Jump to content

Lance Comfort

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Lance Comfort
Directing Jess Conrad in Rag Doll (1961)
Born(1908-08-11)11 August 1908
London, England
Died25 August 1966(1966-08-25) (aged 58)
Worthing, Sussex, England
Occupation(s)Film director, producer

Lance Comfort (11 August 1908 – 25 August 1966) was an English film director. In a career spanning over 25 years, he became one of the most prolific film directors in Britain, though he never gained critical attention and remained on the fringes of the film industry, creating mostly B movies.[1]

Comfort carried on working almost right up to his death in Worthing, Sussex, in 1966.[2] He had four children: Edward (born 1929), James (born 1931), Anna (born 1934) and Jack (born 1936).

Filmography

[edit]

Critical assessment

[edit]

The film historians Steve Chibnall and Brian McFarlane praise Comfort's gifts "in the confident exercise of melodramatic impulses in the interests of illuminating character and relationship, in a decorative visual style to serve these impulses, and in giving their heads to string of dominant actors". They add that all of his films "are persuasive narratives, marked by absence of sentimentality and the whiff of human reality".[3]

References

[edit]
  1. ^ "BFI Screenonline: Comfort, Lance (1908–1966) Biography". screenonline.org.uk.
  2. ^ "Lance Comfort". BFI. Archived from the original on 11 March 2016.
  3. ^ Steve Chibnall & Brian McFarlane, The British 'B' Film, Palgrave Macmillan, London, 2009, pp. 140–43.

Further reading

[edit]
  • McFarlane, Brian, Lance Comfort, British Film Makers series, Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2002. ISBN 0-7190-5484-2 and ISBN 978-0-7190-5484-6
  • McFarlane, Brian, "Lance Comfort: melodrama and an honourable career", Journal of Popular British Cinema, 1, 1998
[edit]