The Rod Amateau Centennial

And how will YOU be celebrating the centennial of the birth of writer/director/ producer Rod Amateau (1923-2003)? If you’re like most people, finding out who he was!

I am quite certain I became aware of this director of famously bad and high-concept comedies by way of his wives. All three of them are interesting: Coleen Gray, the love interest in the original screen version of Nightmare Alley; Joane Andre, co-writer of the 1980 thriller Nightkill; and Sandra Burns, adopted daughter of George Burns and Gracie Allen.

Not surprisingly some of Amateau’s first directing was for The George Burns and Gracie Allen Show. Prior to this, he had written for radio, worked as a stunt man, directed screen tests, and and worked his way up to second unit director and A.D. As a TV director, his association with hokey shows is fairly unmatched: Mister Ed, My Mother the Car, O.K. Crackerby, The Dukes of Hazard, Supertrain, and The New Phil Silvers Show, a program with the bright idea of tweaking Silvers’ Bilko character into a guy who exploits factory workers to enact his get-rich-quick schemes. Bah, humbug!

As a film director, Amateau’s record is similar. These credits include such projects as Jerry Lewis’sHook, Line and Sinker (1969); the 1970 What’s New Pussycat? sequel no one asked for called Pussycat, Pussycat, I Love You starring Ian McShane; The Statue (1971), a comedy in which David Niven gets jealous because his wife’s nude sculpture of him clearly depicts another man’s penis; Where Does it Hurt? (1972), a comedy from Peter Sellers‘ low period in which he plays an unscrupulous hospital administrator; Son of Hitler (1979) in which Bud Cort plays the title character Willi Hitler; and perhaps his lowest point The Garbage Pail Kids Movie (1987), which was widely ridiculed and reviled that he was forced to retire.

There are two interesting subthemes in his work, however.

One is youth-oriented comedy. Early on Amateau had directed multiple episodes of The Bob Cummings Show and The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis, both of which had featured Dwayne Hickman. Several of his dumb comedy films are about teenagers and college kids: Drive-In (1976); The Seniors (1978), the last movie of Alan Reed (Fred Flintstone) and one of the first of Dennis Quaid; High School, U.S.A. (1983); and Lovelines (1984), about a high school battle-of-the-bands.

And Amateau’s career is sort of bookended by westerns. His first directing credit was The Bushwackers (1952) an independent film with a surprisingly stellar yet middle-of-the-road cast: John Ireland,Wayne Morris,Lawrence Tierney,Dorothy Malone, Lon Chaney Jr, and Jack Elam. And in 1988 Blake Edwards made a film that I actually rather like out of Amateau’s unpublished novel Sunset. In this period fantasy, Bruce Willis plays western movie star Tom Mix, who enlists the actual Wyatt Earp (James Garner), then working as a Hollywood consultant, to help him solve a murder mystery.

After this, Amateau returned to form by producing the 1989 film Swimsuit, in which Cyd Charisse plays the owner of a women’s swimwear company who enlists an employee played by William Katt to go out and find suitable models to show off her line. No doubt it has many virtues other than plot and character!

For more on comedy film history please see Chain of Fools: Silent Comedy and Its Legacies from Nickelodeons to Youtube.