Three Documentaries

Saul J. Turell succeeded at enough different aspects of the movie business for any three careers: as a distributor and producer of documentary films, a pioneer in the field of cable television, a distributor of classic feature films from the 1920s through the 1960s, and as an Oscar-winning filmmaker. Turell was a key figure in facilitating the revival of interest in classic cinema during the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. Saul Turell was born in the Bronx, NY, in 1921, and became a filmgoer at an early age thanks to his grandmother, whom he accompanied to the movies regularly when he was still a boy. He served in the United States Army in the South Pacific during World War II, and intended to go into the movie business as a producer at the end of the war. He discovered, however, that there were too many people who were already in or entering the business on the technical side, especially in the field of editing, which he knew something about and through which he’d intended to begin his career. Instead, he became a distributor, founding a company called Sterling Films in 1946. Over the next decade, Turell assembled and directed numerous short documentary films built around easy-to-sell titles and themes, such as Carnival and Sports Around the World; in a manner anticipating the business model of American International Pictures and its co-founders Samuel Z. Arkoff and James H. Nicholson, Turell would often come up with the title and then put the movie together from any newsreel footage that he could gather, with whatever extra features he could draw on, which was how one of his big early successes, Death In the Arena, came about. Dealing with the demise of the matador Manolete, the title of the film came first, then footage of men in the bullring, and all of it enhanced with stills of the late Manolete that had been given to Turell by the man’s mother, with whom he had a previous acquaintance. Sterling Films prospered from the late ‘40s onward; along with Castle Films and Official Films, it was one of the three major suppliers of such vest-pocket documentaries, and when the theatrical market for such short films began drying up, Turell moved into the newly robust, largely untapped non-theatrical market, distributing 16mm prints of his releases to schools and other institutions. He also created School News Digest, a series of newsreel-type documentary shorts aimed specifically at junior high school and high school audiences. At the end of the 1950s, Turell moved into other areas, most notably television; in 1960, he created the anthology series Silents Please, the first (and only) vehicle for the presentation of silent movies on network television. Although hardly ideal in format or presentation, as the material in question was cut into 30-minute segments, the series did allow a new generation of viewers to discover (and older audiences to rediscover) works such as Raoul Walsh’s The Thief of Bagdad (1924) and F.W. Murnau’s Nosferatu (1922). Hosted by Ernie Kovacs and shown on ABC, the show was a critical and commercial success. Turell was also one of those responsible for Legend of Valentino, the groundbreaking 1960 documentary that profiled the life and career of Rudolph Valentino. For NBC, he made Hollywood: The Golden Years, a series hosted by Gene Kelly that took a look back at the early years of the talkies. In 1963, Turell also co-wrote The Great Chase, a classic documentary about silent films built around chase sequences, that went further toward restoring that filmmaking era to the consciousness of modern viewers. During the early ‘60s, Sterling Films merged with the Walter Reade Organization, a huge distribution company, to become Reade-Sterling, with Turell serving as its president. He later founded Sterling Communications in partnership with Chuck Dolan, which became Sterling Cabl}, a fledgling cable television outfit in New York during the mid-’60s that subsequently evolved into Manhattan Cable, which would be absorbed into Time-Warner Cable. In 1965, Turell was the director and co-writer of The Love Goddesses, a film that celebrated the screen’s most renowned actresses from the early silent era through the dawn of the 1960s, which was successful enough in its time to generate an answering film called The Love Gods, made by Turell’s former business associate Paul Killiam. In 1965 and 1966, Turell went into partnership with producer William Becker, when the two took over a near-bankrupt production and distribution company called Janus Films. Becker and Turell, as chairman and president, respectively, were responsible for getting Janus Films into the business of distributing classic films and unusual short subjects – usually packaged by Turell – to schools and universities. They saw a growing interest in film study and made it easy to rent 16mm prints, and the business grew from there. From the late ‘60s until the early ’80s, Janus Films was the primary source for 16mm prints (and later the broadcast rights as well) to the films of Ingmar Bergman, Akira Kurosawa, Luis Bunuel, Alfred Hitchcock, Michael Powell, Emeric Pressburger, and other celebrated filmmakers from Europe, Asia, and England. The company also restored some luster to the RKO library by licensing and repackaging such 1930s and 1940s classics as King Kong, Citizen Kane, The Magnificent Ambersons, and Cat People, both for non-theatrical and television distribution. Janus Films, under Turell and Becker, was also responsible for distributing acclaimed children’s films, including Albert Lamorisse’s The Red Balloon and Circus Angel. In addition, the company had a fascinating penchant for covering both sides of an issue (and all of its bases) in the course of its work: just as Janus distributed Lamorisse’s The Red Balloon, it also distributed British animator Bob Godfrey’s adult parody of The Red Balloon, entitled Dream Doll; similarly, Janus distributed the celebrated leftist film Salt of the Earth, but also handled the rights in America to the 1930s Nazi propaganda films Triumph of the Will and Olympia. Many of these films remained available for theatrical showings only through the efforts of Janus Films and it was through Turell’s company that the first showings of complete editions of Black Narcissus, The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, 49th Parallel, and Lola Montes took place in American theaters or on television, and the company also made possible rereleases of works as varied as Laurence Olivier’s Richard III, Marcel Camus’ Black Orpheus, and contemporary films such as Shohei Imamura’s Vengeance Is Mine and The Ballad of Narayama. Turell taught film courses at New York University for seven years and also taught classes at The New School, in addition to running Janus Films. He returned to documentary filmmaking in the late ‘70s, writing, producing, and directing Paul Robeson: Tribute to an Artist, narrated by Sidney Poitier; released in 1979, the film won the Academy Award for Best Short Subject Documentary, and played a vital role in reviving interest in the late singer/actor/activist. Turell continued to work on new projects, playing a key role in planning and founding the American Movie Classics cable channel. During the mid-’80s, Turell was stricken with cancer and he passed away in 1986, at the age of 65. In the years after his death, Janus Films remained in the film business, principally through The Criterion Collection, an acclaimed laserdisc and DVD production company, which continued to bring important movies from the silent era onward to the public in optimum presentations. His son, Jonathan Turell, was one of the guiding hands and prime movers in The Criterion Collection from its inception in the mid-’80s. —Bruce Eder, Rovi