Rassegna stampa di Richard Fleischer

HE has 60 titles to his credit, ranging from one-reel shorts to international epics, with an Academy Award-wining documentary along the way (the 1947 feature “Design for Death”). But Richard Fleischer remains among the least known and least honored of major American filmmakers, in part because of the sheer volume of his output. Even the most conscientious critic has a hard time picking through the many impersonal projects — films like “Doctor Dolittle” with Rex Harrison (1967), or the 1980 remake of “The Jazz Singer” with Neil Diamond — to uncover the core of his achievement.
Fleischer, who died in 2006, still has not been given a major New York retrospective, but three of his best films will be turning up in the next couple of weeks. The annual Film Comment Selects series at Lincoln Center will include his “10 Rillington Place” (1971) and scandalous “Mandingo” (1975) this week, while “Violent Saturday,” his 1955 color and CinemaScope film noir, will begin a weeklong run at Film Forum on Feb. 29.
Systematically chosen or not, these three films represent a fairly wide range of Fleischer’s meticulous work. Filmed in England and set in the dim, drab postwar London that David Cronenberg recreated for “Spider,” “10 Rillington Place” (Thursday and Feb. 24 at the Walter Reade Theater) belongs to a series of films that Fleischer devoted to serial killers, a term that had barely entered the language when he made his first, “Follow Me Quietly,” for RKO in 1949. His “Compulsion,” based on the Leopold and Loeb “thrill kill” murder of a Chicago schoolboy, appeared in 1959, and “The Boston Strangler” followed in 1968, with Tony Curtis as a plumber accused of the rape and murder of a series of women.

Unlike the current strain of serial killer films, from “The Silence of the Lambs” to “Saw IV,” Fleischer’s don’t invite the spectator to identify surreptitiously with the power and impunity of the murderer, but neither are they simple expressions of moral outrage. They focus, with sober detachment, on the details of crime and the working of the criminal mind, expressing no more shock than would a documentary on the functioning of the Ford assembly line.
Fleischer’s killers are ordinary men (or boys, in the case of “Compulsion”), physically undistinguished and almost faceless (literally so in the case of the haunting “Follow Me Quietly,” in which a detective constructs a blank-faced dummy to take the place of the murderer, a phantom stalker known as “the Judge”). They blend easily into Fleischer’s carefully observed backgrounds, none more smoothly and deceptively than John Reginald Christie (Richard Attenborough) of “10 Rillington Place,” the London landlord (and real-life figure) who raped and murdered several women and allowed the husband of one victim (played by a young John Hurt) to be hanged in his place.
Violent death may seem a strange preoccupation for the son of Max Fleischer, the pioneering animator who produced “Betty Boop” and the best of the “Popeye” cartoons (directed by Dave Fleischer, Max’s brother and Richard’s uncle). But animation has always had its morbid, nightmarish component, and seldom more than with the Fleischers. (There are few films more disturbing than the Fleischers’ “Snow-White” of 1933, with its chorus of “St. James Infirmary Blues.”)
Whereas his father and uncle worked in fantasy, Richard Fleischer became one of the earliest un-self-conscious realists of American film. With extensive location work (perhaps mandated by minuscule budgets), Fleischer’s RKO B-movies — “Bodyguard” (1948), “The Clay Pigeon” (1949), “Trapped” (1949, made on loan to Eagle-Lion), “Armored Car Robbery” (1950) and “The Narrow Margin” (1952) — function as documentaries on a lost Los Angeles, given tension and style by Fleischer’s constant reframing of the action and elaborate camera movements.
At first “Violent Saturday,” the first of Fleischer’s many films for 20th Century-Fox, seems like a simple extension of the RKO noirs into widescreen color. Its setting is a Midwestern mining town laid out in an open, horizontal space that contrasts with the urban canyons of the RKO films. But here Fleischer is less interested in the aberrations of a single personality than in the unhealthy interactions of an entire society.
The town is a coiled spring of sexual and social tensions: a bank president (Tommy Noonan) who moonlights as a peeping Tom; a millionaire’s son (Richard Egan) whose wife is openly carrying on an affair; a mine engineer (Victor Mature) whose son is ashamed of him for failing to serve in World War II. When the criminals appear (Stephen McNally, J. Carrol Naish and Lee Marvin) with the intent of knocking over the local bank, they seem like projections of the town’s inner anxieties. The violence they trigger is harsh and cleansing, a deliverance as much as a judgment.
For the French critic Jacques Lourcelles, one of Fleischer’s most articulate admirers, the recurring theme of his work is society slipping into decadence. That theme is as apparent in “Violent Saturday” as in Fleischer’s matinee classic “The Vikings” (1958), the Gilded Age melodrama “The Girl in the Red Velvet Swing” (1955) or even in his 1973 science fiction film “Soylent Green,” with its grim vision of an end-times America. But Fleischer’s most provocative film on this theme is the still potent “Mandingo” from 1975 (Feb. 23, Walter Reade Theater), an anti-“Gone with the Wind” that treats the pre-Civil War South as a swamp of degradation for white masters and black slaves alike.
Rattling around a tumble-down Tara of peeling plaster and near-empty rooms, James Mason (Captain Nemo in Fleischer’s children’s classic “20,000 Leagues Under the Sea”) presides over a human breeding farm. He is as occupied with finding a suitable stud for his prize female slave as with finding a bride who will give his lame son (Perry King) the male heir he requires.
The treatment of humans as so much chattel, to be bought, sold and cruelly abused regardless of their social position, makes “Mandingo” a thinly veiled Holocaust film that spares none of its protagonists. When “Mandingo” was released, many critics erupted with rage over its aggressively tasteless portrayal of the slave-owning South, which seems in retrospect both a desired and appropriate response. More than a portrait of social decadence, “Mandingo” is Fleischer’s last great crime film, in which the role of the faceless killer is played by an entire social system.

