Michael Curtiz

Career in Europe

Actor

Curtiz became attracted to the theater when he was a child in Hungary. He built a little theatre in the cellar of his family home when he was 8 years old, where he and five of his friends re-enacted plays. They set up the stage, with scenery and props, and Curtiz directed them.

After he graduated from college at age 19, he took a job as an actor with a traveling theatre company, where he began working as one of their traveling players.

Director

He worked as Mihály Kertész at the National Hungarian Theater in 1912. and was a member of the Hungarian fencing team at the Olympic Games in Stockholm. Kertész directed Hungary's first feature film, Today and Tomorrow (Ma és holnap, 1912), in which he also had a leading role. He followed that with another film, The Last Bohemian (Az utolsó bohém, also 1912).

Curtiz began living in various cities in Europe to work on silent films in 1913. He first went to study at Nordisk studio in Denmark, which led to work as an actor and assistant director to August Blom on Denmark's first multireel feature film, Atlantis (1913).

The Warners were impressed that Curtiz had developed a unique visual style which was strongly influenced by German Expressionism, with high crane shots and unusual camera angles. The film also showed that Curtiz was fond of including romantic melodrama "against events of vast historical importance, for driving his characters to crises and forcing them to make moral decisions," according to Rosenzweig. By the time Curtiz accepted Warner's offer, he was already a prolific director, having made 64 films in countries including Hungary, Austria, and Denmark.

Career in the United States

1920s

Curtiz arrived in the United States in the summer of 1926,

Although the language barrier made communicating with the casts and crews a hardship, he continued to invest time in preparation. Before he directed his first Western, for example, he spent three weeks reading about the histories of Texas and the lives of its important men. He found it necessary to continue such intensive studying of American culture and habits in preparation for most other film genres.

The Third Degree (1926), available at the Library of Congress, made good use of Curtiz's experience in using moving cameras to create expressionistic scenes, such as a sequence shot from the perspective of a bullet in motion. During this period, Warner Bros. began experimenting with talking films. They assigned two part-talking pictures for Curtiz to direct: Tenderloin (1928) and Noah's Ark (1928), both of which also starred Costello. while biographer James C. Robertson said it was "one of the most spectacular incidents in film history."

The critical success of these films by Curtiz contributed to Warner Bros' becoming the fastest-growing studio in Hollywood. MGM head Louis B. Mayer saw the film and was impressed enough by Tracy's acting that he hired him on to MGM's roster of stars.

Curtiz's American career did not really take off until 1935. In the early 1930s, Warner Bros. was struggling to compete with the larger MGM, which was releasing costume dramas such as Queen Christina (1933) with Greta Garbo, Treasure Island (1934) with Wallace Beery, and The Count of Monte Cristo (1934). Warner Bros. decided to take a chance and produce their own costume drama.

Until then, it was a genre in which Warners' had assumed they could never succeed, owing to its higher production budgets during the years of the Great Depression. However, in March 1935, Warners announced it would produce Captain Blood (1935), a swashbuckler action drama based on the novel by Rafael Sabatini, and directed by Curtiz.

thumb|Errol Flynn in The Charge of the Light Brigade (1936)

The film was a major success with positive critical reviews. It was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Picture, and though not nominated, Curtiz received the second-highest number of votes for Best Director, solely from write-in votes. It also made stars of both Flynn and de Havilland, and it elevated Curtiz to being the studio's leading director. The film, another Oscar winner, was a greater success at the box-office than Captain Blood. It is in Rotten Tomatoes' list of Top 100 Movies.

That being their third Curtiz film together, Flynn and de Havilland continued to star in other hugely successful films under his direction, including The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex (1939), also co-starring Bette Davis. Davis starred in a Curtiz film in most years during the 1930s. The picture co-starred Bette Davis and Humphrey Bogart.

Because of Curtiz's high film productivity, Warner Bros. created a special unit for his pictures, which then allowed him to manage two film crews. One worked with him during actual filming, while the other prepared everything for the next picture.

John Garfield was among Curtiz's discoveries.

Curtiz discovered Garfield, a stage actor, by accident, when he came across a discarded screen test he gave, and thought he was very good. Garfield had assumed he failed the screen test and was already heading back to New York in disgust. Curtiz then went to Kansas City to intercept the train, where he pulled Garfield off and brought him back to Hollywood. Garfield considered it his "obscure masterpiece." Similar approval came from The New York Times, which called Garfield's acting "bitterly brilliant ... one of the best pictures of anybody's career." Curtiz was also again nominated, solidifying further his status as the studio's most important director.

The following year, Curtiz directed a short subject, Sons of Liberty (1939), starring Claude Rains, in a biopic which dramatizes the Jewish contribution to America's independence.

