Fred Zinnemann

At 89 years old, Fred Zinnemann has this physical status:

Alfred Zinnemann (April 29, 1907 – March 14, 1997) was an Austrian-born American film director.

He won four Academy Awards for directing films in various genres, including thrillers, westerns, film noir and play adaptations.

He made 25 feature films during his 50-year career. He was among the first directors to insist on using authentic locations and for mixing stars with civilians to give his films more realism.

Within the film industry, he was considered a maverick for taking risks and thereby creating unique films, with many of his stories being dramas about lone and principled individuals tested by tragic events.

According to one historian, Zinnemann's style demonstrated his sense of "psychological realism and his apparent determination to make worthwhile pictures that are nevertheless highly entertaining." Among his films were The Search (1947), The Men (1950), High Noon (1952), From Here to Eternity (1953), Oklahoma! (1955), The Nun's Story (1959), A Man For All Seasons (1966), The Day of the Jackal (1973), and Julia (1977).

His films have received 65 Oscar nominations, winning 24. Zinnemann directed and introduced a number of stars in their U.S. film debuts, including Marlon Brando, Rod Steiger, Pier Angeli, Julie Harris, Brandon deWilde, Montgomery Clift, Shirley Jones and Meryl Streep.

He directed 19 actors to Oscar nominations, including Frank Sinatra, Montgomery Clift, Audrey Hepburn, Glynis Johns, Paul Scofield, Robert Shaw, Wendy Hiller, Jason Robards, Vanessa Redgrave, Jane Fonda, Gary Cooper and Maximilian Schell.

Early life

Zinnemann was born in Rzeszów, the son of Anna (Feiwel) and Oskar Zinnemann, a doctor. His parents were Austrian Jews. He had one younger brother. While growing up in Austria, he wanted to become a musician, but went on to graduate with a law degree from the University of Vienna in 1927.

While studying law, he became drawn to films and convinced his parents to let him study film production in Paris. After studying for a year at the Ecole Technique de Photographie et Cinématographie in Paris, he became a cameraman and found work on a number of films in Berlin, before emigrating to Hollywood. Both of his parents were killed during the Holocaust.: 86

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Career as director

After studying filmmaking in France, Zinnemann worked in Germany with several other beginners (Billy Wilder and Robert Siodmak also worked with him on the 1929 film People). In his first film The Wave (1936), shot on location in Mexico with mainly non-professional actors recruited among the locals, it is one of the first examples of social realism in narrative film. Zinnemann had worked with documentarian Robert Flaherty before, "probably the biggest single influence on my work as a filmmaker," he said.

Though he was captivated by Germany's cultural heritage, with its theater, music, and films, he was also aware that the country was in the middle of a serious economic crisis. After continually seeing decadent ostentation and luxury amid unemployed workers, he became dissatisfied with Berlin. The wealthy classes were pushed further to the political right and the poor to the left, with the poor moving to the left. "Emotion had long since started to displace reason," he said. 16 As a result of Europe's political transition, as well as the fact that sound films had appeared in Europe, where filmmaking in Europe was still unprepared to produce their own, film production in Europe slowed drastically. Zinnemann, who was then only 21, got his parents' permission to go to America, where he hoped filmmaking opportunities would be greater.

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He arrived in New York at the time of the stock market crash in 1929. Despite the financial crisis that had erupted, he found New York to be a different cultural environment: 17 yr olds.

A few months after finishing his first directorial effort for the Mexican cultural protest film The Wave in Alvarado, Mexico, he rode a Greyhound bus to Hollywood. Henwar Rodakiewicz, Gunther von Fritsch, and Ned Scott, all fellow contributors to the Mexican project, established residence in North Hollywood. In All Quiet on the Western Front (1930), one of Zinnemann's first jobs in Hollywood was as an extra. Many of the other extras, according to him, were former Russian aristocrats and high-ranking police who immigrated to America after the Russian revolution in 1917.

He was twenty-two years old at the time, but he said he looked older than Hollywood's forty-year-olds. But he was jubilant because he was still determined that "this was the place one could breathe free and belong" at the time. 18 But after a few years, he became disillusioned with Hollywood's limited resources.

After some brief success with short films, he went back to television in 1942, producing two B mysteries, Kid Glove Killer and Eyes in the Night, before his big break with The Seventh Cross (1944), starring Spencer Tracy, became his first success. The film was based on Anna Seghers' novel and, although it was entirely shot on the MGM backlot, made a convincing use of refugees German actors in even the smallest roles. Tracy's central character, a Tracy-based prisoner, is portrayed as largely passive and fatalistic. Despite this, he is still in need of heroic assistance from anti-Nazi Germans. In a sense, the film's most complex character is not Tracy's character, but rather a humble German worker played by Hume Cronyn, who transforms Nazi sympathizer to active critic of the regime as he assists Tracy.

