Don Siegel: Last of the Independents

His career began in the Warner Brothers montage department in the heady heyday of the studio system, and ended at the dawn of the “high concept” ’80s blockbuster. In between, he produced an all-timer classic of paranoiac sci-fi (Invasion of the Body Snatchers), the best (and arguably only good) Elvis Presley vehicle (Flaming Star), filmed John Cassavetes planting an enormous right hook on the jaw of Ronald Reagan (The Killers), and ushered an up-and-coming spaghetti Western actor, Clint Eastwood, into the ranks of Hollywood royalty. A utility man genre filmmaker whose varied films invariably have something of the hard clarity of classical Latin about them, a stubborn artist who managed to survive and thrive inside The System while taking no shit from the moneymen who run (and ruin) the movies, the director of the finest sex scene of Walter Matthau’s career, of course we can only be talking about Don Siegel—and soon, we hope, New York cinephiles will be talking of nothing else.