His résumé also included 'The Incident,' 'Two-Minute Warning,' 'Diary of a Mad Housewife' and 'My Favorite Year.'
Gerald Hirschfeld, the veteran cinematographer who shot the films Fail-Safe and Young Frankenstein in beautiful black and white, died Feb. 13 of natural causes at his home in Ashland, Ore., a family spokesman said. He was 95.
Hirschfeld was the American Society of Cinematographers' most senior member, having joined the organization in 1951, and he received its prestigious Presidents Award in 2007.
Hirschfeld's first major assignment came for director Sidney Lumet on the taut Cold War drama Fail-Safe (1964), and he brilliantly captured the look of the Universal monster movies of the 1930s with Mel Brooks' Young Frankenstein (1974) - despite nearly getting fired.
Hirschfeld also collaborated with director Larry Peerce on the gritty, subway-set The Incident (1967), Goodbye, Columbus (1969), Two-Minute Warning (1976) and The Bell Jar (1979) and with Frank Perry on Last Summer (1969) and Diary of a Mad Housewife (1970).
His other credits include another Lumet film, Child's Play (1972), Cotton Comes to Harlem (1970), Mastermind (1976), Dragonfly (1976), The Bell Jar (1979), John G. Avildsen's Neighbors (1981) and My Favorite Year (1982), directed by Columbus and Mad Housewife star Richard Benjamin.
In a 2006 interview with American Cinematographer magazine, Hirschfeld described how it took some time to get the look that writer-director Brooks and writer-star Gene Wilder desired on Young Frankenstein:
"Mel and Gene Wilder arranged for me to watch a screening of the original Frankenstein and Bride of Frankenstein to remind me of the look of the originals. The problem to solve was re-creating that look with different lenses, different film stocks and different lights than they had used in 1932.