Want to know the best Joel Hirschhorn movies? How about the worst Joel Hirschhorn movies? Curious about Joel Hirschhorn box office grosses or which Joel Hirschhorn movie picked up the most Oscar® nominations? Need to know which Joel Hirschhorn movie got the best reviews from critics and audiences and which got the worst reviews? Well you have come to the right place….because we have all of that information.
Joel Hirschhorn (1937-2005) was a two-time Oscar® winning American singer, composer and writer. Hirschhorn’s songs sold more than 90 million records. Various artists including Elvis Presley, recorded his songs…and Hollywood is still using his work in current movies. His IMDb page shows over 80 credits from 1966-2017. This page will rank Joel Hirschhorn movies from Best to Worst in six different sortable columns of information.
Drivel Part 1: Why a Joel Hirschhorn UMR page? Well….his book….Rating the Movie Stars…is one of the most influential books on this website. Published in 1983, it is a book I have been referencing for almost 40 years. In that book, Hirschhorn, rated every movie that a movie star appeared in during their career. Sometime in 2010, for the millionth time I was looking at his book when I wondered; had he updated his ratings lately? A quick internet check provided the sad news that Mr. Hirchhorn had passed away in 2005. About a month later, I thought I could update the ratings….tunrs out those were the first baby steps of UMR.
Drivel Part 2: This page is from a request from Bob. Bob has been requesting a Joel Hirschhorn page for almost 2 years now. Constantly filling up our request page…with Hirschhorn requests….day after day. Well Bob….finally your Hirsch page is here….hope it was worth the wait…lol.
Joel Hirschhorn Movies Ranked In Chronological Order With Ultimate Movie Rankings Score (1 to 5 UMR Tickets) *Best combo of box office, reviews and awards.
Joel Hirschhorn Movies Can Be Ranked 6 Ways In This Table
The really cool thing about this table is that it is “user-sortable”. Rank the movies anyway you want.
- Sort Joel Hirschhorn movies by co-stars of his movies.
- Sort Joel Hirschhorn movies by adjusted domestic box office grosses using current movie ticket cost (in millions)
- Sort Joel Hirschhorn movies by yearly domestic box office rank
- Sort Joel Hirschhorn movies how they were received by critics and audiences. 60% rating or higher should indicate a good movie.
- Sort by how many Oscar® nominations each Joel Hirschhorn movie received and how many Oscar® wins each Joel Hirschhorn movie won.
- Sort Joel Hirschhorn movies by Ultimate Movie Rankings (UMR) Score. UMR Score puts box office, reviews and awards into a mathematical equation and gives each movie a score.
Stats and Possibly Interesting Things From The Above Joel Hirschhorn Table
- Five Joel Hirschhorn movies crossed the magical $100 million domestic gross mark. That is a percentage of 22.72% of his movies listed. The Towering Inferno (1974) was his biggest box office hit when looking at adjusted domestic box office gross.
- An average Joel Hirschhorn movie grosses $91.20 million in adjusted box office gross.
- Using RottenTomatoes.com’s 60% fresh meter. 14 Joel Hirschhorn movies are rated as good movies…or 46.80% of his movies. The Ice Storm (1997) is his highest rated movie while The Fat Spy (1969) was his lowest rated movie.
- Three Joel Hirschhorn movies received at least one Oscar® nomination in any category…..or 13.63% of his movies.
- Two Joel Hirschhorn movies won at least one Oscar® in any category…..or 9.09% of his movies.
- An average Ultimate Movie Rankings (UMR) Score is 40.00. 8 Joel Hirschhorn movies scored higher than that average….or 36.36% of his movies. The Towering Inferno (1974) got the the highest UMR Score while The Fat Spy (1969) got the lowest UMR Score.
Possibly Interesting Facts About Joel Hirschhorn
1. Joel Hirschhorn was born in Bronx, New York in 1937.
2. After graduating from Manhattan’s High School of Performing Arts, he became a regular performer on New York’s nightclub circuit, both as a solo singer and as a member of the rock & roll band, The Highlighters.
3. During the mid-1960s, Hirschhorn branched out into writing film soundtracks. The results were horrible. 1969’s The Fat Spy is considered to be one of the worst movies ever made.
4. Joel Hirschhorn’s The Fat Spy (1969) is the 11th worst movie in our UMR 36,000 plus movie database.
5. Joel Hirschhorn worked with songwriting partner Al Kasha from the 1960s until the late 1990s.
6. Joel Hirschhorn (and Al Kasha) were nominated for four Oscars® and four Golden Globes®. They won Oscars® for 1972’s The Poseidon Adventure and 1974’s The Towering Inferno. They received two Oscar® nominations for 1977’s Pete’s Dragon.
7. Joel Hirschhorn and Al Kasha also worked together on Broadway musicals, receiving Tony Award® for Best Original Score nominations for both Copperfield and Seven Brides for Seven Brothers.
