Brian Desmond Hurst (12 February 1895 – 26 September 1986) was a Belfast-born film director. Responsible for over 30 movies as director, Hurst was Ireland’s most prolific movie director during the 20th century.
Early life
Hurst was born Hans Hurst in Ribble Street, East Belfast"".into a working class family. Hurst attended the New Road School, a Public Elementary School, on the junction of the Newtownards Road and Hemp Street in East Belfast. The building still exists today and further information on this and the houses he lived in are detailed in the Belfast media legacy website “Black City”.
Brian Desmond Hurst’s father (Robert, senior) and brother (Robert, junior) were iron-workers in the Harland and Wolff shipyard. In August 1914, at the outbreak of World War I Hurst enlisted as a private in the British Army and changed his name from Hans to Brian soon afterwards. He saw service with the 6th Battalion Royal Irish Rifles at the battle of Chunuk Bair in Gallipoli, the Balkans and the Middle East. At the battle of Chunuk Bair his regiment were “battle virgins when they were thrown into the Turkish machine gun fire for the first time on 10th August 1915”. “They had set out a few hours before for the Chunuk Bair with twenty officers and over 700 men. Several stragglers and those who had lost their way returned to base in the hours that lay ahead but by the evening of 10 August the Hampshires and the Rifles had been broken in what amounted to a cruel massacre”.
Hurst was interviewed by Punch magazine in 1969 and the article contained Hurst’s quote “‘I would fight for England against anybody except Ireland’ he says, Why for England? ‘Because an Englishman is worth twenty foreigners.’ Why not against Ireland? ‘Because an Irishman is worth fifty Englishmen.’” In the same article when commenting about his experiences of fighting at Gallipoli in a Battalion that was from a mixed religious background, as it had recruiting offices in Belfast and Dublin, the article comments “Catholic-Protestant antagonism vanished in this holocaust”.
Returning from World War I Hurst found life in Belfast constraining and he took a government grant to emigrate to Canada sometime in 1920. He wanted to follow his artistic ambition and enrolled at the Toronto College of Art. After two years he left and went to France to study art at École des Beaux Arts in Paris.
Early film career
Hurst then moved to Hollywood where he quickly rose from set artwork to movie production. Under the expert guidance of John Ford, sometimes claimed to have been Hurst’s cousin, he learnt the new skills of set management. Hurst even made one screen appearance as an extra in Ford’s Hangman’s House (1928) where he briefly appears alongside a college footballer gaining his first break – John Wayne. Hurst’s skills, however, were behind the camera where his artist training allowed him to capture faces and expressions with a unique flair. These skills were honed under Ford who remained a lifelong friend. Hurst was with Ford and helped advise Ford when Ford brought Hollywood to Ireland when making The Quiet Man (1952).
By 1933 Hurst was ready to return to the UK and settled in Belgravia from the 1930s to his death in 1986 although often returning to Ulster to visit relatives for “a spiritual bath”.
His early Irish work is attracting historic interest with Synge’s Riders to the Sea (1935) and the Irish War of Independence love story Ourselves Alone (1936) proving to be historically important. Hurst’s Irish Hearts (1934) “is certainly one of the main contenders for the first Irish sound feature film”.
Riders to the Sea was shot in Connemara where Hurst used the actors of the Abbey Theatre in Dublin and “the film reflects the disparity between the two, with the actors delivering their lines in a highly technical manner whilst the camera revels in the bleak, natural beauty of the coastline and sky. Hurst’s visuals are invariably compared with those of his mentor, John Ford, and the opening shots of Riders… are markedly Fordian in their elementary quality”.
Ourselves Alone was banned in Northern Ireland at the time of its release in 1936 although it has now achieved the recognition it deserved and is shown in museums and other public access points in Northern Ireland. It appears to have been misunderstood. At the time Hurst pointed out the original story had been written by a British army officer and Hurst claimed that the film was ‘pro-British’.
Hurst’s earliest English films include The Tenth Man (1936) and Glamourous Night (1937).
In 1937 Hurst was retained by Alexander Korda on a resurrected project to direct “Lawrence of Arabia”. In “Filming TE Lawrence Korda’s Lost Epic” it was noted that "Hurst was a Northern Irishman who could speak Arabic… Hurst was about to leave on a trip to Jerusalem to scout locations when Korda cancelled the trip, saying that the Palestine government refused to permit large gatherings of Arabs and they could not make the film without crowds of Arab extras. The last version of Hurst’s screenplay (co-written with Miles Malleson and Duncan Guthrie) dated 4 October 1938 is reprinted in “Filming TE Lawrence Korda’s Lost Epic pages pages 33 to 127.”
“On the Night of the Fire” is regarded as one of the early examples of British film noir. Released in December 1939 at the outbreak of the Second World War and set in Newcastle it charts the slow moral destruction of a barber following his theft of some money. The film critic David Quinlan describes the film as “grim but gripping”. Andrew Spicer, in his book European Film Noir, writes: “A riveting psychological study. With its sustained doom-laden atmosphere, Krampf’s expressive cinematography, its adroit mixture of location shooting and Gothic compositions and Richardson’s wonderful performance as a lower middle-class Everyman, On the Night of the Fire clearly shows that an achieved mastery of film noir existed in British cinema”.
