The Many Lives of Cy Endfield: Film Noir, the Blacklist, and Zulu by Brian Neve (review)

Born at the beginning of World War I to a working-class Jewish family in Scranton, Pennsylvania, Cyril (Cy) Endfield attended Yale University and then lived in New York City, where he joined the New Theatre League School and dabbled in Communism in the mid-1930s, before moving to Los Angeles in 1940 to try his luck as a screenwriter and director in Hollywood. Eleven years later, he was blacklisted. By 1953 he had moved to England, never to return to the States, and died in 1995 in an English town called Shipston-on-Stour, not far from Stratford-upon-Avon.

Brian Neve, a professor of politics and film at the University of Bath in the United Kingdom, states upfront his belief that historians have neglected Cy Endfield's influence, notably "his contribution to late wartime and postwar film style … film noir," and that Endfield's work deserves reconsideration (6). In particular, Neve notes that The Underworld Story and The Sound of Fury/Try and Get Me! from 1950 merit a place alongside John Huston's Asphalt Jungle (1951) and Abraham Polonsky's Force of Evil (1948), other important early social realist film noir features.

Neve structures his biography of Endfield chronologically, but his focus is on "the main outlines of Endfield's life as a context to the films" (217). Neve discusses the time Orson Welles walked into Bert Wheeler's Magic Shop on Hollywood Boulevard (Endfield was a lifelong magic devotee) where Endfield was passing time—a happenstance that gave the novice his first break at RKO—through to his best-known film, the British epic Zulu (1964), with Michael Caine in his first starring role, and afterwards through the last three decades of his life, which Endfield mostly spent away from filmmaking. The book, Neve tells us, sprang from his own chance encounter with Endfield, whom he spotted at Lime Grove Studios in London and subsequently interviewed for three hours in 1989.

Neve shares the backstory of every Endfield film in great detail: how each film was made, the setbacks, rejections, budgets, players, and (usually small) triumphs. This is meticulous work, but the result can feel episodic. A more narrative-driven tale might have begun with a dramatization, say, of September 1951, when a screenwriter named Martin Berkeley appeared before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) and named 160 names, including Cy Endfield's. In other parts of the book, however, Neve's approach works well, especially when he interlaces the plots of Endfield's films with contemporary events, such as Endfield's short film, Inflation (1942), that should have been his big break, but instead was pulled just before its release for its critique of "the American business way" (43).

Most important for oral historians, though, is Neve's use of transcript excerpts from his interviews with Endfield and other family members, which he weaves so fluidly into his narrative that he nearly camouflages them, making them indistinguishable from other primary sources. Without the footnotes indicating that the words in quotations are from an interview, the reader could as easily think they were taken from a personal letter (a primary source that Neve uses prodigiously throughout), or even a secondary source, such as a newspaper clipping, rather than from an interview he conducted himself. Neve does not treat oral histories as supplementary material, but as core primary sources.

Having said that, I have one quibble with Neve's book: the first time we get a piece of uninterrupted dialogue without paraphrasing is on page fifty-four. Not surprisingly for oral historians, with Enfield's voice uninterrupted, the man comes to life, and so does his story: "So by the postwar period, 1945-48, I began to treat with great suspicion the trials that Stalin was having, where all his best friends were supposed to be German spies" (55). But these gems are sparse within the text, as...