Casino Royale

Val Guest

Val Guest (11 December 1911 – 10 May 2006) was a British film director, best known for his science-fiction films for Hammer Film Productions in the 1950s, but who also enjoyed a long, varied and active career in the film industry from the early 1930s up until the early 1980s.

He was born Valmond Maurice Grossmann in London, England, and educated at Seaford College. Guest’s initial career was as an actor, appearing in various productions in London theatres. He also appeared in a few early sound film roles, before he gave up an acting career and moved into writing. For a time in the early 1930s he was the London correspondent for the Hollywood Reporter trade paper, before he began working on film screenplays for Gainsborough Pictures, his first being No Monkey Business in 1935.

He wrote screenplays for the rest of the decade, including working on scripts for Will Hay, as well as some film scores, before in the early 1940s becoming a director, with his debut feature in this… read more

Ken Hughes

Ken Hughes (1922-2001) b. Liverpool, England. Associated with the film industry for over fifty years, Hughes was a television playwright and novelist. Most of his films were crime thrillers, including a bizarre version of Macbeth transposed to American gangland, Joe Macbeth (1955). The success of The Trials of Oscar Wilde (1960) with Peter Finch led to bigger-budget projects. His most ambitious work was Cromwell (1970), in which the dictator of the Commonwealth was seen as a seventeenth-century Castro, leading his freedom fighters. Hughes did score back-to-back successes with the bond spoof Casino Royale (1967) and Disney’s Chitty Chitty Bang Bang (1968). Later he directed Alfie Darling (1975), a 70s sex-comedy follow-up to the Oscar-nominated Alfie (1966). —britmovie.co.uk

John Huston

Adventure in many forms is the theme of many of John Huston’s films. His characters are constantly searching for “the stuff that dreams are made of” (the famous closing-line of his debut film The Maltese Falcon). Huston glorified this chase despite its frequent disillusionment and false promise, since it represented a flight from the complacent virtues of ordinary life. Like Ernest Hemingway and Joseph Conrad, Huston regarded civilization as a false surface which thinly veiled a hostile nature. Only those who lived at the edge, on the margins of society were regarded by Huston as fellow travellers. In films as diverse as The Treasure of Sierra Madre, The Asphalt Jungle and Under the Volcano, Huston celebrated men who circled the abyss; characters who are driven to plunge head first into the void.
The son of the great theatre and film actor Walter Huston (who would win an Oscar under his son’s direction for his role in The Treasure of Sierra Madre) and crime journalist Rhea Gore… read more

Adventure in many forms is the theme of many of John Huston’s films. His characters are constantly searching for “the stuff that dreams are made of” (the famous closing-line of his debut film The Maltese Falcon). Huston glorified this chase despite its frequent disillusionment and false promise, since it represented a flight from the complacent virtues of ordinary life. Like Ernest Hemingway and Joseph Conrad, Huston regarded civilization as a false surface which thinly veiled a hostile nature. Only those who lived at the edge, on the margins of society were regarded by Huston as fellow travellers. In films as diverse as The Treasure of Sierra Madre, The Asphalt Jungle and Under the Volcano, Huston celebrated men who circled the abyss; characters who are driven to plunge head first into the void.
The son of the great theatre and film actor Walter Huston (who would win an Oscar under his son’s direction for his role in The Treasure of Sierra Madre) and crime journalist Rhea Gore, John Huston enjoyed an itinerant youth; exposed to different walks of life while moving through a variety of careers. As a contract screenwriter for Warner Bros. he worked on films such as Jezebel, Juarez, Sergeant York and High Sierra. The latter film, directed by Raoul Walsh, was the first starring role for Humphrey Bogart who would become a regular collaborator, a close friend and the star of Huston’s directorial debut – The Maltese Falcon. This adaptation of Dashiell Hammett’s classic novel is celebrated as an iconic film noir; sparking as many imitators as Citizen Kane, another debut film made the same year.

Huston’s success as a genre film-maker did not steer him away from his natural eclecticism and thirst for challenge. His most adventurous work in the 1940s is perhaps his war documentaries. Serving in the United States Army Signal Corps during the Second World War, Huston made groundbreaking films such as Report to the Aleutians and The Battle of San Pietro. Its technical innovation in cinematography and raw depiction of armed combat influenced many succeeding films about war, fiction and non-fiction alike. His most controversial documentary, Let There Be Light, was cited by Huston, in his autobiography, as a transformative experience. It marked a lifelong engagement with psychology; directly inspiring Freud, his 1962 biopic about the psychoanalyst’s early career. It’s setting in a psychiatric hospital which treated returning soldiers who suffered from shellshock was regarded by the Signal Corps to be demoralizing to the United States Army and the American public. As a result, the film was shelved and withdrawn from public exhibition until 1980.

