Richard Brooks - Independent Writer-producer-director

Independent Writer-producer-director

Brooks spent the last third of his film career working in relative independence. He followed the success of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof with an independent production for United Artists of Elmer Gantry (1960), based on the novel by Sinclair Lewis. The story of a phony preacher, played by Burt Lancaster, and a sincere revivalist, played by Jean Simmons, was edgy for the time. As it had for Blackboard Jungle and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, controversy accompanied the film’s release and helped bring people to theaters. The movie received five Academy Award nominations, including one for best picture, and won Oscars for Lancaster as lead actor, for Shirley Jones as supporting actress, and for Brooks’ script.

Brooks adapted and directed another Tennessee Williams play, Sweet Bird of Youth (1962). Ed Begley won a supporting Oscar for his role in the film. While popular and well-received critically, the MGM production didn’t duplicate the success of the previous Williams work. A dream project followed, an adaptation for Columbia Pictures of Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim (1965), but the lavish film proved to be a misfire at the box office and with most critics. Brooks had spent years writing the script and planning the most expensive project of his career and had assembled a stellar cast led by Peter O’Toole, Eli Wallach, Jack Hawkins, Paul Lukas, and James Mason. While beautifully photographed in Hong Kong and Southeast Asia by Freddie Young and scored by Bronislau Kaper, Lord Jim did not find the audience that had made David Lean’s epics Lawrence of Arabia and Doctor Zhivago notable hits of the 1960s.

To recover professionally from the failure of Lord Jim, Brooks surprised Hollywood by choosing to adapt a minor western novel about a wealthy husband who hires mercenaries to rescue his kidnapped wife from Mexican bandits. Brooks worked quickly and within a year released The Professionals (1966), which turned out to be Columbia’s biggest hit that year. The slick crowd-pleaser starred Burt Lancaster, Lee Marvin, Robert Ryan and Woody Strode as “the professionals” with Jack Palance as the bandit leader and Claudia Cardinale as the kidnapped wife. The film received Oscar nominations for Brooks’ screenplay and direction and for Conrad Hall’s cinematography. It has been lauded as one of the most entertaining westerns ever filmed.

Brooks landed the property of the decade when author Truman Capote selected him to adapt his best-selling book In Cold Blood. Once again rejecting the methodical pace that had slowed him with other productions, Brooks worked quickly to adapt the “nonfiction novel,” as Capote called it, but the reporter in Brooks led him to conduct his own research into the murders of four members of a Kansas farm family and the two drifters responsible for the crime. Brooks rejected Columbia’s suggestion that he hire stars to play the killers and instead cast two relative unknowns, Scott Wilson and Robert Blake. He resisted the studio on another point, shooting the film in black and white rather than color because he thought it was a more frightening medium. He also used locations where the events actually occurred, including the house where the family had been killed. The resulting documentary-style film was among those of the mid-1960s that ushered in a more mature Hollywood film. Brooks once again received double Oscar nominations; cinematographer Conrad Hall and composer Quincy Jones also were nominated.

The Professionals and In Cold Blood marked the apex of Brooks’ career. In the two decades that followed, he wrote and directed just six more films. Of note was The Happy Ending (1969). From his original screenplay about a woman dealing with disappointments in her marriage and her life, it was the kind of low-key personal film more likely to come from Europe than an American director. The film earned an Oscar nomination for star Jean Simmons. (Her own marriage to Brooks would end in divorce in 1980.)

Bite the Bullet (1975) was Brooks’ return to the western. He based his original screenplay on the endurance horse races popular at the turn of the century. In 1977, he released another controversial film, an adaptation of Judith Rossner’s novel Looking for Mr. Goodbar, starring Diane Keaton as a school teacher who searches for sexual satisfaction in singles bars. Brooks made the film on a tight budget, and its frank treatment of sex and its horrific storyline brought praise and condemnation and sold tickets. He ended his career with Wrong Is Right (1982), a satire about the news media and world unrest starring Sean Connery, and a gambling addiction film, Fever Pitch (1985). Both were critical and commercial failures.

Brooks tried developing other projects in the last years of his life. He suffered from heart ailments and a stroke before dying at his home in 1992 at the age of 79.