The auteur theory

In his classic guidebook to auteurism, The American Cinema, Andrew Sarris characterizes Michael Curtiz as a director who “perhaps more than any other … reflected the strengths and weaknesses of the studio system.” ¹ As Sarris put it, “when one speaks of a typical Warners’ film in the thirties and forties, one is generally speaking of a typical Curtiz film of those periods” (1968, 175). That is to say, Curtiz, in his many films, expressed the studio rather than himself. After 1951, with the collapse of the studio system, and “the bottom dropping out of routine film-making” (176), Curtiz’s career “went to the dogs”(175). “If many of the early Curtiz films are hardly worth remembering, none of the later ones are even worth seeing” (1968, 175). However, as we all know, “the director’s one enduring masterpiece is, of course, Casablanca, the happiest of happy accidents, and the most decisive exception to the auteur theory” (176). Or, as Sarris’s great rival, Pauline Kael, put it, somewhat less charitably, “a good hack job.” ²