• Born: Dec 18, 1904 in Oakland, California
• Died: Mar 08, 1975 in Lancaster, California
• Occupation: Director, Cinematographer, Actor, Writer
• Active: '20s-'50s
• Major Genres: Comedy, Drama
• Career Highlights: Shane, Big Business, Giant
• First Major Screen Credit: Black Cyclone (1925)

Biography

American producer/director/cinematographer George Stevens made his professional acting debut at age five in the company of his actor parents. Developing an interest in photography as a hobby, Stevens became an assistant movie cameraman at the age of 17. From 1927 through 1930, he was principal cameraman at Hal Roach Studios, shooting such classic two-reelers as Laurel and Hardy's Two Tars (1928) and Below Zero (1930), as well as a handful of feature films, including the 1927 Western No Man's Law. Stevens was elevated to director in 1930 for Roach's Boy Friends series. Dismissed from Roach during an economy drive in 1931, Stevens moved to Universal and then to RKO to direct comedy shorts (he later professed to hate two-reel comedies, though he enjoyed the company of the comedians with whom he worked, especially Laurel and Hardy). RKO promoted Stevens to features in 1934; after several medium-budget projects, he was assigned the "A" feature Alice Adams (1935) over the protests of the film's star, Katharine Hepburn. When Alice Adams proved successful, Hepburn's attitude toward Stevens did a "180," and she insisted that he direct her starring vehicle Quality Street (1936). Another Stevens triumph from this period was the Astaire/Rogers confection Swing Time (1936), in which the director's father Landers Stevens played an important supporting role. Producing as well as directing from 1938's Vivacious Lady onward, Stevens turned out a string of critical and financial successes: Gunga Din (1939) for RKO, Woman of the Year (1942) for MGM, and Penny Serenade (1941), Talk of the Town (1942) and The More the Merrier (1943), all for Columbia. Stevens' directorial style displayed the same acute sense of visual dynamics that had distinguished his earlier work as a cameraman; the director refined and improved upon that style through sweat and persistence. Once he reached the "A" list, Stevens became one of the most meticulous and painstaking directors in the business, commencing production only after extensive research, filming take after take until perfection was achieved, and then spending as much as a full year editing the finished product. During World War II, Stevens was made an officer in the Signal Corps, filming vivid color footage of such historical milestones as the D-Day maneuvers and the liberation of the death camps; much of this footage was incorporated into the 1984 documentary George Stevens: A Filmaker's Journey, assembled by George Stevens Jr. After the war, Stevens produced and directed his final RKO assignment, I Remember Mama (1948), then moved to Paramount for what many consider his crowning achievement -- 1951's A Place in the Sun, a brilliant filmization of the Theodore Dreiser novel An American Tragedy. While much of the film's content is dated, Stevens succeeded in transferring a bulky and verbose novel to the screen in purely visual terms; he also thrilled the bobbysoxer fans of Montgomery Clift and Elizabeth Taylor by shooting their love scenes in huge, provocatively lit closeups. A Place in the Sun won Stevens his first Oscar for best directing in 1951. Fifteen years later, he threatened legal action against NBC should the network edit out any portion of Place in the Sun for telecasting purposes, and he was backed up in his suit by the California Legislature. The more time and effort Stevens expended on his individual projects, the fewer he produced. His output between 1953 and 1959 consisted of Shane (1953); Giant (1956), in which he put the awkward Cinemascope screen to superb artistic use, winning his second Oscar in the process; and The Diary of Anne Frank (1959). From 1960 through 1965, Stevens labored on a mammoth filmization of the life of Christ, The Greatest Story Ever Told (1965). The film was a failure for several reasons, not least of which was Stevens' curious insistence upon using big-name stars in every role (this is the movie in which John Wayne, as the centurion at the Crucifixion, proclaims "Trew-ly this man wuz the son of Gawd"). Greatest Story lost Stevens his hard-earned autonomy; for his last film, The Only Game in Town (1970), he was little more than a glorified hired hand to stars Elizabeth Taylor and Warren Beatty. While George Stevens' reputation was tarnished by the disappointments of his last years, critics and fans alike have taken a "forgive and forget" stance since his death in 1975, preferring to cite his huge manifest of hits rather than his final faltering misses. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

George Stevens: D-Day to Berlin Buy this Movie	George Stevens: A Filmmaker's Journey Buy this Movie	The Greatest Story Ever Told Buy this Movie	The Diary of Anne Frank Buy this Movie
Giant Buy this Movie	Shane Buy this Movie	A Place in the Sun Buy this Movie	I Remember Mama Buy this Movie

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George Stevens (1904-1975) is highly regarded for the diverse number of films he directed, his work ranging from romance and comedies to Westerns and historical epics. Nominated for five Academy awards for best director, he won twice, for the dramas "A Place in the Sun" and "Giant".

