LYCOS RETRIEVER 
Fred Zinnemann
built 202 days ago
Fred Zinnemann's final film is a meditative examination of an illicit May-December romance, set in the mountain expanse of the Swiss Alps. Sean Connery plays Douglas, a middle-aged Scottish doctor on vacation in the Alps in 1932 with a beautiful and fresh-faced young woman, Kate (Betsy Brantley), whom he introduces as his wife. Douglas has taken Kate to the Alps to introduce her to the invigorating sport of mountain climbing. When Douglas and Kate arrive at the mountain lodge, their happiness is tempered by a knowing melancholy. Through flashbacks, it is revealed that Kate has been madly in love with Douglas since she was a little girl and that she seduced him away from another woman. The flashbacks ... reveal that Kate is not his wife, but his niece.
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Fred Zinnemann's sensitive film on the plight of paraplegic WWII veterans features Marlon Brando in his superbly moving screen debut. He plays Lt. Bud Wilozek, one of a group of veterans recovering in the paraplegic ward of a hospital in his hometown. His former fiancée, Ellen (Theresa Wright), explains to his physician, Dr. Brock (Everett Sloane), her concern about his isolation and apparent depression since he has broken their engagment and refuses to see her. He counsels her to be patient, but when he decides to broach the issue with Bud, the embittered patient reacts angrily to the doctor's intrusiveness, and continues to refuse to see Ellen. The doctor cajoles the withdrawn paraplegic into the life of the ward, where fellow patients Richard Erdman, Jack Webb, and Arthur Jurado begin to pull Bud out of his spiritual miasma. At length, his sense of hope starts to return, and after seeing Ellen for the first time in months, he begins to contemplate the possibility of marriage.
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Fred Zinnemann made several of the most celebrated films of the twentieth century, including The Day of the Jackal, A Man for All Seasons, High Noon and From Here to Eternity. But before his cinematic career developed, he practised still photography and set out to show how people survived and functioned without work during the Great Depression of the 1930's. Zinnemann’s view of life during the Depression is surprisingly optimistic: his images include the crowds at a six-day bicycle race in Madison Square, and the dramatic grandeur of the newly completed Empire State Building.
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Fred Zinnemann (1907–1997) was born in Austria and raised in Vienna. Zinnemann studied law at the University of Vienna, then pursued studies at the École Technique de Photographie et de Cinématographie (Technical School for Cinematography) in Paris in 1927. For the next two years he worked as an assistant cameraman in Berlin, notably on
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Fred Zinnemann was born in Vienna in 1907. In his late teens while studying law he became interested in movies. Impressed with the films of Eisenstein and von Stroheim he decided to quit law, and to the dismay of his family. went off to Paris to do an 18 month camera course. After the course he moved to Berlin and got work in German studios as a camera assistant.
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The most famous image Zinnemann created – the surf sensuously washing over the bodies of Deborah Kerr and Burt Lancaster – stimulated a sexual frisson felt around the world. The shot lasts only seconds but its frank eroticism almost atones for the other compromises that were necessary to bring From Here to Eternity (1953) to the screen. Thus, Hawaiian brothels become “social clubs” where randy soldiers compete to book “conversation” time with the “hostesses”. These Production Code-driven evasions, the cost of doing business in Hollywood... bedevil Raoul Walsh's The Revolt of Mamie Stover (1956) but seem less damaging there because Walsh steamrolls over the improbabilities to emphasise the melodramatic contours of the characters. The wonder is that Zinnemann still manages to question the means and goals of the American military at the very height of the superpatriot McCarthy era.
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Fred Zinnemann