By Erin Free
Despite only having a relatively small body of work, the films of Denis Sanders are so singular and unusual that it is difficult to comprehend why this filmmaker hasn’t inspired a considerably larger cult of appreciators. Though known to hardcore cineastes and also to very serious Elvis Presley acolytes for his vital position in the cinematic pantheon of The King, it is perhaps the disparate nature of the films of Denis Sanders that have prevented the late director’s jump into more high-profile cult territory.
Born in 1929, Denis Sanders made a huge impression with his first film, taking home an Oscar for Best Short Subject for his 1954 effort A Time Of War, a topical twenty-minute drama starring Corey Allen in which a one-hour truce is agreed to by Union and Confederate soldiers who are on opposite sides of a river during The US Civil War. A terse, strong work, A Time Of War was Sanders’ thesis work for his studies at UCLA, and was co-produced by his younger brother, Terry Sanders. A striking piece of ingenuity, the film spoke instantly of the tenacity and ambition of the young Denis Sanders. The success of the film saw Terry Sanders hired by actor turned director Charles Laughton as the second unit director of the 1955 masterpiece The Night Of The Hunter. Laughton then hired both Terry and Denis to write the screenplay for his intended film version of Norman Mailer’s heralded war novel The Naked And The Dead. The financial failure of The Night Of The Hunter (which would only be properly appreciated many years later) saw Laughton removed from the project and replaced by Raoul Walsh. The high-profile nature of the 1958 film provided a major leg-up into the industry for Denis and Terry Sanders.
The brothers made their feature film debut (with Denis directing and Terry producing) in 1959 with the unlikely and highly original Crime And Punishment USA, a contemporary, “Beat Generation” take on Fyodor Dostoevsky’s novel penned by acclaimed screenwriter Walter Newman (Ace In The Hole, The Man With The Golden Arm). Smart and attractively dark-hued, the film stars an enjoyably silky George Hamilton as a law student embroiled in a murder. The film’s dark style, moral complexity, and narrative ambiguity would become something of a hallmark for Sanders, who frequently populated his films with the kind of shady anti-heroes that could have made a happy home in the films of any number of the great émigre directors, like Billy Wilder or Fritz Lang, or gritty American cult figures like Samuel Fuller.
Sanders continued to play in the shadows with the low-budget but highly impressive 1962 Korean War drama-thriller War Hunt, an engagingly strange tale in which a young private played by Robert Redford (in his major big screen role) discovers that one of his platoon members (the excellent John Saxon) is basically a psychopathic serial killer dispensed behind enemy lines by his commanding officers to stab enemy soldiers to death. Featuring early performances from Tom Skerritt, Sydney Pollack, Gavin MacLeod and even Francis Ford Coppola, War Hunt belies its miniscule budget to stand creepily as a strange and decidedly ahead-of-its-time thriller, mixing the war film and the psycho thriller with deft skill. It’s a tight, economic work that again showcases Sanders’ gift for telling dark stories in an unconventional, noirish way.
After detouring into the light with the Don Murray-starring 1963 One Man’s Way (a bright, well executed biopic on preacher and author Norman Vincent Peale, who famously penned the book The Power Of Positive Thinking), and a host of TV show episodes (Naked City, The Defenders, Route 66) Sanders went dark again with 1964’s Shock Treatment, a loopy flick deserving of a much, much bigger cult than the one it currently boasts. Starring Roddy McDowell as a murdering gardener locked down in a psych ward and Stuart Whitman as an actor hired to feign madness in order to befriend McDowell and prise out the whereabouts of the $1 million that he’s apparently stolen, this grim, nasty little hothouse thriller has echoes of Psycho and even louder ones of Samuel Fuller’s Shock Corridor, and features an enjoyably incongruous appearance from Lauren Bacall (who publicly denounced the film), along with great support from Carol Lynley and Ossie Davis.
Sanders won another Oscar in 1969, this time taking out the award for Best Short Documentary Subject for Czechoslovakia 1918-1968, his film about The Prague Spring. It was perhaps Sanders’ Oscar recognition that brought him into the orbit of Elvis Presley, with the director tapped to helm 1970’s Elvis: That’s The Way It Is. The best sanctioned, non-fiction film made on The King, Elvis: That’s The Way It Is is a concert film masterpiece, right up there with The Last Waltz, The Song Remains The Same and Let It Be. This is the ideal record of Presley in what many see as the most interesting section of his career – wedged between the electric brilliance of the ’68 Comeback Special and his slow, torturous Vegas decline in the mid-70s.
When Elvis first started performing in Sin City in 1970, he was still trim, energetic and totally magnetic, and was gradually exploring the musical upheaval that had taken place during his Hollywood-enforced exile with renditions of songs by The Beatles and Tony Joe White. Presley’s musicians (including guitarist James Burton and drummer Ronnie Tutt) and backing vocal groups The Sweet Inspirations and The Imperials gave his performances an epic, orchestral feel, and they’re captured with fluid brilliance by Denis Sanders. As well as Presley’s on-stage performances, Sanders’ mobile camera also slides into the rehearsal room for some deliriously off-the-cuff musical numbers. The director’s incredible work on the film can’t be under-estimated when it comes to Presley’s on-screen output.
