Film director
Born: September 11, 1922;
Died: March 17, 2017
ROBERT Day, who has died aged 94, started off in the film business as a lowly clapper boy – the minion who holds up a board with the scene and take numbers on it just as the cameras start rolling. Over the years he worked his way up to become a cameraman and one of the British film industry’s most in-demand directors in the 1960s.
Day was never an auteur, a critics’ favourite, like Kubrick or Lean, or a household name, like Michael Winner. He specialised to some extent in adventure films. His resume includes four Tarzan movies and Hammer’s adaptation of She (1965), with Ursula Andress as an African high priestess with not much on.
But he also worked with several of the most gifted comic actors of his generation. He directed Peter Sellers in Two-Way Stretch (1960) and Tony Hancock in The Rebel (1961). Although largely forgotten now, both were big hits at the time.
A much underrated film, The Rebel transferred Hancock’s rather pretentious dimwit to the big screen – he gives up an office job to become an exponent of the “Infantile School of Painting” in Paris.
The success of Two-Way Stretch is all the more remarkable, as Sellers decided he was not right for the role and walked out – half-way through filming. Day continued shooting without his star for almost two weeks, before the temperamental comic genius could be lured back to the set.
Subsequently Day relocated to the United States where he continued his career in television, working on series such as Kojak (1975) and the glitzy and phenomenally successful soap opera Dallas (1978), and a string of television movies.
He was born Robert Frederick Day in London in 1922. A family connection led to his entrée into the film business as a clapper boy at the local Teddington film studios. At the time they were operated by Warner Bros to make so-called “quota quickies”, low-budget films that met a legal obligation for cinemas to show a certain proportion of British films.
His early days taught him how to work fast on limited resources. He graduated from clapper-boy to focus-puller and then to cameraman in the second half of the 1940s, before making his directorial debut in 1956 with the black comedy The Green Man, starring the urbane Scottish actor Alastair Sim as a freelance assassin.
The Green Man laid the foundations for a career as a dependable director who brought films in on time and budget. He also worked in television, directing multiple episodes of The Adventures of Robin Hood (1957-60) and The Avengers (1967).
Four Tarzan films took him all over the world, further enhancing his reputation. He worked with three different Tarzans – Gordon Scott, Jock Mahoney and Mike Henry. While filming Tarzan and the Great River (1967) in Brazil he met the American actress Dorothy Provine. Their relationship led to the end of his first marriage.
Provine became his second wife and he settled in the US and continued his career in Hollywood, working steadily through the 1970s and 1980s. Provine died in 2010 and Day is survived by two children, one from each marriage.
BRIAN PENDREIGH
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