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UCLA Film & Television Archive is pleased to present this series framing the turbulent cinematic legacy of writer/director Cy Endfield (1914-1995). Long admired for iconic works such as Hell Drivers (1957) and Zulu (1964), Endfield is doubly fascinating when viewed through the prism of his lesser-known films, especially those made in England where he worked in exile under the pall of McCarthyism. Trained in progressive theater, and loosely connected with Communist intellectual circles at the start of his Hollywood career, Endfield’s disillusionment with the Party could not protect him from HUAC scrutiny. As with several Hollywood contemporaries, he relocated to Europe, ultimately generating more than half his cinematic output from a base in London. His expatriate status, as much as his political background, informed numerous films, positing a diegetic world that turns less on a hero’s journey in pursuit of a goal, than on being plunged headlong into a maelstrom of intersecting dangers. This bleak outlook, closely related to postwar film noir (to which Endfield was a contributor) applies across numerous genres and settings, including the workplace, inhospitable landscapes and institutions of social control such as jail, the military, the press and the political realm. Yet this systemic outlook on power structures (a somewhat Marxist, if not Communist perspective) nonetheless provided for compelling human drama, with space allowed for catharsis, and occasional transcendence. These same convictions undergird Enfield’s distinct filmmaking voice, and inform this examination of his fascinating career.
Note: This series coincides with the publication of Brian Neve's biography, The Many Lives of Cy Endfield: Film Noir, The Blacklist, and Zulu. Neve will be on hand to sign copies of the book at the series opening on January 9, and will introduce several programs in the series.
Thanks to: Brian Neve; Suzannah Endfield Olivier; Jed Rapfogel—Anthology Film Archives; Jim Healy—Cinematheque (Madison, WI); Fleur Buckley—BFI; Anne Mora, Mary Keene, Katie Trainor—Museum of Modern Art.