Sanders mustered the same energy and technical brilliance for 1971’s Soul To Soul (a film which desperately demands reappraisal), a majestic doco that captures The Independence Day concert held in Accra, Ghana, on 6 March 1971, which boasted a blazing array of soul, R’n’B, soul and rock musicians including the likes of an utterly on-fire Tina Turner, Wilson Pickette, Mavis Staples, Roberta Flack, Santana and more. These two superb concert films should certainly see Denis Sanders duly raised when it comes to any discussion of great music cinema.
Though he would work on a few shorts and television projects before his death in 1987 at the age of just 58, Denis Sanders’ final remains one of his weirdest and most truly cultish. Starring hard AF cult hero William Smith (The Losers, Any Which Way You Can and many, many more), 1973’s Invasion Of The Bee Girls is an utterly wacked out curio in the perverse brutal-femme style of the great Russ Myer. The first screenplay from Nicholas Meyer (who would later direct the genius likes of Time After Time and Star Trek II: The Wrath Of Khan), this prime slab of kinky weirdness follows Smith’s government agent as he winds his way through a labyrinthine plot which involves a mad scientist injecting the women of a small town with radiation mutated bee serum which turns them into sex-crazed killers who literally fuck men to death. If you think that sounds like a weird film, well, you’d be right. Far wilder and kinkier than anything Sanders had done, the wildly entertaining Invasion Of The Bee Girls is a strangely fitting capstone work for the director, whose outstanding, criminally overlooked oeuvre is decidedly difficult to categorise, making the late Denis Sander a true Unsung Auteur.
If you liked this story, check out our features on other unsung auteurs Daryl Duke, Jack McCoy, James William Guercio, James Goldstone, Daniel Nettheim, Goran Stolevski, Jared & Jerusha Hess, William Richert, Michael Jenkins, Robert M. Young, Robert Thom, Graeme Clifford, Frank Howson, Oliver Hermanus, Jennings Lang, Matthew Saville, Sophie Hyde, John Curran, Jesse Peretz, Anthony Hayes, Stuart Blumberg, Stewart Copeland, Harriet Frank Jr & Irving Ravetch, Angelo Pizzo, John & Joyce Corrington, Robert Dillon, Irene Kamp, Albert Maltz, Nancy Dowd, Barry Michael Cooper, Gladys Hill, Walon Green, Eleanor Bergstein, William W. Norton, Helen Childress, Bill Lancaster, Lucinda Coxon, Ernest Tidyman, Shauna Cross, Troy Kennedy Martin, Kelly Marcel, Alan Sharp, Leslie Dixon, Jeremy Podeswa, Ferd & Beverly Sebastian, Anthony Page, Julie Gavras, Ted Post, Sarah Jacobson, Anton Corbijn, Gillian Robespierre, Brandon Cronenberg, Laszlo Nemes, Ayelat Menahemi, Ivan Tors, Amanda King & Fabio Cavadini, Cathy Henkel, Colin Higgins, Paul McGuigan, Rose Bosch, Dan Gilroy, Tanya Wexler, Clio Barnard, Robert Aldrich, Maya Forbes, Steven Kastrissios, Talya Lavie, Michael Rowe, Rebecca Cremona, Stephen Hopkins, Tony Bill, Sarah Gavron, Martin Davidson, Fran Rubel Kuzui, Elliot Silverstein, Liz Garbus, Victor Fleming, Barbara Peeters, Robert Benton, Lynn Shelton, Tom Gries, Randa Haines, Leslie H. Martinson, Nancy Kelly, Paul Newman, Brett Haley, Lynne Ramsay, Vernon Zimmerman, Lisa Cholodenko, Robert Greenwald, Phyllida Lloyd, Milton Katselas, Karyn Kusama, Seijun Suzuki, Albert Pyun, Cherie Nowlan, Steve Binder, Jack Cardiff, Anne Fletcher ,Bobcat Goldthwait, Donna Deitch, Frank Pierson, Ann Turner, Jerry Schatzberg, Antonia Bird, Jack Smight, Marielle Heller, James Glickenhaus, Euzhan Palcy, Bill L. Norton, Larysa Kondracki, Mel Stuart, Nanette Burstein, George Armitage, Mary Lambert, James Foley, Lewis John Carlino, Debra Granik, Taylor Sheridan, Laurie Collyer, Jay Roach, Barbara Kopple, John D. Hancock, Sara Colangelo, Michael Lindsay-Hogg, Joyce Chopra, Mike Newell, Gina Prince-Bythewood, John Lee Hancock, Allison Anders, Daniel Petrie Sr., Katt Shea, Frank Perry, Amy Holden Jones, Stuart Rosenberg, Penelope Spheeris, Charles B. Pierce, Tamra Davis, Norman Taurog, Jennifer Lee, Paul Wendkos, Marisa Silver, John Mackenzie, Ida Lupino, John V. Soto, Martha Coolidge, Peter Hyams, Tim Hunter, Stephanie Rothman, Betty Thomas, John Flynn, Lizzie Borden, Lionel Jeffries, Lexi Alexander, Alkinos Tsilimidos, Stewart Raffill, Lamont Johnson, Maggie Greenwald and Tamara Jenkins.
