Remembered twenty years after his death for being a Hollywood Blacklist survivor and for his contributions to restoring Shakespeare's Globe Theatre in London (where he sat out the Red Scare and elected to stay put afterwards), Chicago-born Sam Wanamaker subsidized his theatrical passions with work as a character actor in films (Private Benjamin, The Competition) and by directing both features (Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger, Superman IV: The Quest for Peace) and episodic television (Columbo, Hart to Hart) on both sides of the Atlantic. Based on a 1963 novel by Louis L'Amour, Catlow (1971) stars Yul Brynner and Richard Crenna as former Civil War comrades-in-arms whose postwar professional lives find them on opposite sides of the law - and caught in the crosshairs of mercenary gunman Leonard Nimoy. British producer Euan Lloyd was the driving force behind Catlow and two other adaptations of L'Amour novels: Edward Dmytryk's Shalako (1968), starring Sean Connery, Brigitte Bardot, and Stephen Boyd, and The Man Called Noon (1974), starring Boyd and Crenna. Early in his career, Lloyd had benefited greatly from the generosity of Hollywood actor Alan Ladd and was able to repay the generosity of his late benefactor by casting his son, David Ladd, in small roles in both Catlow and his most successful film, The Wild Geese (1978).

By Richard Harland Smith