Dick Miller 1928- By Barry Brown

In the twenty-odd years since Roger Corman began making movies, literally scores of ambitious and/or talented actors who worked for him have come and gone, some leaving little or no impression at all, others flitting by on their way to greener pastures; yet, for a time, there was a definable Corman stock company, employing a dozen or so of the same players, and to a whole new generation of audiences those players became 'stars'. As that 'Corman generation' came into its own and discovered the heroes, heroines and villains of their screen education being ignored, they began to assume the responsibility of restoring their idols to the throne.

But one such player who was well on his way to a come-back when his cult status caught up with him was Dick Miller, star of Corman's classic horror comedy A Bucket of Blood, who, today, of that original stock company, is its sole survivor, all the others having long departed for producers other than Corman or jobs other than acting. A few, such as Paul Birch and Barboura Morris, have died.

Though all of Miller's filmwork has not been for Roger, most of it has and his relationship with that producer has survived a period when Corman's attitudes towards movies and their making underwent a radical change with Dick finding himself shunted aside in a series of depressingly small roles. But his persistence paid off, the roles again began to gain in significance and in 1976, Miller was the co-star of Hollywood Boulevard, a picture in which the part he played had been designed specifically as a tribute to his work.

Possessing a glib tongue, streetwise good looks and a sardonic sense of humor, Miller's acting style, like that of most of the movie stars he grew up watching, is an exaggeration of his own real-life character. He was born Richard Miller on Christmas Day, 1928 in the Bronx section of New York City, the son of Ira Miller, a printer-foreman at Blanchard Press. Dick's mother, the former Princess Rita von Blucher, who sang on early radio broadcasts and later worked as a fashion designer, was a Russian immigrant whose direct ancestry included Gustav von Bluecher, the Prussian field marshal who, coming to the aid of an embattled Duke of Wellington, brought about the defeat of Napoleon at Waterloo. In his honor, Frederick the Great designed the Iron Cross and delivered unto him half of Poland, making him a Prince.

With the exception of a year and a half with his family in Los Angeles (during which time he attended LeConte Junior High, then Hollywood High), Dick grew up in the Bronx. After attending twelve different grade schools and fifteen different high schools, he entered New York City College when he was but fifteen years old, then transferred to Columbia University the following year, where he majored in Psychology.

Dick's introduction to acting came in the summer of '42 when, at the invitation of a friend, he spent his vacation with a stock company in upstate New York. At first, he painted scenery; then, after observing a few weeks, he began doing small parts (making his debut as a butler) and character roles. He returned the following summer, then put acting out of his mind, for his early interest was in a career as a singer and jazz drummer. For a short time, he ran a teenage band with his buddy Bobby Van (who, though better known as a singer, later made a foray of his own into horror film acting in the 1966 release, The Navy vs. the Night Monsters).

After two years of college, Dick enlisted in the Navy and got in on the tail end of World War Two, serving as yeoman and gunner's mate on an aircraft carrier and, at one hundred twelve pounds, he was the flyweight boxing champ of the Eleventh Naval District.

Emerging from the Navy, he spent time playing halfback on a semi-pro football team, the Fordham All-Stars, at Fordham University, where he had again taken up his study of psychology. For six or seven months, he held a part-time job as 'liason psychologist' at Bellevue Mental Hygiene Clinic, a position he obtained when, at a social function Dick attended one evening, he entered into an argument on theory with a respected psychologist and, at least to some who listened in, won out. One psychologist in particular was impressed with Miller's use of a pragmatic layman's language in combination with an obvious grasp of psychological terminology. Consequently, Dick was used to talk 'straight talk' to mental patients brought into Bellevue who could not understand an aristocratic potentate speaking to them of behavioural aberration, but were able to communicate with the down-to-earth kid who spoke their language and didn't hesitate to tell them they were acting crazy.

