Richard Fleischer

Richard Fleischer (born December 8, 1916, Brooklyn, New York, U.S.—died March 25, 2006, Los Angeles, California) was an American filmmaker who directed a number of popular movies, notably the science-fiction classics 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1954), Fantastic Voyage (1966), and Soylent Green (1973).

Early life and work

Fleischer, the son of animation pioneer Max Fleischer, attended Brown University before enrolling at the Yale School of Drama, where in 1937 he founded a theatrical group. In 1942 he joined RKO as a writer on the Pathé newsreels, and a year later he began directing shorts for the studio.

In 1946 Fleischer helmed his first feature film, the domestic drama Child of Divorce, which did well enough to inspire the sequel, Banjo (1947). He subsequently coproduced Design for Death (1947), an Academy Award-winning documentary about Japanese culture that was intended as insight into that country’s participation in World War II, which had recently ended. Design for Death was assembled from newsreels seized by Allied forces.

Returning to directing, Fleischer entered a highly productive phase that was highlighted by a series of solid B-film noirs. Movies from this period included Bodyguard (1948), with Lawrence Tierney as a former cop who is framed for murder; The Clay Pigeon (1949), about a sailor (played by Bill Williams) who awakens from a coma only to learn that he is about to be court-martialed for treason; Follow Me Quietly (1949), a police procedural about a serial killer; and Trapped (1949), a pseudodocumentary about counterfeiting that starred Lloyd Bridges and Barbara Payton.

The heist drama Armored Car Robbery (1950) is considered a leading example of film noir; it featured Charles McGraw as a police detective on the trail of a gang leader (William Talman).

Fleischer enjoyed further success with The Narrow Margin (1952), one of the best noirs of its day. The taut thriller centers on a policeman (McGraw) who is escorting a gangster’s widow (Marie Windsor) from Chicago to Los Angeles, where she is scheduled to testify before a grand jury. The train ride becomes fraught with danger, however, as the mob tries to silence her. The box-office hit was Fleischer’s final film for RKO.

Middle years

Working as a freelance director, Fleischer made the popular comedy The Happy Time (1952), a sentimental period picture set in Canada, with Charles Boyer and Louis Jourdan. He was subsequently approached by Disney to helm 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1954); Fleischer was a somewhat surprising choice, given that Disney was his father’s main competitor. The resulting adaptation of Jules Verne’s classic novel became one of Disney’s most successful live-action ventures. Kirk Douglas and James Mason headed the cast, though much of the acclaim was for the Oscar-winning special effects; the memorable battle with a giant squid is among cinema’s great action sequences.

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Fleischer returned to film noir with the highly regarded Violent Saturday (1955), which set a bank robbery in a small town. The Girl in the Red Velvet Swing (1955) was an account of the Evelyn Nesbit scandal; Joan Collins starred as the seductive showgirl whose affair with famed architect Stanford White (Ray Milland) leads her husband, Harry Kendall Thaw (Farley Granger), to fatally shoot him.

After the action picture Bandido (1956), Fleischer made The Vikings (1958)—an elaborate adventure starring Douglas, Janet Leigh, and Tony Curtis—and These Thousand Hills (1959), a melodramatic western about an ambitious cowboy (Don Murray). Fleischer closed out the 1950s with the provocative Compulsion (1959), a thinly disguised rendering of the Leopold and Loeb case; Orson Welles portrayed the Clarence Darrow-like attorney whose defense fails to save the thrill-seeking murderers.

Fleischer directed Welles again in Crack in the Mirror (1960), which featured two separate stories about love triangles. The Big Gamble (1961), written by Irwin Shaw, was an action comedy set in Africa, while the biblical epic Barabbas (1961) featured Anthony Quinn as the criminal who is pardoned instead of Jesus.

Fleischer was absent from the screen for five years, but when he returned, it was with his biggest hit in more than a decade, Fantastic Voyage (1966). This science-fiction classic centers on a group of scientists who are miniaturized and injected into the body of a dying man in an attempt to save his life. It won two Academy Awards, for visual effects and art direction, and it remains an approachable explainer of how the human body works. Fleischer next directed Rex Harrison in Doctor Dolittle (1967). A critical and commercial disappointment, the film endured numerous production problems, including difficulties handling some 1,500 animals.

Fleischer rebounded with the popular true-crime tale The Boston Strangler (1968), a suspenseful account of the serial killer who murdered more than 10 women in the 1960s; Curtis was effective as Albert DeSalvo, who confessed to committing the crimes. Che! (1969), however, was a failure; the heavily romanticized account of the revolutionary leader’s life featured Omar Sharif as Che Guevara and Jack Palance as Fidel Castro.

The big-budget Tora! Tora! Tora! (1970), which Fleischer codirected, was a meticulous look at the events leading up to the Pearl Harbor attack, told from both the Japanese and the American vantage points.

Later work

Fleischer returned to true crime and found box-office success with 10 Rillington Place (1971), a pseudodocumentary about the John Reginald Christie–Timothy Evans murder case that shocked England in the 1940s; Richard Attenborough starred as the mass murderer, and John Hurt was the simpleminded man framed for one of the killings and hanged. In 1971 Fleischer directed the thriller See No Evil, with Mia Farrow as a blind woman who returns home to find that her family has been killed, and The Last Run, an offbeat gangster yarn starring George C. Scott. Scott returned for The New Centurions (1972), an adaptation of former cop Joseph Wambaugh’s gritty bestseller.

Fleischer’s Soylent Green (1973) was a cautionary science-fiction tale that featured Charlton Heston as a 21st-century police officer and Edward G. Robinson, in his last film, as an elderly researcher. Although the movie received mixed reviews, it developed a cult following. After several largely unsuccessful films, Fleischer directed Mr. Majestyk (1974), in which Charles Bronson starred as a watermelon farmer who becomes targeted for a gang hit and inventively fights back; its screenplay was by Elmore Leonard.

Mandingo (1975) was a popular melodrama set in the antebellum South. Fleischer had less success with the biopic The Incredible Sarah (1976), which starred Glenda Jackson as the fabled actress Sarah Bernhardt, and Ashanti (1979), with Peter Ustinov as a slave trader who abducts the wife (Beverly Johnson) of a missionary doctor (Michael Caine).

Fleischer’s The Jazz Singer (1980), a remake of the 1927 classic, starred a miscast Neil Diamond as a young Jewish man who dreams of becoming a pop singer despite the objections of his cantor father (Laurence Olivier). The drama was panned by critics but became a camp classic.

After the horror film Amityville 3-D (1983), Fleischer moved to action adventures with Conan the Destroyer (1984), a sequel to the surprise 1982 hit Conan the Barbarian; Arnold Schwarzenegger returned as the titular hero, with Grace Jones and Wilt Chamberlain in supporting roles. It was popular with moviegoers, and Fleischer directed the spin-off Red Sonja (1985).

Fleischer’s final feature film was Million Dollar Mystery (1987), which was largely a promotional gimmick for a treasure hunt being conducted by a maker of garbage bags.

Just Tell Me When to Cry, Fleischer’s autobiography, was published in 1993.