Arthur Penn

Arthur Hiller Penn (September 27, 1922 – September 28, 2010) was an American filmmaker, theatre director, and producer. He was a three-time Academy Award nominee for Best Director, and a Tony Award winner. Among other accolades, he was also nominated for a BAFTA Award, a Golden Globe and two Primetime Emmy Awards.

Penn’s first achieved prominence as a theatre director, winning a Tony Award for Best Direction of a Play for The Miracle Worker. He received similar acclaim and his first Oscar nomination for directing the 1962 film adaptation. His 1967 film Bonnie and Clyde is credited with initiating the New Hollywood movement, by infusing the biographical crime drama with a counterculture sensibility.^[1] He achieved similar critical and commercial success directing the comedy Alice's Restaurant (1969) and the revisionist Western Little Big Man (1970), which further reflected that ethos.

Penn’s other notable films included the neo-noir Night Moves (1975) and the revisionist Western The Missouri Breaks (1976). In the 1990s, he returned to stage and television direction and production, including an executive producer role for the police procedural series Law & Order.^[2]

Penn was born in 1922, to a Russian Jewish family in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, the son of Sonia (Greenberg), a nurse, and Harry (Tzvi) William Penn, a watchmaker, both natives of then Novoaleksandrovsk, Russia, now Zarasai, Lithuania.^[3][4] He was the younger brother of Irving Penn, the fashion, portrait and still life photographer. During his early years, he moved in with his mother after she divorced his father. Some time after, he came back to his sickly father, leading him to run his father's watch repair shop. As Penn grew up, he became increasingly interested in film, especially after seeing the Orson Welles film Citizen Kane.^[5]

At 19, he was drafted into the United States Army during World War II (1943–1946), serving as an infantryman in the Battle of the Bulge.^{[6][7][8][9][10][11][12]} While stationed in Britain, he became interested in theater. He started to direct and take part in shows being put on for the soldiers around England at the time.^[11]

After the war, Penn attended Black Mountain College in North Carolina. As a student there he directed a production of Erik Satie's Le piège de Méduse with R. Buckminster Fuller, Elaine de Kooning, and Merce Cunningham performing,^[13] and he was a featured commentator in the documentary Fully Awake about the college.^[14]

After making a name for himself as a director of quality television dramas, Penn made his feature debut with The Left Handed Gun (1958) for Warner Brothers. A retelling of the Billy the Kid legend, it was distinguished by Paul Newman's portrayal of the outlaw as a psychologically troubled youth (the role was originally intended for James Dean). The production was completed in only 23 days, but Warner Brothers reedited the film against his wishes with a new ending he disapproved of. The film failed upon release in North America, but was well received in Europe.^[15]

Penn's second film was The Miracle Worker (1962), the story of Anne Sullivan's struggle to teach the blind and deaf Helen Keller how to communicate. It garnered two Academy Awards for its leads Anne Bancroft and Patty Duke. Penn had won a Tony Award for directing the stage production, written by William Gibson, also starring Bancroft and Duke,^[16] and he had directed Bancroft's Broadway debut in playwright Gibson's first Broadway production, Two for the Seesaw.^[4]

Penn began working on The Train in France in June and August 1963 when star Burt Lancaster had Penn fired after three days of Penn's filming^[17] and called on John Frankenheimer to take over the film.^[4]

In 1965 Penn directed Mickey One. Heavily influenced by the French New Wave, it was the dreamlike story of a standup comedian (played by Warren Beatty) on the run from sinister, ambiguous forces. In 2010, Penn commented: "You know, you could not have gone through the Second World War with all that nonsense with Russia being an ally and then being the big black monster. It was an absurd time. The McCarthy period was ridiculous and humiliating, deeply humiliating. When I finally did 'Mickey One', it was in repudiation of the kind of fear that overtook free people to the point where they were telling on each other and afraid to speak out. It just astonished me, really astonished me. I mean, I was a vet, so it was nothing like what we thought we were fighting for."^[18]

Penn's next film was The Chase (1966) a thriller following events in a small corrupt Southern town on the day an escaped convict, played by Robert Redford, returns. Penn was excluded from the post-production process, which was instead overseen by producer Sam Spiegel.^[4] However, the film was still praised by critics, with Dave Kehr later calling it one of Penn's "most personal and feverishly creative works".^[4] Also that year, he directed the stage version of the thriller Wait Until Dark starring Lee Remick and Robert Duvall.^[4]

