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FILM COMMENT
January/February 2003
DELMER DAVES
by Bertrand Tavernier
Delmer Daves is the most forgotten of the American directors championed by French film critics in the Fifties - why? The reasons have little to do with his true stature as a filmmaker. He was unlucky enough to end his career with a string of Warners sudsers that seemed sorely lacking in ambition (although a good deal of them are visually remarkable). Some of his masterpieces are westerns, a genre that has now fallen back into disrepute. He rarely ventured into noir territory, and when he did, he stood the genre on its head. To make matters worse, he had given few interviews by the time he died in 1977. As a result, his best films are seldom shown, and hardly any of them are available on video or DVD.
What first impresses the viewer is Daves's attention to landscape, to nature, expressed in shots that intimately and sometimes inextricably mingle lyricism and realism. He actually insisted on personally supervising the kind of material many Hollywood filmmakers would leave to second-unit directors -e xtreme long shots, transitional moments filmed at dawn or twilight. For one setup in To the Victor (48), he spent a whole night on the Trocadero Esplanade in Paris, and, as he wrote to me, "it was worth the trouble."
You can read the complete version of this article in the January/February print edition of Film Comment.
© 2003 Bertrand Tavernier.
