10 Great Filmmakers Best Remembered For The Wrong Films

9. Sidney Lumet

Best Remembered For: Network (1976), Dog Day Afternoon (1975), Serpico (1973) Should Be Remembered For: The Hill (1965) For the traditionally accepted Lumet classics, take your pick: 12 Angry Men, Dog Day Afternoon, Serpico, Network, The Verdict, Before the Devil Knows You're Dead... Yet Lumet's very best film is so often overlooked, mostly because it's so difficult to get hold of these days. That would be The Hill, Lumet's 9th feature and easily one of the most criminally underseen movies ever. The setting is a military prison camp in WWII Africa, where former Sergeant Major Joe Roberts (Sean Connery) and his fellow inmates are repeatedly made to climb the camp's infamous sand hill in the tortuous desert heat. While the storytelling is predictably economical, The Hill is also aesthetically a step above most Lumet movies, the restricting single location urging the director to up his visual game. The performances, though, are as ever Lumet's priority, and he draws understated, vanity-free performances from the whole cast. That includes Sean Connery, who's the best he'd be in his entire career here, a blistering match for Lumet's later collaborator Al Pacino. It remains uncertain as to why The Hill is still so unknown; Woody Allen for one ranks The Hill alongside The Treasure of the Sierra Madre and Double Indemnity as one of the great American movies.