Bryan Forbes

King of the lurid spectacle

Bryan Forbes

What a strange, gifted little martinet he was, this celluloid Nixon who demanded that his every word, no matter how trite or banal, was preserved exactly by his ‘field secretary’ while another acolyte, the ‘chair boy’, ensured that wherever he was he could sit down without looking. Surrounded by these perpetual attendants and telling his crews, ‘You are here to please me, nothing else on earth matters,’ he forged a career that began with the silents and went on to encompass 70 films. In the process he became a household word for a heady mixture of religion and sex. This proved a potent box-office martini which made him a multimillionaire who remained virulently anti-union and a much-quoted reactionary voice. During the McCarthy period he proposed that the membership of the Screen Directors’ Guild sign a non-Communist loyalty oath and it was only the broadside unleashed against him by John Ford, one of the founders of the Guild, that defeated him.

Simon Louvish’s unauthorised biography (the DeMille estate informed him it could ‘not assist in his endeavours’) is meticulously researched and paints a detailed and often highly perceptive portrait of a basically hypocritical figure who was described by his niece, the famous choreographer Agnes de Mille, as the hardest and most terrifying man she had ever met. Although he is now mostly remembered as a master of lavish cinematic spectacle who made biblical epics such as The King of Kings and The Ten Commandments his personal fiefdom, Louvish has unearthed and gives a sympathetic hearing to many of his early works which, surprisingly, often explored social realism. His judgments are invariably intelligent and appropriate.

Whilst publicly presenting himself as a paragon of domestic fidelity (remaining married to the same woman all his life), he was, like so many of his Hollywood mogul contemporaries, a pious adulterer.

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