Arthur Penn

Film, television, and theater director

• Born: September 27, 1922
• Birthplace: Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
• Died: September 28, 2010
• Place of death: New York, New York

Penn gave his films a sweeping visual style, linking the destinies of the characters to their landscapes. Penn’s Westerns and crime films have psychological depth, often presenting their protagonists as tortured existentialists.

Early Life

Arthur Penn (pehn) was three when his parents, Russian Jewish immigrants, divorced. His father, Harry Penn, owned a watch-repair business in Philadelphia, and his mother, Sonia Greenberg, was a nurse. Arthur Penn’s mother took him and his older brother Irving to New York, and the family constantly moved, to apartments in Brooklyn, the Bronx, and Manhattan’s lower East Side.

When he was fourteen, Penn returned to Philadelphia to live with his father; there, Penn discovered that he was interested in the theater. He acted in high school plays and directed at the amateur Neighborhood Playhouse. Soon after his father died in 1943, Penn was drafted into the Army and sent to Fort Jackson, South Carolina. He formed a small theater group and met Fred Coe, with whom he would work later in television and on Broadway. After seeing action in Ardennes as an infantryman, Penn joined Joshua Logan’s Soldier Show Company in Paris. Following his discharge he ran the company for a year in Wiesbaden, Germany.

In 1946, Penn studied philosophy and psychology at Black Mountain College in North Carolina. He also taught acting and staged several plays. Penn then spent two years in Italy, studying literature at universities in Florence and Perugia. Later, he joined the Los Angeles branch of the Actors Studio, where he learned about method acting.

Life’s Work

In 1951, Penn became a floor manager for the National Broadcasting Company (NBC) in New York and worked on The Colgate Comedy Hour, which featured such acts as Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis, and he eventually became an assistant manager. In 1953, he began directing live television dramas for such programs as The Philco Television Playhouse. In 1957, he joined the Columbia Broadcasting System’s prestigious Playhouse 90, where he directed William Gibson’s The Miracle Worker (1957), about the relationship between teacher Annie Sullivan and her deaf-blind pupil Helen Keller.

Penn’s experience directing thirty-six television plays drew the attention of Warner Bros., for which he made his first film, The Left-Handed Gun (1958), a psychological portrait of outlaw Billy the Kid (Paul Newman). The Left-Handed Gun has many similarities to Penn’s later films, with its use of violence, its idealization of society’s outsiders, and its cinematic style. In one memorable scene, a man’s boot stands in the middle of the street after he has been killed in a gunfight. Penn angered cinematographer J. Peverell Marley by breaking with tradition and shooting directly into the sun, an image he repeated inLittle Big Man (1970). The studio reedited the film, and Penn refused to see the result.

Frustrated by this experience, Penn turned to the theater. Before going to Hollywood he had directed Gibson’s Broadway success Two for the Seesaw (1958). The two then turned The Miracle Worker (1959) into a Broadway triumph, and Penn followed with Lillian Hellman’s Toys in the Attic (1960), An Evening with Mike Nichols and Elaine May (1960), and Tad Mosel’s All the Way Home (1960). From 1956 through 2004 Penn directed fifteen Broadway productions. He was also a consultant for John F. Kennedy during the 1960 presidential debates.

Penn returned to filmmaking by tackling The Miracle Worker for the third time in 1962. It won Academy Awards for Anne Bancroft and Patty Duke, who repeated their stage roles, and the director received his first nomination. This success was followed by the disappointment of being replaced by John Frankenheimer after a week of shooting on The Train (1964), reportedly at the request of star Burt Lancaster.

With his next film Penn asserted that he would not play Hollywood’s game. Mickey One (1965) tells the story of a paranoid nightclub comedian (Warren Beatty) being pursued by gangsters in the fragmented, elliptical style of French nouvelle vague directors such as Jean-Luc Godard and François Truffaut. The film was dismissed as self-indulgent and obscure. Next came another flop, The Chase (1966). With a screenplay by Hellman and the presence of Marlon Brando, Jane Fonda, Robert Redford, and Robert Duvall, this examination of small-town mores merged unsuccessfully with violent melodrama.

After being turned down by Godard and Truffaut, Bonnie and Clyde (1967) star-producer Beatty turned to Penn, even though they had argued constantly during Mickey One. The Depression-era gangster film was an instant classic and one of the most influential films of its time, earning ten Academy Award nominations, including one for Penn.

The only film for which Penn is credited as a cowriter, Alice’s Restaurant (1969), is a poignant look at more peaceful outsiders. Based on a song by folk singer Arlo Guthrie, who stars, the film considers the struggles of young people searching for their identities, and Penn received his third and final Academy Award nomination for directing.

Based on Thomas Berger’s 1964 novel, Little Big Man presents the adventures of Jack Crabb (Dustin Hoffman) as he moves back and forth between white and Native American communities over several years, and the film culminates in the Battle of the Little Big Horn. Penn comments on the Vietnam War through the U.S. Army’s massacre of Native Americans.

All of Penn’s best films have political overtones, and the national malaise following Watergate permeates Night Moves (1975), in which a private detective (Gene Hackman) discovers a missing-persons case has unexpected consequences. The film was considered a failure, but its reputation as a stylish, thoughtful noir has increased over the years. Penn’s subsequent films were received poorly. Despite the presence of Brando and Jack Nicholson, The Missouri Breaks (1976) was dismissed as muddled. The story of four working-class young men coming of age in a small town, Four Friends (1981), suffered from a similar lack of focus. Penn seemed merely a director for hire on Target (1985), Dead of Winter (1987), and Penn and Teller Get Killed (1989).

Following these films Penn worked occasionally in theater and television, including serving as an executive producer of Law and Order for the 2000-2001 season. He was president of the Actors Studio during the 1990’s. Penn married actor Peggy Maurer, later a family therapist, in 1955, and one of their two children, Matthew, directed several episodes of Law and Order. Irving Penn, the director’s brother, became one of the most famous photographers of the twentieth century. Arthur Penn died of congestive heart failure on September 28, 2010, at his home in New York City.

Significance

Penn’s films, especially Bonnie and Clyde and Little Big Man, have a sweeping visual style, linking the destinies of the characters to their landscapes. Penn’s Westerns and crime films have psychological depth, often presenting their protagonists as tortured existentialists. His films are notable for the intensity of their performances: Newman in The Left-Handed Gun, Bancroft and Duke in The Miracle Worker, Redford and Duvall in The Chase, the entire cast of Bonnie and Clyde, Hoffman and Chief Dan George in Little Big Man, Hackman in Night Moves. Penn understood how to apply the techniques of method acting to film.

Bibliography

Chaiken, Michael, and Paul Cronin, eds. Arthur Penn: Interviews. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2008. Twenty-four interviews conducted between 1963 and 2007, covering all facets of Penn’s career.

Friedman, Lester D., ed. Arthur Penn’s “Bonnie and Clyde.” New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Essays by Penn, screenwriter David Newman, and six scholars.

Hirsch, Foster. “Arthur Penn’s Open Door.” American Theatre 15 (January, 1998): 24-29. The director discusses the impact of the Actors Studio and method acting on his career.

Kindem, Gorham. The Live Television Generation of Hollywood Film Directors: Interview with Seven Directors. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 1994. Penn discusses what he learned from his television experiences.

Wood, Robin. Arthur Penn. New York: Praeger, 1969. A distinguished scholar analyzes Penn’s films through Alice’s Restaurant.