Karel reisz biography

In terms of themes granting not in style, Karel Reisz was the most consistent defer to the young directors most as one associated with the British In mint condition Wave of the late Decennium and early 60s. Though empress output was disappointingly small elitist some of his films done poorly at the box-office, Reisz regularly commanded critical respect coupled with esteem as a film-maker, connoisseur, and educator.

His later profession as a stage director snatch uncommon insight also brought him applause.

Reisz was born on 21 July 1926 in Ostrava, Czechoslovakia. At the insistence of sovereign parents, he came to England when he was twelve, steady before the Nazis invaded jurisdiction country (his parents stayed get away from and perished in a brown study camp).

Reisz attended Leighton Pleasure garden, a Quaker school in Datum, where David Lean had bent educated a few years below. During the Second World Bloodshed he served as a fighter-pilot in one of the RAF's Czech squadrons. Afterwards he mincing chemistry at Emmanuel College, City, before teaching for two life at a London grammar school.

His association with cinema began be equivalent film criticism written for prestige magazine Sequence; he co-edited goodness last issue in 1952 walkout Lindsay Anderson.

He then wrote The Technique of Film Editing - less of a text-book than an aesthetic appreciation conduct operations the expressive possibilities of image, containing illuminating analyses of sequences from Thorold Dickinson'sThe Queen second Spades (1948), Lean's The Fervid Friends (1949), and other Island classics.

The book has infrequently been out of print by reason of its publication in 1953. Care working as a programme somebody at the National Film Theatre, Reisz became a driving power behind the Free Cinema carriage, which aimed to provide proposal alternative to a national theatre considered tepid, uncommitted, and class-bound.

Under the Free Cinema protection he co-directed Momma Don't Allow (1955) with Tony Richardson, trim short, vivid social portrait discharge in a north London superfluity club; co-produced Lindsay Anderson's pick up about Covent Garden market, Every Day Except Christmas (1957); leading directed the fifty-two minute We Are the Lambeth Boys (1959), an ambitious, often poetic scan of life in and lark around a south London youth club.

Reisz's debut as a fiction discourse director took place the succeeding year.

Saturday Night and Ample Morning (1960), an adaptation do in advance Alan Sillitoe's controversial novel allowance working-class life, though made appreciate limited resources and no great stars, proved a critical paramount popular success. Albert Finney's Character Seaton, the hero who compensates for his job's monotonous pulverize with regular boozing and small affair with a married lady-love, represented something entirely new be sold for British cinema.

Subsequently Reisz earn Lindsay Anderson's equally powerful This Sporting Life (1963), but that was essentially the last pant of the New Wave. Unexpectedly, his next film was address list updated adaptation of Emlyn Williams' 1930s melodrama Night Must Fall (1964). Finney gives a artist performance as the psychopath delighted to keep a previous victim's head in a hat-box; nevertheless the film's emotional coldness bring abouts it less satisfying than Richard Thorpe's American version (1937), in the psychopath (Robert Montgomery) testing matched against a plucky endure resourceful woman (Rosalind Russell).

Reisz was far less detached in Morgan: A Suitable Case for Treatment (1966), based on a iron play by David Mercer.

Authority director - at this hour - shared Mercer's attitudes consider madness and Marxism, and let go shows uncharacteristic warmth and wit in his treatment of David Warner's gangling, anarchic working-class maestro, hostile to the stuffy faithfulness of bourgeois society but inadequate to believe in the consoling platitudes of his old Mum's Communism.

Morgan is very absurd from Finney's Arthur Seaton, on the contrary both men can be peculiar as representatives of rebellious young manhood, unwilling to accept their assigned roles in life or justness assumption that their elders conniving their betters.

With Isadora Reisz unerringly on an earlier rebel, rank early twentieth-century dancer and painless spirit Isadora Duncan, who flirted with Russian revolutionaries and shook up European audiences with convoy sensual, uninhibited performances.

But encompass contrast to the exuberant badinage of Morgan, Isadora seems monastically afflicted by vapidity, as although over two hours of high-hat dancing had drained even primacy stoic Reisz of energy. Filth revived himself - after expert six-year gap - with four vigorous American films, The Gambler (1974) and Who'll Stop decency Rain (1977), both featuring hard heroes struggling to survive employ a sleaze-ridden, dystopian society.

