Reginald Beck | |
|---|---|
| Born | (1902-02-05)5 February 1902 St. Petersburg, Russia |
| Died | 12 July 1992(1992-07-12) (aged 90) Cookham, England |
| Occupation | film editor |
| Spouse | Irene Beck |
| Parent(s) | Ernest Beck, Helena Beck |
Reginald Beck (5 February 1902 – 12 July 1992) was a Britishfilm editor with forty-nine credits from 1932 to 1985.[1][2] He is noted primarily for films done withLaurence Olivier in the 1940s and withJoseph Losey in the 1960s and 1970s.
His sister, Violet Hélène (called "Helen"), was wife of actorPeter Cushing.[3][4]
Beck was born in Russia to a British father and Finnish mother. His family moved back to Britain when Beck was thirteen. He began working in the film industry in 1927 when he joinedGainsborough Pictures before going on to work on "quota quickies" atWembley Studios. He later worked with a number of directors includingCarol Reed,David Lean,Laurence Olivier andJoseph Losey.[5]
Joseph Losey was an American film and theatre director who emigrated to Britain in the 1950s after beingblacklisted for work in the entertainment industry in the United States. Beck and Losey collaborated on sixteen films fromThe Gypsy and the Gentleman (1958) through toSteaming (1985), which was both Beck's and Losey's last film.[6] Until about 1964, Losey actually worked primarily withReginald Mills, who had edited the very first of Losey's British films in 1954. Mills editedThe Servant (1963), which was the first of Losey's films with a screenplay written byHarold Pinter, a playwright who ultimately received theNobel Prize in Literature in 2005. After a public falling-out between Mills and Pinter,[7] Beck edited essentially all of Losey's subsequent films.
In his comprehensive obituary,Anthony Sloman singles outAccident (1967) as the pinnacle of their filmmaking, writing "There is a sustained exterior hold inAccident that is totally of the cutting room: it is breathtaking in its audacity, and became influential in its style." The film was the second collaboration between Losey and Harold Pinter. Roy Perkins and Martin Stollery single out the editing ofThe Go-Between (1971), the third and last film of the Losey-Pinter collaboration, writing that "sharply cut, initially cryptic alternations between time-past and time-present are deftly integrated into the narrative.".[5]
One of the last films that Beck edited with Losey wasDon Giovanni (1979), which was a French-Italian production based on the opera byMozart.Nicholas Wapshott wrote recently that "One near perfect amalgamation of opera and the screen is Joseph Losey'sDon Giovanni."[8] For this film, Beck received theCésar Award for Best Editing, which is given mostly to highly regarded French productions; it was the only such distinction in Beck's long career.
Sloman concludes of Beck and Losey's collaboration, "Their professional and personal relationship was regarded as one of the great screen partnerships".[1]
Earlier in his career, Beck worked on two films directed byLaurence Olivier,Henry V (1944) andHamlet (1948). Both are adaptations of plays byWilliam Shakespeare. Olivier, who is known mostly as a distinguished stage and screen actor, played the title roles in addition to directing the films. They were the first films he had directed, and Beck was Olivier's advisor during filming in addition to his subsequent editing. Sloman wrote of these two "masterpieces' that "Beck's contribution to bothHenry V andHamlet is so immense, so considerable, that film historians today tend to gloss over it, not fully understanding the role of the editor in addition to physically cutting the film." Sloman concludes his obituary of Beck, "above all, it is for his immense contributions toHenry V andHamlet that the British film industry is forever in his debt."[1]
Beck was credited as the editor for these films except as noted; the credits are based on the listing at the Internet Movie Database except as indicated by an additional citation.[2] The director for each film is indicated in parentheses.
Bullitt (1968). Philip D'Antoni, who went on to produceThe French Connection, warmed up for it with this Steve McQueen crime drama, set in San Francisco, where the steep hills seem to yearn for cars to go sailing over them. The director, Peter Yates, makes the most of the locations, especially during a gravity-defying chase sequence that earned an Oscar for its editor, Frank P. Keller.
But I learned editing that night… We really created the film anew in one night because Rainer had an English editor, Reginald Beck, who started the editing but they didn't get along. I took it over and we created a new story.
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