It’s fitting that Abel Gance’s (1889-1981) most famous movie was Napoleon (1927). Like his protagonist, Gance was a fervent conquering force who ended up defeated, not by other armies but by changing times and the indifference of an industry he helped form. As a young man, he switched from law studies to the theater, and he started a Parisian film production company as early as 1911. He cranked out many works during the 1910s, fewer than D.W. Griffith but often just as inventive. La Folie du Docteur Tube (1915), for instance, plays with distorting camera tricks right out of a funhouse hall-of-mirrors in order to portray a wacky inventor’s mind. His first great hit came in 1919 with J’Accuse!, an intense anti-war cry which to this day still gets much of its power from our knowledge that many of the extras in it were real-life WWI soldiers marching off to give their lives in the trenches. La Roue (1923) is even more epic, telling the story of a tragic love triangle between an old railway man, his beloved and his son. The great thing about these movies is their shamelessness. They’re very melodramatic, but Gance rolls with the excess by providing an emotional intensity that spills off the edge of the screen. No wonder Napoleon is still such a rouser. In it, Gance brings together every single film technique he can think of (quick montage, subjective camera movements, superimpositions, split screens) and keeps the audience rocking through the movie’s very long running time. You can taste the director’s joy in creating.

Unfortunately, like with his hero Griffith, the coming of sound did Gance no favors. I haven’t seen enough of his subsequent output to make a judgment, but from the ones I did see, Gance deserved better than getting the cold shoulder from the growing French film industry. Un Grand Amour de Beethoven (1937) is especially remarkable in the way it uses sound (as well as the lack of sound) in a heartfelt biography of the great musician. The remake of J’Accuse! (1938) is even more intense than the silent original, with a main character who’s on the verge of hysteria thanks to the machinations that would prophetically result in World War II. (Both versions include scenes of the dead coming to life to question the waste of war, in what could be the screen’s first instance of zombies.) But, despite support from Francois Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard and Jacques Rivette when they were young critics at the Cahiers du Cinema, Gance floundered throughout the 1950s, and retired after the mid-1960s. It was then, however, that a movement by young movie buffs started, in an attempt to bring the fading director the recognition that he deserved. Among them were British historian Kevin Brownlow and Godfather director Francis Ford Coppola, who in the early 1980s promoted a restored and beautifully scored print of Napoleon to play in theaters. It’s heartening to learn that Gance, then in his nineties, was able to attend the screening of the restored print and be treated like cinema royalty. He died not long after.

Robert Flaherty (1884-1951) was the first filmmaker-explorer. I use the term “explorer” literally. Born in Michigan to Irish-German parents, he worked for Sir William Mackenzie’s Canadian railroad, mined for ore and mapped areas in Hudson Bay, and sailed the Belcher archipelago (even founding Flaherty Island). Filmmaking came later, when Boss Mackenzie suggested that he take a camera with him to better familiarize himself with new territory and people. Flaherty’s first and most famous film, Nanook of the North (1922), was a venture sponsored by a French fur company. It chronicled the life of Nanook, an Inuit hunter who scrambled to eke out a living in the harshness of the icy North. We see Nanook waiting for just the right time to catch a seal, building an igloo, and snuggling with his wife. It was the first official documentary, and was hailed as a breakthrough for cinematic art. Only trouble is, all of it was staged. Nanook was an actually played by an actor, his onscreen wife was an actress, it was really a man tugging at the fishing line instead of a seal, and Flaherty had insisted on more old-fashioned equipment to create “exotic” views of Inuit life. Was Flaherty the “father of the documentary,” as he’s always been called, or the creator of “Punk’d”?

That Nanook of the North is staged doesn’t diminish its value as art, because the fact that we’re witnessing the director braving through the same elements as his subject (cold, hunger, etc.) becomes its own documentary. From the cold, Flaherty moved to tropical heat of the South Seas in Moana (1926), which centered on the manhood rituals of a Samoan tribe. It was probably this movie which got F.W. Murnau to invite him to work together on the similarly South Seas-set Tabu (1931); their temperaments were so different, however, that Flaherty ended up leaving and Murnau completed the film himself. Flaherty would tackle a plethora of subjects, from English factories (Industrial Britain in 1933) to Irish islands (Man of Aran in 1934), but his next great film would come towards the end of his life. In 1948 he directed Louisiana Story, which, like Nanook, also fascinatingly combines fact and fiction. The story of the clash between progress (represented by an oil rig) and nature (a young boy living in the Southern swamps) is full of naïve touches, but it has also many moments of beauty and purity. Flaherty’s greatness, I think, rests in his curiosity and love toward his subjects, the way he would live with them and learn about their culture and then film an essay about how he saw them. It’s not “pure” documentary, but then again, what documentary can really be considered “pure”?

