The Moviemaker STEVEN SPIELBERG

No director or producer has ever put together a more popular body of work. That's why the movies we're now seeing are made in his image

By Roger Ebert Monday, June 08, 1998

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    Roger Ebert is the film critic of the Chicago Sun-Times and co-host of TV's Siskel & Ebert

    Auteurs Who Made Some of the Movies' Milestones

    Two of them turned out Hollywood hits, the others were film critics' darlings, but each of these directors created films that have left an indelible mark on our collective cultural memory.

    PRESTON STURGES (1898-1959)
    He had an ear for the American vernacular, an eye for American eccentricity and a soul attuned to American dreaming. He wrote and directed his seven gerat comedies (The Lady Eve) in four years, then fell out of orbit. But their afterglow shimmers on memory's screens.

    AKIRA KUROSAWA (1910 - )
    He worked the streets of modern Tokyo and the byways of feudal Japan. He saw the connection between the Hollywood western and the samurai epic. Kurosawa is perhaps the most eclectic director who ever lived, which is a way of saying he's also a great universalist, a man who has always sought the common emotional thread in all our cultural costumes.

    INGMAR BERGMAN (1918 - )
    Childhood is another name for claustrophobia, marriage is a torture chamber, and God is probably a deaf-mute. Bergman's is the cinema of suffocation, redeemed only by the unblinking intensity of his gaze, the austere power of his technique, the passion of his dispassion.

    ALFRED HITCHCOCK (1899-1980)
    In cliché, he was the master of suspense. In reality, he was the quaking poet victim of anxieties and obsessions that almost everyone shares. Which is why Hitchcock's best work - Shadow of a Doubt, Notorious, Vertigo - clings so undismissably to our imagination.

    FRANÇOIS TRUFFAUT (1932-1984)
    He was the first exuberant surfer of the new wave, happily hanging 10 as it crashed on formalism's beach. But he was a goodnatured revolutionary: from the start (The 400 Blows), his fervor was tempered by a humanistic romanticism both rueful and rollicking.

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