Adrian Brunel

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Adrian Brunel (born September 4, 1892 in Brighton , † February 18, 1958 in Gerrard's Cross ) was a British film director and screenwriter .

Life

With the support of his mother, Brunel began a stage career after completing his training in Harrow . He was an actor, wrote plays and tried himself as an opera singer. At the same time, his interest in film as a form of expression also grew. In 1916 he founded the film production company "Mirror Films" with the author Harry Fowler Mear , which in 1917 produced Brunel's first film The Cost of a Kiss . He worked in the film department of the British Ministry of Information until the end of the First World War.

Brunel began in 1920 as a director of short film comedies. In 1923 he shot The Man Without Desire in Venice and Berlin , in which the theater star Ivor Novello plays the role of a nobleman who has been brought back to life after two centuries. He developed a visual style that set his films apart from the usual British productions of the time. Michael Balcon became aware of Brunel and produced his comedies from A Typical Budget (1925) at Gainsborough Pictures . These were shown at Ivor Montagu's London Film Society , where Brunel himself was active and also edited foreign films for showing and distribution in the UK.

Balcon saw his talent and offered him to direct larger films. The first of these mainstream productions was Blighty (1927), a WWI family drama starring Lilian Hall-Davis . After the success of the film, Brunel was commissioned to adapt a popular play by Noël Coward . The star in this film, The Vortex (1928), was Ivor Novello, who also starred in Brunel's The Constant Nymph that same year . The latter was a visually outstanding film adaptation of the novel of the same name by Margaret Kennedy from 1924. Mabel Poulton played the main female role in the story about a schoolgirl who falls in love with a composer . Brunel was at the height of his career with these three films.

Disputes with his employer about the payment of his work led to a career turnaround in 1929/30, the time of the transition to sound film in Great Britain. He was still involved in the production of the number revue Elstree Calling (1930) for the sound film company British International Pictures , but then lost his job.

Without working directly on film, he wrote the book Filmcraft , a kind of textbook for budding filmmakers, which was published in 1933. At the same time he got work again and shot several "Quota Quickies", quickly and cheaply produced local films to meet the legal film contingent . Few of the films he made in the 1930s were even eligible. He shot The Invader (1935) with the formerly popular silent film comedian Buster Keaton and Lupita Tovar . He directed Alexander Korda's production, The Lion Has Wings, alongside Michael Powell and Brian Desmond Hurst in 1939 . His last work as main director were two short propaganda films the following year.

Brunel was a production consultant for Leslie Howard in the 1940s , including The First of the Few (1942) and The Gentle Sex (1943), which Howard co-directed with Maurice Elvey .

In Nice Work , published in 1949, Brunel described his experiences in film in an entertaining way.

Footnotes

  1. ↑ see on this in the article British film history

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Brunel, Adrian
BRIEF DESCRIPTION British film director and screenwriter
DATE OF BIRTH September 4, 1892
PLACE OF BIRTH Brighton
DATE OF DEATH February 18, 1958
Place of death Gerrard's Cross