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Saturday Evening Movie Thread - 8/1/2026

Director DNA

There are some questions in film criticism that never seem to disappear. Every generation argues about the greatest director, the greatest western, the greatest horror movie, the greatest performance. They're fun conversations, even if they almost never arrive at an answer. Over the last few years, though, I've found myself drifting toward a different question, one that I think reveals something more interesting about the people who make movies. If you wanted to explain a director to someone who had never seen one of their films before, where would you begin? Not with the movie that's necessarily their greatest achievement, nor even your favorite, but the one that most completely captures who they are as an artist.

The more I thought about it, the more I realized those are two different questions. Great artists don't spend their careers making the same movie over and over again. They experiment. They wander into unfamiliar genres. Sometimes they discover something remarkable by pushing against the instincts that usually define them. A masterpiece, then, can occasionally be an exception rather than a rule. It may represent the highest point of a career without representing the center of it. Somewhere else in that same filmography there may be another movie (not necessarily better, but somehow more representative) that contains the themes, techniques, and preoccupations that kept drawing the director back throughout an entire career. That's the film I've started thinking of as containing a director's DNA.

Alfred Hitchcock

Alfred Hitchcock is probably the easiest place to begin because almost everyone already has an answer prepared. Ask someone to name the quintessential Hitchcock film and they'll probably say Psycho. Others will argue for Vertigo, and if the discussion is simply about greatness, I don't have much interest in disagreeing. Both are extraordinary films. But I don't think either one is the purest expression of Hitchcock's artistic personality. Every time I've tried this exercise, I keep arriving at North by Northwest, not because I think it's his masterpiece, but because it seems to contain the greatest concentration of the things that made Hitchcock Hitchcock.

That observation isn't even mine originally. Screenwriter Ernest Lehman famously said that his goal was to write "the Alfred Hitchcock picture to end all Alfred Hitchcock pictures," and, intentionally or otherwise, that's exactly what he accomplished. Nearly every recurring Hitchcock instinct is present. There's the MacGuffin that hardly matters once the story begins. There's the innocent man mistaken for someone else and thrown into circumstances completely beyond his control. There's the glamorous blonde, the elaborate visual set pieces, the humor that somehow coexists comfortably beside genuine suspense, and perhaps most importantly, the confidence that an audience can understand a scene through images alone. Hitchcock made psychological horror, courtroom dramas, romances, even broad comedies, but whenever he returned to what feels unmistakably like Hitchcock, he kept returning to some variation of this formula. North by Northwest isn't the summit of his career so much as its clearest blueprint.

William Wyler


William Wyler made me realize that the exercise doesn't always produce a surprising answer. Sometimes the film containing a director's DNA really is their masterpiece. For me, that's The Heiress. It isn't merely a great William Wyler film; it's difficult to think of another movie that gathers together so many of the qualities he spent decades refining. If Hitchcock's personality announces itself through suspense and visual wit, Wyler's announces itself almost by disappearing. His direction is so carefully controlled that it's easy to overlook how carefully controlled it actually is. Nothing calls attention to itself. The camera isn't trying to impress you. The compositions are elegant without becoming ostentatious. Actors move with extraordinary precision, but never in a way that feels theatrical or artificial. Everything exists in service of revealing character.

That wasn't an accident. Wyler consistently gravitated toward exceptional source material, often adapting acclaimed novels and successful plays rather than inventing stories from scratch. He seemed to believe that directing wasn't primarily about imposing himself upon a story but about refining one that already possessed dramatic strength. More importantly, he trusted actors more than almost any director of his generation. Watch enough Wyler films and a pattern begins to emerge. The emotional climaxes rarely depend upon spectacle. Instead, they depend upon people talking, arguing, hesitating, or making impossible moral decisions. The Heiress feels like the fullest expression of that philosophy. Olivia de Havilland's performance carries almost every emotional beat of the story, and Wyler understands that no technical flourish could possibly improve upon simply allowing her to perform. Other Wyler films emphasize one aspect of his career. Ben-Hur is inevitably remembered for its spectacle. Roman Holiday is remembered as one of Hollywood's great romantic comedies. The Best Years of Our Lives is inseparable from the historical moment that produced it. The Heiress, however, seems to contain all of Wyler at once.

