Posted on 01/03/2016 2:10:07 PM PST by Borges
The cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond, who was best known for his work on The Deer Hunter and Close Encounters of the Third Kind, has died. He was 85.
His business partner Yuri Neyman confirmed that Zsigmond died on Friday in Big Sur, California.
The Hungarian-born Zsigmond helped define cinema’s American New Wave in the 1970s, through celebrated collaborations and a preference for natural light.
He first gained renown for his collaboration with Robert Altman on the classics McCabe & Mrs Miller and The Long Goodbye. He was nominated for four Oscars: for his work on the Vietnam War epic The Deer Hunter, the Tennessee drama The River, and Brian De Palma’s noir The Black Dahlia.
(Excerpt) Read more at theguardian.com ...
One of the great cameramen. R.I.P.
Just watched “The Deer Hunter” again recently. Great stuff. RIP.
“His business partner Yuri Neyman...”
Notice how they had to put “business” in there to keep you from assuming something else?
I was talking about the photography, since that was his participation. Having read the IMDb boards, I see that a lot of Vietnam vets took extreme exception to Cimino’s storyline in the film (the Russian Roulette stuff especially, claiming that never happened).
The Russian Roulette stuff was from another screenplay about guys who go to Vegas and do it there. The scene was apparently so dramatically striking that Cimino imported it into the film despite it having not much to do with anything.
It is dramatically striking (at least when its initially done at the VC prison cage), though on repeated viewings when DeNiro goes back to Saigon to find Walken, it becomes more ridiculous than anything else. It’s highly unlikely that a heavily drug-addicted Walken would’ve lasted very long playing that “game” (a day, at the most). Of course, even closer scrutiny and you realize both of them are a decade too old to be playing Vietnam draftees.
The age thing is a long standing Hollywood tradition. One has to imagine they are the right age. Jimmy Stewart was about 20 years too old for the character he plays in Vertigo.
Re: “Vertigo”, that seems hard to believe. I thought the character was supposed to be late 40s (Stewart was 50), around the same age as the Gavin Elster character (Tom Helmore was 54). It doesn’t fit that they would’ve been late 20s/early 30s. A middle aged man using Stewart as a vehicle to kill his wife so he can supposedly run off with the younger mistress in her 20s.
Although I’ve not read the source material, so I can’t say what the author had in mind. Of course, clearly Stewart was too old for some of the military films and the Westerns, but still did an excellent job.
I’m going by the fact that Stewart is supposed to be a college buddy and ex boyfriend of Barbara Bel Geddes. She was in her mid 30s at the time. Or maybe she was just miscast...
That’s a good point. She was probably too young, though. She was also too young to play Ellie Ewing on “Dallas”, though they remedied that by having her character be nearly a decade older and by having J.R. being nearly a decade younger than Larry Hagman.
Of course, the silliest bit of casting in a Hitchcock movie was Jessie Royce Landis moving from being Grace Kelly’s mother in “To Catch A Thief” to being Cary Grant’s in “North by Northwest.” Miss Landis was initially thought to be born the same year as Grant, though she turned out to fudge her real age by 8 years and was 7 years older (not that it helped make her more believable in the part).
Stewart’s age was even more ridiculous when he played Lindbergh in “Spirit of St. Louis” a couple of years earlier. Pushing 50, he played a 26-year old.
Zsigmond was also the cinematographer for “Deliverance.”
The Long Goodbye was essentially boring and pointless, and the cinematography made it look like a made for TV movie.
I saw a documentary on Zsigmond's techniques, especially with regard to The Long Goodbye, and was no more impressed knowing how he worked his supposed magic.
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