LUMET, Sidney

(b. 25 June 1924 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania), actor, producer, and television and film director who honed his craft during the golden age of live television and, during the 1960s, began his career as a New York City–based feature filmmaker noted for his expertise with actors and the efficiency and economy of his productions, which often addressed social, moral, political, and ethical issues.

Lumet was the son of Polish immigrants Baruch Lumet, a professional actor in Warsaw, Poland, and Eugenia Wermus Lumet, a dancer; both were veterans of New York's Yiddish theater.

Lumet made his acting debut at the age of four on the radio show The Rabbi from Brooklyn, which Baruch Lumet wrote and directed. In 1928 the five-year-old Lumet appeared on the Yiddish stage alongside his father. As a child and adolescent he read Karl Marx, had a membership in the Young Communist League, and met the playwright Maxwell Anderson, the composer Kurt Weill, and the painter Marc Chagall. Lumet served in the U.S. Army Signal Corps from 1942 to 1946.

Lumet studied with Sandford Meisner at the American Playhouse and was creatively active playing juvenile roles. He was expelled from the newly formed Actor's Studio for rejecting its single acting technique philosophy. Along with other dissidents, Lumet formed the Actor's Workshop, where he conducted a course in the history of drama beginning with contemporary work and tracing back to the Greeks.

Lumet taught acting at the High School of Performing Arts and learned stage directing with productions of Moliere's Bourgeois Gentleman and Doctor's Dilemma and Albert Camus's Caligula. At the age of twenty-six he was offered an assistant director position in the television division of the Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS). This training ground refined Lumet's skills with actors as he learned the language and purpose of the camera, lenses, composition, blocking, and editing. He directed a staggering five hundred live television dramas at the height of the popularity of this medium. Lumet built one of the most impressive resumes of the era, directing 150 episodes of the CBS series Danger, twenty-six episodes of You Are There, and working on assignments for Omnibus, Best of Broadway, Alcoa Theater, and Goodyear Playhouse.

Lumet was married to Rita Gam from 1949 to 1954 and Gloria Vanderbilt from 1956 to 1963. On 23 November 1963 he married Gail Jones, with whom he had two children; the couple divorced in 1978. Lumet married Mary Gimbel in 1980.

In 1957 the actor Henry Fonda gave Lumet the opportunity to direct Twelve Angry Men, a theatrical film he was producing. The low-budget New York production was completed in just nineteen days for $343,000. The conscience of the Reginald Rose script and exploration of democracy at work in the criminal judicial system kindled Lumet's lifelong interest in the moral spectrum of justice.

In the 1960s Twelve Angry Men led to the flowering of a new American cinema. Lumet's training taught him to pre-plan every shot and to work on his feet with intelligence and visual acuity. His political upbringing and sensitivity to social causes merged with his background in the theater to produce a morality that represented the prevailing consciousness of artists of the decade.

Lumet immediately understood the importance of an independent and ethical film artist. Bringing in low-budget films on schedule guaranteed his freedom, because it allowed him to make many films that expressed his fervent views on socially responsible issues. He embraced the philosophy that writers and actors were messengers who could deliver society's truths and create a forum for difficult topics that demanded a cinematic voice.

Tapping into his familiarity with theater, Lumet's first three films of the 1960s were adaptations of Tennessee Williams, Eugene O'Neill, and Arthur Miller plays. The Fugitive Kind (1960) is a rendering of Williams's overheated Orpheus Descending (1957) and is notable for Marlon Brando's electric performance. Shot in sequence, Long Day's Journey into Night (1962) successfully exploits the all-star cast of Katharine Hepburn, Ralph Richardson, Jason Robards, and Dean Stockwell as the Tyrone family, and it is faithful to the play's script. A View from the Bridge (1962) is Arthur Miller's play of forbidden love and betrayal, set in Brooklyn, New York.

After examining the power of sexuality and complex relationships among very different families, Lumet moved into the center of the most-feared global horror of the 1960s, depicted in Fail Safe (1964). The film probed the dangers of the nuclear weapons race between the United States and the Soviet Union. Working again with Henry Fonda, who portrayed the president of the United States, Lumet emphasized the moral agony of a single man. The president is forced by his core values and the enormity of his responsibility to make a decision that not only will annihilate thousands of people he represents, but also will destroy the very lives of his own family. The Pawnbroker (1965) examines the pain and guilt of a Holocaust survivor who struggles with an inability to express emotion. Flash cuts of life in the concentration camp enhance Rod Steiger's emotionally shattering performance.

Lumet was a New York City filmmaker who placed his city at the heart of the drama. Fail Safe concludes with a montage of the vibrant metropolis just seconds before it is sacrificed for the sins of the military-industrial complex. The Pawnbroker chronicles the effects of moral and urban decay of a New York that was home to many who could not live down the past and confront the issues of a decade of changing values and mores. The Hill (1965) explores injustice in a military prison. The Group (1965) is an adaptation of the Mary McCarthy novel that focuses on the social and psychological lives of eight women from Ivy League backgrounds. The Deadly Affair (1967) is a dark adaptation of the John Le Carre novel of espionage. In 1968 Lumet brought Anton Chekov's Seagull to the screen. Bye Bye Braverman (1968) is a comedy concerning third-string literary intellectuals who attend the funeral of a forty-one-year-old colleague. In this film, decades before Steven Spielberg's Schindler's List (1993), Lumet brought the emotional and physical horror of the Holocaust to the screen and satirized the intellectual culture of Jews, a subject about which he had intimate knowledge. Unlike the moguls who created Hollywood, Lumet was not afraid to deal with his Jewish heritage. Lumet closed the decade with The Appointment (1969), a story of obsessive jealousy that destroys a woman's spirit. In the subsequent three decades Lumet dedicated himself to considerations of law enforcement, police corruption, and judicial ethics in Serpico (1974), Dog Day Afternoon (1975), Prince of the City (1981), The Verdict (1982), and Q and A (1990).

Lumet directed theatrical adaptations of Equus (1977), The Wiz (1978), and Deathtrap (1982), and the political dramas Daniel (1983), a fictional account of the Rosenberg spy case, and Running on Empty (1988), which explored the family tensions of underground 1960s radicals.

Lumet's contribution to 1960s filmmaking was a commitment to honest and heartfelt performances realized through a visceral cinematic technique. He probed our sense of right and wrong in a world that since the 1960s has had an increasingly complex social, ethical, and political context.

Sidney Lumet, Making Movies (1995), is a moviemaking primer that gives insight into the director's distinctive methods. Jay Boyer, Sidney Lumet (1993), and Frank R. Cunningham, Sidney Lumet: Film and Literary Vision (rev. ed., 2001), are probing critical studies of the filmmaker's work.

Vincent LoBrutto