Robert Aldrich Films | Robert Aldrich Filmography | Robert Aldrich Biography | Robert Aldrich Career | Robert Aldrich Awards

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Despite a commercially respectable career both within the studio system and as an independent producer-director, Robert Aldrich remains an ill-appreciated, if not entirely bothersome presence for most American critics. Andrew Sarris did praise Aldrich in 1968 as ?one of the most strikingly personal directors of the past two decades?; yet, for the most part, it has remained to the French and the English to attempt to unravel the defiant quirkiness of Aldrich's career. Only the otherworldly Kiss Me Deadly, which Paul Schrader unequivocably dubbed ?the masterpiece of film noir,? has received anything like the attention it deserves on this side of the Atlantic; yet the film is quite indicative of the bitter ironies, bizarre stylistics, and scathing nihilism characteristic of most of Aldrich's work.

In bringing Mickey Spillane's neo-fascist hero Mike Hammer to the screen, Kiss Me Deadly plays havoc with the conventions of the hardboiled detective, turning the existential avenger into a narcissistic materialist who exploits those around him for the benefit of his plush lifestyle. In an outrageous alteration of the novel's plot, Hammer becomes a modern neanderthal whose individualism is revealed as insanity when it causes him to botch a case involving a box of pure nuclear energy and thus the fate of the world. The result is a final shot of a mushroom cloud rising from a California beachhouse, consuming both Hammer and the bad guys. Only at this extreme and this distance in time has Aldrich's acute sense of irony impressed itself upon a liberal critical establishment whose repugnance to the surfaces of his films has usually served as an excuse for ignoring their savage, multi-layered critiques of Hollywood genres and American ideology.

The extremity of Aldrich's reinterpretations of the Western in Ulzana's Raid, of the war movie in Attack!, of the cop film in The Choirboys, and of the women's melodrama in Autumn Leaves betrays a cynicism so bitter that it could only arise from a liberal sensibility utterly disillusioned by an age in which morality has become a cruel joke. In fact, the shattering of illusions is central to Aldrich's work, and it is a powerfully self-destructive process, given the sweetness of the illusions and the anger of his iconoclasm. In Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?, a gothic horror film whose terms are explicitly the hideous realities hidden beneath the sugarcoating of the entertainment industry, Aldrich virtually defines the genre of camp, offering derisive laughter as the only alternative to an unbearably absurd cosmos. This sense of black comedy (which Aldrich shares with, and developed at the same time as, Hollywood contemporary Stanley Kubrick) has frequently been responsible for the volatile relationship his films have had with popular audiences. Given the context of a life-and-death prison football game in The Longest Yard, Aldrich was able to enlist the audience in the hero's bitter laughter in the face of a triumphant totalitarian authority. But when he adopted the same black humor toward the scandalous chicanery of the marginally psychotic cops in The Choirboys, he angered almost everybody, not the least of whom was the novel's author, Joseph Wambaugh.

Turned in an introspective direction, Aldrich's acid sensibility resulted in an intensely discomforting, stylistically alienated version of Clifford Odets's Hollywood-hating The Big Knife and the madly ambitious The Legend of Lylah Clare, an 8-1/2 cum Vertigo far too complex by any Hollywood standard. When turned outward toward the world at large, that same sensibility was responsible for a downbeat, disheartening masterpiece like the much-maligned Hustle, a film that succeeds better than almost any other in summing up the moral displacement and emotional anguish of the whole decade of the 1970s.

At his most skillful, Aldrich could juggle ideologically volatile issues so well that his most popular film, The Dirty Dozen, made during the politically turbulent period of the Vietnam War, played equally well to hawks and doves. Its story of death row prisoners exploited by the military bureaucracy into participation in a suicide raid, where they are to attack a chateau, slaughtering both German officers and civilians, seemed explicitly antiwar in its equation of heroism and criminality and its critique of the body-count mentality of a morally corrupt system. Yet, The Dirty Dozen still managed to emerge as a gung-ho war movie in the best Hollywood tradition. The multiple contradictions of the film's stance are nowhere clearer than in its climactic scene, where Aldrich has black athlete Jim Brown re-create one of his famous touchdown runs in order to set off an underground holocaust explicitly parallelled to Auschwitz.

In a far less popular film, the revisionist western Ulzana's Raid, Aldrich does confront the horrors of Vietnam with a nearly intolerable accuracy via the properly bloody metaphor of a cavalry company using West Point tactics to fight a band of Apache guerilla warriors. The film relentlessly refuses to diminish the brutality of the red man; even as it demonstrates the poverty of the white man's Christian idealism. The result is perhaps the first western ever to cast America's doctrine of Manifest Destiny in explicitly colonial terms.

More than any other mainstream director, Aldrich insisted on presenting the radical contradictions of American ideology. If we adopt a stance not nearly as cynical as his own in most of his films, we might observe that his capacity to do so has frequently resulted in sizable profits. Yet it is also important to remember that, while Stanley Kubrick (whose 1950s films bear striking stylistic and thematic similarities to those of Aldrich) found it necessary to retreat to England, reducing his output to two or three films a decade, Aldrich chose to fight it out in Hollywood, where his capacity for money-making allowed him the space to vent his own personal anger at the compromises we all must make.?ED LOWRY