Fred Zinnemann

Fred Zinnemann
Born	April 29, 1907(1907-04-29) Vienna, Austria-Hungary
Died	March 14, 1997(1997-03-14) (aged 89) London, England
Spouse	Renee Bartlett (1936-97)

Fred Zinnemann (April 29, 1907 – March 14, 1997) was an Austrian-American film director. He won four Academy Awards and directed several films, including High Noon, From Here to Eternity and A Man for All Seasons.

Life and career

Zinnemann was born to a Jewish family in Vienna, Austria. While growing up in Austria, he wanted to become a musician, but went on to study law. While studying at the University of Vienna, he became drawn to films and eventually became a cameraman. He worked in Germany with several other beginners (Billy Wilder and Robert Siodmak also worked with him on the 1929 feature People on Sunday) before going to America to study film.

One of his first assignments in Hollywood was when he found work as an extra in All Quiet on the Western Front (1930), although he was discharged from the production for talking back to the director, Lewis Milestone. After some success with short films, he graduated to features in 1942, turning out two crisp B mysteries, Eyes in the Night and Kid Glove Killer before getting his big break with The Seventh Cross (1944), starring Spencer Tracy, which was his first hit.

He directed many different film genres including thrillers, westerns, film noir, and play adaptations. Nineteen actors appearing in Zinnemann's films received Academy Award nominations for their performances: among that number are Frank Sinatra, Audrey Hepburn, Glynis Johns, Paul Scofield, Robert Shaw, Wendy Hiller, Jason Robards, Vanessa Redgrave, Jane Fonda, Gary Cooper and Maximilian Schell. Zinnemann's 1950 film The Men is noted for giving Marlon Brando his first screen role.

Zinnemann's career spanned six decades, during which he directed 22 features and 19 short subjects, and won four Oscars. Perhaps his best-known work is High Noon (1952), one of the first 25 American films chosen in 1989 for the National Film Registry. With its psychological and moral examinations of its lawman hero, played by Gary Cooper, its allegorical political commentary (on McCarthy-era witch-hunting) and its innovative chronology whereby screen time approximated the 80-minute countdown to the confrontational hour, High Noon broke the mould of the formulaic shoot-‘em-up western.

The director's other films, all dramas of lone and principled individuals tested by tragic events, include From Here to Eternity (1953); The Nun's Story (1959); A Man For All Seasons (1966); and Julia (1977). Regarded as a consummate craftsman, Zinnemann traditionally endowed his work with meticulous attention to detail, an intuitive gift for casting and a preoccupation with the moral dilemmas of his characters.

Zinnemann's penchant for realism and authenticity is evident in his first feature The Wave (1935), shot on location in Mexico with mostly non-professional actors recruited among the locals, which is one of the earliest examples of realism in narrative film. Earlier in the decade, in fact, Zinnemann had worked with documentarian Robert Flaherty, an association he considered "the most important event of my professional life".

His adaptation of The Seventh Cross, based on Anna Seghers' novel, though filmed entirely on the MGM backlot, made realistic use of refugee German actors in even the smallest roles.

Zinnemann also used authentic locales and extras in The Search (1948), which won an Oscar for screenwriting and secured his position in the Hollywood establishment, a vivid drama of World War II aftermath in Berlin that drew on Zinnemann's skills as both documentarian and dramatist. Shot in war-ravaged Germany, the film stars Montgomery Clift in his screen debut as a GI who cares for a lost Czech boy traumatised by the war. In the critically acclaimed The Men (1950), starring newcomer Marlon Brando as a paraplegic war veteran, Zinnemann filmed many scenes in a California hospital where real patients served as extras.

Besides Clift and Brando, other Zinnemann discoveries included Pier Angeli and John Ericson, who co-starred in Teresa (1951), with Rod Steiger and Ralph Meeker debuting in secondary roles. In Oklahoma! (1955), Zinnemann's version of the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical, the wide screen format Todd-AO made its debut, as did the film's young star Shirley Jones.

For his screen adaptation of the play The Member of the Wedding (1952), Zinnemann chose the 26-year-old Julie Harris as the film's 12-year-old protagonist, although she had created the role on Broadway just as the two other leading actors, Ethel Waters and Brandon De Wilde, had. In From Here to Eternity (1953), he cast Frank Sinatra, who was at the lowest point of his popularity. As the likable loser Maggio, Sinatra won an Oscar for Best Supporting Actor. From Here to Eternity also featured Deborah Kerr, best known for prim and proper roles, as a philandering Army wife. Donna Reed played the role of Alma "Lorene" Burke, a prostitute and mistress of Montgomery Clift's character which earned her an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for 1953. And Audrey Hepburn, previously cast in comedic roles, played the anguished Sister Luke in the highly acclaimed The Nun's Story.

