Stuart Rosenberg

Stuart Rosenberg, film director: born New York 11 August 1927; married 1950 Margot Pohoryles (one son); died Beverly Hills, California 15 March 2007.

Stuart Rosenberg directed one of the outstanding films of the 1960s, Cool Hand Luke, which won an Oscar for its supporting player George Kennedy and a nomination for its star, Paul Newman. It remains one of the finest films to deal with prison life, and the scene in which the disturbed loner Newman wins over fellow inmates by his ability to consume 50 hard-boiled eggs in one uninterrupted session has become iconic, as has the catchphrase used by the warden (Strother Martin) which has since become part of the language, "What we have here is failure to communicate."

Rosenberg's subsequent work for the cinema proved both eclectic and erratic, though often lauded for the fine performances he elicited from both leading and supporting players. Some of his better movies, such as The April Fools and Brubaker, fared less well at the box office than such lesser work as The Amityville Horror. Earlier in his career he had been a prolific television director, making episodes for some of the most respected shows of the era, such as Alfred Hitchcock Presents, Twilight Zone, The Untouchables, The Defenders and The Naked City.

Born in Brooklyn in 1927, Rosenberg attended New York University, where he majored in Irish literature. While teaching at the graduate school, he became an apprentice film editor for a television station, and he made his television début as a director in 1957 with episodes of the series Decoy, which starred Beverly Garland as a New York cop. He became one of the most sought-after figures in the field. For Twilight Zone, he directed Rod Serling's well-remembered tale "I Shot an Arrow in the Air" (1960), in which one of three surviving astronauts from a crashed spaceship, believing that they are marooned on an arid asteroid, kills the other two for their water ration, then finds that he is in fact in the Las Vegas desert.

Zone's producer Herbert Hirschman recalled Rosenberg's fastidiousness when shooting "He's Alive" (1963), starring Dennis Hopper as a neo-Nazi taking advice from a living Hitler:

The director came up with this notion that, while Hopper was lying in bed with his eyes open, you could see the swastika in the pupil of his eye, and it took a lot of work with the light and cut-out swastika to project on the eye and trying to get the camera in tight enough to see it. I remember having arguments with Stuart about whether it was worth the time and the trouble . . . ultimately the shot was not used.

In 1963 Rosenberg won an Emmy for his direction of a Defenders episode, "The Madman".

Cool Hand Luke was the third feature film that Rosenberg had worked on - he directed part of Murder Inc. (1960) before it was interrupted by an actors' strike, and he directed a US-German co-production, Question 7 (1961), a Lutheran-financed tale of religious persecution starring Michael Gwynne, that was nominated for a Golden Bear at the Berlin Festival, but it was little seen.

In 1964 Rosenberg directed a pilot episode for a series, Calhoun, starring Barbara Stanwyck and Jackie Cooper. The show never aired, but the writer Merle Miller wrote a book about its development, Only You, Dick Daring! (1964), a best-seller which presents a candid portrait of Rosenberg.

Rosenberg himself discovered Donn Pearce's 1965 novel Cool Hand Luke, and recommended it to Jack Lemmon, who had formed his own production company, Jalem. "It was the first time I had come across an existential hero - not an anti-hero - in American literature," he said. The 1967 film version proved a potent mixture of social comment and fine entertainment, its depiction of life in a southern prison prompting the historian Clive Hirschhorn to comment in his 1979 book The Warner Bros. Story, "Stuart Rosenberg's probing, intimate direction almost amounted to an invasion of the prisoners' privacy."

The director's next film, The April Fools (1969), was conceived as a vehicle for Jack Lemmon and Shirley MacLaine. When MacLaine dropped out, it was refashioned for Catherine Deneuve. The romantic tale of two unhappily married people who meet at a party, fall in love, and, despite the objections of well-meaning friends, fly off together to Paris, had a lot of charm but failed to find a large audience.

Rosenberg was praised for his direction of the quirky pals and eccentrics on the periphery of the couple's lives, and Deneuve, who had hoped to launch a Hollywood career, later stated, I'm not bitter about not having become a great success in America, though I'm disappointed. I don't know what went wrong. I believed in the picture.

Paul Newman was also an admirer of Rosenberg, who directed him in several more films, including WUSA (1970), a well-intentioned but dull and muddled political tale co-starring Newman's wife Joanne Woodward, Pocket Money (1972), a plodding affair despite the star teaming of Newman with Lee Marvin, and The Drowning Pool (1975), the second film in which Newman played Lew Harper, the private eye created by Ross Macdonald.

Rosenberg both produced and directed The Laughing Policeman (1975), in which Walter Matthau was a cop investigating the mass murder of a group of bus travellers, and journeyed to Europe to film Voyage of the Damned (1976). Based on a shocking true event, when in 1939 the Nazis filled a liner with Jewish refugees and sent them to Cuba, knowing that they would be refused entry, it had been planned as a mini-series, and Rosenberg was unable to make the ponderous movie compelling or cohesive, despite a starry cast.

He directed Charles Bronson in Love and Bullets (1979), and in the same year he had his biggest success since Cool Hand Luke with The Amityville Horror, a lurid movie about a family terrorised by demons lurking in their newly purchased home. Though it was not a critical success, the tension and oppressively unsettling atmosphere generated by Rosenberg's direction captured the public imagination and the film made a fortune, spawning a "prequel" and several sequels.

Rosenberg's next film, Brubaker (1980) returned him to the prison-camp milieu for the tale of a convict (Robert Redford) who suffers in a southern jail for half the film's length before it is revealed that he is the new warden seeking first-hand experience of convict life. Despite the sincerity of its script, direction and performances, the worthy film did not find a large audience.

The Pope of Greenwich Village (1984) fared better, with fine performances in an entertaining mosaic of cops and criminals in New York's Little Italy. Rosenberg had his name taken off the thriller about drug dealers in South America, Let's Get Harry (1986) - it was credited to the fictional Alan Smithee.

His last film, My Heroes Have Always Been Cowboys (1991), in which an ageing rodeo star returns to his parents, was engaging but evoked comparisons with Sam Peckinpah's similar and superior Junior Bonner.

Tom Vallance