When Sidney Lumet brought his powerful television influence to the Hollywood cinema of the late 1950s, it was in the company of four other notable American directors who also had emerged from the Golden Age of live television: Arthur Penn, John Frankenheimer, Franklin J. Schaffner, and Robert Mulligan. Their urgent, realist approach-a sharp combination of television drama adaptations reflecting social realism and technically tight production experience-was instrumental in reshaping the face of cinema for the next decade. Like his Golden Age contemporaries, Lumet's training ground had been on-the-spot television.

     Following military service during World War II, Lumet returned to New York stage work. In 1947, exasperated by the pompous practice of the newly­ formed Actor's Studio, he formed his own Actor's Workshop. When the group realized that they did not have a director, Lumet found himself drifting into the role.

     In 1950 he was invited to join CBS Television as an assistant director by his old friend Yul Brynner, then a staff director at the network. When Brynner left to do The King and I on Broadway, Lumet took over the mystery anthology series Danger from him and was promoted to staff director. It was the beginning of what would be some 500 television productions as director; his on-the-spot training ground where he began to develop his clarity of storytelling, his skill for handling actors, and his artistry in coordinating tightly structured drama production.

     For Danger, a McCarthy-era series produced by Martin Ritt and with scripts often supplied by black­ listed writers (Abraham Polonsky, Walter Bernstein, and others) under "front" names, Lumet directed around 150 half-hour episodes between 1951 and 1953. During this period he also directed episodes of the family comedy Mama (also known as/ Rememba Mama) and the newspaper adventure Crime Photographer series before moving on to the drama­ documentary You Are There. (Lumet's replacement on Danger was John Frankenheimer.)

     With the team of Charles Russell producing and Lumet directing, You Are There was unique in television for its multidimensional approach to history, presenting reenactments of major events in history in a current affairs news style. From the multiple episodes he directed between 1953 and 1955, Lumet singles out as personally satisfying works "The First Salem Witch Trial" ("because we did it the same week that Ed Mu- ­ row did his McCarthy show [on See It Now], so we like to think we were slight contributors to the general at­ tack on him," he explained to writer Frank R. Cun­ningham) and "The Death of Socrates" (which featured an astonishing line-up of on-screen talent: Paul Newman, Barry Jones, John Cassavetes, Robert Culp, Richard Kiley, E.G. Marshall, Sheppard Strud­wick).

     When Lumet began directing original plays for television in 1956, his first critical success came with Reginald Rose's tension-charged drama on mob violence "Tragedy in a Temporary Town" for The Alcua Hour. Lumet's cameras gave the production a crush, chilling authority and drew some fine performances from the cast, especially Lloyd Bridges' poignant portrayal as the man facing the mob and denouncing it into shamefaced dispersal.

     It was at this time that the success of the feature adaptation of Paddy Chayefsky's Marty for UnitedArtists had prompted Hollywood to look to television for new talent and material. For the film version of Rose's Twelve Angry Men, star and co producer Henry Fonda selected Lumet as his director (marking Lumet's feature debut). The play had been directed on television (Studio One) in 1954 by Franklin Schaffner. Twelve Angry Men won wide critical approval, opening the door to television-to-cinema traffic, and appeared to cement Lumet's career as a big-screen director.

     During April and May of 1958, he directed three no­ table and much-praised productions for Kraft Television Theatre: "Three Plays by Tennessee Williams" (a color telecast from New York, incorporating "Moony's Kid Don't Cry," "The Last of My Solid Gold Watches," and "This Property is Condemned," all introduced by Williams), an adaptation of Hemingway's "Fifty Grand," and Robert Penn Warren's Pulitzer Prize novel "All the King's Men" (the latter broadcast in two parts). After three less-than-successful feature ventures (Stage Struck, That Kind of Woman, The Fugitive Kind), Lumet returned to television in 1960 and shone again. The two-part presentation (on tape) of Reginald Rose's drama-documentary The Sacco-Vanzetti Story (NBC) was a gripping account of the notorious judicial transgression of 1920, when two alleged Italian anarchists were found guilty of murder and robbery, and were eventually executed following a lengthy and highly controversial trial. Once again, Lumet showed a fine, sure hand in his grasp of the lengthy production (with a cast of 175) and the sharply edged portrayals, notably by the two principals (Martin Balsam as Nico­ las Sacco and Steven Hill as Bartolomeo Vanzetti).

     Lumet's television triumph of 1960, however, was his four-hour rendition of Eugene O'Neill's play about assorted barflies in a 1912 saloon, "The Iceman Cometh." Produced for the PBS Play of the Week strand, the mammoth drama was shown in two parts and scheduled at 10:30-12:30 due to the "mature nature" of the play. The Variety (November 16, 1960) review was ecstatic: "Television drama soared to triumphant, poetic dimensions ... [and] was a landmark for the video medium, a reference point for greatness in television drama." Leading the large cast were Jason Robards Jr. as Hickey and Myron McCor­ mack as Larry Slade, with James Broderick, Roland Winters, and Robert Redford among this modern-day Greek chorus. Considered the high mark of that season's Play of the Week showcase, "the sure, talented, creative hands of director Sidney Lumet seemed everywhere in evidence."

     From 1962 onward, beginning with A View from the Bridge, Lumet was active on the big screen, enjoying the greatest commercial success of his career in 1976 with Network (a forceful indictment of television as a profit machine).

In January 2001, Lumet returned to television as writer, director, and executive producer on the cops­ -and-courtrooms drama series 100 Centre Street (the address of the court building in lower Manhattan). In a nod to old acquaintances, Arthur Penn was invited to direct an episode during the series' second season. Al­ though its themes and characters are more in keeping with Lumet's NYPD (Serpico, Prince of the City) and legal (The Verdict, Guilty as Sin) films than with the live dramas of his early days, 100Centre Street nevertheless displayed all the hallmarks familiar to the di­ rector's favorite subject matter.