Today, I’m framing my prediction with Sidney Lumet’s offerings from the decade of the 1990s.
Q&A (1990). A strange, compelling film that Lumet co-authored. What do I find most strange about the 2024 Chicago Bears? Cole Kmet. Why does Kmet, a tight end that should be a vital component when it comes to making a rookie QB’s life easier, have only six catches over the last three weeks? Thomas Brown must get him more involved to unlocking this passing game.
A Stranger Among Us (1992). Will the real Montez Sweat please stand up? This is not the same player who arrived midseason in 2023, and the Bears needed him to be if they intended to mount a serious pass rush. Sam Darnold has a quick trigger under pressure. Sunday, they need Sweat to apply it.
Guilty as Sin (1993). What am I most guilty of this season? Underplaying the impact of the “Hail Maryland.” Seeing the Bears play Sunday against Green Bay, it’s clear that was not the same team that showed up the previous two weeks. The hangover was real, but it seems to have receded, sadly costing the club their 2024 campaign.
Night Falls on Manhattan (1996). One of the most underrated films of the decade, Night Falls is not perfect, but Lumet guides several brilliant performances, especially the late Ron Leibman. Minnesota features one of the best pass rushes in the league. Night is about to fall on Caleb Williams if the OL is not on high alert. (And I’m not sure their alertness will matter too much.)
Critical Care (1997). A subtle, if not entirely successful reminder that Lumet is the cinema’s greatest institutional critic. The Vikings offense is on a bit of life support. They have won their last three games, but it’s been mostly on the strength of their defense, as they’re allowing only 11 points per game over that stretch.
Gloria (1999). Lumet’s seriously misguided cinematic effort; a remake with no reason for existence. This is a perfect metaphor for Matt Eberflus’s continued role in the Chicago Bears. Still, I’m calling for the upset.
If Jayden Daniels doesn’t play Sunday, and the oddsmakers seem to believe he won’t, it is a massive bummer for the entirety of the NFL. The Washington Commanders (nee Redskins) and Chicago Bears are two of the proudest franchises in the sport, and the league is better when both are winning. Roger Goodell and the boys were going to use this game to promote and celebrate two players – Daniels and Caleb Williams – they expect to be the face of the league for the next decade. And there was a strong chance Bears at Commanders, kicking off at 4:25 PM ET, would be the highest rated day game all season.
Now, who knows? The game is still important. The rating will still be solid. But if Daniels doesn’t play, it loses half of its luster, half of its star power. And personally, I was excited to see both of them in-person, on the same field, and paid a hefty price for that honor. Marcus Mariota’s name on the marquee doesn’t create lines at the box office.
Three Thoughts on the Commanders
What has been sneaky about the Commander resurgence is not the offense; that has been well covered in the national media. But the Commanders are 15th in points allowed per game, and 16th in yards allowed per game. That might not seem impressive, but this was arguably the worst defense in the league in 2023. Advancing to the middle of the pack is a huge leap in one season, and a testament to the coaching work of Dan Quinn. This is not a good defense. But it’s not a bad one, either.
If Daniels does not play Sunday, expect the Commanders to rely heavily on the underrated Brian Robinson. Robinson is rushing to 4.7 YPC, and has 6 touchdowns, but has only been given 20+ carries once this season. That’s likely to change Sunday.
Where has Washington been far better than Chicago? Offensively, on third down. The Commanders convert at a rate of 48.8%, ranking them third in the league. The Bears are much further down the table, converting 35.4% of their opportunities. Could be a game-within-the-game to pay attention to on Sunday.
Lumet VII: Lumet and the Police
Football is taking center stage so I will bypass Lumet VI, which was to focus on his collaborations with Sean Connery and general work abroad. Four films should not be ignored, however, in this regard. The Hill (1965) is a brilliant moral tale, reflective of Lumet’s own conflicted time in the service. The Anderson Tapes (1971) is Lumet’s minor-yet-noteworthy entry into the paranoia cinema of the 1970s. The Offence (1973) is a complicated revelation, especially for Ian Bannen’s brilliant turn as the potential killer. And Murder on the Orient Express (1974) is a cinematic tour de force, another breathtaking example of Lumet’s genius for shooting in the confined space.
