Cy ENDFIELD

Born in Scranton, Pennsylvania on 10 November 1914, Cyril Raker Endfield studied at Yale before working with a number of liberal theatre projects of the kind which developed under Roosevelt's depression-era New Deal policies. At university Endfield's political interests had developed and he became involved with the Young Communist League. Another passion was for magic, particularly card tricks. It was the latter which was to gain him entry to Orson Welles' Mercury production company in Hollywood in the early 1940s, Welles being another devotee of magic.

For the next ten years he was in regular employment as a director, usually credited at this time as Cyril Endfield. He made eight short films and seven features in Hollywood. The bulk of his feature films are routine ‘B’ movies and low budget fillers like Gentleman Joe Palooka (1946) and Tarzan's Savage Fury (1952), but his political leanings are apparent in the powerful lynch mob drama The Sound of Fury (1950) and the taughtly directed crime thriller The Underworld Story (1950). His first short film, Inflation (1942), a wartime propaganda parable about the dangers of conspicuous consumption, was shelved after complaints from the Chamber of Commerce that it was anti-capitalist. In 1951 he fled the United States after being named a Communist by the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC); he resettled in Britain.