As well on his way as he was to getting his degree in psychology, however, Dick didn't find himself too happy. Finally, he quit college and began to support himself with odd jobs, such as dishwasher, short-order cook, truckdriver, delivery man, etc. On many such assignments, he lasted but two or three days before dropping out. His real desire, it was quickly becoming apparent, lay with show business as a singer and musician, but work was hard to come by. A few jobs playing with various small jazz groups in Greenwich Village or singing under different names such as Richard Kelly, Richard Riley and Richard Christian garnered him his first union cards, but little else. By 1950, Dick was anxious to take further advantage of his GI Bill with some schooling that would interfere little with his quest for life as an entertainer. Casting about, he noted that upholsterers were being paid three dollars an hour. "I was going to use my GI Bill to go to an upholstery school. I was all signed up and ready to go with them when the guy said, 'Well, we'll see you Monday morning at eight and I said 'Wait a second, I want to go to the night class, I don't get up at eight in the morning'. He says 'We don't have anymore night classes, the night classes are all filled.' So I looked in my book and I saw the next name in there was the Theatre School of Dramatic Arts (at Carnegie Hall). I called them up and I say, 'What time do your classes start?' They said 'Ten o'clock in the morning.' I said, 'Fine,  I'm coming down." Miller eventually graduated from TSDA (two of his fellow classmates were Tom Poston and Jason Robards) and for a time was an instructor there.

If the previous few years had been maddeningly jumbled with a motley assortment of unattractive jobs, Dick's next three years were dizzily filled with a variety of just those types of jobs he had longed for. It was as though, in 1950, a dam of good luck had burst solely for Dick Miller.

Between 1950 and 1952, he appeared in "tons of stock", on Broadway musical (Alive and Kicking) and numerous off-Broadway shows. Then, at the apex of this period, he worked regularly on three different entertainment programs, sometimes all on the same day. Thrice a week, he acted in skits and played drums for a CBS afternoon live tv show hosted by Bert Parks; six days a week, he produced, directed, wrote and was disc jockey over radio station WOR (and, later, over WNEW) of The Dick Miller Show; finally, five nights a week, he worked with top big-band leader Bobby Sherwood on the live tv show Midnite Set. Amidst all this activity, Dick acted occasionally in tv dramas such as Playhouse 90 and Martin Kane.

One of the most fascinating anecdotes of Dick's New York days is the fact that he was to be the actor who would originate the part of Stanley Kowalski in the very first production of A Streetcar Named Desire. Tennessee Williams had contacted an Off-Broadway house where Dick was a member, a reading was held and Dick landed the role. Through consequent discussions of the character between Miller and Williams, changes in the play's text were made. The original Samuel French edition of the play reflects some of those changes, including the reference to Stanley's having been born on Christmas Day. But, in the meantime, unbeknownst to the group, Williams had been negotiating for a Broadway production of the piece and when that came through he pulled the play from the smaller theatre after rehearsals had already begun and the role went to a young actor named Marlon Brando.

Radical change comes notoriously often in show business. By late 1952 both the afternoon variety show and Midnite Set had been phased out and Dick found himself with the prospect of being solely a disc jockey and struggling actor-musician with but one Broadway credit. He didn't want to be a disc jockey, he one day decided. He wanted to be in pictures. And so, packing his meagre belongings into a '51 canary-yellow Ford convertible, Dick scooted to California in four days, averaging ninety miles an hour.

It was over a year before Miller landed his first movie role. During that time, he supported himself by writing science fiction comics (a practice he'd begun in New York) and short stories, a few of which were published under the pseudonym Arem Dik.. In addition, for a man named Ziff Davis he penned thirteen episodes of a proposed science fiction television anthology that never got off the ground. Then there was another succession of odd jobs, including one in the mail room of National Screen Service.

In his Gotham days, Miller had frequented two coffeehouses, Bird in the Hand and Lindy's, where many young artists and theatre people gathered. One of his acquaintances was a young fellow named Jackie Hayes, who was then a stage manager for Josephine Baker, the Continental entertainer. Jackie expressed some interest in acting and later actually spent some time looking for acting work in New York, then seemed to have dropped from sight. But when Miller, newly arrived in Hollywood, began to hang out at the well-known actors' hangouts, Schwab's drugstore and Googie's, a coffeeshop, he ran into none other than Jackie Hayes, who'd arrived in Hollywood only a few months before Dick, with the same intention of launching a screen career. It wasn't long before the two young actors, along with other aspiring performers recently come to Los Angeles, including Bruno VeSota and Charles 'Chuck' Griffith, became fixtures of the two places, trading gossip, job leads and theories on films and acting.

In the end, it was a chance break that Hayes had that led the way to Roger Corman. Through a friend, Hayes had been introduced to the producer in 1954 and had worked on Corman's first film, The Monster from the Ocean Floor. Corman took a liking to him and employed him on his second picture and, in fact, nearly every picture he did for the next seven years. Hayes, in turn, was able to arrange meetings with the novice producer-director for all his actor-buddies, including Dick Miller, who then proceeded to work in over thirty Corman films, more than any other actor, continuing to appear long after all his contemporaries, including Jack Hayes (who soon adopted the name Jonathan Haze) had departed.

