Max Rosenberg played a key role in the British horror film boom that lasted from the Fifties to the Seventies. He was one of the producers of The Curse of Frankenstein (1957), Hammer’s first big horror hit, and co-founder of Amicus, which specialised in horror anthologies with contemporary settings and provided Hammer with its main opposition in the genre during the next two decades.
An urbane New Yorker, noted for his charm, dapper dress sense and knowledge and appreciation of literature, Rosenberg nevertheless seemed finely tuned to the popular tastes of the day. While Hammer plundered Shelley and Stoker for material, Rosenberg turned to the less respectable and literally more graphic source that was horror comics. He was also quick to exploit the big-screen potential in rock‘n’roll and Doctor Who.
Rosenberg worked on shoe-string budgets but he made a major impact on British cinema with films that were often a lot better than they should have been. Freddie Francis, the Oscar- winning cinematographer, directed several films for Amicus, including Dr Terror’s House of Horrors (1965) and Tales from the Crypt (1972), the film inspired by the controversial comics of the same name.
Francis recalled Rosenberg’s modus operandi in Digby Diehl’s book on the whole Tales from the Crypt phenomenon, which later included a popular television series: “Max and Milton (his production partner and Amicus writer Milton Subotsky) would budget a film and try to raise the money for it. Eventually somebody would offer them about half or two thirds of what they needed and they would go ahead and begin production, then raise the rest as they went along. I was always presented with scripts that were about half as long as they should be, so I’d have to set about adding scenes, sometimes even as we were shooting.”
The films were hardly critics’ favourites at the time, but many are now acknowledged for their invention and style and they proved a major influence on a new generation of film-makers. Back in the United States, Rosenberg went on working well into his eighties. He was often at his desk by 6.30am or earlier and was executive producer on the 1997 film Perdita Durango, aka Dance with the Devil, with Rosie Perez and Javier Bardem.
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His film career stretched across six decades and he produced about fifty films, though he began in the US as a distributor, picking up rights to foreign- language movies, such as von Sternberg’s The Blue Angel and Rossellini’s Rome: Open City.
The son of a furrier, he was born in the Bronx in 1914 and came to movies via law. He had been working in film distribution for about 15 years when he teamed up with Subotsky in the midFifties to make Junior Science, a series of television programmes for children.
They stuck with the junior audience when they produced their first feature film Rock, Rock, Rock! (1956), in which debutant Tuesday Weld must raise money for a new dress for the school dance. The cast also included Chuck Berry, Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers and Alan Freed. Rosenberg recalled that it took just nine days to shoot. “The exciting thing was collecting the music,” he told an interviewer. “As for the picture itself, there’s not much to commend it. It’s just a bunch of songs connected to a stupid plot.
He went on to make several other films with a musical theme, including It’s Trad, Dad! (1962), in which the director Richard Lester exhibited some of the zaniness for which he would soon find the perfect conduits in the Beatles. But it was The Curse of Frankenstein (1957) that began Rosenberg and Subotsky’s long association with England, the horror genre, Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee.
The horror film had been in the doldrums since the glory days of Universal in the Forties, but The Curse of Frankenstein was a major international hit and immediately revived the genre. Hammer rushed into production with Dracula, though initially Rosenberg continued to work on a wide range of films, including Lad: A Dog (1962), the forgotten male version of Lassie, before he and Subotsky set up Amicus Productions. Dr Terror’s House of Horrors (1965) was one of its earliest films and provided the template for later horror portmanteaux. Cushing played a strange fortune-teller on a train, relating five separate stories, about a vampire, a severed hand, a man-eating plant, a voodoo curse and a werewolf.
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Cushing worked regularly with Amicus, which is why he ended up as the cinema version of Doctor Who in Doctor Who and the Daleks (1965), on which Rosenberg had a writing as well as a producing credit, and Daleks: Invasion Earth 2150 AD (1966). By this time Rosenberg and Subotsky had decided Amicus’s niche lay in horror and science-fiction, though their sci-fi output was never quite as distinctive. Other Amicus films included The Skull (1965), Torture Garden (1967), the Jekyll and Hyde remake I, Monster (1971), The Vault of Horror, From Beyond the Grave and And Now the Screaming Starts! (all 1973) and The People that Time Forgot (1977).
Rosenberg’s work was not restricted to Amicus, however, and he was particularly proud to have produced the 1968 film of Harold Pinter’s The Birthday Party, starring Robert Shaw and directed by William Friedkin. In the late Seventies he split with Subotsky and returned to the United States, where he continued to work as a producer, on such films as The Incredible Melting Man (1977), Bloody Birthday (1981) and Homework (1982), but without the distinction that had marked his time in England.
He is survived by his partner, Arlene Becker, and two daughters.
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Max Rosenberg, film producer, was born on September 13, 1914. He died on June 14, 2004, aged 89.