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In December 1951, director Cy Endfield boarded the Queen Mary for the UK with two suitcases in hand. He never looked back. Although Endfield had not been a box office hitmaker, his resume was growing and he seemed poised, if nothing else, for a successful career in Hollywood. Instead, he fled into exile upon learning he would be summoned to testify before the House UnAmerican Activities Committee.
The first full-length study of the director, British film savant Brian Neve’s The Many Lives of Cy Endfield (University of Wisconsin Press), explores a blacklist victim whose life followed a different path than the better-known Dalton Trumbo. Like many idealists in the 1930s and ‘40s, he was drawn to Communism and was a party member, albeit one who drifted away after numerous disagreements with the party line. When HUAC’s summons arrived, Endfield was prepared to admit his lapsed Communist Party membership, but was morally uneasy about “naming names,” exposing friends and associates to the Committee’s wrath (which could result in jail time as well as unemployment). Rather than testify, he caught a boat to England.
Endfield had arrived in Hollywood after success in New York’s left wing theater; like Orson Welles, he loved magic tricks; he directed some dross (a Tarzan flick) as well as some films noir interesting in description and worth tracking down for genre fans. His British career got off to a slow start. His name was omitted from credits because American distributors sometimes banned films credited to blacklisted directors. However, he earned a living and after the blacklist waned, made what became his signature film, the nuanced historical epic Zulu (1964), starring Michael Caine.
Neve’s also explores the director’s aesthetics. Endfield was against many of the art house developments of his day because they failed to communicate. “Endfield felt that filmmaking demanded a trade-off, respecting what the audience wanted while providing them with more than that.”
