Whatever Happened to Robert Aldrich?—His Life and His Films

A streak of anarchism and a distrust of authority marked much of Robert Aldrich's work, reflecting his continuing struggle to deal with the American Dream and the dreams of Hollywood. The scion of a wealthy, powerful family (his cousin Governor Nelson Aldrich Rockefeller was only the most famous of his relatives), Aldrich used his "connections" to do no more than land a low paying production clerk's job at RKO Studios in the early 40s.
From this beginning he went on first to become the assistant director to various filmmakers, many of whom were later blacklisted, and eventually to serve two terms as president of the Directors Guild of America. Though his political sentiments were staunchly liberal and pro-labor, they did not prevent him from using the profits from his 1967 smash, The Dirty Dozen, to acquire his own film studio (which went broke in four years). But whether he was capitalist and entrepreneur or union leader or screenwriter, producer, and director, Aldrich, who died in 1983, remained the insider who was also the outsider, the Hollywood player who "stayed at the table" while hating the game, and the man who found his most memorable heroes among social misfits doomed by their refusal to conform.