Roy Ward Baker
Geoff Mayer(Author)
Manchester University Press
Published on 1. October 2004
Book
Hardback
232 pages
978-0-7190-6354-1 (ISBN)
Description
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. -- .
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. -- .
More details
Series
Language
English
Place of publication
Manchester
United Kingdom
Target group
Professional and scholarly
Illustrations
Illustrations, black & white
Dimensions
Height: 216 mm
Width: 138 mm
ISBN-13
978-0-7190-6354-1 (9780719063541)
Copyright in bibliographic data is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or its licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Person
Geoff Mayer is Chair of the Cinema Studies Program at La Trobe University, Australia
Content
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