"attack"

Sometimes, when choosing a film, only a documentary will do. 

When movie buffs discuss the greatest directors of old Hollywood, the same names tend to crop up: John Ford, Frank Capra, William Wyler, George Cukor, and of course, Hitchcock. Worthy picks of course, but why not Fred Zinnemann? Granted he worked in a wide variety of genres (much like contemporary George Stevens), making him harder to classify. Also he started directing features roughly 15 years after these pioneers of talking pictures. Still, his track record is every bit as impressive.

Today the concept of someone writing and directing their own films is, if not commonplace, hardly unusual. A quick Google search yields many prominent names. So it’s hard to imagine that way back in the thirties, during Hollywood’s Golden Age, there was no such animal. Writers and directors were kept in different silos, and never the ‘twain met.