Duel (Steven Spielberg, 1971)

Dennis Weaver in Duel (Steven Spielberg, 1971)

 Cast: Dennis Weaver, Jacqueline Scott, Eddie Fierstone, Lou Frizzell, Gene Dynarski, Lucille Benson, Tim Herbert, Charles Seel, Shirley O'Hara, Alexander Lockwood, Amy Douglas, Cary Loftin. Screenplay: Richard Matheson. Cinematography: Jack A. Marta. Art direction: Robert A. Smith. Film editing: Frank Morriss. Music: Billy Goldenberg.

Of course the protagonist of Steven Spielberg’s Duel is named David Mann. David vs. Goliath, man vs. machine, get it? This entertaining mashup of a road rage fable with a monster movie launched one of the greatest careers in movie history, and it began in that once-maligned medium, the TV movie. After its modest success as an ABC Movie of the Week – it was only 18th in the rankings of TV movies for 1971, but got good reviews and, more importantly, attracted industry notice – it was expanded into a theatrical feature that played internationally and had a limited release in the United States. Spielberg added the opening sequence of the car leaving the garage and hitting the road, wittily filmed from the point of view of the car, establishing it as much a character in the film as its driver (Dennis Weaver). Mann’s phone call home to his wife (Jacqueline Scott) was added, their unresolved quarrel making his nervousness and irritability more credible. Adding the sequence with the stalled school bus gave Spielberg a chance to heighten the suspense by showing the tanker truck as a malevolent, lurking monster with a single-minded focus on Mann – after he escapes, the truck gives the bus the push it needed. But even in the original version, the scenes at the gas station and in the diner are enough to establish Mann’s isolation and helplessness. Spielberg’s insistence on location shooting in rural Los Angeles County and along the Sierra Highway – the producers wanted to control the budget by faking a lot of the movie in the studio – adds immeasurably to the sense of Mann’s solitary plight. Spielberg often has trouble ending his movies – viz., the cemetery coda to Saving Private Ryan (1998) and the extended epilogue to Schindler’s List (1993), both of which have stirred critical debate – but he found the right one for Duel, with his victorious David tossing pebbles into the wreckage of the vanquished Goliath.

The Sugarland Express (Steven Spielberg, 1974)

William Atherton, Michael Sacks, and Goldie Hawn in The Sugarland Express

Cast: Goldie Hawn, William Atherton, Michael Sacks, Ben Johnson, Gregory Walcott, Steve Kanaly, Louise Latham, Harrison Zanuck, A.L. Camp, Jessie Lee Fulton, Dean Smith, Ted Grossman. Screenplay: Hal Barwood, Matthew Robbins, Steven Spielberg. Cinematography: Vilmos Zsigmond. Art direction: Joe Alves. Film editing: Edward M. Abroms, Verna Fields. Music: John Williams. 

Critics disagree in the most interesting ways. When Roger Ebert reviewed The Sugarland Express in 1974, he disliked Steven Spielberg's use of the automobiles: "If the movie doesn't finally succeed, that's because Spielberg has paid too much attention to all those police cars (and all the crashes they get into), and not enough to the personalities of his characters." But for Pauline Kael, the cars were one of the major reasons she referred to Spielberg's first theatrical feature as "one of the most phenomenal début films in the history of movies": "Spielberg patterns the cars; he makes them dance and crash and bounce back. The cars have tiffs, wrangle, get confused. And so do the people." For once (and I don't think it always happened), Kael's insight into a director's gift was more acute than Ebert's. She got at the essence of at least one aspect of Spielberg's genius as a moviemaker: the ability to provide an environment for characters, to express their personalities through their toys and tools. Goldie Hawn never gave a better performance than she does in this film, perfectly capturing the naïveté, the vanity, and the implacable determination of Lou Jean, showing the grit behind the giggle. (She and William Atherton do a wonderful scene in which they do almost nothing but laugh.) I think Ben Johnson is a little underused as the highway patrol captain in charge of trying to capture Lou Jean and Clovis, while at that same time trying to rescue the young officer (Michael Sacks) they have hijacked, but maybe that's because Johnson was such an old pro that we naturally want to see more of him. The film was unaccountably not a box office success, but to my mind it's one of Spielberg's best movies, with a texture of supporting characters (and cars) that aptly reminded Kael of Preston Sturges.