George Cooper Stevens is noted for allowing the actors in his films to improvise on the set, sometimes causing scenes to be shot dozens of times. His movies feature many of the most noted actors from the 1930s to 1960s, including Katherine Hepburn, Cary Grant, Spencer Tracy, Joel McCrea, Irene Dunne, Ginger Rogers, Jean Arthur, James Stewart, Fred Astaire, and Carole Lombard. While most of these films were romantic comedies, it was for dramas that he received his greatest kudos; as James Harvey noted in Romantic Comedy in Hollywood: "Probably his most serious liability as a comic filmmaker is his apparent lack of any anarchic or subversive or even dissident impulse. He has the temperament of a solid citizen, and he tends to temper and meliorate whatever is harsh or abrasive or unsettling in the familiar people and plots." While not as admired as other directors of his generation, such as Alfred Hitchcock, Howard Hawks, George Cukor, John Ford, and William Wyler, Stevens is credited with investing his films with subtle social messages; and several of his films - Gunga Din, Woman of the Year, A Place in the Sun, Shane, and Giant - are considered Hollywood classics by critics.

Began Directing Two-Reel Comedies

Stevens was born on December 18, 1904, in Oakland, California. He began acting and working as a stage manager for his father's theatrical company before moving to Hollywood in 1921 and finding work as a cameraperson. In 1927 he began directing two-reel comedies for Hal Roach and directed many silent films by comedians Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy. In the early 1930s he became one of RKO Studios' most important directors after he directed Katherine Hepburn her 1935 comedy Alice Adams. The following year he worked with dancers Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers on a film featuring songs by Jerome Kern, Swing Time. In 1938 Stevens directed James Stewart and Ginger Rogers in Vivacious Lady and was expected to direct the Marx Brothers comedy Room Service. When fellow director Howard Hawks was fired from the production of Gunga Din for budget overruns, however, Stevens was hired to replace him.

Starring Cary Grant and Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., Gunga Din is an adaptation of a Rudyard Kipling poem about British soldiers fighting on the Indian frontier. It is remembered mostly by film historians for the difficulties Stevens encountered during filming. For example, he and the film's writers improvised much of the movie since a script was never finalized. Stevens later recalled that the battle scenes were the greatest problem. Some scenes required 1,500 extras, hundreds of mules and horses, and a few elephants.

Stevens followed his action picture with two romantic melodramas, Vigil in the Night and Penny Serenade, before releasing two of his most respected comedies, Woman of the Year, featuring the first cinematic pairing of Hepburn and Spencer Tracy, and The More the Merrier. Critic James Agee assessed Stevens's abilities as a comedic director in The More the Merrier by noting in Agee on Film that the film is "partly nice and partly disappointing. The chiseling, cringing sex and claustrophobia of war-torn Washington might have delivered a really original, really native comedy, and the types are set up to carry this comedy are not bad in conception; they are spoiled in the execution. Stevens has a free, pretty feeling for business … for special colorations of talk…, and for gratuitous satire. … Yet the film as a whole is a tired souffl,, for unfortunately Stevens doesn't know where to stop.

Post-War Films and Activities

During World War II Stevens traveled to Europe as a U.S. Army Signal Corps head of Special Motion Pictures Unit assigned to the 6th Army and was among those film-makers who photographed the grounds and interiors of Nazi Germany's concentration camps. When he returned to the United States, he expressed a wish to make a film nostalgic for simpler times. That film was I Remember Mama, about which Agee wrote that Stevens "developed while he was away at war, like a few other talented picture-makers. … In Mama … he felt no timidity about tackling a script that lacked action and a strong plot. He concentrated, with confidence and resourcefulness, on character, mood and abundant detail, and on the continuous invention of satisfying and expressive things to look at." Stevens chose to shoot many different versions of the same scenes, sometimes taking ten days to film one scene, in order to compose montage sequences comprised of varied camera angles. The result was a film costing more than three million dollars, an outrageous sum for 1948, and a tremendous critical and public success that never recouped its production expenses.