The life of Jean-Pierre Melville (1917-1973) was almost as fascinating as his movies. One of the earliest cinephile-filmmakers, he developed a voracious taste in movies (especially American dramas) from an early age, and became a connoisseur of classic Hollywood. He was also part of the French Resistance during the Nazi invasion, a milieu he would pay homage to years later in Army of Shadows (1969). The occupation also marks his first cinematic triumph, Le Silence de la Mer (1947), which deals with a German soldier’s stay with a French father and daughter in their country cottage. Though the subject is very removed from the gangster stories Melville is most famous for, his style is already evident. A peculiar and intense interiorization of emotion, with an emphasis on the force of gestures and the masks that characters wear, seem to anticipate the work of Robert Bresson, whose Diary of a Country Priest would come out four years later. (For his part, Melville would insist that Bresson ripped off his style.) Also famous is Les Enfants Terribles (1950), Melville’s adaptation of Jean Cocteau’s drama about an unruly trio that seems likewise to predate Francois Truffaut’s Jules and Jim (1962). Bob le Flambeur (1956) was an atmospheric tribute to the silent men in trench coats of American pictures, with a protagonist who could have stepped out of a John Huston movie. Leon Morin, Prete (1961) showed how close Melville’s world was to a certain religious dimension (churches and underworlds rise or fall by their rituals), and was the first time he worked with Jean-Paul Belmondo.

By this time, Melville had become the unofficial older brother of the young critics-turned-filmmakers from Cahiers du Cinema. (He has a famous cameo in Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless in 1960.) It was also in the early 1960s that he began his run of existential crime movies, starting with Le Doulos (1962) and following with Le Deuxieme Souffle (1966), Le Samourai (1967) and Le Cercle Rouge (1970). Like the domestic dramas of Yasujiro Ozu or the romantic comedies of Eric Rohmer, Melville’s mobster tales are often hard to tell apart. They inescapably have Alain Delon and deal with moody loners involved with violence and betrayal, often featuring sardonic police officers, torturously complex plots and attitudes that would be at home in a Hollywood noir thriller from the 1940s. I’m not saying that this sameness is a bad thing, just pointing out that Melville created a whole world of his own by repeating and tweaking the same elements from movie to movie. This process of lapidated cinema continued until his last movie, Un Flic (1972), where just the sight of Delon narrowing his eyes under a fedora is enough to know this is a Melville movie. I have to admit to admiring Melville more than really loving him (perhaps it has to do with his indifference to female characters). As for as French crime dramas, I tend to prefer Jacques Becker’s Touchez pas au Grisbi (1954) and Claude Sautet’s Classe tous Risques (1960). But try telling that to the many fans of the Melville “cool,” from Jim Jarmusch to John Woo to Quentin Tarantino.

Robert Aldrich was a welcome troublemaker at a time when American movies, like the rest of American society, was in danger of succumbing to conformity. Throughout the 1950s, he directed a series of startling movies that rattled Hollywood conventions and tastefulness. What film of that era is more powerful of the grinding anxieties behind the tidy surface than Kiss Me Deadly (1955)? Based on a Mickey Spillane novel, that movie remains a cherry-bomb of ballsy iconoclasm, from the opening credits that run backwards to the climactic meltdown that sends humanity back into the ocean. The excitement visible on the screen, the sheer strangeness of this lurid project, made it a cult movie and a favorite of the impressionable young French critics who would go on to become New Wave directors. Godard and Truffaut loved Aldrich, yet they felt betrayed when later on he made it big with The Dirty Dozen (1967). Indeed, many historians today speak of Aldrich’s decline, but the truth is that the later projects are every bit as important as the early classics in depicting the bulldozing rebellion of this director.

