TSPDT

Key Production Countries: UK, USA
Key Genres: Thriller, Drama, Film Noir, Crime, Action-Adventure, Mystery-Suspense, Mystery, Crime Drama, Romance, Crime Thriller, Disaster Film
Key Collaborators: Stanley Baker (Leading Actor), Lloyd Bridges (Leading Actor), John Prebble (Screenwriter), Jonah Jones (Cinematographer), Herbert Lom (Leading Character Actor), Ernest Archer (Production Designer), Bruce Beeby (Character Actor)

"Yale-educated Cy Endfield quickly found his way into the New York theatre as a director and choreographer of musicals. He also taught drama. In 1946, following some documentary shorts for MGM, he directed his first movie, Gentleman Joe Palooka. But his liberal views got him onto the Hollywood blacklist and in 1950 he came to Britain to continue his career, at first working under a pseudonym. Since then he has proved himself one of those eclectic, highly cultured directors who seem content with a stop-go film career. The Sound of Fury (Try and Get Me!) is a powerful, socially concerned indictment of mob-rule. Hell Drivers is a tough and unusual British thriller about lorry drivers starring Stanley Baker, with whom Endfield formed a production company in the Sixties. Its finest achievement was Zulu, which shows Endfield's social concern transposed into an interest in imperialism and African history." - The Illustrated Who's Who of the Cinema, 1983

"To put it as simply and bluntly as possible, Endfield’s work has an uncommon intelligence so radically critical of the world we live in that it’s dangerous, threatening that world’s perpetuation. But since Endfield has worked in genres in which such ideas are usually inadmissible and even inconceivable, the very possibility of such insights has been ignored. You won’t find Endfield’s name in any of the standard auteurist sources, like Andrew Sarris’s The American Cinema, and when you do come across his name in a reference book, chances are you can’t depend on the “facts” you’ll find… Though Endfield’s films are always entertaining, viewers who expect to find the usual action-movie 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." - Jonathan Rosenbaum (Chicago Reader, 1992)

"From Joe Palooka to the Marquis de Sade is an eventful journey, especially with Tarzan and Welsh soldiers fighting Zulus along the way… 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. I met him in the summer of 1992, in his cottage not far from Oxford, England, and there established that 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)." - David Thomson (The New Biographical Dictionary of Film, 2010)

"Long admired for iconic works such as Hell Drivers (1957) and Zulu (1964), Endfield is doubly fascinating when viewed through the prism of his lesser-known films, especially those made in England where he worked in exile under the pall of McCarthyism… His expatriate status, as much as his political background, informed numerous films, positing a diegetic world that turns less on a hero’s journey in pursuit of a goal, than on being plunged headlong into a maelstrom of intersecting dangers. This bleak outlook, closely related to postwar film noir (to which Endfield was a contributor) applies across numerous genres and settings, including the workplace, inhospitable landscapes and institutions of social control such as jail, the military, the press and the political realm." - UCLA Film & Television Archive, 2016

"The McCarthy witch-hunts caught up with him and forced him out of America. Working in Britain, at first under the double cloak of a pseudonym and the tag of 'supervising director', Endfield soon revealed taste - and talent - for raw, red-blooded action, whether it was on the battlefield or in a man-to-man fist-fight." - David Quinlan (Quinlan's Film Directors, 1999)