Poltergeist (Tobe Hooper, 1982)

Poltergeist (Tobe Hooper, 1982)

Cast: Craig T. Nelson, JoBeth Williams, Beatrice Straight, Dominique Dunne, Oliver Robins, Heather O'Rourke, Michael McManus, Virginia Kiser, Martin Casella, Richard Lawson, Zelda Rubinstein, James Karen. Screenplay: Steven Spielberg, Michael Grais, Mark Victor. Cinematography: Matthew F. Leonetti. Production design: James H. Spencer. Film editing: Michael Kahn. Music: Jerry Goldsmith.

Poltergeist has Steven Spielberg written all over it -- literally, since he wrote the story and collaborated on the screenplay, but also thematically, since its setting is the suburbia in which he grew up and which he portrayed in so many of his films. So it's no surprise that the controversy over how much of the film is really Tobe Hooper's continues to this day. It's clear that Poltergeist is a lot closer in tone and technique to Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) and E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982) than it is to The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1972). That in itself should put an end to any arguments over authorship. I am not a fan of horror movies, and I found Hooper's earlier film simply unpleasant -- shocks without substance. Not that there's much substance in Poltergeist, either. It's full of hokum about the afterlife and exploitation of some elementary terrors, but not much else that would ever make me want to think about it, let alone watch it again.

Saving Private Ryan (Steven Spielberg, 1998)

Tom Hanks, Edward Burns, Tom Sizemore, and Jeremy Davies in Saving Private Ryan

Capt. Miller: Tom Hanks
Sgt. Horvath: Tom Sizemore
Pvt. Reiben: Edward Burns
Pvt. Jackson: Barry Pepper
Pvt. Mellish: Adam Goldberg
Pvt. Caparzo: Vin Diesel
T-4 Medic Wade: Giovanni Ribisi
Cpl. Upham: Jeremy Davies
Pvt. Ryan: Matt Damon
Capt. Hamill: Ted Danson
Sgt. Hill: Paul Giamatti
Lt. Col. Anderson: Dennis Farina
"Steamboat Willie": Joerg Stadler
Minnesota Ryan: Nathan Fillion
Gen. Marshall: Harve Presnell
War Dept. Col.: Dale Dye
War Dept. Col.: Bryan Cranston
Elderly Ryan: Harrison Young
Elderly Ryan's Wife: Kathleen Byron

Director: Steven Spielberg
Screenplay: Robert Rodat
Cinematography: Janusz Kaminski
Production design: Thomas E. Sanders
Film editing: Michael Kahn
Music: John Williams

The criticisms usually leveled at Saving Private Ryan are that its framing scenes of the elderly Ryan visiting the cemetery in Normandy are superfluous and sentimental, that it trades on war-movie clichés such as the ethnically mixed company of soldiers (an Italian, a Jew, a Brooklynite, a Bible-quoting Southerner, and so on), that it eschews any portrayal of the enemy as other than cannon-fodder, and that there's no overall originality of vision on its director's part. And they're all valid criticisms. Are they outweighed by the sheer brilliance of Steven Spielberg's movie-making -- and that of his usual team of cinematographer Janusz Kaminski, editor Michael Kahn, and composer John Williams? As a lover of movies I have to say they are. I would like Robert Rodat's screenplay to be edgier and more intelligent. I would like for the film to provoke thought and to give us a new vision on World War II. But each time I watch the film I come away admiring the way Spielberg and company push my reservations about it into the background as I'm caught once again by the masterly way they manipulate both the medium and its audience. I have learned to ask more of movies than Spielberg gives us -- the unique personal visions of Ozu and Hitchcock and Tarkovsky, for example -- but I'm also content to suspend my expectation that all movies should aspire to that standard and to let myself be manipulated into temporary submission to simple wonder at mastery of the medium.

