Title: Sidney Lumet
First published: 1993
Description: Sidney Lumet, director of landmark motion pictures such as The Pawnbroker, Twelve Angry Men, Serpico, and Network, has proven to be one of America's most enduring and diversified film directors. His singular career as a filmmaker - spanning more than forty years - has embraced both purely commercial projects and ones of enormous complexity and challenge. Lumet has distinguished himself as visionary while tackling every imaginable type of film.

In this exhaustive new study of Lumet, Jay Boyer presents the most up-to-date and inclusive analysis yet of the director's films - moving far beyond the limited analyses previously published. Boyer employs an eclectic approach in his appraisal of Lumet, with a strong emphasis toward auteur methods of criticism. An extensively detailed examination of individual films from Lumet's early, middle and recent periods incorporates discussion of technique (camera placement, mise en scene, editing, etc.) in relation to the narrative idea. This probing of the relationship between form and idea is the essence of Boyer's study.

He argues convincingly that while Lumet does not see himself as an auteur he is someone who has made a significant mark on motion picture art by making films with recurring ideas and motifs, while employing a restrained cinematic style that permits itself to remain subservient to the film narrative. Boyer also astutely observes and builds a case for Lumet as a director whose finest achievements place him inside a circle of filmmakers who belong to the New York School of Filmmaking. Along with those of his contemporaries John Frankenheimer, Delbert Mann, and Martin Scorsese, Lumet's films are often marked by their gritty, urban feel and air of authenticity.

Boyer's study is frank in its appraisal of both the distinguished achievements and the shortcomings of Lumet's life work. Highly readable and lucid, it belies the critical assumptions generally applied to Lumet's films to enable a fuller appreciation of his worth.
Subjects: Criticism and interpretation, Critique et interprétation, Werkverzeichnis, Réalisateurs de cinéma
People: Sidney Lumet (1924-)
LC classification: PN1998.3.L86 B69 1993