Dick made his film debut in Roger Corman's Apache Woman (1955), receiving billing, ostensibly, for a small role as a cowboy. Actually, he appeared both as a cowboy and an Indian! He is plainly visible in the very first scene as an onlooker of a knife-fight between a hot-tempered young fellow (Haze) and a half-breed woman (Joan Taylor) whom he believes has had something to do with the ambush and killing of certain townspeople. After the fight is broken up by a lawman (Lloyd Bridges), Dick has a few lines in support of his buddy Haze. Later, towards the end of the film, both Haze and Miller appear with darkened skin and long straight-haired black wigs as two Indian thugs. Neither has any lines while in their Indian getups, but it is more than simple for an alert viewer to spot them. By the time the Indians are fighting a fatal battle with the townspeople, Haze's white man character has long since been murdered, but Miller is presumably shooting it out with himself, among others.

The pairing of Miller and Haze (who are both 5'7" tall) as cohorts in their first film together was prophetic, for in the next eight years they both appeared in the cast of ten other Corman pictures and in at least three were deliberately cast as partners, an idea not particularly pleasing to Miller.

Several minor roles in Corman Westerns followed; then, in 1956, Dick appeared in his first horror film, It Conquered the World, concerning the arrival on Earth of a monster from Venus, aided by a scientist (Lee Van Cleef). Miller as Sergeant O'Neil, and Haze as Private Manuel Ortiz played a pair of soldiers guarding a research plant who bide their time by trading comic banter with one another. Initially, the roles were 'straight' parts but the two actors, bored with the cardboard dimension of their characters, began to improvise lines and their rapport was so genuine that Corman allowed them the freedom. Of course, it was hardly apparent at the time, but in perspective it is clear that Dick and Jonathan, clowning around, introduced the first elements of intentional humor to a Corman film and, by doing so, changed the course of that producer's work and cleared the path for his classic Black Comedy period.

After a strong role in support of Susan Cabot in Carnival Rock, Dick was given what was to be his own favourite screen role of his career, the part of Mitch in Corman's Naked Paradise (1957), the television title of which is Thunder over Hawaii, shot back to back with She Gods of Shark Reef. With Dick and Jonathan in mind, screenwriters Chuck Griffith and Mark Hanna wrote the story of a crook (Leslie Bradley), his moll (Beverly Garland) and his two henchmen (Miller and Haze) who sail about the Hawaiian islands robbing native villages. Tailored to suit their own talents as displayed in It Conquered the World, it had Bradley's sidekicks constantly exchanging wisecracks. What fascinated Miller wasn't this aspect of the story, but rather that instead of Mitch being a stereotypical smart-ass tough, besides the 'Yeah, boss' shtick, Mitch had a personal life. He is involved romantically with a young Hawaiian girl (Lisa Montell) and in one particular scene talks quite touchingly to her of his plans for the future. In Dick's opinion, it was the best script Griffith helped turn out and it provided him with his first real chance to 'act' in a film rather than simply functioning as a replaceable cog. And, indeed, his performance so impressed Corman that it led, soon after, to Miller's being elevated to leads. Before that, though, he had small but memorable roles in two other horror pictures.

In The Undead, another Griffith-Hanna script, Miller is a disfigured, Medieval man who attends a witches' coven to beseech the Devil (superbly played by Richard Devon) to heal him. The Devil does so -- in return for the man's soul. Dick worked but a few days on The Undead, but, in a February 1976 interview, he had one amusing anecdote to recall: "We're shooting about two or three days on it and the insurance guy, a little old guy came up there, a doctor, that the insurance company sent over to check out the two girls (Pamela Duncan and Allison Hayes). And Allison Hayes is about like this (gesturing expansively) and she looks like a boy next to Pamela Duncan -- it's a true story! This doctor went upstairs to their dressing room and he says, 'Well, can we get you two girls together, because I have to check your hearts" Well, evidently, they both opened up their blouses at the same time and he fainted. True! True story! They couldn't bring him out. They're slapping him and everything. It was such a shock."