Close Encounters of the Third Kind (Steven Spielberg, 1977)

Cary Guffey in Close Encounters of the Third Kind

Roy Neary: Richard Dreyfuss
Claude Lacombe: François Truffaut
Ronnie Neary: Teri Garr
Jillian Guiler: Melinda Dillon
David Laughlin: Bob Balaban
Barry Guiler: Cary Guffey
Project Leader: J. Patrick McNamara
Farmer: Roberts Blossom

Director: Steven Spielberg
Screenplay: Steven Spielberg
Cinematography: Vilmos Zsigmond
Production design: Joe Alves
Film editing: Michael Kahn
Music: John Williams

There are two undeniable facts about Steven Spielberg as a director: He is one of the great visual storytellers, and he often doesn't know how to end his movies. The latter is usually held against him, as with the extended didacticism of the concluding scenes of two of his greatest films, Schindler's List (1993) and Saving Private Ryan (1998). We can see both at work in Close Encounters of the Third Kind, the film that let everyone know that his big breakthrough movie, Jaws (1975), was more than just beginner's luck. Spielberg resists spelling things out for the viewer through dialogue from the beginning, letting images and situations carry the narrative weight. Even a simple gag can work wonders: Roy Neary, the lineman out to resolve a power outage, is stopped at a railroad crossing to look at his maps when we see headlights behind his truck. A car then pulls around him and the driver calls him an asshole. But then another set of headlights shows up, and instead of pulling around him, the lights go up and over the truck as Roy has his first close encounter. The first sightings of the alien ships are thrillingly enigmatic: Where can Spielberg go with this? But by the time we get to the final payoff, things drag out much too long, as if Spielberg has become so enamored of the special effects that he can't bring himself to lose a minute of them. Nevertheless, Close Encounters is epochal filmmaking, not just in its elevation of sci-fi to a major film genre but also in its revelation of Spielberg's genius for instilling a sense of wonder in an audience.

Lincoln (Steven Spielberg, 2012)

Sally Field and Daniel Day-Lewis in Lincoln

Abraham Lincoln: Daniel Day-Lewis
Mary Todd Lincoln: Sally Field
William Seward: David Strathairn
Robert Lincoln: Joseph Gordon-Levitt
W.N. Bilbo: James Spader
Preston Blair: Hal Holbrook
Thaddeus Stevens: Tommy Lee Jones
Robert Latham: John Hawkes
Alexander Stephens: Jackie Earle Haley
Edwin Stanton: Bruce McGill
Richard Schell: Tim Blake Nelson
John Hay: Joseph Cross
Ulysses S. Grant: Jared Harris
Fernando Wood: Lee Pace
George Pendleton: Peter McRobbie
Elizabeth Keckley: Gloria Reuben
George Yeaman: Michael Stuhlbarg
Clay Hoggins: Walton Goggins
Corporal Ira Clark: David Oyelowo
First White Soldier: Lukas Haas
Second White Soldier: Dane DeHaan
Samuel Beckwith: Adam Driver
Lydia Smith: S. Epatha Merkerson

Director: Steven Spielberg
Screenplay: Tony Kushner
Based on a book by Doris Kearns Goodwin
Cinematography: Janusz Kaminski
Production design: Rick Carter
Film editing: Michael Kahn
Music: John Williams

The all-star patriotic historical pageant celebrating American democracy had long been a featured genre of Hollywood films until the disillusionments of Vietnam and Watergate put it pretty much out of favor. But during the brief resurgence of liberal optimism after the election of Barack Obama, Steven Spielberg decided to bring it out of mothballs with a film about Abraham Lincoln's struggles to pass the 13th amendment, banning slavery in the United States. He initially planned to star Liam Neeson in the title role, but when Neeson decided he was too old for the part, the choice fell on Daniel Day-Lewis, the most chameleonic of actors. Lincoln has been played on screen by actors as varied as Walter Huston, Henry Fonda, and Raymond Massey, but Day-Lewis covered himself with glory and encumbered himself with a third Oscar in the role. It is in fact a superb performance, emphasizing the humanity of the man with depictions of his marital problems, his earthy sense of humor (no previous movie Lincoln was ever heard to utter the word "shit"), and above all his willingness to play down-and-dirty politics. The bulk of the drama is in the maneuverings to get a two-thirds majority in the House of Representatives to ratify the amendment, which has substantial opposition even within the president's own party, the Republicans. This means maneuvering some of the holdouts with promises of government jobs and patronage, a task that falls to a team of lobbyists led by W.N. Bilbo, played beautifully by James Spader. It also involves persuading the most volatile of abolitionists, Thaddeus Stevens, to utter compromising language on the floor of the House, in which he asserts that all men are equal before the law, but not necessarily equal "in all things," creating a fiery, funny scene for Tommy Lee Jones as Stevens. Lincoln is also forced to conceal that he is engaged in peace negotiations with the Confederates, fearing that this would lead to postponement of the vote on the amendment. Tony Kushner's screenplay is more cerebral than most, focusing on points of law and political maneuverings, which is why some reviewers and audiences were not fully enthusiastic about it. Though it was nominated for 12 Oscars, it won only two, for Day-Lewis and for production design, losing best picture to Argo (Ben Affleck) and best director to Ang Lee for Life of Pi. Both losses, I think, are inexcusable, as was Sally Field's loss as the fragile Mary Todd Lincoln to Anne Hathaway's lachrymose Fantine in Les Misérables (Tom Hooper). I suspect Lincoln will grow in esteem over the years, thanks to its many finely detailed performances, the superb re-creation of a period in its sets and costumes, and a general lack of cinematic clichés: John Williams even manages to compose a score without quoting from "The Battle Hymn of the Republic," "The Star-Spangled Banner," or any number of other sure-fire, heart-tugging patriotic melodies.

