Frederick Francis Sears (July 7, 1913 – 1957) was an American film actor and director. Though a marginalized figure in 1950s cinema, he created 52 feature films in a number of genres for Columbia Pictures from 1949 to 1957, before his death at the age of 44.
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Born in Boston on July 7, 1913, Sears attended Boston College High School, then Boston College until the stock market crash of 1929 forced him to withdraw after a single semester.
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. In the late 1930s, Sears served as the stage manager of John Barrymore's touring company for one of the actor’s last productions, My Dear Children.
Moving to Memphis in August 1941, Sears became the resident director of the Little Theater and joined the faculty of the Southwestern University (now Rhodes College) on February 17, 1942. He married, but his workload pushed Sears to the brink of exhaustion, and on October 15, 1942, he attempted suicide with an overdose of sleeping pills. After recovering, 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.
In 1946, he moved to Los Angeles to pursue a career in Hollywood and eventually appeared in The Jolson Story as a film editor, as well as performing bit parts in Blondie Knows Best, Douglas Sirk’s Shockproof, and a 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. He was contracted to Columbia Pictures as a director along with several other "potentials" who began as dialogue directors: Henry Levin, William Castle, Mel Ferrer and Robert Gordon.[1]
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).
Sears’ speed and prolificacy soon brought his name to the attention of both producer Sam Katzman and Columbia Pictures president Harry Cohn. In 1952 Katzman teamed Sears with veteran serial director Spencer Gordon Bennet for Blackhawk. 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 15-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 Wallace MacDonald rushed Sears into production of Target Hong Kong (1953), another Oriental 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.
His career kicked into high gear between 1953 and 1957, during which time Sears directed an astounding 29 feature films. He had successfully cracked the Hollywood system, and getting work was no longer a problem. Now, however, as Sears gained confidence in his craft, he began to make a series of dark, foreboding crime films, many shot on location and 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, 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 brief 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.
In his last years Sears created some of his most interesting projects, such as 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; and 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. It's also one of the few Sears films available on DVD.
He also directed the pop classic Rock Around the Clock (1956), featuring Bill Haley & His Comets, The Platters, Freddie Bell and the Bellboys and the Godfather of all rock-and-roll DJs, 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 infamous penitentiary.
In addition to the feature film work listed above, Sears also began directing television shows on the side. He was pushing himself too hard, however, and neglecting his health. On Saturday, November 30, 1957, while preparing for his next film at his office at Columbia Pictures, Sears suffered a fatal cerebral hemorrhage of a communicating artery of the Circle of Willis [2]. Sears left eight feaure films completed at his death, which were posthumously released.
Dixon, Wheeler Winston. Lost in the Fifties: Recovering Phantom Hollywood. Southern Illinois University Press, 2005.