The Lumet Myth

Not loving films by the man considered a cinematic knickerbocker, a celluloid Damon Runyon, might seem unpatriotic because, for the past three decades, Sidney Lumet has been marketed as the filmmaker who most accurately depicts modern New York’s grittiness. That rep is a residual benefit of Lumet being a New York–based, rather than Los Angeles–based, director. But this happenstance is what determined Lumet’s choice of material, actors and fast-and-dirty methods. The hallmark of Lumet’s films, from Twelve Angry Men (1958) to last year’s Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead derive from his early career in 1950s East Coast television production more than it proves his command of a personally expressive style.

But the impersonal nature of Lumet’s movies is what diminishes them as movies. Indeed, it makes them—overall—the consequence of what is essentially hack TV culture.

Ironically, a half-century after Lumet’s motion-picture directing debut with Twelve Angry Men, that television liability has made him a totem of today’s television-centered pop culture. His trite, crude Before the Devil was widely sold—and misunderstood—as an indie breakthrough for an 83-year-old veteran, when it was really just another profane made-for-HBO movie.

The Lumet myth gained momentum with 1975’s Dog Day Afternoon, which recreated a mundane Brooklyn day when an exasperated Brooklynite attempted to rob a bank to pay for his pre-op transsexual boyfriend’s surgery. Instead, he brought together cops, media and local citizens to witness an unplanned, out-of-control event. This was a quintessential New York freak show, and Lumet dined out on the acclaim for its street atmosphere (the timely “Attica! Attica!” cheers) and roster of desperate temperaments: from Al Pacino’s harried Sonny, Christopher Sarandon’s nervous tranny, Charles Durning’s bumptious police detective, James Broderick’s murderous NYPD captain, John Cazale’s demented gunman and the rogue’s galley of onlookers. 

Dog Day’s success focused media attention on Lumet’s accidental verisimilitude in New York–set films like Bye Bye Braverman, The Anderson Tapes, Serpico and Just Tell Me What You Want. Lumet himself pursued this whim in his criminal-justice-system movies: Prince of the City (with Treat Williams’ squeaky-voiced snitch); The Verdict, Q&A (Nick Nolte as a monster bigot cop); A Stranger Among Us (Melanie Griffith as an undercover cop among Hasidim); Night Falls on the City (Andy Garcia as an Irish cop); and Find Me Guilty. Most of these are pretty awful, a couple are as career-killing as The Wiz and several are unforgivable.

But first, let’s clear up some misperceptions. Due to a media leak of what went on at the Dec.10 New York Film Critics Circle’s voting meeting, the Internet was splattered with reports that I “made a passionate speech against Sidney Lumet’s career achievement award”—a journalistic gaffe that omitted the point of my protest. The NYFCC had previously only given one career-achievement award—to Jean-Luc Godard in 1994. My argument was that Lumet had already been honored with a Critics’ Best Director prize in 1981 for Prince of the City (fatuous, overlong, forgettable), which should have been sufficient recognition. Besides, I reasoned, Lumet wasn’t worthy of succeeding the Godard precedent.

Few Circle members knew this history, or cared. Instead, they were emboldened by the recent canard that Lumet was the New York director par excellence and, heck, didn’t he deserve a gift for outliving better directors?

Recently, the Circle dismissed a career-achievement proposal for another filmmaker as being publicist-driven. But in Lumet’s case, critics think like publicists, eagerly promoting the idea that Lumet’s films represent some acme of New York self-presentation. Eventually, the Lumet controversy/fallacy came down to his Career Achievement prize being almost unceremoniously presented. Instead of the great actors Lumet had directed (from Pacino to Paul Newman, Jane Fonda to Vanessa Redgrave, Sean Connery to Shirley Knight to Dean Stockwell) doing the honors, it was Ellen Barkin, star of Lumet’s TV movie Strip Search, who presented the certificate. (Barkin also erroneously stated that Lumet’s was the Circle’s first-ever career kudo.)

