Richard Brooks Movies

Originally billed as merely $, Dollars stars top box office draws Warren Beatty and Goldie Hawn. Beatty plays a security whiz, employed in Hamburg, Germany. He devises a clever method of robbing the secret bank vaults of notorious criminals, reasoning that the crooks will never turn to the cops. The notion that the crooks may have a few words to say to him does not dissuade Beatty as he and gold-hearted hooker Hawn work out their carefully calculated, meticulously timed robbery. ~ Hal Erickson, Rovi

In his only MGM film, Humphrey Bogart plays the commanding officer of a M*A*S*H unit during the Korean War. Bogart runs his operation by the book, though he can take time out now and again for compassion. When nurse June Allyson shows up, Bogie is irritated by her foolhardiness and misplaced idealism. Need we tell you that the two "opposites" eventually fall in love? Keenan Wynn steals the show as the camp's wheeler-dealer, a sort of ancestor for such future insouciant M*A*S*H characters as Hawkeye, Trapper John and B.J. Hunnicutt. According to Hollywood scuttlebutt, Humphrey Bogart liked writer/director Richard Brooks because he could walk all over him. Brooks doesn't appear too servile in his disciplined handling of the film, though one can detect a slight lack of enthusiasm on his part. ~ Hal Erickson, Rovi

In this gritty urban drama, war veteran Richard Dadier (Glenn Ford) wants to begin his career as a teacher and is given an assignment at a boys high school in inner-city New York. However, he soon discovers the school is overrun by delinquents, led by Artie West (Vic Morrow), an insolent hood who likes to call Richard "Mr. Daddy-O." Artie and his gang steal, destroy property, refuse to respect authority, and threaten the female teachers with rape. While most of the faculty have given up and meekly let the delinquents do what they want, Dadier is determined to bring order back to his classroom, even after Artie's thugs threaten Richard's pregnant wife. Keep your eyes peeled for a bit part by Jameel Farah, years before he would change his name to Jamie Farr. Blackboard Jungle was also the first major studio film to use rock & roll on the soundtrack; the film's success kick-started sales of "Rock Around the Clock" by Bill Haley & His Comets, which helped to spark the rock & roll boom of the 1950s. ~ Mark Deming, Rovi

This dynamic and commanding adaptation of Tennessee Williams' Pulitzer Prize-winning play focuses on a troubled Southern family and the discord over their dying father's millions. Wealthy plantation owner Big Daddy Pollitt (Burl Ives), celebrating his 65th birthday, is visited by his sons, Brick (Paul Newman) and Gooper (Jack Carson). He has cancer, but a doctor has deliberately and falsely declared it in remission. Seemingly perfect son Gooper and his wife, Mae (Madeleine Sherwood), have several children and are anxiously expecting to inherit Daddy's millions. By contrast, Big Daddy's "favorite," Brick, is a has-been football star who's taken to drinking his days away since the suicide of his "best friend" a year earlier. He resents his wife, Maggie (Elizabeth Taylor), because he believes that she had an affair with his deceased friend. As a result, he refuses to sleep with her, although she remains devoted to him. Since Brick and Maggie have failed to produce any grandchildren, Big Daddy is inclined to leave his estate to Gooper, but Maggie attempts to prevent that by telling him that she is pregnant. Big Daddy knows better, yet he recognizes that Maggie loves Brick so much that she would be willing to do anything for him. Although Brick is self-destructive and resentful, unable to come to terms with his losses, it takes Big Daddy's recognition of his own mortality to make Brick change his perspective. Brick's struggle with his sexual identity, and the nature of his relationship with his "friend," had to be toned down for mass consumption, although this intelligently written and acted film covers such topics as infertility, adultery, and alcoholism that were still considered taboo in the 1950s. Newman brings depth and feeling to the role as Brick, while Taylor succeeds brilliantly in portraying Maggie as a passionate and understanding woman despite her own real-life emotional turmoil over the death of her husband at the time, producer Mike Todd. ~ Don Kaye, Rovi