8. Joel Hirschhorn the book author. Besides his book RatingThe Movie Stars, Hirschhorn also wrote 2001’s The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Songwriting.
9. *Joel Hirschhorn’s Bette Davis story: “Star quality is difficult to define, but my personal definition was formed after a lunch with Bette Davis. At the time (1972), Davis was to appear in the musical “Copperfield,” which I had co-written with Al Kasha. Al and I went to the Bel Air Hotel to play the score for her. She was a petite, almost delicated woman, but there was nothing timid about her direct gaze, and authoritative speaking voice. We need a piano and the empty dining room didn’t have one, so she told a work-man, “We must have a piano immediately.” She wasn’t rude, but her firmness brooked no argument. The piano materialized in seconds. She applauded after we performed the songs, and I modestly ventured that “We had a lot of help from Dickens.” She responded, “Yes, but look what you did with him!” Her conviction made me feel we were on par with Dickens, that he was lucky to have us as collaborators! She had wit, intelligence, force, charm, vulerability – but most of all, a highly charge belief in herself, in her ability to dominate. The performer who has this belief and this assured, takeover quality can make film vehicles timeless.”
10. Check out Joel Hirschhorn’s career compared to current and classic actors. Most 100 Million Dollar Movies of All-Time
Academy Award® and Oscar® are the registered trademarks of the Academy of Motion Arts and Sciences.
*Bette Davis story comes from Hirschhorn’s Rating The Movie Stars book.
Joel shows up at about 45 seconds.
It will be seen from Part One of this post that I eagerly await any pictorials that Steve can, or wishes to, provide for Alan Ladd’s Saigon. I have mentioned previously that I consider Saigon to be the least effective of the 4 main Ladd/Lake films and film critic Philip K. Scheuer in his review of Saigon for the Los Angeles Times called the film “long on atmosphere and short on logic.”
However although commonly castigated in its day as a “flop” according to Wikipedia, Saigon was reasonably popular and indeed has a fine adjusted US gross of $150 million and in fact it outgrossed Ladd’s.
I have seen many examples of self-opinionated critics airbrushing-out public approval of a movie that the critics themselves have disliked. One such example is provided on page 57 of Joel Hirschhorn’s 1983 book Rating the movie Stars where he says “nobody cared about Desiree or Brando’s performance of Napoleon”
Yet Desiree was the 18th highest grossing film of 1954 at the US box office with an adjusted US gross of $256 million outgrossing even the legendary On the Waterfront [$240 million] also starring Brando; and Desiree had better box office too than Martin and Lewis’ Living It Up, which itself was the highest earner among the 16 films that Dean and Jerry made together.
Indeed Living it Up was Jerry’s highest grossing film OVERALL. Also Lord Larry Olivier publicly pronounced Brando’s interpretation of Napoleon as the definitive one and [here I save the best wine for the last] Bruce gives the film a comfortably -“Good” rating of 67%. He once told me -though he has told me MANY things – that 60% is his yardstick for a movie entering the “Good” range of ratings.
On that same page 57 of his 1983 book Joel carried merrily on with the good work by saying that Brando was a “liability” to the musical Guys and Dolls. Yet that movie grossed a whopping adjusted US take of a lucrative $350 million; and Variety certified it as “the biggest money earner of 1956”. Now see Part 3.
HI STEVE: Thanks for the usual carefully-thought-out response and feedback. Your 1947 offering is great fun and I have just watched it again this morning-for a 3rd time overall so far I think. Actually I wasn’t sure what day it was coming out on so all week it has been like waiting for Sue Gray’s report!!
Interesting take on the Mitchum/Douglas relationship. In Out of the Past Robert was of course the top-billed star; but when they made The Way West together in 1966 Kirk had become the marginally greater star and he was top-billed with Mitch 2nd and my Richard 3rd. Good trivia also about the Mitchum/Jane Greer exchanges.
Initially I was disappointed with the video though because Saigon the Ladd/Lake final outing on screen was not there and Bruce lists it as a 1947 noir. However on checking it out I find out that if you DO include it in your next video you will be right and The Work Horse is wrong. But -say!- what’s new about that?
Indeed my own memory recognised it as a 1948 film which I saw in 1951 and my recollections are usually right when it comes to the work of The Great Ones such as Laddie; though to be honest I don’t have Flora’s overall recall and could barely tell you even what CENTURY a Myrna Loy or Jason Statham film was made in; and I keep mixing up Joel Hirschhorn with Joel Grey until my memory kicks in and I recall that Grey is a hugely-talented guy.
So I will keep my fingers crossed that Saigon makes the cut in your next noir video and meantime as you will have gauged from my lists I have been delighted with your visuals for 1947’s Calcutta starring Laddie and the lovely Gail Russell who was a fave co-star of The Duke. [The Work Horse got that one wrong too citing it as a 1946 movie – that guy needs a break!]
