10 great films by one-time directors

Why do many first time directors never go on to make a second movie? Well, as the saying goes, you only get one chance to make a first impression. If that impression is a bad one for contemporaneous audiences, that can be all it takes to finish a directorial career before it’s had the time to take off, even if decades later, that film is re-evaluated as a classic.

That’s the fate that met Charles Laughton, whose indelible The Night of the Hunter (1955) turns 70 on 26 July. The veteran actor was excited by the prospect of movie directing, and even had his next project ready to go afterwards. When The Night of the Hunter failed resoundingly at the box office however, so ahead of its time that it was little liked or understood, he was too wounded to try it again. Watching his mesmeric, otherworldly film today, the knowledge we were deprived of any further work from Laughton feels like a travesty.

Although not all of the one-timers listed below even wanted a second go behind the camera, that sense of lost potential, of wondering of what we could have had if things had turned out a little differently, is one of the major things that makes their films so interesting. There’s also the fact that often, like Laughton, these directors are already known from a different artistic field — actors, writers, designers, producers. While their directorial efforts were sometimes just footnotes in long and varied careers, the way they cast new light on well-known creative personalities means they can also be illuminating historical documents.

Here are 10 great films from directors who – whether voluntarily or not – were one and done.

Director: Mario Peixoto

Mario Peixoto spent most of his 83 years working as a poet, and that sensibility is redolent throughout his sole feature. Conceived after he saw an André Kertész image on the front page of a magazine, of a man’s handcuffed hands around a woman’s neck (an image he’d recreate at the start of his movie), Limite finds two women and a man stranded on a rowboat. Through a series of transfixing avant-garde flashbacks, we discover how they got there.

Peixoto was only 22 years old when he made Limite, but he promoted it throughout his whole life; in 1965, he even faked a translated article from legendary silent filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein that had supposedly praised it. Such underhandedness was really not necessary. The film’s dreamy lyricism has accrued many a genuine famous fan in the near-century since its release, Martin Scorsese and Walter Salles among them. It’s regularly cited as being one of the best Brazilian movies ever made.

Director: Peter Lorre

With his Hollywood acting career having slowed considerably, Peter Lorre returned to his native Germany to direct The Lost One, which he also co-wrote. He cast himself as a Nazi scientist riddled with guilt after killing his fiancée, whom he discovered selling secrets to the other side during World War II.

Lorre had been a big screen staple for over 20 years by the time he made The Lost One. His intimate knowledge of his own unique gravitas led to both one of his best performances, and some intensely striking images, several of which called back to his star-making role in M (1931). With Germany still very much reeling from the war, and the national mood leaning more towards escapism, the movie – themed so strongly around wartime guilt and the impossibility of forgetting – floundered at the box office. Lorre headed back to America, where he spent the rest of his career working predominantly on the small screen.

Director: Charles Laughton

Like Peter Lorre, Charles Laughton had been a familiar big screen presence for decades before he made a movie of his own. By the dawn of the 1950s, he’d started directing on stage, finding success with productions like 1953’s The Caine Mutiny Court Martial. He was eager to transfer that experience to the medium he knew so well, and got his chance when the novel by Davis Grubb found its way to his doorstep.

The tale of an ex-con posing as a priest (Robert Mitchum), who marries and murders women for their money, told through the eyes of the children of his latest victim (Shelley Winters), The Night of the Hunter is the darkest of fairytales, packed with eerily beautiful imagery, and boasting the finest performance of Mitchum’s career. Though now widely accepted as one of the era’s most thrilling films, at the time, it bombed with critics and audiences alike. Laughton kept any further directorial ambitions strictly on the stage.

Director: Marlon Brando

For his sole directorial venture, Marlon Brando recruited great friend and collaborator Karl Malden; the two play bank robbers Rio (Brando) and Dad (Malden). After a job one day, Rio is caught and sent to prison for five years, thanks to a betrayal from Dad, who becomes the mayor of Monterey while Rio is inside. When he gets out, Rio has revenge on his mind, but his old pal is ready for him.

A notoriously difficult character even when acting was his only responsibility, Brando’s time in the director’s chair was fraught with issues, all of which led to One-Eyed Jacks going three times over its budget, and the legend vowing not to direct again. Despite all those problems however, and a muted critical reception, the resultant movie was a gripping, sweeping western that showed Brando had almost as much skill behind the camera as he did in front of it.

Director: Herk Harvey

Though he just had one feature to his name, Herk Harvey was actually a filmmaker by trade, directing numerous educational and industrial shorts for the Centron Corporation. The sight of an abandoned Utah amusement park inspired Harvey to ask fellow Centron worker John Clifford to write a narrative screenplay, which became Carnival of Souls.

