Jules Buck

Jules Buck, film producer: born St Louis, Missouri 30 July 1917; married 1945 Ruth Getz (died 1996; one daughter); died Paris 18 July 2001.

Jules Buck was a multi-talented film executive who during the course of his career photographed one of the greatest of war documentaries, The Battle of San Pietro, co-wrote with John Steinbeck the script for Viva Zapata!, and was an associate producer of such film classics as The Killers and Naked City. He became a leading producer of feature films, notably during a long partnership with the actor Peter O'Toole, with whom he formed a production company and made such prestigious titles as Becket and The Ruling Class.

Born in St Louis, Missouri, in 1917, Buck began his career as a photographer, and in the mid-Thirties took celebrated candid shots of such stars as Clark Gable, Errol Flynn and W.C. Fields. During the Second World War he served as a cameraman with the Signal Corps.

He was the principal photographer on two notable wartime documentaries written and directed by John Huston, Report from the Aleutians (1943), photographed in colour and the only non-fiction film on the New York Times "ten best" list for the year, and The Battle of San Pietro (1944). The latter was the only complete record of an infantry battle, a 30-minute film described by one critic as "unmatched in evoking the physicality and human price of war", and regarded now as a classic of its kind.

Filmed in black-and-white with 35mm hand-held Eyemo newsreel cameras in the midst of gunfire, it featured low camera angles, some from the ground. It presented the battle in the Liri Valley as a continuing one rather than a decisive victory, and was the first film to show American dead. The US Army cut it by nearly 30 minutes, then banned it completely, complaining that it was "pacificistic – against war". Huston replied, "Well, sir, whenever I make a picture that is for war – why, I hope you take me out and shoot me."

In 1945 the ban was reversed by the Army Chief of Staff, General George C. Marshall, who said,

This picture should be seen by every American soldier in training. It will not discourage them but rather will prepare them for the initial shock of combat.

After his discharge with the rank of captain, Buck went to Hollywood and became an assistant producer to Mark Hellinger on Robert Siodmak's classic film noir based on the Hemingway story The Killers (1946), co-written by John Huston (though uncredited since he was under contract to Warners). Buck was also associate producer on two of the seminal thrillers of the period produced by Hellinger, both of them directed by Jules Dassin, the prison drama Brute Force (1947) and the detective story The Naked City (1948), one of the first films to be made entirely on the streets of New York and a prime influence on later film and television makers.

Buck then joined Huston and the producer Sam Spiegel in founding an independent production company, Horizon Pictures. Their first project was Huston's We Were Strangers (1949), a downbeat tale of revolutionaries trying to overthrow the dictatorship in Cuba in 1933, but after its failure at the box-office Huston returned to directing films for Warners and Buck accepted an offer from Darryl F. Zanuck to be a contract writer and producer at 20th Century-Fox. (Horizon later made one more film, the enormously successful The African Queen in 1951.) At Fox, Buck collaborated with John Steinbeck on the early drafts for Viva Zapata!, filmed by Elia Kazan in 1952. Among the films he produced was Love Nest (1951), a mild comedy notable now for an early featured appearance by Marilyn Monroe.

In 1947 Buck, along with the writer-director Philip Dunne, John Huston and others, had founded the Committee for the First Amendment, which marched on Washington to protest against the actions of the House Un-American Activities Committee. Though never a Communist, Buck became disenchanted with the atmosphere that the ensuing witch-hunts created (several critics attacked We Were Strangers for its perceived leftist slant) and in 1952, realising too that the Hollywood studio system was breaking down, Buck and his wife moved to Paris. Forming a partnership with Jacques Tati, he arranged American distribution for the comic actor's films Jour de Fête and Monsieur Hulot's Holiday.

Five years later the Bucks moved to London, where he produced a television series, O.S.S. (1957-58), about the exploits of the Office of Strategic Services during the Second World War. Twenty-six half-hour episodes were made, with Ron Randell as the star and Buck's old friend Robert Siodmak as one of the directors.

The following year he formed Keep Films Ltd with Peter O'Toole and produced many of O'Toole's films (often in association with American producers) over the next 20 years. Though there was a bias towards pieces originating in the theatre, their output was adventurous and not overtly commercial. It included John Guillermin's suspenseful The Day They Robbed the Bank of England (1960), Peter Glenville's sumptuous version of Jean Anouilh's play Becket (1964), in which, as Henry II to Richard Burton's Thomas Becket, O'Toole won one of his seven Oscar nominations as Best Actor, Richard Brooks's worthy but flawed version of Conrad's Lord Jim (1965), Gordon Flemyng's The Great Catherine (1968), with Jeanne Moreau as the flamboyant queen in an adaptation of a one-act play by Shaw, and Andrew Sinclair's Under Milk Wood (1971), which despite the marvellous voices of Burton, O'Toole, Glynis Johns and Sian Phillips was criticised for making the poetry of Dylan Thomas peripheral to the pictures.

One of the most controversial of the films made by Buck and O'Toole was Peter Medak's The Ruling Class (1972), adapted from Peter Barnes's irreverent and outrageous stage comedy about an earl who is released from a lunatic asylum when he inherits the family estate and arrives with flowing blonde hair, a beard, monk's robes and tennis shoes. Convinced he is Jesus Christ, he habitually hangs from a wooden cross in his living room, though later he decides that he is instead Jack the Ripper.

Described by O'Toole, who won another Oscar nomination for his performance, as "a comedy with tragic relief", it scathingly satirised the depravity of the English aristocracy and organised religion, sharply dividing critics. The official British entry at the Cannes Film Festival in 1972, it was condemned by The Los Angeles Times as "snail-slow, shrill and gesticulating" and Newsweek as "sledgehammer satire", while to The New York Times it was "fantastic fun" and Variety labelled it "brilliantly caustic".

When United Artists, who had acquired the American rights, announced that it would be cutting the film extensively for its US release, Buck dealt the company's London representative a punch across a table at Mr Chow's and bought the film back. Avco Embassy then obtained the rights, and cut its 154-minute running time by only six minutes.

During their time in London, Buck and his wife, the former child actress and teenage model Joyce Getz, whom he married in 1945, became leading members of the city's film colony. Joyce, witty and beautiful, was a prime mover in the group American Democrats Abroad and as co-chairman for the campaigns of McGovern and Carter would turn the Buck home into a gigantic office. In 1980 the couple returned to Los Angeles, where Joyce died in 1996.

They had one daughter, Joan Juliet Buck, who became editor-in-chief of French Vogue – inheriting her visual flair from her parents. Her mother was a respected interior designer, and Buck himself was noted for his visual acumen. He would not tolerate the wearing of ruffles, or pink, or backless shoes by his wife and daughter, and was himself a dapper dresser clad usually in dark grey Brioni suits and the plain Turnbull and Asser shirts that filled his dark green dressing room.

After his wife's death Buck joined his daughter in Paris, where he lived in a dark green apartment and would entertain listeners with his stories of Hollywood and the war. Recently he had told the documentary maker Richard Leacock that claims that some of the footage in The Battle of San Pietro had been staged were absolutely true. "We needed to shoot scenes of soldiers going from one place to another, so the film would make sense. Of course we staged them!"

Tom Vallance