CHAPTER 19
Pages from the Endfield File
If memory serves, I first became interested in writer-director Cy Endfield in the early 1990s, after seeing The Underworld Story and Try and Get Me!, reading about him in Thom Andersen's 1985 essay “Red Hollywood,” and wondering why there was no mention of either him or John Berry in Andrew Sarris's The American Cinema or such books as Kings of the Bs, and The Hollywood Social Problem Film. This led to me writing “Guilty by Omission” for the September–October 1991 Film Comment (reprinted in my collection Placing Movies), which prompted a friendly letter from Endfield correcting a couple of biographical gaffes I had inherited from others. Then, after persuading Barbara Scharres to show a partial Endfield retrospective at Chicago's Film Center, which I wrote about in the Reader, I started a correspondence with Endfield that eventually yielded the following.
MANY THINGS HAVE stood in the way of Cy Endfield becoming better known. A blacklisted filmmaker who moved to England in 1951 in order to continue working, he had to hide for years behind a hired front (Charles De Lautour)—to whom he had to pay typically half his fees—and various pseudonyms even there owing to threats by the U.S. projectionists’ union to block American distribution of English films on which blacklisted personnel worked. His auteurist profile is disrupted by a two-part filmography (seven features in the United States, fourteen abroad) consisting mainly of genre films that aren't easy to come by today. Better known among professional magicians than among film buffs, he is usually unknown in both groups for his remarkable inventions—the Microwriter, a computerized, pocket-sized, four-key typewriter (1978), and the Agenda, a computerized pocket organizer (circa 1982)—or his designed chess sets like the Spasky-Fischer Commemorative, used in the 1972 world tournament, and Chesslandia.
Fortunately, Endfield's two best films by most accounts, including his own and mine—The Sound of Fury (1951) and Zulu (1964)—are readily available, and it isn't hard to find The Underworld Story (1950), Mysterious Island (1961), and Sands of the Kalahari (1965). Over the past few years, a gratifying surge of interest in his work has led to tributes at Chicago's Film Center, in Rotterdam and Telluride, and on the BBC; an interview for National Public Radio, a column by Todd McCarthy in Daily Variety (September 11, 1992), a few pages in Brian Neve's Film and Politics in America (Routledge); and some preliminary forays of my own. A few basic misunderstandings in reference books have been cleared up: contrary to James Monaco, Endfield died not in 1983 but on April 16, 1995, and contrary to Ephraim Katz, he was born in Scranton, Pennsylvania, not South Africa, and never revoked his U.S. citizenship.1 [These sources have now been superseded by Brian Neve's excellent biography, The Many Lives of Cy Endfield: Film Noir, the Blacklist, and Zulu, University of Wisconsin Press, 2015.]
In early 1993, after many phone conversations and exchanged audiocassettes (a substitute for letters because of Endfield's failing eyesight), I was privileged to spend a little more than a day with Endfield and his gracious wife, Maureen, at their home in rural England. Part of what follows derives from that meeting as well as generous help from Thom Andersen, Tom Luddy, Howie Movshovitz, Pierre Rissient, Mehrnaz Saeed-Vafa, Barbara Scharres, Habie Schwarz, and Bart Whaley.
JONATHAN ROSENBAUM: There are references to magic in most of your films, but the first examples that come to mind are all negative: magic as dehumanized nightclub entertainment in The Sound of Fury, as a means of deceiving gullible Africans in Tarzan's Savage Fury, and as the regular work of a blackmailer in The Limping Man. Negativity remains a powerful and meaningful constant in your work, but I'm curious why magic elicits that particular response from you.
CY ENDFIELD: It seems to me now that from the very beginning of my interest in magic, in the performance of tricks, I knew that there was a spurious aspect. For the price of a dime or a quarter, one could buy a knickknack that had some hidden little mechanism in it and at that moment outwit Einstein—at that moment humiliate Einstein by puzzling him, and congratulate oneself that one knew something Einstein didn't. I trace in my memory this understanding that magic has an aggressive component in it, that it derides the intelligence of its audience by obscure and underhanded devices.
When did this all begin? I think when I was twelve or thirteen years old, I was sent to a boys’ camp by my parents. A counselor was assigned to my tent—a college youth who was a magician. Later on, he accrued some identity for himself as Roger Barkin, the poetic magician; he did all his patter in poetry. In any event, the element that attracted me was the dexterity aspect of it. I became early on a card expert; I designed my own tricks, and achieved some identity in the fraternity of magicians, because I submitted articles to magic magazines that described tricks.2 I carried around this hobby and used it to help identify myself and take command in certain situations. In due course, I was being classified as one of the bright youngsters who could do things that others couldn't do.
By this time, I had gone to Yale and had come to New York in pursuit of a career in theater. I think the fact that I did tricks, sometimes being paid for them, gave me a sense of professional identity in connection with theater, and my general interest, which led me to hitchhike to New York and take up residence there, was motivated by my interest in magic. The connection retained its force and affected my whole life—and whatever work emanated from that life.
(“I made a sort of Hitchcockian effort to put tricks into most of my pictures,” Endfield told me somewhat later, citing as one example a variation of the “egg and cup” trick done by actor James Booth with a bullet in the hospital in Zulu.)