Aldrich started out as an assistant director, and the directors he assisted were quite an illustrious bunch: Jean Renoir, Charlie Chaplin, Joseph Losey, William Wellman, Max Ophuls, and Robert Rossen, among others. He directed episodes for TV series (China Smith, Four Star Playhouse) before graduating to features with Apache (1954), with Burt Lancaster playing the first of the director’s many angry outsiders fighting against an oppressive society. That same year he made Vera Cruz, which pairs Lancaster with Gary Cooper in a surprisingly cynical Western that anticipates Sam Peckinpah’s later, meaner work. Kiss Me Deadly was his breakout film, and still remains his greatest, filled with unforgettable images and characters as Aldrich works towards the literally explosive ending. The Big Knife (1955) was a hard-hitting Hollywood exposé, Autumn Leaves (1956) a bizarrely sadistic soap opera, and Attack! (1956) an intense vision of hell on the battlefield. So much amazing work in so few years! The Garment Jungle (1957) was Aldrich’s first bump, not because the movie was bad but because it got him in trouble with studios and saddled with projects he wasn’t interested in, like The Angry Hills (1959) and Sodom and Gomorrah (1961). As the 1960s started, Aldrich was at a low ebb.

Whatever Happened to Baby Jane (1962), with Bette Davis and Joan Crawford screeching for our delight, was the box-office hit Aldrich needed to get back on his feet. In fact, the director’s career is a seesaw of highs and lows, daring movies that bomb and blockbusters that are safe only on the surface. There’s the Old West kinkiness of The Last Sunset (1961), the Rat Pack goofing of 4 for Texas (1963), the self-indulgent meta-exercises in The Legend of Lyla Clare (1968), and the censorship-defying dramatics of The Killing of Sister George (1968). Even the 1970s, which found a certain grubbiness creeping into his style, is full of offbeat gems, like The Grissom Gang (1971) and The Emperor of the North (1973). Hustle (1974) and The Choirboys (1977) are distasteful, and The Frisco Kid (1979) pretty bland. Still, what other movie of the time was as explicit as Twilight’s Last Gleaming (1977) in its criticism of America’s involvement in Vietnam? Aldrich was a formidable artist, swinging low and high, turning out art movies disguised as action thrillers. He was at times down, but never out. It’s fitting that his last movie, All the Marbles (1981), is about athletes who refuse to leave the arena.

Watching Mr. Freeze in reruns of the Batman TV show, I had no idea the bald-pated, blustering villain was actually an important director. Otto Preminger (1906-1986), like Hitchcock, would alternate between art and popular culture. Also like Hitchcock, he had a persona that he would wear like a badge: The image of the Teutonic tyrant was one that the Vienna-born filmmaker cultivated with lines such as “I don’t have ulcers, I give them” or “Cry, you little monsters” (to a bunch of kids). (Billy Wilder knew what he was doing when he cast Preminger in Stalag 17 as the concentration camp commandant.) He also prided himself of being a taboo-breaker, tackling subjects Hollywood would rather dance around. The Moon Is Blue (1953) is famous primarily for including such hitherto-verboten words as “virgin” and “seduce,” The Man with the Golden Arm (1955) showed Frank Sinatra writhing on the floor while trying to quit his addiction to drugs, and Anatomy of a Murder (1959), in its examination of a murder and rape case, ensured that the words “semen” and “panties” could be uttered on the screen. But if Preminger were just a collector of touchy subjects, he would not be worth remembering much. Fortunately, he was also a remarkably subtle and modern director whose films, in addition to consistently superb camerawork, display a surprisingly open and adult sensibility.

Like many European filmmakers, Preminger started in the theater before moving to Hollywood movies in the 1940s. His only movie in German, Die Grosse Liebe (1931), was one of the many early features that he refused to acknowledge. To him, his real first movie was Laura (1944), that classic exercise in noir ambiguity and perversity. It’s a fascinating movie not just for the actors (Dana Andrews, Gene Tierney, Clifton Webb) but also for the style, which showcases his best qualities (the fluidity of his camera and the way it asks more questions than it answers). The earlythrillers—Fallen Angel (1945), Daisy Kenyon (1947), Whirlpool (1949), Where the Sidewalk Ends (1950), Angel Face (1953)—are consistent and teasing enough for auteurist critics to make a case for Preminger as a visionary following his obsessions within the studio system. The 1950s had several offbeat projects, like River of No Return (1954) with Marilyn Monroe, Carmen Jones (1954) with Dorothy Dandridge, and Saint Joan (1957) with Jean Seberg, as well as several masterpieces, like Bonjour Tristesse (1958) and Anatomy of a Murder, both of which grandly summarize the director’s thematic motifs. The young French critics were crazy about them, and, indeed, Jean-Luc Godard admitted to using Seberg in Breathless (1959) as an homage to her work with Preminger.

