Like two of his legendary contemporaries from the same generation, Sydney Pollack and Sidney Lumet, the gifted American filmmaker Stuart Rosenberg cut his chops exhaustively in television in the late '50s and early to mid-'60s, prior to embarking on big-screen assignments. The parallels end, however, when one realizes that the individual titles filmed by Rosenberg far superseded his own recognition as an "above the marquee name." Such pictures as Cool Hand Luke, Brubaker, and The Pope of Greenwich Village are icons of Americana, but few casual admirers of those films could associate the pictures with a single directorial tag (unlike, say, Out of Africa or Dog Day Afternoon). Such is merely a reflection on Rosenberg's aptitude as a competent and efficient cinematic craftsperson and his ability to lose himself in individual assignments -- an approach that typically met with great critical success. At the same time, however, Rosenberg turned out a handful of embarrassing turkeys (such as WUSA [1970], The Amityville Horror [1979], and Love and Bullets [1979]), films far, far beneath his talents, that -- despite meeting everything from financial calamity to number-one box office triumph -- probably would have been far better for Rosenberg's long-term image if buried by the studios and forgotten.
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