The Rams are 29th in passing yards allowed per game through three weeks. They have only four sacks, while allowing seven passing touchdowns. Opposing quarterbacks are tossing to a rate of 127.3, ranking them next to last in the league. Line ’em up, spread ’em out, chuck it.
(They are also a bad rush defense, but does that matter?)
There is a grace period in the NFL, when teams are allowed to look messy and disjointed. Bill Simmons and Cousin Sal, hosts of my favorite NFL podcast, joked that while we the NFL fans were ready for this season, the NFL season was not ready for us. But that grace period usually ends after the first four weeks. The Bears have looked solid and prepared on defense, incoherent and unprepared on offense.
They don’t have to light the Rams up for 40 Sunday, but the non-rookies need to start producing.
Lumet III: Theatrical Roots/Theatrical Cinema
Let’s start linking these units together. We discussed Lumet’s ideological foundations with The Group Theater, and his development of early television aesthetics. So, it’s unsurprising that Lumet’s cinematic career, at least at the early stages, is peppered with stage adaptations.
Stage Struck (1958), his second film, is based on the play Morning Glory. But it’s a light comedy and produces light fare. Lumet quickly understands the in order to bring the stage to the screen, and achieve his sensibility, he has to bring the stage’s heavyweights to the screen. And while he’ll make some script alterations here and there, he’s loyal to the power of the text. (This will be discussed later in the term as one of the reasons Lumet is not a favorite of the auteur theory folks.)
Who are these heavyweights? Tennessee Williams. Arthur Miller. Eugene O’Neill. The three most important American dramatists of the first half of the 20th century. In 1960, Lumet adapted Williams’ Orpheus Descending as The Fugitive Kind, starring Marlon Brando. The film is a strange one, but worth seeing as an example of the dramatic hurdles one faces when bringing the stage to the screen. Lumet’s adaptation of Miller’s A View From the Bridge is far more straightforward, but a rather bland cinematic effort.
It is with Long Day’s Journey into Night that Lumet finds his theatrically adaptive form. It is a beautiful film and an exquisite piece of cinematic craftsmanship. From Film at Lincoln Center:
The definitive Eugene O’Neill on film, Lumet’s flawless adaptation of the author’s autobiographical, Pulitzer Prize-winning masterpiece stars Ralph Richardson as the embittered stage actor James Tyrone, husband to a recovering (or relapsing?) morphine addict (Oscar-nominee Katharine Helpburn) and father to an alcoholic fellow actor (Jason Robards Jr., recreating his role from the original Broadway production) and a tubercular merchant seaman (Dean Stockwell). Shot entirely in sequence at New York’s Chelsea Studios following a lengthy rehearsal period with the cast, Long Day’s Journey swept the acting prizes of the 1962 Cannes Film Festival, winning a collective Best Actor trophy for Richardson, Robards, and Stockwell, and Best Actress for Hepburn.
“After such an experience, I don’t see how one can niggle over whether it’s ‘cinema’ or merely ‘filmed theatre.’ Whatever it is, it’s great…Katharine Hepburn has surpassed herself—the most beautiful comedienne of the thirties and forties has become our greatest tragedienne; seeing her transitions in Journey, the way she can look eighteen or eighty at will, experiencing the magic in the art of acting, once can understand why the appellation ‘the divine’ has sometimes been awarded to certain actresses.”
—Pauline Kael
Lumet always felt he didn’t get enough credit for the cinema of this adaptation. I think anyone revisiting it now understands his displeasure was well-founded.
Here is my favorite speech from the piece. Watch the subtlety of Lumet’s camera, and the effectiveness of the lighting design, in allowing Dean Stockwell, as Edmund, to tell this story.
The Colts are allowing 237 yards per game on the ground through two weeks, and ironically have found themselves in two very close ballgames. If the Bears are going to find their rushing legs in the early part of this season, it is going to happen Sunday.