Cary Grant's utter credibility in the role of a brilliant, world-famous brain surgeon Dr. Eugene Norland Ferguson is the single element that keeps Crisis afloat. While vacationing in a politically unstable Latin American country, Ferguson and his wife, Helen (Paula Raymond), find themselves the unwilling house guests of dictator Raoul Farrago (José Ferrer). Suffering from a brain tumor, Farrago insists that Ferguson operate at once. The "crisis" of the title arises when revolutionary leader Gonzales (Gilbert Roland) demands that Farrago be killed on the operating table -- and kidnaps Dr. Ferguson's wife to bind the bargain. Unaware of his wife's plight, Ferguson proceeds with the operation, setting into motion a series of events leading to a grimly ironic denouement. Director Richard Brooks adapted the screenplay of Crisis from a story by George Tabori. ~ Hal Erickson, Rovi

An abundance of subplots are expertly woven together by screenwriter/director Richard Brooks in Deadline - USA. Humphrey Bogart stars as crusading editor Ed Hutcheson, whose newspaper is on the verge of closing thanks to the machinations of the mercenary daughter (Audrey Christie) of Mrs. Garrison (Ethel Barrymore), the paper's owner. Though he and his staff will all be out of work within a few days, Hutcheson intends to go out with a bang, exposing the criminal activities of "untouchable" gang boss Rienzi (Martin Gabel). Despite numerous disappointments and setbacks, Hutcheson achieves a pyrrhic victory as the film draws to a close. Throughout the story, the many pressures brought to bear upon a big-city newspaper--political, commercial, etc.--are realistically detailed, as is the relationship between Hutcheson and his ex-wife Nora (Kim Hunter). The cast of Deadline USA is uniformly excellent, from featured players Warren Stevens, Jim Backus, Paul Stewart Fay Baker and Ed Begley to such unbilled performers as Tom Browne Henry, Raymond Greenleaf, Tom Powers, and Kasia Orzazewski (essentially reprising her unforgettable characterization in Call Northside 777). ~ Hal Erickson, Rovi

Writer-director Richard Brooks' final film features a weak script and poor acting but high energy direction in a tale of compulsive gambling in Las Vegas. Ryan O'Neal stars as Taggart, a sports reporter obsessed with gambling. As Taggart gets deeper and deeper into debt, he compounds his problems with assorted loansharks and gambling operators. Taggart has already lost his wife because of his compulsive gambling, but he takes up with big-timer Charley (Giancarlo Giannini), hoping to make a killing and settle the score. ~ Paul Brenner, Rovi

Richard Brooks and John Huston's screenplay for Huston's Key Largo eschews the lofty blank verse of Maxwell Anderson's original play, concentrating instead on the simmering tensions among the many characters. Humphrey Bogart plays Frank McCloud, an embittered war veteran who travels to Key Largo in Florida, there to meet Nora Temple (Lauren Bacall), the wife of his deceased war buddy. Arriving at a tumbledown hotel managed by Nora's father-in-law James Temple (Lionel Barrymore), McCloud discovers that the establishment has been taken over by exiled gangster Johnny Rocco (Edward G. Robinson) and what's left of his mob. Also in attendance is Gaye Dawn (Claire Trevor), Rocco's alcoholic girlfriend. While the others bristle at the thought of being held at bay by the gangsters, the disillusioned McCloud refuses to get involved: "One Rocco more or less isn't worth dying for." As he awaits a contact who is bringing him enough money to skip the country, Rocco is responsible for the deaths of a deputy sheriff and two local Indian youth. Unwilling to take a stand before these tragedies, McCloud finally comes to realize that Rocco is a beast who must be destroyed. To save the others from harm, McCloud agrees to pilot Rocco's boat to Cuba through the storm-tossed waters. Just before McCloud leaves, Gaye Dawn slips him a gun -- which leads to the deadly final confrontation between McCloud and Rocco. His resolve to go on living renewed by this cathartic experience, McCloud heads back to Nora, with whom he's fallen in love. Claire Trevor's virtuoso performance as a besotted ex-nightclub singer won her an Academy Award -- as predicted by her admiring fellow actors, who watched her go through several very difficult scenes in long, uninterrupted takes. While Key Largo sags a bit during its more verbose passages, on a visual level the film is one of the best and most evocative examples of the "film noir" school. ~ Hal Erickson, Rovi

