Out of all the old school Directors out of the Hollywood system, my favorite would have to be the strangely unheralded Michael Curtiz. Strange because not only did he Direct 173 movies (according to the IMDB) over the course of his career but he also happened to Direct some all time classics including Casablanca which is regularly considered to be the second greatest American movie ever made right after Citizen Kane.
Quote - Born on December 24th, 1886, in Budapest, Austria-Hungary (now Hungary), Curtiz began acting in and then directing films in his native Hungary in 1912. After WWI, he continued his filmmaking career in Austria and Germany and into the early 1920s when he directed films in other countries in Europe. Moving to the US in 1926, he started making films in Hollywood for Warner Bros. and became thoroughly entrenched in the studio system. His films during the 1930s and '40s encompassed nearly every genre imaginable and some, including Casablanca (1942) and Mildred Pierce (1945), are considered to be film classics. His brilliance waned in the 1950s when he made a number of mediocre films for studios other than Warner. He directed his last film in 1961, a year before his death at 74.
Just look at some of his credits....
Casablanca
The Adventure of Robin Hood
White Christmas
Dodge City
Angels with Dirty Faces
The movie that got me interested in him was Mystery of the Wax Museum (1933), an early two-strip technicolor Horror movie co-starring Fay Wray the same year that she did King Kong. IMHO Wax Museum is a better movie than Kong and deserves more recognition, especially when you see how racy it was for a movie in that era, it was Pre-Code, not to mention the fact that it was considered a "lost" film for years until after the death of Jack Warner and they found a copy of it in his vault. It's also much better than the 1953 remake "House of Wax" starring Vincent Price who is otherwise the best thing in that stagey and melodramatic snoozefest while the original has an amazing freshness to it, even almost 80 years later.
Curtiz seemed to suffer in the later years of his career, most likely due to age, but also because people claimed that he didn't work as well without the support of the studio system. Curtiz is the antithesis of the "auteur theory" as he did his best work within the confines of studio filmmaking while Sidney Lumet felt like his logical successor; a Director that moves from project to project, making some masterpieces along the way but otherwise not gaining the type of recognition as someone like Martin Scorsese who is considered an artist.
Sure, there's something to be said about Orson Well's Citizen Kane, being that it is the greatest American movie ever made, but when you consider that Wells never made anything that compares to his masterwork as he battled the studio's, Director's like Curtiz and Lumet quietly churned out flicks and managed to make some incredible movies. I like Curtiz because I think that Director's shouldn't get wrapped up in the idea of trying to make a masterpiece with each and every project as perfection is often the enemy of good and sometimes even greatness. It disappoints me that a lot of modern day movie makers don't just make more movies because I don't consider cinema to be an "art-form" so much as it is a collective creative endeavor where any number of things could go wrong and it's amazing when everything comes together right.
This is why I admire Michael Curtiz who was, above all else, a craftsman and although not an auteur, he made some pretty goddamn good movies.