He reunited with Warren Beatty for the gangster film Bonnie and Clyde (1967). The film went on to become a worldwide phenomenon. It was strongly influenced by the French New Wave and itself went on to make a huge impression on a younger generation of filmmakers. Indeed, there was a strong resurgence in the "love on the run" subgenre in the wake of Bonnie and Clyde, peaking with Badlands (1973; in which Penn received acknowledgement in the credits). Beatty had given him 10% of the potential profits of the film before production started and the success of the film earned Penn over $2 million.^[19]

At the time he had completed Bonnie and Clyde, Penn was residing in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, when he heard a story of a large-scale littering incident that had happened in the town two years prior. He contacted Arlo Guthrie, received permission to adapt his song "Alice's Restaurant Massacree" into a film, and secured Guthrie's participation as well as several other Stockbridge town residents while filming in many of the same locations where the events took place. The film Alice's Restaurant was released in 1969.^[20] Guthrie later stated in 2023 that he was angered by the film, believing Penn and his co-writer had come to a fundamentally wrong conclusion about whether or not hippie values were still relevant, and had walked out of the film's premiere;^[21] Alice Brock and Richard Robbins, who were also portrayed in the film, were similarly offended.^[22][23]

Penn followed up Alice's Restaurant in 1970 with Little Big Man, a "shaggy dog" account of the life of a white man (played by Dustin Hoffman) who gets adopted into the Cheyenne tribe.^[4] In 1973 Penn provided a segment for a promotional film for the Olympics titled Visions of Eight along with several other major directors such as John Schlesinger and Miloš Forman. His next film was Night Moves (1975) about a private detective (played by Gene Hackman) on the trail of a runaway. Next came The Missouri Breaks (1976), a ramshackle, eccentric story of a horse thief (Jack Nicholson) facing off with an eccentric bounty hunter (played by Marlon Brando).^[4]

In the 1980s, Penn's career began to lose its momentum with critics and audiences. Four Friends (1981) was a traumatic look back at the 1960s. Target (1985) was a mainstream thriller reuniting the director with Gene Hackman, and Dead of Winter (1987) was a horror/thriller.^[24] Subsequently, Penn returned to work in television, including as an executive producer for the crime series Law & Order.^[4]

At the 57th Berlin International Film Festival in 2007, Penn received the Honorary Golden Bear.^[25]

Penn maintained an affiliation with Yale University, occasionally teaching classes there.^[26]

In 1955, he married actress Peggy Maurer. They had two children: son Matthew Penn and daughter, Molly Penn.^[4]

Penn became friends with Alger Hiss during the production of Mickey One, saying in a 2010 interview, "Alger got married here in my apartment. And so I became more of a student of the Hiss period than I knew what to do with, frankly".^[18]

Penn died from congestive heart failure at his home in Manhattan on September 28, 2010, the day after his 88th birthday.^[4]

Penn also received lifetime achievement honors from the Berlin International Film Festival,^[25] the San Francisco International Film Festival, and the Los Angeles Film Critics Association, among others.

Oscar-related Performance
Under Penn's directions, these actors have received Oscar nominations and wins for their performances in these respective roles.

• Arthur Penn – encyclopedia.com
• Chaiken, Michael; Cronin, Paul, eds. (2008). Arthur Penn: Interviews. Jackson, Mississippi: University Press of Mississippi. ISBN 978-1-60473-104-0.
• Arthur Penn at Senses of Cinema
• Obituaries: Arthur Penn at Sight & Sound
• Looking Back at Arthur Penn – slideshow at The New York Times
• Arthur Penn at The Interviews: An Oral History of Television

Metadata

• Arthur Penn at IMDb
• Arthur Penn at the AFI Catalog of Feature Films
• Arthur Penn at the TCM Movie Database
• Arthur Penn at AllMovie
• Arthur Penn at Film Index International
• Arthur Penn at Virtual History
• Arthur Penn at the Internet Broadway Database
• Arthur Penn at the Internet Off-Broadway Database (archived)