Cool Hand Luke, Amityville Director Dies

Mon., Mar. 19, 2007 12:29 PM PDT by Joal Ryan

Stuart Rosenberg wasn't a household name. But his movies were.

Rosenberg, who directed the iconic Cool Hand Luke and the original Amityville Horror, has died, the Los Angeles Times reported Sunday.

He was 79.

Rosenberg suffered a fatal heart attack last Thursday, his son Benjamin told the paper.

In 1968, Rosenberg scored a Directors Guild of America nomination for shackling Paul Newman to a sweaty Southern chain gang in Cool Hand Luke. The film's sudsy car-wash scene, featuring a chain-gang-adjacent buxom blonde, outsoaked and predated Paris Hilton's by more than 30 years. Its signature line, "What we have here is failure to communicate," ranked 11th on the American Film Institute's list of all-time movie quotes.

"He was as good as anybody I ever worked with," Newman said in a statement to the Times.

The 1967 film won a Best Supporting Actor Oscar for George Kennedy, and pulled in three other nominations. Rosenberg wasn't one of the honorees; he never did claim an Academy Award nod.

Cool Hand Luke was Rosenberg's first feature film. He went onto direct Jack Lemmon (1969's The April Fools), Robert Redford (1980's Brubaker) and a shipload of stars—Faye Dunaway, Max von Sydow, Orson Welles, etc.—in the seafaring 1976 Holocaust drama, Voyage of the Damned.

Rosenberg enjoyed a box-office, if not critical, hit with 1979's The Amityville Horror, about a pair of homebuyers (James Brolin and Margot Kidder) who learn that escrow isn't nearly as scary as walls that drip blood. Never playing on more than 750 screens—today's major releases play on more than 3,000—Amityville grossed some $86 million, per Box Office Mojo stats, and spawned a slew of sequels and a 2005 remake.

"Whatever shock and horror power the film might retain, is purely to the credit of director Stuart Rosenberg, whose skillful handling of an otherwise mundane 'haunted house' story still manages to impress in fits and starts," boxoffice.com judged of the original film.

Rosenberg reteamed with Newman on 1970s's WUSA, about political intrigue at a radio station, and 1975's The Drowning Pool, a sequel to the 1966 detective hit Harper.

A veteran of television, Rosenberg spent the 1950s and 1960s directing episodes of The Twilight Zone, Alfred Hitchcock Presents and The Untouchables, among other shows, per the Internet Movie Database.

Born Aug. 11, 1927, in New York City, Rosenberg won a 1963 Emmy for directing an episode of The Defenders.