Born November 10, 1914, Endfield was in his early twenties when he moved to New York after graduating from Yale. (He was a year late in starting there owing to the collapse of his father's business in Scranton.) His interest in theater, which led to him acting in a college production of Waiting for Lefty, brought him in New York to the New Theater League, “the center of activity that grew out of the work of Clifford Odets and the Group Theater, under the direction of men like Elia Kazan and Lee Strasberg.” Endfield dates his discovery of his directorial vocation back to the experience of preparing a scene from Molière's The Fabulous Invalid, a lengthy dialogue between two ladies, for a class demonstration. (Later on, he also taught at the New Theater League, and Shelley Winters and Martin Balsam were among his students.)
ENDFIELD: I made my living at the time by organizing a small entertainment group who worked in social satire, very much in the spirit of Beyond the Fringe, and we worked in nightclubs, at weddings and bar mitzvahs and workers’ social events. Eventually I was offered a position to run an amateur theater—as a salaried professional—in Montreal. I went away for a year, where I directed plays by Ibsen and others, original musicals, and so on. This work took me into the mountains, the Catskills—the herring farms, as they were called, the adult camps and hotels—and there I did direction of plays and musicals and other forms of entertainment. I considered myself qualified as a director, and eventually joined three or four others in an automobile ride across the United States, all of us en route to Los Angeles to take over the movie business. I arrived there in September 1940, and by the end of ’41 I had made very little progress.
There was an incident, however. It happened in Bert Wheeler's magic shop on Hollywood Boulevard, which is still in existence. The front part sells whoopee cushions and cans of itching powder, but the back rooms sell apparatus for magicians and are a hangout for the local fraternity of amateurs, pros, and semi-pros. One day there was a flurry in the front of the shop; somebody was attracting a lot of attention. One of the regulars came to the back and said, “Hey, Orson Welles is here!” This was the Welles who'd just completed Citizen Kane, a man whose identity was very well known to me. Like other men of my age—we were born only a few months apart—I identified very strongly with him. He had come in to see if there were any magicians around that he could communicate with, bringing along some nonmagical friends who worked for him, and had asked, after watching some regulars, “Isn't there somebody good around here? I want to see something that'll fool me!”
It was at that point that my interlocutor had been dispatched; they said, “Get Cy Endfield, let Welles see him.” I objected a little bit to being court jester, but I came forward, was introduced to Orson and handed a pack of cards. Orson said, “I hear you're very good. Come ahead and show me.” I did the first trick for him and his eyes bulged; he stood in shock. After I did one or two more tricks, Welles took my lapel and said, “Son” (or something equally endearing), “I like a few of these items. Do you have a price on them?” He reached into his pocket and took out a wallet full of $100 bills—and a $100 bill was a great deal in those days (this was early January 1942). I was of course much too modest; I told Welles to let me know what tricks he wanted to know and there would not, could not, be any price attached to them. Then, in a grandiose gesture, after we'd become friendly, he took all of us—magicians and others in his film unit—to the Brown Derby, which was just around the corner on Vine Street. It was the first time I ever dined in such an august place.
A few days later, two men who had been with Orson made a reappearance. One was Jack Moss, Orson's producer. He had come back because, in his words, I was the only man he had ever seen who had fooled Orson, and he wanted to know how he too might do a card trick that could fool Orson. There were several illustrations of how whole parties of eminent people were gathered together, sitting obediently at Orson's feet, watching him do these little performances that left them helpless, deceived, and subject to any intellectual whim that Orson might want to impose upon them later on. But a more important matter was going through my mind.
In the whole period I had been in Hollywood, I had been trying to talk my way into the offices of producers or heads of departments. I thought I might be able to function in any of the preparation crafts that lead a person into directing. So we both had our own agendas. I was assuring Jack that I knew things to do, but they would depend to some degree on his own dexterity; he assured me that he had none, but I was nonetheless final in my assurance that I would arm him with several things so that he'd have at least one sight of Orson being puzzled and subjected to disempowerment. Jack said he'd have to test this on Orson's return, and it was then that I discovered that “Orson's return” meant coming back from Brazil, where he'd departed to make It's All True.
We came to a handshake agreement. The tradeoff was that I'd be taken on as an apprentice by the Mercury [Theatre]—would be allowed to come onto the set of Journey into Fear and communicate with the people working on the rough cut of The Magnificent Ambersons and assembling the dailies of the new picture. The compensation was minor, $40 or $50 a week, but a rather decent living wage on my scale of expectations, and my job was defined simply as making a daily appearance for my own benefit at the studio and then conferring with Jack over a pack of cards in his office.
Jack had introduced me to Robert Wise, the editor of Ambersons, and Mark Robson, his assistant. They were very generous and patient. I was not consulted for my contributions, but I was shown pieces of film they were assembling, and I got slightly involved in a few of the discussions. My first real engagement with the work on Ambersons was an invitation from Jack to attend a studio showing of the Welles cut. I was waiting for another round of the Citizen Kane experience, and instead I saw a very lyrical, gently persuasive film of a completely different visual character, and a completely different succession of energies. But the feeling of the people assembled was that the picture was not a winner; the consensus was that something had to be done.