Da The New York Times, 17 Febbraio 2008

Era figlio di Max, famoso nel cinema di animazione prima di Walt Disney, cui Max Fleischer e il fratello Dave terranno testa anche quando Topolino e a Paperino saranno al culmine del successo, ideando Betty Boop (1930) e Braccio di ferro (1933). Richard Fleischer (1916) poteva definirsi in un certo senso il loro fratello maggiore, ma la fama non l'ha ereditata. Anzi, proprio lui diresse il primo film con attori (Kirk Douglas e James Mason) della Disney: 20.000 leghe sotto i mari (1956, due Oscar).
Nella carriera di Fleischer ci sarebbe poi stato un altro film per bambini, Il favoloso dottor Dolittle (1967) con Rex Harrison, che frutta altri due Oscar e diventa modello del Dottor Dolittle di Betty Thomas (1998), con Eddie Murphy. Non è l'unico film di Fleischer che altri registi avrebbero rifatto: Le iene di Chicago (1952) avrebbe generato Rischio totale di Peter Hyams (1990) e Viaggio allucinante (1966) - un altro Oscar - Salto nel buio di Joe Dante (1987). E ancora di Fleischer Che!, con Guevara impersonato da Omar Sharif e Castro da Jack Palance, anche questo un film in corso di rifacimento in una Hollywood dove le qualità di Fleischer sono rimaste proverbiali: mite, modesto, bravo in tutto, capace di passabili film perfino partendo da infime sceneggiature, sempre puntuale nei tempi di lavorazione. Non è solo per gli Oscar ai suoi film e per quello personale, ricevuto per Progetto di morte (1948), che Fleischer ha avuto mezzo secolo di carriera.

