Cy enfield biography of martin

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In a circuitous way this brought him to Hollywood in 1940. He made his own debut film with Inflation (1942), a witty propaganda short for MGM warning the wartime public against the dangers of excessive materialism. Most notable were two striking and powerful independent productions of 1950. There have been conflicting stories as to how he came to the attention of Orson Welles, who was known to have a long-standing fascination with magic.

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce banned his film as "excessively anti-capitalist" and kept it from public view for half a century.

Following wartime service, Endfield wrote several scripts for radio and television. Endfield first met Welles in a magic shop, but it was his producer and business manager Jack Moss, himself a magician, who hired Endfield for the Mercury Theatre as a "general factotum".

While completing his education he became enamored with progressive theatre and appeared in a New Haven production of a minor Russian play in 1934. Its brawling, brute vigour bears out Endfield's conviction that "there is plenty of natural drama in the everyday jobs of men with physical contact with reality ... This sentimental drama was also Endfield's first film with the Welsh actor Stanley Baker, who became his most frequent collaborator, though its bourgeois setting seems uncongenial for both star and director.

That same year he helmed another independently produced minor masterpiece (on a budget of $500,000), the stylish and moody film noir The Underworld Story (1950). Unable to continue working in Hollywood, he was forced to move to the United Kingdom, where he wrote screenplays under various pseudonyms.

In 1958, Endfield was nominated for a BAFTA Award for Best British Screenplay for the thriller "Hell Drivers." He also directed the film, which depicted a deadly race between truck drivers after they clashed with each other.

In 1961, Endfield directed "Mysterious Island," an excellent film about people stranded on an uninhabited island.

"Zulu" received numerous awards, including a BAFTA Award in 1965.

Endfield's last directorial work was the war drama "Universal Soldier," which tells the story of a mercenary who arrived in London on a mission but ultimately decided to reject it due to his memories of war.

Overall, Endfield directed around 30 projects and wrote screenplays for over two dozen films.

The original story was penned by military writer John Prebble and Endfield had written the screenplay as early as 1959. In return for his expertise, Endfield was permitted to sit in on the making of Journey Into Fear (1943) and The Magnificent Ambersons (1942), learning valuable lessons in the process. Apart from co-writing the screenplay and publishing a novelisation of Zulu Dawn (Douglas Hickox, 1979), a belated prequel to Zulu, Endfield subsequently pursued a variety of other interests, including designing a gold-and-silver chess set and inventing a computerised pocket note-taker, the Microwriter.

In addition to his work in film, Endfield is known as the co-inventor of the Microwriter, a one-handed keyboard for typing texts. In this scathing attack on unscrupulous journalism, with the lead character being inherently unsympathetic, Endfield elicited one of the finest performances of his career from Dan Duryea.

The ideas and sentiments expressed in these films were ill-timed, in that they drew the attention of HUAC--The House Un-American Activities Committee, which was tasked with rooting out Communists and other "subversives" in the entertainment industry--which particularly denounced "Sound of Fury" as being un-American.

After the death of his friend Stanley Baker in 1976, Endfield devoted himself to his "technical period". Historical incongruities apart, "Zulu" succeeded as pure spectacle, much in the same way as the big-budget Hollywood epics of the same period.

Endfield lost interest in filmmaking after shooting the anti-war movie Universal Soldier (1971).

As the supercilious upper-crust Lt. Bromhead, Michael Caine, then relatively unknown, began on his path to fame with an excellent performance, alongside Stanley Baker. It was not until Endfield's harrowing indictment of mob rule, The Sound of Fury (1950), that he "arrived" as a director of note.