Now Orson, one must remember, had never seen his cut projected, at least not with an audience watching and reacting to it. Jack Moss's answer to the problems was to preview the show in Pomona, Pasadena, and other places in and around Los Angeles. I felt the picture deserved to exist in its essential form as left by Orson. Sometime in the next week I went to the Pomona preview, which had a middle-class, educated audience. A university was there, and a lot of students had come because they knew that Orson Welles's second feature was playing. The audience sat there reverentially, very enthusiastically applauded at the end, and when they made out their preview cards, they were full of exclamations of awe and wonder and vast approval. But then, with the Pasadena preview and several others, there were some unpleasant reactions, and I think there was panic in the ranks. I personally felt that the panic was unjustified and I was fearful of its consequences.
I sat with Jack Moss most days. The poor man was spending his money on me wastefully, because he was not learning very much. He was naturally clumsy, and had no skill or aptitude for the card moves I was showing him. In the meantime, Orson was showing his anxiety in a number of long-distance calls he made to Jack. A telephone with a private line had been installed in Moss's office in the Mercury bungalow that had a number known only to Orson in Brazil. For the first few days, he had a few discussions with Orson and tried to placate him; then they had started arguing because there were more changes than Orson was prepared to acknowledge. After a few days of this, the phone was just allowed to ring and ring, and I conducted many magic lessons with Moss when the phone was ringing uninterruptedly for hours at a time. I saw Jack enter carrying thirty-five- and forty-page cables that had arrived from Brazil; he'd riffle through the cables, say, “This is what Orson wants us to do today,” and then, without bothering to read them, toss them into the wastebasket.
I was particularly dismayed by the enthusiasm with which the mice played while the cat was away. [Speaking to Todd McCarthy about the famous kitchen scene with Agnes Moorehead and Tim Holt, Endfield said, “I thought it was the greatest scene in the film, and when it looked like they were going to cut it too, I started crying and pleading—I was very young—and I guess they were persuaded.”]
During the same period, Endfield and his first wife—whom he'd met in Montreal, and who worked in Los Angeles with Elsa Lanchester at the Turnabout Theater—were dinner guests at Lanchester and Charles Laughton's home along with Jean Renoir the same night Pearl Harbor was bombed. As Endfield dryly recalled, both Laughton and Renoir interpreted this event as the onset of a worldwide communist revolution and were mainly concerned about the consequent fate of free artistic expression.
Endfield's first consequential Hollywood job was at M-G-M during the summer of 1942, where his first assignment was directing (and largely writing) Inflation, a two-reel propaganda short requested by the Office of War Information to back up a recent speech by FDR. After it was favorably reviewed in the trade press, and seven hundred copies (many times the usual print orders) were struck, Endfield had every expectation of being assigned to direct a feature next. But just before the film was scheduled to open, a telegram from Nicholas M. Schenck, president of Loew's, Inc., M-G-M's parent company, ordered M-G-M to pull all prints. Later it emerged that the Chamber of Commerce's national office requested the suppression, apparently afraid that manufacturers would object to some of the inflationary scams described in the film. Endfield quickly went from being “a white hopeful” at M-G-M to “a very black sheep indeed.” The film's next public screening, at Telluride, would have to wait another half-century.
Inflation offers us two patriarchal sages seated behind desks, each of whom intones a documentary-footage voiceover when he isn't seen addressing the camera or talking into a telephone receiver. One of them—literally the Devil (Edward Arnold)—commands much more space and attention; on the other end of his phone receiver is Adolf Hitler, his pal, whom we faintly hear shrieking in frenetic German. The other one, Franklin Roosevelt, is heard speaking over the radio and sometimes seen addressing the camera.
We first find the Devil cackling over shots of lightning bolts and documentary evidence of wartime devastation. Then we see him seated behind the glass desk in his futurist office, chortling to his sullen, sultry mistress. “Wonderful, wonderful! The best season I ever had!” A signed photo of Hitler rests on his desk and a black raven is perched directly over it.
Clearly there's nothing subtle about Inflation, nor was there meant to be. The Chamber of Commerce may have been perturbed by this punchy expressionist short because Endfield carried out his assigned task—attacking various forms of capitalist greed and selfishness leading to inflation—all too well. It seems relevant that the Devil and a couple of wholesome housewives are both glimpsed at unsettling low angles—the Devil from beneath the surface of his glass desk, the housewives almost from knee level, chatting on a suburban doorstep—and it's difficult to decide which of these two angles seems more sinister. At age twenty-seven, Endfield's flair for portraying brutish self-interest is already firmly in place.
The capitalist selfishness the Devil gleefully encourages begins with the buying binge of factory worker Joe Smith (Horace McNally), who goes with his wife (Esther Williams in her pre-swimming phase) on a shopping spree as soon as he collects his paycheck. “You look wonderful,” he says when she tries on a fur wrap, to which she replies, “Gee, honey, it took four dresses and a new coat for you to say so.” When the clerk suggests that Joe can buy even more on credit, there's a cut to the Devil on the phone beaming, “Well, it's started, Adolf—a blitz without bullets,” explaining that with few goods around, price bidding is bound to start soon. Laden with packages, Joe and his wife wind up listening to FDR on a radio in a shop speak at length about all that should be done: “stabilize prices…ration scarce commodities…invest in war bonds…discourage installment buying,” and so on.
