Fred F. Sears
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Fred F. Sears (1913-1957) was one of the most marginalized figures in 1950s cinema, who created a multi-genre rainbow of 52 feature films for Columbia Pictures from 1949 to 1957, before his shockingly early death at the age of 44 from a heart attack.
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[edit] Childhood
Born in Boston on July 7, 1913, Sears’ childhood was, from all accounts, a peaceful one, and the young boy early on displayed an interest in literature and the theatre. His mother even placed young Frederick in ballet classes, much to the boy’s chagrin. In any event, his mother saw to it that young Fred was well prepared for high school, where he developed a reputation as a conscientious grind. Sears was active in the high school drama club, a tenacious debater, and a writer who tackled both poetry and prose with equal zest. The four years of Sears’ high school at Boston College remained one of the happiest and most fulfilling periods of his short life; it was here that Sears first began to shape the career that would take him into the theatre, and then to Hollywood.
Because he had attended Boston College High School, it seemed natural that Sears would continue his education at Boston College itself; indeed, Sears enrolled on September 14, 1929 for the Fall semester, fully intending to complete his Bachelor’s degree. However, with the stock market crash of 1929, Sears was forced to withdraw after a single semester, and never completed his studies. In that one semester, Sears enthusiastically tackled courses in Greek, Latin,English, History and Religion. A devout Catholic, Sears seemed driven to succeed even at this early stage of his life, and his departure from Boston College on December 16, 1929 was a considerable blow to the young man’s pride.
[edit] Early Work as Theater Director
The world that Sears created in his best films is a zone of personal imprisonment, from which there is no escape. In such films as Chicago Syndicate (1955), one of the great 1950s noir thrillers, Cell 2455 Death Row (1955), based on the criminal career of Caryl Chessman, The Miami Story (1954), El Alaméin (1953), the 3-D color western The Nebraskan (1953), Mission Over Korea (1953), Sky Commando (1953), The 49th Man (1953) and numerous other works, Sears depicted a world of unremitting tension, in which man is constantly at odds with forces that seek to control or destroy him, creating memorable films on near nonexistent budgets.
While he can be favorably compared to Don Siegel, Robert Aldrich, and Ida Lupino as a gritty fifties low budget auteur, Fred F. Sears’ work stands out from that of his colleagues through the sheer force of his uncompromisingly bleak worldview.
Sears was at a loss. The family finances would not permit him to continue his studies, but the young man had little experience in the everyday working world. He learned fast. He toured the RKO circuit for two or three years as a dancer in vaudeville, until it collapsed. Sears went back to Boston as an apprentice with the Copley Stock Company, eventually becoming the company juvenile. But nothing in this grueling introduction to the working world could possibly have been more taxing than Sears’ assignment as stage manager of the John Barrymore touring company of one of the actor’s last productions, My Dear Children. Barrymore’s alcoholism made every performance a test of nerves; he would skip lines, demand to see cue cards, or treat the play as a joke, much to the chagrin of the other actors. But Sears managed to keep Barrymore in check throughout the tour. Sears’ first visit to Memphis came when the company appeared at the Ellis Auditorium in 1939, with Barrymore in the lead.
[edit] Marriage to Judith Elliott
It was during the run of My Dear Children that Sears met his bride to be, Judith Elliott, who was a general understudy for the company, filling in whenever an actress in the troupe was indisposed. After a brief courtship, the couple decided to get married, and was given a gala wedding celebration by the bride’s parents, which took place on March 21, 1940, in Tampa, Florida. Shortly after, Sears was tapped as director of the famed Little Theater of Memphis. Moving permanently to Memphis in August of 1941, the Sears tackled their new assignment with the Little Theater with zest and imagination. But behind the scenes, all was not well. In the early morning hours of October 15, 1942, Fred F. Sears, suffering from overwork and exhaustion, his mind clouded by alcohol, attempted to take his own life. On the same day, Sears, still recovering from his failed suicide attempt, was dismissed from Baptist Hospital at 5 p.m., and returned home.
Sears was spreading himself very thinly, having signed for a second year as director of the Little Theater on May 11, 1942, in addition to joining the faculty of the Southwestern University (now Rhodes College) on February 17, 1942. To many observers, this frenetic activity hinted strongly to unhappiness at home, coupled with Sears’ own inability to remain idle for even a brief period of time. Sure enough, on June 29, 1943, Sears abruptly announced that he was leaving the Little Theater to become a Volunteer Officer Candidate in the U.S. Army. Sears, who had phoned in his resignation from Asheville, North Carolina, while on vacation with his wife, was definitively out.
[edit] The Move to Hollywood
For all the drama of his sudden resignation from the Little Theatre, and his abrupt “disappearance” from Memphis, Sears’ wartime service was uneventful, and by 1946, he was back in civilian circulation, looking for employment. Heading for Los Angeles to pursue a career in Hollywood, Sears persistently made the rounds from one studio to the next in search of employment, finally landing a job as an extra in The Jolson Story as a film editor, subsequent bits in Blondie Knows Best, Douglas Sirk’s Shockproof, and handful of program westerns. In all, from 1947 to 1952, Sears would appear as an actor in 58 films that he did not direct, playing a variety of supporting roles, in addition to his work as a director.
