Stuart Rosenberg

Stuart Rosenberg (born August 11, 1927, New York City, New York, U.S.—died March 15, 2007, Beverly Hills, California) was an American television and film director who was best known for the 1967 classic Cool Hand Luke.

Early work

Rosenberg studied Irish literature at New York University before working in television as an editor. In 1957 he helmed episodes of Decoy, and he subsequently became a sought-after TV director, working on such notable series as Alfred Hitchcock Presents, The Untouchables, Naked City, The Twilight Zone, and The Defenders. During that time he made his first feature film, Murder, Inc. (1960), though it was completed by producer Burt Balaban when an actors’ strike interrupted filming for several months. The drama, which starred Stuart Whitman and Peter Falk, was a taut account of a real-life gang of killers for hire that flourished in the 1930s. After the low-budget West German production Question 7 (1961), Rosenberg returned to television. In addition to his work on episodic shows, he directed the TV movies Fame Is the Name of the Game and A Small Rebellion (both 1966).

Rosenberg returned to the big screen in impressive fashion with Cool Hand Luke (1967), an enormously popular updating of the rebel-within-a-prison formula. Paul Newman gave one of his most charismatic performances as the antihero Luke, an irrepressible, indomitable convict who gives new hope to his chain-gang compatriots; Strother Martin was the warden who tries but fails to break him. The film received four Academy Award nominations, and George Kennedy won an Oscar for his work as Dragline, a fellow inmate who becomes allies with Luke. Rosenberg had less success with The April Fools (1969), a flat romantic comedy that offered the unlikely pairing of Jack Lemmon and Catherine Deneuve as illicit lovers who intend to run away together; the notable supporting cast included Charles Boyer and Myrna Loy.

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Films of the 1970s

Rosenberg began the decade with Move (1970), an irreverent black comedy starring Elliott Gould as a failed playwright who writes pornographic novels for a living. Somewhat better was WUSA (1970), a political drama starring Newman as Rheinhardt, a drifter who becomes an announcer at a right-wing radio station, which he discovers has an alarming agenda. Although didactic, the film had an exceptional cast that included Joanne Woodward, Anthony Perkins, Laurence Harvey, and Cloris Leachman. The slight comedy Pocket Money (1972) had Newman again, now as a modern-day cowboy who, desperate for money, agrees to drive cattle from Mexico to the United States, though things do not go as planned; Lee Marvin was cast as a friend who joins him. The Laughing Policeman (1973) was a police procedural with Walter Matthau and Bruce Dern as partners investigating a mass slaying on a bus. Rosenberg reteamed with Newman on The Drowning Pool (1975), a sequel to the hit crime drama Harper (1966). Newman reprised the role of private detective Lew Harper, and Woodward was cast as a former girlfriend.

Voyage of the Damned (1976) was more ambitious, a dramatization of the 1939 voyage of the ocean liner St. Louis, which transported German Jewish refugees who hoped to land in Havana; when permission to dock was denied there and elsewhere, the ship had to return to Germany. The international cast included Max von Sydow, Faye Dunaway, James Mason, Oskar Werner, Maria Schell, Ben Gazzara, and Julie Harris. Rosenberg took on less-serious fare with Love and Bullets (1979), a Charles Bronson action film.

After more than a decade without a major hit, Rosenberg found box-office success with The Amityville Horror (1979). The thriller was based on Jay Anson’s nonfiction book about a Long Island house that was allegedly possessed by demons. James Brolin and Margot Kidder starred as the homeowners, and Rod Steiger was the priest who tries to exorcize the forces of darkness. Although widely panned by critics, The Amityville Horror was one of the year’s top-grossing films.

Last films

Rosenberg replaced Bob Rafelson on the prison exposé Brubaker (1980), which starred Robert Redford as the new warden of a corrupt and abusive prison. He poses as a convict in order to experience the manifold horrors firsthand and later encounters resistance when he tries to implement much-needed reforms. The unrelenting fact-based drama was a critical and commercial success. Also popular was The Pope of Greenwich Village (1984), a crime comedy based on Vincent Patrick’s novel set in Little Italy. Mickey Rourke gave a strong performance as a small-timer who aspires to greater things, and Eric Roberts was typically over-the-top as his hopelessly ill-fated cousin.

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Let’s Get Harry (1986) was a little-seen action film about a soldier of fortune (Robert Duvall) hired to rescue a man kidnapped in South America. Unhappy with changes made by the studio, Rosenberg had his name removed from the film; the directorial credit is given to “Alan Smithee.” In 1991 Rosenberg made his last film, My Heroes Have Always Been Cowboys, a serviceable take on the aging-rodeo-star tale, with Scott Glenn as a bone-weary circuit veteran and Ben Johnson as his ailing father.

After retiring from filmmaking, Rosenberg taught at the American Film Institute. Among his students were Darren Aronofsky and Todd Field.