forgotten by the average filmgoer — indeed, he’s been nominated for Worst Director at The Razzies three times. And yet, like Victor Fleming decades earlier with his twin successes The Wizard of Oz and Gone with the Wind (both 1939 — read a great recent article on Fleming here), Avildsen has twice punched way above his weight, netting himself an Oscar for Best Director and giving birth to some of the most memorable moments in motion picture history. (more…)