Arthur Penn

Arthur Penn (born September 27, 1922, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, U.S.—died September 28, 2010, New York, New York) was an American motion-picture, television, and theater director whose films were noted for their critical examination of the darker undercurrents of American society.

(Read Martin Scorsese’s Britannica essay on film preservation.)

Early life

A child of divorce, Penn spent the early years of his life with his peripatetic mother and then, as a teenager, went to live with his father, a watchmaker, in Philadelphia. (His older brother Irving Penn became a renowned photographer.) While stationed in South Carolina during service in the U.S. Army (1943–46), Penn became involved with a local theater group in which he met Fred Coe, who later became a prolific television producer. After seeing action during World War II, Penn remained in Europe as a civilian to manage an entertainment unit known as the Soldiers Show Company. Under the G.I. Bill he studied literature at Black Mountain College in North Carolina (where he came in contact with composer John Cage, choreographer Merce Cunningham, painters Willem de Kooning and Robert Rauschenberg, and architect R. Buckminster Fuller) and in Italy before attending Actors Studio West in Los Angeles.

Penn started working in television in 1951 as a floor manager and then as assistant director on The Colgate Comedy Hour. Soon thereafter Coe gave him the opportunity to direct live television dramas, and, like other future filmmakers such as John Frankenheimer and Sidney Lumet, Penn honed his craft as a director working on prestige television programs such as Gulf Playhouse and Philco Television Playhouse. In 1957 he directed the William Gibson-scripted The Miracle Worker for Playhouse 90, and in 1958 he staged Gibson’s play Two for the Seesaw on Broadway. (It was his second Broadway effort, following The Lovers, which closed after four performances in 1956.) Other early Broadway productions directed by Penn included The Miracle Worker (1959), a successful adaptation of Gibson’s teleplay; Toys in the Attic (1960); All the Way Home (1960); and An Evening with Mike Nichols and Elaine May (1960).

Early films

Penn made his screen directing debut with The Left Handed Gun (1958), a psychological retelling of the legend of gunfighter Billy the Kid. Paul Newman essayed the title role, which he had played in the 1955 Philco Playhouse production on which the film was based (Gore Vidal wrote both versions). Although the film (which was taken out of Penn’s hands in postproduction) was a box-office failure, it was much praised by the influential French critic André Bazin in the journal Cahiers du Cinema, solidifying an ongoing reciprocal appreciation between Penn and the critics and filmmakers of the French New Wave.

1 of 2

2 of 2

Frustrated by his ultimate lack of control over The Left Handed Gun, Penn waited five years before he directed the acclaimed screen version of The Miracle Worker (1962). Patty Duke and Anne Bancroft repeated their stage roles as Helen Keller and her teacher Anne Sullivan Macy, respectively. Bancroft won the Academy Award for best actress and Duke the award for best supporting actress, while Penn received his first nomination for best director. Penn then began work on the World War II movie The Train (1964) but was fired by Burt Lancaster, the film’s producer and star, who replaced him with Frankenheimer.

Penn returned to Broadway in 1964 to direct Sammy Davis, Jr., in the hit musical Golden Boy. His next film, the complex Mickey One (1965), offered an unconventional narrative and was characterized by some critics as ambitious and by others as pretentious. Warren Beatty, who was also the film’s producer, played a nightclub comedian undergoing delusions of persecution by the mob. Far more commercial was The Chase (1966), based on a novel by Horton Foote (adapted by Lillian Hellman). It starred Marlon Brando as the sheriff of a Texas town overrun with nymphomaniacs, drunks, and assorted bullies, most of whom are waiting for the return of an escaped convict (Robert Redford); Jane Fonda, E.G. Marshall, and Janice Rule also appeared.

Get Unlimited Access

Try Britannica Premium for free and discover more.