In Ray Nazarro’s 1947 western The Lone Hand Texan, Sears played the role of Sam Jason, an oil prospector whose claim is being challenged by the usual band of unscrupulous miscreants. Charles Starrett, as The Durango Kid, comes to Sam’s rescue. Knowing how to communicate with other actors, Sears struck up a friendship with Starrett. In Nazarro’s West of Dodge City (1947), Sears had a chance to play a slightly larger role in the proceedings. sharing several scenes with Starrett, and further cementing their off-screen relationship. In Nazarro’s Law of the Canyon (1947), Sears had an even more conspicuous role, as the villainous Dr. Middleton, who plunges to his well-deserved death in the film’s final moments. After a series of bit parts, Sears got his first major break as a film director on the Durango Kid western Desert Vigilante (1949). By 1950, Sears had assumed directorial control of the series, directing such entries as Lightning Guns (1950), Prairie Roundup (1951), and Ridin’ the Outlaw Trail (1951).
[edit] Sears Partners with Sam Katzman
Sears’ speed and prolificacy soon brought his name to the attention of both producer Sam Katzman and Harry Cohn, the president of Columbia Pictures. Sears seemed unstoppable. He could act, he could direct, he could play heavies, he could play sympathetic second leads, he had great rapport with actors, he worked quickly, he got good results. In 1952, Katzman teamed Sears with Spencer Gordon Bennet, the veteran serial director, in the production of Blackhawk: Fearless Champion of Freedom. With a running time of 242 minutes, or slightly more than four hours, and a production schedule of 28 days, Blackhawk was the acid test for Sears’ directorial skills. The plot is sheer Cold War insanity. The Blackhawks, an all-male crime fighting squad headed by Blackhawk himself (Kirk Alyn, who was also the original Superman in two Katzman serials) are dedicated to preserving American democracy and world peace, while the villainous Laska (Carol Forman) and her associates seek to advance the Communist doctrine of world domination. The fifteen-chapter serial went off without a hitch, and Katzman made Sears an offer. Sears would spend the rest of his brief career working for Katzman’s Clover Productions, or Wallace MacDonald, another “B” Columbia producer, who was slightly less penurious than Katzman.
Decisively breaking from the Western genre by design, Sears campaigned for a less transparently generic assignment, and was rewarded with Last Train From Bombay (1952), a straightforward thriller set in India, starring Jon Hall, then at the peak of his small-screen fame as the title character in Ramar of the Jungle. Last Train From Bombay was so successful as a second-feature that Columbia producer Wallace MacDonald rushed Sears into production of Target Hong Kong (1953), another Orientalist thriller, again with an espionage-centered narrative, but with the much more capable Richard Denning in the lead. Sears’ next film, however, marked a genuine step up for the director. Ambush at Tomahawk Gap (1953), although a western, was shot in Technicolor, and featured Sears’ first top-flight cast; veterans John Hodiak and David Brian, as well as a very young John Derek, then under contract to Columbia as an actor. What sets Ambush at Tomahawk Gap apart from Sears’ Durango Kid westerns, as well as other program westerns of the period, is the film’s grim and unremitting violence, in which everyone is expendable, and anybody has a price. This narrative structure has been employed in countless westerns before and/or since, but seldom with such delirious viciousness. This brutal nihilism would become the hallmark of the best of Sears’ films.
As his career kicked into high gear between 1953 and 1957, Sears directed an astounding 29 feature films. He had successfully cracked the Hollywood system, and getting work was no longer a problem. But now, as Sears gained confidence in his craft, he began to make a series of dark, foreboding crime films, many shot on location, dealing with big-city corruption, vice and racketeering, in addition to several science fiction films, at least one horror film, the first full length rock and roll musical, and the first Latino musical, all on six-day schedules.
The Miami Story (1954) is a big-city crime thriller that deals with corrupt politicians. Sears and his crew shot much of the film on location in Miami, with Barry Sullivan in the lead role of Mick Flagg, a reformed gangster determined to clean up the corrupt metropolis. Sears then began production on what is arguably one of the most intriguing films of his long career, Cell 2455, Death Row (1955), based on the autobiography of Caryl Chessman, the notorious “Red Light Bandit” of the early 1950s, who successfully acted as his own attorney in staving off a series of execution attempts by the State of California at San Quentin prison, only to finally die in the gas chamber on May 2, 1960.
Sears depicts Chessman as a vicious, highly intelligent but utterly amoral opportunist, who begins his criminal career by stealing groceries to support his indigent family, but soon is stealing cars, staging holdups in gambling casinos (“because that’s where the money is”), and rapidly rising to the head of a small group of ruthless criminals, all of whom Chessman betrays as necessity or convenience dictates. At the end of Cell 2455, Death Row, Chessman has cheated the gas chamber yet another time, but a new execution date will undoubtedly be set; there are more appeals to be filed. The film ends with Chessman working on yet another brief, as the warden looks on with a peculiar mixture of admiration and disgust.