In his next horror piece, Not of this Earth (1957), despite the size of his part, Miller made a strong impression. As a salesman for Airways Vacuum Company, he unfortunately happens upon the home of an alien being (Paul Birch), who feeds on human blood. Dressed in a black suit, black shirt and white tie, Dick comes on as a hostile, aggressive, obnoxious fellow who could only succeed by intimidation and, in fact, succeeds only in annoying the alien, who wears dark sunglasses to hide the blank eyeballs that are a characteristic of his race and enable him to burn through a person's eyes and sizzle their brain. Miller comes close to having the door slammed in his face, the luckiest sale he could ever hope to lose, but he then mentions that he can demonstrate the vacuum's ability in the alien's basement and the alien finally reconsiders. Consequently, Miller is killed, his blood drained and his body stashed in the basement incinerator.

Dick's first actual top-billed role in a film came in 1957. Corman had purchased the rights to a half-hour television drama entitled The Little Guy. Originally, it had starred Dane Clark as a man who feels inferior due to his short height. He becomes a hero, however, when he defies some gangsters, led by Lee Marvin, when they hole up in a bar after robbing a grocery store. The story was expanded into a feature-length script, Rock All Night, with Miller in the Clark part and Russell Johnson in the role formerly played by Marvin. To attract the teenage market, chunks of rock 'n roll acts with various groups like The Platters and The Blockbusters were awkwardly interpolated into the plot-line. The picture, double-billed with Dragstrip Girl, fared well at the boxoffice and poorly with the critics, though Miller himself came out unscathed. One reviewer wrote: "Only the performance (very good, especially considering the so-so production and direction) of Dick Miller in the lead keeps the audience's interest in the film from disintegrating."*
*Variety, April 25, 1957.

Dick's next picture, Sorority Girl, is distinguished merely because it marked his first appearance with Barboura Morris, here using the name Barboura O'Neil, who was to play opposite him so effectively in A Bucket of Blood two years later.

In 1958, back in the fantasy genre, Dick played the hero in the unimpressive War of the Satellites. As Dave Boyer, colleague of Dr. Van Ponder (Richard Devon), Chief of Rocket Operations, Miller was the hero who uncovers and prevents the sabotage of a United Nations satellite after realizing Van Ponder's mind has been taken over by outer space forces.

And finally, in 1959, came A Bucket of Blood, the first (and, some say, the best) of Corman's black comedies. Why its sibling film, The Little Shop of Horrors, remains unarguably the most popular of the two is a moot point. It is a fact, however, that A Bucket of Blood was sold to American International, who were at a loss as to the promotion of such a strange film, while Little Shop, being a property of Corman's own company, Filmgroup, was allowed more leeway in its exposure and soon found its own audience. The fans of A Bucket of Blood are more select. The argument between the two factions as to which picture is the most enjoyable/effective usually centers around the use of the talking plant in Little Shop and the absence of such an artificial gimmick in Bucket. A strong case may be made for either.

A Bucket of Blood , shot in five days with one or two days' location shooting, remains one of the best American films of its genre. With no fantastic elements at all (other than Chuck Griffith's imagination) it tells the story of Walter Paisley, a gentle, miserable busboy at a beatnik hangout. Walter is, apparently, emotionally retarded, but he is a nice man (and children heartily identified with him) who desperately desires the esteem of his pompous artist-peers, yet receives only their scorn, with the ambiguous exception of one girl, Carla (Barboura Morris) who, at the least, is courteous and with whom Walter is in love.

He dreams of being a sculptor, but his aspirations far exceed his talent. One night, he returns to his small apartment, sad as ever, and hears the meowing of his landlady's cat, Frankie, coming from behind the wall. The animal has managed to find its way in, but has taken to moaning pitifully when it can't find its way back out. Walter comes fumbling to the rescue, proceeding to cut a hole in the wall with a kitchen knife. Unwittingly, he misjudges the kitty's location and shoves the knife into its body. Horrified not only by his act, but the thought that his landlady might find out, Walter decides to cover his deed, literally, by packing the animal in molding clay and lo and behold, he has created a sculpture!

When he displays his creation at the beat hangout, he's the hit of the day. Those who scorned him now revere and pursue him. The night of his presentation of his 'Dead Cat', a girl gives him a nickel bag of heroin as homage. An undercover fascist, seeing the gift given, then tries to bully Walter and Walter, rightly, kills him. Walter's next sculpture is of a dead man. It receives even higher acclaim.

And so Walter Paisley embarks on a self-destructive binge on the alcohol of acclaim. Another of his victims is a snooty model (Judy Bamber) who'd refused to pose for him before he'd brought in 'Dead Cat', but now is dying to sit in the nude for him. His next sculpture is called 'Nude Woman.'