Subscribe

Films of the later 1960s

Penn’s next film, Bonnie and Clyde (1967), became a landmark of the American cinema and is widely recognized as one of the best and most-influential movies of the 1960s. Once again Beatty was the film’s producer as well as its star. After offering the film to French directors François Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard, Beatty turned to the still relatively unknown Penn, who brought his own New Wave sensibility to the project, alternating richly comic moments with scenes of shocking brutality. More than a few critics took the film to task for its extraordinary violence, but others recognized that Penn was primarily concerned with mythmaking. Penn himself countered the criticism of the violence in the film by saying that television news reports of the Vietnam War showed far worse images. The story of the exploits of the Depression-era bank robbers Bonnie and Clyde—Bonnie Parker (Faye Dunaway) and Clyde Barrow (Beatty)—typified Penn’s recurring interest in outcasts and characters living, often rebelliously, on the margins of society. Although the film struggled initially at the box office, it went on to become one of Warner Brothers’ highest-grossing films of the era and earned a bevy of Academy Award nominations, including for best director (Penn), best picture, best actor (Beatty), best actress (Dunaway), best supporting actor (Gene Hackman), and best original screenplay (Robert Benton and David Newman); Estelle Parsons won the award for best supporting actress, and Burnett Guffey won for best cinematography. By breaking taboos regarding narrative expectations, antiheroic protagonists, and the depiction of graphic violence, Bonnie and Clyde helped set the stage for rebellious youth-oriented films such as Easy Rider (1969) and for a generation of iconoclastic American filmmakers such as Martin Scorsese, Robert Altman, and Hal Ashby.

Penn chose to follow Bonnie and Clyde with the kinder, gentler Alice’s Restaurant (1969), the plot of which was based on singer-songwriter Arlo Guthrie’s 18-minute-long narrative song. Penn, who cowrote the screenplay, evocatively captured the flavour of that song and the hippie counterculture that it celebrated, earning another Academy Award nomination as best director.

Films and plays of the 1970s

The revisionist western Little Big Man (1970) proved to be another directorial tour de force for Penn. Equal parts of burlesque and tragedy, this reimagining of Thomas Berger’s picaresque novel not only depicted American frontier policy as brutal and genocidal but also acted as a parable of U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War. So too it depicted and debunked a parade of Hollywood western movie conventions, including captivity narratives, gunfighter myths, and medicine shows, as well as the often-told tale of the Battle of Little Bighorn. Dustin Hoffman gave an inventive performance as the bewildered protagonist, with strong supporting performances by Dunaway and Chief Dan George.

Largely as a result of the lukewarm commercial response to Little Big Man, Penn spent five years away from the screen and then returned with the carefully crafted but extremely downbeat film noir Night Moves (1975), in which Hackman played a private detective whose marriage is falling apart and who becomes immersed in a case involving a runaway teenager (Melanie Griffith). Back on Broadway in 1976, Penn directed George C. Scott in the well-received Sly Fox, Larrry Gelbart’s play based on Volpone by Ben Jonson. Penn returned to film work with The Missouri Breaks (1976), a controversial, eccentric, big-budget western with a screenplay by novelist Thomas McGuane and starring Brando as a hired killer toying with a gang of rustlers whose former leader was played by Jack Nicholson. In 1977 Penn directed Bancroft’s portrayal of Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir in Gibson’s stage play Golda.

Films of the 1980s and later work

After another five-year screen hiatus, Penn directed Four Friends (1981), an impressionistic account of America in the 1960s as seen through the eyes of a Yugoslav immigrant (Craig Wasson); it met with mixed reviews. A third teaming with Hackman, the Alfred Hitchcock-like thriller Target (1985), followed but failed to win the accolades of their previous films together. Dead of Winter (1987), based on Joseph H. Lewis’s 1945 film noir My Name Is Julia Ross and starring Mary Steenburgen as the woman being held prisoner in a spooky mansion, was better. Penn & Teller Get Killed (1989), a marriage of black humour and violence, became a cult favourite with fans of the subversive comedian-magicians of the title.

From 1990 to 2010 Penn acted as an executive producer for NBC’s much-acclaimed television crime-and-punishment franchise Law & Order. From 1992 to 2000 he served as Actors Studio president. During that period he also directed the television film The Portrait (1993), an adaptation of Tina Howe’s play Painting Churches that starred Gregory Peck and Lauren Bacall. Penn’s final film, Inside (1996), was another made-for-television project. As his active career as director wound down, he returned once more to the theater, directing Fortune’s Fool, an adaptation of a play by Ivan Turgenev that starred Alan Bates and Frank Langella in 2002, and a revival of Sly Fox in 2004. Penn died of heart failure at the age of 88, leaving behind a distinguished body of work in which a radical aesthetic was deftly juxtaposed with an often equally radical political message.