Michael Curtiz

Born Manó Kaminer in Budapest, Curtiz directed dozens of films across Hungary, Austria and Germany before Warner Bros. lured him to Hollywood in 1926. He arrived, legend has it, on the Fourth of July, mistaking the fireworks for a welcome. He would spend the next quarter-century as the studio's most valuable and least sentimental workhorse, a director who could shape any genre thrown at him and shape it beautifully.

What made Curtiz extraordinary was range without a signature ego. He gave Errol Flynn his swashbuckling immortality in Captain Blood and The Adventures of Robin Hood, all swooping crane shots and clashing steel. He made taut gangster pictures like Angels with Dirty Faces, the delirious wartime musical Yankee Doodle Dandy, and the shadowed melodrama Mildred Pierce that resurrected Joan Crawford's career. His images were sculpted with expressionist lighting and a European feel for atmosphere, yet they moved with pure American velocity.

His monument, of course, is Casablanca. Assembled almost by accident from a troubled script being rewritten as it shot, it became the most beloved studio film ever made and won Curtiz the Academy Award for Best Director in 1943. He accepted with the fractured English that made him a Hollywood punchline; his mangled commands were collected and mocked, but the results silenced everyone.

Curtiz worked murderously hard and treated actors and animals with a coldness that earned him enemies. He cared for the frame above all. When the studio system that suited him so perfectly began to crumble in the 1950s, his output thinned and softened, though he still delivered White Christmas and helped launch Elvis Presley in King Creole.

He died in 1962, and film culture has never quite known what to do with him, precisely because he had no single obsession to theorize. That anonymity is his paradox: one of the most gifted directors of images Hollywood ever employed, remembered less as an artist than as the man who happened to make its most quotable film.