In Remembrance: Richard Fleischer

     Richard Fleischer, the director of such classic films as 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea (1954), Tora! Tora! Tora! (1970) and Soylent Green (1973) has passed away on March 25, 2006 in Woodland Hills, California. He was 89.

     Born on December 8, 1916 in Brooklyn, NY, Fleischer was the son of pioneer animator Max Fleischer, creator of the Betty Boop cartoon character and co-founder of Fleischer Studios, the cartoon production company behind the Popeye cartoons. Warned by his father to “avoid anything to do with Hollywood,“ Richard Fleischer earned a degree in psychology from Brown University. However, after graduation, he enrolled in the Yale Drama School and founded a theatrical company that toured New England hotels.

     In the early 1940s an RKO talent scout recommended Fleischer for a job writing for the studio’s Pathe Newsreels. He also served as a director and producer for RKO’s Flicker Flashbacks series. He won an Academy Award for the documentary Design For Death (1947), which charted the steps that Japan took that led to the attack on Pearl Harbor while looking back at the historical forces that shaped pre-War Japanese society.

     Following a stint in the Army, Fleischer returned to RKO in 1948 as a director of B movies including such noir titles as The Clay Pigeon, Trapped (both 1949) and Armored Car Robbery (1950). Fleischer’s 1952 noir drama The Narrow Margin broke ground as one of the first feature films to be shot with hand held cameras. Shot on a budget of $230,000 in just 13 days and almost entirely in one studio-bound railroad car set, the film has been lauded by film historian Leonard Maltin as “one of the best B pictures ever made.”

     Ironically, Fleischer was offered a chance to direct his first major motion picture, 1954's 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea, from his father's old animation rival Walt Disney Studios. Fleischer received the offer Walt Disney himself, despite the animosity that had existed between Disney and Fleischer's father, Max. Reportedly, Disney was impressed with Fleischer's work on the 1952 film The Happy Time which featured Charles Boyer and former Disney child star Bobby Driscoll and said "Anybody who can make an actor of Bobby Driscoll has to be a good director." With a budget of $5 million, 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea was one of the most expensive films made at the time. It was a gamble that paid off for the studio, as it was a box-office success, launching the Disney Studio into a long string of live action films.

     Fleischer followed up his Leagues success with a few minor films before his next major feature The Vikings (1958), which would reunite him with his 20,000 Leagues star Kirk Douglas. Over the course of his 40 plus film, four-decade career, Fleischer would see many ups and downs. Although he had success with such films as the science-fiction adventure Fantastic Voyage (1966), Mr. Majestyk (1974) and the 1980 remake of The Jazz Singer, he would also have misses with such films as Mandingo (1975) and Conan The Destroyer (1984). Although 1967’s Dr. Dolittle was a disappointment upon its initial release, it has become to be regarded as a minor classic.

     Although he worked in a variety of genres, Fleischer often counted the three true-crime films he directed among the favorites of his work: 1959's Compulsion was based on the Leopold and Loeb child-murder case; the quasi-documentary style The Boston Strangler (1968) with Tony Curtis; and 10 Rillington Place (1971) based on a 1940s British murder case.