Last Hurrahs

How do great film artists bring the curtain down on long careers?  Some address mortality head on, others embarrassingly attempt to recapture past form. The below list looks at the final celluloid flings of movie makers who each laboured in the industry for fifty years or more.

The Good

“Gertrud” (Carl Theodor Dreyer, 1964).  Absolutely loathed on first release, this drawing room drama about a woman’s decision to cut herself off from the world after a failed love affair was taken as evidence of the 75 year old Dreyer’s senility and/or laziness.  For those attuned to minimalist camera technique and astonishing framing, it is a masterpiece.

“A Passage to India” (David Lean, 1984). 76 year old Lean came out of a self-imposed 14 year retirement with a visually rich, dramatically assured version of EM Forster’s classic novel.

“The Dead” (John Huston, 1987).  On oxygen and confined to a wheel chair, 81 year old Huston rallied one last time.  An adaptation of James Joyce’s elegiac short story, “The Dead” is the most thematically appropriate swan song in film history.

The Bad

“A Countess from Hong Kong” (Charles Chaplin, 1967).  Chaplin had conceived the story in the 1930s but fatally made the film three decades later.  The woeful miscasting of Marlon Brando, slack pacing and anachronistic premise make this the saddest of codas.

“Buddy, Buddy” (Billy Wilder, 1981).  This desperately unfunny black comedy about two hit men - Wilder stalwarts Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau - suggests even comic geniuses lose their touch.  Wilder was his own severest critic; despite living another 30 years he declined to make another feature.

“Querelle” (Rainer Werner Fassbinder, 1982). I’m cheating here.  Fassbinder only made movies for 16 years.  But he made 43 of them.  Most were good, many great. He saved the worst for last.

The Interesting

“7 Women” (John Ford, 1966). At age 72 Ford had the courage to try something different: a drama about just over a dozen females in 1930s China.  Stage bound and uninspired in its cardboard villainy, it’s impeccably acted and framed.

“Family Plot” (Alfred Hitchcock, 1976).  The master of suspense went out mildly, though the parallel plots in this comic thriller about jewel thieves demonstrate that he never stopped experimenting.

“Maadadayo” (Akira Kurosawa, 1993).  Made exactly a half century after his debut, 83 year old Kurosawa shows strong personal identification with his protagonist, a retired school teacher not ready to give up his grip on life.