"Walter Grauman, who has died aged 93, was an American director and producer noted for his work on long-running television series such as Murder, She Wrote; in Britain, he is remembered as the director of the feature film 633 Squadron (1964), about the gung-ho exploits of a fictional RAF fighter-bomber squadron in the Second World War. Starring the Americans Cliff Robertson (as Wing Commander Roy Grant) and George Chakiris (known for his role as a West Side Story gangleader) playing a Norwegian resistance leader, the movie concerns an RAF mission to destroy a German V-2 rocket fuel plant at the end of a narrow, well-defended fjord. While it was not showered with plaudits, the film was regarded as spectacular. The fjord sequence is said to have inspired the climactic “trench run” scene in George Lucas’s Star Wars, in which rebel fighter pilots have to negotiate a narrow ravine in the side of the Death Star and target their torpedoes at an exhaust port. Walter Grauman was born in Milwaukee on March 17 1922, the son of Jacob Grauman, who owned several cinemas, and a first cousin once removed of Sid Grauman, who built the Chinese and Egyptian movie theatres in Hollywood. Walter studied at the Universities of Wisconsin and Arizona, but a month after the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor in 1941 he enlisted in the US Army Air Corps. He piloted B-25 bombers, and was awarded a DFC and Air Medal with five oak leaf clusters for his service in 56 missions in Europe. During his service he wrote to his mother every day." http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/11499714/Walter-Grauman-film-director-obituary.html