Starting with the 1960s, Preminger’s projects swelled along with his ambition. No more small thrillers for him, now it was the birth of Israel (Exodus (1960)), corruption in Washington (Advise & Consent (1962)), and the path to the Vatican (The Cardinal (1963)). Many of these movies have wonderful elements, but in my opinion their enlarged scope diminishes the intensity of his earlier works, an intensity regained in Bunny Lake Is Missing (1965), a mystery set in London that’s one of his most underrated movies. I haven’t yet caught the legendarily goofy Skidoo (1968), but the unintentionally hilarious Hurry Sundown (1967) has to be Preminger’s worst movie. Or at least I hope it is. Such Good Friends (1971) and Rosebud (1975) didn’t do much for his career in the new decade, though the solid spy-yarn The Human Factor (1979), his final film, allowed the director to close his long, endlessly interesting career on a honorable note.

Charlie Chaplin or Buster Keaton? In movie terms, that’s the equivalent of the old Beatles or Elvis query. Of course, you can love them both, but they’re such opposite figures that buffs keep resorting to “either… or” arguments. I’d say Chaplin is the deeper artist of the two, but, as I have known since I first saw The General (1926) in a film class back in college, Buster (1895-1966) will always give me more laughs. For one thing, he was less in love with his own comic persona than Chaplin was with his Little Tramp character. Keaton was known as “The Great Stone Face” for the characters he played, Everymen whose visages seemed always frozen with a wide-eyed stare and a turned-down mouth, along with his trademark porkpie hat. Both Chaplin and Keaton make movies about men pitted against the world, and Chaplin had the more profound sense of emotion. But Keaton, being the better filmmaker, gave the world he was pushing against a formalized dimension. It’s a world full of mechanisms, barren landscapes, ships that feel like haunted houses, avalanches, and typhoons. The way his characters endure them with a blank braveness makes them strangely modern, even in some aspects existential. (Jacques Tati and Richard Lester were big fans, and so were Beckett and Bunuel.) To Chaplin, the screen was his private stage and pulpit, while Keaton saw it as a minefield of gags in which his characters were just one of the beautifully put together elements.

From the cradle, Keaton was destined for legendary physical stunts. Legend goes that he got the “Buster” tag from Houdini himself, who congratulated him when as a youngster he tumbled down a flight of stairs. He was part of a vaudeville act with his parents, and got into film in the late 1910s, at first as a sidekick in Fatty Arbuckle two-reelers. He graduated to devising his own movies in 1920, with wonderful shorts like One Week, The Goat and The Playhouse. His first feature-length comedy was The Three Ages (1923), a parody of D.W. Griffith’s Intolerance that contrasted a romantic courtship in three different periods. Keaton’s string of hits in the silent era is astonishing. You have the breathtaking cliffhangers in Our Hospitality (1923), the wondrous surrealism of Sherlock Jr. (1924), the flabbergasted views of Nature and Woman in Seven Chances (1925), and the stampede in Go West (1925). Then his masterpiece, The General, and more: Battling Butler (1926), College (1927), Steamboat Bill, Jr. (1927), and The Cameraman (1928). Keaton’s life was a sad affair, with the coming of sound and his private affairs worsening his alcoholism and leading to shabby treatment at studios. It wasn’t until the 1960s that he was rediscovered and given the respect that he deserved. Decades after they were made, the movies remain wonders of timing, camerawork, and a dry worldview that’s more Jim Jarmusch than Mack Sennett.

