Alfred Zinnemann (April 29, 1907 – March 14, 1997) was an Austrian and American film director, producer, and screenwriter. Born in Austria-Hungary and educated in France and Germany, Zinnemann began his career in Europe before emigrating to the US, where he specialized in shorts before making 25 feature films during his 50-year career. He won four Academy Awards, both for directing and producing, and made films in a variety of genres including thrillers, westerns, film noir, and stage adaptations.
Among his best-known films were The Search (1948), The Men (1950), High Noon (1952), From Here to Eternity (1953), Oklahoma! (1955), The Nun's Story (1959), The Sundowners (1960), A Man for All Seasons (1966), The Day of the Jackal (1973), and Julia (1977). His films received 65 Oscar nominations, winning 24; Zinnemann himself was nominated for 10, and won Best Director for From Here to Eternity (1953), Best Picture and Best Director for A Man for All Seasons (1966), and Best Documentary, Short Subjects for Benjy (1951).
He directed and introduced a number of stars in their American film debuts, including Marlon Brando, Rod Steiger, Pier Angeli, Julie Harris, Brandon deWilde, Montgomery Clift, Shirley Jones and Meryl Streep. He directed 19 actors to Oscar nominations, including Frank Sinatra, Montgomery Clift, Audrey Hepburn, Glynis Johns, Paul Scofield, Robert Shaw, Wendy Hiller, Jason Robards, Vanessa Redgrave, Jane Fonda, Gary Cooper and Maximilian Schell.
Zinnemann was among the first directors to insist on using authentic locations and for mixing stars with non-professional actors to give his films more realism. Within the film industry, he was considered a maverick for taking risks and thereby creating unique films, with many of his stories being dramas about lone and principled individuals tested by tragic events. Among other honors, Zinnemann received a U.S. Congressional Gold Medal in 1987, a BAFTA Fellowship, and the French Ordre des Arts et des Lettres.
Early life
Zinnemann was born in Rzeszów, Austria-Hungary (today part of Poland), the son of Jewishthe London telegraph: "The music behind Hollywood's golden age – As the Proms pays tribute to Hollywood's golden age, Tim Robey looks at the composers who redefined the film score" Austria-Hungary By Tim Robey. August 24, 2013. parents Anna (née Feiwel) and Oskar Zinnemann. pages 48-49 He had one younger brother.
Zinnemann grew up in Vienna during the First World War, during much of which his father served as a combat medic with the Austro-Hungarian Army on the Eastern Front. Zinnemann later recalled that his father was severely traumatized by his war experiences and often suffered from nightmares.Fred Zinnemann (1992), A Life in the Movies: An Autobiography, Charles Scribner Sons. Pages 7–8.
While growing up in the First Austrian Republic, which had been formed as a rump state of a fallen Empire in 1918 and which he later described as, "a tiny, defeated, impoverished country",Fred Zinnemann (1992), A Life in the Movies: An Autobiography, Charles Scribner Sons. Page 7. Zinnemann wanted to become a musician, but went on to graduate with a law degree from the University of Vienna in 1927.
While studying law, he became drawn to films and convinced his parents to let him study film production in the Third French Republic. After studying for a year at the Ecole Technique de Photographie et Cinématographie in Paris, Zinnemann became a cameraman and found work on a number of films being made at Babelsberg Studio in Berlin, during the Weimar Republic, before emigrating to the United States. Both of Zinnemann's parents, whom he later described as nostalgic for the days of the Habsburg Monarchy, returned to Poland after Anschluss and were later murdered by the Germans during the Holocaust. Writing in Polish, Zinnemann exchanged letters with them up until their death.
Career as director
Early career Zinnemann worked in Germany with several other beginners (Billy Wilder and Robert Siodmak also worked with him on the 1929 feature People on Sunday) after he studied filmmaking in France. His penchant for realism and authenticity is evident in his first feature The Wave (1936), shot on location in Mexico with mostly non-professional actors recruited among the locals, which is one of the earliest examples of social realism in narrative film. Earlier in the decade, in fact, Zinnemann had worked with documentarian Robert Flaherty, "probably the greatest single influence on my work as a filmmaker", he said.
Although he was fascinated by the artistic culture of Germany, with its theater, music and films, he was also aware that the country was in a deep economic crisis. He became disenchanted with Berlin after continually seeing decadent ostentation and luxury existing alongside desperate unemployment. The wealthy classes were moving more to the political right and the poor to the left. "Emotion had long since begun to displace reason," he said. As a result of the changing political climate, along with the fact that sound films had arrived in Europe, which was technically unprepared to produce their own, film production throughout Europe slowed dramatically. Zinnemann, then only 21, got his parents' permission to go to America where he hoped filmmaking opportunities would be greater.