“Look at me—Joe Sap!” a chastened Joe declares at the end of this speech, and his wife agrees that they've been “overdoing it.” But all the other citizens we meet remain, more plausibly, unenlightened, whether it's a chorus girl buying nylons on the black market, a tailor being taught by the Devil how to switch labels on a garment and thereby cheat on price fixing, housewives expounding on the virtues of hoarding and stockpiling, or a fellow in a restaurant being convinced by the Devil to cash in his war bonds and buy an expensive car to improve his image.
“Would you like to join us?” the Devil asks the camera at the end, extolling the virtues of racial superiority before urging us all to buy, “squawk,” be greedy, hoard, and so on. “Do these things and oblige my friend”—he points to the phone receiver, affectionately adding “Sieg heil!”—“and your most humble servant.” He cackles some more, and the lightning bolts return, welcoming us all to the impending apocalypse.
With his career abruptly short-circuited, Endfield received only the most routine assignments at M-G-M.3 After exploring the possibility of directing features at Columbia, he lost his draft deferment and wound up at a Signal Corps training center in Missouri. A year later, on maneuvers, he was sent to the hospital, told that he had a chronically spastic colon, and given an honorable discharge. Back in Los Angeles, he discovered that he was legally entitled to eight more months of employment at M-G-M, and got his old position back with minimal assignments on shorts and directing tests. In his spare time, he conversed with Buster Keaton—“working in the adjoining office as a gagman on a Red Skelton picture”—and listened to Suspense on the radio. Finding himself in the same car pool with the latter's producer, William Spier, he proposed writing a script for the show and sold the first four that he wrote; the first of these was called The Argyle Album and starred Robert Taylor. (Welles also hired him to rewrite a radio script for his wartime show Hello Americans, though he wound up using very little of Endfield's draft.)
After getting a freelance job to rewrite the script for the first “Joe Palooka” feature being produced at Monogram, Joe Palooka Champ (1946)—the first in a series based on the popular comic strip—Endfield got to direct as well as write the second, Gentleman Joe Palooka (1946), and later directed and cowrote Joe Palooka in the Big Fight (1949) as well. While working on the latter, Endfield got a call from songwriter Allan Roberts who, in collaboration with Lester Lee, had just written the songs for Gilda4 and wanted him to write the book for a Broadway musical they were preparing, Dear Sears Roebuck—a show that never saw the light of day. While working at Roberts and Lee's cottage office at Columbia, he met the studio actress Marilyn Monroe, and tried unsuccessfully to get his producer at Monogram, Hal Chester, to cast her as Palooka's sweetheart. But shortly afterward, when Endfield and Joe Kirkwood Jr., the actor playing Palooka, were planning an in-person act to promote the Palooka pictures, Kirkwood himself suggested Monroe as a singer and sketch performer. As a trial run, they performed the act gratis at a few veterans’ hospitals and men's club benefits, with Endfield serving as writer, emcee, and magician and Monroe assisting in the magic, playing in the comedy sketch, and singing “Diamonds Are a Girl's Best Friend,” but the act never went any further.
Most of Endfield's other credits in this period are poverty-row commissions: writing or cowriting two Bowery Boy features in 1946 (Mr. Hex and Hard Boiled Mahoney); writing and directing a comedy with a two-week shooting schedule called Stork Bites Man in 1947 (“an impossible piece of trash,” was all he cared to tell me about it) that received either limited release or no release at all; writing the Chinatown wedding scene in Douglas Sirk's Sleep My Love in 1948.5 But in 1948 he also wrote and directed his third feature, the first that he would later recall with any pride or affection, The Argyle Secrets, a surprisingly beautiful Z-budget thriller hastily adapted from his first radio script and shot in six days.
Inflation is unusually packed and fast-moving, but the rarely shown, sixty-three-minute Argyle Secrets is even more so. The cast features well over a dozen fully developed speaking parts, and there are so many interlocking and often paranoid intrigues crammed into one twenty-four-hour story line that even after three viewings I'd defy anyone to come up with a complete synopsis. The sheer darkness of the night scenes only intensifies our occasional perplexity, though it must be added that Endfield and his cinematographer, Mack Stengler, create many remarkable and arresting noir compositions out of this interminable stretch of night, usually with what appear to be minimal light sources. (One of the best utilizes two figures silhouetted behind frosted glass flanking the hero inside a police lieutenant's office; at the end of the scene, when the hero leaves and the police lieutenant picks up the phone to order two cops to shadow him, the “shadows” promptly disappear from behind the glass.) Great quantities of plot and deduction are shoehorned into the dialogue or voiceover narration at various junctures, and Endfield's drastic economy in negotiating this overflow produces some startling moments of visual poetry.
If the quest plot carries certain unmistakable echoes of The Maltese Falcon, made seven years earlier, the brittle, anxious, doom-ridden mood is even more evocative of Kiss Me Deadly, made seven years later. It seems that the only direct steal in the movie, however, is a shock cut from a character making a belated discovery to a screaming tugboat whistle; Hitchcock in The 39 Steps gets the same effect from the discovery of a dead body and a train whistle.
