For more than 40 years, the American director Richard Fleischer (1916–2006) created crime movies, historical epics, horror films, science fiction pictures, and the occasional Western, all of which (at least until a late career slump) were marked by an unusually high degree of cinematic acumen. His scores of successful mainstream movies often gazed fearlessly upon the darker aspects of human nature with considerably more grit than most of his Hollywood contemporaries.

If younger mainstream moviegoers don’t recognize the name, an ongoing tribute at the Film Society of Lincoln Center and a forthcoming rerelease of a Fleischer classic, “Violent Saturday,” at Film Forum, offer a worthwhile introduction.

If one can imagine Robert Wise, Fleischer’s early colleague in the B-picture unit of RKO Pictures and eventual multiple-Oscar-winning director, as the 1960s American film equivalent of the Beatles, then Fleischer was the Rolling Stones. Simultaneously innovative and classicist, the Brooklyn native brought a risky darkness and verve to middle-of-the-road American picture making that, if it didn’t earn him critical accolades, certainly sold barge-loads of tickets and inspired two generations of filmmakers.

“I admire Fleischer’s craft, economy, staging, shooting,” Alexander Payne, the director of “Sideways” and “Election,” said recently. “Had he been born 20 years earlier, I could have imagined him as one of Warner Brothers’ great directors, with his precision, versatility, and crisp visual flair.”

But Fleischer’s career began not at Jack Warner’s two-fisted dream factory — home of Michael Curtiz and Raoul Walsh — but at budget studio RKO. In the late 1940s, the young Yale drama graduate began making short subjects and helming fast-paced and quickly made heist pictures and whodunits at RKO’s B-unit. Fleischer’s ascent paralleled the studio system’s demise and auspiciously paired the wide-screen format of the 1950s, CinemaScope, with a man who became one of the rectangular frame’s most unsung champions. In 1954, after seeing Fleischer’s remarkably assured wide-screen debut (and Disney’s first live-action film), “20,000 Leagues Under the Sea,” the producer Buddy Adler hired Fleischer to direct “Violent Saturday” at the house of Scope itself, 20th Century Fox.

Though Hollywood heavyweights often decried the mid-1950s advent of wide-screen films, Fleischer found a new energy in the CinemaScope format. During the course of nearly two decades at Fox, he subtly radicalized CinemaScope with brilliant compositions, cuts, and movements that were rivaled only by Japan’s first generation of pro-Scope directors, such as Kon Ichikawa. In 1950, a few years prior to adopting the all wide-screen policy that would outlast his tenure as head honcho of the Fox studio, Darryl Zanuck observed in a memo circulated to his directing stable that, “as a general rule, we use entirely too many close-ups.” By 1955, when Fleischer undertook “Violent Saturday,” the studio was in the midst of a very expensive gamble that CinemaScope would be able to lure TV-sated audiences back to theaters. Zanuck’s belief in visually emphasizing spectacle over intimacy was even more keenly felt.

“Violent Saturday,” which will play in a dazzling new print at Film Forum beginning next Friday, is nevertheless a pulpy pictorial symphony of frames within frames, foreground-to-background dynamism, and razor-sharp couplings of faces in Zanuck’s forbidden close-up configurations. During a late film tête-à-tête, the characters played by Richard Egan and Virginia Leith grieve in a Scope-bordered exchange of profiles against a background of mining trucks and earth movers going about their business like diesel-powered honeybees. Though Sydney Boehm’s soapy dialogue is awash with regrets and longings, what’s happening around the star-crossed couple thriftily and subtly communicates the truth: Life goes on regardless. This weekend, Film Society of Lincoln Center’s Film Comment Selects series will present two films from the other end of Fleischer’s career. Lurid, preposterous, bizarrely cast, and so irresistibly exploitative that it spawned its own sub-genre of grind house codpiece rippers, 1975’s “Mandingo” is the last of Fleischer’s representative uses of wide-screen before he entered a final professional decade of less interesting fare.

“10 Rillington Place” (1971), however, is unique even within Fleischer’s varied career. Though he had effectively explored similar true-crime subjects in wide-screen via “Compulsion” (1959) and the intricately composed split-screen procedural “The Boston Strangler” (1968), for “10 Rillington Place,” which recounts the appalling true story of British mass-murderer John Christie, the director chose the comparatively claustrophobic standard frame. The true spectacle of “10 Rillington Place” is the completely naturalistic treatment that Christie’s depravity receives.

“I saw a beautiful 35 mm print of ’10 Rillington Place’ a couple of years ago,” Mr. Payne said, “and found it extraordinary, for the tension of it and how beautifully it’s shot.” Though Sir Richard Attenborough’s performance as Christie is a study in venality, Mr. Payne singled out John Hurt in the role of Timothy Evans, who was wrongly hanged by the Crown for Christie’s crimes, as the superior role. Mr. Hurt’s “portrayal of a small, ignorant, easily duped man was nonpareil,” Mr. Payne said.

I met Fleischer a few years before his death, when the director introduced a screening of “20,000 Leagues Under the Sea” at Rochester’s indispensable film archive, the George Eastman House. When I asked him about a tight widescreen close-up of Captain Nemo’s eyes during an action sequence in “20,000 Leagues Under the Sea” — a shot that Sergio Leone and others later made a cliché — the director fixed me with a steely gaze of his own.

“We shot the whole picture on one lens,” he said, his lips gently curling with pride. Given the visual complexity of “Leagues,” this was the revelation of a technical and practical miracle roughly equivalent to winning the Masters with a single golf club. How was the director able to get such a variety of frames and depth effects out of one fixed-focal-length lens? “We just recalibrated,” he said, choosing not to elaborate further. A craftsman, not a showman, Fleischer engaged movie making at a no-nonsense level of maturity and ingenuity sometimes far beyond the scope of his films’ scripts. His is a film legacy of vision and uncompromising creativity, tempered into timeless popular art in the pitiless heat of the marketplace. It’s high time he received his due.