Robert Hamer

Writer: Robert Hamer

Born: Mar 31, 1911 in Kidderminster, England
Died: Dec 04, 1963 in London, England, UK
Occupation: Writer, Director
Active: '40s-'60s
Major Genres: Drama, Comedy
Career Highlights: Kind Hearts and Coronets, The Detective, Pink String and Sealing Wax
First Major Screen Credit: The Beachcomber (1938)

Biography

Robert Hamer was educated at Cambridge University. He went to work at London Films as a clapper boy in 1934, and by 1938 was on the editing staff. An associate producer from 1943, Hamer made his directorial entree with the "Haunted Mirror" sequence in the portmanteau feature Dead of Night (1943); his first feature-length assignment was Pink String and Sealing Wax (1944). For several years, Hamer's career soared like a comet, thanks largely to his quartet of films with Alec Guinness. The best of these, Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949), is an imperishable comedy classic. But as the 1950s rolled on, Hamer's reputation plummeted. Three years after directing his last film, the enjoyable but money-losing School for Scoundrels, Robert Hamer was dead at 52. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

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Wikipedia: Robert Hamer

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Robert Hamer (31 March 1911, Kidderminster, Worcestershire – 4 December 1963, London) was a British film director and screenwriter. He was the son of the actor Gerald Hamer (1886-1972).^[1]

Hamer was educated at Cambridge University^[2] and began his career in 1934, and from 1935 worked as a film editor and cut such films as Hitchcock's Jamaica Inn (1939) co-produced by Charles Laughton. At the end of the 1930s, he worked on documentaries for the GPO Film Unit.^[1]

He is best remembered for his work at Ealing Studios in the 1940s, including the black comedy Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949), with Dennis Price and Alec Guinness.

Hamer died of pneumonia at the age of 52 at St Thomas's Hospital in London. An alcoholic, who was homosexual in an era when it was taboo in the UK, Hamer's career "now looks like the most serious miscarriage of talent in the postwar British cinema", according to film critic David Thomson.^[3]

Filmography

San Demetrio London (1943)
Dead of Night (1945) (as co-director)
Pink String and Sealing Wax (1946)
The Loves of Joanna Godden (1947)
It Always Rains on Sunday (1947)
The Spider and the Fly (1949)
Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949)
The Long Memory (1952)
His Excellency (1952)
Father Brown (1954)
To Paris With Love (1955)
The Scapegoat (1959)
School for Scoundrels (1960)

References

^ ^a ^b Brian McFarlane The Encyclopedia of British Film, 2003, London: BFI/Methuen, p281-82
^ Ephraim Katz The Macmillan International Film Encyclopedia, 1998, London: Macmillan, p585
^ David Thomson The New Biographical Dictionary of Cinema, 2002, London: Little, Brown, p367

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