The much-sought-after object here is an argyle album containing the records of agreements struck between American and Nazi businessmen during the war, valued as much for blackmail and resale value as for a potential journalistic scoop. As a woman named Marla (Marjorie Lord) explains it, in a patch of expository dialogue offering a fair sample of Endfield's cadenced prose:
“You know, some men weren't so sure we'd win this late and little lamented war. So they made deals, deals with men who should have been their enemies—big money deals so they'd come out all right no matter which side won. The records of those deals were buried deep. What happened? A bomb made a direct hit. A bank vault opened like a spoiled tin can and spilled its rotten secrets. Then came the scavengers, the looters who always follow air raids, and with them Winters, who found among the debris the documents of betrayal. Winters lived in America before, recognized the names inscribed, and knew that he found a fortune—a fortune in blackmail.”
This sort of collaboration with the Nazis is a subject that, to the best of my knowledge, no other moviemakers were broaching in the late ’40s; but what is most distinctive about The Argyle Secrets is its view of humanity as inflected by war, a view that seems fully consistent with the one presented in Inflation five years earlier. Indeed, by the end of the film, even the hero and voiceover narrator—a rather unsavory and callous reporter named Harry Mitchell (William Gargan) who manages to triumph over all the assorted crooks, creeps, and exploiters in the film through his own cleverness—is tarnished by his own brutality and careerism, despite his claims of being motivated by loyalty to another journalist. (Eleven years earlier Gargan played Father Dolan in Fritz Lang's You Only Live Once, which suggests he's a somewhat unconventional casting choice for a hero.)
The other journalist is a famous political columnist, Pierce (George Anderson), who builds up interest in his paper for two weeks about the contents of the argyle album, then offers Mitchell an exclusive interview after he enters a hospital, fearing he might not live long enough to tell his tale. Pierce grows faint and dizzy before he can even explain what the album is, though he does show Mitchell a photostat of its cover; and just after Mitchell rushes to the washroom to fetch him some water, Pierce dies, an offscreen death memorably signaled by a close-up of the faucet as it ceases to drip (a perfect example of Endfield's surrealist sense of economy). Mitchell determines that Pierce is dead by feeling his pulse, but moments later, when he returns to the room with several others, they find a scalpel planted in Pierce's chest. The police turn up, and after the corpse of Mitchell's photographer is found in the same room only a few moments later, Mitchell flees from the scene and loses himself in traffic, proceeding to Pierce's office, where he promptly (if apologetically) slaps the secretary (Barbara Billingsley) unconscious so he can go through her boss's address book, hoping to track down the album.
Though he's far from a nice guy, Mitchell turns out to be relatively charismatic compared with the war profiteers, hoods, and stupid cops—not to mention a seedy fence and a corrupt doctor—who figure at various points in the plot, a rogue's gallery like the one only sketched in Inflation. “Relatively” is the operative term here, as it often is in Endfield's moral universe; when Mitchell learns from Marla that she's interested in the album only for its resale value, he remarks, “That's a comparatively decent motive,” and she replies, “I'm a comparatively decent person.”
Yet despite the jaded view of human impulses on display here, Endfield doesn't really qualify as a misanthrope like Anthony Mann or Stanley Kubrick (two other pessimistic disciples of Orson Welles and the ’40s noir tradition). One of the most appealing and unexpected interludes in The Argyle Secrets occurs when Mitchell, fleeing down a fire escape from war profiteer Winters (John Banner) and his hoods (who have beaten him senseless offscreen, expressionistically depicted in a sequence illustrating his disassociation and delirium), suddenly enters the flat of a working-class Jewish family he knew slightly years before. Much of the ensuing comedy stems from the family's trust toward Mitchell—a boy dutifully carries out his violin practice under the strict orders of his ditsy, anxious mother and dim-witted but good-natured older brother, a rookie cop who suddenly turns up with groceries.
Though Endfield ribs all three of these quaint, myopic characters, he's clearly affectionate rather than caustic. (Jewish himself, he suggested to me that he regarded this scene as something of an in-joke about his early work in the Catskills—a Borscht-circuit background that later led to his highly successful staging of the English production of Neil Simon's first play, Come Blow Your Horn.) There's a similar gentleness in his treatment of a stupid police lieutenant (Ralph Byrd), who figures much more prominently in the plot than the Jewish family. And if the “comparatively” decent Marla is still largely a standard-issue noir bitch goddess, the other, more odious types in the story—a southern rascal with a stiletto (Jack Reitzen), a fence whose cover is his job in waterfront salvage (Alex Fraser), and arguably even Winters—offer brief glimpses of humanity. Like the pinpoints of light briefly and strategically illuminating the film's endless reaches of darkness, these small, humanizing breaks in the overall patterns of greed are glancing yet pivotal elements in the overall composition.
“Are you a pessimist?” I asked Endfield when I visited him in England. He replied, “I would prefer ‘realist’. But I would add that my realistic appraisal of the condition of man in terms of odds is that the outlook is poor. There are options. I think our whole evolution has been founded on two contradictory aspects. One is the survival of yourself as an individual, the other is group survival. So we have two main ideas at cross-purposes, which makes the outlook very bad. And the economic developments of societies have never been stabilized to give the benefits of the creative parts of society, in whose name these parts are invented, to most of our species.”
