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Fred Zinnemann
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Director Fred Zinnemann (1907 - 1977) was one of the central European-born filmmakers who shaped the classic era of Hollywood film. He directed films whose images are etched deeply into the imaginations of filmgoers everywhere, especially the 1951 Western "High Noon" and the wartime drama "From Here to Eternity", in 1953.
Atrue craftsman of cinema, Zinnemann worked slowly. He made only about 20 feature films over his long career, but many of them were high-minded, detailed films only slightly less significant than his two great classics. Schooled in documentary techniques when he was young, Zinnemann did much to give mainstream American film a straightforward, realistic look. His handling of actors was superb, and a long list of future stars began their careers facing the lens of his camera. The most distinctive characteristic of Zinnemann's films, however, was their consistent focus on integrity as a theme. That integrity carried over into Zinnemann's approach to filmmaking; although he was not of a revolutionary temperament, he often faced down Hollywood money men and insisted on making films as he thought best.
Distracted from Law Studies
Zinnemann was born in Rzeszów, Poland, on April 29, 1907, and grew up in Vienna, Austria. He was of Jewish background, and his father, a doctor, expected him to pursue a professional career. After going to a college-preparatory high school, the Franz-Josef Gymnasium, Zinnemann dutifully enrolled in law classes at the University of Vienna. But he was bored with the law and discouraged about his prospects. "As a Jew, one was a second-class citizen," Zinnemann told David Robinson of London's Guardian newspaper. "I would probably have become a doctor like my father, but there were too many doctors after the first world war, so I was made to study law. To avoid the boredom of the lectures, I went to the movies."
That was during the classic era of European silent film, and Zinnemann saw one directorial masterpiece after another: Sergei Eisenstein's The Battleship Potemkin from Russia, Erich von Stroheim's Greed from Germany, and King Vidor's war drama The Big Parade from the United States. Zinnemann's parents resisted his desire to study film, but eventually gave in and allowed him to attend the Ecole Technique de Photographie et Cinématographie in Paris, France, one of just two film schools in Europe at the time. He had trouble getting a permit to work in France and so moved to Berlin, where he served as an assistant cameraman on several films and met a group of young directors who were thinking of seeking their fortunes in the growing American film industry. Zinnemann sailed for America himself in 1929, arrived in New York on the day the stock market crashed, and took a Greyhound bus to California.
If Zinnemann had stayed in Germanic Europe, he was quoted as saying in the Times of London, "I'd be dead by now. Probably not even buried." Zinnemann's parents, indeed, died in the Holocaust. But Zinnemann prospered in Hollywood. He landed a job as an extra in the antiwar classic All Quiet on the Western Front and was hired as an assistant by the pioneering documentary filmmaker Robert Flaherty, the director of Nanook of the North. Zinnemann accompanied Flaherty back to Europe to work on a documentary set in Central Asia. The film fell through, but Zinnemann benefited from long discussions with Flaherty. "He influenced me in every possible way, not only technically, but also in what I learned from him by being his assistant, his whole spirit of being his own man, of being independent of the general spirit of Hollywood, to the point where he didn't worry about working there," Zinnemann told Brian Neve of Cineaste.
Back in the Western hemisphere, Zinnemann directed a documentary, Los redes (The Waves), that was funded by the Mexican government and dealt with the lives of fishermen in the Veracruz area. Armed with a letter of introduction from Flaherty, he got a job at the MGM studio. Zinnemann worked his way up the studio hierarchy in the late 1930s, starting out as a film cutter and later being allowed to direct short subjects. He married English-born Renée Bartlett, a costume assistant, in 1936; they had a son, Tim, who went into the film industry. The following year, Zinnemann became an American citizen. One of his short subjects, That Mothers Might Live (about deaths in childbirth), won an Academy Award in 1938.
Directed Film About German War Resister
It was during World War II that Zinnemann was elevated to the roster of feature-film directors at MGM. After the crime potboiler Kid Glove Killer in 1942 he made his first serious film two years later: The Seventh Cross, with an all-star cast that included Spencer Tracy, Jessica Tandy and Hume Cronyn, dealt with a group of German concentration camp escapees. The subject matter of moral individuals surrounded by corrupt organizations or societies would attract Zinnemann throughout his career.
