Credit where credit's due

Adam Mars-Jones

A SIEGEL FILM by Don Siegel Faber, 120, pp. 500 Whenever Don Siegel was offered a terrible script for a project that for some reason he wanted to be involved with he would use a tactful code and say it needed 'refocussing'. If only someone had breathed the same deadly euphemism into Siegel's ear, and saved him from publishing such a perversely awful book.

. The problems start with the title. There is no such thing as 'a Siegel film', in the sense that there is 'a Hitchcock film' or' a Bufiuel film'. It's not a signature, it's only a credit. Siegel never seems to have originat- ed a project, but from what he was offered or contractually obliged to undertake he directed a handful of masterful genre pic- tures. A certain lack of distinctiveness is Suggested by Faber's blurb, which mentions three films by name — one of them Mag- num Force, directed in reality by Ted Post. . Clearly it is possible to turn out impres- sive work without an artist's self-conscious- ness, but it can only be a mistake to produce a 500-page book entirely con- cerned with your work rather than your life, if you have no point of view about it. Here is Siegel on an averagely analytical page: I find it very difficult to explain my reasons for making a film like Dirty Harry, other than that I'm a firm believer in entertainment, hoping that every picture I make will be a commercial success.

In practice, his reason for making Dirty Hany was exactly the same as his reason for making The Beguiled, a subversive piece of Gothic that could hardly be more differ- ent: Clint Eastwood put him up to it.

Siegel's classic B-movie from 1956, Inva- sion of the Body Snatchers, has often been given credit for a political overtone very different from Dirty Hany's, its theme of People replaced by emotionless pods being read as a sharp comment on a conformist decade. In fact, Siegel seems to have thought of himself quite instinctively as one of the true humans in a world of pods, and to have been politically comatose. It takes a special kind of person to cross picket lines with a police escort in two separate strikes (at Warner Brothers during the 1940s) and never to know what the indus- trial disputes were about.

Don Siegel has chosen to cast his profes- sional memoirs largely in the form of screenplay dialogue, which is both suspi- ciously fluent (who could remember con- versations word for word after half a century?) and inherently stiff. A screen- play, after all, is not an end product. He tells us personal details only when his work makes them relevant: his father's plans to have him study guitar under Segovia, his early diabetes, his marriages. We get no elaboration: not why he didn't, go to Spain after all, nor how it felt to be diagnosed at 27, nor how a marriage broke up.

Even without an intentional self-portrait, a picture of Siegel indirectly emerges. He has moments of strength when he defends a project (there were attempts to sweeten The Beguiled) or even a principle, when the backers of the socially aware prison drama Riot in Cell Block 11 baulked at casting an ex-con. But otherwise there is an alterna- tion between truculence and truckling to authority. Sometimes the two bizarrely coincide, as when, offered The Gun Run- ners, a pointless remake of To Have and Have Not, he says, 'Who do I have to fuck to get off this picture?', but signs up any- way. The crude protest made at the time, when he is legally unbound, makes him out a maverick, the subsequent signature certi- fies him a company man. Siegel sees himself as anti-war. Here is the peroration of his section on Hell Is For Heroes: War is senseless and futile. It is true that hell is for heroes. It is equally true that for heroes there is only hell.' Aggres- sion, though, he likes. On almost every page there is admiration for big men, for tall men, for men handy with their fists, for men who know about guns, for a producer who is 'surprisingly good as an amateur boxer'. Recording Das Boot, an abortive project from 1978, Siegel finds space to describe the producer Ken Hyman as a 'bear of a man', but not for an irrelevance like the name of the man who directed the eventual and excellent film (Wolfgang Petersen).

Siegel's description of Lee Marvin ('whom I liked and admired') is typical:

He moved like a cat, a ballet dancer, but there was nothing homosexual about him. On the contrary, he was mucho macho with an eye for the ladies. He could be dangerous when drunk. He liked to fight and was very knowledgeable about street-fighting and karate.

So that's all right then. If a man chooses to move like a cat, that's his business, so long as he's dangerous when drunk.

A reader ploughing through this immense botch of a book, starved for entertainment, may take up slack by specu- lating how a dismal `man's man' like Siegel would react to a woman in a position of power.

The answer comes in the section on Tele- fon (1977). Siegel was faced with a commit- tee at MGM that included Sherry Lansing, described as 'a most attractive girl in her

late twenties' (she was head of the story department). Lansing liked the scene in an early draft where the heroine fought off a rapist. As Siegel reports it:

LANSING: I feel very strongly it should be left in.

ME: When it comes to rape, you unquestion- ably know more than I do. I'm also quite sure that in karate you are much better than I. (Very business-like, standing up.) Perhaps the committee might like to witness what would happen if I tried to rape you — without a knife, of course. (Walking towards her.) I think you should get to your feet with your back towards me. Don't worry about hurting me.

Sherry Lansing was certainly being taught a lesson that day, but it had as little to do with the art of film as anything else in this lamentable book.