Classic Films

The writer, director, and comedy legend Mike Nichols died November 19th.

Born Michael Igor Peschkowsky in Berlin in 1931, Nichols fled Germany when he was just a boy. As a young man he studied with Lee Strasberg, and in 1960 made his Broadway debut as a performer. His first Broadway directorial credit was for Barefoot in the Park three years later.

[url]http://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/director-mike-nichols-dies-age-83-n252326[/url]

Nichols was one of a small handful of people to win an Emmy, a Tony, a Grammy and an Oscar. His body of work included some of the defining American films of the second half of the 20th century, among them “Working Girl,” “Silkwood” and “The Birdcage.” He won an Oscar in 1968 for the seminal comedy “The Graduate.”

Across an extraordinary five-decade career, he won both popular success and critical acclaim as he moved easily between farces, political satires, romantic dramas and literary adaptations. He was known as an actor’s director who gave his performers the freedom to be loose and theatrical.

“There’s nothing better than discovering, to your own astonishment, what you’re meant to do,” he once said. “It’s like falling in love.”

He was a natural-born filmmaker. Nichols had never stepped behind the camera when Warner Brothers asked him to direct the “Virginia Woolf” adaptation in 1966. But the finished product was technically self-assured and thematically mature — and Nichols quickly followed it with the cultural touchstone “The Graduate.”

[url]http://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/postscript-mike-nichols[/url]

To pick one item from his many résumés seems impractical, not to say unfair. The Nichols filmography is extensive, and it represents more than forty years of work, but whether it actually represents the best of him—whether cinema, as it were, occupied more than a couple of octaves on the keyboard—is another matter. Many readers of “Oscar Wilde,” Richard Ellmann’s majestic 1989 biography, were left with the disarming suspicion that, however crystalline Wilde’s plays are (and one of them is without flaw), they somehow fall short of maximum Wildeness, and that the importance of being Oscar outshone even the dazzle of his dramatic prose. Nichols, of course, was far less tempted to self-dramatize than Wilde, and the regular striking of a public pose did not concern him; nonetheless, when you survey the richness of his gifts, a movie like “Working Girl” (1986), deft and diverting as it was, feels a little limited—lacking the gleeful pulse that Sydney Pollack brought to “Tootsie,” for instance, earlier in the decade. The smoother the expertise that Nichols displayed, the more you found yourself wondering if his passions lay elsewhere, and, indeed, what they might consist of. At a distance, it seems bizarre that a filmmaker of such well-tempered urbanity was ever considered the right choice for the rousing, barely controllable comic indignation of “Catch-22.” Why should anyone expect an antiwar broadside from a director whose idea of an antibourgeois, as enshrined in “The Graduate,” was a polite young fellow with excellent grades and a well-pressed jacket and tie? As the wicked parody of Benjamin Braddock, in Mad magazine, put it, to Nichols’s bemusement and delight: “Mom, how come I’m Jewish and you and Dad aren’t?”

That is one of many tales retold in “Pictures from a Revolution,” Mark Harris’s delectable book on the Oscar-nominated pictures of 1967. One of them was “The Graduate,” and addicts of counterfactual history will lap up Harris’s disclosure that Nichols’s early choices, for the roles of Mr. and Mrs. Robinson, were Ronald Reagan and Doris Day. How much would you have paid to see that movie? (“Calamity Jane, are you trying to seduce me?” ) The only surprise is that Nichols failed to snag them. His eye for casting never dimmed, and actors swarmed to him, as if unbidden. Meryl Streep was there for “Silkwood” (1983), “Heartburn” (1986), and “Postcards from the Edge” (1988). Later, in the same vein, though on a smaller screen, Nichols turned to Emma Thompson, for “Primary Colors” (1998), “Wit” (2001), and “Angels in America” (2003). We should expect no less, from a guy whose climb to fame began in the company of Elaine May. Their duologues stand up astoundingly well, even now, and the equality and fraternity of their act, as they strop their eager wits on one another, has grown more touching with age. If anything, by a hair’s breadth, she has the edge.

Credits:

[url]http://ibdb.com/person.php?id=7767[/url]

[url]http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0001566/[/url]



With Elaine May