Richard Brooks

Richard Brooks (born May 18, 1912, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, U.S.—died March 11, 1992, Beverly Hills, California) was an American screenwriter and director whose best-known movies were adaptations of literary works, notably Blackboard Jungle (1955), Elmer Gantry (1960), and In Cold Blood (1967).

(Read Martin Scorsese’s Britannica essay on film preservation.)

Early films

After attending Temple University in Philadelphia, Brooks began his writing career as a sports journalist and later was a radio commentator for NBC. In the early 1940s he moved to Hollywood, where he worked at Universal on the screenplays for such films as Men of Texas (1942) and Cobra Woman (1944). After serving (1943–45) in World War II, Brooks wrote The Brick Foxhole (1945), a novel about the persecution of a homosexual. The book was the basis for Edward Dmytryk’s noir classic Crossfire (1947), though the film centres on anti-Semitism. Brooks later provided the scripts for such notable films as the Jules Dassin noir Brute Force (1947) and John Huston’s Key Largo (1948).

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In 1950 Brooks was given the chance to direct his own script for Crisis, thanks to its star, Cary Grant, who interceded with MGM on Brooks’s behalf. The political thriller received generally good reviews, and two years later Brooks made The Light Touch, a standard caper starring Stewart Granger as an art thief. Deadline—USA (1952) was a significant step forward, using Brooks’s newspaper background to provide Humphrey Bogart with one of his better late films. After a string of indifferent movies, Brooks had his first major success with Blackboard Jungle (1955). Based on a popular novel by Evan Hunter, the film is set in a New York City school terrorized by teenage hoodlums (played by Vic Morrow and Sidney Poitier, among others) until a new teacher (Glenn Ford) intervenes. Extremely influential, the drama helped launch the rock-and-roll revolution by using “Rock Around the Clock” by Bill Haley and the Comets as its theme. Brooks received an Academy Award nomination for his screenplay.

In 1956 Brooks directed one of his few westerns, The Last Hunt, and The Catered Affair, a romantic comedy starring Bette Davis and Ernest Borgnine. He then made Something of Value (1957), an account of the Mau Mau uprising in Kenya, with Poitier, Rock Hudson, and Wendy Hiller. Brooks also wrote the screenplay, as he would for all his later films.

Heyday

Brooks subsequently entered the most-successful period of his career, transferring a series of prominent literary works to the big screen. Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1958) was his adaptation of Tennessee Williams’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play about a troubled Southern family. Despite numerous changes to satisfy the Production Code, even today it still carries considerable force, in large part because of strong performances by Paul Newman, Elizabeth Taylor, and Burl Ives. The film received six Oscar nominations, including for best picture and director. In addition, Brooks also received (with James Poe) a nod for the screenplay. He had less success, however, with his 1958 adaptation of Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov.

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Brooks then wrote and directed Elmer Gantry (1960), which was based on Sinclair Lewis’s novel about a philandering evangelist. A cynical masterpiece, the drama earned Brooks an Academy Award for his screenplay, and Burt Lancaster and Shirley Jones also earned Oscars. (Brooks married leading lady Jean Simmons after filming completed in 1960; they divorced in 1977.) In 1962 Brooks reteamed with Newman on Sweet Bird of Youth, another adaptation of a Williams play that proved not as potent as the stage version. It featured notable performances by Geraldine Page, Shirley Knight, and Ed Begley, who won an Oscar.

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The ambitious Lord Jim (1965), with Peter O’Toole as the guilt-racked protagonist of Joseph Conrad’s novel, was considered by some to be self-indulgent, although most of the reviews were largely positive. Brooks had greater success with the action-packed The Professionals (1966), which was one of the decade’s best westerns. A precursor to Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch (1969), the picture boasted a dream cast—Lancaster, Lee Marvin, Robert Ryan, Jack Palance, Woody Strode, and Claudia Cardinale—and earned Brooks Oscar nominations for both direction and screenplay.

Brooks’s next film was arguably the one with which he is most closely identified. In Cold Blood (1967) was based on the Truman Capote best seller about the 1959 murder of a Kansas family by two petty criminals, Perry Edward Smith and Dick Hickock, who were played by Robert Blake and Scott Wilson, respectively. Brooks’s docudrama approach approximates Capote’s own technique. In Cold Blood is widely considered a classic, and Brooks earned Academy Award nominations for both his screenplay and his direction.

Later work

Brooks’s subsequent films failed to match the success of his earlier work. After the melodrama The Happy Ending (1969), Brooks turned to comedy with $ (1971), a complicated but crowd-pleasing caper in which a security expert (Warren Beatty) and a prostitute (Goldie Hawn) steal millions from a bank. Bite the Bullet (1975) was a well-made throwback to the heyday of westerns, featuring fine performances by Gene Hackman, James Coburn, and Ben Johnson. However, it opened the same week as Steven Spielberg’s Jaws and sank without a trace.

In 1977 Brooks made the much-anticipated Looking for Mr. Goodbar, an adaptation of Judith Rossner’s best seller about a repressed teacher (Diane Keaton) whose sexual explorations end in tragedy. A controversial moneymaker upon its release, the film earned mixed reviews, with much of the criticism directed at Brooks’s direction.

After a five-year absence from the big screen, Brooks returned with Wrong Is Right (1982), a satire about the media that was largely ignored by moviegoers, despite the presence of Sean Connery. His last movie was Fever Pitch (1985), starring Ryan O’Neal as a gambling addict. The drama was a commercial and critical failure, and Brooks subsequently retired.