Fred Zinnemann

Director Fred Zinnemann (1907–1977) was one of the central European-born filmmakers who shaped the classic era of Hollywood film. He directed films whose images are etched deeply into the imaginations of filmgoers everywhere, especially the 1951 Western High Noon and the wartime drama From Here to Eternity, in 1953.

Atrue craftsman of cinema, Zinnemann worked slowly. He made only about 20 feature films over his long career, but many of them were high-minded, detailed films only slightly less significant than his two great classics. Schooled in documentary techniques when he was young, Zinnemann did much to give mainstream American film a straightforward, realistic look. His handling of actors was superb, and a long list of future stars began their careers facing the lens of his camera. The most distinctive characteristic of Zinnemann's films, however, was their consistent focus on integrity as a theme. That integrity carried over into Zinnemann's approach to filmmaking; although he was not of a revolutionary temperament, he often faced down Hollywood money men and insisted on making films as he thought best.

Distracted from Law Studies

Zinnemann was born in Rzeszów, Poland, on April 29, 1907, and grew up in Vienna, Austria. He was of Jewish background, and his father, a doctor, expected him to pursue a professional career. After going to a college-preparatory high school, the Franz-Josef Gymnasium, Zinnemann dutifully enrolled in law classes at the University of Vienna. But he was bored with the law and discouraged about his prospects. "As a Jew, one was a second-class citizen," Zinnemann told David Robinson of London's Guardian newspaper. "I would probably have become a doctor like my father, but there were too many doctors after the first world war, so I was made to study law. To avoid the boredom of the lectures, I went to the movies."

That was during the classic era of European silent film, and Zinnemann saw one directorial masterpiece after another: Sergei Eisenstein's The Battleship Potemkin from Russia, Erich von Stroheim's Greed from Germany, and King Vidor's war drama The Big Parade from the United States. Zinnemann's parents resisted his desire to study film, but eventually gave in and allowed him to attend the Ecole Technique de Photographie et Cinématographie in Paris, France, one of just two film schools in Europe at the time. He had trouble getting a permit to work in France and so moved to Berlin, where he served as an assistant cameraman on several films and met a group of young directors who were thinking of seeking their fortunes in the growing American film industry. Zinnemann sailed for America himself in 1929, arrived in New York on the day the stock market crashed, and took a Greyhound bus to California.

If Zinnemann had stayed in Germanic Europe, he was quoted as saying in the Times of London, "I'd be dead by now. Probably not even buried." Zinnemann's parents, indeed, died in the Holocaust. But Zinnemann prospered in Hollywood. He landed a job as an extra in the antiwar classic All Quiet on the Western Front and was hired as an assistant by the pioneering documentary filmmaker Robert Flaherty, the director of Nanook of the North. Zinnemann accompanied Flaherty back to Europe to work on a documentary set in Central Asia. The film fell through, but Zinnemann benefited from long discussions with Flaherty. "He influenced me in every possible way, not only technically, but also in what I learned from him by being his assistant, his whole spirit of being his own man, of being independent of the general spirit of Hollywood, to the point where he didn't worry about working there," Zinnemann told Brian Neve of Cineaste.

Back in the Western hemisphere, Zinnemann directed a documentary, Los redes (The Waves), that was funded by the Mexican government and dealt with the lives of fishermen in the Veracruz area. Armed with a letter of introduction from Flaherty, he got a job at the MGM studio. Zinnemann worked his way up the studio hierarchy in the late 1930s, starting out as a film cutter and later being allowed to direct short subjects. He married English-born Renée Bartlett, a costume assistant, in 1936; they had a son, Tim, who went into the film industry. The following year, Zinnemann became an American citizen. One of his short subjects, That Mothers Might Live (about deaths in childbirth), won an Academy Award in 1938.

Directed Film About German War Resister

It was during World War II that Zinnemann was elevated to the roster of feature-film directors at MGM. After the crime potboiler Kid Glove Killer in 1942 he made his first serious film two years later: The Seventh Cross, with an all-star cast that included Spencer Tracy, Jessica Tandy and Hume Cronyn, dealt with a group of German concentration camp escapees. The subject matter of moral individuals surrounded by corrupt organizations or societies would attract Zinnemann throughout his career.

Zinnemann's realistic style proved invaluable in bringing to life the war's aftermath; some dubbed his style neorealist by analogy with the gritty style of contemporary Italian films, but Zinnemann credited his training with Flaherty as a more important influence. The Search (1948), starring a then-unknown Montgomery Clift, marked Zinnemann's emergence as a distinctive talent; its story of European war orphans mixed documentary-style footage with scripted narrative. Clift was cast at Zinnemann's insistence, and he became the first of a long list of actors whose careers the director launched or furthered in their early stages. The list included Marlon Brando who starred in The Men, Zinnemann's 1950 film about disabled veterans, Ava Gardner, Grace Kelly, Rod Steiger, Paul Scofield, Meryl Streep and John Hurt. Another important early Zinnemann film, highly esteemed by film buffs, was Act of Violence (1949), a dark-hued drama about survivor's guilt. Zinnemann left MGM after that film and worked mostly with independent producer Stanley Kramer over the next several years. In 1951 he picked up his first Academy Award, a best director nod for the short subject Benjy.

