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Sydney Pollack, 1934-2008

May 27, 2008

Ladies gush over the bittersweet romance of The Way We Were (1973) and the Oscar-winning Out of Africa (1985); guys groove to the post-Watergate conspiracy thriller Three Days of the Condor (1975) and the outdoor drama of Jeremiah Johnson (1972); and everybody—everybody--loves Tootsie (1982). All four are big, star-filled, well-received Hollywood movies, and all were directed by Sydney Pollack, who died of cancer today at the age of 73.

 

Pollack was a straight-ahead, no-nonsense filmmaker who appeared to be a really nice, warm guy. (It’s ironic that Tootsie is his only comedy.) He directed some 20 large-scale Hollywood films with such heavyweights as

Streep, Redford, Newman, Hoffman, Mitchum, Streisand, Cruise, Penn, Kidman, Ford, Fonda and Pacino—and that couldn’t have been an easy feat in so ego-driven an industry. On the production side, Pollack’s projects, while frequently crafted in Hollywood, appeared to be much more personal and independent-styled. Some of the more notable films of the nearly 50 he produced include Up at the Villa (2000), Sliding Doors (1998), Sense and Sensibility (1995), Flesh and Bone (1993), Leaving Normal (1992) and Songwriter (1984).

 
And let’s not forget about the Pollack on the big screen as an actor. The last decade or so found Pollack doing a lot of solid, on-screen character work, frequently portraying corporate heavies with dangerous professional agendas, as was the case with his businessman in Changing Lanes (2002) and his senior law office partner in Michael Clayton (2007). More often than not, his contribution added a substantial charge to the proceedings—would we have felt the menace that Tom Cruise experienced in Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut (1999) if Pollack’s zillionaire hadn’t knocked a few balls around a blood-red pool table while calmly warning him that he was in over his head? Not bad for a guy who began as a television talent, appearing in such early Sixties boob tube staples as The Twilight Zone, Have Gun-Will Travel and Alfred Hitchcock Presents.  It was years later, when he was a successful filmmaker, that he made his biggest onscreen impression as talent agent George Fields in his own Tootsie. “Nobody wants to pay $20 to watch people living next to chemical waste,” he bellows to Dustin Hoffman about a play focusing on a couple that moves back to Love Canal. “They can see that in New Jersey!”

 

Posted by Laurence Lerman on May 27, 2008 | Comments (7)