Career Highlights: This Sporting Life, Who'll Stop the Rain?, Morgan!
First Major Screen Credit: We Are the Lambeth Boys (1959)
Biography
Czech-born Karel Reisz was 12 when his father, a Jewish lawyer, felt it expedient to bundle his son to England before Hitler entrenched himself in the Sudetenland. Sadly, Reisz ended up the only member of his family to survive the Holocaust. Educated at the Quaker's Leighton Park School, Reisz served with the RAF, then became a chemistry student at Cambridge. After two years as a teacher in the London school system, Reisz began writing film criticism for such specialized magazines as Sight and Sound. With fellow future director Lindsay Anderson, Reisz founded the influential film periodical Sequence. After the publication of his book The Technique of Film Editing (a remarkably incisive effort, considering that he'd never set foot on a movie soundstage), Reisz was a firmly established leader of Britain's Free Cinema movement; he got a chance to put his theories in practice when he and Tony Richardson co-directed the influential "night life" documentary Momma Don't Allow (1955). He turned to non-documentary filmmaking with his first solo feature, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1960), essentially an outgrowth of the disenfranchised-youth theme he'd previously explored in Momma Don't Allow. Most of his later films were celebrations of eccentric individualism, such as Morgan! (1966), Isadora (1968), and The Gambler (1974). In 1981, Reisz, together with scenarist Harold Pinter, met and mastered the challenge of translating John Fowles' complex novel The French Lieutenant's Woman to the screen. Twice married, Karel Reisz's second wife was actress Betsy Blair, best known for her portrayal of the "dog" heroine in Marty (1955). ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide
Reisz was a founder member of the Free Cinema documentary film movement. His first short film, Momma Don't Allow (1955), co-directed with Tony Richardson, was included in the first Free Cinema programme shown at the National Film Theatre in February 1956. His film We Are the Lambeth Boys (1958)[3] was a naturalistic depiction of the members of a South London boys' club, which was unusual in showing the leisure life of working-class teenagers as it was, with skiffle music and cigarettes, cricket, drawing and discussion groups. The film represented Britain at the Venice Film Festival. The BBC made two follow-up films about the same people and youth club, broadcast in 1985.
His first feature film Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1960) was based on the social realist novel by Alan Sillitoe, and used many of the same techniques as his earlier documentaries. In particular, scenes filmed at the Raleigh factory in Nottingham have the look of a documentary, and give the story a vivid sense of verisimilitude.
Reisz had three sons by his first wife, Julia Coppard, whom he later divorced.[4] Reisz wed Betsy Blair, former wife of Gene Kelly, in 1963 and remained married until his death.