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1904-1975 Film director
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filmography
main site
key dates
Born 18 December in Oakland, California, US
Breaks into films at the Hal Roach Laurel & Hardy's Two Tars
Directs his tyro feature film, The Cohens and Kellys in Hollywood
Directs Katharine Hepburn in Alice Adams
Directs Fred Astaire-Ginger Rogers gem Swing Time
Directs the rousing action-adventure yarn Gunga Din
Directs The More the Merrier, which earns him his first Oscar nomination. On active duty in the 2ndd World War, photographing the liberation of the concentration camp at Dachau
Directs I Remember Mama, the last Stevens film with any comedic elements
Wins an Oscar for his direction of A Place in the Sun
Oscar nominated for Shane
Wins 2nd Oscar for direction for Giant
Oscar nominated for The Diary of Anne Frank
Last major project, The Greatest Story Ever Told
Directs final film The Only Game in Town
Dies of a heart attack on 8 March in Lancaster, California, USA. His 3 children survive him, including the director George Stevens Jr
where is he interred?At Forest Lawn (Hollywood Hills), Los Angeles, California, USA, in the Morning Light section, Space 3, Plot #8034.
links
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"The Diary of Anne Frank" (1959)
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b. Oakland, California
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Until 1994, there was a George Stevens film not in most filmographies, seldom seen, and not even shaped into a "movie." Entitled George Stevens: D-Day to Berlin, it is the 16mm color footage
he shot himself in Europe as head of the Signal Corps Special Motion Picture Unit. It
includes scenes of death and ruin, as well as
coverage of Dachau taken shortly after its liberation. I mention this because it is often said
that the war changed Stevens, and made it
less easy for him to believe in entertainment.
Was he a Sullivan who went too far to be comfortable again in Hollywood? The question is hard to answer. But something seems to have afflicted
Stevens. He was never a great director. But in
the thirties he had a feeling for fun, grace, and
story. Thereafter, he was always somber—and
sometimes heavier than that.
This falling off is all the sadder in view of
Stevens's origins. Hal Roach hired him as gagman and, eventually, director for Laurel and Hardy. Once established, he made a string of
pleasant pictures, usually with a comic
emphasis and allowing special opportunities
to actors. Alice Adams is still a major
Katharine Hepburn film; Swing Time is classic Astaire and Rogers with Astaire's virtuoso
Bojangles dance and one of the most mercurial of the intimate dance routines with
Ginger, Pick Yourself Up; Quality Street,
Vivacious Lady, Gunga Din, Penny Serenade,
Woman of the Year, The Talk of the Town, and
The More the Merrier all seem scarcely to
belong to the laborious director of later years,
dulled by overcraft. Woman of the Year, especialy, is an excellent emotional comedy that
introduced Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn and never lost the charge of feeling
between ihern, even if it settles for a male
chauvinist attitude. The Talk of the Town has unresolved echoes of Capra and Fury, too much
piety toward the Supreme Court, and too
great a willingness to keep Cary Grant in
hiding while Jean Arthur and Ronald Colman talk.
The theory outlined above doesn't quite
hold. I Remember Mama (48) is decent and very
fond of the Bay Area, and A Place in the Sun (51) is
a beautifully pessimistic love story, nearly rapturous in its treatment of Clift and Elizabeth Taylor and in its observation of their feelings
for each other. Indeed, there is a gravitational
pull toward death in the love scenes that is
unashamed and subversive.
Of the rest, Shane (53) works because of a simple fable, the jeweled grandeur of the landscape, and the rapport between Alan Ladd
and Brandon de Wilde. Giant (56) is bloated, seldom plausible, with actors who never settle
into the story or the idea of Texas. The three
films after that are strenuous disasters. Maybe
Stevens was miscast as a maker of big pictures, and rather exposed when he had to take
up the load of theme or ideas.
After all, in the thirties, he directed scripts,
stories, projects, and stars that had built-in
virtues. There have always been directors who
were most generously used if asked to do no
more. But maybe war and its horrors compelled Stevens into authorship and philosophy, things beyond his craft.