But, finally, Walter is discovered. At his first one-man show, a connoisseur happens to notice that a tuft of hair protrudes from the 'Dead Cat' piece while another sees a human fingernail beneath the chipped clay of 'Nude Woman'.

The real 'body' of Walter's work is soon exposed and, finally, Walter, pursued by the screams of the multitudes of his failures, gives to them his final sculpture: an unsuccessful piece of a hanged man, Walter himself, spottily covered with clay. It was one of the most effective horror images since Olga Baclanova's bird-woman in Freaks.

The film was not more profound than its actors. Miller made Paisley a poignant poor man's Sammy Glick, achingly telling lies, openly self-demeaning but quietly defiant, a predecessor of DeNiro's Taxi Driver. And his fellow-players: Barboura Morris, surely one of the most intelligent actresses since Carole Lombard, urging on her insecure Romeo, but ultimately rejecting him; Julian Burton, Anthony Carbone, Judy Bamber and the ubiquitous Bruno VeSota -- all make for a gem of a movie. It was also the last lead Miller played for Corman.

Shortly after the completion of Bucket, Roger offered Dick the lead in The Little Shop of Horrors, the tale of Seymour Krelboined, a gentle, miserable young man who works in a florist's shop and dreams of success, which he achieves when he discovers a rare plant that feeds on human blood. In order to remain successful he, like Walter Paisley, must kill and eventually he commits suicide by feeding himself to his plant. Miller balked at the idea of starring as a character so similar to the one he'd just played. Instead, he offered to take a smaller role and recommended Jonathan Haze for Seymour. Corman hired Haze and Dick took the role of Fouch, a habitué of the florist shop who buys flowers to eat them (with a grain or two of salt). Improvising most of his actions and much of his dialogue, he gave a delightful performance.

After 1961, Roger Corman began making a different kind of film -- color photography, higher budgets and name actors in the leads. And Miller became a supporting player once again, even, at times, doing bits with little more than a handful of lines. He had a fair role as Mole a gravedigger in The Premature Burial (1962), from the Edgar Allan Poe tale of a catatonic (Ray Milland) who is buried alive; a substantial part as Stefan, the servant of an evil sorcerer named Baron Von Leppe (Boris Karloff) in The Terror (1963); but in X - The Man with the X-Ray Eyes (1963), the tale of a scientist (Milland again) who develops a tormenting X-ray vision, Miller had a bit as a heckler at a carnival sideshow. He was partnered with Jonathan Haze. It was their last film together.

Miller's life had changed a lot in the past four years. In 1959, besides his screen triumph as Walter Paisley, he married Elaine Halpern, a pretty registered nurse he'd met at (where else?) Schwab's and in 1960 their daughter Barbara was born. It was that year also that Dick had a falling-out with Jackie Haze that severed their friendship.

Following the success of The Little Shop of Horrors, Haze suggested to Corman that he finance a script which Haze and Miller would write and star in. Roger approved and the two went to work on a script entitled The Monsters of Nicholson Mesa, concerning two comic soldiers (inspired by their characters in It Conquered the World) who meet up with female aliens from outer space. But Miller and Haze were mismatched collaborators, tempers flared and Haze asked Miller to let him write it alone. Dick acquiesced, then pulled out of the project altogether, leading Corman to back off from financing it. Haze ended by selling it to Ararat Productions, a small-time outfit, where it was eventually re-written and filmed as Invasion of the Star Creatures and released by American International, double-billed with The Brain That Wouldn't Die. Dick was relieved to see that sole screenwriting credit went to Haze, though Miller had, in fact, written a small portion of the original script.

For a time in the mid-Sixties, with Corman employing him only occasionally, Dick's income was coming primarily from television. He'd always worked tv inbetween feature work in the late fifties, but now his acting was confined almost totally to the small screen where, besides making the usual rounds on shows like 77 Sunset Strip, Hawaiian Eye, Bonanza, Dragnet, etc. he was a semi-regular on two series, Oh! Susannah and My Man Higgins.

From bits in pictures like Ski Party (1965) and Wild Angels (1966), he climbed again to supporting roles and in 1967 was prominent in both The Trip, his last film with Barboura Morris, and A Time for Killing. The latter, which Miller had a hand in writing in its original form, then titled The Long Ride Home, went before the cameras in 1966 under the direction of Roger Corman, but he was replaced by Phil Karlson. Miller played Zollcoffer, one of the Union troopers pursuing escaped Confederate soldiers.

