The Many Lives of Cy Endfield
Film Noir, the Blacklist, and Zulu
Publication Year: 2015
The Many Lives of Cy Endfield is the first book on this fascinating figure. The fruit of years of archival research and personal interviews by Brian Neve, it documents Endfield’s many identities: among them second-generation immigrant, Jew, Communist, and exile. Neve paints detailed scenes not only of the political and personal dramas of the blacklist era, but also of the attempts by Hollywood directors in the postwar 1940s and early 1950s to address social and political controversies of the day. Out of these efforts came two crime melodramas (what would become known as film noir) on inequalities of class and race: The Underworld Story and The Sound of Fury (also known as Try and Get Me!). Neve reveals the complex production and reception histories of Endfield’s films, which the critic Jonathan Rosenbaum saw as reflective of “an uncommon intelligence so radically critical of the world we live in that it’s dangerous.”
The Many Lives of Cy Endfield is at once a revealing biography of an independent, protean figure, an insight into film industry struggles, and a sensitive and informed study of an underappreciated body of work.
Published by: University of Wisconsin Press
Series: Wisconsin Film Studies
Cover
Title Page, Copyright
Acknowledgments
This section thanks those who have helped me in this project. Of the archivists who assisted me I would like to give particular thanks to Barbara Hall and other staff at the Margaret Herrick Library, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS); and to Ned Comstock at the USC Archives of Performing Arts. Larry Ceplair was also of...
Introduction
In late 1989, while visiting the Lime Grove studios of the BBC in relation to a short television piece on the new British film Fellow Traveller, I spotted a man being interviewed in an adjacent room. It was Cy Endfield, who was there with his wife, Maureen (Mo), to talk about his direct experience of the Hollywood blacklist. Endfield was well known as the...
1. Early Life and the Thirties
Many Jews left the Russian empire in the first decade of the twentieth century, escaping the pogroms in their homeland and looking for new opportunities in the cities of the northeastern United States. Binem (later Benjamin) Endfield (this surname was used on his immigration papers) was born in 1888 in the Polish city of Łód´z, which was then...
2. The War and After
In September 1940, after fifteen months of married life, Endfield and Fanny Osborne (she adopted Osborne as her stage name) arrived in Los Angeles. At this time he was uncertain as to whether the move was permanent, having discussed returning to New York to resume a teaching role at the New Theatre School. The couple stayed for a few weeks with...
3. The Sound of Fury and HUAC
This short period from 1949 to 1951 was one in which Endfield’s profile was on the rise, but it was also a time when unfolding national and international events would impact his life and career in a dramatic (and negative) manner. By June 1950 he had directed one well-received crime melodrama and was working on another; both had budgets that were...
4. Britain in the Fifties
Ever the materialist, Endfield presented his migration to Britain in primarily economic terms, while also acknowledging that there was a moral dimension to his decision. He wrote in 1992: “I later chose exile—1951—when my options for economic survival reduced to zero when I was ‘named.’ The political enthusiasms attributed to me were already...
5. Zulu and the Sixties
The genesis of Zulu (1964) was a long and tortuous one. Endfield had been working in television advertising from around 1959, and it was the executive Douglas Rankin who alerted him to a short article on the engagement in 1879 between some four thousand Zulu warriors and a garrison of around one hundred British soldiers at the mission station...
6. Magic, Invention, and Telluride
The early seventies saw the withdrawal of American movie capital from Britain and the beginning of a movement of British directors to the United States, where a new American cinema more attuned to the youth market was slowly emerging, with the old studios collapsing and becoming integrated into new conglomerates. At the end of his fifties, Endfield...
Conclusion
There was an air of regret in Cy Endfield’s interviews toward the end of his life, when his work attracted some public attention. Perhaps he was aware that he could have achieved more in the cinema and that the recognition, while gratifying, had come too late. There had been several “false starts.” At the age of twenty-nine he had made...
E-ISBN-13: 9780299303730
E-ISBN-10: 029930373X
Print-ISBN-13: 9780299303747
Print-ISBN-10: 0299303748
Page Count: 292
Illustrations: 15 b/w photos
Publication Year: 2015
Series Title: Wisconsin Film Studies
Series Editor Byline: Patrick McGilligan, Series Editor
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