LYCOS RETRIEVER 
Fred Zinnemann: Robert Flaherty
built 629 days ago
Directed by Fred Zinnemann, the film picks up the story midstride. Slick, conniving Henry VIII (a charismatic Robert Shaw) wants a divorce from his barren wife in order to remarry and produce an heir. The plan runs contrary to the Catholic-dominated law of the land, which Henry tries to subvert by proclaiming himself the head of the church in England. Henry makes overtures to More, whom he hopes will grant his stamp of approval and ... provide the shady enterprise some moral credibility.
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Back in the Western hemisphere, Zinnemann directed a documentary, Los redes (The Waves), that was funded by the Mexican government and dealt with the lives of fishermen in the Veracruz area. Armed with a letter of introduction from Flaherty, he got a job at the MGM studio. Zinnemann worked his way up the studio hierarchy in the late 1930s, starting out as a film cutter and later being allowed to direct short subjects. He married English-born Renée Bartlett, a costume assistant, in 1936; they had a son, Tim, who went into the film industry. The following year, Zinnemann became an American citizen. One of his short subjects, That Mothers Might Live (about deaths in childbirth), won an Academy Award in 1938.
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Zinnemann studied law at the University of Vienna (1925–27) and then decided he wanted to make movies. In pursuit of this career, he studied cinematography in Paris (1927–28). In 1929 he immigrated to the United States, becoming a citizen in 1937. In Hollywood he became an assistant to Robert Flaherty, a pioneer in documentary filmmaking. This experience influenced all of Zinnemann's subsequent feature films, which show a rigorous authenticity in subject matter and style. He spent the next decade making documentaries, earning two Academy Awards for them.
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Zinnemann was born to a Jewish family in Vienna, Austria, and died of a heart attack in London, England. 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 ... worked with him on the 1929 feature People on Sunday) before coming to America to study film.
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[One] landmark of middlebrow culture was Ernest Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea (1958), yet when circumstances demanded that he violate Flaherty-like authenticity, Zinnemann preferred to abandon the production. Weighing the constellation of problems – the inability to find a suitable great fish, the difficulties of shooting on the open seas, and the inappropriately well-fed person of Spencer Tracy – he sensibly concluded that it “made little sense to proceed with a robot pretending to be a fish in a studio tank pretending to be the Gulf Stream with an actor pretending to be a fisherman” (19), leaving it to John Sturges to finish that plodding adaptation.
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Robert Flaherty