By Erin Free
Many filmmakers who have featured in the Unsung Auteurs column have done so because they are more celebrated for their other pursuits, be it cinematographer/director Jack Cardiff, producer/director Tony Bill, actor/director Paul Newman, or any number of others. Joining this group is late director Ulu Grosbard, a fine filmmaker with a strong but relatively small body of work who is best known for his work in the theatre. He does, however, have one film on his resume that skirts dangerously close to being an unheralded classic – and, indeed, a near masterpiece – which instantly provides enough cache for a little undue celebration.
Born in Antwerp, Belgium in 1929, Israel “Ulu” Grosbard was the son of a diamond merchant and emigrated to Havana, Cuba with his family in 1942, fleeing the persecution of Jews by the German occupiers of Belgium during WW2. In 1948, the Grosbard family moved to the US, where Ulu studied at The University Of Chicago and then the Yale School Of Drama before joining the US Army and becoming a naturalised US citizen in 1954. Pursuing a career in the arts, Grosbard moved to New York City in the early 1960s, and slowly, surely edged his way into the theatre. His first directing credit came with The Days And Nights Of BeeBee Fenstermaker off-Broadway, which paved the way for Grosbard’s move onto Broadway with The Subject Was Roses, which scored him a Tony Award nomination for Best Director in 1964. The same year, Grosbard also enjoyed great success with an off-Broadway revival of Arthur Miller’s classic play, A View From The Bridge.
Grosbard directed a run of major Broadway productions (American Buffalo, The Tenth Man and more) before quietly making his move into cinema, beginning his screen career as a first assistant director on films like Splendor In The Grass, West Side Story, The Hustler, The Miracle Worker and The Pawnbroker, learning from greats like Elia Kazan, Robert Rossen, Arthur Penn and Sidney Lumet. Always a sensible careerist, Ulu Grosbard finally made his big screen directorial debut in 1968 with an adaptation of Frank D. Gilroy’s The Subject Was Roses, the play with which he made his Broadway debut. Though undeniably stagey, it’s an intense, powerful film about the enormous fissures that open up between long-married couple Patricia Neal and Jack Albertson when their son Martin Sheen returns home from WW2. The performances are utterly exquisite, with Albertson scoring a Best Supporting Actor Oscar and the great Patricia Neal nominated for Best Actress. Grosbard’s theatre roots obviously show with his debut, but the big screen debutante soundly proved that he could control a narrative and get true greatness out of his actors.
Ulu Grosbard delivered something considerably more cinematic with his sophomore effort, 1971’s Who Is Harry Kellerman And Why Is He Saying Those Terrible Things About Me?, a film (and title!) very much of its time. Largely forgotten today, this oddball comedy drama stars Dustin Hoffman as a successful but suicidal music producer crippled by paranoia, and gripped by the overpowering belief that the titular enigma is spreading outrageous lies about him. Though not a great film, Who Is Harry Kellerman And Why Is He Saying Those Terrible Things About Me? is certainly an original and unusual one, and even more importantly, it brought Grosbard together with Dustin Hoffman, with whom he would make that aforementioned near masterpiece.
Though rightly acclaimed, 1978’s blistering crime drama Straight Time still doesn’t get quite enough due when the best films of that great cinematic decade are tallied up. Hoffman was initially slated to direct this adaptation of the semi-autobiographical book No Beast So Fierce by ex-con Eddie Bunker (who would much later play Mr. Blue in Reservoir Dogs), but was dumped after failing to get one single shot on his first day of shooting. Grosbard stepped in and teamed with Hoffman to craft something truly extraordinary. Hoffman gives one of his best performances (and that’s saying something) as Max Dembo, a hardened thief desperately trying to go straight after getting out of prison who just can’t get ahead and ends up back on the brutal merry-go-round of botched heists and shady criminal associates. Grimly authentic, blackly funny, and brilliantly performed (M. Emmett Walsh is wonderful as Dembo’s arsehole parole officer, while Gary Busey, Harry Dean Stanton and Theresa Russell offer richly characterised support), Straight Time remains Grosbard’s most impressive work, a towering slab of tough but tender street-smart cinema and one of the best of the 1970s.
From a script by literary powerhouses John Gregory Dunne and Joan Didion, Grosbard’s 1981 dramatic thriller True Confessions lacked the energy and swagger of its predecessor, but there’s much to like about this thoughtful, cerebral meditation on religion and murder. The most obvious upshot is the cast, with Robert De Niro and Robert Duvall excellent as brothers – the former a priest and the latter a cop – who clash over the death of a young prostitute. Thick with 1940s, James Ellroy-style menace, and rich in nuance, True Confessions is a little slow, but is certainly deserving of way more than the miniscule amount of commentary it has received since its release. Grosbard’s skill with actors was obvious, and De Niro would tellingly work with the director again on 1984’s Falling In Love, the actor’s much touted reunion with Meryl Streep, his co-star from The Deer Hunter. A simple romance about two married people who, as the title suggests, fall in love, the film was seen as underwhelming upon its release due to its high-voltage, acting-royalty stars, but when viewed today through a less fevered lense, this is an honest, sensitive film about the need to connect, which Grosbard allows to unfold in an engagingly clean, uncluttered way. The performances, needless to say, are exemplary.
After the low-key, quietly moving Falling In Love, Grosbard returned to more powerful emotions with 1995’s Georgia, a bold, uncompromising project conjured up by daring and fiery actress Jennifer Jason Leigh and her screenwriter mother Barbara Turner. Inspired by the early 1990s Seattle music scene, the film features an astonishingly raw and ravaged performance from Leigh as Sadie Flood, a wild, erratic, drugged-up punk singer who arrives on the doorstep of her older sister, Georgia Flood (the brilliant Mare Winningham) – a successful, stable, happily married country singer – which stokes up all kinds of problems. A masterclass in performance, Georgia is a tough, gutsy work from Ulu Grosbard, and features a scene (in which Georgia ill-advisedly invites Sadie up on stage with her for a disastrous performance of Van Morrison’s “Take Me Back”) that once witnessed can never be forgotten.
This slice of unhinged sisterly madness would have been a fitting capstone work for Grosbard, but the director’s final film would instead end up being 1999’s considerably less memorable The Deep End Of The Ocean, a now largely forgotten drama in which Michelle Pfeiffer and Treat Williams discover the surprise whereabouts of their kidnapped son. It’s based on an “Oprah’s Book Club” novel by Jacquelyn Mitchard, and features Whoopi Goldberg as a cop (which is not usually a good thing, unless it’s in The Player), giving some indication of the film’s middle-of-the-road, soft-around-the-edges style.
Ulu Grosbard died on March 19, 2012 in Manhattan at the age 83, duly noted for his great success on stage, but considerably less so for his collection of deeply thoughtful, profoundly human, often highly original, and frequently quietly daring films.
If you liked this story, check out our features on other unsung auteurs Denis Sanders, 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.