Three Westerns directed by Curtiz also starring Flynn were Dodge City (1939), Santa Fe Trail (1940) co-starring future US president Ronald Reagan, and Virginia City (1940).

1940s

During the 1940s Curtiz continued to release more critically acclaimed films, including The Sea Hawk (1940), Dive Bomber (1941), The Sea Wolf (1941), Casablanca (1942), Yankee Doodle Dandy (1942), This Is the Army (1943), Mildred Pierce (1945), and Life with Father (1947).

One of the biggest hits of 1940 was The Sea Hawk, starring Errol Flynn in the role of an adventurer in the mold of Sir Francis Drake. Flora Robson played Queen Elizabeth I, and Claude Rains acted as the Spanish ambassador, whose job it was to mislead the Queen, who rightly suspected the Spanish Armada was about to attempt to invade England. Some critics felt the story was equivalent to actual events then taking place in Europe, describing it as a "thinly veiled diatribe against American isolationism on World War II's brink." Film columnist Boyd Martin noticed the similarities:

thumb|left|Scene from Dive Bomber (1941)

Dive Bomber (1941) was released a few months before the attack on Pearl Harbor.

Curtiz shot every foot of Dive Bomber with Navy assistance and under strict Navy scrutiny. Filming at the active naval base in San Diego required great care, especially for aerial sequences. To create realistic shots, he mounted cameras on the Navy's planes to achieve "amazing point-of-view shots," taking viewers inside the cockpit during flight. He also mounted cameras underneath the wings of planes to dramatize take-offs from the Enterprise, an aircraft carrier launched a few years earlier.

The film was well received by the public, becoming the sixth-most popular film that year. No other pre-Pearl Harbor picture matched the quality of its flying scenes.

Edward G. Robinson starred in The Sea Wolf (1941), his second film directed by Curtiz. He portrayed the rampaging, dictatorial captain of a ship in an adaptation of one of Jack London's best known novels. Robinson said the character he portrayed "was a Nazi in everything but name," which, Robinson observed, was relevant to the state of the world at that time. Robinson was impressed by Garfield's intense personality, which he felt may have contributed to Garfield's death at age 39:

Curtiz directed another Air Force film, Captains of the Clouds (1942), about the Royal Canadian Air Force. It starred James Cagney and Brenda Marshall. According to Hal B. Wallis, its producer, it became Warner Bros.' most extensive and difficult production, and everything had to be relocated to Canada.

Shortly after Captains of the Clouds was completed, but released after his next picture, Casablanca, Curtiz directed the musical biopic, Yankee Doodle Dandy (1942), a film about singer, dancer, and composer George M. Cohan. It starred James Cagney in a role totally opposite from the one he had played four years earlier in Curtiz's Angels with Dirty Faces. Where the earlier film became a career high point for Cagney's portrayals of a gangster, a role he played in many earlier films, in this film, an overtly patriotic musical, Cagney demonstrates his considerable dancing and singing talents. It was Cagney's favorite career role.

Cagney's bravura performance earned him his only Academy Award as Best Actor. For Warner Bros., it became their biggest box-office success in the company's history up to that time, nominated for nine Academy Awards and winning four. The success of the film also became a high point in Curtiz's career, with his nomination as Best Director. The film has been added to annals of Hollywood as a cinematic classic, preserved in the United States National Film Registry at the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant". Its stars were Humphrey Bogart, playing an expatriate living in Morocco, and Ingrid Bergman as a woman who was trying to escape the Nazis. The supporting cast features Paul Henreid, Claude Rains, Conrad Veidt, Sydney Greenstreet, and Peter Lorre. The picture received eight Academy Award nominations and won three, including one for Curtiz as Best Director.

thumb|upright 1.2|Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman in Casablanca (1942)

Another patriotic Curtiz film was This Is the Army (1943), a musical adapted from the stage play with a score by Irving Berlin. As America was engaged in World War II, the film boosted the morale of soldiers and the public. Kate Smith's rendition of "God Bless America" was one of the highlights of the film's nineteen songs.

As a result of the film's numerous popular and generic elements, such as ground and aerial combat, recruitment, training, and marching as well as comedy, romance, song, and dance, it was the most financially successful war-themed film of any kind made during World War II.

The script, the music, and the acting all came together to produce a remarkable picture, the likes of which Presley never again matched in his career. It received good reviews: Variety magazine declared that the film "Shows the young star [Presley] as a better than fair actor". The New York Times also gave it a favorable review: "As for Mr. Presley, in his third screen attempt, it's a pleasure to find him up to a little more than Bourbon Street shoutin' and wigglin'. Acting is his assignment in this shrewdly upholstered showcase, and he does it, so help us, over a picket fence." Presley later thanked Curtiz for giving him the opportunity to show his potential as an actor; of his 33 films, Elvis considered it his favorite.

