7. Michael Curtiz
Key films: Captain Blood, The Adventures of Robin Hood, Angels with the Dirty Faces, Yankee Doodle Dandy, Casablanca, Mildred Pierce, White Christmas A filmmaker like Michael Curtiz does not get enough credit because he is usually dismissed as a product of the studio system. Curtiz, in particular, was a reliable force under the Warner Brothers label, yet in a sense he developed his own distinct style while having that virtuosity of being able to make a film of any genre. Michael Curtiz, more than most people in the early days of Hollywood, was a visual director. He liked playing with shadows in his films especially to get around the harsh censorship boards at the time. Angels with the Dirty Faces, one of the last great gangster films of the 1930s, was able to get around it violent conclusions with the use of shadows and inference. Another example of the use of shadow is in the most famous swashbuckling classic, The Adventures of Robin Hood in which Errol Flynn gets into a sword fight that goes out of the screen, transitioning the action to huge, overarching shadows. But, criticisms said that he was more about style than substance but that is countered by the mere fact that he made Casablanca. The stylization of Casablanca is without a doubt. There are crane shots rising over an airport as the rain pours down but, it is quite a directorial achievement. Look at the efficiency of the very first scene. In a close to perfect montage of sequences, Curtiz was able to deliver the problem, the characters, albeit Rick, and the world we are in. His skills made him a valuable asset in the assembly line nature of film studios at the time. Jumping around from hit musicals such as Yankee Doodle Dandy and the film noir, Mildred Pierce, Curtiz was able to put his stamp on a whole slew of genres, imprinting his style on all of them. His workman like mentality and virtuosity was able to lift even the most mundane material to something worth mentioning, making him a director that should be worth noting instead of his current denomination.