Reginald Mills
| Reginald Mills | |
|---|---|
| Born |
Reginald Cuthbert Mills 15 September 1912 London, England |
| Died | July 1990 (aged 76) |
| Occupation | filmmaker |
Reginald "Reggie" Mills (15 September 1912 – July 1990) was an English film editor and one-time film director with more than thirty feature film credits. Among his prominent films are The Red Shoes (1948), for which he received his only Academy Award nomination, The Servant (1963), and Romeo and Juliet (1968).
Mills graduated from Cambridge University with a degree in modern languages in 1934. He was the assistant to David Lean (then an editor) on two films directed by Paul Czinner, As You Like It (1936) and Dreaming Lips (1937). Mills then worked for Publicity Films at Merton Park Studios, both as a director and editor of films for commercial clients.
During World War II (1939–1945) he was stationed in an anti-aircraft battery on the Thames Estuary throughout the whole of the London Blitz. He served with the Army Kinematograph Unit, and was the uncredited editor for a military orientation film, The New Lot (directed by Carol Reed-1943).
After the war he began a fruitful association with the film-making partnership called "The Archers", which was led by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger. His first credit was for A Matter of Life and Death (1946), followed by Black Narcissus (1947). Mills received an Academy Award nomination for his work on the Archers' ballet film, The Red Shoes (1948). A 2010 appreciation of the film by Peter Canavese notes Mills' contributions, "The still astonishing expressionistic dance sequence that stands as a performance of the Ballet Lermontov's The Red Shoes ... is rapturous, as a feast of theatrical lighting and Technicolor photography (shot by the brilliant cinematographer Jack Cardiff), the choreography of Robert Helpmann, the music of Brian Easdale and the montage of editor Reginald Mills." Implicitly acknowledging its editing, Michael Sragow wrote in 2011, "Yes, The Red Shoes is ecstatic entertainment. ... But is it realistic? Only in the manner of an Expressionist painting. Powell and Pressburger create a stylized, intoxicating environment that fuses art and life and dance and cinema."The Tales of Hoffmann (1951) also incorporated ballet in its adaptation of the original Offenbach opera, and André Bazin wrote at the time, "The cinema thus creates here a new artistic monster: the best legs adorned by the best voice. Not only is opera liberated from its material constraints but also from its human limitations. Lastly, dance itself is renewed by the photography and the editing, which allows a kind of choreography of the second degree where the rhythm of the dance is served by that of the cinema."
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