Streetwise Saint
Sidney Lumet: A Life
By Maura Spiegel, St. Martin’s Press, $29.99
Unlike other five-borough portraitists (Scorsese, Allen, Spike Lee), Sidney Lumet refused to mythologize his city, to underline its mysteries or romance for effect: his New Yorkers are cold, weary, and life-sized.
KNOWN IN HIS TIME AS “AN ACTOR’S DIRECTOR”—AND responsible for career-best, he bore this stigma in “the 1980s and 1990s, when the L word was reviled by both the left and the right.” Lumet’s a quintessential New York director, whose works include and , but he was so prolific, so protean—in the two years between those classics, he adapted Larry McMurtry () and Agatha Christie ( )—that he can’t be tethered to any one milieu. Condemned, it would seem, for doing it all and doing it , Lumet is only now receiving his first major biography.
