Don Siegel: No Time For Flowers

The art of Siegel is one that, no matter how much time may pass, how many retrospectives there are, or how many books written about him, will never quite get its 'due'. I first came across him as a named entity in Andrew Sarris' The American Cinema, which features him and several other 'misfit' directors in the 'Expressive Esoterica' category: all of them artists who, although one might have seen one or two of their works, don't have the reputation or consistency of career to sustain a non-cultist interest. Siegel only late in life got to work semi-regularly on his own terms as a producer and recognized auteur, to the point where he jumped at the chance to have each production be signed as 'A Siegel Film'.

Like many of his contemporaries (Frank Tashlin, John Frankenheimer, Douglas Sirk), he still represented a sort of 'no-nonsense' ethos of filmmaking as an industrial trade that one learned and didn't brag about, that a director was merely a facilitator of a production, not an author -- on the other side, he did live long enough to see himself recognized as an auteur by European and American critics, and you have to think that 'A Siegel Film' was done in response to the respect and pride he must have felt after decades of toiling away in the system. You don't do that sort of thing unless you actually care about the art, so although Siegel's gruffness feigns at irreverence to his labor, it's readily apparent that he did conceive of himself as a unique presence, and that's why he gained a reputation of someone who would stand-up to producers and actors until they clawed him away from the final cut.

Going through his filmography as I am wont to do, I felt that reputation was appropriate, because it's clear that Siegel 'lost' as often as he 'won': after a beginning as a montage editor at Warners for directors like Raoul Walsh and Michael Curtiz, then making some cornball short films, Siegel floundered across several genres until Riot In Cell Block 11, which set him on a general path towards being a crime/western specialist. Before Riot, you'd find it hard to understand Siegel's point-of-view -- from the expressionist extremities of The Verdict and Night Unto Night, to the B-movie speediness of The Duel At Silver Creek and The Big Steal, to the dull, sub-Ninotchka Cold Warrior junk of No Time For Flowers, it is unavoidable to conclude that for about a decade after the war, he was a capable hired hand, but without any real calling card that would catapult him past his fellow journeymen brethren.

I make note of all of this because, after his successes of the late 60s, it's not a question that Siegel is an auteur, and his career becomes much more consistent in quality during the 1970s, but he got saddled with a lot of bad projects before and after that decade. To listen to his interviews is to see a man of obvious intelligence downplaying it at every opportunity, a liberal-minded person whose pugnacious relationship with producers made him lean towards a disavowed conservatism. The Siegel ethic is clear: renegade men, whether they be assassins, cops, criminals, or humans against an alien invasion, men who cannot square their skills and cynical behavior with a universe that has no place for them in it, and the women in their life who either die alongside them or are helpless to stop their destruction, often self-inflicted. Siegel represents a post-war libertarian philosophy that is hostile to all systems, an existentialism that denies itself the counterculture solidarity that the beatniks and hippies would later make famous. No Siegel protagonist survives their stories without some scars, if not outright death, the world makes mincemeat of them when they run out of luck, and like Charley Varrick, they only have their 'genius' to fall back on.

This type of unrelenting masculine pessimism is quite common among directors who work at telling pulp stories, and someone like John Carpenter would later propel it forward into cosmic realms that Siegel, as a hard-bitten materialist, never entertained after Invasion of the Body Snatchers. If you had to find an American equivalent to Jean-Pierre Melville, Siegel would be close, but Siegel's bullheaded neo-classicism never broaches the smooth desolate modernism that Melville made into his trademark. Melville was a poet of the underworld that he saw in noir and Renoir and in the French Resistance, but Siegel better resembled the prose of Jim Thompson or Mickey Spillane, he made images which punched you in the nose and didn't wait for you to get back up. Unlike Robert Aldrich, Sam Peckinpah or Sam Fuller, there isn't a strong historical/political dimension to Siegel's cinema -- there are individuals, there are organizations, and then there's everyone who gets in the way. It's a highly myopic worldview that could almost become abstract, but the key to Siegel is that while he is a minimalist, he stays out of the heads of characters, there is little psychology to the psychosis he depicts, there is adjustment or maladjustment to reality and little nuance between.