He arrived in New York at the end of October 1929, at the time of the Wall Street Crash. Despite the financial panic then beginning, he found New York to be a different cultural environment:
Shortly after, he took a Greyhound bus to Hollywood. One of Zinnemann's first jobs in Hollywood was as an extra in All Quiet on the Western Front (1930). He said that many of the other extras were former Russian aristocrats and high-ranking officers who fled to America as refugees from the October Revolution in 1917 and the ensuing Red Terror.
He was twenty-two but he said he felt older than the forty-year-olds in Hollywood. But he was jubilant because he was then certain that "this was the place one could breathe free and belong." But after a few years he became disillusioned with the limited talents of Hollywood's elites. His first directorial effort was the Mexican cultural protest film, The Wave, in Alvarado, Mexico. He established residence in North Hollywood with Henwar Rodakiewicz, Gunther von Fritsch and Ned Scott, all fellow contributors to the Mexican project.
1940s
After some directing success with some short films, he graduated to features in 1942, turning out two B mysteries, Kid Glove Killer and Eyes in the Night before getting his big break with The Seventh Cross (1944), starring Spencer Tracy, which became his first hit. The film was based on Anna Seghers' novel and, while filmed entirely on the MGM backlot, made realistic use of refugee German actors in even the smallest roles. The central character—an escaped prisoner played by Tracy—is seen as comparatively passive and fatalistic. He is, however, the subject of heroic assistance from anti-Nazi Germans. In a sense, the most dynamic character 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.
After World War II, Zinnemann learned that both of his parents had been murdered in the Holocaust. He was frustrated by his studio contract, which dictated that he did not have a choice in directing films like Little Mister Jim (1946) and My Brother Talks to Horses (1947) despite his lack of interest in their subject matter. However, his next film, The Search (1948), won an Oscar for screenwriting and secured his position in the Hollywood establishment. Shot in war-ravaged Germany, the film stars Montgomery Clift in his screen debut as a GI who cares for a lost Czech boy traumatized by the war. It was followed by Act of Violence (1948), a gritty film noir starring Van Heflin as a haunted POW, Robert Ryan as his hot-tempered former friend, Janet Leigh as Heflin's wife, and Mary Astor as a sympathetic prostitute. Zinnemann considered Act of Violence the first project in which he "felt comfortable knowing exactly what I wanted and exactly how to get it."
1950s The Men (1950) stars Marlon Brando as a paraplegic war veteran. It was Brando's first film. Zinnemann filmed many scenes in a California hospital where real patients served as extras. It was followed by Teresa (1951), starring Pier Angeli.
Perhaps Zinnemann's 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 Marshall Will Kane, played by Gary Cooper and its innovative chronology whereby screen time approximated the 80-minute countdown to the confrontational hour, the film broke the mold of the formulaic western. Working closely with cinematographer and longtime friend Floyd Crosby, he shot without filters, giving the landscape a harsh "newsreel" quality that clashed with the more painterly cinematography of John Ford's westerns.J. E. Smyth, "Fred Zinnemann and the Cinema of Resistance", Univ. Press of Mississippi, 2014. Pages 103–04. During production he established a strong rapport with Gary Cooper, photographing the aging actor in many tight close-ups which showed him sweating, and at one point, even crying on screen.
Screenwriter Carl Foreman apparently intended High Noon to be an allegory of Senator Joseph McCarthy's vendetta against alleged Communists. However, Zinnemann disagreed, insisting, late in life, that the issues in the film, for him, were broader, and were more about conscience and independent, uncompromising fearlessness. He says, "High Noon is "not a Western, as far as I'm concerned; it just happens to be set in the Old West."
Film critic Stephen Prince suggests that the character of Kane actually represents Zinnemann, who tried to create an atmosphere of impending threat on the horizon, a fear of potential "fascism", represented by the gang of killers soon arriving. Zinnemann explained the general context for many of his films: "One of the crucial things today [is] trying to preserve our civilization."
Prince adds that Zinnemann, having learned that both his parents were murdered in the Holocaust, wanted Kane willing to "fight rather than run", unlike everyone else in town. As a result, "Zinnemann allies himself" with the film's hero.Nolletti, Arthur, ed. The Films of Fred Zinnemann: Critical Perspectives, State Univ. of N.Y. Press (1999) Zinnemann explains the theme of the film and its relevance to modern times:
For his screen adaptation of the play The Member of the Wedding (1952), Zinnemann chose Julie Harris as the film's 12-year-old protagonist, although she was by then 26 years old. Two years earlier Harris had created the role on Broadway just as the two other leading actors, Ethel Waters and Brandon deWilde, had.The Member of the Wedding review, The Digital Bits, July 28, 2016
Zinnemann's next film, From Here to Eternity (1953), based on the novel by James Jones, was nominated for 13 Academy Awards and would go on to win 8, including Best Picture and Best Director. Zinnemann fought hard with producer Harry Cohn to cast Montgomery Clift as the character of Prewitt, although Frank Sinatra, who was at the lowest point of his popularity, cast himself in the role of "Maggio" against Zinnemann's wishes. Sinatra would later win 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.