Throughout the month of May, Chicago’s Gene Siskel Film Center will honor all aspects of his legacy with “Haskell Wexler: Impact, Influence and Iconography,” an eight-film retrospective of some of his most notable works (including a few being presented in 35mm) to commemorate his centenary. Besides being an ideal primer to the man and his work, the retrospective also serves as a mini-festival of some of the most momentous and groundbreaking works of his era.
Wexler was born in Chicago in 1922. After spending a year of college at the University of California at Berkley, he volunteered to join the Merchant Marines as the U.S. was preparing to enter WWII. Following a stint working for the desegregation of his fellow Marines and receiving the Silver Star after his ship was torpedoed by a German submarine off the coast of South Africa, Wexler returned to Chicago and decided to become a filmmaker. With his father, Simon, he set up a studio in Des Plaines and made industrial films in local factories. The studio did not last long but Wexler continued with his filmmaking ambitions by joining the International Photographers Guild in 1947 and working on films, television shows, and TV commercials. (He continued to do commercials throughout his career, eventually forming a commercial production company with fellow celebrated cinematographer Conrad Hall.) He also began to make documentaries and one, the Chicago-focused “The Living City” (1953), was nominated for an Oscar for Best Documentary Short.
In 1958, Wexler made his feature film debut as cinematographer with “Stakeout on Dope Street,” beginning an association with up-and-coming filmmaker Irving Kershner that saw them reunite on “The Hoodlum Priest” (1961) and “Face in the Rain” (1963) and establish a pattern of working numerous times with certain directors. In 1963, Wexler financed and shot “The Bus” (1965), a documentary that followed a group of Freedom Riders on a journey from San Francisco to Washington D.C., and landed his first job as cinematographer of a big-budget studio film, Elia Kazan’s acclaimed drama “America, America.” Following the success of that film, Wexler began working steadily in Hollywood, shooting the political drama “The Best Man” (1964), the black comedy “The Loved One,” and “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” (1966), Mike Nichols’ enormously controversial adaptation of the Edward Albee play. Although much of the original focus of the publicity surrounding the film focused on the then-shocking language in the script, Mike Nichols making his directorial debut, and the presence of co-stars Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, Wexler’s contributions were celebrated as well. Wexler received one of the film’s five eventual Oscars for Cinematography – Black-and-White (the last year for that category before it and the Color category were merged into one).
Wexler’s next project, 1967’s “In the Heat of the Night” (May 8 and 19), also his first collaboration with director Norman Jewison, was even more significant and groundbreaking. The plot concerns Virgil Tibbs (Sidney Poitier), a Black homicide investigator from Philadelphia who teams up with Gillespie (Rod Steiger), the police chief of the town of Sparta, Mississippi, to solve the murder of a rich local industrialist in the face of open racism. Having a Black man at the center of a major Hollywood full-color production was still an anomaly back then, and filmmakers at that time did not take into consideration that the standard lighting methods used by most cinematographers did not favor actors with darker skin, often causing a glare that left them looking slightly less distinct than their white counterparts. Wexler recognized this and took careful consideration to light his scenes in ways that solved this problem. He allowed Poitier to stand out as distinctly as Steiger and the rest of his co-stars, an accomplishment that not only made Poitier look as good as he ever would on screen, but subtly reinforce the notion that this was a film about a Black man determined to stand out and do his job, no matter what anyone around him might think. Insanely, Wexler’s contributions were not among the seven Oscar nominations that the film received—though he was given the Best Cinematography prize from the National Society of Film Critics—but it could be argued his work here went on to become the most influential of all his shoots for the way it influenced the filming of Black actors.