Cy Endfield
Cyril Raker Endfield was an American film director, who at times also worked as a writer, theatre director, and inventor. Born in Scranton, Pennsylvania, he worked in the New York theatre in the late 1930s before moving to Hollywood in 1940.
After World War II, his film career was interrupted by the Hollywood blacklist. He resettled in London at the end of 1951. He is particularly known for The Sound of Fury, Hell Drivers and Zulu.
Early life and career
Cyril Endfield was born in Scranton, Pennsylvania on November 10, 1914, the first of three children. His parents were first generation Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe; his father ran a fur business. A bright boy, Cyril developed an early interest both in chess and sleight-of-hand card magic, publishing a routine in a magicians’ magazine at the age of 16. In 1932 he won a scholarship to Yale, but delayed his arrival by a year because of the collapse of his father's business during the Depression. While in Scranton, he first met Israel Shapiro, a politically conscious screenwriter-to-be who would become a life-long friend.In his two years at Yale, Endfield's attitude to his studies was ‘rather lackadaisical’, although he read widely, and developed an extra-curricular interest in new science fiction. Much of his time in New Haven was devoted to the intertwined worlds of theatre and radical politics: he joined the local Unity Theatre and was an active member of the Young Communist League. Rather than graduate, Endfield left Yale in early 1936, moving to New York and taking classes at the leftist New Theatre League, supporting himself by taking acting jobs and contributing magic acts to new theatre movement revues.
At age 23 he joined the League as a teacher, before spending a year directing an amateur theatre group in Montreal, where he met writers and playwrights including – briefly – Clifford Odets. It was also here that he married actress Fanny Shurack.
In 1940, with a baby due, the couple moved to Hollywood, and Endfield looked for work in the studios. His first assignment, a short-lived engagement with Orson Welles’s Mercury Theatre unit at RKO, followed a random meeting with Welles at a Los Angeles magic shop. During this period, Endfield was one of the few people to view the original, uncut version of Welles's The Magnificent Ambersons. Eventually he secured a position with the short subject department at MGM. But his first film, Inflation, a well-regarded propaganda short approved by the Office of War Information, was quickly withdrawn from distribution following criticism from the Chamber of Commerce. The United States' entry into World War II had made studios very sensitive to criticism.
Endfield remained at MGM until he was called up to a year of military service with the U.S. Army at Fort Crowder in Missouri. After the war he returned to the studio, before writing and directing several low budget Joe Palooka features for Monogram. What he later called his first "auteur effort', The Argyle Secrets, was made after nine days of shooting, from his own short1 radio play for the CBS Suspense series. Endfield's career revived in 1950, with the release of two well-received crime features, The Underworld Story and The Sound of Fury.
Politics and exile
In 1951 Endfield found his career derailed as a result of hearings by the House Committee on Un-American Activities. Screenwriter Martin Berkeley named him in September 1951 as known to have been involved with left wing political associations. Endfield was called to testify and, while he was reluctant to plead the Fifth Amendment before the Committee, he found the option of ‘naming names’, so as to clear himself for further Hollywood film work, to be unacceptable. He made a hurried settlement with his wife, from whom he had separated, and sailed for England on the Queen Mary in December 1951. He slowly re-established his filmmaking career in London.He later commented:
Endfield was 37 when he began his new life in the UK, and it was a struggle to get work both in theatre and film. The British security services took a close interest, and for a time there was a real possibility of him being sent back to the United States. His FBI and Home Office files reveal something of this struggle. Only slowly, as he found film work, did the Board of Trade become more sympathetic, recognising the value to the country of the employment and dollar investment that the filmmaker began to attract.
Endfield was one of a number of American filmmakers with left-wing associations who moved to Europe in the early fifties because of the blacklist. His stay in the UK was gradually extended, and he made a series of low budget films. His association with the producer Benjamin Fisz led to two better funded productions, Hell Drivers and Sea Fury, for Britain's largest production company, the Rank Organisation; both featured Stanley Baker, who was to appear in six of his films. Filmink called Endfield "one of several blacklisted Americans who brought a great deal of life to the British film industry during this period."
Endfield was eventually issued with a new passport and in 1957 he was given permission to remain permanently in the UK, having remarried in March 1956, to the model, Mo Forshaw.
Yet Endfield's career remained something of a struggle, and the blacklist still prevented him being considered for international productions, with American finance. It was in 1960, when he was offered the direction of Mysterious Island by Columbia Pictures, that he decided that he needed to clear himself by appearing before the House Committee on Un-American Activities in Washington. Endfield had written to the Committee in August 1958, but it was in March 1960 that he reluctantly made the flight to Washington D.C. to appear before the Committee. He there admitted his associations with the Communist Party, and of distancing himself from the Party after the war, such that some left-wing friends saw him as a renegade. At this late stage, with the blacklist beginning to collapse, all of those named were already blacklisted. Yet some of his fellow American exiles were not impressed by his action, which allowed him to direct Mysterious Island, at a time when he and Stanley Baker were working to try and set up an ambitious production of Zulu on location in South Africa.
