Robert Aldrich produced many social and political movies

Robert Aldrich (1918–1983)

A director who produced many of his own films, he was especially well known for making action movies with strong social and political points of view, and many of his best films depict rebellion against authority. Robert Aldrich was very much an independent filmmaker with a reputation as an iconoclast. He remains an undervalued director, in large part because of his commercial failures during the last 15 years of his career.

In total, Robert Aldrich directed 30 films, with his greatest commercial and critical successes coming in streaks during the late 1950s and 1960s. Born to one of the most influential and powerful families in Rhode Island, Robert Aldrich was a cousin of the Rockefellers and the progeny of a clan that could trace its lineage back to the Mayflower. Twenty-one years old and not having bothered to graduate from college, he used his connections to land his first job at RKO as a gofer in 1941. He went on to gain his training as an assistant director for some of cinema's most illustrious directors, such as Charlie Chaplin, Jean Renoir, Lewis Milestone, Max Ophuls, William Wellman, and Joseph Losey. He also became the studio manager at Enterprise Studios, a short-lived company that produced such films as Body and Soul (1947) and Force of Evil (1948).

Television

Ironically, after an apprenticeship of more than a decade in Hollywood, he received his first chance to direct for television in New York, shooting 17 episodes of The Doctor in 1952 and 1953. Finally, he got his chance to direct his first theatrical film, The Big Leaguer (1953), a “B” MOVIE starring Edward G. Robinson. Then, after coproducing and directing an interesting flop, World for Ransom (1954), Robert Aldrich hit the big time when he was hired to direct Burt Lancaster in Apache (1954).

During the next dozen years, Robert Aldrich made a number of Hollywood's bellwether films in terms of content and point of view, though not all of them were influential or successful at the time of their release. For instance, his version of Mickey Spillane's Kiss Me Deadly (1955) was the apotheosis of the FILM NOIR; there wasn't a darker, more cynical movie made during the 1950s. In addition, Robert Aldrich made a memorably vicious “inside-story” film about Hollywood called The Big Knife (1955), as well as the visceral war movie Attack! (1956), a film with a striking combination of violence and morality. Robert Aldrich is perhaps best remembered as the director of three films, the macabre and campy What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962) with Bette Davis and Joan Crawford, Hush . . . Hush, Sweet Charlotte (1965), with Bette Davis and Olivia de Havilland, and the rousing war story The Dirty Dozen (1967) with Lee Marvin.

A new studio

The Dirty Dozen was such a huge hit that it allowed Robert Aldrich to buy his own studio in 1968. Unfortunately, he had precious few commercial successes in the years to follow. He did, however, make a number of excellent movies; among them were Ulzana's Raid (1972), which was one of the last great westerns made by Hollywood and a film that many consider the director's best. He also made The Longest Yard (1974), starring Burt Reynolds, which was Robert Aldrich's last major box-office triumph. His later films included Twilight's Last Gleaming (1977) and The Frisco Kid (1979), a comedy with Harrison Ford and Gene Wilder. Robert Aldrich's last film was . . . All the Marbles (1981).\

Though Robert Aldrich had never been nominated for an Oscar, his peers thought enough of him to elect him twice as president of the Directors Guild of America during the 1970s. In late 1983 Robert Aldrich suffered kidney failure. He chose to die at home rather than accept continued medical intervention.

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