The post-war career of Huston followed two alternating currents of studio projects and personal works, many of them adaptations of literary classics. Shot in Ireland, Moby Dick was a difficult but rewarding production; its innovative cinematography by Oswald Morris resulted in one of Huston’s most expressive uses of colour. His most consistent period extended from Fat City (1972)to Wise Blood (1979), tough intimate dramas of failure and defeat. This cycle ended with Under the Volcano, perhaps the darkest of Huston’s gazes into the abyss. The Dead, his final film, made on his deathbed with the help of his children and an oxygen tank, is a work of serene majesty and rousing beauty. —Mr Bongo

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Robert Parrish

Robert R. Parrish (born 4 January 1916, Columbus, Georgia – 4 December 1995, Southampton, New York) was an American actor, film editor, film director, and writer. He received an Academy Award for Film Editing for the 1947 film, Body and Soul.

Parrish was the son of factory cashier Gordon R. Parrish and Laura R. Parrish. In the mid-1920s, the family moved from Georgia to Los Angeles and Parrish and his sisters Beverly and Helen began obtaining work as actors soon thereafter. Parrish made his film debut in the 1927 Our Gang short Olympic Games. (Their mother, Laura R. Parrish, was an actress as well and appeared in a few films of the 1940s.) He appeared in the anti-war classic All Quiet on the Western Front (1930) and Charles Chaplin’s City Lights (1931), and in several films for John Ford.

Ford then enlisted him as an assistant editor in 1936 on Mary of Scotland, and as a sound editor on Young Mr Lincoln (1939). Parrish worked as an assistant editor and sound editor on… read more

Robert R. Parrish (born 4 January 1916, Columbus, Georgia – 4 December 1995, Southampton, New York) was an American actor, film editor, film director, and writer. He received an Academy Award for Film Editing for the 1947 film, Body and Soul.

Parrish was the son of factory cashier Gordon R. Parrish and Laura R. Parrish. In the mid-1920s, the family moved from Georgia to Los Angeles and Parrish and his sisters Beverly and Helen began obtaining work as actors soon thereafter. Parrish made his film debut in the 1927 Our Gang short Olympic Games. (Their mother, Laura R. Parrish, was an actress as well and appeared in a few films of the 1940s.) He appeared in the anti-war classic All Quiet on the Western Front (1930) and Charles Chaplin’s City Lights (1931), and in several films for John Ford.

Ford then enlisted him as an assistant editor in 1936 on Mary of Scotland, and as a sound editor on Young Mr Lincoln (1939). Parrish worked as an assistant editor and sound editor on other Ford movies as Drums Along the Mohawk (1939) and The Grapes of Wrath (1940). Parrish and Ford were in the United States Navy during the Second World War, and worked on documentary and training films including The Battle of Midway (1942).

In 1947 he won an Oscar for his debut as a feature film editor on Robert Rossen’s high tempo boxing drama Body and Soul; the award was shared with Francis Lyon. Parrish was later nominated for another Rossen film – the political drama All the King’s Men (1949); he shared the nomination with Al Clark.

Parrish went on to contribute his technical talents to a host of highly regarded films and made a promising directorial debut in 1951 with the gripping revenge melodrama, Cry Danger. His subsequent output met with varying success. The Purple Plain (1954) was nominated for “Best British film” at the 8th British Academy Film Awards. One of the most notorious of his films was the James Bond Parody Casino Royale (1967), in which he was one of the film’s five directors. His last film, on which he shared co-director credit with Bertrand Tavernier, was Mississippi Blues (1983).

Parrish wrote two memoirs, Growing Up in Hollywood (1976) and its sequel Hollywood Doesn’t Live Here Anymore (1988). Of the first, Kevin Brownlow wrote, “His stories about these pictures were marvellous in themselves, and he often came at them sideways, so not only the punchline but the situation took you by surprise. We all entreated him to write them down and in 1976 he did so, producing one of the most enchanting – and hilarious – books about the picture business ever written. It was called Growing Up in Hollywood and it ought to be reprinted in this centenary year.” Summing up Parrish’s career, Allen Grant Richards wrote, “Other than his excellent editing work and early directing, Parrish may be most remembered as storyteller from his two books of Hollywood memoirs.” —Wikipedia

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