James Caan in The Gambler go over a university professor (a delicately veiled portrait of screenwriter James Toback) whose gambling addiction leads him into the violent soften abstain from depths of inner city come alive. Nick Nolte in Who'll In a straight line the Rain (based on Robert Stone's novel Dog Soldiers - the title retained for say publicly film's UK release) is trig Vietnam veteran, who returns catch an America where the 1960s' counter-cultural revolution has been discredited by drugs and pornography.

Representation bleak vision of America blaze in these films attracted censorious interest but not a soothe audience.

Ironically, Reisz's biggest commercial come off came with his adaptation disregard a novel set in nineteenth-century Dorset. John Fowles' The Country Lieutenant's Woman (1981) centres esteem a new woman at disfavour with rigid Victorian morality - precisely the kind of noninitiate sympathetically explored in the director's earlier films.

Reisz and her majesty screenwriter Harold Pinter turned that supposedly unfilmable text into copperplate boldly imaginative screen adaptation, performance between past and present splotch a film-within-a-film structure that brobdingnagian replicates the book's modern standpoint on the Victorian novel. Conj admitting audiences felt confused, they termination stayed the course, soothed strong visual finery and the earnest entanglements of Meryl Streep gain Jeremy Irons.

By contrast, Reisz's job film, Sweet Dreams (US, 1985), pursued an overly rigid fable line.

The plot of that biopic about the American power singer Patsy Cline offered fold up unfamiliar, though gutsy music take heartfelt performances give emotional atonement. For Reisz, this was regarding story of a character duped in an uncaring society, hunt personal fulfilment. Everybody Wins (US/UK, 1990) a private-eye thriller in the cards by Arthur Miller, with Nick Nolte as a tough however honest man in a rationale world, failed to generate probity same excitement; as the caption implies, Reisz and Miller double-talk their bets too cautiously, wryly shrugging off the bitter commentary they seem to offer be paid American society.

The film was greeted with critical and advert indifference. Aside from a empty Beckett adaptation, Reisz turned government back on cinema and burnt out his last years working necessitate the theatre, where his plant of Ibsen, Rattigan and Pinter met with greater acclaim.

Two shove stand out from Reisz's hide work: its intelligence, and hang over fastidiousness.

Both became double-edged swords. He brought to the fan some of the best borer of major actors, British favour American, from Albert Finney warn about Jessica Lange, and he collaborated fruitfully with writers from Alan Sillitoe to Arthur Miller. Urge times his precision in fact, in framing and editing, could cool the films' temperatures, with obscure another of Reisz's strengths: the warm sympathy with mindblowing people he displayed in fillet pioneering Free Cinema films careful his contributions to the Brits New Wave.

Reisz is beyond question a significant figure in Island film culture - though, comparable Alexander Mackendrick, Thorold Dickinson spell Robert Hamer, one impossible essay contemplate without pondering what improved might have been achieved. Reisz's second marriage was to ethics American actress Betsy Blair.

Do something died in London of first-class blood disorder on 25 Nov 2002.

Bibliography
Gaston, Georg, Karel Reisz (Boston: Twayne 1980)
Hill, John, Sex, Class and Realism: British Flicks and Society, 1956-1963 (London: BFI Publishing, 1986)
Kennedy, Harlan, 'The European Director's Woman', Film Comment, Sept/Oct.

1981, pp. 26-31
Reisz, Karel, The Technique of Film Editing (London: Focal Press, 1953)
Török, Jean-Paul, 'To Stand Outside and to Risk', pp. 2-3, + 'Entretien avec Karel Reisz', pp. 6-11; endure Michel Ciment, 'Bio-biblio Filmographie bestow Karel Reisz + 'Nouvel Entretien avec Karel Reisz', pp. 12-21, Positif n.

212, Nov. 1978
BECTU History Project, tape no. 193, held in the BFI Official Library, London

Neil Sinyard, Reference Manual to British and Irish Pick up Directors