The Indy media is on the assault, and thankfully some of that criticism is being levied at their GM, Chris Ballard. Ballard has been playing the sports media for a decade, leaking more than any other personnel man in the league, and receiving unwarranted kudos for mediocrity as a result. Said a friend (in the league) to me, “I like just about everybody, but I don’t trust Ballard.”
It is not a stat to which many point but opposing passer rating does tell a story and Colts’ opponents through two weeks are pitching to 120.7 rating. Only three teams are worse: the league’s worst team (Carolina), the league’s worst defense (Washington), and a team Kyler Murray just publicly embarrassed (Los Angeles).
Lumet II: Early TV Aesthetics and 12 Angry Men
Sidney Lumet is not a cinematic stylist; there is no signature, visual aesthetic attributable to his work. His camera is a collaborator in service of the story. This is one of the reasons he has not received proper consideration.
But to understand Lumet’s technique, per se, one must understand where he began as a director: live television. Throughout the early 50s, Lumet directed hundreds of live specials for shows like Playhouse 90 and Kraft Television Theater. These had minimal sets (often one), small budgets and tight production schedules. Lumet learned the craft of filmmaking – camera movement, lighting, handling actors – in what amounted to a cinematic bootcamp.
How does one show this? Lumet does it brilliantly in his must-read book, Making Movies:
12 Angry Men, Boris Kaufman, photographer. It never occurred to me that shooting an entire picture in one room was a problem. In fact, I felt I could turn it into an advantage. One of the most important dramatic elements for me was the sense of entrapment those men must have felt in that room. Immediately, a “lens plot” occurred to me. As the picture unfolded, I wanted the room to seem smaller and smaller. That means that I would slowly shift to longer lenses as the picture continued. Starting with the normal range (28mm to 40mm), we progressed to 50mm, 75mm, and 100mm lenses. (p. 81)
When you watch 12 Angry Men, pay close attention to what we in the sports world might call “the thirteen man” – the camera. (The film is available to stream everywhere but it’s free on Roku Channel and with your MGM+ and Criterion subscriptions.)
Evaluating a rookie quarterback after his first game is much like evaluating a limerick after the first line: nonsensical. (“What do I care if this guy is from NANTUCKET?!?!?!”)
Caleb Williams is going to have bad games. More bad games, I should say. He’s also going to have good games. And by the end of the season, one would hope the player in Green Bay come January bears little resemblance to the player at Soldier Field last weekend.
We must see progress, incremental yet noticeable progress. But I’m not going to be using this space to dissect every quarter, every drive, every snap of his rookie season. At the bye, with a six-game sample size, we’ll chart his progress. Then around Thanksgiving, we’ll chart it again. At the end of the season, he’ll have a body of work to analyze and a list of distinct issues to address this offseason. That’s how it works with rookies, despite the now cottage industry of former backup quarterbacks trying to earn their living analyzing every throw on social media. Rookies, man. They’re up. They’re down. They make special plays. They make dumb plays.
What do we hope for? That there are more ups than downs. That the special outweighs the dumb. That by the end of this campaign the organization is confident this is the guy. It’s not an exciting approach but it’s only prudent way to approach rookies playing this position.
Lumet I: The Group Theater
Relevant Books:
The Fervent Years by Harold Clurman
Real Life Drama: The Group Theatre and America, 1931-1940 by Wendy Smith
Waiting for Lefty by Clifford Odets
The Method: How the Twentieth Century Learned to Act by Isaac Butler
Summary:
From the East Hampton Star, in a piece about the 2015 documentary By Sidney Lumet: “Lumet mentions that he was often criticized for not having a thematic line in his work and for doing many different kinds of movies. “It’s nonsense,” he said. “There is always a bedrock concern: Is it fair?”
Lumet was the son of Baruch Lumet, a popular actor in the New York City Yiddish Theater, and Sidney was an incredibly successful young actor on Broadway. But it’s his connection with the Group Theater that provides the foundations of his ideological preoccupations as a filmmaker.
