“Columbus would still be in Spain, if they waited
for preview cards.”—Screenwriter-director Richard Brooks, quoted in Peter Hay, Movie Anecdotes (1990)
Today is the centennial of the birth of Richard Brooks, who hit his stride as a
filmmaker just as Hollywood sought to distinguish its fare from TV in the 1950s and
1960s. Having cut his teeth writing for such works as Key Largo (1947), and Any
Number Can Play (1949), he was finally given a chance to direct as well
with the Cary Grant film Crisis
(1950).
Over the next two decades, he wrote or directed films that, while not
necessarily flashy, were direct and compelling, including The Blackboard Jungle, Cat on a Hot Tin
Roof, Elmer Gantry, Sweet Bird of Youth, and In Cold Blood.
In an interview included in Backstory 2: Interviews with Screenwriters of the 1940s and 1950s,
edited by Patrick McGilligan, Brooks bemoaned the lack of humanism in the
texture of recent movies. His own, he explained, tried to express hope, the
difference between man and the animals: “Sex is a tremendous drive, and love,
but that is not enough. People have to care about each other, too. Then the
picture means something. People care when someone reaches a hand out to someone.
Then you begin to care about the movie, whether you know it or not.”
One of the few misfires of Brooks’ career was The Last Time I Saw Paris, his adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s classic short story “Babylon Revisited.” It ditched the time of the tale—the Great Crash and after—that was so essential to its theme of emotional payments for living riotously, and it turned a poignant but ultimately hard-bitten story into a high-gloss soap opera. The last product of Brooks’ days at MGM as a studio hire, it exemplified how Hollywood has so often mishandled Fitzgerald’s finely wrought material. Perhaps it’s just as well that Brooks struck out on his own afterward: his movies thereafter took on a new toughness.
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