James Bridges and the Workmanlike Auteur Urban Cowboy (1980)
James Bridges directed seven feature films between 1970 and 1988. Three of them — The Paper Chase (1973), The China Syndrome (1979), and Urban Cowboy (1980) — would land on most informed lists of the best American films of their decade. Bridges does not appear on most lists of the best American directors of those decades. He is, in the auteurist sense, the missing director: a craftsman whose pictures consistently work and whose authorial signature has been hard for critics to name.
The workmanlike auteur problem
Auteur theory, in the Cahiers and post-Cahiers form American critics absorbed in the 1960s and 1970s, prizes directors with visible signatures — directors whose pictures look or feel a certain way regardless of subject. Hitchcock, Hawks, Sirk, Ford, and the New Hollywood directors who emerged in the late 1960s (Coppola, Scorsese, Altman, Spielberg, De Palma) all have signatures critics learned to read. Bridges does not. The Paper Chase is a campus drama; September 30, 1955 is a James Dean–memorial period piece; The China Syndrome is a procedural thriller; Urban Cowboy is a country-pop romance; Mike's Murder is a neo-noir; Perfect is a magazine-article-as-movie; Bright Lights, Big City is a Jay McInerney adaptation. The pictures do not look or feel like each other.
"Jim Bridges was the most underrated American director of the 1970s and 1980s. He made The Paper Chase. He made The China Syndrome. He made Urban Cowboy. Three pictures any director would want on his stone. He doesn't have a stone." — John Travolta, GQ (2014)
What the signature actually was
The signature, on closer reading, is structural rather than visual. Bridges directed pictures about institutions — the law school, the nuclear plant, the honky-tonk, the magazine — and about characters who learn the institution's terms over the course of the picture. The pictures are interested in how a person becomes the kind of person the institution wants. The Paper Chase is about how Hart becomes a lawyer; The China Syndrome is about how Kimberly Wells becomes a serious journalist; Urban Cowboy is about how Bud becomes a husband. The institution is the room and the picture is the education.
"Bridges always wanted to know what the rules were. The Paper Chase is about the law's rules. The China Syndrome is about a nuclear plant's rules. Urban Cowboy is about Gilley's rules. He didn't make pictures about the world. He made pictures about specific institutions and the people inside them." — John Houseman, Front and Center (1979) (book, not available online)
The structural decision in Urban Cowboy to deliberately empty the rodeo contest as a climax candidate (see The Decoy Climax) is the clearest single example of the signature: Bridges is willing to use the institutional form to argue against the institutional form, and the picture's effect depends on the audience feeling the difference.
The career was uneven and the late films are the reason
Bridges's auteurist eclipse owes something to the late pictures. Mike's Murder (1984) — a second collaboration with Debra Winger (in Urban Cowboy) — was severely cut by the studio in editing. Perfect (1985) was a misfire. Bright Lights, Big City (1988) was a competent adaptation but not the picture the McInerney novel could have been. Bridges was diagnosed with cancer in the late 1980s and died in 1993 at fifty-seven. He never had the late-career run that lets a workmanlike director become an auteur in retrospect (the Sidney Lumet path).
"If Bridges had lived another fifteen years, he would have made the picture that put the others in retrospect. He died before that picture happened. So the body of work has to speak without the late film that would have unified it." — Pauline Kael, The New Yorker (1980)
The reassessment is happening slowly
Bridges has had a slow critical recovery in the last fifteen years. Texas Monthly and Sight & Sound have run pieces; the Criterion Collection has not yet released any of his films, but the conversation has shifted from "competent journeyman" to "underrated New Hollywood figure." The 2018 Texas Monthly retrospective on Urban Cowboy explicitly framed Bridges as the picture's primary author. The reassessment has not yet caught the popular consensus.
The case for Bridges as a workmanlike auteur is not that his pictures look alike but that his pictures argue alike: every one of them is about the moment a person stops being able to fake the institutional terms and has to actually become the person the institution requires. Urban Cowboy is the clearest version of that argument. Bud has been faking the cowboy for two hours of screen time, and the picture's climax is the moment he stops faking and apologizes.