The Group Theater was founded by Harold Clurman, Cheryl Crawford and Lee Strasberg as a response to what they saw as an exceedingly commercial and unserious theater scene in and around the crash of the stock market in 1929. Their intention was to do work that mattered, and they would reflect on their stages the struggles of those aimlessly wandering on the NYC streets outside. This intentionality, this political purpose, defines the career of Lumet as he consistently grapples with the social peril of the moment, constantly challenging institutional authority.
The Group gave theatrical life to the work of Clifford Odets, and the early stage plays of William Saroyan. Their company members would forge a cinematic political legacy that included the works of Elia Kazan (On the Waterfront), Martin Ritt (Hud, Norma Rae), and John Garfield’s anti-McCarthy film productions under the Enterprise label (Force of Evil, The Breaking Point). The political legacy of American cinema is born on the stages of The Group.
The Group’s most famous moment comes in the closing lines of Waiting for Lefty. When the play’s maligned cab drivers stepped to the front of the stage to yell “Strike!” they were greeted with an audience in solidarity. It has been widely reported that each performance of Lefty included an audience joining those pro-worker cheers, so much that those passing by the Longacre worried there was a riot taking place inside.
Stanislavsky’s “method” acting approach was brought to New York by the founding members of this company after visits to meet the master in Russia; thus, their reach expands to the greatest American actors of the 20th Century: Pacino, DeNiro, Newman, Brando, etc. (We’ll discuss Lumet’s issues with the method in the auteur section later.)
The Group failed for many reasons, but the essential one was financial. These were the days before the non-profit theater model. Companies either sold tickets or perished. The Group didn’t sell enough tickets, but their legacy remains. (Turns out people wanted, in the years of the Depression, to be distracted by the stage, not reminded of the tears at the fabric of American society.)
This season, I’m trying something different. Instead of using this space to randomly comment on culture, there will be a recurring theme: the work of Sidney Lumet. Lumet is one of America’s most prolific cinematic artists, and yet is dramatically underrepresented by the critical and academic communities. My long-term mission is to remedy that injustice, and I’ll be using this space to work through concepts, notes, etc.
There’s a poetry to this decision, as well. Lumet was born in 1924, making this his centennial. As my book on Lumet is still years from reaching the desk of a publisher, I’m thrilled to celebrate his 100th birthday right here on this little old blog Noah and I started two decades ago.
Below you’ll find the syllabus. Why am I publishing this? Because if you’re interested in taking a “class” on Lumet, this is your opportunity. There are fourteen films listed and each of them is rentable on one platform or another for a few bucks. If you want a thorough appreciation of a great filmmaker, and also to understand what we do in the Cinema Studies world, I welcome you to watch the films each week and follow along. And any questions you might have along the way, simply email me: jeff@dabearsblog.com.
Week 2: Lumet and The Group Theater
Week 3: Early Television Aesthetics and 12 Angry Men
Week 4: Stage Adaptations
Week 5: The Pawnbroker and Post-War Memory
Week 6: Fail Safe and the Cold War
Week 7: The Sean Connery Collaborations, or Lumet Abroad
Week 8: Serpico, Prince of the City, and the Police
Week 9: Dog Day Afternoon
Week 10: Network and Auteur Theory
Week 11: New York City in The Wiz
Week 12: The Verdict
Week 13: Garbo Talks in the Middle of Ronald Reagan
Week 14: Sins of the Father: Daniel, Running on Empty, and Family Business
Week 15: Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead and Post-9/11 New York
Week 16: The Legacy of Lumet’s Seminal Book, Making Movies
Week 17: Final Thoughts and Bibliography
Three Thoughts on the Titans
Tennessee had arguably the strangest offseason is the NFL. They fired their well-respected coach and looked poised to enter a rebuilding period. They did not. Instead, they were one of the most active teams in free agency, bringing in a collection of expensive veterans and role players. After all of those moves, the Titans still find themselves, according to DraftKings Sportsbook, with the longest odds to win the NFC South at 10-1. (For comparison, the Colts are the third favorite at about 3.5-1.)
