Lewis GILBERT

Born in Hackney, London on 6 March 1920, Lewis Gilbert has had a long and varied career in British cinema. Coming from two generations of music hall performers, Gilbert came into cinema as a child actor and had appeared in more than seventy films by 1938. He moved behind the camera to become an assistant director in the late 1930s and then during the Second World War was seconded from the RAF Film Unit to the US Air Corps Film Unit. After being invalided out of the services in 1944, he joined Gaumont-British Instructional Films where he made short documentaries. His feature film debut came with the modest children's film The Little Ballerina (1947). Half a dozen poverty-row ‘B’ movies followed before he moved towards mainstream respectability with the entertaining POW drama Albert RN (1953).

During the 1950s Gilbert steadily built his commercial reputation by specialising in two popular genres, the crime film and the nostalgic Second World War drama. In the crime genre he produced the first British ‘X’ film with the joyfully lurid Cosh Boy (1953), a downbeat caper movie The Good Die Young (1954) with Laurence Harvey and Cast a Dark Shadow (1955), an atmospheric suspenser with Dirk Bogarde cast against type as a wife-murderer. However, his greatest success came with his war films and particularly the phenomenally popular Reach for the Sky (1956) which tells the moving story of the pilot Douglas Bader (Kenneth More) who lost both legs in a flying accident but managed to return to active duty in the war.