Five legendary directors who saved their worst movie for last
Every director has their ups and downs in their careers. For every Godfather, there is a Jack, and for every Pulp Fiction, there is a Death Proof. Some directors, however, manage to maintain the quality of their films even as their careers extend beyond their heyday. John Huston, for example, closed out his filmography with the emotionally nuanced 1987 James Joyce adaptation The Dead, nearly five decades after making his stunning directorial debut with The Maltese Falcon. Stanley Kubrick also finished on a high with Eyes Wide Shut, even if critics didn’t recognise it at the time.
More often than not, however, masterful careers end with a whimper, not a bang. Michael Powell, who helped revolutionise cinema with his sumptuous, eye-popping collaborations with Emil Pressburger, finished his career with Age of Consent, a slight, mildly sexy drama that feels far too mediocre to be the work of the man who made The Red Shoes.
Then, there are the directors who round out their careers with their worst movies. The best case scenario is that they don’t realise that it’s their lowest point and can live and die in blissful ignorance about the potential souring of their legacy. Howard Hawks was not one of them. He regretted Rio Lobo immediately and never got to redeem himself with his planned next feature.
On the bright side, none of the directors on this list were defined by their final effort. Each of them was so iconic by the time they made their last movies that their legacies were set. In most cases, these concluding duds have been politely forgotten, but we’re going to dredge them up again anyway.
Five iconic directors whose final movie was awful:
Alfred Hitchcock (‘Family Plot,’ 1976)
The Master of Suspense needs no pity from anyone. Of all the directors to bask in commercial success during Hollywood’s Golden Age, he has emerged as the most enduring. If anything, he has only become more well-known after his death, with movies like Psycho and Vertigo being held up as the gold standard of entertaining cinema. However, even Hitchcock had his misses, and sadly, his final film was one of them.
Family Plot centres on a phoney psychic and her cab driver boyfriend (Barbara Harris and Bruce Dern, respectively) who are trying to track down a wealthy heiress’s long-lost nephew for a sizable reward. Unbeknownst to them, the nephew is now a con artist and kidnapper.
It is a typically twisty Hitchcockian plot, but unlike North by Northwest or Vertigo, it doesn’t quite hang together. It might not be as uncomfortable to watch from a 21st-century perspective as Marnie or as messy as Topaz, but it is slight and a bit too farcical, which is arguably worse. Of all the disappointing directorial swan songs, this is far from the worst, but Hitchcock set the bar high for himself, and Family Plot falls short.
Howard Hawks (‘Rio Lobo,’ 1970)
Howard Hawks was one of the most versatile directors of all time, helming some of the greatest Old Hollywood comedies like His Girl Friday and Bringing Up Baby, hardboiled film noir like To Have and Have Not and The Big Sleep, gangster movies like Scarface, and westerns like Red River and Rio Bravo. He even directed the musical Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. It’s hard to think of any other director who has excelled in so many genres. Unfortunately, he saved the worst for last.
Rio Lobo had all kinds of potential. It starred John Wayne, for one thing, and it was a rehashing of two of Hawks and Wayne’s previous films, the magnificent Rio Bravo and the less magnificent El Dorado. Wayne plays a Civil War veteran who confronts two traitors who killed one of his friends and hijacked a gold shipment.
Quentin Tarantino has used this film as justification for limiting his own output and quitting while he’s ahead. “I want all my movies to have some connection to Reservoir Dogs,” he said, adding, “I don’t want to make Rio Lobo.” Ouch.
George Cukor (‘Rich and Famous,’ 1981)
Throughout most of his career, George Cukor was known for being a woman’s director. He helped elevate the careers of everyone from Katharine Hepburn–who he directed in nine films across nearly five decades–to Ingrid Bergman, who he shepherded through her Oscar-winning performance in Gaslight in 1944. His most notable films include The Philadelphia Story, Born Yesterday, and My Fair Lady, all of which centred on female characters bursting with personality, which was not a given for movies at the time.
In keeping with the trend, his final film, 1981’s Rich and Famous, focused on a friendship between two women, but was completely devoid of his singular magic. Jacqueline Bisset and Candice Bergen star as friends from university who become writers. Bisset’s character is an high-brow author whose work is well received. She is unhappy in love, embarking on a series of unfulfilling relationships and one-night stands. Meanwhile, Bergen’s character drifts into being a housewife and then writes a trashy novel that instantly becomes a bestseller.
It’s a very horny film for an 82-year-old director, but more surprisingly, it operates on the level of a soap opera more than a ‘Best Picture’ winner, and is ultimately, sadly, extremely forgettable.
Billy Wilder (‘Buddy Buddy,’ 1981)
No director symbolises the Golden Age of Hollywood more than Billy Wilder. Throughout his five-decade career, he made such masterpieces as Double Indemnity, Some Like it Hot, Sunset Boulevard, and The Apartment, and helped define what movies of the period looked like. Beginning his career with the German Expressionists, he knew how to use dramatic lighting to tell a story and always found a way to make his films look elegant rather than ostentatious.
Sadly, however, this master of the medium went out on a terrible note. On the face of it, Buddy Buddy had potential. It was a buddy comedy starring Walter Matthau and Jack Lemmon after all, two actors who had already proven their comedic chemistry in three films, including 1968’s The Odd Couple. In Buddy Buddy, Matthau plays a hitman who, while working on his last assignment, rents a hotel room next to Lemmon’s character, who is desperately trying to kill himself but can never seem to get it right.
Critics were largely scathing, calling it a relentlessly unfunny farce. Roger Ebert summed up the consensus when he began his one-and-a-half-star review by saying, “This film is appalling.”
Stanley Donen (‘Blame It on Rio,’ 1980)
Stanley Donen might have wanted to blame it on Rio, but it’s hard not to point the finger directly at him on this one. The director behind such Golden Age classics as Singin’ in the Rain, Funny Face, and Charade closed out his feature filmography with a star-studded picture that was in such poor taste that most of the people involved have all but disowned it.
Blame it on Rio stars Michael Caine and Joseph Bologna as businessmen who take their teenage daughters (Demi Moore and Michelle Johnson) on holiday to Brazil. It’s all very wholesome until one of the dads starts having passionate beach sex with the other’s daughter. It’s neither funny nor sexy nor particularly watchable, which is a remarkable feat for a film with such an impressive credits list.
Donen had already toppled from his Hollywood throne when the movie came out, thanks to the 1980 Kirk Douglas debacle Saturn 5, but Blame it on Rio was beyond the pale, even for his most passionate defenders.
