Judging by the thirty feature films he left us with (and certainly he has been judged by them), Hollywood director Robert Aldrich’s enduring legacy will be the fact of having endured his legacy.
Probably best known for The Dirty Dozen, Aldrich made his name in the 1950s and ’60s, piling up variously pulp-inclined genre films — and all manner of backhanded compliments, faint-praise damnings and even flat-out insults from critics to go with them.
So the Pacific Film Archive’s month-long survey of his lesser known work, A Dirty Dozen: The Films of Robert Aldrich should be as fun and worthy and illuminating as it is to imagine how challenging it would be for today’s marketeers to extract selling-point slogans from those movies’ reviews.
Oh sure, the critics have admired and commended Aldrich too. But the compliments always seemed so intriguingly conditional, as when Time Out New York called 1961’s The Last Sunset “more lyrical than Aldrich’s usual macho posturings,” or Pauline Kael observed of 1955’s The Big Knife that “Robert Aldrich directed, overdoing everything in sight; he just about turns hysteria into a style.”
It was also Kael who noted, of 1965’s Hush…Hush, Sweet Charlotte, that “a lot of people seemed to enjoy the spectacle of [Bette] Davis crawling and howling and looking wildly repulsive.” And, even less forgivingly, of 1977’s Twilight’s Last Gleaming, that “…it falls apart, and drags on and on…it suggests an overextended episode of a TV series, and the attempts at wit are pathetically gross.”
