William Wellman Retrospective at Film Forum Paramount Pictures The director William Wellman (near right, by camera, shooting "Young Eagles," 1930) is the subject of a retrospective at Film Forum. THEY called him, not always affectionately, Wild Bill. William A. Wellman earned the nickname as a flier in World War I, and it stuck to him for the 40 years or so he spent directing movies in Hollywood. It was a good sort of name to have in the early days of American filmmaking, when he got his start, as a director of cheap, fast silent westerns - a time when making movies was a daredevil, seat-of-the-pants activity, best suited to those who were arrogant enough to believe that they could control the complicated machines they put in motion, and crazy enough not to care if they crashed and burned. Warner Brothers Pictures "The Public Enemy" (1931), with, below from near right, Edward Woods, Joan Blondell, James Cagney and Mae Clarke. 20th Century Fox/Photofest, via Film Forum Henry Fonda, near right, with Harry Morgan in William Wellman's western "The Ox-Bow Incident" (1943). The filmography in Wellman's wacky, rambling 1974 autobiography, "A Short Time for Insanity," lists 75 feature films for which he was at the controls. Some were triumphs, but many, inevitably, were not, and in those rugged days it was important for a director to be able, as Wellman was, to walk away from a wreck - and after a few smokes and more than a few drinks, to get up the next day and head for the clouds again. On Friday Film Forum began rolling out a big Wellman retrospective - 42 movies in three weeks, starting, aptly, with his World War I flyboy extravaganza "Wings" (1927), which won the first Academy Award for best picture - and the series demonstrates pretty conclusively that he had the right stuff. Wellman's movies are much better known than he is, in part because they're so different from one another that it can be difficult to remember that the same director who made the classic gangster film "The Public Enemy" (1931) was also responsible for the wonderful screwball comedies "Nothing Sacred" (1937) and "Roxie Hart" (1942), the original "Star Is Born" (1937), the stark western "The Ox-Bow Incident" (1943) and the extraordinarily moving World War II drama "The Story of G.I. Joe" (1945). He's a hard man to get a fix on; you think for a moment that you've got him in your sights, and then he's gone. What's constant in Wellman's work, for all its radical variations in style and tone, is a fascination with pure movement: how people get from one place to another, and how they arrange themselves once they're there. Early in his career he made two vigorous pictures about riding the rails: the silent "Beggars of Life" (1928) and "Wild Boys of the Road" (1933). In both there are remarkable sequences of characters jumping on and off moving trains, filmed with as little trickery as possible: in most cases, you can see that the actors are doing their own stunts (just as in "Wings," when Wellman actually sent his poor actors up in those rickety-looking planes). And after the excitement of those scenes, when people are settling into their boxcars and trying to get their heart rates back down again, something of that kinetic charge seems to linger in the way the figures group themselves in the frame. Even when Wellman's people are at rest, they look about to burst into motion. It's a quality painters, sculptors and dancers strive for; Wellman, who had no fine-arts background and not much formal education of any kind, appears to have had it in his bones. His group compositions are helplessly dynamic: dense with detail in both the foreground and the background, and always slightly unstable, as if they could change any second. He's an action director even when nothing's happening on the screen, which is part of the reason his movies about soldiers, like "Story of G.I. Joe" and "Battleground" (1949), are so effective despite showing relatively little combat. His soldiers march from place to place without knowing exactly where they're going, or why, and wait, and grumble, and wait some more, but they're constantly ready, twitchy with anticipation - as men in their dire circumstances ought to be. Wellman was terrific with situations like that. "The Ox-Bow Incident" is all buildup, as a posse turns inexorably into a lynch mob. It's like watching a long fuse burn. When he wanted to, though, he could zip through a complicated, eventful story in nothing flat. His artfully overstimulated "Heroes for Sale" (1933) takes its protagonist from the trenches of World War I to a crazily up-and-down business career at the beginning of the Great Depression in a head-spinningly brisk 68 minutes. Speed, both of production and of running time, was highly prized in the early "30s, when Wellman was under contract to Warner Brothers: in one four-year stretch he ground out 20 pictures, most of them forgettable but a few - "The Public Enemy," "Wild Boys of the Road," "Heroes for Sale" and the Barbara Stanwyck vehicle "Night Nurse" (1931) - improbably good. In his "30s pictures Wellman worked best with actors who could give him the brisk tempo he needed: quick, agile physical performers like Stanwyck, James Cagney (in "The Public Enemy"), Frankie Darro (in "Wild Boys") and Carole Lombard (in "Nothing Sacred"). Cagney was, in a way, the ideal Wellman actor in that period, because he was never completely still. He always looked as if there were something eating at him, making him shiver his shoulders and bounce up and down on the balls of his feet, a runner perpetually waiting for the race to start. Later, Wellman learned to favor the slower movers - the drawlers and the amblers - like Henry Fonda (in "The Ox-Bow Incident"), Robert Mitchum (in "G.I Joe" and the moody 1954 western "Track of the Cat") and John Wayne, with whom he made three films in the "50s, including the hit 1954 airliner-in-peril melodrama "The High and the Mighty." Maybe this apparent change in casting philosophy was the consequence of Wellman's having become older and more settled himself, less enamored of the itchy acting styles of the "30s stars. At the end of his Warner period Wellman, who had burned through three wives already, married the young actress Dorothy Coonan, who had appeared in "Wild Boys"; when he died, in 1975 at 79, she was still at his side. But it's just as likely that he sensed a shift in the rhythm of American life, understood somehow that the urgency and nervous energy of the Depression had given way in the "40s to a more somber national temperament and in the "50s to a hunger for ease and peace. Wellman, as his movies show, was exquisitely attuned to moods, and even more sensitive to rhythm. He felt the pace at which things and people moved. That gift, which must have been instinctive, made him unusually adaptable, able to survive for four decades every shift in Hollywood's winds, and to assemble, over the years, such a bewilderingly diverse body of work. Directors with that sort of flexibility can often be, or become, hacks, and Wellman, at times, had a touch of the hack in him. But he had a touch of the poet too, which you see whenever the people in his movies begin to stir from their rest into motion, or even, as you sometimes sense, into a dream of motion, the feeling that there's room for them to move in. Wellman, who contained multitudes, gave them that room, because he knew there was plenty for everybody, on earth and above. He'd been there.