Rudolph Cartier
Rudolph Cartier was an Austrian television director, filmmaker, screenwriter and producer who worked predominantly in British television, exclusively for the BBC. He is best known for his 1950s collaborations with screenwriter Nigel Kneale, most notably the Quatermass serials and their 1954 adaptation of George Orwell's dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four.
After studying architecture and then drama, Cartier began his career as a screenwriter and then film director in Berlin, working for UFA Studios. After a brief spell in the United States he moved to the United Kingdom in 1935. Initially failing to gain a foothold in the British film industry, he did some scripting work for BBC Television in 1939 before the service was suspended at the outbreak of the Second World War. After the war, he occasionally worked for British films before he was again hired by the BBC in 1952. He soon became one of the public service broadcaster's leading directors and went on to produce and direct over 120 productions in the next 24 years, ending his television career with the play Loyalties in 1976.
Active in both dramatic programming and opera, Cartier won the equivalent of a BAFTA in 1957 for his work in the former, and one of his operatic productions was given an award at the 1962 Salzburg Festival. The British Film Institute's "Screenonline" website describes him as "a true pioneer of television", while the critic Peter Black once wrote that: "Nobody was within a mile of Rudolph Cartier in the trick of making a picture on a TV screen seem as wide and as deep as CinemaScope."
Early life and career
Born in Vienna, Austria-Hungary, Cartier initially studied to become an architect, before changing career paths and enrolling to study drama at the Vienna Academy of Music and Dramatic Art. There he was taught by Max Reinhardt, who proved a major influence on Cartier. Reinhardt thought of a script as being similar to a musical score, which should be interpreted by a director in the same way as a musician interpreting a piece of music—an approach with which Cartier agreed.Cartier became involved in the film industry in 1929, when he successfully submitted a script to a company based in Berlin, Germany. He then became a staff scriptwriter for UFA Studios, the primary German film company of the era, for which he worked on crime films and thrillers. While at UFA, he worked with noted writers, directors and producers including Ewald André Dupont and Erich Pommer. In 1933 he became a film director, overseeing the thriller Invisible Opponent for producer Sam Spiegel.
The same year as Invisible Opponent was released, the Nazis came to power in Germany, and the Jewish Cartier left the country. Several members of Cartier's family who had remained in Europe, including his mother, were murdered in the Holocaust. Encouraged by a UFA colleague, Billy Wilder, to come to Hollywood, Cartier changed his surname and moved to the United States. However, unlike Wilder, Cartier did not find success in America, and in 1935 he moved again, to the United Kingdom.
In 1939, Cartier first worked for BBC Television when his script Rehearsal for a Drama was produced by the service. He had also worked on another play for the service, The Dead Eye, but due to the outbreak of the Second World War this was stopped at the production stage. Little further is recorded of Cartier's career until after the war, when he began writing storylines for several minor British films. He also worked as a film producer, overseeing a 1951 short film adaptation of the Sherlock Holmes story The Man with the Twisted Lip. Cartier returned for a time to the United States, where he studied production methods in the new medium of television.
In 1952, Michael Barry, with whom Cartier had worked on an aborted project in 1948, became the new Head of Drama at BBC Television and interviewed Cartier for a post as a staff television producer in the drama department, a job which also involved directing. At his interview, Cartier told Barry that he thought his department's output was "dreadful", and that television drama needed "new scripts and a new approach". In a 1990 interview about his career, he told BBC Two's The Late Show that the BBC drama department had "needed me like water in the desert". Barry shared many of Cartier's views on the need to improve television drama, and he hired him for the producer's job.
