The director Sidney Lumet called the best of all time: “The greatest who’s ever been in films”
A few months ago, I came to an important decision. It was one I’d given some thought to over the last years, one about which my opinion had changed over time, but now, finally, I had made up my mind. I had just finished watching a movie, that movie being 2007’s Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead, and it sealed the deal – I believe Sidney Lumet is the greatest film director of all time.
Now, this is just an opinion, and the good thing about opinions is that you don’t have to agree with them, and if you don’t, you can offer up suggestions as to why that isn’t the case, but unfortunately, you’d be wrong, because he is. The evidence is overwhelming. He consistently made the best films, over a long period of time, and with some of the finest actors in history.
I’ll kick things off with his debut movie, 1957’s courtroom drama 12 Angry Men, which, as first attempts go, is akin to getting a telescope for Christmas and discovering a new star the first time you take it out of the box.
Then came a ridiculous string of outrageously good films, some of which people are only just getting wise to now. There’s Katharine Hepburn’s Long Day’s Journey Into Night in 1962, there’s the sweating, exhausting, Sean Connery-starring African military prison movie The Hill from 1965, and two very different but brilliant films the year before in Fail-Safe and The Pawnbroker.
The 1970s, somehow, got even better, as Lumet brought Al Pacino on board and made the incredible Dog Day Afternoon and Serpico. He wasn’t done there, though, teaming up with Faye Dunaway and William Holden to make the searing TV news satire Network in 1976, and keeping the run going with the crooked cop thriller Prince of the City in 1981, and then Paul Newman’s brilliant The Verdict in 1982; the finest courtroom movie since Lumet’s own debut.
Was he done there? Of course not. There was the underrated word of mouth thriller Q&A in 1990 starring Nick Nolte, and the aforementioned Philip Seymour-Hoffman cracker Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead, one of the best movies of the past 20 years without doubt; a twisting, engrossing heist movie with career-best performances from all involved and some astonishing direction from Lumet, a full 50 years after 12 Angry Men.
As for Lumet himself, which director did he feel had the most impact on him? Who did he admire the most? Well, amusingly, not many. But he did speak to his fellow director Peter Bogdanovich about any that influenced his work, saying, “I don’t think any (have). I have great respect for about, I guess, seven or eight directors – Carl Dreyer, to me the greatest director who’s ever been in films – René Clair, Stevens, Jean Vigo, de Sica, Wyler, Zinnemann.”
Lumet’s pick, Carl Dreyer, was a Danish film director who is considered by those in the industry to be one of the finest to ever sit behind a lens. He is possibly best known for his 1928 silent movie The Passion of Joan of Arc, regularly cited as a hugely influential film in terms of cinematography, direction and production.
Dreyer directed films for 40 years but only sparingly, making just 14 feature films in his career. His 1943 horror Day of Wrath about witchcraft trials in the 1600s was also highly acclaimed, as was 1955’s fantasy drama Ordet, about a family torn apart by religion.
