Jack Gold Biography
Jack Gold was a film director born in London in 1930. He obtained degrees in law and economics from London University and later joined the BBC, where he worked as an editor on the news Tonight with journalists Alan Whicker and Fyfe Robertson. His experience at the BBC allowed him to work faster than was possible under the film industry's union agreements.
Gold showed humanistic concerns in his work, as in the case of Death in the Morning, a 1964 anti-foxhunting film for the BBC, and a Marxist perspective in his direction of Jim Allen's 1967 television comedy The Lump, which he harshly criticized the construction industry.
His first theatrical film, 1968's The Bofors Gun, scripted by John McGrath, dealt with the conflict between a young officer and an embittered, unstable soldier in a peacetime army unit. His second film, 1969's The Reckoning, featured a violent antihero in a boardroom.
The 1970s brought some acclaimed films, such as 1973's The National Health and 1975's Man Friday, a variation of the Robinson Crusoe story that subverted the colonialist theme of the original. Gold was also the director of 1976's Aces High, an aerial version of RC Sherriff's classic 1929 anti-war comedy, Journey's End.
The Medusa Touch, a 1978 horror-thriller, is considered Gold's most stylistically exuberant work. Richard Burton gave a compelling performance as an intellectual anarchist with the telekinetic power to cause disaster.
In the 1970s, Gold worked in both film and television, but thereafter, aside from an outstanding 1984 moving comedy, The Chain, he concentrated on the small screen. Gold was praised by actors for his attention to his characters' inner motivations and his concern for the truth of a situation. His television work includes 1975's The Naked Civil Servant and 1998's Goodnight Mister Tom, both featuring performances by John Hurt and John Thaw respectively.
