Reginald Beck
| Reginald Beck | |
|---|---|
| Born |
5 February 1902 St. Petersburg, Russia |
| Died | 12 July 1992 (aged 90) England |
| Occupation | film editor |
Reginald Beck (5 February 1902 – 12 July 1992) was a British film editor with forty-nine credits from 1932 to 1985. He is noted primarily for films done with Laurence Olivier in the 1940s and with Joseph Losey in the 1960s and 1970s.
He was the brother of Violet Helen Beck Cushing, wife of actor Peter Cushing.
Beck was born in Russia, but his family emigrated to Britain while Beck was a child. He began working in the film industry in 1927 when he joined Gainsborough Pictures before going on to work on "quota quickies" at Wembley Studios. He later worked with a number of directors including Carol Reed, David Lean, Laurence Olivier and Joseph Losey.
Joseph Losey was an American film and theater director who emigrated to Britain in the 1950s after being blacklisted for work in the entertainment industry in the United States. Beck and Losey collaborated on sixteen films from The Gypsy and the Gentleman (1958) through Steaming (1985), which was both Beck's and Losey's last film. Until about 1964, Losey actually worked primarily with Reginald Mills, who had edited the very first of Losey's British films in 1954. Mills edited The Servant (1963), which was the first of Losey's films with a screenplay written by Harold Pinter, a playwright who ultimately received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2005. After a public falling-out between Mills and Pinter, Beck edited essentially all of Losey's subsequent films.
In his comprehensive obituary, Anthony Sloman singles out Accident (1967) as the pinnacle of their filmmaking, writing "There is a sustained exterior hold in Accident 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 of The 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.".
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