Richard Fleischer
He inherited an animation studio and made his name in the opposite register. Richard Fleischer was the son of Max Fleischer, the animator behind Betty Boop and Popeye, and served as chairman of Fleischer Studios, but his own films were live action, unsentimental and frequently very dark. He won an Academy Award for a documentary feature early on, then spent four decades directing genre pictures for the studios, from the tail of the Golden Age into the 1980s.
His real subject was murder, and specifically the paperwork around it. Compulsion, The Boston Strangler and 10 Rillington Place form one of the strangest trilogies any American director ever accumulated: three films about real killers, made without style for its own sake, far more interested in interrogation rooms and rented lodgings than in violence. The Boston Strangler carved the screen into moving panels so that a manhunt could happen in several places at once, a device borrowed constantly ever since.
Separately, he was one of the most reliable spectacle directors alive. 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, The Vikings, Fantastic Voyage, Tora! Tora! Tora! and Soylent Green are studio filmmaking at full stretch, built to a scale nobody attempts by hand any more. The late work is where it collapses. Amityville 3-D, Conan the Destroyer and Red Sonja are the credits of a professional taking assignments, and the professionalism is more visible than the interest.
Movies (28)
- The Vikings (1958)
- 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1954)
- Red Sonja (1985)
- Soylent Green (1973)
- Conan the Destroyer (1984)
- Mandingo (1975)
- Tora! Tora! Tora! (1970)
- Barabbas (1961)
- Doctor Dolittle (1967)
- Fantastic Voyage (1966)
- The Prince and the Pauper (1977)
- Mr. Majestyk (1974)
- The New Centurions (1972)
- The Boston Strangler (1968)
- Ashanti (1979)
- The Jazz Singer (1980)
- The Girl in the Red Velvet Swing (1955)
- 10 Rillington Place (1971)
- Amityville 3-D (1983)
- Trapped (1949)
- The Spikes Gang (1974)
- Violent Saturday (1955)
- The Last Run (1971)
- See No Evil (1971)
- The Narrow Margin (1952)
- Filmmakers vs. Tycoons (2005)
- Compulsion (1959)
- Cameraman: The Life and Work of Jack Cardiff (2010)
Where to start with Richard Fleischer
The correct starting point is The Narrow Margin: a train-bound B-thriller with no fat on it and the clearest demonstration of how well he could tell a story when nobody important was watching. From there, 10 Rillington Place and The Boston Strangler, in that order, for the true-crime run that is his real legacy. Both are cold, and the first is genuinely upsetting.
For large-canvas Fleischer, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea still works as adventure filmmaking and Fantastic Voyage remains a beautiful piece of production design. Soylent Green earns its place on world-building alone, even though everybody already knows the line. Tora! Tora! Tora! is the technical achievement, enormous and oddly neutral about its own subject.
Approach Conan the Destroyer, Red Sonja and Amityville 3-D only as evidence of how a long career ends.