Michael Curtiz
gigatos | March 28, 2022
Summary
Michael Curtiz (Budapest, December 24, 1886 – Hollywood, April 10, 1962) was a Hungarian-American film director. He was also known as Mihaly Kertesz or Manó Kertész Kaminer, his birth name.
He directed at least fifty films in Europe and about one hundred in the United States, and was very successful in the early days of Warner Bros. and acquired a reputation for competence and efficiency, but also for being difficult to work with. His best known films are Casablanca and The Adventures of Robin Hood. The latter was the most successful of a series of classic adventure films in which he directed the star Errol Flynn. In the 1950s, he directed Elvis Presley in King Creole. He was less successful from the late forties on, when he tried to switch from directing films to production, and to independent work. Although several of his works, such as Casablanca, are highly respected by film critics, there is some controversy about how much of his body of work has a coherent personal style.
Born Manó Kertész Kaminer in Budapest, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, now the capital of Hungary, into a Jewish family. He claimed to have been born on December 24, 1886, but both day and year of birth are subject to doubt. He liked to tell stories about his childhood and youth. For example, that he would have run away from home to join the circus and that he was part of the Hungarian fencing team at the 1912 Summer Olympics in Stockholm, 1912. However, he seems to have had a conventional middle-class life. He studied at Markoszy University and the Royal Academy of Theatre and Art, both in Budapest. He then began his career as an actor and director under the pseudonym Mihály Kertész at the Hungarian National Theatre in 1912.
There are few details of his early experiences as a director, and it is unclear what part he may have taken in directing several of his early films, but it is known that he directed at least one film in Hungary before spending 6 months of 1913 at the Nordisk studio in Denmark honing his craft. When World War I broke out, he served briefly in the Austro-Hungarian Army artillery, and returned to filmmaking in 1915. In this or the following year, he married actress Lucy Doraine. They divorced in 1923.
Curtiz left Hungary when the film industry was nationalized in 1919 and eventually settled in Vienna. He made at least 21 films for the Sascha-Film studio, including the biblical epics Sodom und Gomorrha (1922) and Die Sklavenkönigin in 1924. The latter was released in the United States as Moon of Israel and caught the attention of Jack Warner, who hired Curtiz at his studio with the intention that he direct a similar film for Warner Bros. The film was Noah”s Ark (en
Curtiz arrived in the United States in 1926, according to some sources on July 4, American Independence Day. But according to other sources, Curtiz arrived in June. He adopted the Americanized name Michael Curtiz. He had a long and prolific Hollywood career, which included his name in the credits of more than 100 films, in many genres of cinema. During the 1930s, Curtiz was credited with four films in a single year! However, he was not always the only director on these projects. In the period before the Hayes Code, Curtiz directed such films as The Museum Crimes (shot in 2-track Technicolor) and The Kennel Murder Case, with William Powell playing Philo Vance.
In the mid-1930s, Curtiz began the very successful cycle of adventure films, starring Olivia de Havilland and Errol Flynn, which included Captain Blood (1935), The Charge of the Light Brigade (1936), The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938) and 1940”s The Santa Fe Road.
By the early 1940s, Curtiz was already quite wealthy, earning $3600 a week. He owned a substantial mansion, which included a polo field. One of his regular partners was Hall Wallis, who met Curtiz upon his arrival in the United States and became his close friend. Wallis” wife, actress Louise Fazenda, and Curtiz”s third wife, Bess Meredyth, an actress and screenwriter, became close since Curtiz and Meredyth”s marriage in 1929. Curtiz was very unfaithful and had numerous sexual relationships with extra actresses in the filming environment. Meredyth did leave him, but it was for a short period: they remained married until 1961, shortly before Curtiz”s death. She assisted Curtiz whenever he needed to deal with scripts or other elements beyond her knowledge of English. He would often call her for advice whenever he was presented with a problem during a shoot.
Good examples of his work in the 1940s were The Wolf in the Sea (1941), Casablanca (1942), and 1945”s Soul in Suffering. During this period he also directed Mission to Moscow, a 1943 pro-Soviet propaganda film for which he was appointed at the request of President Franklin D. Roosevelt to assist in the war effort.
Although Curtiz fled Europe before the rise of Nazism, other members of his family were not as lucky. His sister”s family was sent to Auschwitz, where her husband and three children died. Curtiz donated part of his salary to the European Film Fund, a charity that helped European refugees who were from the film industry to settle in the United States.
In the late 1940s, he made a new deal with Warner, under which the studio and Curtiz”s film production company would share the costs and profits of upcoming films. The films had poor box office, however, both as a result of the general decline of the film industry in this period and because Curtiz may not have had the ability to shape the complete project of a successful film, which includes more than directing the film. According to one biography, Curtiz said that “they only like you when you bring money into the company account. Otherwise they throw you in the gutter the next day. The long partnership between the director and the studio collapsed in a bitter court battle. After his relationship with Warner ended, Curtiz continued to direct, freelance, from 1953 onward.
His last film, The Comancheros, with John Wayne, was released less than a year before his death by cancer on April 10, 1962. He was buried in Forest Lawn Memorial Park Cemetery in Glendale, California.
Curtiz was always extremely active: his work days were very long, he played various sports in his spare time, and was often found sleeping under a cold shower… He disliked actors who ate lunch, as he believed that lunch took away energy for the work in the afternoon. The downside of this dedication was often harsh treatment from others: actress Fay Wray said “it seemed he was not flesh and blood, but part of the same metal as the camera.” He was also not very popular with his colleagues: he was known as arrogant and a perfectionist. He reserved much of his venom for subordinates rather than stars: he often argued with technicians and dismissed extra actors with harsh words. Bette Davis refused to work with him for a second time, because he directed harsh and foul words at her.
Throughout his life, Curtiz struggled with the English language, and there are several anecdotes about his difficulties with expression. He confused a stage manager in Casablanca when he asked for a poodle, when what he wanted was a puddle of mud, or “puddle of water” in English. The actor David Niven liked “bring in the empty horses,” Curtiz”s phrase when he meant “bring in the horses without their riders” so much that he used it as the title of his autobiography.
Curtiz”s work has received relatively little attention from film criticism: his phenomenal productivity and the variety of his output seem to make him the antithesis of auteur cinema. However, these characteristics were typical of studio production, with which Curtiz worked, rather than unique to him. As journalist and film historian Aljean Harmetz states “virtually all Warner Bros. films eschewed the theory that the director is the author of the film. Curtiz can be seen as fundamentally a studio director, who excelled at directing in the shooting environment, but who lost his footing when he tried to have greater control over the production of a film, as he did from the late 1940s on. Harmetz claims that Curtiz”s vision of film was totally visual. He even quotes a Curtiz quote: “who cares about the characters? I make the film move so fast that nobody cares about them.”
Curtiz received four Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Oscar nominations for Best Director: before Casablanca won in 1944, he was nominated for The Victory Song in 1943, for Angels with a Dirty Face, and Four Daughters in 1939. Captain Blood came in second in the 1936 Oscar standings, even though it was an off-list candidate.
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