Adapted from Judith Rossner's best-selling novelization of a true story, Richard Brooks's melodrama turns one woman's search for a liberated life into a cautionary tale about promiscuity. After an affair with her college professor, no-longer-good Catholic girl Theresa Dunn (Diane Keaton) follows the lead of her hedonistic sister (Tuesday Weld) and moves out of her oppressive family home to forge a life of her own. A compassionate teacher of deaf children by day, Theresa metamorphoses into a sexually free cruiser of singles bars by night. She prefers the satisfying attentions of unpredictable, danger-tinged stud Tony Lopanto (Richard Gere) to the more noble intentions of social worker James (William Atherton), but she ditches anyone who prevents her from being her "own girl." As Theresa's life threatens to spin out of control, she makes a vow to clean up her existence once and for all. But before she makes the break, she goes to one more bar and brings home one more man (Tom Berenger). ~ Lucia Bozzola, Rovi

Surprisingly little known, Universal's Men of Texas boasts an impressive cast and a fairly exciting and complex storyline. Set just after the Civil War, the film stars Robert Stack as Chicago war correspondent Barry Conovan, who is sent by his newspaper to Texas to get the low-down on the martial law that has been imposed on the state. Conovan is accompanied by Sam Sawyer (Leo Carrillo), his photographer-and never mind that newspapers didn't run photographs in 1866! Despite the good intentions of General Sam Houston (William Farnum), Texas is in the hands of carpetbaggers, scallawags and tinhorn dictators, the worst of whom is Henry Jackson (Brod Crawford), a self-styled patriot who runs his section of the territory like his own private fiefdom, with an army of outlaws at his beck and call. The plot gets even hairier when both Conovan and Jackson fall in love with Jane Baxter Scott (Anne Gwynne), whose younger brother Robert (Jackie Cooper) is a living embodiment of the ideological confusion plaguing postwar Texas. ~ Hal Erickson, Rovi

Blonde good-time girl Vivian Heldon (Jan Sterling), who lives in a cheap rooming house in a working-class section of Boston, run by the inquisitive and neurotic Mrs. Smerrling (Elsa Lanchester), goes out one night after a phone conversation with her boyfriend, proclaiming that she's got big plans and might even move to a nicer place. After putting in her shift as a waitress at a cheap dive called The Grass Skirt, she latches onto Henry Shanway (Marshall Thompson), an innocently drunk patron, who's trying to wash away his sadness over his wife's stillborn child. She uses Henry's car with him in tow to drive out to Cape Cod, then strands him on foot and meets her boyfriend -- but when she arrives, he puts a bullet into her, then strips the body, throws it into the sea, and drops the clothes and the car into a lake. Six months later, an ornithologist from the cape spots the skeleton of a human foot sticking up through the sand.

