Oscar-winning director, producer and actor Sydney Pollack has died at the age of 73, reportedly due to cancer. Pollack’s death comes just two months after that of his producing partner Anthony Minghella, who, though almost 20 years Pollack’s junior, also suffered from cancer. Here’s the NY Times obit; see a clip from my favorite film directed by Pollack, They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?, above.

Richard Widmark, who appeared in 70+ films including Saint Joan, Panic in the Streets and No Way Out, has died at the age of 93. Widmark began his career in the 40s, often playing vicious villains and anti-heroes. In the mid-50s, he started a production company, through which he made a number of Cold War-era social dramas including Time Limit and The Bedford Incident. My favorite Widmark film is probably Sam Fuller’s Pickup on South Street; I’ve embedded a typically, casually violent clip from that film above. The New York Times‘ obit lives here.

My experience with Norman Mailer, who died this weekend at age 84, was fairly limited, so here’s a look at some of the tributes to him springing up on the blogs:

• Jeff Wells recalls interviewing Mailer for the press kit for his final film, Tough Guys Don’t Dance: “He was in a pissy mood when I called him to do the initial interview. But we eventually got rolling and he gradually came to realize I wasn’t an idiot.”
• Lou Lumenick reruns an interview with Mailer from 1987, in which he explains why he chose to direct films without a script: “I figured the screenwriter had no control over the movie anyway — why bother with a script? Write the movie out of what you shot.”
• At The Guardian, Mark Hooper assesses Mailer’s real impact on the craft of filmmaking: “Ever the perfectionist, he complained about the phoney “punch” sounds used on movie soundtracks, and so he locked himself away with the sound designer and repeatedly punched himself in the face. The sound designer claims to have used the more accurate sound of Mailer’s masochism in countless features since.”
• Stu links back to The Reeler’s coverage of Mailer’s last public appearance, at the launch of a retrospective of his moving image work. At the time, Mailer assessed his filmmaking career thusly: “I was a bold amateur who had developed a certain confidence that if you bash into things with enough competence — if you have enough skills of another sort — you can translate a good many of them surprisingly.”
• Video evidence: Rex Sorgatz links to a TV debate between Mailer and Marshall McLuhan on Google Video; Mike at Bad Lit tells us where “you can watch [Rip] Torn whack Mailer with a hammer, whereupon the writer tries to chew Torn’s ear off.”
• I what I guess could be described as a dissenting obit in 5,200 words (!), Roger Kimball ignores Mailer’s side career as filmmaker and concentrates on slamming him for epitomizing “a certain species of macho, adolescent radicalism that helped to inure the wider public to displays of violence, anti-American tirades, and sexual braggadocio.” Fair enough, but couldn’t it wait until the corpse cooled?

Let’s hope there’s no truth that old “these things come in threes” adage. Exactly a week ago, I rounded up reactions to the death of film critic Anderson Jones; today, I’m collecting responses to the death of film critic Joel Siegel.

Siegel, who had been the house critic for ABC’s Good Morning America for the past 25 years, succumbed to colon cancer on Friday. He is remembered vividly by former college roommate Harry Shearer at the Huffington Post, who offers a few anecdotes in tribute to “the Joel Siegel that I knew: the pre-moustache Joel.” Siegel’s fellow cancer sufferer Roger Ebert quotes from an email in which Siegel admitted to actually appearing on camera with “a pouch in my right hand pumping chemo into a port in my chest.” Ebert also quotes Siegel’s wife, Ena Swansea who says her husband was “so sad that true film criticism was being replaced by ‘entertainment news,’ when they only get interviews if their review is laudatory, or they don’t review at all.