Victor Saville
1895 - 1979Victor Saville (25 September 1895, Birmingham, England – 8 May 1979, London) was an English film director, producer and screenwriter. He directed 39 films between 1927 and 1954. He also produced 36 films between 1923 and 1962.
He produced his first film, Woman to Woman, with Michael Balcon in 1923, and on the back of its success produced pictures for the veteran director Maurice Elvey, including the classic British silent Hindle Wakes (1927). His first picture as director was The Arcadians (1927). In 1929 he and Balcon worked together again on a talkie remake of Woman to Woman for Balcon's company, Gainsborough Pictures. This time Saville directed it.
From 1931, as Gainsborough Pictures and the Gaumont British Picture Corporation joined forces, Saville produced a string of comedies, musicals and dramas for Gainsborough and Gaumont-British, including the popular Jessie Matthews pictures. In 1937, he left to set up his own production company, Victor Saville Productions, and made three pictures for Alexander Korda's London Films at Denham studios.
As an independent producer he had purchased the film rights to A. J. Cronin's novel The Citadel. He was persuaded to sell them to Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer in return for the chance to produce the film and another big-budget adaptation, Goodbye Mr Chips (1939). Both films starred Robert Donat and were a great success in the USA as well as in Britain, providing Saville with a passport to Hollywood.
When the war broke out in 1939, Saville was in America and was advised to remain there. He produced pictures in support of the war effort, such as The Mortal Storm and Forever and a Day (1943) (in which he worked for the last time with his former star Jessie Matthews), and in 1945 Tonight and Every Night, based on the history of the Windmill Theatre in London.
After the war Saville continued directing films for MGM but eventually returned to Britain. Saville acquired production rights for Mickey Spillane's Mike Hammer mysteries and produced a few features, though Spillane thought he was interested in doing so only to acquire the money to produce The Silver Chalice. He produced two final films in the 1960s, The Greengage Summer (1961), adapted from the novel of the same name, and Mix Me a Person (1962).
First a Girl
Victor Saville
Jessie Matthews, Sonnie Hale
First a Girl is a 1935 British comedy film directed by Victor Saville and starring Jessie Matthews. First a Girl was adapted from the 1933 German film Viktor und Viktoria written and directed by Reinhold Schünzel.
First a Girl
Forever and a Day
Robert Stevenson, Frank Lloyd
Kent Smith, Reginald Gardiner
In World War II, American Gates Trimble Pomfret is in London during the Blitz to sell the ancestral family house. The current tenant, Leslie Trimble, tries to dissuade him from selling by telling him the 140-year history of the place and the connections between the Trimble and Pomfret families.
Forever and a Day
Tesha
Victor Saville, Edwin Greenwood
María Corda, Jameson Thomas
The luminous Maria Corda stars as the eponymous Tesha, a celebrated Russian dancer who marries an Englishman (Thomas). The couple long for a child but after five years of happy marriage, remain childless. On a trip to Southampton Tesha succumbs to a brief fling with a stranger (Cavanagh), unleashing a barrage of unforeseen consequences and emotional turmoil. The superb cinematography is by the great German cinematographer Werner Brandes who worked on dozens of prestige British productions in the 1920s. Originally shot silent, sound was added in 1929.
Tesha
Green Dolphin Street
Victor Saville
Lana Turner, Van Heflin
Sophie loved Edmund, but he left town when her parents forced her to marry wealthy Octavius. Years later, Edmund returns with his son, William. Sophie's daughter, Marguerite, and William fall in love. Marguerite's sister, Marianne, also loves William. Timothy, a lowly carpenter, secretly loves Marianne. He kills a man in a fight, and Edmund helps him flee to New Zealand. William deserts inadvertently from the navy, and also flees in disgrace to New Zealand, where he and Timothy start a profitable business. One night, drunk, William writes Octavius, demanding his daughter's hand; but, being drunk, he asks for the wrong sister.
Green Dolphin Street
South Riding
Victor Saville
Edna Best, Ralph Richardson
Winifred Holtby realised that Local Government is not a dry affair of meetings and memoranda:- but 'the front-line defence thrown up by humanity against its common enemies of sickness, poverty and ignorance.' She built her story around six people working for a typical County Council:- Beneath the lives of the public servants runs the thread of their personal drama. Our story tells how a public life affects the private life; and how a man's personal sufferings make him what he is in public. " Corruption, intrigue and romance in a Yorkshire setting. A country squire whose wife is in a mental hospital becomes attracted to a crusading local schoolmistress.
South Riding
The Faithful Heart
Victor Saville
Herbert Marshall, Edna Best
Herbert Marshall and Edna Best, husband and wife in 1933, star in the British drama Faithful Hearts. Best plays the daughter of Marshall, who years earlier had run out on his family. When Edna re-enters Marshall's life, it causes him to reassess his values-and to end his engagement to his judgmental fiancee. When Faithful Hearts was released in the US, all the voices were redubbed by American actors; even Herbert Marshall, a fixture in Hollywood films since the dawn of the talkie era, was submitted to this electronic augmentation. Original titled The Faithful Heart (Americans must have more of everything!), the film was based on a play by Monckton Hoffe.
The Faithful Heart
I Was A Spy
Victor Saville
Conrad Veidt, Herbert Marshall
During World War I, a young nurse in a hospital in German-occupied Belgium is secretly feeding military information to the British. Complicating matters is the guilt she feels when she has to treat the German casualties inflicted as a result of the information she's passed on, and the fact that the local German commandant is falling in love with her.
I Was A Spy
Friday the Thirteenth
Victor Saville
Sonnie Hale, Cyril Smith
It is pouring with rain at one minute to midnight on Friday the thirteenth, and the driver of a London bus is peering through his blurred windscreen as his vehicle sails down an empty road. Suddenly, lightning strikes, and a vast crane above topples into the path of the oncoming bus... Then Big Ben begins to wind backwards. Time recedes. And we discover the lives of all the passengers and the events that brought them to that late-night bus journey, from the con-man with a hundred-pound cheque to the businessman's distraught and elderly wife. Time flows on, inevitably, to the crash -- and past it, as some live and some die.
Friday the Thirteenth
