Sidney Lumet

Film director, actor, and producer

• Born: June 25, 1924
• Birthplace: Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
• Died: April 9, 2011
• Place of death: New York, New York

Lumet is a prolific film director who, for fifty years, has made nearly a film per year, working continuously and efficiently to turn out a body of work notable for the high quality of performances by his actors.

Early Life

Sidney Lumet (lew-MEHT) was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, to Eugenia Wermus, a dancer who died when Lumet was young, and Baruch Lumet, a native of Poland who moved to the United States to be a writer, a director, an actor, and a producer for the Yiddish stage. Sidney Lumet’s father appeared in Woody Allen’s Everything You Wanted to Know About Sex but Were Afraid to Ask (1972) and in his son’s films The Group (1966) and The Pawnbroker (1964). Thus, Lumet was born into the world of entertainment, and from age four he was on radio, in theater, and in film. He studied at New York’s Professional Children’s School and appeared to critical acclaim in Sidney Kingsley’s Dead End Kids production of Dead End (1935) as well as in both the stage and the 1939 film adaptation of One Third of a Nation. After spending three years in the United States Army as a radar repairman during World War II, which included deployments to India, China, and Myanmar (then Burma), Lumet returned home disinterested in acting. He taught briefly at the laboratories of Philco in Philadelphia (with the skills he had developed from repairing radars for the Army) before resolving to follow in his father’s footsteps as a producer and a director.

Lumet joined the Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS) in 1950, interested in the then-new medium of television, and went on to direct hundreds of episodes for the television series You Are There (1953-1957), I Remember Mama (1948-1957), and Danger (1950-1955), replacing Yul Brynner. As a show centered on psychological suspense, Danger provided Lumet with an opportunity to hone his skills at drawing out effective performances from his actors. However, he was also fortunate at the time to work with then-unknowns Charlton Heston, Lee Grant, Rod Steiger, James Dean, Jack Lemmon, Cloris Leachman, and Paul Newman. He would later work with Newman and Steiger in two of his most memorable films: with Newman in The Verdict (1982) and with Steiger in The Pawnbroker. Lumet quickly developed an extremely efficient and fast method for shooting television scripts, a critical skill during the hectic days of early live television. This not only earned him recognition and plaudits as a director but also served him well in his move to directing big-screen films. Lumet described the approach in his book Making Movies (1995), which film critic Roger Ebert described as having “more common sense in it about how films are actually made than any other I have read.”

Life’s Work

Lumet formed an Off-Broadway acting troupe in 1947 with Brynner and Eli Wallach. This led to numerous theatrical productions and Henry Fonda selecting Lumet to direct the Fonda-produced film Twelve Angry Men in 1957. Nominated for Academy Awards in the categories of Best Director, Best Picture, and Best Adapted Screenplay, the film established Lumet’s credibility as a film director and has since been ranked among the best courtroom dramas of all time.

Since that success, Lumet has directed nearly one film per year, with approximately half of those films being adaptations. He is well-known in the film industry for his ability to produce efficiently, even on a massive project such as the three-hour Prince of the City (1981), which completed shooting in only fifty-two days. Lumet credits rehearsals as key to this efficiency, which allows him to capture scenes in as few as one or two takes.

Besides his deliberately economic approach to filmmaking, Lumet is also known for inspiring superb performances from his actors. In more than forty films, seventeen of his actors have received Academy Award nominations, with four winning: Faye Dunaway, Peter Finch, and Beatrice Straight in Paddy Chayefsky’s Network (1976) and Ingrid Bergman in Murder on the Orient Express (1974). Even without Academy Award wins, Newman as a washed-up lawyer in The Verdict; Steiger as a Holocaust survivor in The Pawnbroker; Judd Hirsch, Christine Lahti, and River Phoenix as an underground family on the run from the Federal Bureau of Investigation in Running on Empty (1988); Al Pacino as a justice-obsessed police officer in Serpico (1973) or a would-be bank robber in Dog Day Afternoon (1975); and Katharine Hepburn, Ralph Richardson, Jason Robards, and Dean Stockwell in Lumet’s adaptation of Tennessee Williams’s Long Day’s Journey into Night (1962) all provided highly acclaimed film performances, owing at least in part to Lumet’s directing insights. In his lifelong promotion of social justice as shown through the arts, Lumet has also explored specifically Jewish themes in Bye Bye Braverman (1968), Daniel (1983), and A Stranger Among Us (1992).

Lumet has been called the last of the neorealists. That is, he aims to make the film medium as unobtrusive as possible so that the transparency allows the lives and actions of the characters to come across as clearly as possible. This focus allows depictions in his films of characters with irrepressible passions for justice, dignity, human worth, and family. Pacino in Serpico, as the real-life police officer who sought to expose New York police corruption, exemplifies this. The authenticity of the actions of the characters in Lumet’s films has been well received. In 2005, he received a Lifetime Achievement Academy Award and acknowledgment as one of the most important American directors of all time.

Significance

Lumet’s significance as a director is not simply in his economy of production or in his prompting of memorable performances from actors but in his consistent vision and the promotion of films that inspire. In his best works, Lumet shows characters of all types and personalities who yearn for what is best. They may reach this goal or be defeated (as the story demands). If his films focus on difficult situations, this is less because life is inherently difficult and more because under such circumstances human nature best expresses its deep yearning for justice and a better world. Taking film to be an art, Lumet keeps a steady keel on the tempestuous conditions in the stories he depicts to reveal the richness of life.

Bibliography

Bowles, Stephen E. Sidney Lumet: A Guide to References and Resources, Boston: G. K. Hall, 1979. Though limited to pre-1980 films by Lumet, this book of biographical and critical essays is still useful for contextualizing Lumet’s work in general.

Boyer, Jay. Sidney Lumet. New York: Twayne, 1993. Part of the Twayne series about filmmakers, this book offers critical details of Lumet’s work and biographical information about the director.

Cunningham, Frank R. Sidney Lumet: Film and Literary Vision. 2d ed. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2001. This expanded edition of the 1991 publication includes new discussions of Murder on the Orient Express, The Appointment (1969), A Stranger Among Us, and other films. The chapters “A Cinema of Conscience” and “The Loner and the Struggle for Moral Culpability” are especially useful.

Lumet, Sidney. Making Movies. New York: Knopf, 1995. Called one of the most insightful books into filmmaking by critic Roger Ebert, this also shows Lumet’s vision of the world and art that drives him to direct films.