The Professionals: Richard Quine

Richard Quine, between stars Jack Lemmon and Kim Novak,
rehearsing a scene from his 1962 film, The Notorious Landlady.

Richard Quine has intrigued me for years. Long before I knew who he was, this film director held sway over me, thanks to his 1964 farce, Sex and the Single Girl, a film I have enjoyed since the late Sixties when it made an appearance on late-night television. Son of an actor, Quine was born in Detroit, Michigan, on November 12, 1920. Six years later his family relocated to Los Angeles, and Quine began work as a child actor on radio. He made his film debut in Cavalcade, which won the Best Picture Oscar of 1933, but left Los Angeles for New York City and Broadway a few years later, making his debut on The Great White Way in the 1939 musical Very Warm for May. The next year Quine was cast in the comedy My Sister Eileen, starring Shirley Booth. The show was a huge success, and it led Quine back to Hollywood when Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer cast him in one of their "kids" musicals, Babes on Broadway, with Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland, in 1941. At MGM, Quine met a promising actress also working at the studio named Susan Peters. The two married in 1943.

December 1941 brought the United States' entry into World War II, and Quine began his service in the US Coast Guard. After the war, MGM dropped his acting contract and, he began to consider a life behind the camera instead of in front of it. It was also around this time that tragedy struck his wife, Susan Peters.

Richard Quine and Susan Peters on their wedding day.
The marriage and their relationship would end after a tragic accident.

Susan Peters had earned a Best Supporting Actress nomination for Random Harvest--her first substantive role--and her career at MGM was off to a promising start. On New Year's Day 1945, however, Quine and Peters were duck hunting when a rifle accidentally discharged, and Peters was shot. The bullet lodged in her spinal cord, and she was paralyzed for the rest of her life. The couple tried to make the best of it: In 1946 they adopted a boy, but ultimately they separated, with Peters charging Quine with cruelty, saying he would not speak to her for days at a time. They divorced in 1948, and Peters died in 1952 from complications stemming from her paralysis as well as depression. At this time in his career, Quine met an aspiring writer, Blake Edwards. The two met on Quine's first directorial effort, 1948's Leather Gloves, when Edwards was a struggling actor cast in the film.They would subsequently collaborate on seven films written by Edwards or co-written by the pair, including Edwards' 1955 directorial debut, Bring Your Smile Along. 

Blake Edwards, with cigar, in the 1960s

Richard Quine's career progressed steadily throughout the 1950s. Highlights included the noir drama, Pushover (1954), his first with muse Kim Novak; the musical remake of My Sister Eileen (1955); and a pair of Judy Holiday vehicles, The Solid Gold Cadillac and Full of Life (both 1956). These were all solid box office winners produced with small budgets. 1957 saw a real breakout winner, military service comedy, Operation Mad Ball. Starring Jack Lemmon in the second of six collaborations with Quine (My Sister Eileen was the first), Operation Mad Ball pushed the comedic boundaries to the late Fifties' limit. The film was such a surprise hit that Columbia Pictures' Harry Cohn entrusted Quine with the adaptation of the Broadway hit, Bell, Book and Candle. Starring Kim Novak and James Stewart fresh off Hitchcock's box office disappointment, Vertigo, with Lemmon in a secondary role, BB&C was a substantial hit for Columbia. With Novak more relaxed and natural under Quine's guidance the studio again paired the director and star for the sudsy, underrated Strangers When We Meet. If Richard Quine is remembered for anything in cinema history it should be for the natural, relaxed sexiness he coaxed out of Kim Novak on screen, something most of her other directors didn't seem capable of.

Quine with star and muse, Kim Novak

Quine's next project was based on a best-selling novel and Broadway play, The World of Suzie Wong. Starring William Holden and newcomer Nancy Kwan, Suzie Wong told the provocative story of architect Holden who chucks everything to go earn his living as an artist in Hong Kong. There he meets prostitute Suzie Wong. Attracted to her yet disturbed by her life, Holden and Kwan's Suzie fall in love, which raise complications to be overcome. The film was a big hit--number six at the nation's theaters.

In 1962, Novak and Lemmon reunited--with Fred Astaire, no less--in Quine's quirky, Hitchcockian, romantic comedy, The Notorious Landlady, about an American, played by Lemmon, who works at the American embassy in London. Novak plays his landlady, who is suspected of killing her husband. While she is put on trial, she is released for lack of evidence (no corpse), so suspicions remain. Meanwhile, Lemmon and Novak fall in love. Response to the film was somewhat lackluster, and the release of The Notorious Landlady also saw the end of the Quine-Novak romance, which appeared to have run its course. 

