The Many Lives of Cy Endfield: Film Noir, the Blacklist, and Zulu

Neve (politics & film, Univ. of Bath; Film and Politics in America: A Social Tradition; Elia Kazan: The Cinema of an American Outsider) gives readers the first book dedicated to a varied and underrepresented film director. The author seamlessly blends biography with social and political commentary, all set within one of the most volatile periods in American film history. Readers are introduced to Endfield (1914–1995), learning about him and his work in the context of major periods and events in his life: his theater days in New York, including gaining and losing an apprenticeship with the Mercury Theater; his film work, including film noir and The Sound of Fury (1950), regarded as a great social commentary but perceived by audiences as anti-American; and his blacklisting by the House Un-American Activities Committee in September 1951 and leaving the United States and his family for Great Britain. Each chapter achieves its own purpose and serves the book as a whole. This title may cause readers to wonder what might have been if the director had the years to dedicate to his craft, uninterrupted.