From all appearances, Sydney Pollack was a total mensch, and he (almost) always made money for his partners, which keeps you alive if you’re in the mafia and keeps you working if you’re in Hollywood. I think I would have loved to meet the guy, and I always enjoyed seeing him onscreen.

So let me be very delicate and careful in saying, in the midst of all the encomiums to his status as an industry “giant” and so forth:

He was a pretty lousy director. In fact, that may be one of the reasons he out-lasted so many of his far more interesting and original peers.

And it matters to say this, because in many ways, the cinema of Sydney Pollack - star-driven, respectfully “issues-based” in a nonthreatening way designed to keep audiences from feeling offended while making everyone involved feel like they’re honoring their high school civics teachers -- killed off a much more interesting approach to “serious” moviemaking that hit its stride right around the same time as Pollack’s career did.

It’s 1969. After a celebrated TV career, Pollack becomes bankable with They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? - probably his best movie, a dark and offbeat drama set in a Depression-era dance marathon that became an unexpected hit during the weird, Vietnam-obsessed and soul-searching days of the late-Woodstock period.

1969 is two years after Mike Nichols made The Graduate and Arthur Penn made Bonnie and Clyde. It’s a year before Altman’s M*A*S*H. Kubrick’s 2001 has just ended its extended and controversial run; Easy Rider is in the last stages of playing off. In Hollywood, the old guard that held the studio era together is dying out and the hipster barbarians seem to be at the gates, bringing revisionist subject matters and a new sophistication of narrative treatment and visual style to the American screen.

It was an amazing time for American movies, one that extended well into the early 1970s, and Pollack seemed poised to be a leading voice among so many vibrant new ones.

Instead, Pollack quickly established himself as a true throwback to the studio era that others, including Francis Coppola, Hal Ashby and Martin Scorsese, were doing so much to overthrow. Pollack was not heir to the Hollywood that bred Howard Hawks, John Ford, Frank Capra or any other major figure who found a way to create a unified body of work within commercial formula films, but to the parallel Hollywood universe of W. S. “One Take Woody” Van Dyke, and all the other minor contract directing talents who saw a large part of their function as holding major stars in focus for the clinches.

To illustrate the difference between Pollack and his “New Hollywood” contemporaries, it’s useful to compare his principal creative partnership against another one. Just say these words out loud: Martin Scorsese and Robert De Niro. What comes into your head? Most likely an electrifying collaboration between an actor and a director spanning decades, one that brought out the best in each partner, and may have changed the course of American movie history as a result.

Now follow that up by reciting these magic syllables: Sydney Pollack and Robert Redford. Unless you’re a Hollywood insider or read today’s obituaries, you most likely can’t remember what movies they made together, and if you do, you probably can’t help thinking that at least three of the seven - Out of Africa, The Electric Horseman and Havana - were flat-out bores. As were Pollack’s two Harrison Ford pictures, the awful remake of Sabrina and the turgid Random Hearts, which were of a piece with the Redford movies insofar as they showed Pollack to be a director who felt most comfortable working with wooden if iconic male leads.

Those five films represent more than a quarter of Pollack’s output (in forty years he made only 19 narrative films); the remainder include forgotten early works (The Slender Thread, The Scalphunters, and Castle Keep); four additional Redford films, of which Jeremiah Johnson and Three Days of the Condor are easily the best; the very dull existential racing picture Bobby Deerfield; and Tootsie, the charming, uncharacteristic and much-loved drag comedy often (and ludicrously) cited as the equal of screwball masterpieces from the 1930s and 1940s.

Like everything Pollack did, Tootsie is style-less, proficient, commercial and anonymous, with a flat-footed camera approach that is likely a legacy of Pollack’s TV apprenticeship. But he caught lightning in a bottle when he cast Dustin Hoffman as his lead, and Hoffman’s insistence that Pollack play his agent revealed the unpretentious and likable director to be an unpretentious and likable character man of the sort that a true screwball master like Capra or Billy Wilder would have kept employed in minor parts for decades. As an actor, he worked with Kubrick and Woody Allen, giving him walk-on status in two bodies of work that take the kinds of risks Pollack’s movies don’t even appear to be able to see.

I personally think Pollack made a half-dozen or so decent movies and two or three highly entertaining ones - just like that reliable and unfussy old time contract man W.S. Van Dyke, who directed The Thin Man, after all. But Pollack’s career flourished mainly because he liked stars and knew how to make them look good and feel important. It’s no wonder he ended his days as an executive producer helping square-jawed George Clooney make films of flaccid Significance like Michael Clayton - political pictures that couldn’t change a single mind but made all concerned feel brave and important for making them. Compared to people he came up beside like Penn, Altman and Hal Ashby, Pollack was a comforting figure of reaction in a time of dice-throwers, and if his loss seems magnified in the moment, it’s only because, as Gloria Swanson said in Sunset Blvd., it’s the pictures that have gotten so small.