A committed liberal, he took great trouble with his research, and often the vagaries of his dialogue had much to do with the egos of his casts (he had to rewrite McQueen’s part in The Towering Inferno to give him as many lines as his co-star Paul Newman).Born in Detroit in 1918, Silliphant wrote his first story at the age of five, and worked as a sports writer before becoming a publicity director for 20th Century-Fox between 1946 and 1953. None the less, at his best Silliphant produced high-quality work within a commercial framework, containing ideas that could have seemed outrageous to a mass audience at the time – a black policeman more civilised and intelligent than a white one, for example. Generally regarded as a “hired gun”, he continually failed in his efforts to interest studios in his own more spiritual, personal projects, such as his long-held ambition to film Carlos Castaneda’s The Teachings of Don Juan (“Not being able to make that film has got to be the great disappointment of my life,” he once said). While someone with Lee’s personal magnetism and strong belief in the project could have pulled it off, David Carradine simply looked like an uncomfortable straight man in a Monty Python sketch.Yet Silliphant was far from a hack. Unfortunately, such scripts depended on genuine stars for their success. Silliphant’s dialogue for The Towering Inferno (1974) or The Enforcer (1976) is no better than that in his less successful films, but it was tailored for real stars like Steve McQueen and Clint Eastwood; many other “stars” lacked the screen presence to deliver his dialogue as if they believed it.Never was this more apparent than in The Silent Flute/ Circle of Iron (1978), a pet project Silliphant developed with Bruce Lee and James Coburn. This applied not just to lead players, like Rod Steiger’s racist Southern policeman in In the Heat of the Night (1967) or Cliff Robertson’s retard- turned-genius in Charly (1968), both of whom won Oscars in Silliphant- scripted roles; it is impossible to think of The Poseidon Adventure (1972) without Shelley Winters’s “I can hold my breath, Manny: it’s the one thing I can do” monologue and death scene springing to mind.
Fond of quoting Raymond Chandler’s dictum, “A good writer is one who can take a cliche and write it as though it has never been used before”, Silliphant wrote unashamed movie-star parts for unashamed movie stars.

Yet some wonder whether the stake will be a platform for one of the predators, said to be circling.. The screenwriter Stirling Silliphant was a master of “the Oscar scene”, Hollywood parlance for a scene that allows a star to pour out his heart and show his or her full range – and which inevitably features heavily in campaigns to get nominated for an award. The general view is that the Swiss involvement is passive, with the shareholder banking on QMH’s recovery. A mystery Swiss investor who has been playing in the shares has picked up 3.5 million, lifting his interest to 13.8 per cent. With a pounds 7.2m market valuation it could be a target as the financial industry is reshaped.rQueens Moat Houses, the hotel group, continues to gather Continental support. He and his wife, Patricia, netted around pounds 2.8m from the sale of 394,000 shares at 715p.

Last week the sports shops chain produced profits up 70 per cent to pounds 12.9m. The shares shaded 3p to 708p.TAKING STOCKrStockbroker Neilson Cobbold, based at Liverpool, attracted attention. The shares, which arrived on AIM at 145p in October, rose 40p, hitting a 270p peak. The group, which has an investment management operation, reported profits of pounds 884,000 for last year.

It intends to use its quoted vehicle as an investment trust specialising in hard-pressed groups.David Whelan, the former footballer who runs JJB Sports, is the latest to cash in on sporting shares. An upbeat retail sales survey helped.Trocadero, confirming its Enid Blyton deal, held at 72p and Pan Andean Resources, seeking oil in Bolivia, surged 11p to 81p ahead of tomorrow’s expected assessment from its dominant partner, the Australian BHP giant.More arrivals on AIM Waterfall, a leisure group placed at 45p, reached 56p. The company, 25 per cent owned by First Leisure Corporation, has 20 snooker clubs and runs three nightclubs. FNR, with forestry interests in the former Soviet Union, touched 39p from a 35p placing.Exco, the money broker, rose 3p to 103p, reflecting director buying, but Perpetual’s heady run came to an end with a 30p fall to 2,443p.Battered Cray Electronics recovered 5p to 48p following a positive trading statement and Knox D’Arcy, the investment trust born out of the remains of Ingham, once a car parts and worsted business, returned at 36p, just above the suspension price.Knox D’Arcy is a firm of management consultants with an impressive record of company turnarounds. Moss Bros, the clothing retailer long seen as a possible bidder for Austin Reed, rose 28p to 938p. Smith & Nephew, the health-care group which has enjoyed many spectacular takeover runs, could be about to assume a new role – biotech hotshot.

Its skin-growing link with a US group could move S&N to the cutting edge of health development, making its shares a much more realistic play than many of the over-hyped drug hopefuls where blue-sky considerations represent most of the share price.
S&N, long seen as an obvious target for the US health group Johnson & Johnson, gained 4.75p to 193.25p, a two-day uplift of 7.75p, a remarkable advance by a group which normally has to be content with fractional movements. It has linked with Advance Tissue Sciences of California, which has discovered how to grow skin from human cells held in “tissue banks”. More importantly, the company said its planned expansion to 75 sites by the end of July 1997, from the 39 trading currently, was on track, despite having fallen behind original expectations.The Pet City concept is intriguing, a chain of out-of-town pet superstores that the company boasts are “more like going to the zoo than just shopping”. And the fledgling group has ambitious plans – a network of 300 stores is planned by the year 2003.That has already been reflected in the share price, which has risen more than a third from the 300p placing price, after a sparkling debut when they jumped to a first-day premium of 55p. After another 20p rise, they closed yesterday at 415p.On the basis of illustrative projections, the company, which is aiming for the sort of category dominance enjoyed by businesses such as B&Q and Toys R Us, could be making sales of over pounds 200m and profits of about pounds 9m by the year to July 1999.Assuming a full tax charge on that profit, the resultant earnings per share of about 25p would put the shares on a prospective price/earnings ratio of about 16 three years out.That seems a pretty steep price to pay for a company that is yet to prove that its range, price advantage and “shopping experience” is enough to tempt shoppers out of the supermarkets, Pet City’s largest competitor In the meantime the shares are high enough..