Robert Siodmak - Later Career

Later Career

His return to Hollywood film-making in 1967 to make the wide-screen western Custer of the West was another disappointment. Siodmak fared better in Europe, especially with the British film The Rough and the Smooth (1959), another noir, but much meaner and gloomier than anything he had made in America.

He ended his career with a six-hour, two-part toga and chariot epic, Der Kampf um Rom (1968), oddly more campy (perhaps intentionally, one hopes) than Cobra Woman had been. There was a brief and profitable foray into television in Great Britain with the series O.S.S. (1957–58). Siodmak was last seen publicly in an interview for Swiss television at his home in Ascona in 1971. He died alone in 1973, seven weeks after his wife's death.