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.
BRANDO AND MALDEN – STREETCAR ON FILM
1/Karl Malden knew A Streetcar Named Desire back to front by the time they came to shoot it, having worked on the original Broadway production with star Marlon Brando and director Elia Kazan. Tennessee Williams’s fetid melodrama cast Malden as Mitch, the gallumphing would-be suitor of troubled Blanche DuBois (Vivien Leigh) and best friend of Brando’s Stanley. Brando and Malden as they had done on Broadway got on like a house on fire when filming Streetcar Named Desire.
2/The 1954 classic On the Waterfront returned Malden to Brando and director Elia Kazan. Karl’s performance as Father Corrigan, the good angel, and ultimate soulmate of Terry Malloy, who guides Brando’s compromised longshoreman Terry up the path of righteousness, may well be the role he is most identified with. It was also enough to win him a second Oscar nomination; and place him among those actors who have tasted Oscar success at one level or another with the same star and director in two different movies.
3/Brando’s lone film as director – 1960’s One-Eyed Jacks – found a seminal, exceptionally pungent role for his old cohort against the wishes of Paramount who wanted Spencer Tracy. So Malden co-starred as the duplicitous Dad Longworth, a bank robber who has reinvented himself as a sheriff.
4/Not unlike Harry Lime and Holly Martins in The Third Man, Dad Longworth and Brando’s Rio were once great friends but as it was with Martins and Lime Rio ultimately becomes Dad’s nemesis. The chemistry between the two stars that was so evident on Waterfront and Streetcar in film and the latter on the stage was again evident in One Eyed Jacks.
BRANDO AND SIMMONS
Jean Simmons starred with Marlon Brando in Desiree (1954), based on a best-selling novel about an early love of Napoleon. The couple became good friends, and the following year their rapport was even more apparent in the screen version of the stage musical, Guys and Dolls.
Producer Sam Goldwyn, recognising the spark they generated, decided against his original plan to have the pair’s singing dubbed, and let them sing for themselves. Though the screen transfer has its faults, it is at its best when Simmons and Brando are on screen. There is a genuine erotic charge between Simmons and Brando, one a “Save-a-Soul” missionary, the other an unrepentant gamble.
BRANDO AND DUVALL
Look over the many films in which Robert Duvall has appeared over the past 50 years and you can’t help but notice the number of screen greats with whom he has worked: Wayne, Gregory Peck, Marlon Brando, Frank Sinatra, Steve McQueen, Clint Eastwood, and Laurence Olivier . He singles out Brando as the one who influenced him most: “He was kind of like the godfather of young actors.”
That influence undoubtedly helped Duvall to a golden harvest of Oscar glory: win as best actor for 1983’s Tender Mercies and 6 nominations for other roles including ones for The Godfather and Apocalypse Now, where he says he benefited from direct contact with Brando in both those classic movies.
ANCHOR MAN – A TV a major personality known for pro-Government of the day sympathies and lenient in his interviews with other powerful interests:
“I blame your Opposition party for most of which has happened.”
OPPOSITION SPOKESMAN: “You would say that, otherwise you would have to blame the Government and the shipping company.”
ANCHORMAN [Highly indignantly being a highly-excitable figure at times] “Are you saying that I’m biased and self-edit?
OPPOSITION SPOKESMAN: No, I regard you as a thoroughly honest and decent man who genuinely believes in what he thinks and says; it’s just that if you didn’t think and say those things you wouldn’t’ be sitting where you are now.”
The only clue that Mr Hirschhorn gives us for his adoration of Debs in The King and I was, on page 211 of his book, that Deborah was “ladylike” in her performance. He made that flattering statement within the context of contrasting her governess in that musical with the ‘sluttishness’ of her From Here To Eternity role as Lancaster’s married mistress and he doesn’t mention the fact that she was dubbed in the musical.
Maybe he didn’t know, because he was an inexperienced and little known critic when he wrote his 1983 book. However there has long been a tendency in movie critical circles to possibly inflate the value of often very good but nevertheless somewhat standard performances as figures such as Royals, aristocrats, priests or other figures of high rank or fine manners as opposed to an equally good performance from, say, “a mumbling, twitching boy.”
Certainly Mr Hirschhorn’s 4 stars for no-voice “ladylike”singing Debs in King and I whilst running down other thespians for being lacking in that department certainly gives a whole new meaning to the old distinction “It’s the singer not the song”!
“Cogerson
March 29, 2019 at 8:47 pm Joel Hirschhorn Rating The Movie Stars Subjects That Do Not Have An UMR Page. He has 410 stars listed…I have pages on 278 of the stars….that leaves 132 to go….or 32.19% to go.” NRMESIS: I have long been a fan of the diversity of this site and targets are healthy as they can give us motivation; but I am dubious about the value of this exercise at least for me personally in the light of what I have said above and elsewhere.
Hey Nemesis…..books with massive lists will never be agreed on by everyone…that is the fun of websites like UMR and books like Consumer Reports Rating The Movie Stars. I think Joel was more in tuned to the singing in movies than most….so when it comes to his thoughts on those singing roles…I think he knows what he is talking about. Thanks for including the comment from March 29th….so I have knocked out another 40 Joel subjects since then….I will pat myself on the back…lol. Thanks as always for the feedback…and now my 14 hour day in schools starts.
I have long had doubts about the impartiality of this critic because whilst he drooled and fawned over many performers who were generally beloved within the film business and chattering critical class power structures, he could be savage in his appraisals ofother thespians to the extent of even berating them over personal matters [such as the extent of their earnings] that had nothing to do with the quality of this performance or that. He seemed to me to look for excuses to put down certain individuals.
Those doubts have increased as I have become more familiar with the detail of the reviews in his 1983 book. For example whilst criticising some performers for poor singing voices in certain musicals, he gives Deborah Kerr a 4 star rating for The King and I even though her singing voice was dubbed in that movie and Marni Dixon actually sang the songs that Deb’s character was singing.
Deborah was a wonderful actress and a deservedly great star of the 1950s in particular; but leaving aside the possible double standards and unfairness to other artists inherent in such an apparent inconsistency; and looking at just the Kerr performance within its own right, it is difficult to see how top marks can be awarded for a singing performance in which the thespian doesn’t sing. Singin’ in the Rain’s Lina Lamont [Jean Hagen] would undoubtedly have been delighted with Mr Hirschhorn’s patronage – but poor Kathy Seldon![Debbie].
Hey Nemesis…..I am actually attempting to get in touch with his widow….I am hoping to ask her some questions about how he put together the book. The book…which was from the editors of Consumer Reports…used numerous contributors (10 I think). His introduction to his book…..explains some of the thoughts of the book. Good thoughts on Deborah Kerr and Debbie from Cryin’ In The Rain.