A Veteran of Tough Times and Tough Films

For more than two years during the Depression, Richard Brooks rode the rails across the country, looking for jobs. At a Hollywood gathering in his honor Sunday night, Brooks remembered waiting one freezing day for a southbound freight at a hobo camp in West Virginia, his clothes lined with newspapers against the bitter chill.

He began talking with a laid-off railroad man who also was awaiting what a lyric of the time called a “side-door Pullman car.” Brooks said he’d been a journalism student and wanted to be a writer when things got better. The railroad man, Brooks said, spoke fondly of Flaubert and Scott Fitzgerald and gave Brooks some priceless advice: “For every word you write, read 1,000 and you’ll make it, kid.”

Brooks survived the Depression, attended Temple University, got a job as a sportswriter on the Philadelphia Record and, after many a further adventure, became one of the ablest writer-directors in Hollywood--”Blackboard Jungle,” “Elmer Gantry,” “The Professionals,” “In Cold Blood.”

The Directors Guild of America and the Writers Guild of America, which in the past have fought bitterly over such matters as credits and the sharing of revenues, uniquely joined forces to present Brooks with their first-ever combined Lifetime Achievement Award.

On one of those uncommon Hollywood evenings toned by genuine affection in lieu of hypocrisy, envy or ceremonial duty, a full house turned out at the Directors Guild headquarters to honor a man who, at 78, has still not lost the feisty, crew-cut, tieless, damn-the-brass militancy of the wartime Marine he once was.

Time magazine critic Richard Schickel, a friend of Brooks’ for 20 years, oversaw and presented montages from several films and clips from others, including “Crisis,” which was Brooks’ maiden voyage as a director in 1950 and starred Cary Grant, and “Blackboard Jungle” (1955), which confirmed his rising reputation as a tough, muscular storyteller who insisted his films also be about something.

I introduced a clip from his third film as writer-director, “Deadline USA,” made in 1952, with Humphrey Bogart as the crusading editor of a newspaper that had just been sold by the owner’s widow (a wonderful performance by Ethel Barrymore) and his daughters. Bogart and staff are on the trail of a powerful gangster (a suave Martin Gabel), but the new owner intends to close down the paper.

The film is as eloquent a tribute as a metropolitan daily ever received; it was also very personal for Brooks. Near the end, the mother of a murdered son and daughter comes to the paper, bringing evidence that will convict the mobster. In heavily accented English she explains that she’s known and trusted the paper for 30 years. It taught her to read and write and understand the city, and it was kind to her slain daughter. The police she doesn’t know.

“That was my mother,” Brooks told me. “My parents both learned to read and write English from the Philadelphia Bulletin. They both worked in factories and went to night school three nights a week, and read the Bulletin. And the Bulletin was the paper the movie was about.”

A procession of Brooks’ friends talked about him, about the ferocious attention to detail, the uncompromising quest for perfection, the command of both intimate scenes and massive logistics (like the climactic fire scene in “Gantry” and the explosive escape from a Mexican town in “The Professionals”).

Fay Kanin, a friend and fellow writer of long standing; Shirley Jones, who won an Academy Award for “Gantry”; and Robert Blake, who gave Brooks an unforgettable performance as a killer in “In Cold Blood,” all agreed there was a gentle and indeed sentimental man beneath the imperious exterior.

There were tributes as well from Glenn Ford, the embattled inner-city teacher in “Blackboard Jungle”; Robert Culp, the actor turned producer-director for whom Brooks was a mentor; cinematographer Conrad Hall, who photographed “The Professionals”; Paul Mazursky, now a writer-director but then a young New York actor and one of the classroom baddies in “Blackboard Jungle”; producer Howard W. Koch, who was Brooks’ assistant director on “Crisis”; production manager Tom Shaw, a veteran from “The Professionals” and other Brooks films; and director George Sidney and writer George Kirgo, representing the guilds.

From sportswriting, Brooks turned to radio. Coming to Hollywood in 1941, he wrote a 15-minute playlet for radio five nights a week, at $25 each, an impressive sum in those days just before Pearl Harbor. He did five different versions of the “Hamlet” story in a year.

When the war began, he enlisted in the Marines. He had brought his parents to live in Southern California, and on Sunday night Brooks movingly recalled how his father asked to ride downtown with him on the Red Car when Brooks went to catch the bus for camp. “ ‘I never kissed you, never hugged you, never told you I loved you,’ my father said. So there at the bus station, he hugged me and we kissed. That was my father.”

Brooks paid special tribute to four people Sunday night: his parents, the laid-off railroad man and Miss Marian, his first-grade teacher who taught him to read and write. “The day I could spell cat and dog , I carried her books to the bus stop and kissed her hand,” Brooks said.

After the war in 1947, his novel “The Brick Foxhole” became the movie “Crossfire.” Brooks joined the writing staff at MGM, hoping with each script to direct. Eventually Cary Grant agreed to star in “Crisis,” on the agreement that Brooks would indeed direct it (an act of great kindness by an established star toward an untried filmmaker). The studio went along, reluctantly.

In mid-production, a heavy camera on a dolly ran over Brooks’ foot. Blood filled his shoe, but Brooks wouldn’t leave for treatment. He told Grant quietly that the minute he left the set, the studio would send in another director to take over. “Grant,” Brooks told me not long ago, “said, ‘Ah. Well, I’ll take care of that; I’ll go with you. Nothing’s going to happen until we get back.’ ” And so it was.

Among his friends, Brooks has been called the last angry director, and few have equalled his passion for the movies themselves, for the craft with which they can be made, for the stories they can tell, the issues they can deal with and the impact they can have on their audiences.

As early as “Blackboard Jungle,” Brooks was pushing against the tolerances of the studio brass (although not of the audiences, which were ready for his kind of toughness). He won more battles than he lost. His great entertainments, like “The Professionals,” have a subtext of close observation of ordinary men in extraordinary situations, finding courage and rough wisdom in the face of betrayal, danger and the unkind fates.

Of his movies, Brooks told writer Jeff Silverman in an interview: “I love the failures as well as the successes. Every one of them has a piece of my life in it. . . . I don’t care if you kill 94 people in the first three minutes of the movie, it is still not a movie unless you’ve got a story to tell.”