Master's piece... Ingmar Bergman and Liv Ullman on the set of Saraband, a film made when he was 84. Photograph: Bengt Wanselius
The death of Robert Altman at the age of 81 has provoked much discussion about movies made at the end of careers, not least because he'd just made a movie that many consider both one of his best and a work that, in the drawing together of recurrent themes and preoccupations, might be regarded as testamentary. Do directors mature or go into decline? Do they do their best work early on, in mid-career, or at the end?
The revered Portuguese director Manoel de Oliveira, born 1908, is in post-production on his 43rd film at the age of 98, and his films are generally thought of as combining a confident mature style with the experience and wisdom of a lifetime. And he has been able to get major international actors - Catherine Deneuve, John Malkovich, Michel Piccoli, among them - to appear in them.
On the other hand, the world's first truly great director, the legendarily prolific DW Griffith, who lived until his early 70s, wasn't able to find work after his mid-50s. He made just two sound pictures, having pretty well failed to keep abreast of popular taste or even to get truly into the 20th century. There's also an uneasiness about all Chaplin's last talking pictures, and those he made after his mid-60s are not so much mature as the work of an old, tired man.
Nowadays if you don't establish a reputation with your first couple of pictures, you're pretty well finished. But during the time of the studio system - roughly from the great war to the early 60s - directors served apprenticeships, working as assistants or making minor movies, and so their best work was likely to be in mid-career. Hitchcock's and Ford's classics, for instance, came between the late 1920s and the early 60s, but we're inclined to treat their last few films with some indulgence and delve into them for profounder statements and feelings than are perhaps there.
Some directors pack it in when at their best, before signs of tiredness set in - Douglas Sirk, for example, was at the top of his form at 58, though not in good health, when he retired in 1959. He lived, however, for a further 30 years.
John Huston kept on until his 80s, but among a deal of dross he produced several masterpieces on subjects close to his heart, notably the long-cherished projects The Man Who Would Be King, a film of epic status, and The Dead, a low-budget chamber film. Huston's exact contemporary, Billy Wilder went into a sad decline, could find no financial backing after the late 1970s, and knew himself to be out of touch with public taste. Huston died while still at work, Wilder outlived him by 14 years, but did nothing in his final three decades.
Victor Sjöström, Sweden's greatest film-maker of the silent era, and a major figure in Hollywood during the 1920s, gave up directing at the age of 57 (following his one British movie, made in 1937 after a gap of five years), devoting himself to film and stage acting in Sweden. He produced the first film by the great Swedish director of the sound era, Ingmar Bergman, and had the lead at the age of 78 in one of Bergman's finest pictures, Wild Strawberries. Although Bergman officially retired from the cinema in 1983, he has continued to work in the theatre, to write screenplays, and to direct the occasional TV film. One of the latter, Saraband (2002) made at the age of 84, is among the finest pictures made in this new century.
Health, luck, guile, the state of the industry, the ability to either keep abreast of fashion or confidently ignore it, are important factors. Sidney Pollack once said that being physically fit was the first essential quality of a director embarking on a new venture. After he'd reached his peak with Out of Africa in 1985, which brought him Oscars for best film and direction at the age of 51, Pollack has devoted himself largely to production (often helping promising newcomers on their way) and has directed a mere four films, none of them demanding or particularly interesting either to himself or anyone else.
