A glance at the career of the British-born schlockmeister movie producer Harry Alan Towers, who has died aged 88, might easily suggest that he took a strictly pragmatic approach to the value of culture. Most of his 100 or so productions, many of them cheaply made action films, horror pictures and soft-porn movies, had no claims to be considered art, the compulsion behind them being to entertain and to make a quick profit.
Yet Towers managed to attract big name actors such as Orson Welles, Michael Caine and Christopher Lee more than once, and he was a pioneer of the British television movie – instigating 90-minute "specials" from 1956. He was also one of the first film producers to make deals around the world, seeking tax shelters to finance his movies. South Africa under apartheid, while shunned by many, welcomed his productions, which included a remake of the colonialist adventure Sanders of the River, with Richard Todd, retitled Death Drums Along the River (1963).
There is an anecdote, possibly apocryphal, about how Towers tried to persuade Herbert Lom, a particular favourite, to join the cast of a new "Harry Palmer" spy movie, starring Caine. He told Lom that it would be shot in Russia in an exciting location where few film crews had ever gone, without naming the place. When Lom asked where it was, Towers replied, after some hesitation: "Um … Chernobyl."
If some of his productions were of dubious taste, so were some of his relationships. In 1960, at a high society party, his friend Stephen Ward, pimp to the upper classes, introduced him to Mandy Rice-Davies, whom Towers would cast as the star in a piece of erotica called Black Venus (1983), two decades after her notorious involvement in the Profumo scandal. More significantly, Ward introduced Towers to a woman called Mariella Novotny, with whom Towers had an affair and promised to put in television commercials in America. What ensued reads like a script for one of Towers's B-movies.
Not long after arriving in New York, Novotny was arrested by the FBI and charged with soliciting. Three days later Towers was accused of transporting her from Britain to New York for the purpose of prostitution. It seemed that Towers ran what amounted to a call-girl agency, though, according to a statement made by Novotny to the FBI, Towers was actually a Soviet agent providing the Russians with information for the purposes of compromising certain prominent individuals.
In April 1961 Towers appeared before a US grand jury on five counts of violating the White Slave Traffic Act, but he jumped bail, returning to Britain. The FBI case against Towers and Novotny was eventually dropped, for mysterious reasons. Novotny returned to running sex parties in London, which were attended by so many senior politicians that she began to refer to herself as the "government's chief whip", while Towers began making feature films.
Towers was born in London, the son of a theatrical agent. He attended the Italia Conti school for child actors before becoming a radio disc jockey and scriptwriter in his teens. While serving in the RAF during the second world war, he wrote many radio plays under the name Peter Welbeck, a pseudonym he used from time to time as a scriptwriter throughout his career. In 1946 he and his mother, Margaret Miller Towers, started a company called Towers of London that sold various syndicated radio shows around the world, including The Lives of Harry Lime, with Orson Welles, The Secrets of Scotland Yard, with Clive Brook, Horatio Hornblower, with Michael Redgrave, and a series of Sherlock Holmes stories featuring John Gielgud as Holmes, Ralph Richardson as Watson and Welles as Moriarty.
Towers moved into television in the mid-1950s, producing shows such as Armchair Theatre, The Scarlet Pimpernel, with Marius Goring in the title role, and A Christmas Carol, starring Basil Rathbone as Scrooge. Most of his films were remakes or adaptations of popular novels by writers such as Edgar Wallace, Arthur Conan Doyle, H Rider Haggard and Agatha Christie, whose Ten Little Indians (the politically corrected title) Towers produced no fewer than three times with all-star casts. Sax Rohmer provided the basis for The Million Eyes of Sumuru (1967), with a cast headed by the fading pop star Frankie Avalon and the former heart-throb George Nader; The Seven Secrets of Sumuru (1969), again starring the ex-Bond girl Shirley Eaton as Sumuru; and five Fu Manchu movies between 1965 and 1970, with Christopher Lee as the oriental villain, most of them directed by the maverick director Jesus Franco.
From 1985, Towers became associated with Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus, of Cannon Films, for whom he produced Phantom of the Opera (1989), with Robert Englund of Freddy Krueger infamy. In 1995 he somehow persuaded Caine to return as the spy anti-hero Palmer in two films made back to back, Bullet to Beijing and Midnight in St Petersburg, both of which went straight to video. "Here's to capitalism and big tits," Caine says at a strip club in Moscow in the former, which could have been Towers's cri de coeur if one considers some of the titles in his "blue period" of the 1980s: Lady Libertine, Fanny Hill and Love Scenes.
Towers, active to the end, died during post-production of Moll Flanders, directed by Ken Russell, with whom he co-wrote the screenplay, starring Lucinda Rhodes-Flaherty in the title role, supported by Steven Berkoff, and Barry Humphries in drag.
Towers is survived by his wife, the Austrian-born Maria Rohm, 25 years his junior, who appeared in many of his movies.