Irvin Kershner's best films - The Luck of Ginger Coffey (1963), Loving (1970), and The Return of a Man Called Horse (1975) - were all box office flops. An independent artist, Kershner studied music and painting (with Hans Hoffmann) before turning to films in the late forties (via USC film school and a number of government sponsored documentaries). His first feature, Stake Out on Dope Street, was made on $30,000 in Chicago in 1958: Haskell Wexler photographed, and Roger Corman wound up making a lot of money distributing it. His first critical hit, The Luck of Ginger Coffey, was made in Canada in 1963. The qualities that kept audiences away from Ginger Coffey are exactly those which helped insure that Loving would not make it in the mass market: a neo-Chekhovian sensibility, and a disrupting but lifelike approach to the subject of adult emotional behavior in the flow of the normal daily life problems of work and marriage. Strangely, this director who is able to create delicate epiphanies of feeling, of character insight, of human hurt and loneliness in one forlorn tragi-comic masterpiece after another is also able to shift career gears for an occasional stint at the helm of a Big Hollywood Project. He directed Barbra Streisand in Up the Sandbox, and managed to inject enough stylistic naturalism and genuine feeling for the plight of a neglected young mother in New York to make the film something less than a normal Streisand smash. After directing Faye Dunaway in The Eyes of Laura Mars, Kershner took on the assignment of directing the sequel to Star Wars, The Empire Strikes Back, now finishing post-production in Marin. Back to Loving, one of the neglected classics of the 70s: here are some excerpts from the New York Times' review by Roger Greenspun:
“Irvin Kershner seems to specialize in directing movies about men who have to rush to keep up with themselves. In his best film so far, Loving... he has not only a hero in a hurry, but also an actor who while he runs can react with precision, depth and endless good sense....
“George Segal plays a commercial artist with wife (wonderful Eva Marie Saint) and kids in Westport, and mistress and contacts in New York. He is in the midst of losing his mistress, winning a major account, acquiring a new house, keeping up appearances, satisfying his desires, pleasing clients, asserting his independence - and somehow keeping at bay the success that seems in danger of settling the precarious imbalance....
“It is a comic situation, being, like most comedy, a few footnotes to the course of human misery....
“In a sense, the very banality of the film's anecdote allows George Segal the fullest scope for his intelligence - just as it forces Irvin Kershner's attention for once to upper middle-class normality, with greatly satisfying results.
“Loving is wholly a New York (or, more accurately, greater metropolitan area) movie. Like the best New York movies, it is strong on reality - not local color, but localized attitudes and occupations. To his everlasting glory, Kershner never condescends toward the profession of commercial art, but, instead, understands it as effort, anxiety and independence - as the essence of self-employment and not as personal sellout. The film ultimately reveals less about suburban morals, its advertised subject, than about the morality of making do, its real subject. It succeeds beautifully with the details of how we live, and fails only in the forced mechanics of its major scenes.”
The novel “Brooks Wilson Ltd.,” which is the basis for Don Devlin's screenplay, was written by the illustrator and independent filmmaker John R. McDermott (under the name J.M. Ryan), whose neglected war films Pickett's Charge and Belleau Wood were featured here last November.