Great Directors and Genre Themes

A friend of mine who is also an occasional commenter here noted privately in response to my Casino post from the other day that Scorsese just makes the same movie and that this is a cut rate version of Goodfellas. I don’t really buy that on either front. Scorsese has made almost as many films about religious faith as he has about gangsters, but no one accuses him of directing another religious movie. I also think the two movies are both outstanding, even if they share some similarities.

But I think there is a larger point here, which is that nearly every great director of all time has had a core set of actors doing the same film over and over again around the same theme. Here’s a few examples;

1. John Ford, working with John Wayne and the usual supporting cast making western after western
2. Akira Kurosawa, working with Toshiro Mifune and making samurai movies. And then when they fell out, he just kept making samurai movies
3. Ingmar Bergman, working with his crew of Von Sydow, Bibi and Harriett Andersson, Ullman, later Josephson and making movies about the lack of a god and the horrors of his own relationships
4. Charlie Chaplin, playing the same character his entire career
5. Yasujiro Ozu, working with Chishu Ryu and Setsuko Hara and making film after film about family relationships in mid-century Japan
6. Alfred Hitchock, working with Grant, Stewart, and a variety of frosty blondes and making various forms of the mystery film
7. Woody Allen, working with the women in his life at a given time, making a Woody Allen film.
8. Wong Kar Wai, working with Maggie Cheung and Tony Leung and making romantic films about 1960s era Hong Kong
9. Eric Rohmer, who never worked with the same actors, but made an entire career of chatty films about romance that are all basically versions of the same theme.
10. Hayao Mizazaki, who I don’t know which Japanese voice actors he works with, but he created an entire style that he has used for an entire career.

Of course there are exceptions to this. Stanley Kubrick, Howard Hawks, etc., made a huge variety of styles, But the idea that it’s a problem that a great director just does the same damn thing over and over again is not only not really a criticism that holds water, it’s actually counter to the entire history of film.