Muriel box

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Muriel Box (born September 22, 1905 in Tolworth as Violette Muriel Baker , † May 19, 1991 in London ) was a British screenwriter and director .

life and career

Muriel Box started working in the film business in 1927. She first worked as a script girl at British International Pictures for Anthony Asquith and began writing screenplays with her husband, Sydney Box , from 1935 . At first they wrote a number of short pieces for theater groups. Their breakthrough came with the screenplay for Compton Bennett's The Last Veil , for which they received the Oscar for best original screenplay . Box was also the first woman to win an Oscar in this category.

As a result, Sydney was invited by The Rank Organization to take over Gainsborough Pictures , where Muriel led the script department. “The emphasis was on volume production, but many of the Boxes' scripts - like The Years In Between (directed by Compton Bennett, 1946) or Dance into the Abyss (directed by David Macdonald , 1948) - emphasize the problems women face in their Fight for recognition or independence. ”Muriel occasionally assisted as a dialogue director or re-directed scenes. In The Lost People (1949), an adaptation of Bridget Boland's play about the plight of European refugees, she was officially recognized as co-director with Bernard Knowles . The program booklet for the film series Pioneers of Film Noir in 2019 says: "The directorial debut of the then famous screenwriter Muriel Box, who directed about half of the film, lives from its tightness and lively characters."

From 1949 she wrote her own scripts and also appeared as a director of comedies and crime films. In total, she wrote 25 scripts and directed 16 times.

In 1964 she directed her last film with Seduction wants to be learned . “Aesthetically more faithful to the 1950s, the director makes the decisive move into the 1960s with the subject. By addressing family abuse and female addictions, Rattle of a Simple Man is much more serious than Muriel Box's earlier comedies. ”The film was a failure and sealed Muriel Box's career.

The Festival Internacional de Cine de San Sebastián and the Lumière Grand Lyon Film Festival dedicated a retrospective to Muriel Box in 2018 .

Sonja Hartl wrote: “No British woman has directed more films than Muriel Box. She was the first woman to win an Oscar for Best Original Screenplay. And yet she is largely unknown. ”Using her example, Hartl identifies something many directors have in common:“ But the story of Muriel Box, which is just as unknown as that of her sister-in-law Betty Box, shows something else . It is always the same names that are 'rediscovered'. In the second wave of feminism in the 1970s, it was the works u. a. by Lois Weber , Alice Guy , Ida Lupino or Dorothy Arzner . In the 1990s, the women of the classic phase of British cinema began to claim their share: Jill Craigie , Kay Mander, Wendy Toye and Muriel Box. But these attempts had little endurance. "The retrospective audience finds Muriel Box interesting not only because of her outsider status, according to Phil Hoad in The Guardian ," but also because of her fearless search for new ways of expressing the way of life of women. "

Filmography (selection)

Director

  • 1949: The Lost People
  • 1953: At the street corner (Street Corner)
  • 1954: Damned to Paradise (The Beachcomber)
  • 1954: The Million Baby (To Dorothy a Son)
  • 1955: Simon and Laura (Simon and Laura)
  • 1956: Key witness wanted (Eyewitness)
  • 1957: The Passionate Stranger
  • 1959: Subway in the Sky
  • 1962: The Piper's Tune
  • 1964: Seduction has to be learned ... (Rattle of a Simple Man)

script

literature

  • Kay Less : The film's great personal dictionary . The actors, directors, cameramen, producers, composers, screenwriters, film architects, outfitters, costume designers, editors, sound engineers, make-up artists and special effects designers of the 20th century. Volume 1: A - C. Erik Aaes - Jack Carson. Schwarzkopf & Schwarzkopf, Berlin 2001, ISBN 3-89602-340-3 , p. 499.
  • Rachel Cooke: Her Brilliant Career: Ten Extraordinary Women of the Fifties . Virago 2013

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Andrew Spicer: BFI Screen online: Box, Muriel (1905-1991) Biography. Retrieved November 25, 2018 .
  2. ↑ Pioneers of Film Noir - A joint event between the DFF and the Frankfurt film collective. In: Deutsches Filminstitut Filmmuseum. Retrieved on June 19, 2019 (German).
  3. ↑ Borjana Gaković: Rattle of a Simple Man. In: Awakening of Women Authors II - Women Directors of the 1960s in Europe. 2016, accessed November 25, 2018 .
  4. ^ Sonja Hartl: Choosing women: rediscovered. kino-zeit.de, accessed on November 19, 2018 .
  5. ↑ Phil Hoad: Muriel Box: Britain's most prolific female director you've never heard of. October 26, 2018, accessed November 25, 2018 .
personal data
SURNAME Box, Muriel
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Baker, Violette Muriel (maiden name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION British screenwriter and director
DATE OF BIRTH September 22, 1905
PLACE OF BIRTH Tolworth
DATE OF DEATH May 19, 1991
Place of death London