Di questa professionalità il grande pubblico ha colto i risultati, come I diavoli del Pacifico (1956), che precorreva in chiave bellica I segreti di Brokeback Mountain. Celeberrimo anche I vichinghi (1958), dove si formava ancora il sodalizio di Fleischer con Kirk Douglas, affiancato da Tony Curtis ed Ernest Borgnine, caso raro di film i cui interpreti siano vivi dopo quasi mezzo secolo; caso più raro d'attori ebrei in parti di scandinavi.
In compenso il messicano Anthony Quinn sarebbe stato l'ebreo Barabba nel film omonimo (1962), il primo girato da Fleischer per Dino De Laurentiis e il primo girato in Italia, con un cast che includeva ancora Borgnine, oltre a Vittorio Gassman, su sceneggiatura di Christopher Fry e Diego Fabbri a partire dall'adattamento di Giuseppe Berto e Ivo Perilli del romanzo di Lagerkvist.
In quel periodo Fleischer era al culmine della carriera. Agli Oscar s'era aggiunto il premio al Festival di Cannes per gli interpreti (Orson Welles, Bradford Dillman e Dean Stockwell) di Frenesia del delitto (1959), ispirato all'episodio di cronaca già all'origine dell'hitchockiano Nodo alla gola. Sarebbero seguiti i titoli oggi più famosi della filmografia fleischeriana: oltre al citato Viaggio allucinante, che lanciò Raquel Welch, sono suoi i primi film su assassini seriali: Lo strangolatore di Boston (1968), con Tony Curtis; e L'assassino di Rillington Place n. 10 (1970) con Richard Attenborough. Nello stesso anno Fleischer gira un altro film sulla guerra del Pacifico, il migliore su come Roosevelt indusse Hirohito alla guerra: Tora, Tora, Tora!
Precursore per natura, Fleischer impone al pubblico anche uno dei primi film su minorati, come Terrore cieco (1971), con Mia Farrow. E dal romanzo di Joseph Wambaugh trae I nuovi centurioni (1972), con George C. Scott, il migliore dei tanti film sulla polizia di Los Angeles. E fra effetto serra, eutanasia libera e crisi alimentare 2022: i sopravvissuti (1973), con Charlton Heston e Edward G. Robinson, è un'anticipazione molto più verosimile oggi, a soli sedici anni dalla data del titolo.
Poi i primi segni del declino: il fiasco dell'avventuroso Ashanti (1979), con Omas Sharif, Peter Ustinov e William Holden, fu amaro per Fleischer, ma per il proprietario del maggiore cinema di Lugano, che l'aveva ipotecato per finanziare il film, fu inizio e fine della carriera di produttore, come inizio e fine della carriera d'attore di Neil Diamond fu Il cantante di jazz (1980). Fleischer è stato grande, ma anche i grandi sbagliano.
Da Il giornale, 27 marzo 2006

Mr. Fleischer was the son of Max Fleischer, once a rival to Walt Disney in early movie animation through comedy shorts featuring cartoon flapper Betty Boop and Popeye the Sailor.
Richard Fleischer initially made movies of distinct, if understated, tension that were sometimes likened to Hitchcock done on the cheap. "The Narrow Margin" (1952), a witness-protection caper set on a cross-country train, is considered his early classic.
RKO studio officials had denied Mr. Fleischer money to build a train interior that could be mounted on a platform and rocked to give the effect of train motion. To compensate, Mr. Fleischer used a hand-held camera that jostled enough to convey a moving train.
"I made sure to hang something in every scene," he once said. "A coat or a jacket. Sleeper curtains. We put little wires on them and moved them back and forth so in the background you had the feeling that the train might be moving. We got away with it."
Once an aspiring psychiatrist, Mr. Fleischer was drawn to tales of the criminal class. They often had a masochistic streak, including "Violent Saturday" (1955), a bank-robbery tale with a memorable death-by-pitchfork scene, and "The Girl in the Red Velvet Swing" (1955), about the murder of architect Stanford White and his love affair with model Evelyn Nesbit.