Martin Scorsese


Martin Scorsese presents a different problem altogether because public perception has simplified him into something he never really was. For many people, Scorsese is the gangster director, an image that's perfectly understandable given the enormous cultural shadow cast by Mean Streets, Goodfellas, Casino, and The Wolf of Wall Street (gangster in its own Wall Street way). Yet those films represent only one corner of an astonishingly varied career that includes religious dramas, psychological thrillers, documentaries, historical epics, literary adaptations, black comedies, and period romances. Reducing Scorsese to organized crime feels a little like reducing John Ford to Monument Valley. It's true often enough to become recognizable, but false often enough to become misleading.

For that reason, my choice has always been The Age of Innocence. It usually surprises people, but the surprise disappears once you stop thinking about Scorsese in terms of genre and start thinking about the questions that seem to fascinate him regardless of genre. Again and again, his films ask what happens when personal desire collides with the demands of a community. Sometimes that community is the Mafia. Sometimes it's the Catholic Church. Sometimes it's politics, family, or business. In The Age of Innocence, it happens to be New York high society, but the conflict is fundamentally the same. Newland Archer isn't trapped by criminals. He's trapped by expectations. He belongs to a world whose values he understands perfectly, and that understanding becomes its own prison.

Scorsese once referred to The Age of Innocence as the most violent film he'd ever made. At first glance that sounds absurd coming from the man who directed the scene of Joe Pesci getting beaten to death with a baseball bat in Casino, but the more I thought about it, the more it made sense. Violence in Scorsese has never really been about bloodshed. Violence is what people do to one another when loyalty, guilt, obligation, or identity become impossible burdens to carry. Sometimes that manifests itself through fists and guns. Other times it manifests itself through silence, manners, and self-denial. Strip away the gangsters, and those concerns remain almost everywhere in Scorsese's work. The restless camera, the intricate editing, the fascination with New York itself. All of those stylistic signatures are present in The Age of Innocence. More importantly, so are the moral questions that seem to have occupied him throughout his career. Watch that film carefully, and the path toward Silence, Bringing Out the Dead, and even The Irishman suddenly becomes much easier to see.

John Ford


John Ford may have been the director who convinced me that a filmmaker's masterpiece and their artistic center can actually point in opposite directions. I think The Searchers is Ford's greatest film. I also think it's an outlier. It presents a vision of Ford that is darker, lonelier, and more tragic than the one that appears throughout most of his career. Ethan Edwards ends that film standing outside the doorway, separated forever from the community he helped preserve. It's one of the greatest endings in American cinema precisely because it denies its hero the thing he has spent the entire story pursuing.

That's why I'd choose The Quiet Man instead. The longer I watch Ford's films, the less convinced I become that he was fundamentally interested in the American West. Monument Valley is unforgettable, but it isn't really the subject of his movies. Communities are. Whether he's filming cavalry officers, settlers, Irish villagers, Mormons, or families struggling through the Depression, Ford keeps returning to the same basic question: how does an individual find a place among other people? That's Shaun Thornton's story from beginning to end. He isn't trying to defeat evil. He's trying to belong.

Once that idea occurred to me, a great many of Ford's stylistic choices suddenly made more sense. He devotes enormous stretches of screen time to dances, church services, funerals, military ceremonies, and shared meals, scenes that many directors would compress because they don't appear to advance the plot. Ford understood that they advance something more important than plot. They reveal the habits through which a community defines itself. Even the famous climactic fistfight in The Quiet Man isn't really about violence. The village gathers around it almost like a festival. The fight restores relationships rather than destroying them. Compare that ending with The Searchers, and the distinction becomes clear. Ethan Edwards saves the family but never joins it. Shaun Thornton joins the community he came searching for. One film is Ford's greatest tragedy. The other feels like the clearest expression of what he spent a lifetime celebrating.

