Directors whose best film is also their most popular

[Kormod]

I don't watch a lot of movies I expect to be bad so I haven't really seen all that many turkeys, but I think Chasing Amy may have been the worst movie I've ever seen.

I saw them years ago, but I remember Chasing Amy and Clerks being all right. His other films (all of which, except for Cop Out, I've seen, inexplicably) are straight-up turkeys.

Some other choices:

Paul Thomas Anderson - There Will Be Blood (debatable)
David Lynch - The Elephant Man (very debatable -- also, Dune made slightly more money at the box office, but I think since Elephant Man has been generally praised and Dune generally maligned, that the Elephant Man is now the more widely seen film).

[crumbum]

Keeping in the provisional spirit of most opinions expressed here, I think a solid case could be made that ET is Spielberg’s best (and I’m assuming that, adjusting for inflation, it’s by far his most successful). At the same time, I would probably name Close Encounters, Jaws or Munich as my personal faves, with ET somewhere nearby.

[Austin From Chicago]

Was Nashville Altman's most successful film? I think, technically, that it might be his best (but my personal favorite is California Split...such a great and underrated movie: you keep waiting for the downbeat, depressing turn to happen and the characters to meet some comeuppance but it never happens - they just get luckier and happier). I'm not in the mood to research this but maybe MASH is his most successful.

Anyway, I'm high on coke and I like Robert Altman. Yeah, I said it.

[Kormod]

M*A*S*H* is Altman's most successful film. My favorite is probably McCabe and Mrs. Miller.

Ben Affleck - The Town?

[nec13]

Was Nashville Altman's most successful film? I think, technically, that it might be his best (but my personal favorite is California Split...such a great and underrated movie: you keep waiting for the downbeat, depressing turn to happen and the characters to meet some comeuppance but it never happens - they just get luckier and happier). I'm not in the mood to research this but maybe MASH is his most successful.

Anyway, I'm high on coke and I like Robert Altman. Yeah, I said it.

Nashville is no O.C. and Stiggs.

[Chris L]

Elephant Man has been generally praised and Dune generally maligned, that the Elephant Man is now the more widely seen film).

I would count the Twin Peaks pilot and I'm sure it's the most heavily-viewed thing he's directed.

For some reason I thought Boogie Nights did slightly better than There Will Be Blood but it didn't. That's a pretty clear-cut example in my mind, but others will disagree.

[Shaggy 2 Grote]

My Godfather assertion is mostly anecdotal (for example, the writer Luc Sante has said he dislikes both movies, but he said it aloud and I have no evidence for it). Hopefully you will trust me, because I liked the movies and all I am saying is a reasonable person can dislike them and it would be totally fucking insane for me to be lying about this.

The general knock on the movie, as I've heard it -- which, let me reiterate, I do not share -- is that it presents itself as authentic but contains a lot of mythologizing and fakery. I did find this, from Carlos Clarens:

"... For all the curiosity the Mafia arouses in the layman, THE BLACK
HAND and PAY OR DIE adopted an external, legalistic viewpoint, and an
attitude tinged with outrage. THE GODFATHER reversed the viewpoint,
looking from inside the underworld out into a hopelessly corrupt
society from which tradition, loyalty, honor and respect for one's
elders had almost totally vanished. This daring dramatic device would
ruinously have failed had the outside, straight world been allowed to
intrude. Two of the most debatable propositions of the criminal world
were carried to a claustrophobic extreme; namely, that there is a code
of honor among thieves, and that this perfectly self-contained (and
self-sustaining) world rarely touches the man in the street. There was
a frightening, memorable scene in Walsh's THE ROARING TWENTIES in
which an elderly couple was caught in the crossfire between rival
gangs at a restaurant. There were virtually no bystanders in THE
GODFATHER, and none of those who were included retained any
innocence."

