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62 DGA QUARTERLY Warner Bros.' Crown Jewel THE SEA HAWK (1940) > Curtiz demonstrates the proper thrust and parry while making The Sea Hawk, the ninth of 11 fi lms he'd make with Errol Flynn between 1935-1941. Although Rode writes that the ac- tor "believed Curtiz was responsible for typecast- ing him as a comic-book hero of Westerns and swashbucklers," Flynn's star wattage was never higher than when Curtiz was in command. T H E S U B J E C T O F Alan K. Rode's exhaustive biography, Michael Curtiz: A Life in Film (University Press of Kentucky), was responsible for some of the most enduring classics of Hollywood's Golden Age. And yet the prolifi c director—whose career spanned from the silents in his native Hungary to the early '60s—was rarely a orded the same high regard as more auteurist contemporaries like Hitchcock, Hawks and Sturges. Instead of imposing a signature style, Curtiz served the story, whether it be a costume epic, literary adaptation, Western or melodrama. His career is irrevocably tied to peak performances by some of the silver screen's biggest stars, including Errol Flynn, James Cagney, Joan Crawford and Humphrey Bogart, even if they all, to varying degrees, chafed at the di- rector's often brusque and autocratic manner. Curtiz just as frequently rebelled against the man- dates of studio heads and producers at Warner Bros.—his employer of some 30 years—not to veer from the script, and to simplify his style to keep costs down. But the work speaks for itself, and as Rode's book amply illustrates, Curtiz is being viewed in an entirely new light. By Steve Chagollan