Bridge of Spies (Steven Spielberg, 2015)

It goes without saying that Steven Spielberg is one of the great directors, with a seldom-equaled skill at visual storytelling and at building tension and suspense. But Spielberg tries too hard to make a statement in Bridge of Spies -- something about defending the Constitution -- when it could have been simply an engaging film about Cold War tensions. It also suffers from the wrong kind of star power: Tom Hanks has devolved from a terrific actor, skilled at both comedy and drama, into the movies' iconic Good Guy. Casting him as the lawyer James Donovan, forced to defend a Soviet spy, deprives the film of any ambiguity about Donovan's defense of Rudolf Abel (Mark Rylance). Hanks's Donovan can simply wrap himself in the Constitution and we're with him all the way, even as public opinion of the time turns against him. As a film actor Hanks has lost his dark side, so we know that whoever he plays will triumph. Imagine Bridge of Spies with Donovan played by George Clooney or Bradley Cooper, stars with just a touch of shadow in their personae, and you can see what I mean. Fortunately, the film is otherwise well-cast, including Rylance's Oscar-winning turn as Abel, as well as Scott Shepherd's impatient CIA man and Sebastian Koch's duplicitous East German lawyer, and the screenplay by Matt Charman and Joel and Ethan Coen manages a good deal of suspense. (Sometimes at the expense of historical accuracy: Donovan was never shot at in his home, as the film has it.) The Coen brothers were brought in to work on the first draft of Charman's screenplay, specifically on the section in which Donovan finds himself negotiating separately with the Soviets and the East Germans to engineer an exchange of Abel for imprisoned U2 pilot Francis Gary Powers (Austin Stowell) and an American student, Frederic Pryor (Will Rogers), who has been accidentally arrested in East Berlin. It's the best part of the movie, as Donovan wrangles not only with the conflicting egos and bureaucracies of the Soviet and East German officials but also with the CIA's insistence that only Powers need be included in the deal. Unfortunately, Spielberg doesn't know when his movie is over. Bridge of Spies should end with the exchange of spies at the bridge, but Spielberg keeps it running as Donovan boards the plane for home, returns to the arms of his family just as the news of his successful negotiation is breaking, gives his wife (Amy Ryan) the jar of marmalade he promised to bring her from London, witnesses her realization that he wasn't in London after all, and soon afterward rides to work on the bus where a woman who had previously frowned at him as a traitor now smiles at him as a hero after seeing his picture in the newspaper. All the while, Thomas Newman's score is telling us what we're supposed to feel. It's sheer sentimental anticlimax, of the sort that many critics decry in what are usually regarded as Spielberg's greatest films, Saving Private Ryan (1998) and Schindler's List (1993). (I happen to agree that the frame story of the aging Ryan's visit to the cemetery in Normandy is unnecessary, though I think the Yad Vashem sequence at the end of the latter film can be justified by the enormity of its subject matter.)  Bridge of Spies is by no means a bad movie, but it would have been a lot better if Spielberg hadn't given in to his instinct for overemphasis.