Zinnemann discovered that both of his parents had been killed in the Holocaust during World War II. 86 He was furious by his studio deal, which meant he had no choice but to direct films like Little Mister Jim (1946) and My Brother Talks to Horses (1947) despite their lack of enthusiasm in the subject matter. However, his next film, The Search (1948), received an Academy Award for screenwriting and gained his first film in the Hollywood studio. Montgomery Clift stars in his first film appearance as a GI who is traumatized by the conflict for a lost Czech child. Act of Violence (1948), a gritty film noir starring Van Heflin as his troubled POW, Robert Ryan as Heflin's wife, and Mary Astor as a sympathetic prostitute, were followed by Act of Violence (1948). Act of Violence was Zinnemann's first venture in which he "felt secure" knowing exactly what I wanted and specifically how to obtain it."

Marlon Brando, a war veteran of the Men (1950s), appears in The Men (1950): A It was Brando's first film. In a California hospital where real patients appeared as extras, Zinnemann shot several scenes. Teresa (1951), which starred Pier Angeli, was followed by Teresa (1951).

High Noon (1952), one of the first 25 American films chosen in 1989 for the National Film Registry, may have been Zinnemann's best-known film. The film broke the mold of the formulaic western with psychological and moral examinations of its lawman hero Marshall Will Kane, played by Gary Cooper and its experimental chronology, in which by screen time approximated the 80-minute countdown to the confrontational hour. He worked closely with cinematographer and longtime friend Floyd Crosby, giving the scene a gritty "newsreel" look that contrasted with John Ford's more painterly cinematography. He developed a strong rapport with Gary Cooper during filming, photographing the aging actor in several tight close-ups that involved sweating and at one point, even crying on set.

According to screenwriter Carl Foreman, High Noon was supposed to be an allegory of Senator Joseph McCarthy's vendetta against suspected Communists. However, Zinnemann denied this, saying that the film's problems were wider and concerned both conscience and brave, uncompromising fearlessness. "High Noon is not a Western, as far as I'm concerned; it just happens to be set in the Old West," he says.

Kane's character, according to film critic Stephen Prince, is actually Zinnemann, who set up an atmosphere of imminent danger on the horizon, a fear of future "fascism" depicted by the group of killers' soon-arrived. "One of the things that are most important today [is] preserving our culture," Zinnemann said in a general context for several of his films.

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The prince claims that Zinnemann, having discovered that both his parents were killed in the Holocaust, wanted Kane to "fight rather than run," as well as every other resident of town. As a result, "Zinnemann allies himself" with the film's hero. 86 Zinnemann addresses the film's subject matter and its relevance to modern times: 86 Zinnemann introduces the film and its relevance to modern times:

Though Julie Harris was not yet 26 years old, Zinnemann selected Julie Harris as the film's 12-year-old protagonist for his screen adaptation of The Member of the Wedding (1952). Harris had performed on Broadway two years ago, just as the two other leading actors, Ethel Waters and Brandon deWilde, had.

From Here to Eternity (1953), based on James Jones' book, was nominated for 13 Academy Awards and will go on to win 8, including Best Picture and Best Director. Zinnemann fought hard with producer Harry Cohn to make Montgomery Clift the character of Prewitt, but Frank Sinatra, who was at a low point of his fame, appeared in the role of "Maggie" against Zinnemann's wishes. Sinatra would win the Best Supporting Actor award later this year. Deborah Kerr, who is best known for prim and proper roles as a philandering Army wife, appeared on Here to Eternity. Donna Reed portrayed Alma "Lorene" Burke, a prostitute and mistress of Montgomery Clift's story, winning her an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for 1953.

In Oklahoma!

(1955) Zinnemann's interpretation of the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical, the widescreen version of Todd-AO, made its debut, as did the film's young star, Shirley Jones. It was also an expression of Zinnemann's continuing faith and awe for America, with its energy and exuberance.

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Don Murray, Eva Marie Saint, and Anthony Franciosa appeared in his next film, A Hatful of Rain (1957), which was based on Michael V. Gazzo's play. It's a drama about a young married man with a cryptic morphine addiction who struggles to avoid and suffers from traumatic withdrawal symptoms. Since film representations of drug use and withdrawal in the 1950s were rare, Zinnemann's film was a risk.

