"The best entry yet in the British Film Makers series, this is an astonishingly detailed work. A truly remarkable achievement, it brings Britain's post-war film industry vividly to life. " Howard Maxford, Film Review An authoritative account of the career of Sydney Box, (1940-1965), one of British cinema's most successful and significant producers. This study highlights the crucial but often misunderstood role that the producer plays in the film making process and, using largely unpublished material, affords an exceptional insight into the workings of the film industry during one of its most...

This is the first sustained and comprehensive critical study of Anthony Asquith. Ryall sets the director's work in the context of British cinema from the silent period to the 1960s, and examines the artistic and cultural influences within which his films can be understood. Asquith's silent films were compared favourably to those of his eminent contemporary Alfred Hitchcock, but his career faltered during the 1930s. However, the success of Pygmalion (1938) and French Without Tears (1939), based on plays by George Bernard Shaw and Terence Rattigan, together with his significant contributions to...

Perhaps best known for his controversial 1981 adaptation of John Fowles' The French Lieutenant's Woman, Czech-born refugee Karel Reisz (1926-2002) is widely regarded as one of the seminal figures in post-war British cinema. Along with Lindsay Anderson and Tony Richardson, Reisz was a founder member of the independent Free Cinema 'movement' which attacked the parochial middle-class values of home-grown studio product with a vigorous commitment to everyday working-class subject matter and a poetically-charged film style, the aesthetic foundation for the international success of Reisz's first...

"Really refreshing...treated with perception and intelligence " Barry Forshaw, Crime Time 2005 No 43 This book traces the career of Roy Ward Baker, one of the great survivors of the British film and television industry. He directed the landmark British film Morning Departure (1949), worked at Twentieth Century Fox in Hollywood in the early 1950s where he directed Marilyn Monroe's 'breakthrough' film (Don't Bother to Knock), and followed this with a succession of fine films for Rank, culminating in the best version of the Titanic disaster, A Night to Remember in 1958. Yet within three years he...

First published on the fiftieth anniversary of his directorial debut, this book is the first to examine the work of a man once hailed as the finest film-maker to emerge from the British studio system after the Second World War. J. Lee Thompson first came to notice as a talented teenage playwright before entering the film business as a scriptwriter. In the unadventurous world of British film-making in the 1950s, he established himself as a controversial figure known for his innovative ideas and public clashes with the Censor. Before being recruited by Hollywood he made a string of classic...

Richard Attenborough's film career has stretched across seven decades; surprisingly, Sally Dux's book is the first detailed scholarly analysis of his work as a filmmaker. Concentrating on his work behind the camera, she explores his initial role as a producer, including his partnerships with Bryan Forbes in Beaver Films (1959-64) and with Allied Film Makers (1960-64). As we know, Attenborough went on to direct twelve films, many of which achieved great acclaim, most notably Gandhi, which won eight Academy Awards in 1982.Attenborough is most renowned for his biographical films including Young...

'A rule of mine is this', said William Goldman in 1983, 'there are always three hot directors and one of them is always David Lean.' One of the best known and most admired of British film makers, David Lean had a directorial career that spanned five decades and encompassed everything from the intimate black-and-white romance of Brief Encounter (1945) to the spectacular Technicolor epic of Lawrence of Arabia (1962).
This book offers comprehensive coverage of every feature film directed by Lean, yielding new insights on the established classics of his career as well as its lesser-known...

'A rule of mine is this', said William Goldman in 1983, 'there are always three hot directors and one of them is always David Lean.' One of the best known and most admired of British film makers, David Lean had a directorial career that spanned five decades and encompassed everything from the intimate black-and-white romance of Brief Encounter (1945) to the spectacular Technicolor epic of Lawrence of Arabia (1962).

This book offers comprehensive coverage of every feature film directed by Lean, yielding new insights on the established classics of his career as well as its lesser-known...