Finally graduating to more respectable budgets in The Underworld Story and The Sound of Fury (subsequently retitled Try and Get Me!, which is how one most often locates it today), two more noirs with callous journalists, Endfield revealed himself a consummate action director in the terrifying mob scene that concludes the latter film—a talent he was able to develop only overseas in such films as Hell Drivers (1957), Sea Fury (1958), and Zulu. On the other hand, though Endfield's films are usually entertaining, viewers who expect to find the security blankets of charismatic heroes and neat psychological explanations are likely to be perturbed—at times even scared and shaken—by their relative absence in his work. With rare exceptions, these are upsetting movies with values that are often difficult to separate from Endfield's negativity and his capacity to depress us. People who go to movies in order to flee distress are advised to steer clear of Endfield's corrosive work.
A social environmentalist, Endfield is interested in how individuals relate to one another and in how groups interact within particular societies and temporary gatherings. He's particularly fascinated by chance encounters on plane flights; The Limping Man (1953), The Master Plan (1954), Sands of the Kalahari (1965), and even the formulaic Jet Storm (1959) all begin with people on planes or in airports, and the behavior of a group during a cataclysmic crisis is the focus of the latter two movies as well as The Sound of Fury and Zulu. A keen observer of class differences and (something that's much rarer) class resentments, he's much more interested in the ways that people are socially programmed and in how they function in collective situations than he is in individual psychological profiles, and in this respect he's more a Marxist than a Freudian. (Though avowedly never a card-carrying party member6—even when he regarded himself as a Young Communist League worker at Yale, after being introduced to politics by Paul Jarrico—Endfield also developed a grim analysis of human nature early on that informs all his subsequent work.)
Of course this Marxism doesn't make all of Endfield's films pro-communist by any means. The eerie plot of The Master Plan (credited pseudonymously to Hugh Raker for script and direction)—involving a convalescent American major (Wayne Morris) with a head wound, stationed in Germany to plug an intelligence leak, being hypnotized by communists to microfilm secret documents—postulates a cold war universe every bit as hysterical as the parodic version in The Manchurian Candidate. On the other hand, this remarkable film—which Endfield told me he had practically no memory of making—doesn't leave us with much confidence in the capitalist world, either. Though the invisible communist villains are certainly ruthless, the American major's superior (Norman Wooland), an English colonel, isn't exactly endearing. When the movie starts we assume that the major's the hero; gradually the colonel assumes this role instead, but so many characters are potential spies that any security defined according to nationality eventually becomes undermined. (The German setting may even make us confuse the communists with Nazis.) When one of the major characters is finally unveiled as a spy, Endfield wastes no time on the person's motivations. Rather he leaves us with a queasy sense that this is a crazed militarized culture in which everyone is a dupe, a spy, a paranoid schizophrenic, or some diseased combination of the above.
Indeed, working almost exclusively in thrillers and adventure stories, Endfield shows relatively little patience with certain generic staples widely believed to be obligatory: heroes and villains (at least as they're usually positioned and defined), sympathetic identification figures, and psychological motivations, all three of which tend to be mutually dependent. But all these apparent shortcomings work in his favor as a social analyst by objectifying the social terrains on which his plots unfold.
I'm not trying to idealize his approach. It's likely that his distance from conventional models isn't always intentional and questionable whether his powers as a social critic in the United States ever became fully translated into an English context. The Limping Man, The Master Plan, and Impulse (1955), three of his earliest English features, all have American protagonists (Lloyd Bridges, Wayne Morris, and Arthur Kennedy, respectively) who drift through complex intrigues rather like sleepwalkers, and Child in the House (1956) has its dreamy drifts as well. (It was Endfield's second picture with English child actress Mandy Miller, and its shooting was briefly watched by Charlie Chaplin, who complimented Endfield on his efficient direction of her.) Hell Drivers is an effective American-style proletarian thriller (with a few nods to The Wages of Fear), and was successful enough to lead to a long-term association with Stanley Baker (with whom Endfield formed a production company), but how much it has to say about English life is debatable; and the gravitation of the later work toward “international” social allegory in Jet Storm and Sands of the Kalahari further suggests a loss of specificity that came with exile.
The strained resolutions of The Underworld Story and The Limping Man are flawed by any standards. In the first, a corrupt journalist (Dan Duryea) undergoes a sudden moral transformation, thereby earning the love of Gale Storm, the belated mantle of a conventional hero, and a formulaic happy ending, all within a matter of minutes. In the second, a mystery plot about a war veteran (Bridges) returning to London is suddenly dissipated for one of those silly “it was all a dream” denouements. But in both cases these flaws contribute to a sense of overall disassociation that bolsters our analytical relation to the events while increasing their power to disturb. Not knowing precisely how we stand in relation to other characters—Howard da Silva's frighteningly cheerful and honest hood in The Underworld Story, or a “serious” Scotland Yard inspector who habitually leers at women in The Limping Man—we have to fall back uneasily on our own resources.
The absence of any hero in The Sound of Fury proves to be even more purposeful—radically shifting our focus two-thirds of the way through from working-class characters to wealthy characters without losing any thematic or ethical focus. The plot derives from a true incident as filtered through a novel: in 1933, two men were arrested in San Jose, California, for kidnapping and murdering a wealthy man named Brooke Hart; after confessing, they were lynched by the townspeople. This became the basis for Jo Pagano's novel The Condemned, which Pagano adapted for The Sound of Fury. Endfield was hired for this independent production as a replacement director, and when he objected to Pagano focusing on an Italian professor as a mouthpiece for his ideas and not placing more emphasis on the working-class victims, Pagano angrily left the project. After Endfield rewrote the first part of the script, producer Robert Stillman convinced Pagano to accept the changes and return to work under Endfield's supervision. Much of the $500,000 picture was shot in Phoenix, Arizona; when several thousand people gathered to watch the lynching being filmed, Endfield improvised ways of using them as extras.