Among his other postwar projects was the short-lived Liberty Studios, which Stevens set up with directors Frank Capra and William Wyler and which produced only one film, Capra's classic It's a Wonderful Life. Stevens also served as president of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and briefly became embroiled in the blacklisting scandals perpetrated by Senator Joseph McCarthy's Un-American Activities Committee and the effort to route out suspected communists during the height of the cold war. Stevens was responsible for preventing screenwriter Dalton Trumbo from receiving an Academy Award for his screenplay The Brave One because the blacklisted writer had deceived the Academy by using the pseudonym Robert Rich.

An American Trilogy

Of the films Stevens released in the 1950s, A Place in the Sun, Shane, and Giant have collectively been considered his "American Trilogy," for it is through these films he attempts to critique elements of American culture and society. Based on Theodore Dreiser's novel An American Tragedy, A Place in the Sun concerns the attempt of a young middle-class male (Montgomery Clift) to marry into society (represented by Elizabeth Taylor). His aspirations are thwarted, however, when he impregnates a woman from his own class (Shelley Winters). Shane, listed as one of the American Film Institute's Top 100 American Films, stars Alan Ladd as a former gunslinger who is forced to defend homesteaders from ruthless land-grabbers. According to Stanley J. Solomon in Beyond Formula: American FilmGenres, "Shane was evidently conceived in terms of an interpretation of the Western genre film as an allegorical battleground between good and evil. … But Stevens chose to heighten the symbolic import of the genre's typical iconography (costume, language, manners, and rituals) by setting his film in an immense, open environment, dominated by the snowcapped mountains of Wyoming in the distance. By continually locating the immediate scene within a vast, calm, rigidly endurable locale, Stevens deliberately and recurringly directs our attention to the genre's mythic dimensions, in regard to the lonely hero, the isolated community, the natural conflict between people and the terrain, and the violent power struggle between the land-grabbing local tyrant and the individual homestead farmers over who will control the territory." In filming Giant, Stevens earned his second Academy Award for his adaptation of Edna Ferber's novel about the beginnings of the Texas oil boom and the instant wealth it provided. At the heart of the story, however, is a love triangle between characters portrayed by Elizabeth Taylor, Rock Hudson, and James Dean in his third and final film.

Directed Three Final Films

Before he retired in the early 1970s, Stevens directed three more films, The Diary of Anne Frank, The Greatest Story Ever Told, and The Only Game in Town. While his casting of Millie Perkins in the title role in the first film drew negative criticism, Anne Frank co-star Shelley Winters won an Academy award for best supporting actress, and Stevens won another Academy award nomination. In The Greatest Story Ever Told, he attempted to create an epic film about the life of Jesus Christ, starring Max von Sydow, Charlton Heston, Sidney Poitier, and John Wayne. The film's detractors were numerous and included James Harvey, who wrote that "Even when he embarks on a mad and ludicrous enterprise like The Greatest Story Ever Told, the result, though elephantine, turns out to be impersonal, perfectly without religious feeling of any kind, and in its way rather modest: a life of Jesus drawn not only from Scripture but from a Reader's Digest rewrite of them." Stevens's final film, The Only Game in Town, starred Warren Beatty. Reputedly angered that 20th Century-Fox didn't promote the film effectively, Stevens opted to retire following its release. He died on March 9, 1975, in Paris.

Books

Agee, James, Agee on Film: Criticism and Comment on the Movies, Random House, 2000.

Behlmer, Rudy, America's Favorite Movies: Behind the Scenes, Frederick Ungar, 1982.

Harvey, James, Romantic Comedy in Hollywood, Alfred A. Knopf, 1987.

Sarris, Andrew, editor, St. James Guide to Film Directors, Visible Ink Press, 1998.

Silvester, Christopher, editor, The Grove Book of Hollywood, Grove Press, 1998.

Solomon, Stanley J., Beyond Formula: American Film Genres, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1976.

Online

Reel Classics,http://www.reelclassics.com/ (February 21, 2002).

For more information on George Stevens, visit Britannica.com.

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