Millard Kaufman, who died on Saturday at the age of 92, was a veteran screenwriter with a wide-ranging career that had a few notable highs. A graduate of John Hopkins University, Kaufman served as a marine in the Pacific during World War II. Upon his return to the States, he moved to California and broke in as a writer for UPA cartoons. He first made history as the co-creator, with director John Hubley and actor Jim Backus, of the near-sighted perambulator and Stag Beer pitchman Mr. Magoo. The character first appeared in Kaufman's script for the 1949 short Ragtime Bear; according to that distinguished on-line journal of film studies Wikipedia, "Columbia was reluctant to release the short, but did so, only because it included a bear." On this point, I refer you back to the film's title. (Apparently bears were big box office in those days.) Despite Harry Cohn's ursine fetish, Magoo turned out to be the chief audience attraction, and the blind sumbitch would become UPA's most enduring star character. A year later, Kaufman would officially break into live-action features as the credited author of the cult noir classic Gun Crazy, though in fact, he was fronting for the blacklisted Dalton Trumbo. On his own, Kaufman racked up two Academy Award nominations for writing Richard Brooks's Take the High Ground! (1953), starring Richard Widmark as a drill instructor, and John Sturges's Bad Day at Black Rock (1955), a taut melodrama notable for its muckraking focus on racist mistreatment of Asian-Americans during World War II.

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There have been a number of interesting movie books published this season, and two new volumes, both of them singled out for praise by Michael Fox, flesh out the careers of Hollywood directors who had important careers with major films to their credit but whose names generally don't make it onto the established lists of great filmmakers. Victor Fleming, the subject of Michael Sragow's Victor Fleming: An American Movie Master, has the distinction of being the credited director what might be seen as the most iconic American movie classics of the early color era, Gone with the Wind and The Wizard of Oz--both of which were released in 1939, and both of which were huge productions that Fleming was brought in to complete after other hands had started filming. (Fleming's was still working on Oz when Clark Gable decreed that he would only continue in the role of Rhett Butler if Fleming was brought in to replace George Cukor, who had also done some labors on Oz. King Vidor wrapped up Oz while Fleming made his way to the GWTW set. Sam Wood also worked on GWTW for a few weeks while Fleming was recovering from exhaustion.) Fleming, whose other credits include Red Dust, Bombshell, Treasure Island, and Captains Courageous, broke into movies as a camera assistant, much valued for his mechanical prowess, before moving up to directing silent action films. Fox writes that "Sragow’s great accomplishment... is effortlessly weaving together the various film-book genres. His digressions to illuminate the careers and characters of Gary Cooper, Clark Gable and Spencer Tracy are meaty and delicious, while the making-of chapters...brim with well-chosen behind-the-scenes details that illuminate the bigger picture of Fleming as a fearless pro. Sragow also gives a strong sense of the dynamics of the studio system, while dropping in any number of contemporary references and critical assessments without slowing the narrative a whit." Fleming combined a sensitive side with the man's man aura that made someone like Gable so comfortable about putting his career in his hands. And whatever one thinks of Sragow's efforts to sell him as an artist on the level of, say, Howard Hawks, he certainly got a lot done with the time given to him. He died of a heart attack in 1948, at the age of 59; his last film was Joan of Arc, starring Ingrid Bergman, the last of a long string of leading ladies with whom he'd been enjoying an affair during their off-hours.

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The director Richard Fleischer, who died a couple of years ago at the age of 89, had a long career, an immaculate bloodline (as the son and nephew of Max and Dave Fleischer, the animators behind the great short films starring Betty Boop, Superman, and Popeye), and no critical reputation to speak of. Fleischer's vast filmography is all over the map in terms of subject matter and style, and his name is attached to a number of big commercial disasters (Dr. Dolittle, Tora! Tora! Tora!) and minor embarassments (Che!, an attempt by 20th-Century Fox to cash in on '60s revolutionary youth, starring Omar Sharif in the title role and Jack Palance as Fidel Castro; The Jazz Singer, starring Neil Diamond, with Laurence Olivier as his chagrinned poppa; Red Sonja with Brigitte Nielsen) that are unified mainly by their lack of personality. But he's begun to attract defenders, and Dave Kehr, for one, thinks it's surprising that he "still has not been given a major New York retrospective." As it happens, three of Fleisher's movies are enjoying return engagements on the New York revival circuit in the days and weeks to come. Violent Saturday (1955), which plays for a week at Film Forum starting February 29, is one of those odd film noirs where the thugs from the city hit the highway and track their mud all over the clean, open fields of the American heartland.

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