The spare style Zinnemann favored was applied with brilliant effect to the Western genre in High Noon (1952), which brought star Gary Cooper an Academy Award for best actor and a best director nomination for Zinnemann himself. Zinnemann and cinematographer Floyd Crosby set out to duplicate the plain style of a newsreel, and the film was shot in real time, over 85 minutes approaching a showdown between a marshal and a murderous gang. Abandoned by deputies, townspeople and even his wife, Cooper's marshal was both a classic lone hero and, in the view of some observers, an indictment of a corrupt society spiraling into the repressive years of the Red Scare.

The theme of an individual with a conscience recurred in From Here to Eternity, released in 1953 and considered perhaps his greatest film. Zinnemann won the Academy Award for best director, and the film won a host of other awards including one for Frank Sinatra in the role of Angelo Maggio, a soldier friend to Montgomery Clift's Private Prewitt. The film's most famous scene was a beach rendezvous between adulterous lovers Burt Lancaster and Deborah Kerr, complete with water splashing over the embracing pair, but much of the rest of the story, set in the days surrounding the bombing of Pearl Harbor, brought a new level of realism to Hollywood film. Zinnemann used newsreel footage of the bombing.

Attracted by Big Screen Format

Zinnemann's next film was atypical within his overall output; Oklahoma! (1955) was a musical comedy, the only one he directed. He was offered the helm of the big-budget production because of the success of his last two films, and he agreed to direct it because, as he told Neve, "I found it fascinating to try a new medium, this huge screen." The film was a hugely popular success although one critic joked that Zinnemann's rather dry style had in effect removed the exclamation point from the film's title. Zinnemann returned to more serious fare A Hatful of Rain (1957), a drama about drug addiction, and The Nun's Story, a 1959 film starring Audrey Hepburn as a Belgian missionary nurse serving in the Congo.

The Nun's Story earned eight Academy Award nominations, including one for Zinnemann as best director. He added to his nomination tally with The Sundowners (1960), a family drama set on the Australian frontier, but his next film, the Spanish Civil War tale Behold a Pale Horse, was less successful despite the presence of Gregory Peck in the lead role. Zinnemann moved to London, England, in the early 1960s. He had several motivations: England was his wife's homeland, and he had often worked in Europe and thought about returning there. He was also still troubled by the blacklisting and loyalty oaths that had plagued Hollywood in the anti-Communist atmosphere of the 1950s.

Zinnemann's career got a second wind in London with the historical drama A Man for All Seasons (1966), which starred unknown Paul Scofield as St. Thomas More, another of Zinnemann's maverick heroes. The film took Academy Awards for best director and best picture among others. Despite this success, Zinnemann's next film, Man's Fate, was cancelled by the MGM studio just before Zinnemann was set to begin shooting. Zinnemann rebounded in the 1970s, however, with the taut thriller The Day of the Jackal (1973), in which he returned to his classic detached style. Julia (1977) introduced Meryl Streep in a small role. Based on the memoirs of playwright Lillian Hellman and starring liberal icons Jane Fonda and Vanessa Redgrave, the film brought Zinnemann his final best director Academy Award nomination.

Zinnemann made one more film, the gentle romance Five Days One Summer (1982); it featured Sean Connery as its star and a generous portion of mountain scenery in the Swiss Alps. Zinnemann himself was an avid mountaineer. He was frequently honored in the late 1980s for his lifetime of achievements and remained active in film circles, working for directors' rights to resist colorization of their black-and-white films. Ambulatory only with the aid of a walking stick, he nevertheless served as president of the Britain's Directors Guild. In the last year of his life, Zinnemann successfully resisted filmmakers' attempts to give a remake of The Day of the Jackal the same title, arguing that it had been altered too much from the original story (it was eventually released as The Jackal). Asked by Neve shortly before his death about his view of the future of cinema, he replied, "I would like to be optimistic, because we have brilliant directors and writers and actors, but I tend to be pessimistic. We have enormous powers of persuasion, and we are role models for the rest of the world, but we no longer have a positive attitude towards life. Until that is changed, I think it is not going to be good." Zinnemann died in London on March 14, 1997.

Books

International Dictionary of Films and Filmmakers, 4th ed., St. James, 2000.

Zinnemann, Fred, An Autobiography: A Life in the Movies, Scribner's, 1990.

Periodicals

Australian, March 24, 1997.

Chicago Sun-Times, March 15, 1997.

Cineaste, Winter 1997.

Entertainment Weekly, March 28, 1997.

Guardian (London, England), March 17, 1997.

Mail on Sunday (London, England), March 16, 1997.

New York Times, March 15, 1997.

Times (London, England), March 17, 1997.

Variety, March 17, 1997.

Washington Times, March 23, 1997.

Online

"Fred Zinnemann," All Movie Guide, http://www.allmovie.com (January 30, 2006).