Joe Dante


Joe Dante may be the oddest example because the film I'd choose isn't even my favorite Joe Dante movie. That would probably be Matinee, which I think has a warmth and emotional maturity that few directors ever achieve when looking back upon childhood. Yet if the goal is to identify the movie containing the most Joe Dante, I don't think anything surpasses Gremlins 2. It's a sequel that behaves almost like a parody of the original film, dismantling its own mythology while simultaneously celebrating everything that made it popular in the first place.

That contradiction seems to run through Dante's entire career. He genuinely loves movies, television, monster pictures, comic books, animation, and virtually every corner of American popular culture. At the same time, he refuses to treat any of it as sacred. That's the distinction I think makes Dante unique. He approaches popular culture with affection rather than reverence. Gremlins 2 spends nearly its entire running time mocking sequels, merchandising, studio filmmaking, and even itself. The Gremlins interrupt the movie, attack the projection, and threaten the illusion that we're watching a finished film at all. It feels like the work of someone who knows these traditions intimately enough to understand that genuine love includes the ability to laugh at the thing you love. If Matinee is Joe Dante looking backward with nostalgia, then Gremlins 2 is Joe Dante looking backward with a grin.

A Never-ending Game


The more I've played this game, the less interested I've become in arguing about which films are objectively greatest. Those conversations are enjoyable, but they're ultimately conversations about quality. This feels like a conversation about identity. Asking which Hitchcock film contains the most Hitchcock or which Ford film contains the most Ford forces you to think less about isolated achievements and more about recurring ideas. What themes keep resurfacing? Which visual habits never disappear? Which questions refuse to leave the director alone regardless of genre or subject matter? Eventually a pattern begins to emerge, and somewhere inside that pattern sits a single film where everything seems to converge.

That's the movie I find myself recommending now. Not because it's necessarily the best one, but because I think it's the one that best introduces the artist. Masterpieces tell us what a director was capable of accomplishing. Their DNA film tells us who they were.

Movies of Today

Opening in Theaters:

Spider-Man: Brand New Day

Movies I Saw This Fortnight:

The Nanny (Rating 3/4) Full Review "It's a handsome, attractive, well-acted film worthy of discovery." [YouTube]

Dracula: Prince of Darkness (Rating 3/4) Full Review "I think this is the best Dracula film that Hammer has produced, even if the ending could have used another rewrite." [Archive.org]

The Plague of the Zombies (Rating 2/4) Full Review "Still, there's modest entertainment within. Far from enough to get this near the top of the Hammer pile, but enough for it to sit comfortably somewhere in the middle." [Library]

Rasputin: The Mad Monk (Rating 2.5/4) Full Review "Still, Lee is in almost every scene, the few scenes he's not in are dominated mostly by Pasco. And that's not a bad combination. Honestly, I enjoyed this more than I thought I would, but it's certainly not good." [Library]

One Million Years B.C. (Rating 2.5/4) Full Review "There is entertainment to be had, but it's restrained in any impact beyond the sensationalist. Still, the sensationalist part is quite good." [Library]

The Viking Queen (Rating 3/4) Full Review "I latched onto the supporting cast and the setting most, I think, and I went along for an entertaining ride." [Library]

Frankenstein Created Woman (Rating 3/4) Full Review "I think it works. I think it entertains. It's solid." [Library]

Quatermass and the Pit (Rating 3/4) Full Review "The dread, the scale of the antagonists, and the distinct Britishness of the whole affair created an appealing package that I found infectious." [Library]

Please check out my videos from the last few weeks:

Fritz Lang: The Directors Series
Fritz Lang: The Definitive Ranking
William Wyler: The Directors Series
William Wyler: The Definitive Ranking
John Frankenheimer: The Definitive Ranking
Contact

Email any suggestions or questions to thejamesmadison.aos at symbol gmail dot com.
I've also archived all the old posts here, by request. I'll add new posts a week after they originally post at the HQ.
My next thread will be on 8/22.