I was surprised no one had done a book about Richard Brooks until now – he’d made a number of important films, he only died in the early 90s, many of his friends and colleagues were still around, and his papers were at the Margaret Herrick Library. But then Brooks has never seemed to inspire much passion among film fans – he doesn’t have the following of, say, a Wilder, Kubrick or Hitchcock.
He also seems to have been very unpleasant personally, forever screaming on set at cast and crew, particularly bullying young actresses (he married and romanced several young actresses, including Jean Simmons, Jean Brooks and Angie Dickinson – coincidence?). He found supporting his parents a drag; he whinged about being under contract to the studio, even though MGM backed him through several dud films; he was too cowardly to visit his supposed great friend Bogart when the latter was dying; he wouldn’t make any public announcements concerning politics, even during the McCarthy and Nixon eras; he acted like some tough Marine even though his entire war serve was spent in the US making movies.
Some people did admire him, ,he fought on behalf of getting cast and crew on films, and always tried to make intelligent entertainments. But he comes across as a bit of a wanker, even in Daniel’s admirably balanced account.
Brooks was an only child, the son of immigrants. He went to college until the Depression hit, then apparently travelled the rails (we don’t know where or for how long or if Brooks made it up – I wonder if he ran into Robert Mitchum!). He got work as a newspaper journalist, eventually moving to New York City and going into radio. A divorce saw him move to Hollywood where he worked again in radio, working with Orson Welles on Hello, Americans, then broke into film writing at Universal, particularly vehicles for Maria Montez (Daniel is a little unfairly dismissive of these, the scripts hold up fairly well today). He joined the Marines, where he made training films for two years and got material for a novel called The Brick Foxhole. This was later filmed successfully as Crossfire and kicked Brooks’ career up a level – he made a number of movies for producer Mark Hellinger, and soon established himself as one of the best tough guy screenwriters in the business (The Killers, Key Largo, Brute Force).
Brooks used this power to move into directing, starting with the Cary Grant thriller Crisis at MGM. (Grant starred in a few movies by writers-turned directors – Sidney Sheldon was another.) It flopped but MGM liked Brooks – his literary pedigree and tough guy attitude appealed to studio head Dore Schary, for whom Crossfire had been a hit at RKO.
They kept him directing despite a series of flat, unremarkable films: The Light Touch, Deadline USA, Battle Hymn, Flame and the Flesh, Take the High Ground, The Last Time I Saw Paris. None of these seem to have been particularly well reviewed or received but the studio still kept him on. Brooks finally bought home the bacon with The Blackboard Jungle (which he promptly said was a big hit because it was the first film allowed to do His Way – which as Daniel shows wasn’t actually true).
He was now an A-list director, and followed this up with some prestige films for MGM, none of which entirely quite worked – The Last Hunt (did Dore Schary really think the public wanted to see a film about real buffalo slaughter?), The Catered Affair (of interest to me because Rod Taylor was in it but Davis doesn’t mention him), Something of Value, The Brothers Karamazov. Then there was another big hit with Cat on a Hot Tin Roof before Brooks left MGM to make Elmer Gantry, his biggest success, critically and commercially, and major claim to greatness. It was followed by some works on which opinion is more divided, Sweet Bird of Youth and Lord Jim, but The Professionals and In Cold Blood are classics of their genre.
Then things got harder over the next decade and a half – The Happy Ending, $, Bite the Bullet, Wrong is Right, Fever Pitch – but he did enjoy a final break-out success in 1977 with Looking for Mr Goodbar. By my account that’s five classic films, and a couple of decent ones. A fair record – but not enough to justify being such a bully on set. Maybe that's the only way he could work.
This book contains lots of stuff I didn’t know about Brooks: working with Welles; being attached to direct First Blood in the 70s and came close to doing it; being offered Godfather I and III; he was married four times (I knew about Jean Simmons and Jean Brooks – both of whom became alcoholics – but not about the other two); hanging out at the Playboy Mansion for extended periods of time after his divorce from Simmons in the late 70s.
This is a worthy, if not superb book, perhaps too attached to mentioning where his films were listed on top-earning movies of their year (a better resource for the box office success of his films is the Eddie Mannix ledger at the Margaret Herrick Library, which shows most of Brooks' MGM movies lost money, including Sweet Bird of Youth, The Light Touch, The Last Hunt and Something of Value... although The Brothers Karamazov made a small profit). Daniel is particularly good on Brooks' novels and how he adapted works by Tennessee Williams, Sinclair Lewis, etc.