BBC television
Cartier's first BBC television production was a play entitled Arrow to the Heart, transmitted on the evening of 20 July 1952. It was initially adapted by Cartier from Albrecht Goes' novel Unruhige Nacht, but Barry felt that the dialogue was "too Germanic" and assigned drama department staff scriptwriter Nigel Kneale to edit the script. Arrow to the Heart was the first of many collaborations between the pair, who enjoyed during the next few years a highly productive working relationship, despite profound creative disagreements on occasion. Cartier and Kneale were an important presence in the British television drama of the era and were, according to television historian Lez Cooke, "responsible for introducing a completely new dimension to television drama in the early to mid-1950s".Collaborations with Nigel Kneale
Cartier and Kneale's first major production was the six-part serial The Quatermass Experiment, broadcast in the summer of 1953. A science-fiction story, it relates the sending of the first humans into space by Professor Bernard Quatermass and the consequences when an alien presence invades the crew's rocket during its flight and returns to Earth in the body of the one remaining crewmember, having absorbed the consciousnesses and shredded the bodies of the other two. A critical and popular success, The Quatermass Experiment has been described by the British Film Institute's Screenonline website as "one of the most influential series of the 1950s". Cartier's contribution to the serial's success was highlighted in his 1994 obituary in The Times newspaper, which also called the serial "a landmark in British television drama as much for its visual imagination as for its ability to shock and disturb".The success of The Quatermass Experiment led to two sequels, Quatermass II and Quatermass and the Pit, both produced and directed by Cartier and written by Kneale. Both were successful and critically acclaimed, and Cartier's production work on them became increasingly ambitious. For Quatermass II, he pre-filmed a significant amount of material on location, using 35 mm film, opening the drama out from a confined studio setting with the most ambitious location shooting yet attempted in British television. Cartier, with his previous experience as a film director, particularly enjoyed working on these cinema-style filmed scenes.
The appeal of the Quatermass serials has been attributed by the Museum of Broadcast Communications to the depiction of "A new range of gendered fears about Britain's postwar and post-colonial security. As a result, or perhaps simply because of Kneale and Cartier's effective combination of science fiction and poignant melodrama, audiences were captivated." The Screenonline website suggests that the visual impact of Cartier's interpretation of Kneale's scripts was a major factor in their success, which it attributes to their "originality, mass appeal and dynamism... The Quatermass Experiment became a landmark of science fiction and the cornerstone of the genre on British television."
Aside from the Quatermass serials, Cartier and Kneale collaborated on several one-off dramas, including literary and theatrical adaptations of Wuthering Heights and The Moment of Truth, as well as Kneale's own The Creature. Of particular note was their collaboration on an adaptation of George Orwell's novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, originally broadcast on 12 December 1954, regarded as Cartier's most famous work. The Times's review the day after its broadcast noted its "vividness... the two minutes' hate was, for instance, a wonderfully riotious orgy of vindictiveness." The production also attracted considerable controversy. There were questions asked in the House of Commons concerning some of the graphic scenes of horror in the play, and the BBC received several telephone calls threatening Cartier's life if the second live performance, scheduled for 16 December, went ahead. The BBC took these threats seriously enough to assign him bodyguards. Cartier appeared live on television himself to defend the production in a studio debate, and eventually the Board of Governors of the BBC voted that the second performance should go ahead as planned. The production had by this time received the backing of the Duke of Edinburgh, who commented during a speech to the Royal Society of Arts that he and the Queen had watched and enjoyed the first performance.
Nineteen Eighty-Four had been a success, but it was also one of the most expensive television dramas ever made in the UK. Cartier often spent large amounts of money on his productions. Earlier in 1954, Michael Barry had heavily criticised him for the money and resources he had expended in an adaptation of Rebecca. In a memo written after that production's transmission, Barry admonished Cartier for his over-ambitious production:
The performance of Rebecca seems to me to have taken us further into the danger area instead of showing any improvement. I am unable to defend at a time when departmental costs and scene loads are in an acute state the load imposed by Rebecca on Design and Supply and the expenditure upon extras and costumes... the vast area of the hall and the stairway never justified the great expenditure of effort required in building and one is left with a very clear impression of reaching a point where the department must be accused of not knowing what it is doing.