Background
BROOKS, Richard was born on May 18, 1912.
BROOKS, Richard was born on May 18, 1912.
He studied at Temple University.
A sports reporter and radio commentator, Brooks had screenwriting credits on Sin Town (42, Ray Enright), White Savage (43, Arthur Lubin), Mi/ Best Gal (44, Anthony Mann), and Cobra Woman (45, Robert Siodmak) before war senice in the Marines. He emerged with his first novel, The Brick Foxhole, which became the movie Crossfire (47, Edward Dmytryk). He then scripted Swell Cat (47, Frank Tuttle), Brute Force (47, Jules Dassin), To the Victor (48, Delmer Daves), Key Largo (48. John I luston), Mystery Street (50, John Sturges), Storm Warning (50, Stuart Heisler), and Any Number Can Flay (50, Mervyn LeRoy) before Cary Grants good offices enabled him to direct the script he had written for Crisis.
In interviews, Brooks often gave pungent and hilarious accounts of his early life in the film world. But his own films are solemnly respectable, exactly what one might expect from “the writer' figure as presented in American films. Attempts to see great pictorial or thematic virtues in his work are an ingenious diversion from his characteristic preference for literary properties and unambiguous messages.
His early films are at best neat— C tisis—and at worst corn—Take the High Ground and The Last Time I Saw Paris. One has onlv to compare him with Kazan, especially in the matter of Tennessee Williams adaptations, to see how tar emotional intensity eludes him. And whenever he has taken on larger subjects—Dostoyevsky, Conrad, and In Cold Blood—he has settled for a rendering of the plot that is elementarv and cautious. The Last Hunt is an unusual Western and Elmer Gantry has a good period flavor. But Sinclair Lewis is not the most stimulating of models and Gantry is too obvious a vehicle for Burt Lancaster.
He took great risks personally to make Good-bar, and made large demands on Diane Keaton. But it is a coarse, brutal film, unaware that its own sensationalism stops any chance of a serious commentary on sexuality.
Married Jean Simmons.