Still, where did this rep come from? Lumet did not make the quintessential New York movies. These would be My Man Godfrey, A Man’s Castle, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, Gentleman’s Agreement, On the Corner, The Taking of Pelham 1,2,3, Annie Hall, Do the Right Thing—films about the struggles of the working class and the ethos of ethnic strivers. Instead, the films that make his reputation are the ones that herald the skullduggery of the city’s movers-and-wreckers; that is, the power fantasies of New York’s media elite. Media wonks like to pretend blue-collar virtue while enjoying the benefits of white-collar luxe—but without showing intellectual pretense. Lumet gets celebrated for making New York magazine or Daily News movies; these aren’t snotty New Yorker magazine movies but a modish version of blue-collar pulp. To have influenced David Chase or George Clooney (Barkin smiled and said that Clooney considered Network a “perfect film”) is nothing to be proud of.

Film Forum’s schedule picks fairly broadly from the diversity of Lumet’s career, yet none of these films demonstrate that Lumet is a filmmaker. It ranges through his filmed-theater phase, his Euro-trash phase, his Big City phase. Some of his more curious features are missing (Last of the Mobile Hot Shots, The Appointment, The Wiz, Lovin’ Molly). Despite their eclecticism and box-office failure, they argue against the idea that Lumet is a renaissance artist. This retrospective simply shuffles the postcards of a long, peripatetic career.

Take note, there is one great film in the barrel: the 1962 Ely Landau production of O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey Into Night where Lumet’s TV style sufficiently captured definitive and career-peak performances by Katharine Hepburn, Jason Robards, Ralph Richardson and Dean Stockwell. Some adroit imagery even allows the play, the voices and the faces to reign. It’s workmanlike filmmaking that turned out to be a classic. But most often, Lumet’s career divergences would bring him right back to New Yawk  blatancy and vulgarity. And although this may well be Lumet’s legacy, it should be clearly recognized that he never films New York as Scorsese or Spike Lee do—as an artist who creates meaning through the quality of images (unless you count urban blight as an aesthetic). Perhaps one reason Lumet has garnered esteem in the post-TV age is that he makes movie-watching as simple as TV.

Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. used the wrong analogy in an American Heritage line that Lumet’s films offered “as comprehensive a sociology of New York city as Balzac or Zola did of Paris.” Not only is this literary nonsense, it’s cinematic ignorance. Lumet’s films about New York society cover diverse territory but they pretty much keep to the perspectives of the white middle-class and the white-ethnic proletariat scramble for power. These stories—from the quasi-tragic The Pawnbroker to the serio-comic Find Me Guilty are anything but comprehensive. Rather, they are stereotypical New York stories; not the first cinematic examples of modern urban archetypes, just the most recent.

Schlesinger’s pumping-up resembles a similar inflated boast that The Times’ Vincent Canby gave to Woody Allen, willfully ascribing to these New York filmmakers a depth and scope that is beyond their middling talents, all in the effort to erect a cultural eminence for the contemporary marketplace. But this exaggeration (which Film Forum rubber-stamps) is also a political ploy; it ratifies the social hegemony that Lumet’s movies promote, titillate and exploit. Lumet favors class divisions between cops and lawyers and perps and politicians, judges and merchants as if breaking past visions Dos Passos, Langston Hughes, Henry Roth, Hubert Selby, Piri Thomas, Irwin Shaw and Philip Roth had not already etched. If Lumet’s films seem realistic, that’s because they are familiar in their superficiality. No Lumet New York movie probes as deeply as Kazan’s Gentleman’s Agreement, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn or scans as widely as Frank Borzage’s Bad Girl and After Tomorrow.

Lumet’s cynicism repeats and sustains Big, Bad, Tough city mythology. Not in the way of the old Naked City TV series (“There are 8 million stories in the Naked City. This has been one of them.) but in the nihilistic, deadbeat sense of the ad infinitum Law and Order TV series that routinely rips Armageddon from the headlines—just to provide fodder for TV advertisers. Lumet sustains his modern rep by indulging Hollywood’s contemporary skepticism about social reform and offering only gloating, ugly urban chaos. This cynicism began with his TV satire Network, Paddy Chayefsky’s prophetic nightmare of media madness. Network may have predicted reality TV, Infotainment  series and rampant corporate-media greed, but it is still an overacted, visually glum, ham-fisted piece of agit-prop. Not lively, just aggressive—an offshoot of Lumet’s TV-bred blatancy. It is an example of the coarsened humanity it pretends to critique.

A Lumet movie is always a little cheap—as if budgetary considerations were as important to him as thematic ones. But don’t confuse this with the unrefined style of underground, independent filmmaking when it is, mainly, hasty and frugal. That’s less a New York school of filmmaking than a demonstration of New York hustling.