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52 film facts

Black and white photograph of Stanley Baker in Joseph Losey's Accident

Photograph of Stanley Baker in Joseph Losey's film Accident.

  1. Stanley Baker made his debut as a schoolboy in Undercover (1943) a story of the Resistance in Yugoslavia, starring Welsh actress Rachel Thomas.
  2. In 1943 Humphrey Jennings made the drama-doc Silent Village (1943), transplanting the Nazi massacre of villagers at Lidice, Czechoslovakia to Wales. Local miners played an important role in the production.
  3. Jill Craigie, late wife of politician Michael Foot, was the only female director of fiction films in Britain when she made the Welsh mining drama Blue Scar in 1949.
  4. Richard Burton made his screen debut in The Last Days of Dolwyn (1949), the only film directed by Welsh actor Emlyn Williams, who also starred in the movie.
  5. One of the great British mining films Fame Is The Spur (1947), made by the Boulting Brothers (Roy and John), was based on the novel by former Cardiff journalist Howard Spring and contained a sequence set in Wales.
  6. For drama-documentary These Are The Men, Dylan Thomas took poetic licence and 're-created' speeches made by Nazi leaders at Nuremberg, ensuring they condemned themselves out of their own mouths.
  7. American musicals, film and stage star Howard Keel made his screen debut in the leading role as a villain in the Welsh-set gangster thriller The Small Voice (US title: Hideout) in 1948. He was billed as 'Harold Keel'.
  8. Ray Milland became the first Welshman to win Hollywood's Oscar Best Actor award - for The Lost Weekend (1946), directed by Billy Wilder.
  9. Wales' contribution to the 1951 Festival of Britain was the short drama-doc David; a thinly-veiled biopic of DR Griffiths, brother of the first Welsh Secretary of State Jim Griffiths.
  10. Cy Endfield, director of Stanley Baker in Zulu (1964) had been blacklisted by Hollywood during the Anti-Communist witch hunts. He made four films with Baker including the popular Hell Drivers (1957).

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