One of the most notable promotions to direction from among the ranks of screenwriters was that of Paul Schrader (b.1946), an erstwhile critic and film historian who wrote several scripts, among them Scorsese's Taxi Driver, before making his directorial debut with 1978's hard-hitting Blue Collar that starred Harvey Keitel and Richard Pryor. This conspicuously well-crafted picture is cleverly disguised as a sharp thriller concerning trade-union corruption but below the film's surface it is a gripping essay on alienation.
Schrader's following film Hardcore (1979) though often intriguing in its response to Los Angeles's notorious underworld, is curiously bereft of narrative plausibility, But American Gigolo (1980) a love song to Robert Bresson's earlier opus, Pickpocket (1959) is a major achievement; Schrader the ever trickster - once again adopts the frame-work of a suspense story, combining a seductively fluid technique with a disquieting foray into the metaphysical realms of guilt and regeneration.
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| Patton's perving |
1982's Cat People is a valid remake of the Jacques Tourneur/Val Lewton minor classic of 1942 that served as a starring vehicle for then up and coming model turned actress Nastassja Kinski. Schrader has directed a sum of eighteen films; his latest, a recently released thriller, Dying of the Light (2014) starring Nicholas Cage.