The Directors: Richard Fleischer

He was a soft-spoken, well-liked, respected craftsman who made quite a number of movies I enjoyed.  He was never as showy or as famous as a number of his contemporaries or forefathers but he got the job done.  He did not have a particular style that I could detect nor did he make a certain type of movie.  Richard Fleischer made some epics, sci-fi's, true-life crime, even horror and thrillers, and to my ever-lasting gratitude, some wonderful film noirs.


His directing career lasted through four decades.  He was there during Hollywood's Golden Age and he was still around during its New Wave.  He was a director whose career I closely monitored because I wanted to see what he was up to next.  His early work in noir made me a devotee for life, despite the fact that his forays into two more of my favorite genres, musicals and westerns, were not his best work.  The two musicals he made were beyond dreadful and his couple of westerns were just routine.

He was born into a show business family in Brooklyn in 1916.  His father, cartoonist Max Fleischer, created the legendary Betty Boop.  He did not have early ambitions to give show business a try because all he thought about was becoming a psychiatrist.  After graduating from Brown University with a change of heart he then enrolled at Yale where he majored in drama.

While at Yale he founded the Arena Players, producing and directing all of its plays.  It's also where he met Mary Dickson, his future and only wife of 53 years.

In 1942 he joined RKO as a writer on Pathé newsreels and then directed shorts and documentaries.  One of the latter, Design for Death, co-written with Ted Geisel (later known as Dr. Seuss), won an Oscar.  It examines the cultural forces that led to Japan's stronghold throughout WWII and was assembled from newsreels seized by Allied Forces.

Finally in 1948 Fleischer got a chance to direct feature films after billionaire Howard Hughes took over RKO.  They were often at odds but Hughes loved film noir and he assigned Fleischer to a series of them.

It took me a few years to see his earliest ones.  Bodyguard (1948) starred Lawrence Tierney (always so wickedly wonderful) as an ex-cop (fired for insubordination) who hires on as a bodyguard to the owner of a meat-packing plant where a murder has taken place.  Tierney was a scary person which made his movies more titillating.  This was future director Robert Altman's first writing assignment.  For Fleischer's first effort, it wasn't all that bad.

The Clay Pigeon (1949) is another good B noir starring real-life marrieds Barbara Hale and Bill Williams.  He wakes up in a hospital from a coma and discovers he is being charged with treason for informing on fellow prisoners in a Japanese prison camp.  He runs off with the help of nurse Hale in a tight little drama.

Trapped (1949), using the documentary style so popular at the time, stars Lloyd Bridges and real-life bad girl Barbara Payton who are coaxed by the Feds to weed out his former counterfeiting gang.  Bridges plans to double-cross the cops and the gang.  It reeks of B and held my attention from start to finish. 

Payton and Bridges are on the money

The title Armed Car Robbery (1950) just about covers it.  Three B actors are starred... Charles McGraw is a cop and William (prosecuting attorney Hamilton Burger of Perry Mason fame) Talman is the crook with Adele Jergens as the moll.  Awfully good fun.

Over his career he was often asked to take over for a director who had started a film but for whatever reasons wasn't cutting it.  Studio head Howard Hughes was not pleased with director John Farrow or the ending for the film His Kind of Woman (1951) that headlined RKO's top stars, Robert Mitchum and Jane Russell.  It was always difficult dealing with the mercurial Hughes and Fleischer quickly did his job and got out.  Farrow was given sole directing credit.

Then came Narrow Margin (1952)...  another B noir and a B cast with McGraw again and a fabulous Marie Windsor performance that takes place almost entirely on a train.  We reviewed it earlier.  This was the first Fleischer film I saw and is as responsible as any for my life-long love of noir.  In my opinion it's the director's best film and he said it was his favorite.

Fleisher was loaned to Columbia to make a rare comedy, The Happy Time (1952), which is well-named.  The charming Bobby Driscoll stars as a young teen in a French family in 1920s Ottawa who falls for the new maid causing much turmoil.  Louis Jourdan, Charles Boyer and comely Linda Christian costar.

The stars of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea

At this point Fleischer left RKO and some would say he left his most interesting period as a director.  He got a Disney gig directing the mega-popular 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1954).  He probably had a hard time explaining that one to his father who was a sworn enemy of Walt Disney.  It was not an easy shoot in the same way that Jaws wasn't easy for Spielberg 21 years later.  He said Kirk Douglas wasn't happy with scenes in which he wasn't the focus of attention.

Violent Saturday (1955) is a tidy little noir thriller about a bank robbery in a small town which we reviewed in a recent piece on one of its stars, Stephen McNally.  Its large cast excited me.  

Studio head honcho Darryl Zanuck was so impressed with Fleischer's work on Violent Saturday that he offered him a standard 7-year contract.  It came with handing over the directorial reins for a movie the studio was high on, The Girl in the Red Velvet Swing (1955).  I share their high with the based-on-a-true-story of turn-of-the-century nymphet Evelyn Nesbitt whose affair with famed New York architect Stanford White causes her loony husband to kill him.  The film and a young Joan Collins were beautiful to behold.