Just as John Ford brought nobility to the American Western, Sergio Leone (1929-1989) did the same for the spaghetti Western. Which is ironic, because his earliest movies play like caustic parodies of the original Old West. Leone was born with already cinema in his DNA, the son of a filmmaker and an actress. He entered the medium as an often uncredited assistant director in productions ranging from Vittorio De Sica’s postwar classic The Bicycle Thief (1948) to Robert Aldrich’s kooky biblical epic Sodom and Gomorrah (1962). His first movie as a director was indeed part of the whole sand-and-sword genre: The Colossus of Rhodes (1961), which is better than most others of its ilk and quite good on its own. It was A Fistful of Dollars (1964), however, that really kicked off his career. It was a rip-off of Akira Kurosawa’s Yojimbo (Kurosawa even sued Leone for it), even as Yojimbo itself was influenced by American Westerns. Leone loved Westerns, yet A Fistful of Dollars is a sort of mockery of their innocence, as if their purity could not survive in the cynical, venal modern world. It’s no wonder Clint Eastwood became an international sensation as “the Man with No Name,” embodying a new kind of hero for nihilistic modern times.

Eastwood (along with Lee Van Cleef) also starred in the other two installments of the “Dollar Trilogy,” For a Few Dollars More (1965) and The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly (1966). These are frantic, sardonic movies, with the tropes of American oaters (especially the sadism of the villains) cranked up to 11. The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly began a turning point for Leone, with a melancholy beauty starting to seep through the sarcastic veneer. This beauty bloomed in Once Upon a Time in the West (1968), perhaps Leone’s greatest movie. The story of land disputes, revenge and killers is not original, but the treatment Leone gives it is transcendental. It’s visually ravishing, with the rocky mountains of the American West for once playing themselves rather than being faked by Spanish deserts; the cast (Henry Fonda, Charles Bronson, Claudia Cardinale, Jason Robards) are icons being forged before your eyes; and Ennio Morricone’s magnificent soundtrack brings a majestic dimension to every scene. And there’s an aching feeling for the passing of an era, the death of a time. Once Upon a Time in the West is the film Leone moved his whole life towards, a sort of simultaneous questioning, love letter, and eulogy for railroads, taciturn cowboys and ballsy ladies, and American vistas.

Like David Lean, Leone felt the need to keep making bigger and bigger movies. Duck, You Sucker (1971) had enormous sequences of riots and shootings, but what’s most striking about it is the emotional effects he gets out of the friendship between Rod Steiger’s Mexican bandit and James Coburn’s Irish revolutionary. It’s also a very political movie, in that it sees revolt not so much as doomed as it is removed from the people who were originally meant to benefit from it. Afterwards, Leone became more a producer than a director, though his uncredited hand could be felt in bits of My Name Is Nobody (1973). His last movie was the epic Once Upon a Time in America (1984), which was famously mauled by the studio and released in a horribly cut version. The restored version reveals Leone’s final masterpiece, a tale of betrayal, death and closet honor among thieves that unfolds across decades with a flowing, almost Proustian sense of memory and loss. He died prematurely at 60, just as he was about to start a new production with Robert De Niro about war in Leningrad.

It took me a bit to get into Luchino Visconti (1906-1976). For a while, watching his period pieces of men in tuxedos and women in fancy brocades posed against impeccably turned-out rooms, I had the feeling he was sort of an Italian James Ivory, directing furniture better than people. Even a viewing of The Leopard (1963) didn’t help change my mind, but that’s because the version I saw (the English-language released in theaters by Fox) had been truncated and very badly recut. It was a viewing of The Leopard that Visconti wanted, the Criterion DVD version that’s over three hours and in Italian, which changed my mind. Suddenly, everything had fallen into place. It wasn’t about the décor, but about the passage of time, the story of people (the director included) who mourned the fading beauty of their world. Another fascinating thing was the way Visconti, especially as he grew older, became both fascinated and repelled by this rotting. It’s the intensity of their feelings that keep the films turning into camp.

Visconti was a fascinating figure, full of contradictions: An aristocratic gay Marxist, courtly and massive (Burt Lancaster once described him as a “magnificent bull”). He was born in luxury, the son of a Duke who loved expensive horses. His interest in the arts took him to the fertile artists’ enclave of early 20th-century Europe, where he met Coco Chanel, Jean Cocteau, and Jean Renoir. It was Renoir who gave Visconti his start as an assistant director in the great French director’s A Day in the Country (1936). During the shooting, Renoir reportedly brought James M. Cain’s novel The Postman Always Rings Twice to Visconti’s attention, and, sure enough, in 1943 Visconti debuted as a director with his own version of it, Ossessione. If it shows plenty of elements that illustrate Renoir’s influence, his next movie, La Terra Treme (1948), plays like a catalog of Italian neo-realist tropes (location shooting, nonprofessional actors). The thing, however, is that Visconti is as far from a neo-realist as possible. He’s operatic, voluptuous, his movies spill over. This contrast between control and abandon is a tension that follows him throughout his career.