Quine with third wife, entertainer Fran Jeffries

Quine moved on. In 1964, he directed two more romantic comedies: Paris When It Sizzles, a critical bomb starring William Holden and Audrey Hepburn; and Sex and the Single Girl with a stellar cast of Natalie Wood, Tony Curtis, Henry Fonda, Lauren Bacall, Mel Ferrer (Mr. Audrey Hepburn at the time), and Quine's future wife, Fran Jeffries. 

Sex and the Single Girl--an entirely fictional comedy based on the groundbreaking nonfiction book of the same name by Helen Gurley Brown--is one of my all-time guilty pleasures. Everything about this movie continues to bring joy to my inner pubescent boy: Natalie Wood's innocently sexy role as psychologist, Dr. Helen Gurley Brown; Tony Curtis's shameless playboy-cum-magazine writer, Bob Weston; Fonda and Bacall's constantly bickering-yet-obsessed couple, Frank and Sylvia Broderick; and Mel Ferrer's obnoxious clinic colleague, Rudy ("Oh, shut up, Rudy!"). Sex and the Single Girl offered about all the sex and innuendo this grade-school boy could hope for when I first saw it in the late Sixties. A precursor to an endless list of imitators, including Sex and the City, the film's plot concerns psychologist Helen Gurley Brown whose book, Sex and the Single Girl, causes a scandal at her clinic and how Curtis tries to expose Helen as a fake (that is, a virgin), while at the same time falling in love with her (who wouldn't?). Quine, by now an old hand at such stuff, crams in some slapstick (Curtis's Bob, pretending to be Fonda's Frank, threatens suicide, falls off a pier and into the ocean, taking Helen, who has arrived to save him, into the water with him; the entire cast, including a beleaguered and/or unbalanced highway patrolman, played by Larry Storch, on a madcap chase through Los Angeles to the airport) as well as an inside joke regarding Curtis's resemblance to Jack Lemmon from that movie in which he dresses as a woman (1959's Some Like It Hot) as Curtis, after taking his suicidal ocean dive goes back to Helen's apartment to dry off and wears her robe (the movie's friskiest scene).

Richard Quine and Jack Lemmon worked together for the last time on 1965's How to Murder Your Wife. This time capsule of a comedy has the quintessential bachelor mentality of its day (i.e., chauvinist by modern standards), yet at the time it was popular enough to land number eleven of the Top Twenty Box Office Hits of 1965. It was also the last substantial hit of Quine's career. Later that year, Quine made an off-beat, risky venture, Synanon. Based on an actual rehab house of the same name, the film (which I haven't seen), released by Columbia Pictures, seems a curiosity in Quine's career.

1967 brought the director his last two real high-profile ventures. Hotel, based on a best-selling novel by Arthur (Airport) Hailey, boasted an all-star cast that included Rod Taylor, Karl Malden, Melvyn Douglas, Merle Oberon,  Richard Conte, and Michael Rennie. Not a great success at the box office--it broke even--the film did lead to a semi-successful Aaron Spelling-produced television series in the 1980s, starring James Brolin and Connie Sellecca. The other film Quine directed that year was the adaptation of the groundbreaking off-Broadway play Oh Dad, Poor Dad, Mamma's Hung You in the Closet and I'm Feeling So Sad. With a cast that included Rosalind Russell, Barbara Harris, Robert Morse, Hugh Griffith, and Jonathan Winters, this film version did not live up to the stage version's expectations. The next couple of years found Quine involved in the less-than-stellar productions, A Talent for Loving  and The Moonshine War, both starring Richard Widmark, who was also at a low point in his career. The films quickly disappeared. It was around this time-1970-that the director's marriage to Fran Jeffries ended, and Quine, with limited film prospects, took several television jobs. From 1972 to 1974, he directed three episodes of the popular Peter Falk series, Columbo, along with other shows. In 1974, Quine directed his first film in four years with the mystery thriller, W, starring supermodel Twiggy. The film came and went with barely a trace.

In 1979, Quine directed his last credited feature, The Prisoner of Zenda, starring Peter Sellers. Two other, better productions preceded Quine's version of Zenda. Despite the presence of Sellers, the film didn't amount to much at the box office, and though it was nice to see Quine's name associated with an A-picture again, it was soon forgotten. Quine started on Sellers' next project, The Fiendish Plot of Fu Manchu, but he was fired while the film was in pre-production. It was the last project Richard Quine was associated with. Depressed and angry with an industry that hadn't allowed him to direct a quality film in nearly a decade, Quine died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound in June 1989. He was 68 years old.

Sources:  Wikipedia
                Kim Novak on Camera by Larry Kleno
                Jack Lemmon, The Pyramid Illustrated History of the Movies by Will Holtzman
                Kirk Douglas, The Pyramid Illustrated History of the Movies by Joseph McBride
                Golden Boy: The Untold Story of William Holden by Bob Thomas