Dede Allen brought a new approach to shaping the look and sound of American movies.The Associated Press
Dede Allen, the film editor whose pioneering work on movies like The Hustler and Bonnie and Clyde brought a new approach to shaping the look and sound of American movies, died on April 17 at the age of 86 at her home in Los Angeles.
She had suffered a stroke, her son Tom Fleischman told The Los Angeles Times.
With Bonnie and Clyde in 1967, Allen became the first film editor to receive sole credit on a movie. She was nominated for Academy Awards for that movie, 1975's Dog Day Afternoon, Reds in 1981 and Wonder Boys in 2000.
Allen was the first American to embrace European methods of editing by beginning sequences with close-ups or jump cuts and using the sound from the next shot while the previous scene was still playing.
Greg Faller, professor of film studies at Towson University in Maryland, said The Hustler and Bonnie and Clyde "must be considered benchmark films in the history of editing."
Many of her techniques are now standard in modern filmmaking.
"It's hard to see the changes she made because most of what she did has been so fully embraced by the industry," Faller said.
In Dog Day Afternoon, she used a staccato tempo, sometimes called shock cutting.
"She creates this menacing quality by not cutting where you'd expect it - she typically would cut sooner than you might expect," Faller said. "You weren't ready for it."
Allen edited or co-edited 20 major films over four decades. She was most closely identified with directors Arthur Penn, Sidney Lumet and George Roy Hill and actor-directors Paul Newman, Warren Beatty and Robert Redford.
Dorothea Corothers Allen was born in Cincinnati on Dec. 3, 1923. She attended Scripps College in Claremont but left school to take a job as a messenger at Columbia Pictures. She started out working on television commercials before getting her first big break in the late 1950s editing Robert Wise's Odds Against Tomorrow.
In 1994, she received a career achievement award given by American Cinema Editors. In November 2007 she received the Motion Picture Editors Guild's Fellowship and Service Award.
In addition to her son, Tom, she is survived by her husband of 63 years, Stephen E. Fleischman, daughter Ramey Ward, five grandchildren, and two great-grandchildren.
The Associated Press