from Cleveland.com

Sidney Lumet, film director, dead at 86: A second opinion

By Tony Brown, The Plain Dealer 

When Howard Beale signs off, he says: “I want you to go to the window, open it, stick your head out and yell: ‘I’m as mad as hell, and I’m not going to take this anymore.’ ”

Filmmaker Sidney Lumet, who died Saturday after a half-century of era-defining movies full of American urban grit, didn’t say those words. They were spoken by actor Peter Finch as a self-made-for-TV prophet in 1976’s “Network.”

Nor did Lumet write them. They came from the pen of Paddy Chayefsky, whose masterpiece screenplay better than any work of art before or since portrays the corporate venality that still fuels television’s dumbing-down of America.

But director Lumet made those and other famous movie lines live forever in films stretching from 1957’s “Twelve Angry Men,” through “The Pawnbroker,” “Serpico,” “Dog Day Afternoon” and “The Verdict,” all the way up his last critically acclaimed effort, 2007’s “Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead.”

Those 50 years worth of cinematic moments cum cultural icons live on. But the man who created them is gone, dead of lymphoma, in his beloved Manhattan, the down-and-dirty setting for so many of his greatest works.

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