Bellissima (1951) was a vehicle for Anna Magnani, while Senso (1954), with Alida Valli and Farley Granger, was the first of his portrayals of febrile emotion corseted by the strictures of society. The White Nights (1957) is a really ravishing transposition of Dostoyevsky, even though I can’t stand Maria Schell’s tireless smiling. Rocco and His Brothers (1960), with Alain Delon as the prettiest boxer ever, again suggests opera without the singing, though it wasn’t until The Leopard that Visconti’s themes and styles came together beautifully (few movies can be positively compared to Orson Welles’s The Magnificent Ambersons). I still haven’t seen Sandra (1965) and The Stranger (1967); The Damned (1969) is sort of a turning point, since after it Visconti seemed to simply stop caring about plot and characterizations to focus exclusively on mood and gorgeous images of decay. Death in Venice (1971) and Ludwig (1972) and long and slow, unmistakably heartfelt but hard to sit through for somebody who doesn’t share Visconti’s obsessions. Weirdly enough, Conversation Piece (1974), the Visconti nobody seems to like, is my favorite of his late movies, a surprisingly mellow comedy. The ailing filmmaker died before completing editing of his last film, The Innocent (1976).

You’d need a thick book to do justice to Werner Herzog (b. 1942). Anybody who’s wrangled Klaus Kinski, walked into an active volcano, eaten his own shoe, and had a ship pulled over a mountain deserves a handful of bronze statues. No challenge is too daunting for this Bavarian maverick. A tireless traveler and explorer, he makes unfeasible bets with himself and wins every time. His first movie, Signs of Life (1968), shows many of his techniques and interests already fully formed. He loves landscapes, the stranger the better; man (or Man, rather) is always pitted against a Nature he wants to conquer, but can’t; and the camera is constantly surprising, in an eccentric place, calmly recording the craziness. Even Dwarves Started Small (1970) is one of the scariest movies I’ve ever watched, because it totally re-imagines the proportions and rules of the world. In Fata Morgana (1970) and Land of Silence and Darkness (1971), you can practically feel the desert sun or the touch of handicapped people. Herzog’s movies are among the most tactile ever.

Aguirre, the Wrath of God (1972) is still one of his most famous movies, with Klaus Kinski as the mad conquistador muddling through the Amazon jungle. What courage (or insanity) is needed for a project like this, especially with an unstable diva like Kinski always ready to flip out (behind-the-scenes documentary footage of Herzog’s projects are often as fascinating as the movies themselves). The Mystery of Kaspar Hauser (1976) is my favorite of his works, a hugely moving story about a human lump awakening to the sublime nature around him and, tragically, the rules of society. It makes even The Miracle Worker pale in comparison. Heart of Glass (1976) and Nosferatu (1979) remind us of how often Herzog shapes his movies like visions that he has and which he needs to exorcise onto a screen. Fitzcarraldo (1982) is one of his most representative movies, just because the ordeal of the plot (Kinski struggles to bring opera to the jungle, which means hauling a steamboat over a hill) so clearly mirrors the director’s own tenacity of vision.

The 1980s and 1990s were a period of miscellaneous activity for Herzog. Many of his movies seem like mementos from his trips and explorations. Some of them, like the 1992 documentary Lessons of Darkness, are extraordinary; many of them (including countless shorts) are still hard to find. Then, in 2005, he was again a star with Grizzly Man, a documentary drawn largely from found footage but whose subject (bear activist Timothy Treadwell, who was killed by grizzlies during his ecological expeditions) was a perfect summarization of Herzog’s own obsessions throughout the decades. This entrancing director, already pushing 70, hasn’t stopped since. You can almost always count on at least some gift from him on a yearly basis, whether it’s a surprising big-budget project like Rescue Dawn (2006) or a rumination about the odd extremes of life like Encounters at the End of the World (2007). Among his upcoming projects is a remake of Abel Ferrara’s infamous Bad Lieutenant, set in New Orleans. It sounds crazy, but “the Zog” wouldn’t want it any other way.