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name, though the wartime thrillers no doubt have melodramatic elements. There were six intervening films, justifying the journalist who described him in early 1943 as the ‘Busiest British film director … Within the last six months he’s made five films, and now he’s busy on a sixth [ Escape to Danger ] . And they haven’t all been the same kind of movie as well.’ 1 Indeed they were not. In order of release, 2 they were: the comedy-drama of
Lance Comfort began to work in films between the age of 17 and 19, more or less growing up with the cinema. When he came to make 'B' films in the 1950s and 1960s, his wide-ranging expertise enabled him to deal efficiently with the constraints of tight budgets and schedules. He was astute at juggling several concurrent plot strands, his prescient anticipation of postwar disaffection, the invoking of film noir techniques to articulate the dilemma of the tormented protagonist. Comfort's reputation as a features director seemed to be made when Hatter's Castle, made by Paramount's British operation, opened at the Plaza, Piccadilly Circus, after a well-publicised charity première attended by the Duchess of Kent and luminaries such as Noel Coward. He had been in the film business for twenty years when, in 1946, he directed Margaret Lockwood in Bedelia. Comfort is not the only director who enjoyed his greatest prestige in the 1940s and drifted into providing fodder for the bottom half of the double-bill in the ensuing decades. There were six intervening films, justifying the journalist who described him in early 1943 as the Busiest British film director. Great Day, Portrait of Clare, Temptation Harbour, Bedelia, Daughter of Darkness, and Silent Dust were his six melodramas. He was an unpretentious craftsman who was also at best an artist, and in exploring his career trajectory, the viewer is rewarded by the spectacle of one who responded resiliently to the challenges of a volatile industry.
This is a book about the British film director Terence Fisher. A prolific film-maker with fifty titles to his credit, Fisher’s last film – Frankenstein and the Monster from Hell – was released in 1974, when I was twelve. I was not old enough to see any of the horror films upon which Fisher’s reputation rests when they were first released; for a number of them, I was not even born. I have been
In this chapter I want to reflect on the ways in which the reputation of the British film director Nicolas Roeg has developed from the 1970s through to the twenty-first century, and to consider how this might tell us interesting things about the discursive and cultural frameworks that shape particular films (and their critical reception) historically within the contexts of British art cinema. 1 Looking specifically at Performance (co-directed with Donald Cammell, 1970) and Don’t Look Now (1973), I will argue that through an
This book is about the British film director Terence Fisher. It begins by setting the context by detailing Fisher's directorial debut to Hammer's horror production and the importance of the Hammer horror to Fisher's career. Hammer's horror production represents one of the striking developments in post-war British cinema. The book explains some professional and industrial contexts in which Fisher operated and shows how these relate both to the films he made and the way in which these films have been judged and valued. It presents a detailed account of The Astonished Heart, Fisher's sixth film as director, highlighting the benefits and some of the problems involved in thinking about Fisher's career generally in its pre-horror phase. The successful Hammer film, The Curse of Frankenstein, both inaugurated the British horror boom and established Fisher as a film-maker whose name was known to critics as someone who specialised in the despised horror genre. After The Curse of Frankenstein, Fisher became primarily a horror director. The book presents an account of the highs and lows Fisher faced in his directorial career, highlighting his significant achievements and his box-office failures. It also shows Fisher as a director dependent on and at ease with the industrial and collaborative nature of film-making. In a fundamental sense, what value there is in Terence Fisher's work exists because of the British film industry and the opportunities it afforded Fisher, not despite the industry.
and film comedy, registers his contribution, as does Take Ten: Contemporary British Film Directors (1991). There, Peter Greenaway speaks of admiring Gilliam and fellow Python Terry Jones for their anarchy and irreverence, 4 while Derek Jarman puts ‘glorious Terry Gilliam’s Brazil ’ on a very short list of British 1970s and 1980s films he would keep. 5 By
This is the first book-length study of one of the most significant of all British television writers, Jimmy McGovern. The book provides comprehensive coverage of all his work for television including early writing on Brookside, major documentary dramas such as Hillsborough and Sunday and more recent series such as The Street and Accused.
Whilst the book is firmly focused on McGovern’s own work, the range of his output over the period in which he has been working also provides something of an overview of the radical changes in television drama commissioning that have taken place during this time. Without compromising his deeply-held convictions McGovern has managed to adapt to an ever changing environment, often using his position as a sought-after writer to defy industry trends.
The book also challenges the notion of McGovern as an uncomplicated social realist in stylistic terms. Looking particularly at his later work, a case is made for McGovern employing a greater range of narrative approaches, albeit subtly and within boundaries that allow him to continue to write for large popular audiences.
Finally it is worth pointing to the book’s examination of McGovern’s role in recent years as a mentor to new voices, frequently acting as a creative producer on series that he part-writes and part brings through different less-experienced names.
. Consequently, if the written word is no bloody good, no director in the world is going to be able to put it into a visual form which is going to be done ably.’ 4 This hardly seems the voice of a great film artist, someone described by David Pirie as one of the few British film directors whose films ‘embody a recognizable and coherent Weltanschauung’. 5 It is worth mentioning here that one of the initial impulses behind the study of
’s invaluable biography. 2 My focus is on Jarman as a maker of films and I hope that the detailed analyses I give of the eleven feature-length films he made between 1976 and 1993 will convince the reader that he is the most interesting British film director of the last thirty years and a major figure in European and World cinema. His career was unique in many respects and there are no obvious immediate successors to him, but his
, the British film director revealed that he persuaded his boss, Alexander Korda, to send him to Burma to fetch film costumes and props, and make contacts. At the age of eighty-one he recalled his Imperial journey from Southampton to Rangoon in 1937 as one of his happiest travel memories. He exaggerated flying on average 2,000 miles a day (half that is more likely), but he