(posted 7818 days ago)The Times
Obituaries
November 28, 2002Karel Reisz
Director who spearheaded the Sixties film revolution and later changed course to find a new raison d'être in the theatreA leading figure in the British cinema renaissance that took place in the the early 1960s, Karel Reisz made his name with Saturday Night and Sunday Morning which burst like a thunderclap on British cinema audiences in 1960. An adaptation of Alan Sillitoe’s novel of working-class life in the Midlands, it starred Albert Finney as a young factory worker, Arthur Seaton, trying to kick over the traces of a stultifying job on a car production line through a social life that was a violent rejection of the regimentation of the workplace.
In the year 1960, the Sixties as they .developed - broad-minded about sex, class and bad behaviour - had, in reality, not yet begun. And Finney’s hero - self-destructively drunken, rebellious, self-loathing and sexually predatory - delighted the audiences that flocked to see the film from across the social spectrum. It not only pitted a working class against bourgeois respectability, but youth against an older (even if working-class) generation inclined in itself to capitulate to convention. Its message was that while parents were sitting in watching TV on Saturday nights, the young were out drinking - and probably copulating - as if there were no tomorrow and, as a consequence, liable to get into all sorts of trouble. For the first time in British film was articulated a viewpoint, given its form at the outset of the film by its protagonist: “What I’m out for is a good time! The rest is propaganda!”
The film certainly frightened the horses. In Warwickshire, birthplace of Shakespeare no less, it was banned, leading the production company to declare stoutly that it would not cut the bedroom scenes objected to by the county council. British film was certainly never to be the same again, and Saturday Night was the progenitor of many offspring, notably, and hard on its heels, A Taste of Honey (1961) and A Kind of Loving (1962).
Such was the impact of the film, a huge popular as well as a critical success, that the rest of Reisz’s career could scarcely avoid seeming something of an anticlimax. But if his later films did not generate the same excitement, they were invariably made with intelligence, a sharp eye for detail and a high degree of cinematic skill.
Reisz was a methodical worker, who liked to prepare his films thoroughly and leave nothing to chance. He was also very particular about his choice of subject and declared that he would rather not work at all than go ahead with a project in which he was less than fully engaged.
For these reasons he was not a prolific director and after Saturday Night and Sunday Morning he completed only eight feature films over the next 30 years. Yet each was different from the one before, discouraging attempts to analyse Reisz’s output in terms of common themes and preoccupations. He was, at heart, a craftsman, relying on the virtues of script, acting and cinematic technique.
In the 1990s Reisz developed a successful career as a director for the stage. In this, too, his tastes were eclectic, varying from mainstream modern classics to the minimalism of Harold Pinter, with whom he had worked on what was, perhaps, his second most discussed film, The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1981).
Karel Reisz was born in Octava, Czechoslovakia, on July 21, 1926. He arrived in Britain from Prague at the age of 12 on a kindertransport train as a refugee from the persecution of Jews in his Nazi-occupied country. His parents died in Auschwitz. He was educated at Leighton Park School, Reading, where he made some 16mm films.
During the Second World War he served in a Czech Royal Air Force squadron. Afterwards he read chemistry at Emmanuel College, Cambridge, and taught for two years in a North London school.
His interest in film led him to the magazine Sequence, where in company with other young critics such as Lindsay Anderson and Gavin Lambert he sustained a vigorous attack on the feebleness of the British cinema. Less contentiously, he wrote The Technique of Film Editing, which became a standard manual on its publication in 1953. In the early 1950s, too, he was in charge of programme planning at the National Film Theatre.
From Sequence developed the movement known as Free Cinema, whose leading lights were Reisz, Anderson and Tony Richardson. The principal ideas of Free Cinema were that film artists (that is, directors) should have the opportunities for personal expression; and that films should reflect the problems and issues of contemporary life.
The group put these precepts into practice with a series of documentaries shown at the National Film Theatre between 1956 and 1959. Reisz’s films were Momma Don’t Allow (1956), a portrait of a North London jazz club co-directed with Tony Richardson; and We Are The Lambeth Boys (1958), a sympathetic study of a youth club in Kennington. The second was sponsored by the Ford Motor Company, of which Reisz was films officer.
One by one the leaders of Free Cinema went into feature films. Reisz made Saturday Night and Sunday Morning for Woodfall, a production company formed by Richardson with the playwright John Osborne. It was an auspicious debut, showing a feeling - rare in British films up to then - for the industrial working-class milieu, and launching Albert Finney as a powerful new actor.
Reisz acted as producer on Lindsay Anderson’s first feature, This Sporting Life (1963), and then tried to set up a film about the Australian outlaw Ned Kelly. When this proved abortive he accepted an invitation from MGM to do a remake of Emlyn Williams’s sinister stage crime thriller of 1935, Night Must Fall, which he also co-produced and which came out in 1964. For a man who had campaigned to put the British cinema more in touch with contemporary life, it was, perhaps, a strange choice; and the film was coolly received.
A more ambitious exercise was Morgan - A Suitable Case for Treatment (1965), derived from a television play by David Mercer about a young artist - engagingly played by the gangling David Warner - suffering from schizophrenia. As a comic treatment of madness, the film was highly successful though marred at times by the director’s over-indulgence in visual gimmicry.
Isadora (1968) was an ambitious attempt at the difficult task of presenting the life of the unconventional American character dancer, Isadora Duncan, with Vanessa Redgrave striking in the title role.
During the 1970s Reisz made only two films, both in the US. The Gambler (1975) starred James Caan as a man being destroyed by his obsessive desire to play the casinos; while Who’ll Stop the Rain (1978) - British title Dog Soldiers - was a drug-pushing thriller set in the shadow of the Vietnam war. Both hinted at an underlying sickness in American society.
In 1981 he realised a long cherished project, The French Lieutenant’s Woman, based on John Fowles’s complex novel about a Victorian gentleman’s passion for a woman jilted by a French lover. With a script by Harold Pinter, which controversially introduced a parallel story set in the present day, and a sensitive performance from the American actress Meryl Streep (who won an Oscar nomination), it confirmed Reisz as a film-maker of stature.
Sweet Dreams (1986) was a biopic about the effect on her marriage of the folk-singer Patsy Kline’s career success, while Everybody Wins (1990) was a study of small-town corruption in which Nick Nolte’s private detective is seduced by the unstable woman (played by Debra Winger) who has hired him.
From 1990 onwards, Reisz saw his directing future as being linked inextricably with the theatre and he took on projects both modern minimalist and traditional. Among other things, he resumed a collaboration with Pinter, whose Moonlight he directed at the Donmar Warehouse, London, and in New York in 1994 and 1995. His flawless direction of a revival of Pinter’s 1982 play A Kind of Alaska, first at the Gate Theatre, Dublin, and later at the Donmar, was also much admired, when it was put on there as part of a treble bill of Pinter plays in 1998. Act Sans Paroles (2000) was a short film of the Beckett play that had been done at the Gate.
But Reisz did not eschew the traditional theatre: among other modern classics he tackled Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, and Eugene O’Neill’s A Long Day’s Journey Into Night, and was quite at home with the conventionality of Terence Rattigan’s early 1950s drama of infidelity and attempted suicide, The Deep Blue Sea.
Reisz’s marriage, in 1953, to his first wife, Julia, was dissolved in 1963. In that year he married the actress Betsy Blair. She and the three sons of his first marriage survive him.
Karel Reisz, film and theatre director, was born in Octava, Czechoslovakia, on July 21, 1926. He died of a blood disorder in London on November 25, 2002, aged 76.