Sydney Pollack with George Clooney in Michael Clayton
Cinema's ageing bulls usually enjoy a period of gentle decline before the inevitable exit. They have the moneyed retirement in the Hollywood hills, the odd career retrospective and perhaps an honorary Oscar to set against the perfunctory grumble about their inability to get a green-light from the youth-obsessed studios. Not so Sydney Pollack. The 73-year-old multi-hyphenate (writer, director, actor, producer) died yesterday with two pictures (Margaret; The Reader) still in post-production. He was a bustling, vigorous presence right to the end.
Pollack always struck me as one of the last, best representatives of the Hollywood studio system - an old-school film-maker who found a way to flourish alongside the young guns of 70s American cinema. He might have named Raging Bull as one of his all-time favourite films, but his own work was altogether more tailored and polished. Where Scorsese chose Robert De Niro as his muse, Pollack significantly plumped for another Robert (Redford) - kicking off a fruitful collaboration that stretched from Jeremiah Johnson to The Way We Were to Three Days of the Condor before culminating in 1986's Oscar-winning Out of Africa. The handsome embodiment of Hollywood glamour, Redford proved the perfect front for a Pollack production.
For all that, one could argue that his most challenging, interesting films were made outside the Redford aegis. The Swimmer (which he co-directed with Frank Perry) was a cold-eyed, compelling study of suburban affluenza and one of the great underrated films of the 60s. They Shoot Horses, Don't They? ranks alongside John Ford's The Grapes of Wrath as a devastating tale of the American Depression. Tootsie - spearheaded by Dustin Hoffman's turn as a cross-dressing soap star - was one of the smartest, funniest comedies of the 1980s.
It's tempting to write off Pollack's later career, though even here he found a way to confound us. At the same time as his films were turning blandly anonymous (The Firm, Sabrina, The Interpreter), he discovered a vibrant sideline as a character actor. If anything, latter-day Pollack was more captivating in front of the camera than he was behind it. He was hilarous as a lawyer suffering a mid-life crisis in Woody Allen's Husbands and Wives and excelled as George Clooney's flawed, dissembling father figure in last year's Michael Clayton.
Pollack's last film as a director was a heartfelt, personal study of the architect Frank Gehry. It was a film that told us a lot about Gehry, but it also said a lot about Pollack too. Its maker revealed himself as a modest, self-critical man, a robust talent who could recognise genius when he saw it. "I wouldn't have the courage to try what [Gehry is] trying with film-making," he confessed in a Guardian blog. "He's really broken all the rules ... I'm much more of a coward. I've never thought I was going to reinvent cinema." Maybe he never did; not many people do. But Sydney Pollack was an intelligent, versatile and often brilliant film-maker. Cinema is poorer without him.
