Background
Irving Lerner was born on 7 March 1909 in New York, New York, United States.
Irving Lerner was born on 7 March 1909 in New York, New York, United States.
Lerner was originally an academic, making films for the anthropology department of Columbia University years before Jean Rouch.
He hovered around the industry as editor and second- unit director: One Third of a Nation (39, Dudley Murphy); Valley Town (40, Willard Van Dyke); and The Children Must Learn (40, Van Dyke). During the war, he produced two Office ol War Information documentaries: Toscanini: Hymn of the Nations (44) and A Place to Live (44). After that, he was head of the Educational Film Institute at New York University, before teaming up with Joseph Strick to make the artfully edited Muscle Beach. C-Man and Man Crazy were second features, apparently now lost. Lerner was technical advisor on The Savage Eye (59, Strick, Ben Maddow, and Sidney Meyers) and editor and second-unit director on Spartacus (60, Stanley Kubrick).
To Be a Man was a minor war picture, Royal Hunt of the Sun a disastrously serious epic. He also produced and did second-unit work on Custer of the West (6S, Robert Siodmak), produced and edited Captain Apache (71, Alexander Singer), and edited Executive Action (73, David Miller) and New York, New York (77, Martin Scorsese), which is dedicated to his memory.
To Be a Man
1963Lerner's involvement with cinema remained that of a disapproving outsider, waiting for the medium to come round to his way of thinking, but bowing to its crazy rules occasionally and finding that he rather enjoyed them. Although Lerner is most associated with fringe activities—whether arty, educational, or technical—in 1958—59, he made two films on seven-day schedules that proved engrossing, interesting thrillers: Murder by Contract and City of Fear. Both photographed with distinction by Lucien Ballard, they showed the potential of the genre quickie when made by accomplished technicians. Lerner may have concluded that cheapness was viable, whereas the real lesson is that genre is intrinsic and can make elaborate screenplays redundant. But Lerner sought to apply the same working economy to a different type of subject, the period novel Studs Lonigan, which proved a tasteful failure.