Just wanted to muddy the waters a bit, here. I think naming a “best” artist in anything may be an exercise of limited usefulness: who’s “better”, Jacques-Louis David or Michelangelo? Shakespeare or Goethe? Britney or Cristina? See where I’m going with this?
Having said that, I’d like to toss in a vote for a guy nobody’s mentioned yet, which is kind of not surprising, the largely unremembered genius of early 20th-century film, King Vidor. And here are a very few reasons why:
1.) He made “The Big Parade”, which no less a critic than Alistair Cooke considered the most insightful view of the unequalled carnage that was World War I trench warfare ever committed to film. If you don’t much care for silents, this one might well change your mind.
2.) He risked his career to do, as his first sound project, the all-black musical “Hallelujah”, which the suits at the studio assured him was going to be a ghastly flop. (That, half a century later, an explosive racial conflict broke out between klueless Klansmen and African-American residents of a town called Vidor in Texas is another one of those little cosmic ironies that annoy me from time to time.)
3.) He had the unenviable and uncredited task of handling the black-and-white sequences in “The Wizard of Oz” when Victor Fleming was hastily called away to the set of “Gone With the Wind” to replace the dismissed George Cukor (whose only crime appears to have been that, as an openly gay man in Hollywood, he just might have known how rugged he-man hero Clark Gable got that screen test in the first place). I’m not certain about this, but recall reading someplace that he also worked on “GWTW” for a while in the directorial ruckus, but also didn’t get a lick worth of appreciation for that either.
4.) He made “Duel in the Sun” for David O. Selznick, famed git-outta-my-way-you’re-only-the-director producer, and managed to set the screen afire. And then he did it again.
5.) According to the fascinating page-turner “A Cast of Killers” by Sidney Kirkpatrick, Vidor ended up solving the famous unsolved mystery of who killed early film director William Desmond Taylor in the early 1920s. That he appears to have started this as an exercise in screenplay development and ended up seeing it as a matter of justice surprises me not one whit.
6.) He made “Street Scene”, a filmed adaptation of what was considered an absolutely unfilmable Broadway oddity by playwright Elmer Rice, and he built an extraordinary block-long set that makes watching the movie an absolutely captivating experience.
7.) Despite a personal life marked by great unhappiness with at least three different wives, and great temptation in the person of the one who got away, Vidor presents women in his movies as complex and fully-realized characters with souls and brains, in addition to bodies.
Over and over again in his movies, and in his life, Vidor stuck up for the persecuted little guy, without condescension, oversimplification, or dumbing-down, and he managed consistently to make movies that were exciting without being mindless. His work is well worth checking out, if you haven’t seen one of his movies.
