Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1359892
45 S P R I N G Q 1 I S S U E B O O K R E V I E W their life, but for the public, this kind of total devotion is often linked to directors. Among those who might be thought to live only to make films, Martin Scorsese is an obvious first, along with Francois Truffaut, before them Charlie Chaplin, Sergei Eisenstein, and currently Quentin Tarantino. The work of other successful and well-known directors is often placed within the context of a life lived alongside their passion for filmmaking. Michael Curtiz is not a name that quickly springs to mind when listing Hollywood direc- tors who were completely consumed by filmmaking, but Rode's book makes clear that Curtiz, best-remembered as the director of "Casablanca," was among the most fanatically obsessed. Curtiz seem- ingly lived almost solely to make movies, w i t h o n l y b r i e f t i m e o u t s to a c t t h e Lothario and play polo on his 25-acre "Canoga Ranch." After a short acting career, Curtiz made films for the next 50 years. He d i re c t e d h i s f i r s t f i l m , " To d a y a n d Tomorrow," in 1912 in his homeland, Hungary, where his stage name was Mihaly Kertesz, and one of his good friends was Alexander Korda (Sándor László Kellner). He worked continuously in Europe and Hollywood until 1962 when illness forced him off the set of "The Comancheros" (John Wayne fin- ished directing). Curtiz became the top director in H u n g a r y d u r i n g t h e l a t e 1 9 1 0 s a n d early 1920s, a time when Budapest was home to 37 film production companies. Curtiz worked in formats that ranged from silent black-and-white shorts to Cinemascope and Technicolor epics, and everything in between, from World War I documentaries to an array of Hollywood genres: musicals, westerns, swashbuck- lers, films noir, thrillers, dramas, and perhaps least successfully, comedies. During his many years under contract at Warner Brothers, Curtiz directed a staggering 44 features between 1930 and 1939. In this heyday of the studio system, Curtiz was highly prized by the parsimonious brothers Warner for work- ing very fast (read: very cheap) and very competently with the scripts assigned to him. In a single year, 1945, he went from the middling comedy/drama of "Roughly Speaking," starring Rosalind Russell, to directing the sublime noir atmosphere (with Joan Crawford's Oscar-winning Curtiz directed a staggering 44 features between 1930 and 1939.