RIP Sidney Lumet

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Famed film director Sidney Lumet has died at age 86.


http://www.nydailynews.com/entertain...bref=obnetwork

Director Sidney Lumet died at the age of 86 on Saturday. The passing of Sidney Lumet Saturday at age 86 ends an era of New York filmmaking. not that Lumet's mantle hasn't been taken up by city filmmakers, but Lumet's specific way of dealing with the stresses, comedy, kookiness and subcultures among is was rare among directors who came after him.

With the exception of Martin Scorsese, few filmmakers can go high and low the way Lumet could when he was hitting on all cylinders.

As far back as 1965's "The Pawnbroker," in which a Holocaust survivor [[Rod Steiger) lives a haunted existence in upper Manhattan, Lumet had a feel for New York's enclaves and enclosures. A veteran director of 1950s New York-based live television, Lumet had a sense of realism that permeated all of his city-based projects.

In 1973, His adaptation of Peter Maas' nonfiction book "Serpico" captured the suspicions of the era toward police and authority, and connected Al Pacino to a level of tortured New York conscience.

Lumet and Pacino's repairing, 1975's "Dog Day Afternoon," took them each to another level: A comical, cranky, casebook example of New Yorkiness. The movie's Brooklyn bank robbery is more than just a theft that goes south. it's an object lesson in the city's exercising control over everything, a tale of what might go wrong will go wrong, and a rich tapestry of borough characters brought together by circumstance.

It remains one of the very best movies of the 1970s.

In 1976, "Network" was set mostly in studios and conference rooms, but it's image of TV execs crassly manipulating a newsman's mental collapse felt like a particular flavor of New York acid. It's famous scene of viewers throwing their television sets out the window as Peter Finch encourages them to scream "I'm mad as Hell, and I'm not gonna take it anymore!" show people sticking their heads out of New York apartments, getting out of one box because another told them to.

Lumet's immediate returns to new York were';t as memorable: He re-energized Kaufman Astoria Studios in Queens by spending a year and a half filming there for "The Wiz." But the movie is an ill-fated adaptation of a Broadway fantasia, a Harlem reworking of "The Wizard of Oz," and though Lumet liked to say he could work in genres, this was one that escaped him.

His later New York movies, including 1989's "Family Business" -- about three generations of gangsters -- "A Stranger Among Us," about a cop hiding out with New York Hasidim, and the combo of "Q&A" and "Night Falls on Manhattan," which cast a suspect eye on the characters who inhabit the legal system, may not have matched his work of the 1970s, but nonetheless are notable for their comfort within these specific worlds.

His final film, 2007's "Before the Devil Knows You;re Dead," had all the energy of a younger filmmaker and features what feel like an alternate-universe new York, one where lowlife brothers [[Ethan Hawke and Philip Seymour Hoffman) plot to rob their parents' jewelery store) in a time and place that feels far away from Mayor Michael Bloomberg's New York.

Lumet's sense of place may seem rudimentary; you set a movie in New York, or you take a new York story, and the rest simply follows. But in fact, to see the opposite of that assumption, watch any of the romantic comedies or thrillers set in the city made every year. Many are set in new York, and yet almost every one could be set anywhere. They have no character, no flash, no give-and-take equilibrium, no thrill, no dirt, no punch. They are as antiseptic as TV shows set in New York but filmed on soundstages. Lumet, by dint of his personality and an understanding for the place he lived in since he was a year old, knew what to do to get the opposite effect.

Mainly, he let New York be New York, from its power plays to its dog days. And it paid off in spades.

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From "12 Angry Men" to "Network" to "Before the Devil Knows You're Dead"...that's quite an impressive legacy. RIP, Mr. Lumet, and thank you...