Enter Lt. Peter Morales (Ricardo Montalban) of the Boston PD; he and his partner on this case, Det. Sharkey (Wally Maher), bring the bones to Dr. McAdoo (Bruce Bennett), of Harvard University's forensic medical laboratory. Over the next few days, McAdoo and his staff are able to determine the gender, age, and general appearance of the person to whom the bones belonged, and that this is a case of murder -- and that the victim was pregnant. Morales and Sharkey, combing through what they know about the victim and the missing persons records of six nearby states, eventually tie the skeleton up with Vivian Heldon, who disappeared on just about the same day the victim was killed, and also to Shanway's car, which he reported stolen that day. The poor slob, who is merely trying to cover up a drunken lapse from his wife (Sally Forrest), acts guilty enough and lies about just enough so that Morales is certain that he's the murderer. His investigation isn't helped by the interference of Mrs. Smerrling, who sold Vivian's belongings when she didn't return to her room, and now seems fixated, even obsessed with the details of the case and its connection to her rooming house. While the police tighten the screws on Shanway, she backtracks Vivian's phone calls and makes contact with the woman's boyfriend, James Joshua Harkley (Edmon Ryan), member of a wealthy Boston family, and a married man; she also manages to steal a vital piece of evidence. But instead of turning it over to the police, she uses it to blackmail Harkley.

Meanwhile, the district attorney sets an early trial date for Shanway, but with the opening arguments only a week away, Morales begins to develop doubts about Shanway's guilt, in addition to harboring his own sympathy for Grace Shanway, whose life is being gradually destroyed by the prosecution on her husband -- not that Morales thinks he's innocent, but there's enough that's not right about the case, including the missing murder weapon, that he's not 100-percent sure. And that's when Vivian's friend and neighbor, Jackie Elcott (Betsy Blair) reports how strangely Mrs. Smerrling is acting, and the fact that she's got a gun. But before they can question her, Harkley kills Mrs. Smerrling -- now it's a race between Morales and Harkley to see who can get to the murder weapon first. ~ Bruce Eder, Rovi

The literalism of writer-director Richard Brooks serves him well in this meticulously faithful adaptation of the Robert Ruark novel Something of Value. Filmed on location in Africa, this is the story of the Mau Mau uprising in Kenya, as seen through the eyes of a handful of protagonists. Virtually alone in a sea of racist British colonialism, gentleman farmer Peter McKenzie (Rock Hudson) strives to understand the demands of freedom and equality made by Kenya's black population in particular and his childhood friend Kimani (Sidney Poitier) in particular. Ultimately, however, McKenzie and Kimani find themselves on opposite sides of the fence when the latter aligns himself with the Mau Mau. Without advocating the terrorism of this controversial movement, the screenplay is careful to deal the ongoing iniquities and frustrations that forced men like Kimani to take arms against their white brethren. There were a few theatres in the American south who, feeling that the racial tensions inherent in Something of Value hit too close to home, refused to book this fascinating, thought-provoking, often startlingly brutal film. ~ Hal Erickson, Rovi

Paul Newman recreates his Broadway role in the 1962 film version of Tennessee Williams' Sweet Bird of Youth. Newman plays handsome hustler Chance Wayne, who romances fading film star Alexandra Del Lago (Geraldine Page) in hopes of winning a movie contract for himself. The mercenary Wayne and the self-destructive Alexandra find themselves in Chance's home town, where corrupt politician Boss Finley (Oscar-winner Ed Begley) rules the roost. Finley's daughter Heavenly (Shirley Knight), impregnated by Chance during his last visit, dreams of a reunion with her old beau, but Finley and his brutish son Tom Jr. (Rip Torn) make certain that no such reunion occurs. Even the well-intentioned interventions of Heavenly's Aunt Nonny (Mildred Dunnock) fail to move the stubborn Finley. Warned to leave town or risk a broken skull, Chance is dumped by Alexandra, whose recent "comeback" film has proven a success and who thus no longer needs a gigolo to feed her ego. From this point on, Richard Brooks' screenplay departs so radically from the Tennessee Williams original that to elucidate the differences would require a book in itself. Suffice to say that the play's Chance Wayne is rendered "less than a man" by the vengeful Finley, whereas the film's Wayne emerges with all his working parts intact. A second version Sweet Bird of Youth (1989), purportedly based on Williams' own rewrite of his earlier material, was filmed for television in 1989, with Elizabeth Taylor and Mark Harmon in the leads, and with Rip Torn, Tom Finley Jr. in the original, stepping into the role of Boss Finley. ~ Hal Erickson, Rovi