In 1990, Clint Eastwood made the film clef White Hunter, Black Heart about director John Huston's obsession with bagging an elephant while on location for The African Queen. But having read Natasha Fraser-Cavasson's study of its producer, Sam Spiegel, it is tempting to suggest he picked the wrong character, as the life of this caricature maverick really is the stuff that movies are made of, writes David Parkinson.

Raised in Hapsburg-controlled Galicia, Spiegel joined the Hashomer Hatzair youth movement in 1918 and was among the first Zionist wave intent on making Palestine its homeland. However, he soon decided that nation building was not his forte and embarked upon a series of misadventures that saw him jailed for financial irregularities and deported from the US. Yet somehow he managed to weedle his way into the Berlin offices of Universal Studios and land himself the task of organising the German release of All Quiet on the Western Front.

These events, as well as many that followed, have been stripped of their Spiegelese spin in this meticulously researched volume. Fraser-Cavassoni resists the temptation to disapprove of his womanising and vulgar displays of cultural affectation. But more importantly, she recognises that artists like Elia Kazan and David Lean treated Spiegel shabbily, notwithstanding the fact that without his intuitive showmanship and genius for playing the system On the Waterfront, The Bridge on the River Kwai and Lawrence of Arabia would never have been made.

S.P. Eagle (as he was briefly known) may have been a rogue, but no one else has single-handedly produced three Best Picture winners at the Academy Awards. Now he has a biography worthy of his achievement.