After Endfield made his final cut, Stillman insisted on restoring some of the Italian professor's pontifications. The film opened in December 1950, at the height of the Korean War. (Endfield to Howie Movshovitz: “I started going to cinemas where it was playing, and the manager of one of them told me, ‘I never have a performance when I don't get at least two or three people coming around to tell me it's a disgrace to run this kind of anti-American picture.’”) After a private screening that he set up himself, Endfield told me he recalled an upset Joseph Cotten saying to him, “Cy, we've both grown up in the same country, but the America you know is not the America I know.”
Such wartime sentiments are understandable given the film's potent negativity, but the highly distanced approach taken by Endfield toward all his characters shouldn't be confused with cynicism. Cynicism hardly describes the approach to the jobless veteran (Frank Lovejoy) we're introduced to at the film's beginning, who falls into crime because he can't bear his wife and son having to live without luxuries—and then becomes so guilt-ridden about a kidnapping and murder carried out with his psychopathic partner (Lloyd Bridges) that he blurts out a confession to a hapless manicurist he's dating. Though she may be pathetic and even grotesque, she's hardly bad or selfish either; the dry treatment she's accorded might border on cruelty, but it's far from cynical.
The same could be said of the treatment of both the Zulus and the British soldiers in Zulu—a celebration of courage and nobility on both sides of the conflict—although here, for once, the lack of psychology limits the film's social vision. It's an epic account of an attack by four thousand Zulu warriors on a garrison of 104 British soldiers in Natal, South Africa, in 1879 (very persuasively shown and remarkably choreographed, although Endfield never used more than 250 Zulu extras, usually 150), and its lack of any explanation for the siege may add to the film's purity as action spectacle, but it also limits our understanding of any historical and social context.7
This isn't to say that these and other Endfield pictures aren't full of cynics and creeps, viewed moreover with a complete lack of sentimentality. Indeed, it might be argued that the world in most Endfield films tends to be divided between victims and predators, though neither category winds up satisfactorily fulfilling the usual parts played by heroes and villains. Society in all of Endfield's best films—and even in a few of his worst, like Tarzan's Savage Fury—proves to be so profoundly out of joint that getting rid of a few bad apples scarcely solves a thing. Far from defeatist, his searing social allegories are all about explicitly man-made horrors, which implicitly means they can be unmade or remade.
Take the cynic in Sands of the Kalahari, whose viewpoint Endfield makes clear is far from his own. This rifle-toting American thug (Stuart Whitman)—an allegorical cold warrior itching to colonize everything in sight—survives a plane crash in the African desert, then devotes himself to shooting both baboons and some of his European companions on the theory that they're competitors for food and water who'd do the same thing to him if they had half a chance. By the end he's become Lord of the Baboons, a job for which he seems ideally suited.
A pronounced feeling for abstraction in relation to both physical space (aural as well as visual) and social milieu can be felt throughout Endfield's work. There are haunting scenes in both The Sound of Fury and The Limping Man in which families are seated in dark living rooms watching TV shows whose violence we perceive only through their staccato sound effects. No less suggestive is the scene in The Sound of Fury when the veteran first meets the manicurist: the emotional distance between these shy strangers is brutally conveyed by the smooching of the other couple they're with, standing directly between them at screen center.
The same visual irony turns up in Jet Storm. An explosives expert (Richard Attenborough) driven mad by the hit-and-run death of his little girl boards the same flight as the hit-and-run driver and secretly plants a time bomb somewhere on the plane. After we're treated to a caustic survey of possible human responses to this crisis, and all the adults on board have exhausted their means of persuading the madman to report the bomb's whereabouts, an eight-year-old boy is enlisted to try. At a climactic moment, Endfield frames a loosely hanging phone receiver in the foreground directly between these estranged characters, parodying their noncommunication with a symbol of communication that practically dwarfs them both. It's a representative image of Endfield's blighted, angry, and absurdist but far from hopeless universe, where the social lucidity of what we see usually becomes the only form of hope and redemption in sight.
