Background
Cy Endfield was born on 10 November 1914 in Scranton, Pennsylvania, United States.
filmmaker inventor screenwriter author
Cy Endfield was born on 10 November 1914 in Scranton, Pennsylvania, United States.
From Yale and the New Theatre School he became a producer and a drama teacher.
After the war, he went into movies as a writer and then took up direction. He was compelled to leave America during the McCarthy period and worked in England uncredited or under a pseudonym.
Hell Drivers was an unexpectedly raw look into the lives of English lorry drivers with much of the flavor and violence of an American thriller. It is an obvious, sensational film, but still Endfield's best and worth seeing for its pitching together of Stanley Baker and Patrick McGoohan. The meeting with Baker proved verv profitable for Endfield; it led to a joint production company that made Zulu and Sands of the Kalahari. The first is a well-told, old-fashioned war story that includes some exciting footage of tribesmen.
Endfield has been rediscovered, or factually amended. Most reference books—this one included—said he had been born in South Africa. One went so far as to say he had died in 1983. He had been a magician who had caught the attention of, and worked with, Orson Welles around the time of The Magnificent Ambersons.
He helped with the scripts of most of his own films and contributed to Sleep My Love (48, Douglas Sirk); Crashout (55, Lewis R. Foster); Night of the Demon (58, Jacques Tourneur); and Zulu Dawn (79, Douglas Hickox).
Of his own films, The Underworld Story is revealed as an unusually somber mood piece, much helped by Dan Duryea. Impulse, made in England, has Arthur Kennedy in a rut as an estate agent and drawm into romance and intrigue while his wife’s away. The plot grows far-fetched, but the first half hour is very sharp and Losey-like. But many of Endfield’s films are still very hard to find.