The director who played his own genre game to the most rewarding effect was John Milius; born in St Louis, Missouri in the year 1944. Milius would first reach the radars when he would pen two notable studies in old-time individualism - Sydney Pollack's Jeremiah Johnson and John Huston's The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean. When Milius proceeded to take over the director's chair, the result was the idiosyncratically brilliant Dillinger (1973), an astute account of the Depression Era bank robber's career couched in the terms of a latter-day folk tale.
It's successor, The Wind and The Lion (1975) a mite more ambitious but equally entrancing, this film dramatized a curious incident of 1904 involving American gunboat diplomacy in Morocco - confirmed Milius' delight in tales of derring-do and in the strange byways of history as well as his adroitly staged action sequences. The apt casting of John Huston in a walk-on role set an appropriate seal on the film's lineage. When Milius moved from modernizing genre material to more openly personal concerns in the semi-autobiographical surfing story with 1978's Big Wednesday.
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| Surf's up, Big Wednesday (1978) Milius liked to hang-ten before those take-one's |
In the eighties, Milius achieved decidedly more commercial success with the sword and sorcery epic Conan the Barbarian (1981) starring erstwhile Olympic athlete Arnold Schwarzenegger and the jingoistic yarn Red Dawn (1984) which was historically the first American film released with a PG-13 rating, in which a group of American high-school students practicing guerrilla warfare defend their homeland against sadistic Soviet and Central American invaders.
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| Guerrilla High, USA - Red Dawn (1984) |
In 2013 directors Joey Figueroa and Zak Knutson filmed a two-hour documentary chronicling the life of this seemingly unsung director in Milius.