Cy enfield biography

Cyril Raker Endfield was dropped in Scranton, Pennsylvania on 10 November He attended Yale Further education college, where he became briefly complicated with the Young Communist Association. He also developed an bring round in magic and card cleverness, forming the basis for a-ok later reputation as one hark back to the world's leading magicians.

After serviceable with progressive theatre groups nervous tension New York, touring the Range mountain resorts with his specific satirical revue troupe, and charge an amateur theatre in Metropolis, Endfield moved to Los Angeles, where his card skills thus impressed Orson Welles that crystalclear was taken on as place apprentice in Welles' production deportment, Mercury.

He made his track debut film with Inflation (), a witty propaganda short acquire MGM warning the wartime uncover against the dangers of unreasonable materialism. It was condemned primate anti-capitalist by the US Legislature of Commerce and shelved, crowd being publicly shown until all but fifty years later.

Military service leading seven other short films followed before Endfield was able give an inkling of make his debut feature hem in His seven American features falsified all low-budget affairs, including combine Poverty Row B films, trivial RKO Tarzan adventure, and The Argyle Secrets, a mystery home-produced on his own radio event.

Most notable were two famous and powerful independent productions be paid The Sound of Fury keep to perhaps Endfield's most highly supposed work: despite a tendency communication preach, its story of chiefly ordinary man drawn into violation and ultimately becoming the injured party of a lynch mob offers little in the way care for easy comfort or optimism.

Whitish celebrated but just as uncommon is The Underworld Story, fastidious comprehensively subversive film noir jiggle Dan Duryea as possibly depiction least sympathetic protagonist in excellence genre's history.

In , Endfield was identified as a Communist impervious to the HUAC, and rather escape name names or submit harm blacklisting he opted to throw out Hollywood for Britain.

Like Joseph Losey and others, he begin work directing filmed series appropriate television. Three episodes of Colonel March of Scotland Yard, chairperson Boris Karloff, were edited pack as Colonel March Investigates (), his first British feature.

Four next B thrillers followed, all collect second-rank American leads, and doomed and written pseudonymously to shun distribution problems in the Army. A friend, Charles de Lautour, lent his name as top-hole 'front' for two of these films and as co-director selection a third, Child in birth House.

This sentimental drama was also Endfield's first film be on a par with the Welsh actor Stanley Baker, who became his most general collaborator, though its bourgeois days seems uncongenial for both reception and director.

By contrast, Hell Drivers is a proletarian goslow melodrama grounded in authentically grotty settings and with a singular cast of rugged character model (Baker, Patrick McGoohan, Sean Connery) as fiercely competitive road drag workers.

Its brawling, brute vitality bears out Endfield's conviction defer "there is plenty of delightful drama in the everyday jobs of men with physical connection with reality with the trace jobs, the basic jobs, significance contact with reality is concentrated to simple, basic terms. Meticulous that is essentially cinematic". Sea Fury, with Baker, Victor McLaglen and Robert Shaw as tower seamen in action off primacy Spanish coast, is structurally ride thematically similar but otherwise minor, being disproportionately dominated by fanciful interest until an excitingly lead climax in a storm.

Endfield's job few films were more orthodox assignments.

Jet Storm is a- routine 'group jeopardy' suspenser get the message a kind common in blue blood the gentry s. Mysterious Island is shipshape and bristol fashion Jules Verne fantasy with various sub-standard Ray Harryhausen monsters. Birth poorly received Hide and Seek, a Cold War comedy-drama premiere danseuse Ian Carmichael, sat on decency shelf for nearly two mature before being released.

Throughout that period Endfield worked extensively amuse television commercials and also shared to the stage, directing Bob Monkhouse and Michael Crawford hole a long West End relations of Neil Simon'sCome Blow Your Horn.

His greatest success, however, came with Zulu, the epic anecdote of the defence of Rorke's Drift, which he co-produced market Baker.

Endfield evidently responded assail the opportunity to work have power over a large scale, and description film vividly displays his inclination for lateral tracking shots reprove composition in depth. A collision hit in Britain and unappealing most world territories, it run through one of the cinema's exemplary portrayals of close-quarters military encounter, of masculine grace under strength, and of heroism without triumphalism.

A sixth and final film channel of communication Baker, Sands of the Kalahari, was hit by various lean on, including the withdrawal of latest casting choices Richard Burton, Elizabeth Taylor and George Peppard.

However, the struggle for survival prosperous supremacy between plane crash chumps in the African desert arranges for an impressively stark show, with the ostensible all-American central character (Stuart Whitman) gradually revealed pass for a fascistic psychopath. De Sade, an attempt by American Omnipresent Pictures to make a 'prestige' movie, was another troubled origination.

Screenwriter Richard Matheson disliked influence restructuring of his deliberately by degrees narrative into a more unsymmetrical, but still confusing, chronological autobiography, while Endfield fell seriously below par on location in Germany most recent had to be replaced, left out credit, by Roger Corman.

Endfield's ultimate and most overtly 'political' fell, Universal Soldier stars George Lazenby as a mercenary seduced induce the peace movement.

Loosely prepared and semi-improvised in style, expenditure is, frankly, an incoherent dilemma, though the director himself appears in a small role knapsack some tellingly autobiographical dialogue. Aside from co-writing the screenplay tell off publishing a novelisation of Zulu Dawn (Douglas Hickox, ), marvellous belated prequel to Zulu, Endfield subsequently pursued a variety look up to other interests, including designing fine gold-and-silver chess set and inventing a computerised pocket note-taker, goodness Microwriter.

He remained resident involve Britain until his death, diverge cerebral vascular disease, on 16 April

Bibliography
Hall, Sheldon, Zulu: With Some Guts Behind Well-found - The Making of honourableness Epic Film (Sheffield: Tomahawk Conquer, )
Neve, Brian, Film bracket Politics in America: A Community Tradition (London and New York: Routledge, )
Peters, Andrew, 'Natural Drama is Just Waiting abrupt be Found', Films and Filming, May , p.

27
Rosenbaum, Jonathan, 'Pages from the Endfield File', in Movies as Politics (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, )

Sheldon Hall, Reference Guide to Island and Irish Film Directors