"... Puzo supplied the Corleones with fairly mythological dimensions,
but Coppola was to go even further in the same direction. The director
adopted as key scenes in both films the classic moment in mythological
fiction in which the hero, under the influence of the past, confronts
his fate and accepts it, as if the future ha suddenly been revealed to
him. Michael's first kill THE GODFATHER, Vito's in PART TWO, did not
carry the same significance in Puzo's novel, where they were presented
as stages in the development of the characters."

"THE GODFATHER, especially PART TWO, has undergone close scrutiny (in
JUMP-CUT magazine, for one) along critical lines that constitute a
politicization of Robert Warshow's famous dictum that the gangster
embodies a denial of capitalist society. And Coppola, at least ex post
facto, encouraged this reading of THE GODFATHER by admitting to a
metaphysical critique of the American system. It was a metaphor,
however, that Coppola could only activate at the expense of the genre,
that could only function by leaving narrative gaps which, were they
filled, would compromise the dominant premise of the Mafia as a self-
supporting, self-regulating, alternative society."

Is that a weirdly moralistic critique of the films? Sure. But it's more substantial than Armond-White style contrarianism.
 

[Kormod]

A quick ctrl-F through http://www.listology.com/dgeiser13/story/recommendations-directors-favorite-films reveals that Gore Verbinski and Joel Schumacher like the Conversation better than the Godfather (though of course there's the possibility that they just haven't seen the Godfather). It's weird that the top 10 of the director of Batman and Robin looks like this:

Joel Schumacher  (circa 2002):
Battleship Potemkin (Eisenstein)
Lawrence of Arabia (Lean)
The Cook, The Thief, His Wife & Her Lover (Greenaway)
Bicycle Thieves (De Sica)
Breaking the Waves (von Trier)
A Clockwork Orange (Kubrick)
The Conversation (Coppola)
Sunset Blvd. (Wilder)
Stalker (Tarkovsky)
The Conformist (Bertolucci)

[Crusherkc]

Keeping in the provisional spirit of most opinions expressed here, I think a solid case could be made that ET is Spielberg’s best (and I’m assuming that, adjusting for inflation, it’s by far his most successful). At the same time, I would probably name Close Encounters, Jaws or Munich as my personal faves, with ET somewhere nearby.

#4    E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial    adj for inflation = $1,130,579,000  unadj. = $435,110,554
#7    Jaws                                                        = $1,020,788,200            = $260,000,000

I wanted to put Jaws on this list b/c I think it is his best, but a good argument can be made for ET.  I think the mid 70s/early 80s Spielberg is really interesting as he was going through rough personal times, his creativity was flourishing. Once his real life became a hollywood fantasy (and who says 'no' to the King of H'wood?) his movies became more flaccid and commercial, w/the exception of a "Empire of the Sun" or "Munich" (probably his best since the 80s). "Super 8" is like a great compilation box set of a movie for that period. 

[Wes]

"Best" for Spielberg would be a fight between Raiders and Jaws, not ET (which is still great), in my opinion. ET is the highest grossing, but I think an argument could be made that Raiders has become his "most popular" film over time due to giving way to a series of massively successful films, a short-lived TV series and video games that aren't best remembered for filling up landfills.

In any case, I think Spielberg's relative high points are too close and his biggest successes all too pervasively ingrained in pop culture to be able to pull out one that could be easily agreed upon for both categories to qualify for this topic.

It's weird that "most popular" is, in some ways, just as difficult to define as "best." How about Richard Lester - which is his most popular movie, A Hard Day's Night or Superman II?

[buffcoat]

Although Raiders of the Lost Ark for Atari was pretty annoying, with that weird thief dude in the marketplace and the randomly appearing snakes.

I'd be interested in a long-form review on this board. 

[Kormod]

Franklin J. Schaffner - Patton

[Crusherkc]

Franklin J. Schaffner - Patton

Patton did make the most money and was a critical success w/7 Academy Awards, but you might run into Planet of the Apes fans who'd disagree. My personal favorite by him is Papillon