[edit] Sears' Most Prolific Period
Pressing on, Sears created some of his most interesting and individual projects; 1955’s Teen-Age Crime Wave, in which a group of marauding teenagers terrorize a rural family in the aftermath of a robbery; The Werewolf (1956), one of the best of the late Columbia horror films, with a surprisingly sympathetic performance from Steven Ritch, who is unwittingly transformed into a lycanthrope by a group of unscrupulous scientists; Fury at Gunsight Pass (1956), a truly bizarre western in which corrupt undertaker Peter Boggs (played by the ever-unctuous Percy Helton) conspires with a gang of desperados to rob the bank of a frontier town in the midst of a blinding sandstorm; Earth vs. the Flying Saucers (1956), which remains Sears’ best known film, immeasurably enhanced by Ray Harryhausen’s then-state-of-the-art stop motion special effects, and his only film available on DVD; the pop classic Rock Around the Clock (1956), featuring Bill Haley and The Comets, The Platters, Freddie Bell and The Bellboys, and the Godfather of all rock and roll DJ’s, Alan Freed; Cha-Cha-Cha Boom! (1956), the first Latino/a musical, featuring Perez Prado, Luis Arcaraz, and Manny Lopez with their respective orchestras, performing a non-stop medley of authentic pop hits, presenting the Latino/a public for the first time with positive images of their music and culture in a mainstream Hollywood film; Calypso Heat Wave (1957), which showcased Caribbean music, and offered a young Maya Angelou her first screen role; and Escape From San Quentin (1957), a neatly constructed suspense thriller involving a prison escape using a stolen plane to fly over the walls of the penitentiary.
But time had run out for Fred F. Sears. The pace was literally killing him, yet there seemed to be no way to stop the flood of work that was offered to him. Sears was simply too competent, too professional, and too gifted to turn in a second-rate job, and the directing assignments continued to pile up. Sears drove himself even harder, accepting directorial assignments in the fledgling world of television on such shows as Ford Theater, Damon Runyon Theater, and Celebrity Playhouse, often working on several series simultaneously to keep up with the voracious demand of television. Surely, the future held promise. He was still a relatively young man, and other assignments, perhaps with more prestige, would surely follow. And yet home life was just a memory. Fred F. Sears lived to work.
[edit] Death of Fred F. Sears
On Saturday, November 30, 1957, Sears was researching a new project for Sam Katzman, a topical picture about unrest in the Philippines, in his office at the Columbia Studios at 1442 Lyman Place.
When no one answered the phone at Sears' desk, Albert H. Wingerter, chief of security for Columbia Pictures, received a call asking if Sears was in his office, and went to investigate. Unable to raise Sears by telephone himself, Wingerter walked over to the office block, and unlocked the door to Sears’ office. No one was there. Wingerter checked the washroom, discovered Sears’ body, and immediately phoned the police. The book on the Philippines still lay open on Sears’ desk, mute testimony to a project that would never reach fruition. The next day, the newspapers announced Sears’ death of a sudden heart attack.
But Sears was not really “dead.” His speed in production left Columbia with five completed films in the can, all of which were released in 1958; The World Was His Jury, Going Steady, Crash Landing, Badman’s Country, and Ghost of the China Sea. Looking back over Fred F. Sears’ career, one is struck by the sheer quantity of his work, the speed with which he executed it, and the bracing originality of his aggressive visual style (shadows, restless tracking shots, deep focus compositions, detailed master shots that contained numerous different compositions within the frame.)
[edit] Conclusion
The world that Sears created in his best films is a zone of personal imprisonment, from which there is no escape. While Sears’ films superficially conformed to the genre requirements of each new assignment, even a casual viewing of the films reveals that Sears was creating a comment on 1950s society in America during the McCarthy era, finding it equally corrupt on both ends of the social spectrum. The crime bosses, corrupt ranchers, and other authority figures in Sears’ numerous films are invariably seen as morally bankrupt; at the same time, Sears views society itself as a construct coming apart at the seams. What makes Sears’ films all the more compelling, in addition to their rapid pacing, draconian economy and stylishly executed camera movements, coupled with superb performances by all the performers involved, is the fact that they mirror the 1950s in a way that is impossible to replicate today.
The legacy of Sears is thus twofold; as a social historian, and as an artist whose best work addressed the paranoia, alienation and angst that formed the true fabric of 1950s consciousness. Sears documented a decade that saw the rise of the Cold War, the birth of rock and roll, and paved the way for the cultural and social revolution of the 1960s. While it is true that many of Sears’ films are cheap and shoddy, it is also true that at his best -- during his white hot-streak at Columbia during the 1950s -- Sears told the viewing public more about the dark side of the American Dream than most of us would care to admit. Sears’ films caught a decade in crisis in a series of microcosmic films that accurately defined the pleasure, passions, and concerns of the Cold War era. The fact that his films are not revived today is not really an index of their quality, or lack of it, but rather because their concerns belong to a vanished era; an era, however, that in many respects eerily mimics our own.
Bibliography: Dixon, Wheeler Winston. Lost in the Fifties: Recovering Phantom Hollywood. Southern Illinois University Press, 2005.
