Karel Reisz

Karel Reisz (1926-2002), Czech-born British film director, born in Ostrava, whose early career is closely associated with the directors Tony Richardson and Lindsay Anderson. As a Jew he fled Czechoslovakia just before the Nazi invasion in 1938, being sent to Britain by his parents, who stayed behind and were killed in the Holocaust in Auschwitz concentration camp. He read natural sciences at the University of Cambridge and became a school teacher, but abandoned it to become a journalist and critic. He joined the Sequence group (named after the magazine of the same name and centred around Lindsay Anderson), which argued for a socially committed cinema, and in 1953 he published The Technique of Film Editing.

His first film, the scrappy Momma Don’t Allow (1955, co-directed by Tony Richardson), was a documentary set in the Wood Green Jazz Club and associated with the Free Cinema movement, which aimed to create a cinema that reflected the realities of every-day lives. He followed it with We Are the Lambeth Boys (1959), a view of a South London youth club that appears somewhat condescending in retrospect but which, nevertheless, survives as an important period piece. He also began production work at this time, producing Anderson’s short film, Every Day Except Christmas (1957). Reisz’s first feature, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1960), produced by Richardson, catapulted Albert Finney, as a recalcitrant factory worker, to fame. The film’s success in large part rested on the ex-Ealing director and editor Seth Holt, who worked and shaped a great deal of the near-documentary material into a dramatic shape.

Without such support, Reisz had difficulty achieving the same impact again. Night Must Fall (1964, again featuring Finney), Morgan—A Suitable Case for Treatment (1966), Isadora (1968, starring Vanessa Redgrave), The Gambler (1974), and Who’ll Stop the Rain? (1978) were all ambitious but flawed films which revealed little of his initial promise. His later films, including an adaptation of John Fowles’s The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1981, starring Meryl Streep and Jeremy Irons; scripted by Harold Pinter), the Patsy Cline biopic Sweet Dreams (1985, starring Jessica Lange), and Everybody Wins (1990, with a script by Arthur Miller), confirmed his painstaking craftsmanship, but revealed what many critics perceived to be a utilitarian approach that Reisz himself recognized as being close to “stamp collecting”. He was married to the actress Betsy Blair.