By Erin Free
FilmInk salutes the work of creatives who have never truly received the credit that they deserve. In this installment: director William A. Graham, who helmed Where The Lilies Bloom, Change Of Habit, Sounder Part 2 and Return To The Blue Lagoon.
Like so many of his fellow Unsung Auteurs, the late William A. Graham worked principally in television – crafting both episodic TV and a huge number of high-quality telemovies – but again, like so many others featured in this column, he also directed a small but impressive collection of big screen features. Aside from the enormity of his body of work, Graham is also notable for the deeply humanist and highly progressive nature of his feature films. Even when toiling in genres with very little in the way of social concern (like, say, “Elvis movies”), Graham still gravitated towards the few projects in these fields that boasted ambitions and intentions greater and more noble than most of their forebears. The issue of race was an important one to William A. Graham, and he consistently featured strong African-American characters and stories in his films; yes, these films would today far more appropriately be made by African-American directors, but back in the early 1970s, those behind the camera were mostly white, and mostly male.
William A. Graham was born in New York City in 1926, and served in The US Navy and studied at Yale University before beginning his long career in television directing the popular anthology programme Kraft Television Theatre, which served as the launching pad for many actors and directors. From there, Graham moved on to more live television and anthology programmes before directing episodes of classic series like The Virginian, Route 66, Dr. Kildare, The Naked City, Batman, The Fugitive, The Big Valley, The FBI, and many, many more. Graham’s 1966 episode of the anthology series ABC Stage 67 was re-edited and released theatrically in some territories as The Last Generation, unofficially marking the director’s big screen debut. Barely released and incredibly rare, this bleak post-apocalyptic adventure starring Stuart Whitman was followed by the rollicking, Blake Edwards-produced 1967 comic western Waterhole # 3 starring James Coburn and Carroll O’Connor, and 1968’s Submarine X-1, a naval adventure starring James Caan.
After more television work (including the pilot for the Michael Parks cult series Then Came Bronson), Graham got the tick of approval from the one and only Elvis Presley to direct what would ultimately be the rock’n’roll icon and frequent actor’s final big screen performance outside of concert films. Though many would likely offer debate, 1969’s Change Of Habit still stands as one of Presley’s top film efforts, and also marked Graham’s move into socially conscious filmmaking. Lighter on songs and much heavier on drama than most “Elvis movies” (essentially a genre unto itself…see Unsung Auteur Norman Taurog), Change Of Habit stars The King as Dr. John Carpenter (yes, you read that right), who works with Mary Tyler Moore’s streetwise nun to help the troubled residents of an inner-city ghetto.
Though obviously twee by today’s standards, this was punchy stuff for the late 1960s, and everyone’s heart was in the right place, while the chemistry between The King and Mary Tyler Moore is considerable. Thoughtful and sincere, Change Of Habit is a lot meatier than most of the films in Presley’s cinematic canon. “Elvis was wonderful to work with,” Graham said of The King in 2005. “Elvis was the nicest man I ever met in my life. He was the politest man I ever met. He called everyone sir or ma’am, you know, starting with the crafts service man and the guard at the gate, all the way up to the head of the studio.” Graham even talked Presley into changing up his greasy pompadour for the film. “[My hairdresser] washed all the grease out of his hair and modified the styling, and it was quite a landmark achievement. It was pretty unusual to get that done. And Elvis actually liked it very much.”
Graham pushed further into provocative territory with 1971’s luridly titled Honky, which tells of the troubled relationship between Sheila (Brenda Sykes), an affluent black teenager, and working-class white teen Wayne (John Nealson), and is cited as one of the first Blaxploitation films. The film is now largely forgotten, as is Graham’s next film, 1972’s Cry For Me Billy, a rare western which not only displays deep sympathy for Native Americans, but also features a central, meaningful relationship between a white man and a Native American woman, played by real life couple Cliff and Maria Potts. Bleak, darkly romantic, sensual and violent, Cry For Me Billy is in every way a true 1970s western, trading in revisionism over gunplay, though there’s a fair slab of that too.
While consistently directing for television, Graham continued to make fairly regular detours onto the big screen, sensitively directing 1974’s Where The Lilies Bloom, an adaptation of Bill & Vera Cleaver’s novel by Earl Hamner Jr., the creator of the beloved TV series The Waltons. Rich with sentiment and the grit of a hardscrabble existence, Where The Lillies Bloom shares much with Hamner’s iconic series, but remains largely forgotten today, though its down-home tale of a family of Appalachian children living together in the backwoods after the death of their widower father is ripe for rediscovery. Graham shifted gears for 1974’s Blaxploitation-adjacent Together Brothers, and was then picked to direct 1976’s Sounder, Part 2, a sequel to Martin Ritt’s classic about a family of African-American sharecroppers.
After the relative failure of this high-profile project, Graham remained largely in the telemovie field, where he directed some of the finest examples in the medium, including (to name just a handful) 1976’s star-laden 21 Hours At Munich, 1977’s Contract On Cherry Street (with Frank Sinatra), 1979’s Orphan Train (with cult icon Linda Manz), 1980’s award-winning Guyana Tragedy: The Story Of Jim Jones (with a stunning Powers Boothe as the notorious cult leader), 1980’s Rage! (starring David Soul as a rehabbing rapist), 1985’s Mussolini: The Untold Story (with George C. Scott in the title role and Robert Downey Jr. as his son), 1989’s Billy The Kid (with Val Kilmer as the famous outlaw) and 1993’s most appropriate Elvis And The Colonel, starring Rob Youngblood and Beau Bridges, respectively.
