Robert Hamer
Robert James Hamer (31 March 1911, Kidderminster, Worcestershire – 4 December 1963, London) was a British film director and screenwriter. He was the son of the actor Gerald Hamer (1886-1972).[1]
Hamer won a scholarship to Cambridge University[2] but was sent down (expelled) from Cambridge,[3] [4] and began his career in 1934 as a cutting room assistant and from 1935 worked as a film editor involved with such films as Hitchcock's Jamaica Inn (1939) co-produced by Charles Laughton. At the end of the 1930s, he worked on documentaries for the GPO Film Unit.[1]
When his boss at the GPO Alberto Cavalcanti moved to Ealing Studios, Hamer was invited to join him there. He gained some experience as a director by substituting for colleagues and contributed the 'haunted mirror' sequence to Dead of Night (1945). He followed this with the three Ealing films under his own name for which he is best remembered: Pink String and Sealing Wax (1946), It Always Rains on Sunday (1947), both featuring Googie Withers, and the black comedy Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949), with Dennis Price and Alec Guinness.
Hamer died of pneumonia at the age of 52 at St Thomas's Hospital in London. An alcoholic, who was homosexual in an era when it was taboo in the UK, Hamer's career "now looks like the most serious miscarriage of talent in the postwar British cinema", according to film critic David Thomson.[5]
[edit] Filmography
- San Demetrio London (1943)
- Dead of Night (1945) (as co-director)
- Pink String and Sealing Wax (1946)
- The Loves of Joanna Godden (1947)
- It Always Rains on Sunday (1947)
- The Spider and the Fly (1949)
- Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949)
- The Long Memory (1952)
- His Excellency (1952)
- Father Brown (1954)
- To Paris With Love (1955)
- The Scapegoat (1959)
- School for Scoundrels (1960)
[edit] References
- ^ a b Brian McFarlane The Encyclopedia of British Film, 2003, London: BFI/Methuen, p281-82
- ^ Ephraim Katz The Macmillan International Film Encyclopedia, 1998, London: Macmillan, p585
- ^ "Hamer, Robert (1911-63)", BFI screenonline website
- ^ Kidderminster Civic Society Newsletter Another Famous Son of Kidderminster February 2011 p1 suggests that he was suspended for homosexual activities but did eventually graduate
- ^ David Thomson The New Biographical Dictionary of Cinema, 2002, London: Little, Brown, p367
[edit] External links
- Robert Hamer at the Internet Movie Database
- British Film Institute: Screen online
- Kind Hearts and Coronets: 60th anniversary of a classic
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