Oscar Profile #72: Fred Zinnemann

Born April 29, 1907 in Vienna, Austria, Fred Zinnemann grew up wanting to be a musician but ended up studying law instead. While studying at the University of Vienna he became interested in films and got his start as a cameraman working alongside such future greats as Billy Wilder and Robert Siodmak.

Moving to the U.S. to study film, he was cast as an extra in 1930’s All Quiet on the Western Front but was fired for talking back to director Lewis Milestone. He later directed numerous shorts before being assigned his first feature films, two excellent early noirs, Kid Glove Killer with Van Heflin and Eyes in the Night with Edward Arnold. He followed them with his first major success, 1944’s anti-Nazi drama, The Seventh Cross with Spencer Tracy.

Employing the documentary style he had trained in, he received his first Oscar nomination for his direction of 1948’s The Search the film about World War II refugees that catapulted Montgomery Clift to stardom. Again working with Van Heflin, he directed the 1949 cult favorite Act of Violence and provided Marlon Brando with the launching pad of his film career as a paraplegic war veteran in 1950’s The Men. The following year he won his first Oscar for the documentary short subject, Benjy about a disabled boy played by Lee Aaker.

His 1952 anti-Western High Noon further enhanced his career, earning him numerous awards including the New York Film Critics Award for Best Director as well as another Oscar nomination. That same year’s The Member of the Wedding also has many admirers, but for Zinnemann it was a trying time as he couldn’t connect with one of the film’s stars. When he tried to provide direction to Ethel Waters, she famously told him “God is my director”. He couldn’t argue with that.

Zinnemann won his second New York Film critics Award and his second Oscar, his first for Best Director, for his helming of 1953’s From Here to Eternity based on James Jones’ bestseller about life on an Army base in Hawaii leading up to the bombing of Pearl Harbor. Although Zinnemann was now considered among the top directors working in Hollywood, drama, not musical comedy, was his forte and his direction of the long-awaited film version of Rodgers & Hammerstein’s Oklahoma! was not, shall we say, his finest moment.

More at home with the dark corners of the mind explored in 1957’s drug drama, A Hatful of Rain, he would not, however, return to awards circles until 1959’s The Nun’s Story and 1960’s The Sundowners, two films for which he received Oscar nominations for his direction of strong female characters. Audrey Hepburn and a galaxy of fine character actresses as nuns in the former, and Deborah Kerr and Glynis Johns as women in the Australian in the latter. As producer of The Sundowners he was also credited with that film’s Best Picture nomination.

Despite a well-regarded source novel by Emeric Pressburger and a cast headed by Gregory Peck, Anthony Quinn and Omar Sharif in the aftermath of the Spanish Civil War, Behold a Pale Horse, his first film in four years was not a success. He would have better luck with the following year’s A Man for All Seasons, the story of Sir Thomas More’s disavowing of Hnery VIII’s break with the Catholic Church, for which he won his third and fourth Oscars, one for Best Director, the other for Best Picture.

Zinnemann did not make another film for seven years when he came back with the critically acclaimed film version of Frederick Forsyth’s The Day of the Jackal about the attempted assassination of French President Charles de Gaulle. His next film, 1977’s Julia from Lillian Hellman’s memoir proved to be his last hurrah, earning eleven Oscar nominations including one for the now 70 year-old director.

He would make one last film, 1982’s poorly received mountain climbing drama, Five Days One Summer.

Late in his career, while meeting with a young executive, the executive asked him to list what he had done in his career. The shocked, but quick-thinking, gentlemanly director replied “Sure. You first.”

Fred Zinnemann died of emphysema March 14, 1997 a month before his 90th birthday.

ESSENTIAL FILMS

THE SEARCH (1948)

Zinnemann’s skills as a documentary film-maker were never more evident in one of his dramatic films than in this poignant story of World War II refugees. At its heart it’s the story a lost boy, movingly played by Ivan Jandl, and the mother, also movingly played by Jarmilla Novotka, who searches for him. Montgomery Clift is the G.I. who befriends the boy and eventually wants to adopt him when caseworker Aline MacMahon puts two and two together and moves to reunite mother and child. Clift became an overnight star.

HIGH NOON (1952)

Seen at the time as a metaphor for standing up against McCarthyism and the House Un-American Activities Committee, the film was criticized by John Wayne as being un-American and later by Wayne and Howard Hawks as being an anti-Western. The latter it was. This was not your typical western in which the good guys stand behind the sheriff, or in this case, the marshal, but let the hero fight it out on his own. Which is truer to life? While one wants to think the Hawks-Wayne version is, one can’t help but think that sometimes the Zinnemann-Gary Cooper version is.

One of the great Oscar stories is that John Wayne, curiously not nominated for The Quiet Man as might have been expected, was asked by old friend Cooper to accept his Oscar for High Noon should he win. A chagrined Wayne was forced to do just that.

FROM HERE TO ETERNITY (1953)

James Jones’ relationship drama leading up to the Japnese attack on Pearl Harbor was one of those books that was seemingly impossible to film under the heavy restrictions of the Production code. Nevertheless it got made with very little changes to the novel. All the actors excel, under Zinnemann’s astute direction, especially the five who were nominated for Oscars, Burt Lancaster as the career sergeant, Montgomery Clift and Frank Sinatra as sensitive souls and Deborah Kerr and Donna Reed, playing against type, Kerr as a nymphomaniac and Reed as a prostitute, thinly disguised as a party girl.

THE NUN’S STORY (1959)

Zinnemann’s direction of a largely female cast is superlative. Audrey Hepburn shines in her greatest performance as a dedicagted nun who questions the rigidity of her order especially in light of her native Belgium’s neutrality in the Second World War. Peter Finch as a doctor in the Congo and Dean Jagger as Hepburn’s doctor father are the only major male characters in the film. Acting honors, in addition to Hepburn, go to Edith Evans as the order’s Mother Abbess, Peggy Ashcroft as Mother Superior in the Congo scenes and Colleen Dewhurst as a dangerous mental patient. Mildred Dunnock, Ruth White, Patricia Collinge, Barbaa O’Neill and others provide memorable cameos.

A MAN FOR ALL SEASONS (1966)

One of the most literate films ever to win a Best Picture Oscar, Zinnemann’s film at the time was widely regarded as a metaphor for protests against the Vietnam War. Paul Scofield, under Zinnemann’s immaculate direction, excels as St. Sir Thomas More, Chancellor of England who withheld his support of Henry VIII in his break with Rome over the refusal of the Pope to allow him an annulment so he could leave Catherine of Aragon, mother of his only child, and marry Anne Boleyn. Robert Shaw’s portrayal a young, lusty Henry was considered a breath of fresh air at the time as the late, corpulent Charles Laughton had for generations been considered the definitive Henry. Wendy Hiller also shines as More’s uncomprehending wife.