Speaking of The Duke, Ladd and the movie Saigon, as you know Big John and the Great Alan led Hollywood’s fightback against the “Reds” so that if Laddie had lived beyond 1964 he would have been devastated that some of his screen work had been in vain: his beloved Saigon fell to the victorious Viet Cong as a casualty of the Vietnam war and is today known as Ho Chi Minh City. [Just think of how a true-blue Conservative would feel if Manchester were renamed Jeremy Corbyn City!]
BLOOD ALLEY 1955: In this one The Duke captains a ship that smuggles West-leaning “good” citizens fleeing Red China. The Duke is highly-suspicious of one of them [not knowing that this chap too is really a “good guy”] and every time the poor guy moves or even breathes Big John adopts a physically-confrontational stance towards him. However one night the “bad Communists” creep aboard the ship and would have killed The Duke if the “good guy” whom Wayne has been menacing had not intervened. The Duke now looks at him afresh and with cow eyes says “YOU’LL DO!”
See also Parts 2 and 3.
‘Brando was a liability to the over-produced Guys and Dolls. He couldn’t sing or dance and Frank Sinatra was justified in referring to him as “mumbles”.’ Again from page 57 of 1983’s Rating the Movie Stars. Fact or Imagination? Let’s look at some Posterity snap shots:
1/ “Guys and Dolls is one of THE great movie musicals of all time. With Sinatra in the picture it took courage for two non-singing stars to tackle the roles that Brando and Simmons undertook. Maybe not so much for Simmons who was a trained dancer but Brando and Jean both danced wonderfully together and because of that the movie remains a historical screen gem even today and was massively commercially successful in its day. The results show that Simmons and Brando obviously got on very well off-screen while making the movie.” [Neil Norman British playwright and film critic with musical expertise and Dr Bonnie Greer author and broadcaster both speaking in the 2017 TV documentary “Discovering Jean Simmons aired this week”]
2/Guys and Dolls has a Cogerson adjusted domestic gross of $346 million and Variety designated it the “biggest money-making picture of 1956”. It is thus difficult to see how Brando’s presence was a liability in any way. For example it out-grossed High Society in which Sinatra teamed with Bing [who could undoubtedly sing!] and Princess Grace – Cogerson adjusted domestic gross $280 million However as for some reason Mr Hirschhorn dragged-in Sinatra’s supposed opinion to make one of the snidest remarks I have ever seen from a supposed impartial film critic we’ll let Frankie have the last word.
3/INTERVIEWER “How do you as a singer approach a heavy dramatic part such as that in Man with the Golden Arm?” SINATRA “Well, I can be wary but if I get into trouble I tend to take a leaf from Marlon Brando’s book on acting.”
“Beware of false prophets who come disguised as harmless sheep but are really vicious wolves.” Matthew 7:15 The Bible King James Version
“Avast there! Gather round lads and lasses for the last voyage of the Crimson Pirate but remember Believe nothing of what you hear and only half of what you see!” Burt Lancaster in 1952’s The Crimson Pirate.
“NOBODY cared for Desiree or Brando’s portrayal of Napoleon” From Page 57 of Joel Hirschhorn’s Rating the Movie Stars 1983. True or False? Here are other takes in the matter:
1/ “In Desiree Jean Simmons plays a character who actually existed historically. Desiree was one of Napoleon’s early lovers and the film is a Napoleonic drama which was very successful.” Stephen Armstrong English Sunday Times film critic in the 2017 TV documentary “Discovering Jean Simmons”
2/Brando’s Napoleon is the greatest portrayal that I have seen of a historical character in films.” Lord Larry Olivier.
3/Desiree’s adjusted domestic Cogerson gross is $256 million. It was ranked above the [deservedly] much-lauded On the Waterfront in Variety’s list of the Top 10 “Box Office Rental Champs” of 1954. Everybody is entitled to their opinions but possibly before attributing his own opinions to others Mr Hirschhorn should have consulted a dictionary about the definition of “nobody” before making such a sweeping statement.
“Steve Lensman
July 7, 2021 at 8:44 am
Hi Bob, thanks for the reply. That last Shakespeare quote btw was from the film ‘Anonymous’ I just wanted to add a bit of humour at the end.
Richard Donner died recently, director of Superman the Movie and I cam across this story about his reaction to Brando’s paycheck for playing Jor-El. Here’s an excerpt –
“When I first came on the picture and I heard how much Marlon Brando was paid for it, I was really upset, because it seemed like much more money than anyone is worth,” Donner said. But then he admitted, “But then working with him and seeing him on film, to me, he is underpaid.”
Said Brando then of the huge sum for his immeasurable talent, “Everything has a price in the marketplace, so do cars, so do hula hoops, so do useless endeavors. And I don’t suppose actors are any different than rock bands” who start a fad.
https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-news/richard-donner-had-serious-issue-with-marlon-brando-superman-salary-1234977745/
Next video will be on monday, hopefully.”