Take One (Jan 1979)

apotheosis of a prestige, first-class professional. But his work can be too immaculate, and his calculated artiness has helped to embalm pictures like In Cold Blood and Butch Cassidy. At worst, there is too much sharpness in his imagery, too much deliberation, not enough involvement. In recent years, Hall has leaned towards high-toned projects like Day of the Locust (with its garish stylized diffusion) and The Marathon Man (another Schlesinger picture), and his penchant for perfectionism has been coddled. It may be that Hall is at his most satisfying while enhancing smaller situations. His’ softlypasteled Smile (1974) or Huston’s Fat City (1972)—shot in a faded, bluish haze, as if through the smokey mist of a pool hall— are both more subtle achievements. For years now, Hall has been angling to adapt a Faulkner novel, with hopes to join the swelling ranks of cameramen-directors. Capsule: Hall’s work shows traces of his Tahitian upbringing, and the hypnotic influence of the sea: a preoccupation with dimensions of light and shade. Laszio Kovacs Along with friend Vilmos Zsigmond, Kovacs fled the 1956 Hungarian revolution and arrived in Los Angeles. After knocking about for many years, their film on modern dance, Lullaby, gained a measure of recognition and allowed entrée to feature work in the industry. Like Zsigmond, Kovacs today is one of the principal stylists among active Hollywood cinematographers. Beginning with the richly haunting Targets, directed by Peter Bogdanovich in 1968, Kovacs has photographed a streak of some of the most visually exciting pictures in the modern American cinema: including Altman’s That Cold Day in the Park (1969), Easy Rider (1969), Five Easy Pieces (1970), Mazursky’s Alex in Wonderland (1970), The Last Movie (1971), Marriage of a Young Stockbroker (1971), Pocket Money (1972), King of Marvin Gardens (1972), Steelyard Blues (1973), Paper Moon (1973), Slither (1973), Freebie and the Bean (1974), Ashby’s Shampoo (1975), At Long Last Love (1975), Nickelodeon (1976), Baby Blue Marine (1976) and New York, New York (1977), F.I.S.T. (1978), Paradise Alley (1978). Critics have not always been able to distinguish Kovacs’ cinematography from the anti-establishment tone or offbeat 26 TAKE ONE /JANUARY 1979 nature of his fringe projects (Stanley Kauffmann complaining about Paper Moon that “the look of the film is all wrong,” Charles Champlin insisting that “the camera is almost always in the wrong place” in Steelyard Blues). But Kovacs looks more inventive with time, at ease in period or contemporary settings, stationary or afoot. An atmospherist who favors cool or muted colors, he has collaborated with Bogdanovich on_ black-and-white (Paper Moon) and color drained of color (At Long Last Love). A location buff, he has also shot one of the most voluptuous, contained studio films of the decade, Scorsese’s New York, New York, a Minnelli turned inside-out. Less obsessive than Zsigmond, Kovacs is more decorous, evocative, discreet. Capsule: A Twilight Zone-like edginess. Cold, dark tones, often. Kovacs favors bleak-freak filmscapes, but his camerawork is open, expansive; there is leeway and sympathy in the worst of his worlds. ROBERT SURTEES In the matter of Surtees, there are the following complaints: that he is an old-time high-gloss glamor photographer; that he eschews flashiness, trickery, gimmickry or even hand-held movement; that his personality never intrudes or embroiders; that his style varies with whatever property he is accommodating. All true. What is true, also, is that Surtees is the last of the great traditionalists, a craftsman whose camerawork is always tasteful, appropriate, motivated, whose range is unbounded and whose pallette is never dry. Surtees’ versatility accounts for Oklahoma! (1955), as well as Oklahoma Crude (1973); the sprawling, biblical epic Ben Hur (1959), as well as the pre-hip The Graduate (1967) and post-hip A Star Is Born (1976); the liltingly nostalgic Summer of ‘42 and (shot the same year, 1971) the extreme depth of field and black-and-white angst of The Last Picture Show (“A perfectly calculated balance between faultless realism and sentimental association,’”’ in the words of Jan Dawson); and the manysplendored visual charms of Intruder in the Dust (1949), King Solomon's Mines (1950), Quo Vadis (1951), Minnelli’s The Bad and the Beautiful (1952), WellesKafka's The Trial (1955), Raintree County (1957), Mutiny on the Bounty (1962), The Collector (1965), Doctor Doolittle (1967), Sweet Charity (1968), Kazan’s The Arrangement (1969), The Cowboys (1972), The Other (1972), The Sting (1973), The Great Waldo Pepper (1975), The Hindenberg (1975) and now Blood Brothers (1978), among many others. Born in 1906, Surtees joined Universal as an assistant cameraman in 1927, later working for MGM and Warners. His first solo credit was on This Precious Freedom in 1942. Still active, still “modern,” he has three Oscars and over a dozen nominations to his name. There is no more consistent, intelligent and distinguished cinematographer presently working in Hollywood. Capsule: An Old World Romantic. The men, lit with a strong cross-light to accentuate rugged features; the women, lit softly, without diffusion. HASKELL WEXLER Wexler’s name is synonymous with classy cinematography: he is a left-romantic, an iconoclast, a documentarist as well as a Hollywood regular, a man whose integrity has led him to argument and sometimes quitting, a first-rank artist whose early passion for grainy realism has yielded to a warm, naturalistic view. Wexler began by shooting labor documentaries in Chicago, and shot his first feature, The Savage Eye, for Joseph Strick in 1959. Said to be independently wealthy, he has been increasingly selective about his work ever since that debut. His credits include: The Hoodlum Priest (1961), Kazan’s America, America (1963), The Best Man (1964), The Loved One (co-credit, 1965), Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf (1966), In the Heat of the Night (1967), The Thomas Crown Affair (1968), One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (co-credit, 1975), and (three by Ashby) Bound for Glory (1976), Coming Home (1977) and the forthcoming The Hamster of Happiness. Wexler evidently shoots whatever strikes his fancy, and pops up on movies to perform his specialty—as “visual consultant” on American Graffiti (1973), on which he supervised photography and helped “with some of the actors, mostly holding Richard Dreyfuss down from over-acting”; shooting the Super Bowl footage for Black Sunday (1976); lensing the Chicago mill sequences of Terrence Malick’s Days of Heaven (1978). Not content with a limited role behind the camera, Wexler wrote, shot, directed and produced Medium Cool in 1969, a vérité-influenced movie revolving around protests at the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago, “a kind of cinematic ‘Guernica’,” as The New York Times called it. His documentary credits include A Report on Torture in Brazil (1971), Trial of the Catonsville Nine (1972), Interview with Allende (1971), Introduction to the Enemy (1976) and Underground (1976). From coaching actors (Graffiti, again) to script contributions (always with Ashby), Wexler steeps himself in the entire process of a given project. An innovator as well, Wexler’s work for In the Heat of the Night advanced the use of depth of focus in color photography. His “paraplegic” wheelchair is an invented device for smoothly moving shots in and out of camera. For the surpassing visual splendors of Bound for