Legendary one-eyed directors ...
Whether an accident or an early health condition made them lose an eye or sight in one, it didn't prevent these legendary directors to have successful careers and be major influences in their own respective fields.
Which one left the greatest legacy?
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Which one left the greatest legacy?
Discuss here
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- Director
- Writer
- Producer
Fritz Lang was born in Vienna, Austria, in 1890. His father managed a construction company. His mother, Pauline Schlesinger, was Jewish but converted to Catholicism when Lang was ten. After high school, he enrolled briefly at the Technische Hochschule Wien and then started to train as a painter. From 1910 to 1914, he traveled in Europe, and he would later claim, also in Asia and North Africa. He studied painting in Paris from 1913-14. At the start of World War I, he returned to Vienna, enlisting in the army in January 1915. Severely wounded in June 1916, he wrote some scenarios for films while convalescing. In early 1918, he was sent home shell-shocked and acted briefly in Viennese theater before accepting a job as a writer at Erich Pommer's production company in Berlin, Decla. In Berlin, Lang worked briefly as a writer and then as a director, at Ufa and then for Nero-Film, owned by the American Seymour Nebenzal. In 1920, he began a relationship with actress and writer Thea von Harbou (1889-1954), who wrote with him the scripts for his most celebrated films: Dr. Mabuse, the Gambler (1922), Die Nibelungen: Siegfried (1924), Metropolis (1927) and M (1931) (credited to von Harbou alone). They married in 1922 and divorced in 1933. In that year, Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels offered Lang the job of head of the German Cinema Institute. Lang--who was an anti-Nazi mainly because of his Catholic background--did not accept the position (it was later offered to and accepted by filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl) and, after secretly sending most of his money out of the country, fled Germany to Paris. After about a year in Paris, Lang moved to the United States in mid-1934, initially under contract to MGM. Over the next 20 years, he directed numerous American films. In the 1950s, in part because the film industry was in economic decline and also because of Lang's long-standing reputation for being difficult with, and abusive to, actors, he found it increasingly hard to get work. At the end of the 1950s, he traveled to Germany and made what turned out to be his final three films there, none of which were well received.
In 1964, nearly blind, he was chosen to be president of the jury at the Cannes Film Festival. He was an avid collector of primitive art and habitually wore a monocle, an affectation he picked up during his early days in Vienna. After his divorce from von Harbou, he had relationships with many other women, but from about 1931 to his death in 1976, he was close to Lily Latte, who helped him in many ways.LEGACY : A master of dark and shadowy atmospheres and heart-pounding psychological thriller such as "M" and the "Dr Mabuse" movies, this father of Expressionist Cinema paved the way that would lead to the success of film-noir in America and Hitchcock's suspense movies. But Lang is also the director of one of the greatest Sci-fi movies ever "Metropolis", a high-scaled futuristic epic tale with exciting and intriguing social and religious undertones. With his extraordinary use of imagery and richness in content, Lang is perhaps the first director who understood that the power of movie-making could go beyond the limits of mass entertainment, a film that shows something is good, but if it says something, it's even better.- Director
- Producer
- Actor
John Ford came to Hollywood following one of his brothers, an actor. Asked what brought him to Hollywood, he replied "the train". He became one of the most respected directors in the business, in spite of being known for his westerns, which were not considered "serious" film. He won six Oscars, counting (he always did) the two that he won for his WWII documentary work. He had one wife; a son and daughter; and a grandson, Dan Ford who wrote a biography on his famous grandfather.LEGACY : A cinematic pioneer who inspired a whole generation of filmmakers (Orson Welles watched "Stagecoach" almost fourty times while making "Citizen Kane"), he's not just the most emblematic director of the Western-genre but also a gifted artist who sometimes, flamboyantly, some others poignantly, depicted the history and the roots of America from the Conquest of the West to the Great Depression, from Monument Valley to the Emerald Isle. And of course, he's the man who launched the career of an American icon : John Wayne.- Director
- Actor
- Writer
Raoul Walsh's 52-year directorial career made him a Hollywood legend. Walsh was also an actor: He appeared in the first version of W. Somerset Maugham's "Rain" renamed Sadie Thompson (1928) opposite Gloria Swanson in the title role. He would have played the Cisco Kid in his own film In Old Arizona (1928) if an errant jackrabbit hadn't cost him his right eye by leaping through the windshield of his automobile. Warner Baxter filled the role and won an Oscar. Before John Ford and Nicholas Ray, it was Raoul Walsh who made the eye-patch almost as synonymous with a Hollywood director as Cecil B. DeMille's jodhpurs.
He interned with the best, serving as assistant director and editor on D.W. Griffith's racist masterpiece, The Clansman, better known as The Birth of a Nation (1915), a blockbuster that may have been the highest-grossing film of all time if accurate box office records had been kept before the sound era. He pulled triple duty on that picture, playing John Wilkes Booth, the man who assassinated President Abraham Lincoln at Ford's Theater and ranked as the most notorious American actor of all time until Pee Wee Herman (Paul Reubens).
The year before The Clansman, Walsh was second unit director on The Life of General Villa (1914), also playing the Mexican revolutionary Pancho Villa as a young man. Walsh got his start in the business as co-director of another Pancho Villa flick, The Life of General Villa (1914), in 1912. The movie featured footage shot of an actually battle between Villa's forces and Mexican federal troops.
In 1915, in addition to helping out the great Griffith, Walsh directed no less than 14 films, including his first feature-length film, The Regeneration (1915), which he also wrote. The movie starred silent cinema superstar Anna Q. Nilsson as a society woman turned social worker who aids the regeneration of a Bowery gang leader. It was a melodrama, but an effective one. In his autobiography, Walsh credited D.W. Griffith with teaching him about the art of filmmaking and about production management techniques. The film is memorable for its shots of New York City, where Walsh had been born 28 years earlier on March 11, 1887.
