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Norman Jewison Could (and Did) Do It All
There are contortionists who can’t fold themselves into as many different shapes as the late Moonstruck director did during his career.
And the sexy heist thriller The Thomas Crown Affair, which treated Steve McQueen and Faye Dunaway as pure eye candy and ignited a decade-long craze for mosaic-style split-screen collages. Jewison flexed himself across as many genres as any of the film-school-educated “movie brats” who followed him a generation later (Coppola, Scorsese, Spielberg, et al.), but although he had the never-break-a-sweat professionalism that Boomer filmmakers worshiped in old studio workhorse directors like George Stevens ( Swing Time, Gunga Din, Giant, Shane), he didn’t publicly call attention to the magic act, much less analyze it at length. His films about the effect of systemic racial oppression on justice — In the Heat of the Night, A Soldier’s Story, and The Hurricane — form a searing triptych of social criticism in genre garb, as impressive as the best of Lumet’s ground-level New York dramas about institutional corruption and indifference.
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