Siegel's influence on Clint Eastwood is evident in the fast set-ups and strong, semi-spontaneous feeling that both artists share. None of their films feel over-elaborated or arcane, and only a few indicate the sin of self-consciousness (The Beguiled is the one time that it seems Siegel tried to make an 'art film' for his 70s European admirers, and I think it is worse-off for that reason). Eastwood dedicated Unforgiven to Don Siegel and Sergio Leone, and you can see how each director imparted the young Eastwood with important wisdom: Leone's pack-rat formalism and obsession with mythology, and Siegel's nose-to-the-grindstone pragmatism and anti-social stance. But Siegel, if not always sympathizing with his outcasts, certainly sided with them against their enemies -- Eastwood instead brought a critical complexity and contextual depth in films like True Crime or The 15:17 to Paris that Siegel didn't care to do, and I must say that Siegel's own wishes to be able to make comedies and romances were a promise that Eastwood fulfilled with great skill in his own directing/acting career, a skill that I don't think Siegel was ever able to put to use, if he had it.

I conclude with Siegel that he was a director who made several crucial films and got to work with almost all of the great action talent of his era, but he didn't always make their best films, and I'm not sure if Siegel had the taste or the wherewithal to say no to scripts that didn't do him any favors. Every director has to work and eat and pay the bills, there's no shame in that, but Siegel's authorship was dependent than most on the stars aligning in just the right way, and when they were aligned, especially with Eastwood, he was able to shine very brightly as a consummate craftsman of overclocked crime stories and moody westerns. He worked very well with Elvis Presley, he gave Steve McQueen an excellent ensemble war picture before The Great Escape, he made Eli Wallach into a hell of a hitman, and helped to complete a crucial 60s elegiac western with Richard Widmark.

Siegel didn't have the luxuries of his more lauded peers, you get the sense that most of his films were completed in a scrappy ad-hoc fashion by the skin of everyone's teeth -- he worked best outside of studio sets, in the real world with real locales, and although he didn't indulge often in 'pretty' landscape wide shots, his films are very good looking and he never neglected to make every environment seem interesting and lived-in -- the beige-toned sweat and exhaustion of a film like Madigan is palpable to this day. So in the exchange of a consistent career, I think Siegel got to achieve more highs in the fashion he liked to, his classics are all-timer classics in their genres, even if you have to dig a little bit to find them.

Andrew Sarris wrote that Siegel, in the late 60s, could have become a victim of Hollwood's 'excluded middle' -- meaning, the movies that aren't trying to win awards, but also aren't trying to be big blockbusters. But Siegel did tough it out, and in the 1970s made many of his masterpieces regardless of the trends towards corporate consolidation and high concept films in the industry. He faltered in the early 1980s, partially because his health failed him, but by that point he had survived so many transitions in the industry -- the post-war collapse of the box office, the Paramount Decree, the advent of television, the vogue for international productions, the inception of New Hollywood. I think by the 80s, he more than deserved his laurels and his rest, and today, the 'excluded middle' is still endangered, but Siegel's descendants are working as hard as ever to make their names known across the world -- his influence is felt in the films of Jesse V. Johnson, Peter Hyams and John Hyams, Yugo Sakamoto, Martin Campbell, and Jaume Collet-Sera. Siegel's cinema isn't that of 'the wind in the trees' -- there's no time to sit and ponder the questions of existence, there's survival at hand and no one is exempt from the bluntness of death. The urgency that he felt this was important to tell us remains in the DNA of all action filmmaking and filmmakers, staying one step ahead of total calamity, not stopping to smell the flowers until you're buried six-feet under.