Henri Cornelius Biography
Henry Cornelius was born in Cape Town, to a German-Jewish South African family, on 18 August 1913. When he was still young his family moved back to Berlin, where at the age of 18 he was accepted to study acting and theater production with Max Reinhardt. Before the age of 20 he was producing plays at the Schiller Theater in Berlin, but he left Germany with the advent of the Nazis and moved to Paris, where he worked as a journalist and entered the film industry as an assistant editor at the Studios de Montrouge. From there he moved to London, where René Clair was about to begin work on The Ghost Goes West for Alexander Korda. Clair wanted a French-speaking assistant editor, "inexperienced enough to take rather than give advice"; Cornelius fit the bill perfectly. Cornelius remained with Korda for the next four years. He was promoted to editor of Men Are Not Gods (m. Walter Reisch, 1936), and also worked on Forget Me Not (m. Zoltan Korda, 1936), The Drum (m. Zoltan Korda, 1938), The Four Feathers (m. Zoltan Korda, 1939) and The Lion Has Wings (d. Michael Powell/Adrian Brunel/Brian Desmond Hurst, 1939). In 1939 he briefly joined Alberto Cavalcanti at the GPO Film Unit, then returned to his home country to become deputy director of the film section of the South African government's propaganda unit. In this capacity he wrote, produced, directed and edited around fifteen propaganda short films. He returned to Britain in 1943 and at Cavalcanti's suggestion joined Ealing Studios as an associate producer (producer, in fact, at this studio). Cornelius' first assignment was the dramatic documentary, Painted Boats (1945), directed by Charles Crichton. He went on to produce two key Ealing films: Hue and Cry (1946), again for Crichton, the first of the true "Ealing comedies", and Robert Hamer's poetic realism-influenced East End drama It Always Rains on Sunday (1947) . Their success convinced Michael Balcon to let Cornelius try his hand at directing a feature film. Passport to Pimlico (1949), in which the London borough of Pimlico declares independence from Britain and shakes off post-war controls, has become one of the most fondly remembered Ealing comedies, a classic example of the "mild revolution " by Balcony. But to Balcon's dismay, filming went over schedule and over budget, not entirely Cornelius' fault; the action, set during the summer of 1947, one of the driest on record, was filmed during the summer of 1948, one of the rainiest. Cornelius seemed poised to become one of Britain's most important directors. But ill health was hindering his career and he directed only two more films. I Am a Camera (1955) was a double adaptation, based on John Van Druten's Broadway play, which was itself adapted from Christopher Isherwood's Berlin novels, Mr Norris Changes Trains and Goodbye to Berlin. The material - which later provided the basis for the hugely successful musical Kander and Ebb's Cabaret - was heavily made-up and the film showed little sense of style of the time. He was further burdened by Laurence Harvey, disastrously miscast as Herr Issyvoo. Isherwood himself described it as "a truly shocking and shameful mess", and the US critic Walter Kerr dismissed it with the immortal crack, "Me no Leica". Cornelius' last film, which he scripted from a story by Paul Gallico, was Next to No Time (1958), a flaccidly whimsical comedy about a mild-mannered engineer (played by Kenneth More) on an ocean liner. Learning that each day on board he gains "a lost hour" to compensate for the time zone change, he is encouraged to change his life and realize his ambitions. By the time the film was released, Cornelius had succumbed to his illness. He died in London on 2 May 1958.
