Albert Band, 78; Producer, Director Worked With Huston

Albert Band, 78, a producer, director and writer who frequently collaborated with John Huston, most famously in “Red Badge of Courage,” died June 14 at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles.

The cause was complications from stomach blockage and a lung infection.

Band was born in Paris but fled to America with his family in 1941, just ahead of the Nazi invasion and subsequent occupation of France in World War II. He graduated from Hollywood High School and began to develop contacts that eventually led him to Huston.

He became Huston’s assistant director on “The Asphalt Jungle,” the 1950 film that starred Sterling Hayden, Louis Calhern and a young Marilyn Monroe.

The next year, Band adapted Stephen Crane’s “Red Badge of Courage,” the Civil War masterpiece about a soldier’s coming of age, into the 1951 film that starred Audie Murphy, Bill Mauldin and Andy Devine.

Band moved to Stockholm in 1959 and, with Europe as his base for the next decade, worked on films such as “Face of Fire,” based on another Crane story. Band directed the movie that starred Cameron Mitchell and James Whitmore.

After returning to the United States in the early 1970s, Band produced and directed movies such as “Ghoulies,” “Prehysteria” and “Trancers III” for his son Charles’ independent Empire Films and later Full Moon Films. He also was executive producer on “Honey, I Blew Up the Kids.”