Zinnemann's realistic style proved invaluable in bringing to life the war's aftermath; some dubbed his style neorealist by analogy with the gritty style of contemporary Italian films, but Zinnemann credited his training with Flaherty as a more important influence. The Search (1948), starring a then-unknown Montgomery Clift, marked Zinnemann's emergence as a distinctive talent; its story of European war orphans mixed documentary-style footage with scripted narrative. Clift was cast at Zinnemann's insistence, and he became the first of a long list of actors whose careers the director launched or furthered in their early stages. The list included Marlon Brando who starred in The Men, Zinnemann's 1950 film about disabled veterans, Ava Gardner, Grace Kelly, Rod Steiger, Paul Scofield, Meryl Streep and John Hurt. Another important early Zinnemann film, highly esteemed by film buffs, was Act of Violence (1949), a dark-hued drama about survivor's guilt. Zinnemann left MGM after that film and worked mostly with independent producer Stanley Kramer over the next several years. In 1951 he picked up his first Academy Award, a best director nod for the short subject Benjy.
The spare style Zinnemann favored was applied with brilliant effect to the Western genre in High Noon (1952), which brought star Gary Cooper an Academy Award for best actor and a best director nomination for Zinnemann himself. Zinnemann and cinematographer Floyd Crosby set out to duplicate the plain style of a newsreel, and the film was shot in real time, over 85 minutes approaching a showdown between a marshal and a murderous gang. Abandoned by deputies, townspeople and even his wife, Cooper's marshal was both a classic lone hero and, in the view of some observers, an indictment of a corrupt society spiraling into the repressive years of the Red Scare.
The theme of an individual with a conscience recurred in From Here to Eternity, released in 1953 and considered perhaps his greatest film. Zinnemann won the Academy Award for best director, and the film won a host of other awards including one for Frank Sinatra in the role of Angelo Maggio, a soldier friend to Montgomery Clift's Private Prewitt. The film's most famous scene was a beach rendezvous between adulterous lovers Burt Lancaster and Deborah Kerr, complete with water splashing over the embracing pair, but much of the rest of the story, set in the days surrounding the bombing of Pearl Harbor, brought a new level of realism to Hollywood film. Zinnemann used newsreel footage of the bombing.
Attracted by Big Screen Format
Zinnemann's next film was atypical within his overall output; Oklahoma! (1955) was a musical comedy, the only one he directed. He was offered the helm of the big-budget production because of the success of his last two films, and he agreed to direct it because, as he told Neve, "I found it fascinating to try a new medium, this huge screen." The film was a hugely popular success although one critic joked that Zinnemann's rather dry style had in effect removed the exclamation point from the film's title. Zinnemann returned to more serious fare A Hatful of Rain (1957), a drama about drug addiction, and The Nun's Story, a 1959 film starring Audrey Hepburn as a Belgian missionary nurse serving in the Congo.
The Nun's Story earned eight Academy Award nominations, including one for Zinnemann as best director. He added to his nomination tally with The Sundowners (1960), a family drama set on the Australian frontier, but his next film, the Spanish Civil War tale Behold a Pale Horse, was less successful despite the presence of Gregory Peck in the lead role. Zinnemann moved to London, England, in the early 1960s. He had several motivations: England was his wife's homeland, and he had often worked in Europe and thought about returning there. He was also still troubled by the blacklisting and loyalty oaths that had plagued Hollywood in the anti-Communist atmosphere of the 1950s.
Zinnemann's career got a second wind in London with the historical drama A Man for All Seasons (1966), which starred unknown Paul Scofield as St. Thomas More, another of Zinnemann's maverick heroes. The film took Academy Awards for best director and best picture among others. Despite this success, Zinnemann's next film, Man's Fate, was cancelled by the MGM studio just before Zinnemann was set to begin shooting. Zinnemann rebounded in the 1970s, however, with the taut thriller The Day of the Jackal (1973), in which he returned to his classic detached style. Julia (1977) introduced Meryl Streep in a small role. Based on the memoirs of playwright Lillian Hellman and starring liberal icons Jane Fonda and Vanessa Redgrave, the film brought Zinnemann his final best director Academy Award nomination.
