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 was unable to secure a job in the British film industry and he moved to television series such as The Avengers, The Saint and Minder. Later Baker re-emerged as a major director of science-fiction (Quatermass and the Pit) and horror films (Asylum).
Geoff Mayer provides an industrial and aesthetic context in which to understand the interrelationship between a skilled classical director and the transformation of the British film industry in the 1950s.
- ISBN10 0719063558
- ISBN13 9780719063558
- Publish Date 1 April 2011 (first published 1 October 2004)
- Publish Status Active
- Publish Country GB
- Imprint Manchester University Press
- Format Paperback
- Pages 232
- Language English