Hurst then had the distinction of being selected by Alexander Korda to help co-direct Korda’s bit for the war effort The Lion Has Wings (1939) featuring Ralph Richardson which was described by one critic as “Hurst’s most celebrated film of the 1930s”. The historic importance of the movie is understood when it is realised that Korda was a close friend of Winston Churchill and had made a promise to Churchill to get this movie out within a month of war being declared. The review on Imdb.com comments that “This first of its kind in propaganda films of World War II, shows the might of the English Empire and its eagerness to stand up to the oppressors of morality and free will. Crude but effective propaganda cinema that sets the tone for things to come. With its stiff upper lip attitude…”.
Later years
The Times, in its obituary of Hurst in 1986, commented that Dangerous Moonlight (1941) was “his best known picture”, “a big popular success” which “launched a cycle of pictures with concerti as their theme music” because of its successful utilisation of Richard Addinsell’s Warsaw Concerto.
Hurst worked for the Ministry of Information during the Second World War for whom his films included A Call to Arms (1940), Miss Grant Goes to the Door (1940) and his homeland movie A Letter From Ulster (1943) where Hurst and Terence Young (scriptwritter) and his fellow Ulsterman and Assistant Director William MacQuitty created a film “promoting a sense of community” between the people of Northern Ireland and over one hundred thousand troops from the USA based in Northern Ireland at the time. Brian McIlroy explained that “Hurst was able to persuade one Catholic and one Protestant soldier to write letters home, explaining their impressions of their stay. From these letters, Terence Young, the scriptwritter, was able to construct a sequence of activities that revealed the different traditions of Ireland.”
An interesting fact about Hurst’s Hundred Pound Window (1944) was that it featured a young Richard Attenborough obtaining his first credited role (playing Tommy Draper).
Hurst’s Theirs is the Glory (1946) was possibly the biggest grossing war movie for a decade where he took 200 members of the 1st Airborne back to Arnhem and Oosterbeek to direct and ‘remake’ their role in the Battle of Arnhem. Every single person in that movie served with the 1st Airborne or was a civilian from Oosterbeek or Arnhem. You cannot help but wonder whether Hurst was thinking back to his colleagues that he left behind at Gallipoli especially when you watch the moving opening scene featuring 10 men in a Nissen hut preparing for battle and the closing scene featuring only 2 returning. What we do know is that Hurst said “The film is my favourite because of the wonderful experience of working with soldiers, and because it is a true documentary reconstruction of the event. I say without modesty it is one of the best war films ever made”".
The premier of Theirs is the Glory was on the second anniversary of the battle in September 1946 and was attended by the Prime Minister. King George VI commanded a private screening at Balmoral. Theirs is the Glory and A Bridge Too Far were compared in the battlefields magazine Against All Odds and the comparison is stark and revealing “A Bridge Too Far is a slow moving epic, well worth a viewing with some authentic scenes, but is unconvincing in its portrayal of the battle of Oosterbeek…‘Theirs is the Glory’ is the only feature film currently released that accurately portrays the events at Oosterbeek in atmospheric and chronoligical terms, despite its jerky portrayal of events. This is a film to watch.”
Hurst’s post-war career included producing and directing the definitive Christmas movie Scrooge (1951) which is the “best of the many screen versions of Dickens’s warm-as-mince-pies Christmas Carol, with Alastair Sim as Scrooge incarnate: his miserly humbuggery is a delight. So is Michael Hordern’s ghastly Jacob Marley, and the snowy, atmospheric photography of C.M. Pennington-Richards”.
Hurst produced Tom Brown’s Schooldays (1951) and directed the box office successes Malta Story (1953) featuring Alec Guinness as an RAF pilot helping to defend Malta. “The combination of an A list cast, the portrayal of the iron relilence of the Maltese people, the gallantry of the RAF pilots and a tragic love story were the four components of its success”. Hurst went on to directSimba- Mark of the Mau Mau (1955) featuring Dirk Bogarde and The Black Tent (1956) featuring Donald Pleasence, Anthony Steel and Donald Sinden. In his late 60s Hurst returned to Synge and adapted the script, produced and directed Playboy of the Western World (1962), his last film.
In the same way that John Ford had mentored Hurst it seems that Hurst was able to mentor and help many leading lights in the movie business. Hurst spotted a young Roger Moore in 1945 where he was an extra on the film set of Caesar and Cleopatra in London. He offered him the chance to audition for RADA (Royal Academy of Dramatic Art) with his parent’s consent and paid his fees.
The first three scriptwriting roles of Terence Young were on the Hurst directed movies On the Night of the Fire (1939), Dangerous Moonlight (1941) and A Letter From Ulster (1942). They worked together again on Hungry Hill (1947).
Writings
The official legacy website on Brian Desmond Hurst is at http://www.briandesmondhurst.org and a link to this is also included below at the links section. He was the subject of an acclaimed memoir, The Empress of Ireland, written by Christopher Robbins, in 2004. —Wikipedia