Endfield's film work
The short period from 1949 to 1951 was one in which Endfield's profile was on the rise. He directed The Underworld Story, a crime story with social overtones, that was made for a subsidiary of Monogram Pictures. He followed this up with The Sound of Fury, for the independent company Robert Stillman Productions, at the end of the year. He described both films as ‘nervous A’ pictures, meaning that they had a budget of around $500,000. Their cost was beyond that of a B-picture, but still well short of that of ‘A’ pictures. This was a step up for directors such as Endfield and followed in the tradition of the successful pictures associated with rising producer Stanley Kramer in the late forties, notably Champion and Home of the Brave. Both the 1950 films, and particularly the second, came to be seen as film noirs, to use the term then being applied by critics to a series of American crime films that were released in France after the war.The success of The Underworld Story led to the effort by new producer Robert Stillman to set up The Sound of Fury, based on a 1947 novel by Jo Pagano that dealt with a notorious kidnapping and lynching case of 1933. The events, in San Jose, had already loosely inspired Fritz Lang's Fury, with Spencer Tracy. Endfield put heart and soul into the project, which was filmed on location in Phoenix, Arizona, and which starred Lloyd Bridges, Frank Lovejoy, Katherine Ryan and Art Smith. There were disagreements over the script, but the story was a powerful one of a decent, family man whose desperation for work leads to an ill-fated, criminal alliance with a psychopath. The climax, in which a mob invades a prison where the two criminals are being kept, had a particularly strong impact on critics.
Endfield arranged a private showing of The Sound of Fury for friends and associates. In the audience was the actor Joseph Cotten, who Endfield had got to know well at the Welles unit at RKO. The director recalled Cotten's comment after the showing: ‘Cy, we’ve both grown up in the same country, but I'm telling you, the America you know is not the America that I know.’ To the director this reaction indicated how such a film could be viewed in the febrile atmosphere of the Cold War. The critic Manny Farber also saw the film in these terms, describing it as ‘an ominous snarl at American life.’ Endfield talked to theatre managers who reported that some patrons had complained that the film was ‘un-American’, at a time when Americans were fighting and dying in Korea.
Early in his time in London Endfield worked without credit for the American producer Hannah Weinstein, directing three pilot episodes for a television series called Colonel March Investigates, with Boris Karloff. His other films were directed anonymously, with another director – Charles de la Tour – often being credited, and being paid to stand by on set. This partly reflected then rules of the film industry union, the Association of Cinematograph Technicians, as well as the reluctance of American distributors to handle films that carried the names of those blacklisted. Such films included The Limping Man and Impulse, while for The Master Plan, Endfield was credited as Hugh Raker. The director's credit for The Secret, and Child in the House was C. Raker Endfield, although the latter film still saw la Tour standing by. There are some resonances of the blacklist experience in The Secret and in Child of the House, the first of Endfield's films with Stanley Baker.
Hell Drivers was a breakthrough in terms of scale and ambition; it was successful in the UK and has attained a cult reputation. The subject, from a short story by John Kruse, concerned the trucking industry, and the short-haul transport of ballast, by a private company that stokes the ultra-competitive behaviour of its drivers. A publicity still of the time described it as a ‘drama of men who battle for their livelihood in ten-ton trucks.’ Stanley Baker plays the driver Tom Yately, while the strong cast includes Herbert Lom, Peggy Cummins, William Hartnell, and Wilfred Lawson, together with, in small but significant roles, emerging British actors Sean Connery and Patrick McGoohan.
Endfield wrote at the time of the rationale for the film, and for the Rank film that followed, Sea Fury, seeing both as drawing inspiration from Hollywood dramas of working-class life. The Sunday Times review referred to "a pace and muscular command of violent action uncommon in British cinema", while another critic, referencing Henri-Georges Clouzot's 1953 film The Wages of Fear, wrote of ‘a British Wages of Fear’. Sea Fury drew on similar aspects of the world of work, in this case following the efforts of men on salvage boats off the coast of Spain; the action sequences attracted particular critical attention.
Yet neither film was successful internationally, and in the late fifties Endfield become discouraged by the lack of opportunities in the industry. Several film projects collapsed, including adaptations of Evelyn Waugh's Scoop, and Mary Webb's Precious Bane, although he did direct Mysterious Island, a studio project that successfully exploited Ray Harryhausen's special effects to tell the Jules Verne story.
For several years the director worked on commercials, while he and Baker engaged in a long struggle to make Zulu, a recreation of the 1879 engagement between four thousand Zulu warriors and a small garrison of British soldiers at Rorke's Drift, in southern Africa. With a script by John Prebble, Endfield and Baker eventually achieved financing from Joseph Levine, as well as from Paramount. The resulting film was a huge success in Britain and has remained one of the most popular of British war films.
It was Endfield who took a chance on inexperienced 30-year-old actor Michael Caine to play one of the two British officers, and personally engaged the then Zulu chief, Prince Mangosuthu Buthelezi to play Cetshwayo, the King of the Zulus at the time. Caine has long recalled that it took an American to give this working-class actor the chance to play a British officer role. His acting career never looked back. The resulting film uses the epic scenery of the Drakensberg Mountains and the Royal National Park, establishing the beleaguered colonial garrison and then elegantly depicting the hour-long battle. For all the lack of historical context, and developed characters on the Zulu side, the film avoids jingoism, and presents the British officers as having a final sense of self-disgust at their survival.
Despite this success, Endfield struggled in the following years, as American financing for British projects became scarcer. His last film as a director was Universal Soldier, with George Lazenby, while he wrote the screenplay for Zulu Dawn, and a novel with the same title. The science fiction writer Brian Aldiss, who worked on several unrealised projects with the director, made his own comment: ‘I admired Cy. He never had another success like Zulu. But then, how many people could have achieved the sheer organisation and artistry that went into the film?’