Roy Ward Baker [Paperback]

This book traces the career of Roy Ward Baker, one of the great survivors of the British film and television industry. He directed the landmark British film Morning Departure (1949), worked at Twentieth Century Fox in Hollywood in the early 1950s where he directed Marilyn Monroe's 'breakthrough' film (Don't Bother to Knock), and followed this with a succession of fine films for Rank, culminating in the best version of the Titanic disaster, A Night to Remember in 1958. Yet within three years he was unable to secure a job in the British film industry and he moved to television series such as The Avengers, The Saint and Minder. Later Baker re-emerged as a major director of science-fiction (Quatermass and the Pit) and horror films (Asylum).

Geoff Mayer provides an industrial and aesthetic context in which to understand the interrelationship between a skilled classical director and the transformation of the British film industry in the 1950s.

List of plates

Series Editors' Foreword

Acknowledgements

Introduction: A classical director working in a melodramatic force field

2. 'Realism' - 'Flame in the Streets' and 'A Night to Remember'

3. 'A morbid sensibility': 1947-1961

4. 'Roy Ward Baker': Hammer and Amicus

5. Conclusion: 'The One That Got Away'

Filmography

Select Bibliography

Index

Really refreshingtreated with perception and intelligence

Geoff Mayer is Chair of the Cinema Studies Program at La Trobe University, Australia