Zinnemann made one more film, the gentle romance Five Days One Summer (1982); it featured Sean Connery as its star and a generous portion of mountain scenery in the Swiss Alps. Zinnemann himself was an avid mountaineer. He was frequently honored in the late 1980s for his lifetime of achievements and remained active in film circles, working for directors' rights to resist colorization of their black-and-white films. Ambulatory only with the aid of a walking stick, he nevertheless served as president of the Britain's Directors Guild. In the last year of his life, Zinnemann successfully resisted filmmakers' attempts to give a remake of The Day of the Jackal the same title, arguing that it had been altered too much from the original story (it was eventually released as The Jackal). Asked by Neve shortly before his death about his view of the future of cinema, he replied, "I would like to be optimistic, because we have brilliant directors and writers and actors, but I tend to be pessimistic. We have enormous powers of persuasion, and we are role models for the rest of the world, but we no longer have a positive attitude towards life. Until that is changed, I think it is not going to be good." Zinnemann died in London on March 14, 1997.
Books
International Dictionary of Films and Filmmakers, 4th ed., St. James, 2000.
Zinnemann, Fred, An Autobiography: A Life in the Movies, Scribner's, 1990.
Periodicals
Australian, March 24, 1997.
Chicago Sun-Times, March 15, 1997.
Cineaste, Winter 1997.
Entertainment Weekly, March 28, 1997.
Guardian (London, England), March 17, 1997.
Mail on Sunday (London, England), March 16, 1997.
New York Times, March 15, 1997.
Times (London, England), March 17, 1997.
Variety, March 17, 1997.
Washington Times, March 23, 1997.
Online
"Fred Zinnemann," All Movie Guide, http://www.allmovie.com (January 30, 2006).
| WordNet: Fred Zinnemann |
Note: click on a word meaning below to see its connections and related words.
The noun has one meaning:
Meaning #1:
United States filmmaker (born in Austria) (1907-1997)
Synonym: Zinnemann
| Director: Fred Zinnemann |
- Born: Apr 29, 1907 in Vienna, Austria
- Died: Mar 14, 1997 in London, England, UK
- Occupation: Director, Actor
- Active: '30s-'60s, '80s
- Major Genres: Drama
- Career Highlights: High Noon, The Day of the Jackal, Julia
- First Major Screen Credit: Menschen am Sonntag (1929)
Biography
Vienna-born Fred Zinnemann had childhood dreams of becoming a musician, and later planned on a law career, before his viewing of the movies of Erich Von Stroheim drew him into the movie business, initially as a cameraman. He came to the United States in 1929, and later found work as an editor, and subsequently as an assistant to documentary filmmaker Robert Flaherty, and then as an assistant to choreographer Busby Berkeley. He joined MGM in the late '30s as a director of comedy shorts, and won an Academy award for his 1938 short subject That Mothers Might Live. Zinnemann moved up to full-length features in 1941, but found little opportunity to work on anything but B-pictures until 1948, with The Search, a drama set in post-World War II Europe. He didn't really become a major recognized box-office name as a director, however, until 1952 when his Western drama High Noon, starring Gary Cooper, which had been perceived by most observers as headed for commercial disaster, became a monster box-office hit and a multi-Academy award nominee. Zinnemann's handling of From Here to Eternity solidified his reputation as one of Hollywood's most reliable hands at dealing with difficult screen material. Comfortable in most genres, Zinnemann subsequently excelled in musicals (Oklahoma!), adaptations of stage work (A Man for All Seasons, for which he won another Oscar), and thrillers (Day of the Jackal). Along with Billy Wilder, Zinnemann represented the most successful of expatriate European directors in Hollywood. ~ Bruce Eder, All Movie Guide| Filmography: Fred Zinnemann |
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| Wikipedia: Fred Zinnemann |
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This article does not cite any references or sources. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. (August 2007) |
| Fred Zinnemann | |
|---|---|
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| Born | April 29, 1907 Vienna, Austria-Hungary |
| Died | March 14, 1997 (aged 89) London, England |
| Spouse(s) | Renee Bartlett (1936-1997) |
Fred Zinnemann (April 29, 1907–March 14, 1997) was an Austrian-American film director. He won four Academy Awards and directed movies like High Noon, From Here to Eternity and A Man for All Seasons.