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With The Nun's Story (1959), Zinnemann brought Audrey Hepburn into the role of Sister Luke, a nun who later gives up the religious life to join the Belgian resistance in the Second World War. Marie Louise Habets' life was based on the film. Hepburn, who gave up the opportunity to star Anne Frank in order to work on The Nun's Story, found it to be her best and most personal work. Carl Theodor Dreyer's The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928), Zinnemann's favorite film, inspired him greatly. He was thankful that Hepburn was so quick to work with:

The Sundowners (1960), starring Robert Mitchum and Deborah Kerr as an Australian outback husband and wife, received more Academy Award nominations, including Best Picture, Best Screenplay, Best Actress (Kerr) and Best Supporting Actress (Glynis Johns), but no awards were given out. Behold A Pale Horse (1964) was a post-Spanish Civil War epic based on the book Killing a Mouse by Emeric Pressburger and starring Gregory Peck, Anthony Quinn and Omar Sharif, but the film later admitted that it "didn't really come together."

He appeared on the jury at the 4th Moscow International Film Festival in 1965.

With A Man for All Seasons (1966), scripted by Robert Bolt from his own play and starring Paul Scofield as Sir Thomas More, Zinnemann's fortunes changed once more, portraying him as a man driven by conscience to his ultimate destiny. The film went on to win six Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Best Actor (Scofield) and Best Director, Zinnemann's second consecutive Oscar nomination to date. The film was also accepted into the 5th Moscow International Film Festival.

Zinnemann was all about to direct a Man's Fate for MGM after all this. However, the project was cancelled in 1969, and the studio attempted to hold Zinnemann accountable for at least $1 million of the $3.5 million that had already been invested on pre-production. Zinnemann pleaded a lawsuit against the studio, but it will be four years before he makes his next film.

By the early 1970s, Zinnemann had been out of work since Man's Fate's demise; he said it had "marked the end of an era in image making and the start of a new one," he said, as lawyers and accountants began to substitute showmen as head of the studios and when a handshake was no longer a handshake. However, Universal later offered him the opportunity to direct The Day of the Jackal (1973), based on Frederick Forsyth's best-selling suspense book. Edward Fox was portraying Edward Fox as an English assassin hired to murder French President Charles de Gaulle, and Michael Lonsdale as the French detective charged with blocking him. When it eventually became a success with the public, Zinnemann was excited by the possibility to direct a film in which the audience would already know the ending (the Jackal's mission).

Julia (1977), based on a tale in Lillian Hellman's book Penduentto, was followed four years later. Jane Fonda played Hellman and Vanessa Redgrave as her best friend Julia, a doomed American heiress who took the opportunity and security of great wealth to dedicate her life to the anti-Nazi movement in Germany. The film was nominated for 11 Academy Awards, three for Best Screenplay (Alvin Sargent), Best Supporting Actor (Jason Robards), and Best Supporting Actress for Redgrave, who received boos on Oscar night for her "Zionist hoodlums" acceptance address. Fonda's performance, according to Zinnemann, was remarkable, and she also deserved an award.

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Five Days One Summer (1982), directed in Switzerland and based on Kay Boyle's short story Maiden, Maiden, was Zinnemann's last film. Sean Connery and Betsy Brantley as a "couple" holidaying in the Alps in the 1930s, and a young Lambert Wilson as a mountain climber who is increasingly suspicious of their relationship. The film was both a critical and commercial flop, but Zinnemann would be told by several commentators in later years that it was an underrated achievement. Zinnemann criticized the film's cultural and commercial demise for his departure from filmmaking: "I'm not saying it was a good film." However, there was a certain degree of brutality in the reviews. The pleasure some people took in tearing down the film was sorely lacking."

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Honours and awards

• Academy Award for Best Short Subject, One-Reel: That Mothers Might Live (1938).
• Golden Globe for Best Film Promoting International Understanding: "The Search" (1948).
• Academy Award for Best Documentary Short Subject: Benjy (1951).
• New York Film Critics Circle Award for Best Director: High Noon (1952).
• Academy Award for Best Director, Directors Guild of America (DGA) Award for Outstanding Directorial Achievement in Motion Pictures: From Here to Eternity (1953).
• New York Film Critics Circle Award for Best Director: The Nun's Story (1959).
• Academy Award for Best Director, New York Film Critics Circle Award for Best Director, and Directors Guild of America (DGA) Award for Outstanding Directorial Achievement in Motion Pictures: A Man for All Seasons (1966).
• D. W. Griffith Award, 1971.
• Order of Arts and Letters, France, 1982.
• U.S. Congressional Lifetime Achievement Award, 1987.
• John Huston Award, Artists Right Foundation, 1994.