E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (Steven Spielberg, 1982)

There are movies you can watch over and over, either to savor something you hadn't particularly noticed before or in delighted anticipation of favorite parts. And then there are movies that you wish you could watch the way you did the first time you saw them, with surprise and exhilaration. I first saw E.T. in the summer of its initial release, with my wife and 8-year-old daughter in a theater in Chestnut Hill, Mass. It was an unspoiled delight, not layered over with the years' accretions of commentary and critique. I can never again see the movie that we saw that afternoon in Chestnut Hill. Watching it last night for the first time in years, I found that the best thing about it is that it brought back faint memories of the initial experience. It hasn't grown in my estimation, but on the other hand it also hasn't diminished very much. Spielberg is one of the great cinematic storytellers, particularly in his ability to narrate without words -- a gift that began to vanish from filmmaking with the arrival of sound almost 90 years ago. The opening of the film, with the scurrying, botanizing aliens and the clumsy, sinister humans who want to spy on them, is a near perfect example of showing instead of telling, and Spielberg's use of that technique is threaded throughout the movie. He also knows how to direct people, even precocious actors like Henry Thomas, Drew Barrymore, and Robert MacNaughton, who are utterly convincing in the way that movie kids rarely were before E.T. and seldom have been since. Yes, there are sequences that don't quite work, like the liberation of the frogs in the science class, and the special effects, such as the kids on the flying bicycles, look antiquated. The appearance of the resuscitated E.T., shrouded in a sheet and with a glowing heart, evoking Christian iconography, is a serious misstep. There are times when the John Williams score verges on overkill. And it undeniably helped set the film industry off in the wrong direction away from making movies for adults and toward crowd-pleasers. But all of that is part of the accretion of time. There is a timeless core to E.T. that helps it secure its place among the great movies.

Schindler's List (Steven Spielberg, 1993)

Amid the nearly universal acclaim for Schindler's List, two major criticisms are often heard. One is that Spielberg tends toward the sentimental, especially at the end of the film: He lets Schindler's remorse at having not been able to save more Jews from the Holocaust go on too long, and the appearance of the surviving Schindlerjuden with the actors who played them is an unnecessary extension of the film's already clear moral statement, blurring the distinction between documentary and fictionalized narrative. The other objection is that the appearance of the girl in the red coat during the liquidation of the Kraków ghetto is a too-showy use of film technique in what should be a gripping, realistic scene. The former objection is a highly subjective one: For many, the film needs something to soften the harshness of the story's catharsis. For others, the answer is simply, "Let Spielberg be Spielberg," a gifted but traditional storyteller whose vision of the material he chooses is invariably personal. It's the second objection that gets to the heart of what film criticism is all about. I think David Thomson, in his brief essay on Schindler's List in Have You Seen ... ?,  puts the objection most provocatively when he observes, "With that one arty nudge Spielberg assigned his sense of his own past to the collected memories of all the films he had seen. All of a sudden, the drab Krakow vista became a set, with assistant directors urging the extras into line.... It was an organization of art and craft designed to re-create a terrible reality done nearly to perfection. But in that one small tarting up ..., there lay exposed the comprehensive vulgarity of the venture." I can't be as harsh as Thomson, for one thing because when I saw the film in the theater shortly after its release in 1993, I didn't notice the red coat -- the one note of color in the middle of the black-and-white film -- because I am mildly red-green colorblind. (It's difficult to explain to the non-colorblind, but those of us with the color deficiency usually see the color in question, but it's not quite the same color that the normally sighted see.) I did, however, notice the little girl: The framing by Spielberg and cinematographer Janusz Kaminski puts her in the center of the action and makes her search for a hiding place evident even in a long shot. What I did miss that time was the reappearance of the girl's body in a stack of corpses later in the film, something that would be evident to anyone who had earlier seen the red of the coat. Later, when I saw the film on video, after having read about the controversy over the red highlight, I was able to perceive the color -- not so intense for me as perhaps for you, but once brought to my attention inescapable -- and to be shocked by its reappearance in the later scene. But only when I watched the film again last night did I realize the function of the "arty nudge": When we first see the girl in the red coat, we see her from the point of view of Schindler (Liam Neeson) himself, on a hillside above the ghetto. And when we see her body, we are seeing it again from the point of view of Schindler, visiting the cremation site where Amon Goeth (Ralph Fiennes) has been ordered to burn the bodies of those killed in the liquidation of the ghetto. It is a subtle but effective move because it coincides with (or perhaps precipitates) Schindler's decision to try to save as many of his Jewish workers as he can. Is it "arty" or "tarting up" or "vulgar"? Perhaps it is, but it's also effective filmmaking. And only the fact that the Holocaust remains so large and sacrosanct an event in the moral history of the West raises the question of whether "effective filmmaking" is inappropriate to such a subject.