Throughout his career Zinnemann favoured a protagonist morally impelled to act heroically in defence of his or her beliefs. Hepburn in The Nun's Story and Cooper in High Noon, determined to confront savage outlaws hungry for revenge, are two other prominent examples. Paul Scofield as Sir Thomas More in A Man For All Seasons (1966) portrayed a man driven by conscience to his ultimate fate.

A variation on that theme is found in The Seventh Cross, in which the central character—an escaped prisoner played by Spencer Tracy—is comparatively passive and fatalistic. He is, however, the subject of heroic assistance from anti-Nazi Germans. In a sense, the protagonist of the film is not the Tracy character but a humble German worker played by Hume Cronyn, who changes from Nazi sympathizer to active opponent of the regime as he aids Tracy.

In Julia (1977), Vanessa Redgrave is a doomed American heiress who forsakes the safety and comfort of great wealth to devote her life to the anti-Nazi cause in Germany. (The film is also notable for being the screen debut of Meryl Streep.) Perhaps the most unusual loner in Zinnemann's films is Edward Fox as the cold-blooded anti-hero assassin in the thriller The Day of the Jackal (1973), a man who is as clever and resourceful as he is relentlessly driven to complete his mission to try to kill French president Charles de Gaulle.

Zinnemann won the Academy Award for Directing for From Here to Eternity and A Man for All Seasons and also took home the Best Picture Oscar for producing the latter film. He received his first Oscar in 1951 for the documentary short Benjy.

His final film was Five Days One Summer in 1982, filmed in Switzerland. He died of a heart attack in London, England on March 14, 1997. He was 89 years old.

Zinnemann is often regarded as striking a blow against "ageism" in Hollywood. The story (which may be apocryphal) goes that, in the 1980s, during a meeting with a young Hollywood executive, Zinnemann was surprised to find the executive didn't know who he was, despite having won four Academy Awards, and directing many of Hollywood's biggest films. When the young executive callowly asked Zinnemann to list what he had done in his career, Zinnemann delivered an elegant comeback by reportedly answering, "Sure. You first." In Hollywood, the story is known as "You First," and is often alluded to when veteran creators find that upstarts are unfamiliar with their work.

Filmography

Feature Films

Year	Film	Oscar Nominations	Oscar Wins	BAFTA Nominations	BAFTA Wins	Golden Globe Nominations	Golden Globe Wins
1930	Menschen am Sonntag (Documentary)			n/a	n/a	n/a	n/a
1936	Redes (film) (aka The Wave)
1942	Kid Glove Killer
	Eyes in the Night
1944	The Seventh Cross	1
1945	The Clock (uncredited)
1946	Little Mister Jim
1947	My Brother Talks to Horses
1948	The Search	4	1	1	1
	Act of Violence
1950	The Men			1
1951	Teresa	1				1	1
1952	High Noon	7	4			7	4
	The Member of the Wedding	1
1953	From Here to Eternity	13	8	1		2	2
1955	Oklahoma!	4	2
1957	A Hatful of Rain	1		1		3
1958	The Old Man and the Sea (uncredited)	3	1			1
1959	The Nun's Story	8		5	1	5
1960	The Sundowners	5		3		1
1964	Behold a Pale Horse
1966	A Man For All Seasons	8	6	7	7	5	4
1973	The Day of the Jackal	1		7	1	3
1977	Julia	11	3	10	4	7	2
1982	Five Days One Summer
	Total (Doesn't include uncredited films)	65	24	36	14	34	13

Short Films

Year	Film	Oscar Nominations	Oscar Wins
1937	Friend Indeed
1938	They Live Again
	That Mothers Might Live	1	1
	The Story of Doctor Carver
1939	Weather Wizards
	While America Sleeps
	Help Wanted
	One Against the World
	The Ash Can Fleet
	Forgotten Victory
1940	Stuffie
	The Great Meddler
	The Old South
	A Way in the Wilderness
1941	Forbidden Passage	1
	Your Last Act
1942	The Greenie
	The Lady or the Tiger?
1951	Benjy (Documentary)	1	1

External links

• Fred Zinnemann at the Internet Movie Database
• Fred Zinnemann at Find a Grave
• Literature on Fred Zinnemann