Kirk Douglas and United Artists borrowed Fleischer to make The Vikings (1958) and it turned out to be one of the director's most remembered movies.  Filming in and around the icy waters of Norway, it is the story of sworn enemies, a prince (Douglas) and a slave (Tony Curtis), in love with a captive princess (Janet Leigh).  It fulfilled a longtime dream Douglas had to play a viking.  It was a troubled production with weather conditions, three large ships to build, a longer-than-planned shooting schedule and therefore budgetary problems with the home office.  It was a rousing success by all accounts.  It would result in one of two nominations Fleischer would receive from the Director's Guild honoring his good work.

With Compulsion stars Diane Varsi & Dean Stockwell

The second nomination would come from his directing a film that always fascinated me, Compulsion (1959).  Based on the real-life Leopold-Loeb trial of a pair of young friends who commit murder just for kicks.  Stars Dean Stockwell and Bradford Dillman are riveting as the killers.  Orson Welles, always a handful on film sets, has his moments as the defense attorney.  Some of his behavior is about the bitterness he felt that Hollywood would not allow him to direct any longer.  Fleischer had to laugh that the actor, when giving his courtroom speeches, asks other actors in the scene to close their eyes because watching him made Welles nervous.  

In 1960 Fleischer was invited to direct the John Wayne western North to Alaska but declined after reading the script because there was nothing there.  He earned the life-long enmity of Wayne whom Fleischer thought was an ass.

He gathered up his family at this point and moved to Europe where they stayed for five years.  While there he made two films with Zanuck's girlfriend of the moment, Juliette Greco... Crack in the Mirror and The Big Gamble.  I enjoyed them both although neither was a hit.

While biblical films were never great favorites, I did take a liking to Barabbas (1961), the story of the felon whose life changes after Jesus is crucified in his stead.  Perhaps it was a bit plodding but the international cast including Anthony Quinn, Silvana Mangano, Arthur Kennedy, Vittorio Gassman, Valentina Cortesa and Jack Palance was enough to seduce me into buying a ticket.

He returned to the states and Fox in the mid-sixties and made one of his biggest hit in more than a decade, the sci-fi drama Fantastic Voyage (1966).  It concerns a miniaturized submarine and a team of scientists (Stephen Boyd and Raquel Welch among them) being inserted into the bloodstream of an important scientist who has developed a blood clot in his brain.  What a hit it was.  One trembles to think of what could be done with it today.

If that was the high point, the low came quickly and severely with Doctor Doolittle (1967) which went belly-up at the box office and summoned all the vitriol critics could muster.  There were terrific problems during production that often centered on the insufferable Rex Harrison, the studio head and most of the animals.  Harrison had the opposite problem that Welles had on Compulsion.  He flew into a tizzy when the animals would not look at him when he sang to them.   The movie was recently remade and again was a flop.

The Boston Strangler (1968) gave Tony Curtis one of his best roles as real-life serial killer Albert De Salvo and it was another hit.  Then came Tora! Tora! Tora! (1970), which I thought was a terrific war picture done from both the American and Japanese points of view.  The Pearl Harbor scenes were about the best I've ever seen but for some reason the film didn't particularly register with the public.  Fleischer ended his tenure at Fox.

Fleischer went to England to film two movies.  The first was 10 Rillington Place (1971), another true serial killer story, this time one that rocked Britain in the 40s.  Richard Attenborough is the killer and John Hurt the neighbor who suffered a terrible miscarriage of justice.  

Then Fleischer moved on to the Mia Farrow scarefest, See No Evil (1971).  She is blind, living in a castle while members of her family, also in residence, are being killed one by one.  I thought the atmospheric thriller had some genuinely scary parts.

The remainder of Fleischer's work unfortunately fell well below his usual standards.  The New Centurions (1972), the first of Joseph Wambaugh's gritty crime novels to become a movie, had its moments looking at the cop partnership of George C. Scott and Stacy Keach, but it was an uneven script.  Fleischer's followup, Soylent Green (1973), is an odd and clumsy sci-fi tale that took itself too seriously.

Mandingo (1975) is a frequently hard-to-watch, lurid, exploitative, racist tale of the antebellum south that earned big boxoffice.  I confess the only reason I went to see it were the sex scenes between hunky Ken Norton and Susan George.  Fleischer again replaced the original director.  

Ashanti (1978) about a man in search of his kidnapped wife needed some tightening but The Jazz Singer (1982) with singer Neil Diamond and Laurence Olivier, who at this point would do anything for a paycheck, was staggeringly horrid.  Two Arnold Schwarzeneger flicks, Conan the Destroyer (1984) and Red Sonja (1985) were a franchise the limited actor should have passed on along with Fleischer.  

In 1993 his memoir, Just Tell Me When to Cry was published and it was a great favorite of mine at the time.  He let it all hang out, telling some of the secrets he'd been keeping but without much bitterness.  It was juicy and done with great dollops of humor.  The unusual title comes from actress Sylvia Sidney while making Violent Saturday.  Fleischer was giving her all kinds of instructions as to how he wanted a scene played.  She impatiently and quietly listened to him and then blurted out just tell me when to cry.

Fleischer made his last film in 1987.  He was a devoted family man and spending time with them was a great joy for him.  He also headed Fleischer Studios which, among other things, handled licensing issues on his father's work.  He suffered from heart problems in his last few years and died in his sleep of natural causes in 2006 at age 89.


Next posting:
A musical biography