Richard Fleischer: Reading the autobiography of the film director Richard Fleischer, Just Tell Me When To Cry (1993), one senses an almost fatalistic acceptance of the Hollywood machine from a man born into the business of mass entertainment.
His father, Max, was an innovative animator - creator of Betty Boop and the screen incarnation of Popeye - and his son, born in Brooklyn, went from studying medicine at Brown University, Rhode Island, to the Yale Drama School. He entered the film industry in his late 20s, eventually notching up 47 feature films.
Fleischer, who has died aged 89, was certainly a survivor. He was married devotedly to Mickey for more than 50 years, weathered the egos of his stars, the vagaries of his collaborators and terrorisation by the studio bosses. He went where the jobs were - working extensively in Europe - though he always returned to Tinseltown, building a reputation as a talented director who made one masterpiece, a few small gems and some highly competent commercial films, plus quite a few routine works.
His career straddled the latter heyday of Hollywood and he fitted comfortably into the mainstream, with enough variety to mark him a notch above the average. He entered the film industry during the second World War. For three years he toiled away at Pathe News in New York, waiting for studio machinations at RKO to allow him to take up a contract first offered in 1942. Early studies and an apprenticeship on documentaries, newsreels and comedy shorts proved instructive and his feature debut, Child of Divorce (1947), was a competent drama and the first of nine films for RKO.
All were produced cheaply, with second-string stars, but at least four - Bodyguard (1948), The Clay Pigeon (1949), Armoured Car Robbery (1950) and The Narrow Margin (1952) - have stood the test of time. The last is a classic thriller, with elements of film noir. Set on board a train, it is crisp, well acted and breathlessly exciting. It established Fleischer's credentials and led to the dubious reward of his being taken under the wing of the studio's new dictator, Howard Hughes.
During this period he also worked with the liberal producer Stanley Kramer; the best of their films was a charming rites of passage story, The Happy Time (1952), with Bobby Driscoll observing the gentle philandering of Louis Jourdan and Charles Boyer as he grows into his first pair of long trousers - an uncharacteristic work for Fleischer, who normally concentrated on police stories.
By the mid-1950s, his success on B-movies led to the first of his big budget films, a star-laden treatment of Jules Verne's Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (1954) for Walt Disney. It was followed by a return to a familiar genre and more modest budget with Violent Saturday (1955), which concerned a small-town robbery that exposed latent dramas and hypocrisies. It was an excellent example of Fleischer's work with tough actors - Lee Marvin, Ernest Borgnine and Victor Mature - and his use of wide screen and a fine sense of pace and atmosphere.
Fleischer was not always as fortunate with his movies as this and routine actioners filled the next few years, among them Bandido (1956) and These Thousand Hills (1959). During the same period he also directed The Vikings (1958), produced by and starring Kirk Douglas, which proved a baptism of fire in terms of logistics, ego and production problems.
A happier experience came along in 1959, when Fleischer directed Compulsion - in black-and-white and Cinemascope - an intelligent treatment of the Leopold-Loeb murder case, with a barn-storming cameo performance from Orson Welles as their defence lawyer, Clarence Darrow.
Alongside his early minor classics, it remains one of his most fully achieved and personal works. But as the studio system became more fragmented, Fleischer found himself more frequently in Europe, making his home in Paris, then Rome.
He directed a variety of works, among them the religious epic Barabbas (1962), the science fiction thriller Fantastic Voyage (1966), in which a team of doctors - Raquel Welch among them - were miniaturised to travel in the bloodstream of a shot scientist, and the musical Doctor Dolittle (1967), with Rex Harrison.
Controversy was to follow in 1968 with the factually based and graphic account of The Boston Strangler, starring Tony Curtis, and again in 1971 with the British-made 10 Rillington Place, with Richard Attenborough and John Hurt portraying Ludovic Kennedy's account of the John Christie-Timothy Evans murder case.
This disturbing film was followed by a routine thriller, Blind Terror (1971) and some successful work with George C Scott on the quirky thriller The Last Run (1971) and the tough cop movie, The New Centurions (1972), which illustrated Fleischer's continuing concern with so-called realism and docu-drama.
This was quickly followed by the apocalyptic Soylent Green (1973), the engaging western The Spike's Gang (1974) and a brush with Charles Bronson on Mr Majestyk (1974).
After this, Fleischer had the good fortune to be reunited with producer Dino de Laurentiis, with whom he had worked on Barabbas; the result was Mandingo (1975), a heady portrait of slavery, racism and southern US bigotry, which divided critics and public alike.
Some saw it as opportunistic, almost risible in its melodrama and heightened tensions. Others regard Mandingo as the single most important film on the subject, a vision so wholehearted in its condemnation of racist barbarity that any so-called excesses can be readily excused.
Dominated by a claustrophobic atmosphere and some fine performances - notably by James Mason - it remained the highlight of Fleischer's career, and sadly his last film of significance.
He continued to work steadily for 14 years, making 10 films, some with lavish budgets. After the horror film, Amityville 3-D (1983), he directed two films with Arnold Schwarzenegger, Conan the Destroyer (1984) and Red Sonja (1985). He was then reunited with de Laurentiis again on a Million Dollar Mystery (1987), which, apart from the Showscan special, Call from Space (1989), was to be his last film.
His wife, their two sons and a daughter survive him.
Richard Fleischer: born December 8th, 1916; died March 25th, 2006.