Don’t expect the law to protect you ( High Noon), anymore than the institution to which you’ve committed your life ( From Here to Eternity), and certainly not government apparatchiks ( Day of the Jackal).
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Zinnemann’s world is a tougher place than traditionally described and full of hard lessons. When Zinnemann deals with religious practices in The Nun’s Story and A Man For All Seasons, he casts a highly sceptical and rationalist eye on them. Yet this approach often reduces Zinnemann’s themes to watery pieties about conscience, with misleading religious and political implications. To approach Fred Zinnemann’s work the conventional way is to trace its historical or cultural impact, or how individual films enlivened genres like the western or film noir, or how his performers achieved a rare intimacy onscreen. When this director holds a close-up, it most often shows the character struggling to understand, whether it is a despondent and exhausted little boy ( The Search), a teenaged girl who keeps trying on personas like hats ( The Member of the Wedding), or the adult playwright still immature from not having pushed the limits of her principles ( Julia). This could mean facing one’s own cowardice ( Act of Violence), or betrayal by the body ( The Men), or fear in the light of duty ( High Noon), or social pressure from the group ( From Here to Eternity), or addiction ( A Hatful of Rain). Realizing the self, struggling against pressures both public and private, constitutes the goal of Zinnemann’s characters. These titles, which enjoy enduring popularity, have taken their place in the canon of official classics, with ample literature by both champions and detractors that debates their merits from various angles. However impressive awards may seem, his most famous titles – High Noon, From Here to Eternity, A Man For All Seasons – also struck a chord with mainstream audiences, catching the post-war spirit of questioning society during the ostensibly complacent 1950s.
BEHOLD A PALE HORSE 1964 CAST PLUS
In between, he won all the big awards, including four for Best Director from the New York Film Critics, and five Academy Awards (including Best One-Reel Short in 1938 and Best Short Documentary in 1951), plus the D.W.Griffith Award of the Director’s Guild of America in 1970, and the Lifetime Achievement award from the Berlin Film Festival in 1994. Zinnemann’s first directing credit comes exactly half a century before his last.
In Fred Zinnemann’s body of work – twenty-two feature films and nineteen documentary shorts – there are notably few guns but many trains, remarkably little romance or outright comedy, but much searching for consequences and externalising of interior dramas. The typical Zinnemann film reaches a climax when a clock ticks away the seconds while the protagonist – Gary Cooper or Audrey Hepburn or Jane Fonda – struggles with the enemy within, and somewhere close by there’s a locomotive coming. What I want to know is why he shoots it and what the consequences are. The fact that somebody shoots a gun is of no interest.