During the couple of days (February 11–12, 1993) I spent with Endfield—most of them devoted to conversation and watching copies on video of Child in the House and Sea Fury—I sensed that he felt some satisfaction in finally getting some recognition as a director after many years of neglect. (Perhaps the first sign of this came when an old friend from high school sent him a clipping that placed Underworld Story and Try and Get Me! at the top of a list of recent best-selling black-and-white movies on video.) But at the same time, he was reluctant to claim too much for many of his pictures, implying that I overrated some of them, like Jet Storm, that he saw strictly as meat-and-potato operations. He wasn't eager to talk much about the Joe Palooka pictures (which he barely remembered, and which I hadn't seen myself since early childhood), and, among other films of his I wasn't conversant with, was fairly dismissive about his first English feature, Colonel March Investigates (1953), made up of three pilot episodes for a TV series with Boris Karloff called The Department of Queer Complaints, whose scripts (by Sidney Buchman) he was initially hired to rewrite, and Hide and Seek (1963), which he called “just a utility picture.” By contrast, he wanted me to see The Secret (his first color film,8 1955, and Universal Soldier (his last picture, 1971), a movie about mercenaries in which he appears as an actor (not a picture that has generally been well received even by his fans), neither of which I've been able to track down.9
Among those films I had seen, he was especially scornful of Tarzan's Savage Fury (1952), his last American feature, describing it as a film with impossible production conditions that his agent had talked him into doing. Regarding many of his English pictures, his memory often focused on the actors originally cast for certain parts: Richard Conte in the part played by Arthur Kennedy in Impulse, Robert Ryan in the part played by Jack Hawkins in Zulu (a character Endfield saw as embodying the worst side of colonialism), Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor (at the height of their fame) as the leads of Sands of the Kalahari (with Burton eventually replaced by George Peppard, who quit after a day's shooting, to be replaced by Stuart Whitman), Orson Welles for the part in De Sade (1969) eventually taken by John Huston. (After directing that picture for three or four weeks, including most or all of the film's early scenes, Endfield wound up with what he described as a “subclinical virus” that left him immobilized for months in a Berlin hospital; Roger Corman and Gordon Hessler directed the rest.)
What did he take some pride in? What he called his “structuralist” sense of craft in working on scripts; the final sequence of The Sound of Fury (minus the voiceovers); the fact that on Mysterious Island, he was the first director ever to get special effects wizard Ray Harryhausen to agree to a few changes in his production drawings, and that this “Dynamation” special was the top grosser in England in 1961; the exhaustive, multifaceted research (consuming three-quarters of a year) that went into Zulu, leading to Endfield's long-term friendship with Chief Gatsha Buthelezi, the great-grandson of the Zulu king depicted in the film, who played his own great-grandfather in the movie. (The novel Zulu Dawn is dedicated to him.) Again on Zulu, Endfield took pride in the fact that he was willing to spend four years shopping his script around until he found all the right conditions for making it the way he wanted to, and the fact that he knew how to compose the shots in the film for 70mm VistaVision.
He didn't want to take much credit for choosing exile over giving names during the blacklist; as he put it to Howie Movshovitz, “I don't feel heroic about it. I didn't have heroic thoughts.” But even though he had abandoned his Marxist activism and repudiated Stalinism many years before, it's clear that his social conscience remained intact—not only when he chose exile over betrayal but also when he made The Sound of Fury two years earlier.
Where in American cinema can one go for more succinct expressions of everyday blue-collar despair—the agony of seeing even modest dreams gallop away at high speed—than the successive homecomings of Howard Tyler (Frank Lovejoy) in The Sound of Fury? Each of these supposedly humdrum events is composed as a discrete, concentrated catalog of sensual and emotional facts, from the cacophony of kids scuffling around a wire fence to the pathos of a family radio (perceived in relation to a next-door neighbor's TV) to the slow, rhythmic snapping of a window blind in the night breeze across from Tyler's sleeping wife. If the beautiful and disquieting cinema of Cyril Raker Endfield describes a poetry of thwarted ambitions, dark social insights, and awesomely orchestrated spectacle designed to drive us out of our cocoons, this is surely a good place to start.
Notes
This originally appeared in Film Comment, November–December 1993; revised December 1995, November 1996, and November 2017.
1. See Endfield's own letter in the March–April 1992 Film Comment, p. 79, written in response to my “Guilty by Omission”—an essay reprinted (with corrections) in Placing Movies: The Practice of Film Criticism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 281–94.
2. See Endfield's article “I Lobby My Hobby” in the January 1943 Esquire and Lewis Ganson's three-volume Cy Endfield's Entertaining Card Magic, published in London in the mid-’50s.
3. These consisted of three “Our Gang” comedies (Radio Bugs, Tale of a Dog, Dancing Romeo) and work on a couple of “Passing Parade” shorts about Nostradamus, all in 1944. After his military service, he's credited with three more “Passing Parade” shorts, The Great American Mug (1945), Magic on a Stick, and Our Old Car (both 1946).
4. According to most accounts, Roberts's collaborator on the songs for Gilda was Doris Fisher.
5. His writing credits after he moved to England, apart from the films he directed, include his script for the 1955 American movie Crashout, an uncredited rewrite on Curse of the Demon (1957), and Zulu Dawn (1979).
6. This fact is disputed by Pierre Rissient, one of Endfield's oldest friends—and clearly the individual most responsible for his critical discovery [November 2017].
7. To get such an understanding, we have to turn to Endfield's best-selling 1979 novel, Zulu Dawn (nearly 250,000 copies sold in England)—a much better realization of his intentions than the eponymous prequel directed by Douglas Hickox, released the same year, which he coscripted.
8. About a year after The Secret was released, Endfield adapted and directed it for the London stage. The production was not a success.
9. Since writing the above, I've been able, thanks to the generosity of film scholar David Thompson, to see on video Universal Soldier—a rather dated effort, alas, whose interest mainly resides in its period flavor and in Endfield's cameo as a landlord with a background identical to his own [November 1996]. And thanks to Brian Neve, I've by now caught up with all the Endfield films I hadn't seen, including the dreadful Stork Bites Man, all three of the Joe Palooka pictures, and the excellent The Secret [November 2017].