Raoul Walsh would continue to be a top director for 40 years and would not hang up his director's megaphone (if he still had one at that late in the game) until 1964. As a writer, his last script was made in 1970, meaning his career as a whole spanned seven decades and 58 years.
He introduced the world to John Wayne in The Big Trail (1930) in 70mm wide-screen in 1930. It would take nine more years and John Ford to make the Duke a star. In one three-year period at Warner Bros., he directed The Roaring Twenties (1939), They Drive by Night (1940), High Sierra (1940), The Strawberry Blonde (1941), Manpower (1941), They Died with Their Boots On (1941), and Gentleman Jim (1942), among other films in that time frame. He helped consolidate the stardom of Humphrey Bogart and Errol Flynn while directing the great James Cagney in one of his more delightful films, The Strawberry Blonde (1941). This was the same director that would elicit Cagney's most searing performance since The Public Enemy (1931) in the crime classic White Heat (1949).
Novelist Norman Mailer says that Walsh was dragged off of his death bed to direct the underrated film adaptation of Mailer's The Naked and the Dead (1958). The movie is as masculine and unsentimental as the book, an exceedingly harsh look at the power relations between men at war on the same side that includes the attempted murder of prisoners of war and the "fragging" of officers (Sergeant Croft allows his lieutenant to walk into an ambush). Walsh was at his best when directing men in war or action pictures.
Raoul Walsh seemingly recovered from Mailer's phantasmagorical death bed, as he lived another 22 years after The Naked and the Dead (1958). He died on December 31, 1980, in Simi Valley, California, at the age of 93.LEGACY : A prolific director who specialized in the crime genre, his most famous works include "The Roaring Twenties", "They Drive by Night", "The Strawberry Blonde", "High Sierra" and one of the most celebrated gangster noir classics "White Heat". As far as film-making went, if he didn't quite make it to the 'top of the world', his greatest contribution to Cinema was to have allowed a 42-yeard old actor, used to supporting roles of sidekicks and antagonists, to be for the first time the lead in "High Sierra", his name was Humphrey Bogart, a legend was born with this film.- Director
- Actor
- Writer
Tex Avery was a descendant of Judge Roy Bean and Daniel Boone, but all his grandma ever told him about it was "Don't ever mention you are kin to Roy Bean. He's a no good skunk!!" After graduating from North Dallas High School in 1927, Avery moved to Southern California in 1929 and got a job in the harbor. After showing samples of his artwork he got a job at Walter Lantz Studios in 1929 as animator. His contributions during the years at Walter Lantz Studios were minor. From 1936 to 1941 he worked as supervisor - another word for cartoon director - of some 60 titles in the Merrie Melodies and Looney Tunes series for Leon Schlesinger at Warner's. From 1942 to 1954 Avery worked as director of cartoons at MGM. He was responsible for practically every MGM Cartoon that did not feature Tom and Jerry. In 1955 he did four cartoons, again for Walter Lantz Studios, before leaving the field for advertising, where, alas, his unique sense of humor went largely unappreciated, but primarily because commercials are not credited for the viewing audience (perhaps his best known commercial work was for Raid bug spray, which always featured the cartoon bugs screaming "Raid!" before getting smashed.)
Among the many cartoon characters Avery created are Daffy Duck, Droopy, Screwy Squirrel, George and Junior and Chilly Willy. Tex Avery is also credited with creating the basic personality of Bugs Bunny. He was the one who coined the phrase "What's up, Doc?"LEGACY : Perhaps the most influential director of modern animation, he can be perceived as an anti-Disney. His parodic ahead-of-its-time humor mostly relied on sight gags, over-the-top animation and continuous fourth-wall breaking -a hysterical chase scene would be interrupted with a sign saying 'corny, isn't it?'- appealing to both kids and adults. Indeed, he'll forever be remembered for such creations as the wolf's frenetic howling toward so-realistically sexy redhead, the laconic Droopy and Screwy Squirrel during his MGM period. At Warner Bros, well, he only created Porky Pig, Daffy Duck ... and Bugs Bunny.- Director
- Writer
- Second Unit Director or Assistant Director
Although he obtained a law degree from the Royal Hungarian University, Andre De Toth decided to become an actor, and spent several years on the stage. He then entered the Hungarian film industry, obtaining work as a writer, editor, second unit director and actor before finally becoming a director. He directed a few films just before the outbreak of WW II, when he fled to England. Alexander Korda gave him a job there, and when De Toth emigrated to the US in 1942, Korda got him a job as a second unit director on The Jungle Book (1942). De Toth made his debut as a director in American films in 1944. He was known for his tough, hard-edged pictures, whether westerns or urban crime dramas, and showed no compunction about depicting violence in as realistic a manner as possible, an unusual and somewhat controversial attitude for the time. Probably his best known film is House of Wax (1953), a Vincent Price horror film shot in 3-D. As De Toth only had one eye, that put him in the somewhat odd position of shooting a film in a process in which he would never be able to see the result. That didn't seem to matter, though; the film was a critical and financial success, and is generally considered to be the best 3-D film ever made.(suggested by yrnej)
LEGACY : (from IMDb) He was known for his tough, hard-edged pictures, whether westerns or urban crime dramas, and showed no compunction about depicting violence in as realistic a manner as possible, an unusual and somewhat controversial attitude for the time. Probably his best known film is "House of Wax", the film was a critical and financial success, and is generally considered to be the best 3-D film ever made.