Joseph Ezekiel Strick (July 6, 1923 – June 1, 2010) was an American director, producer, and screenwriter whose career spanned experimental documentary, literary adaptation, and narrative feature filmmaking. Born in Braddock, Pennsylvania, Strick served as a cameraman in the U.S. Army Air Forces during World War II before beginning his filmmaking career with the short Muscle Beach (1948), co-directed with Irving Lerner. He later collaborated with Lerner, Ben Maddow, and Sidney Meyers on the experimental documentary The Savage Eye (1959), which won the BAFTA Flaherty Documentary Award. Strick w...
The Balcony
Shelley Winters is the madame of a house where customers play out their erotic fantasies, oblivious to a revolution which is sweeping the country. When her old friend, the chief of police (Peter Falk), asks her to impersonate the missing queen in order to reassure the people and halt the revolution, she offers instead three of her customers to play the general, bishop and chief justice, all of whom have died in the revolution.