Background
Seth Holt was born on 21 June 1923 in Palestine.
Seth Holt was born on 21 June 1923 in Palestine.
Despite the fact that Holt seemed unable to escape flawed, unfinished work, creator of marvelous sequences within melodramas, he was the most gifted British director working in Britain. Nowhere to Go is an out-of-the-ordinary thriller (scripted by Holt and Kenneth Tynan); A Taste of Fear was genuinely frightening; and Station Six Sahara is a jittery account of sexual tension. The Nanny was subtle guignol and Danger Route an especiallv fragmented work. But even the cheap-skate espionage of that film contains the enigmatic sequence in which Richard Johnson kills Carol Lynley.
The final disarray, complete with two abandoned films—Diabolique and Monsieur LeCoq— and a script about Bakunin (done with Al Alvarez), is the stranger because Holt served a dutiful apprenticeship. From acting, he joined Ealing in 1944 as an assistant editor. In that capacity he worked on Return to the Vikings (44, Charles Frend); Champagne Charlie (44, Alberto Cavalcanti); Dead of Night (45, Cavalcanti, et al.): Hue and Cry (46, Charles Crichton); Scott of the Antarctic (48, Frend); Passport to Pimlico (48, Henry Cornelius); Kind Hearts and Coronets (49, Robert Hamer); The Lavender Hill Mob (51, Crichton); His Excellency (51, Hamer); Mandy (52, Alexander Mackendrick); The Titfield Thunderbolt (52, Crichton); and Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (60, Karel Reisz). He was also an associate producer on Maekendricks The Ladykillers (55) and Crichtons The Man in the Sky (56).
As a director he made many episodes for TV series and nurtured forlorn projects. His early career might have been textbook, but once he had made the grade he was antitraditional. His taste for visual excitement was more American than British, and not the least point in his favor was his skill at directing an oddly assorted range of actresses: Maggie Smith, Susan Strasberg, Carroll Baker, Bette Davis, and Carol Lynley.
An intimate biography of Seth Holt would make a pretty picture of the razor lining to the film industry. When he died he was engaged on his least interesting film, a merciless potboiler. He was a man of fascinating, unfulfilled projects and of a casual talent that never swallowed a film whole. It speaks for his frustration that If. .. . (69) was his project originally, only passed on to Lindsay Anderson when Holt began to decline. His death—from heart disease and exhaustion—was little noticed by the press. Similarly, few' people remarked on the death of Holt’s brother-in-law, Robert Hamer.