Roy Ward Baker obituary (original) (raw)

Roy Ward Baker, who has died aged 93, progressed from teaboy to director of sturdy British dramas to weird Hammer horrors, via Hollywood. It was a rather quirky career for a very straightforward man. Baker – who directed Marilyn Monroe in Don't Bother to Knock and made the camp Mexican western The Singer Not the Song, the lesbian The Vampire Lovers and the transsexual Dr Jekyll and Sister Hyde – insisted on calling himself "a simple-minded English lad". Perhaps the film closest to his personality was A Night to Remember (1958), which many would argue is the best of the cinematic versions of the story of the sinking of the Titanic.

Roy Horace Baker (he frequently replaced his middle name with Ward, his mother's maiden name) was born in London into a middle-class family. As a boy, he was sent to study at the Lycée Corneille in Rouen, France, followed by the City of London school. At 13, he saw Broadway Melody (1929), the first genuine Hollywood musical, and the experience made him decide to enter films. He wrote immediately to Edward Black, the production controller at Gainsborough Pictures, who told him to write again when he had finished school. Five years later, Baker wrote to Black again, and got a job as a gofer at Gainsborough's Islington studios.

By 1938 Baker had risen to second assistant to Alfred Hitchcock on The Lady Vanishes, which he considered "a great education". After working as assistant to Carol Reed on Night Train to Munich (1940), Baker volunteered for army service, joining an infantry regiment. He then transferred to Army Kinematograph, where he was able to make a number of military documentaries under the supervision of the novelist Eric Ambler. After the war, Ambler asked Baker to direct his production of The October Man (1947). The tautly directed suspense drama, written by Ambler, starred John Mills as an amnesiac who believes himself responsible for an accident in which a child is killed.

Mills, who was to make five films with Baker, played the resourceful commander in Morning Departure (1950), a well-made, claustrophobic submarine drama which attracted the attention of Darryl Zanuck, head of 20th Century-Fox. Ironically, Baker's first film for Fox, the starchy period piece The House in the Square (1951), starring Tyrone Power, was made in England.

This was followed by the eerie Don't Bother To Knock (1952), with Monroe, in her first substantial role, as a homicidal babysitter. Baker was proud of having fired her dramatic coach from the set and needing a maximum of only five takes for the difficult actress. He preferred few takes, and worked quickly. Baker's most interesting Hollywood movie was Inferno (1953), which used the 3-D lens imaginatively. The melodrama, with Robert Ryan being left to die with a broken leg by his adulterous wife (Rhonda Fleming), was shot on location in the Mojave desert, the close-ups being done later in the studio.

Baker then returned to England with the aptly titled Passage Home (1955), a murky J Arthur Rank drama set on a merchant ship, featuring Peter Finch as a drunken captain. Among the uninspiring output of Rank in the 50s, Baker was able to make several films of quality from which a certain independence emerged. Despite the studio wanting Dirk Bogarde for the role of the only German PoW in Britain who escaped in The One That Got Away (1957), Baker insisted on casting the young German actor Hardy Kruger. The authenticity paid off.

Although studio-bound and unable to compete in spectacle with James Cameron's 1997 blockbuster Titanic, A Night to Remember is full of solid virtues and excellent performances. Basing the film on Walter Lord's meticulously researched book (adapted by Ambler), Baker opted for a documentary approach that focused on the human interest without recourse to melodrama, making it both moving and exciting.

The Singer Not the Song (1960) was a curious, allegorical western with homosexual undertones. Bogarde, in tight, black leather trousers, portrayed a Mexican bandit, opposed by a priest – John Mills. The antagonists die together locked in an embrace. "I played the bandit like Gloria Swanson in Queen Kelly, which at least gave me a laugh," Bogarde remarked. The actors made unconvincing Mexicans but the backgrounds were genuine, and Baker used CinemaScope well. Although it was one of his most celebrated films, Baker hated it. When Rank had offered it to him, he protested. "I can't do it. It's hopeless. I don't understand it and it's nothing to do with me at all." Baker suggested Luis Buñuel in his place, but the studio boss asked, "Who?"

More to his liking was Flame in the Streets (1961), one of the first British films to deal with race relations. Based on a Ted Willis play about a union boss (Mills) whose daughter falls in love with a Jamaican man, it was made in colour and CinemaScope, and set in working-class Notting Hill Gate.

In 1967 Baker's career took a different turn when he joined Hammer. His first picture there was Quatermass and the Pit, the third, most ambitious and best feature film based on the popular sci-fi TV series created by Nigel Kneale. Then came The Anniversary (1968), a black comedy with Bette Davis as a monstrous, one-eyed widow controlling her three sons with an iron hand.

Of The Vampire Lovers (1970) – which bled eroticism into Sheridan Le Fanu's story Carmilla, and was Hammer's first horror film with nudity – Baker commented: "It's not a picture I should ever have made. I really don't have any appetite for this sort of material." Like it or not, he went on to direct another vampire movie, Scars of Dracula (1970), with Christopher Lee in the title role and bad special effects such as rubber bats on strings.

Baker continued to make competent, low-budget horror movies, including Asylum (1972) and And Now the Screaming Starts (1973), while working in television on The Avengers, The Persuaders and Minder. He directed The Flame Trees of Thika (1981) with Hayley Mills, 34 years after he first worked with her father.

In later years, Baker was amused by the notion that his eclectic output could put him in the auteur category, as some film critics have tended to do. "I wasn't a show-off director like Hitchcock. I paid the price for not putting myself about more, for not making myself more famous. I don't give a damn now."

Nicholas, his son by his second marriage, survives him.