Arthur Hiller

Arthur Hiller directed more than thirty features across a fifty-year career and almost none of them look like the work of the same person, which was rather the point. He came up in Canadian television, moved to the American networks, and by the late 1950s was making films: mostly comedies, mostly on time. The industry word for that is journeyman, and it was used as an insult for years before anyone noticed how much of Hollywood it actually describes.

His two sharpest films came from Paddy Chayefsky screenplays. The Americanization of Emily in 1964 is an anti-war comedy with a genuinely hostile streak, and The Hospital in 1971 is a black farce about institutional collapse that has aged into something close to documentary. Both work because Hiller stays out of the way: he shoots the dialogue cleanly, keeps the pace up, and trusts a script smarter than any visual idea he might have added to it.

Then there is Love Story, which in 1970 became the thing everyone knew him for, and which took seven Academy Award nominations including one for his direction. The comedies that followed are the durable ones. Silver Streak and The In-Laws are still funny, Making Love in 1982 took a commercial risk on gay material that few studio directors would touch, and the late run thins out badly. One of his final credits is a comedy about a director disowning his own film, which is a strange and rather fitting end for fifty years inside the studio system.