Recently Dead

Stuart Rosenberg, director of Cool Hand Luke, The Amityville Horror, and The Pope of Greenwich Village, died from a heart attack at home in Beverly Hills on Thursday. He was 79. Luke was his first feature film, in 1967; previously, he’d worked throughout the 1950s directing 300 episodes of such TV drama series as The Defenders, The Twilight Zone, The Untouchables, and Naked City, winning an Emmy for a Defenders. ep. But after Cool Hand Luke, not surprisingly, he never returned to TV. Rosenberg’s credits would seem to show he favored the thriller genre, but apparently not. “I think that he always felt that if you were a director it was criminally insane to be pigeonholed,” said his son Benjamin. “If you can direct, you can direct.” (LA Times)