The sole survivor of a nightmarish car crash, Mary (Candace Hilligoss) heads cross country to start her new job as a church organist. While she’s eager to move on from the trauma of the crash, visions of an eerie man (Harvey), and periods where no-one around is able to see or hear her, make that a difficult proposition; it seems she’s pierced the veil between life and death. Thickly atmospheric and indelibly creepy, after an initially underwhelming reception, growing popularity from late night showings on TV and special Halloween screenings helped Carnival of Souls become a cult classic.

Director: Barbara Loden

A newspaper story in which a woman thanked a judge for her 20-year prison sentence served as the inspiration for Barbara Loden’s Wanda. Loden also wrote the screenplay and starred as the eponymous character: an aimless woman who leaves her husband and two small children, and drifts into being the getaway driver for a violent criminal, Mr Dennis (Michael Higgins).

Wanda is the fascinating portrait of a woman assertive enough to leave her family behind, but passive enough to let other men treat her terribly. Wanda doesn’t get any lengthy speeches to explain her complex interiority; her slow growth and complicated agency is expressed subtly, through empathetic close-ups, the way she interacts with her environment, and Loden’s own textured performance. Loden directed two educational shorts in 1975, but was never able to secure the financing for another feature. She died in 1980 of breast cancer, at just 48 years old.

Director: Dalton Trumbo

Dalton Trumbo wrote the novel Johnny Got His Gun in 1938, as the world was on the brink of World War II. More than 30 years later – years that contained a famously tumultuous period on the Hollywood Blacklist, and then a failed collaboration attempt with Luis Buñuel as director – the movie adaptation was released into an America in the middle of the Vietnam War.

That long journey could hardly have been more apt for the vehemently anti-war story, which follows a young man (Timothy Bottoms) who’s had all his limbs and his face blown off during World War I, and yet remains alive, stuck in his head with nothing but his memories and hallucinations for company. Trumbo deftly handles both the surrealism of his story and the grimness of his theme, injecting real tenderness as a counterpoint to all the fury at its centre. He died five years later, having finally gotten his message across.

Director: Philip D’Antoni

The Seven-Ups is something of a spiritual sequel to The French Connection (1971). Both films are set in the grimy underworld of 1970s New York City, and feature a barnstorming car chase sequence. They share a composer and a stunt coordinator. Roy Scheider’s character in both is loosely based on the same real-life cop, although he moves from supporting role to lead in the later movie (it was his first star turn, his next would be in Jaws in 1975).

And Philip D’Antoni, who produced The French Connection, directed The Seven-Ups – the story of the titular group of NYC cops who try to bust an organised kidnapping ring that claims the lives of one of their own. D’Antoni’s producing experience, and familiarity with the core team, helped the novice helm both the enormous central set pieces and the smaller scale emotional scenes with a steady, assured hand. The result is a severely underrated crime film.

Director: Saul Bass

Graphic designer Saul Bass was best known for revolutionising the art of title design. His credit sequences and posters for classic films such as Vertigo (1958), Anatomy of a Murder (1959) and West Side Story (1961) would be vital tools in the way those films endured in the cultural consciousness. He was an expert at distilling the whole essence of a movie down to a few striking images.

Though he spent six decades working in Hollywood, and made a handful of excellent shorts, Phase IV was his only feature directing credit. While the story of scientists trying to stop killer ants from taking over the universe sounds like the stuff of 50s sci-fi pablum, Bass used his mastery of visual storytelling to make his film haunting, spare and stylish, with particular images – ants crawling out of a dead man’s hand, the seven towers the ants had constructed in the desert – lingering long in the memory.

Director: Tom Stoppard

Playwright Tom Stoppard wrote Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead, a play about two peripheral characters in Hamlet taking centre stage, in 1966. An initial attempt at a film adaptation with John Boorman at the helm floundered. Then Stoppard moved on to other things. Over two decades later, the opportunity came round again, aided by Stoppard himself being willing to direct – the idea of writer-directors, as he’d put it in an interview with Newsweek, at the time being, “quite attractive and sexy”.

Stoppard tells his story with a robustly cinematic eye. The screenplay is dense with text, but he opens up the action into various grand locations, adding a racing, fluid camera, and drawing entertaining performances from two future British acting legends, Gary Oldman and Tim Roth. Stoppard enjoyed the experience, and was happy with the end result, but – a writer first and foremost – he felt no great pull back towards the director’s chair.