Mervyn Ian Guy Hamilton (16 September 1922 – 20 April 2016) was an English film director. He directed 22 films from the 1950s to the 1980s, including four James Bond films.
Early life
Hamilton was born in Paris on 16 September 1922, son of Frederick William Guy Hamilton (1895–1988), press attaché to the British embassy in Paris and Captain in the King's Own Royal Lancaster Regiment, and Winifred Grace Culling (1895–1970), daughter of William Archibald Culling Fremantle, of the Church Missionary Society in India. His mother was a great-granddaughter of the Christian campaigner Sir Culling Eardley, 3rd Baronet, and of the politician Thomas Fremantle, 1st Baron Cottesloe. His parents divorced in 1923, and Hamilton was educated in England at Haileybury College. He later said, "The cinema, more specifically the storytelling part of the cinema, really fascinated me. From the age of ten, till I was about fourteen or fifteen, a holiday was a lousy one if I didn’t see one picture a day."
Having travelled from Oran to Gibraltar before arriving in London, he worked in the film library at Paramount News before being commissioned in the Royal Navy; he served in the 15th Motor Torpedo Boat 718 Flotilla, a unit that ferried agents into France and brought downed British pilots back to England.
During this service, he was left behind for a month in occupied Brittany; he was later awarded the Distinguished Service Cross.
Career
Assistant director
After the war Hamilton wanted to get into film production. He said " In my absence, the unions had become very powerful, and I couldn’t get a ‘ticket’—you couldn't get a job in the film business if you didn't have a ticket. So I had to do quite a lot of stalling around but finally—finally—I got in as a third assistant director."
He worked on They Made Me a Fugitive (1947), Mine Own Executioner (1947), Anna Karenina (1948), and The Fallen Idol (1949) directed by Carol Reed. "I was devoted to Carol," said Hamilton later. "He made my life easy because I followed him around like a little dog while learning my trade. If you’d ask him a question, he’d always answer it...Carol Reed was the biggest influence on me and on everything that I did."
Hamilton assisted on Britannia Mews (1949), a 20th Century Fox film shot in England, directed by Jean Negulesco; was reunited with Reed on The Third Man (1949), in which Hamilton doubled for Orson Welles in a couple of shots;
Hamilton's second film as director was The Intruder (1953) dealing with soldiers returning to civilian life, produced by Ivan Foxwell who would made three more films with Hamilton. The movie was an "A picture and Hamilton was able to make it after being approved by Jack Hawkins. The director wanted to follow it with a film of Dial M for Murder but Korda sold the rights to the play to Alfred Hitchcock and instead assigned Hamilton to direct an adaptation of An Inspector Calls (1954).
Hamilton's fourth film as director was the prisoner-of-war story The Colditz Story (1955), which he also co-wrote with producer Foxwell. It was his highest-grossing movie of the decade. He also tried a musical with Max Bygraves, Charley Moon (1956) and an adventure film which he co-wrote with Foxwell, Manuela (1957) which he later said was one of his most personal movies.
Hamilton had his first experience with larger-budget films towards the end of the decade, when he replaced the sacked Alexander Mackendrick on the set of The Devil's Disciple (1959) featuring Kirk Douglas and Burt Lancaster. Hamilon later said "The terrifying thing was that I found it so easy to be a ‘traffic cop’ with no ‘gut’ in the project. I'd never done it before and won't do it again. All you can do is follow the blueprint." He later said "after one Bond, you should walk away from it, charge your batteries, and then come back if you have something to say. I felt I didn’t have that, and to do Bond justice, you have to arrive with a huge amount of enthusiasm." Live and Let Die (1973) and The Man with the Golden Gun (1974). He claimed in a much later interview that he had instructed Roger Moore not to mimic Sean Connery's rendition of James Bond and said the only Bond he regretted making was Golden Gun.
Hamilton was originally chosen to direct Superman: The Movie (1978), but due to his status as a tax exile, he was allowed to be in England for only thirty days a year, where production had moved at the last minute to Pinewood Studios. The job of director was then passed to Richard Donner, but Hamilton insisted that he be paid in full.
Hamilton's only films in the latter part of the 1970s were the commercially unsuccessful Force 10 from Navarone (1978) and the poorly received adaptation of Agatha Christie's mystery The Mirror Crack'd (1980).
Another Christie adaptation followed in 1982, with Evil Under the Sun which was received more favourably than The Mirror Crack'd.
Hamilton directed only two more films in the 1980s (Remo Williams: The Adventure Begins in 1985 and 1989's Try This One for Size) before retiring.
In the late 1980s he was approached to direct Batman (1989), but declined. In a 2003 interview, he said that the contemporary Bond films relied too heavily on special effects and not as much on the spectacular and risky stunts of the Bond films of his era. and then to the actress Kerima in 1964, many years after they first met during the filming of Outcast of the Islands. They lived in a villa in Andratx on the Mediterranean island of Mallorca from the mid-1970s until his death.
Filmography
{| class="wikitable sortable"
|-
! Year
! Title
! Distributor
! Notes
|-
| 1952
| The Ringer
| rowspan="5" | British Lion Films
|
|-
| 1953
| The Intruder
|
|-
| 1954
| An Inspector Calls
|
|-
| 1955
| The Colditz Story
| Also co-writer
|-
| 1956
| Charley Moon
|
|-
| 1957
| Manuela
| Paramount Pictures
|
|-
| rowspan="2" | 1959
| The Devil's Disciple
| United Artists
|
|-
| A Touch of Larceny
| Paramount Pictures
|
|-
| 1961
| The Best of Enemies
| Dino De Laurentiis Cinematografica
|
|-
| rowspan="2" | 1964
| Man in the Middle
| 20th Century Fox
|
|-
| Goldfinger
| United Artists
|
|-
| 1965
| The Party's Over
| Monarch Film Corporation
|
|-
| 1966
| Funeral in Berlin
| Paramount Pictures
|
|-
| 1969
| Battle of Britain
| rowspan="4" | United Artists
|
|-
| 1971
| Diamonds Are Forever
|
|-
| 1973
| Live and Let Die
|
|-
| 1974
| The Man with the Golden Gun
|
|-
| 1978
| Force 10 from Navarone
| Columbia Pictures
|
|-
| 1980
| The Mirror Crack'd
| rowspan="2" | Columbia-EMI-Warner Distributors
|
|-
| 1982
| Evil Under the Sun
|
|-
| 1985
| Remo Williams: The Adventure Begins
| Orion Pictures
|
|-
| 1989
| Try This One for Size
|
|
|}
Notes
References
External links
- Guy Hamilton at BFI Screenonline