Graham only directed two more features (1982’s barely released Harry Tracy: The Last Of The Wild Bunch with Bruce Dern, and 1991’s inexplicable sequel Return To The Blue Lagoon with Milla Jovovich and Brian Krause subbing for Brooke Shields and Christopher Atkins) before his passing in 2013 at the age of 87 from complications due to pneumonia. A quietly progressive filmmaker and a true titan of the telemovie field, William A. Graham was a voice for change in the American film industry, and he deserves far more credit for that than he gets…
If you liked this story, check out our features on other unsung auteurs Judith Rascoe, Michael Pressman, Peter Carter, Leo V. Gordon, Dalene Young, Gary Nelson, Fred Walton, James Frawley, Pete Docter, Max Baer Jr., James Clavell, Ronald F. Maxwell, Frank D. Gilroy, John Hough, Dick Richards, William Girdler, Rayland Jensen, Richard T. Heffron, Christopher Jones, Earl Owensby, James Bridges, Jeff Kanew, Robert Butler, Leigh Chapman, Joe Camp, John Patrick Shanley, William Peter Blatty, Peter Clifton, Peter R. Hunt, Shaun Grant, James B. Harris, Gerald Wilson, Patricia Birch, Buzz Kulik, Kris Kristofferson, Rick Rosenthal, Kirsten Smith & Karen McCullah, Jerrold Freeman, William Dear, Anthony Harvey, Douglas Hickox, Karen Arthur, Larry Peerce, Tony Goldwyn, Brian G. Hutton, Shelley Duvall, Robert Towne, David Giler, William D. Wittliff, Tom DeSimone, Ulu Grosbard, Denis Sanders, Daryl Duke, Jack McCoy, James William Guercio, James Goldstone, Daniel Nettheim, Goran Stolevski, Jared & Jerusha Hess, William Richert, Michael Jenkins, Robert M. Young, Robert Thom, Graeme Clifford, Frank Howson, Oliver Hermanus, Jennings Lang, Matthew Saville, Sophie Hyde, John Curran, Jesse Peretz, Anthony Hayes, Stuart Blumberg, Stewart Copeland, Harriet Frank Jr & Irving Ravetch, Angelo Pizzo, John & Joyce Corrington, Robert Dillon, Irene Kamp, Albert Maltz, Nancy Dowd, Barry Michael Cooper, Gladys Hill, Walon Green, Eleanor Bergstein, William W. Norton, Helen Childress, Bill Lancaster, Lucinda Coxon, Ernest Tidyman, Shauna Cross, Troy Kennedy Martin, Kelly Marcel, Alan Sharp, Leslie Dixon, Jeremy Podeswa, Ferd & Beverly Sebastian, Anthony Page, Julie Gavras, Ted Post, Sarah Jacobson, Anton Corbijn, Gillian Robespierre, Brandon Cronenberg, Laszlo Nemes, Ayelat Menahemi, Ivan Tors, Amanda King & Fabio Cavadini, Cathy Henkel, Colin Higgins, Paul McGuigan, Rose Bosch, Dan Gilroy, Tanya Wexler, Clio Barnard, Robert Aldrich, Maya Forbes, Steven Kastrissios, Talya Lavie, Michael Rowe, Rebecca Cremona, Stephen Hopkins, Tony Bill, Sarah Gavron, Martin Davidson, Fran Rubel Kuzui, Elliot Silverstein, Liz Garbus, Victor Fleming, Barbara Peeters, Robert Benton, Lynn Shelton, Tom Gries, Randa Haines, Leslie H. Martinson, Nancy Kelly, Paul Newman, Brett Haley, Lynne Ramsay, Vernon Zimmerman, Lisa Cholodenko, Robert Greenwald, Phyllida Lloyd, Milton Katselas, Karyn Kusama, Seijun Suzuki, Albert Pyun, Cherie Nowlan, Steve Binder, Jack Cardiff, Anne Fletcher ,Bobcat Goldthwait, Donna Deitch, Frank Pierson, Ann Turner, Jerry Schatzberg, Antonia Bird, Jack Smight, Marielle Heller, James Glickenhaus, Euzhan Palcy, Bill L. Norton, Larysa Kondracki, Mel Stuart, Nanette Burstein, George Armitage, Mary Lambert, James Foley, Lewis John Carlino, Debra Granik, Taylor Sheridan, Laurie Collyer, Jay Roach, Barbara Kopple, John D. Hancock, Sara Colangelo, Michael Lindsay-Hogg, Joyce Chopra, Mike Newell, Gina Prince-Bythewood, John Lee Hancock, Allison Anders, Daniel Petrie Sr., Katt Shea, Frank Perry, Amy Holden Jones, Stuart Rosenberg, Penelope Spheeris, Charles B. Pierce, Tamra Davis, Norman Taurog, Jennifer Lee, Paul Wendkos, Marisa Silver, John Mackenzie, Ida Lupino, John V. Soto, Martha Coolidge, Peter Hyams, Tim Hunter, Stephanie Rothman, Betty Thomas, John Flynn, Lizzie Borden, Lionel Jeffries, Lexi Alexander, Alkinos Tsilimidos, Stewart Raffill, Lamont Johnson, Maggie Greenwald and Tamara Jenkins.
