Writer and director whose screenplays included The Fox, The Mechanic and I Never Promised You a Rose GardenAfter early success, the writer Lewis John Carlino, who has died aged 88, attracted some criticism for abandoning experimental theatre and moving into mainstream cinema, as both writer and director. Broadway’s loss was cinema’s gain.
His screenplays were intriguingly diverse, and included The Fox (1967), adapted from DH Lawrence’s novella, an uncharacteristically taut Michael Winner thriller, The Mechanic (1972), and several films dealing with organised crime. His sparse output as a director ranged from his adaptation of Yukio Mishima’s The Sailor Who Fell from Grace With the Sea (1976) to a glossy sex
comedy, Class (1983), in which Jacqueline Bisset played a woman who has sex in a glass-sided lift with her son’s schoolfriend.