Mr. Fleischer also directed "Compulsion" (1959), with Orson Welles as a Clarence Darrow-like lawyer in a replay of the Leopold-Loeb murder case, and "10 Rillington Place" (1971), with Richard Attenborough as the necrophiliac English landlord John Reginald Christie.
He also extracted an unnerving performance from Tony Curtis as convicted rapist and serial killer Albert DeSalvo in the documentary-style "The Boston Strangler" (1968).
Mr. Fleischer once said he received a hand-embossed leather wallet from DeSalvo. "It was a difficult thank you letter to write," he said. "I keep the wallet in my office, and I doubt I'll ever use it."
There was also "See No Evil" (1971), with Mia Farrow as a blind woman fleeing a psychopath; "The New Centurions" (1972), based on Joseph Wambaugh's police novel and starring George C. Scott; and the science fiction thriller "Soylent Green" (1973), which has proved an enduring favorite for its closing line: "Soylent Green is people!"
Despite an exhaustive output -- he made more than 45 films -- Mr. Fleischer was hard to classify. He had no signature style, and he crossed many genres. He helmed the expensive musical flop "Doctor Dolittle" (1967) with Rex Harrison and then tackled Charles Bronson's odd farm-labor revenge drama "Mr. Majestyk" (1974).
Film historian David Thomson noted Mr. Fleischer's reputation as "the most prolific and least identifiable director in America," adding that despite some misguided efforts along the way, "many other Fleischer films are genuine entertainments."
Richard O. Fleischer was born in Brooklyn, N.Y., on Dec. 8, 1916. His mother wanted to give him the middle name Owen but for no apparent reason abbreviated it to "O."
He was a Brown University graduate and attended Yale University's drama school. In 1942, a talent scout recruited him to RKO-Pathe pictures, editing newsreels.
"Deadlines were obviously very tight," he later told the Guardian of London. "We had one day to turn thousands of feet of material into one reel, plus do the research and write the commentary. It gave you an instinct: Even now I can run a piece of film and know to the nearest frame where to cut it. Nowadays, a film school can show you what to do, but nothing concentrates the mind like doing it for paying customers."
He also helped make short films, including cheeky, silent-era tributes called flicker flashbacks, and worked on two films, "Child of Divorce" (1946) and "Banjo" (1947), that were intended to transform the RKO child actress Sharyn Moffett into the next Shirley Temple.
As director, Mr. Fleischer shared the Academy Award for best documentary feature for "Design for Death" (1947), showing the political and economic influences that led the Japanese to invade Pearl Harbor. The script was credited to Dr. Seuss and his wife, Helen Palmer.
From there, Mr. Fleischer made several superior "B" pictures, including "The Clay Pigeon," "Follow Me Quietly" and "Trapped" (all 1949) as well as "Armored Car Robbery" (1951). He also made the 3-D bullring picture "Arena" (1953), but he said the bull was terribly friendly and undermined the menace it was supposed to convey.
Another project, "The Happy Time," (1952) with Walt Disney child star Bobby Driscoll led Disney to offer Mr. Fleischer the directing job on "20,000 Leagues Under the Sea" (1954), a Jules Verne adventure starring Kirk Douglas and James Mason.
This grandiose color film for Disney led to several spectacles: "The Vikings" (1958) with Douglas and Curtis; "Barabbas" (1962), a Biblical epic with Anthony Quinn; "Fantastic Voyage" (1966), about a group of doctors miniaturized and sent into a dying body; and "Tora! Tora! Tora!" (1970), a restaging of Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor that he co-directed with Kinji Fukasaku and Toshio Masuda.
Mr. Fleischer also made "Che!" (1969), with Omar Sharif as the Argentine-born guerrilla fighter. His enthusiasm for the picture waned when the studio "forced" script changes "so that nothing was seen from Che's point of view," he told the Guardian. "I was tempted to leave the picture, but that's something I've never done in all my career, so I stuck with it."
He also stuck through "Doctor Dolittle," later saying he wanted to give Rex Harrison "a swift kick in the head" for making all manner of divalike demands about music and casting.
Further, Mr. Fleischer reported that a parrot kept calling "cut" during elaborate scenes and that a squirrel got buzzed from gin that someone had fed it as a tranquilizer. The film became a symbol of motion-picture excess in John Gregory Dunne's book "The Studio" (1968).
Mr. Fleischer went on to make "Mandingo" (1975); "The Jazz Singer" (1980), with an ill-fated pairing of Neil Diamond and Laurence Olivier; "Amityville 3-D" (1983); and two Arnold Schwarzenegger pictures, "Conan the Destroyer" (1984) and "Red Sonja" (1985).
Mr. Fleischer became heavily involved in merchandising Betty Boop and tried in the early 1990s to stir interest in an animated feature. He also wrote a memoir, "Just Tell Me When to Cry" (1993), that spoke bluntly of the stars he knew but, like many of his films, seldom wallowed in self-regard.
Survivors include his wife of 62 years, Mary Dickson Fleischer of Los Angeles; three children, Bruce Fleischer of State College, Pa., Mark Fleischer of Los Angeles and Jane Reid of Oakland, Calif.; and five grandchildren.
Da Washington Post, 27 March 2006