Contents |
Life and career
Zinnemann was born to a Jewish family in Vienna, Austria, and died of a heart attack in London, England. While growing up in Austria, he wanted to become a musician, but went on to study law. While studying at the University of Vienna, he became drawn to films and eventually became a cameraman. He worked in Germany with several other beginners (Billy Wilder and Robert Siodmak also worked with him on the 1929 feature People on Sunday) before going to America to study film.
One of his first assignments in Hollywood was when he found work as an extra in All Quiet on the Western Front (1930), although he was fired from the production for talking back to the director, Lewis Milestone. After some success with short films, he graduated to features in 1942, turning out two crisp B mysteries, Eyes in the Night and Kid Glove Killer before getting his big break with The Seventh Cross (1944), a top-notch A picture starring Spencer Tracy, and his first hit.
He directed many different film genres including thrillers, westerns, film noir, and play adaptations. Nineteen actors appearing in Zinnemann's films received Academy Award nominations for their performances: among that number are Frank Sinatra, Audrey Hepburn, Glynis Johns, Paul Scofield, Robert Shaw, Wendy Hiller, Jason Robards, Vanessa Redgrave, Jane Fonda, Gary Cooper and Maximilian Schell. Zinnemann's 1950 film The Men is noted for giving Marlon Brando his first screen role.
Zinnemann enjoyed an outstanding career spanning six decades, during which he directed 22 features, 19 short subjects and won four Oscars. Perhaps his best-known work is High Noon (1952), one of the first 25 American film classics chosen in 1989 for the National Film Registry. With its psychological and moral examinations of its lawman hero, played by Gary Cooper, its allegorical political commentary (on McCarthy-era witch-hunting) and its innovative chronology whereby screen time approximated the tense 80-minute countdown to the confrontational hour, High Noon shattered the mould of the formulaic shoot-‘em-up western.
The director's other eminent films, all compelling dramas of lone and principled individuals tested by tragic events, include From Here to Eternity (1953); The Nun's Story (1959); A Man For All Seasons (1966); and Julia (1977). Regarded as a consummate craftsman, Zinnemann traditionally endowed his work with meticulous attention to detail, an intuitive gift for brilliant casting and a preoccupation with the moral dilemmas of his characters.
Zinnemann's penchant for realism and authenticity is evident in his first feature The Wave (1935), shot on location in Mexico with mostly non-professional actors recruited among the locals, which is one of the earliest examples of realism in narrative film. Earlier in the decade, in fact, Zinnemann had worked with documentarian Robert Flaherty, an association he considered "the most important event of my professional life".
His adaptation of The Seventh Cross, though filmed entirely on the MGM backlot, captured the essence of the Anna Seghers novel by realistic use of refugee German actors in even the smallest roles.
The filmmaker also used authentic locales and extras in The Search (1948), which won an Oscar for screenwriting and secured his position in the Hollywood establishment, a vivid drama of World War II aftermath in Berlin that drew on Zinnemann's skills as both documentarian and dramatist. Shot in war-ravaged Germany, the film stars Montgomery Clift in his screen debut as a GI who cares for a lost Czech boy traumatised by the war. In the critically acclaimed The Men (1950), starring newcomer Marlon Brando as a paraplegic war veteran, Zinnemann filmed many scenes in a California hospital where real patients served as extras.
Besides Clift and Brando, other Zinnemann discoveries included Pier Angeli and John Ericson, who co-starred in Teresa (1951), with Rod Steiger and Ralph Meeker debuting in secondary roles. And in Oklahoma! (1955), Zinnemann's version of the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical, the wide screen format Todd-AO made its debut, as did the film's young star Shirley Jones.
Zinnemann's casting choices were often as daring as they were judicious. For his screen adaptation of the play The Member of the Wedding (1952), Zinnemann chose the 26-year-old Julie Harris as the film's 12-year-old protagonist, although she had created the role on Broadway just as the two other leading actors, Ethel Waters and Brandon De Wilde, had. In From Here to Eternity (1953), he cast Frank Sinatra, who was at the lowest point of his popularity. As the likable loser Maggio, Sinatra won an Oscar for Best Supporting Actor. From Here to Eternity also featured Deborah Kerr, best known for prim and proper roles, as a philandering Army wife. And Audrey Hepburn, previously cast in delightful comedic roles, gave the performance of her career as the anguished Sister Luke in the highly acclaimed The Nun's Story.