But the lean years weren't over. From 1968 to 1972 his name appeared on the credits of only one film, Which Way to the Front?, a Jerry Lewis comedy on which Dick was a story collaborator but in which he did not appear. By 1973, however, the world began to look rosy again.

The latest rash of series pictures, after the horror and teenage films of the fifties and the beach party flicks of the sixties, has included 'kung fu movies, black audience crime features and the soft-R melodrama usually characterized by multiple story lines featuring three competent starlets as willing and eager to disrobe for the camera as any stuntman in a Monogram Western was to take a fall. Corman, via his New World production company, was prolific in this latter genre and in a period of four years, Miller found himself with notable supporting roles in pictures like The Young Nurses, Fly Me, The Student Teachers, Candy Stripe Nurses and Night Call Nurses. The state of his career steadily improved and, by 1975, he not only appeared in the role of Birdie the sheriff in the box-office smash White Line Fever, but co-wrote, with actor Ken Metcalfe, the screenplay to the highly remunerative TNT Jackson about a black female karate expert (Jeanne Bell) who combats Hong Kong heroin smugglers. "She's a one Mama massacre squad" read the ads. By the end of the year, the film had grossed $1,300,000.

It was 1975, moreover, that saw Miller turn in what is perhaps the most masterful performance of his career in the hilarious Corman presentation, Hollywood Boulevard, the story of the tribulations of an aspiring movie starlet (Candice Rialson) who, through a small-time agent (Miller), is launched on her movie career in a series of grade Z quickies, Machete Maidens of Mora Tau and Atomic War Brides, involving her with a company of incredibly expedient moviemakers and, eventually, with an insane murderess who is disposing of some of our heroine's fellow actresses one by one.

Shot, amazingly, in ten days and adroitly incorporating stock footage from past Corman pictures, Hollywood Boulevard was the product of a wonderful collaboration of talents. The screenplay is credited to one Patrick Hobby, a pseudonym for several people and also the character name of the male protagonist, a screenwriter (Jeffrey Kramer). Some of the actual screenwriters, fans of past Corman pictures, were also horror-film lovers from the classic period of that producer's fantasy output*.

* Joe Dante, co-director with Allan Arkush had, as a youngster contributed many articles to Castle of Frankenstein, perhaps the finest fantasy magazine of the period.

With nearly three dozen films by then under his belt, Dick proceeded to walk away with the picture creating, via immaculate comic timing and a considerable knowledge of screen technique, an impressive, insidious parody of that unique creature, the talent agent -- a fast-talking, wise-cracking, sardonically-inclined hustler, residing in an office which could only be described as a hole-in-the-wall (astutely decorated by art director Jack DeWolfe). One of the stranger scenes has Miller attending, with his client and her boyfriend, the premiere of her first movie at a drive-in and watching a clip of himself and Karloff from The Terror.

Appearing in bit parts in Hollywood Boulevard are Miller's old friend Charles Griffith, and Forrest J. Ackerman, editor of the popular magazine Famous Monsters of Filmland. Of added interest to fantasy fans is the presence of Robby the Robot and Godzilla, as well as a parody of the futuristic film, Death Race 2000.

Since Hollywood Boulevard, Miller has continued to work often and there is a strong probability he will author other screenplays. He lives in a pleasant West Hollywood apartment with his wife and daughter.

Disregarding his small but strong following in this country, Dick's performances seem to have had greater impact in France, where it is not unusual to see, at museum screenings and film festivals, a Corman picture billed as a 'Roger Corman-Dick Miller movie'. Strangely, Miller has yet to take advantage of his European popularity, preferring perhaps the very stability he has attained in the profession here. Though his twenty-year association with Corman has had its strains, Dick expresses "great affection" for the man.

Speaking of his work as an actor, Miller said: "I don't think I was influenced directly by anybody. I was probably influenced by every actor that Warner Brothers ever turned out in the forties, by osmosis." Indeed, he succeeded perhaps more than any other film player introduced to the screen by Corman in creating a dynamic star personality, individual, engaging and unique. Regrettably, few of his roles were viable showcases of his talents during the time it counted most. Only recently, too, has the onus of having come up from the ranks of independent productions been dispelled.

Unlike so many of his contemporaries, however, to give a solid shape and form to his career is quite impossible, the highs and lows of his film history to date defying a prediction of where the future may take him. But one thing is certain; the spunky little scrapper who became a hero to a generation of young filmgoers that cared nothing for Hollywood's double-standards can't yet be counted out.