The final film that Curtiz directed was The Comancheros, released six months before his death from cancer on April 10, 1962. Curtiz was ill during the shoot, but star John Wayne took over directing on the days Curtiz was too ill to work. Wayne did not want to take a co-director credit.

Directing style

Preparation

Curtiz always invested the time necessary to prepare all aspects of a film before shooting. "As far as I am concerned," he said, "the chief work in directing a film is in preparing a story for the screen ... Nothing is as important ... A director can be likened to the field general of an army. He should know more clearly than anyone else what is coming, what to expect ... I believe this as a sound working plan."

By putting time into preparation, he cut down on delays after production started, which gave him the ability to put out about six films a year until the 1940s. He turned out Front Page Woman (1935) in only three weeks, despite its rapid-fire newspaper dialogue with Bette Davis, then turned around and made Captain Blood almost entirely on the sound stage without having to leave the studio.

Cinematography

thumb|Curtiz planning how best to photograph a scene with [[Lil Dagover in 1932]]

Sidney Rosenzweig argues that Curtiz had his own personal style, which was in place by the time of his move to America: "high crane shots to establish a story's environment; unusual camera angles and complex compositions in which characters are often framed by physical objects; much camera movement; subjective shots, in which the camera becomes the character's eye; and high contrast lighting with pools of shadows".

In preparing scenes, Curtiz liked to compare himself to an artist, painting with characters, light, motion, and background on a canvas. However, during his career, this "individualism," says Robertson, "was hidden from public view" and undervalued because, unlike many other directors, Curtiz's films covered such a wide spectrum of different genres.

Curtiz struggled with English as he was too busy filming to learn the language. He sometimes used pantomimes to show what he wanted an actor to do, which led to many amusing anecdotes about his choice of words when directing. David Niven never forgot Curtiz's saying to "bring on the empty horses" when he wanted to "bring out the horses without riders," so much so that he used it for the title of his memoir. Similar stories abound: For the final scene in Casablanca Curtiz asked the set designer for a "poodle" on the ground so the wet steps of the actors could be seen on camera. The next day the set designer brought a little dog not realizing Curtiz meant "puddle" not "poodle". But not all actors who worked under Curtiz were as amused by his malapropisms. Edward G. Robinson, whom Curtiz directed in The Sea Wolf, had a different opinion about language handicaps by foreigners to Hollywood:

Personal life

When he left for the United States, Curtiz left behind an illegitimate son and an illegitimate daughter. Their obituaries make no mention of such a marriage.

Curtiz had left Europe before the rise of Nazism: other members of his family were less fortunate. He once asked Jack Warner, who was going to Budapest in 1938, to contact his family and help them get exit visas. Warner succeeded in getting Curtiz's mother to the U.S., where she spent the rest of her life living with her son. He could not rescue Curtiz's only sister, her husband, or their three children, who were sent to Auschwitz, where her husband and two of the children were murdered.

Curtiz paid part of his own salary into the European Film Fund, a benevolent association which helped European refugees in the film business establish themselves in the U.S.

In 1933, Curtiz became a naturalized U.S. citizen. By the early 1940s, he had become fairly wealthy, earning $3,600 per week and owning a substantial estate, complete with polo pitch. She was Curtiz's helper whenever his need to deal with scripts or other elements went beyond his grasp of English and he often phoned her for advice when presented with a problem while filming. Cary Grant swore he would never work with him again after his experience filming Night and Day.

Death

Curtiz died from cancer on April 10, 1962, aged 75. At the time of his death, he was living alone in a small apartment in Sherman Oaks, California.

Legacy

Curtiz directed some of the best known films of the 20th century, achieving numerous award-winning performances from actors. Before moving to Hollywood from his native Hungary when he was 38 years of age, he had already directed 64 films in Europe. He soon helped Warner Bros. become the nation's fastest-growing studio, directing 102 films during his career in Hollywood, more than any other director. Curtiz himself was nominated five times and won as Best Director for Casablanca.

He earned a reputation as a harsh taskmaster to his actors, as he micromanaged every detail on the set. With his background as director since 1912, his experience and dedication to the art made him a perfectionist. He had an astounding mastery of technical details. Hal B. Wallis, who produced a number of his major films, including Casablanca, said Curtiz had always been his favorite director:

Some, such as screenwriter Robert Rossen, ask whether Curtiz has "been misjudged by cinema history," since he is not included among those often considered to be great directors, such as John Ford, Howard Hawks, Orson Welles and Alfred Hitchcock: "He was obviously a talent highly alert to the creative movements of his time such as German expressionism, the genius of the Hollywood studio system, genres such as film noir, and the possibilities offered by talented stars."

Film historian Catherine Portuges has described Curtiz as one of the "most enigmatic of film directors, and often underrated."