Throughout his career Zinnemann favoured a protagonist morally impelled to act heroically in defence of his or her beliefs. Hepburn in The Nun's Story and Cooper in High Noon, determined to confront savage outlaws hungry for revenge, are two other prominent examples. Paul Scofield as Sir Thomas More in A Man For All Seasons (1966) gave a brilliant portrayal of a man driven by conscience to his ultimate fate.
A variation on that theme is found in The Seventh Cross, in which the central character—an escaped prisoner played by Spencer Tracy -- is comparatively passive and fatalistic. He is, however, the subject of heroic assistance from anti-Nazi Germans. In a sense, the protagonist of the movie is not the Tracy character but a humble German worker played by Hume Cronyn, who changes from Nazi sympathizer to active opponent of the regime as he aids Tracy.
And in Julia (1977), another of Zinnemann's crowning achievements, Vanessa Redgrave is a doomed American heiress who forsakes the safety and comfort of great wealth to devote her life to the anti-Nazi cause in Germany. (The film is also notable for being the screen debut of Meryl Streep.) Perhaps the most unusual and perversely engaging loner in Zinnemann's films is Edward Fox as the cold-blooded anti-hero assassin in the taut thriller The Day of the Jackal (1973), a man who is as clever and resourceful as he is relentlessly single-mindedly driven to complete his mission, impelled by sheer professionalism and a perverse self- pride rather than politics to try to kill French president Charles de Gaulle.
He won the Academy Award for Directing for From Here to Eternity and A Man for All Seasons and also took home the Best Picture Oscar for producing the latter film. He received his first Oscar in 1951 for the documentary short Benjy.
His final film was Five Days One Summer in 1982.
Zinnemann is often regarded as striking a blow against "ageism" in Hollywood. The story (which may be apocryphal) goes that, in the 1980s, during a meeting with a young Hollywood executive, Zinnemann was surprised to find the executive didn't know who he was, despite winning two Academy Awards, and directing many of Hollywood's biggest movies. When the young executive callowly asked Zinnemann to list what he had done in his career, Zinnemann delivered an elegant comeback by reportedly answering, "Sure. You first." In Hollywood, the story is known as "You First," and is often alluded to when veteran creators find that upstarts are unfamiliar with their work.[1]
Filmography
| Year | Film | Academy Award Wins | Academy Award Nominations | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1938 | That Mothers Might Live (short film) | 1 | 1 | |
| 1944 | The Seventh Cross | 1 | ||
| 1948 | The Search | 1 | 5 | |
| Act of Violence | ||||
| 1950 | The Men | 1 | ||
| 1951 | Benjy (short documentary) | 1 | 1 | |
| 1952 | High Noon | 4 | 7 | |
| 1953 | From Here to Eternity | 8 | 13 | |
| 1956 | Oklahoma! | 2 | 4 | |
| 1959 | The Nun's Story | 8 | ||
| 1960 | The Sundowners | 5 | ||
| 1964 | Behold a Pale Horse | |||
| 1966 | A Man for All Seasons | 6 | 8 | |
| 1973 | The Day of the Jackal | 1 | ||
| 1977 | Julia | 3 | 11 | |
| 1982 | Five Days One Summer |
References
- ^ Weinraub, Bernard (1994-09-14). "At Lunch with: John Gregory Dunne; The Bad Old Days In All Their Glory". The New York Times. http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9F0DE1D9153BF937A2575AC0A962958260&sec=&spon=&pagewanted=2. Retrieved 2007-10-09.
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Mentioned in
- As I See It (1997 Film, TV & Radio Film)
- The Ash Can Fleet (1939 Film)
- Benjy (1951 Culture & Society Film)
- John C. Higgins (Writer, Crime/Drama)
- Strand: Under the Dark Cloth (1990 History Film)
- Help Wanted (1939 Crime Film)
- That Mothers Might Live (1938 Film)
- Forbidden Passage (1941 Film)
- Elmo Williams (Director, Cinematographer, Drama/Adventure)
- Five Days One Summer (1982 Romance Film)
- The Seventh Cross (1944 Drama Film)
- The Sundowners (1960 Drama Film)
- The Day of the Jackal (1973 Thriller Film)
- Kid Glove Killer (1942 Crime Film)
