Cy Endfield Biography
Cyril Raker Endfield was born in Scranton in 1914. He attended Yale University, where he was briefly involved in the Young Communist League. He also developed an interest in magic and card tricks, forming the basis for a later reputation as one of the world's leading magicians.
After working with progressive theater groups in New York, touring the Catskills mountain towns with his satirical revue troupe, and running an amateur theater in Montreal, Endfield moved to Los Angeles, where his card skills impressed so much Orson Welles that he was hired as an apprentice in Welles' production company, Mercury. He made his film debut with Inflation (1942), a witty propaganda shorthand for MGM that warned wartime audiences of the dangers of excessive materialism. It was condemned as anti-capitalist by the United States Chamber of Commerce and shelved, not being shown publicly until nearly fifty years later. His seven American features are all low-budget affairs, including three Poverty Row B films, an RKO Tarzan adventure and The Argyle Secrets, a mystery based on his radio show. Most notable were two striking and powerful independent productions from 1950. The Sound of Fury is perhaps Endfield's most popular work: despite its tendency to preach, its story of an ordinary man drawn into crime and ultimately the victim of a lynching offers little in the way of easy comfort or optimism. Less celebrated but equally remarkable is The Underworld Story, a largely subversive film noir starring Dan Duryea as perhaps the least sympathetic protagonist in the history of the genre. In 1951, Endfield was identified as a communist by HUAC and, rather than name names or submit to the blacklist, chose to leave Hollywood for Britain. Like Joseph Losey and others, he found work directing filmed series for television. Three episodes of Colonel March of Scotland Yard, starring Boris Karloff, were edited together as Colonel March Investigates (1953), his first British feature film. Four more B-list thrillers followed, all starring second-rate American protagonists, and directed and written under a pseudonym to avoid distribution problems in the United States. A friend, Charles de Lautour, lent his name as "cover" for two of these films and as co-director for a third, Child in the House. This romantic drama was also Endfield's first film with Welsh actor Stanley Baker, who became his most frequent collaborator, although the bourgeois setting seems uncongenial to both star and director. The next Endfield films were more conventional assignments. Jet Storm is a routine "gang danger" suspenser of a type common in the 1950s. Mysterious Island is a Jules Verne fantasy with several cheesy Ray Harryhausen monsters. The poorly received Hide and Seek, a Cold War comedy-drama starring Ian Carmichael, sat on the shelf for nearly two years before being released. During this period Endfield worked extensively in television commercials and also returned to the stage, directing Bob Monkhouse and Michael Crawford in a long-running West End run of Neil Simon's Come Blow Your Horn. Endfield's latest film, the most openly "political", Universal Soldier stars George Lazenby as a mercenary seduced by the peace movement. Loosely structured and semi-improvised in style, it is, frankly, an incoherent mess, although the director himself appears in a small role with some significantly autobiographical dialogue. In addition to writing the screenplay and publishing a novel of Zulu Dawn (Douglas Hickox, 1979), a belated prequel to Zulu, Endfield subsequently pursued a number of other interests, including designing a gold and gold chess set silver and the invention of a computerized chess game. pocket note taker, the Microwriter. He remained resident in Great Britain until his death from cerebral vascular disease on 16 April 1995.
