Obituary: Karel Reisz
An unusually modest and unassuming man, the film director Karel Reisz, who has died aged 76, was probably unfortunate in being so closely associated with the combative Lindsay Anderson (obituary, September 1 1994). Both took their first steps in cinema during the heady 1950s days of the Aldermaston marches, the Suez crisis and Look Back In Anger. Anderson, comfortably middle-class, public school, son of an Indian Army officer, took to the prevailing climate of revolt like a duck to water, maintaining his hectoring assault on accepted values long past its sell-by date, until it soured into self-parody in films such as Britannia Hospital (1982). But the emigré Reisz, as the dispassion of his early films suggests, and the increasing subjectivity of his later work confirms, looked on the British social scene with much more diffidence.
Born of Jewish extraction in Ostrava, Czechoslovakia, Karel Reisz was sent to Britain just before the outbreak of the second world war and went to Leighton Park, a Quaker school near Reading; his parents subsequently died in Auschwitz. After serving as a pilot with one of the RAF's Czechoslovak squadrons in the closing stages of the war, Reisz read chemistry at Emmanuel College, Cambridge.
It was while teaching in a grammar school that he became involved with the cinema. He wrote criticism for Sequence (the last issue of which he co-edited with Lindsay Anderson in 1952) and for Sight And Sound; published a book on the aesthetics of montage, The Technique Of Film Editing (1953); and became one of the first programme planners at the National Film Theatre. It was there, between 1956 and 1959, that the four programmes designed as a manifesto and progress report for "Free Cinema" were showcased.
Aimed at undermining the prevailing blandness of British films, Free Cinema was so called, according to one of its publicity handouts, because "these films are free in the sense that their statements are entirely personal". While undoubtedly true of much of the foreign work incorporated in the programmes - notably early films from Franju, Polanski, Truffaut and Chabrol - this was much less evident in the British contribution, documentaries which emerged like dutiful responses to a classroom exercise in looking at how the other half lives in a classbound society. These included Lindsay Anderson's O Dreamland (1953) and Every Day Except Christmas (1957), dealing respectively with popular entertainments at the seaside funfair and the sterling qualities of the Covent Garden porter; Tony Richardson and Karel Reisz's Momma Don't Allow (1955) and Reisz's We Are The Lambeth Boys (1958), both observing underprivileged youth at a loose end and at play. All had undeniable freshness, but also a largely predictable and sometimes patronising attitude.
Reisz went on to considerable success with his first feature, Saturday Night And Sunday Morning (1960). Another foray into the world of cloth-cap underprivilege, it now looks horribly cliché-ridden, although Albert Finney's performance as the young Nottingham factory worker, roaring "Don't let the bastards grind you down!" as he faces up to the bleak vista of his future still retains its abrasive edge. With Free Cinema foundering even as its French New Wave counterpart flourished, the film's success did mean that Reisz was able to produce Lindsay Anderson's debut feature, This Sporting Life (1962).
Having paid his dues to sociology, Reisz meandered for some years in search of something to replace it. Night Must Fall (1964), featuring a chilling performance from Albert Finney as a psychopathic youth given to crooning sweet nothings over a hatbox secreting a memento of his murderous desires, might have worked better had it adhered more slavishly to its source, a barnstorming play by Emlyn Williams. Reisz, however, tried to add resonance by adumbrating a system of moral counterbalances between hero and heroine, with the designated victim finally gaining ascendancy over her nemesis. This didn't work, leaving the plot hamstrung by what emerged as mere pretensions.
This apparent aimlessness continued in Morgan, A Suitable Case for Treatment (1966) and Isadora (1968). Morgan, adapted from a TV play by David Mercer, is a sporadically interesting fantasy about a young artist (engagingly played by David Warner), reluctantly divorced from the wife he adores and prevented by a court injunction from approaching her, who dons a gorilla suit in order to exact a King Kong revenge on the society he blames for his predicament. Reisz's investment of some fellow-feeling is evident in the intensity with which Morgan's suffering is presented; but the film itself is frittered away in the slapstick carry-on of his revenge and the muddled set of political references that underpin it. Isadora, scripted by Melvyn Bragg, is little more than a set of decorative curlicues illustrating the life and times of Isadora Duncan, not helped by the casting of a gangly Vanessa Redgrave as a dancer said to have moved with infallible grace.
In 1974, Reisz resurfaced in America with The Gambler, a dark odyssey in which a compulsive gambler, by day a New York professor of literature given to lucid analysis of his own malady in his lectures on Dostoevsky, desperately tries to stave off brutal retribution by raising the money he owes. Typically of scriptwriter James Toback, however, the gambler (incisively played by James Caan) is beset by an obscure existential angst that gradually takes shape as a drive to self-destruction. A key scene, staged by Reisz with wistful insistence, features a family gathering to pay homage on his 80th birthday to the grandfather, an emigré Lithuanian Jew, whose ruthless risk-taking in building his fortune taught the future gambler everything he imagines he knows about luck.
The Gambler released a vein of dark lyricism in Reisz that was to illuminate all his subsequent work, featuring characters to varying degrees and in various ways marginalised by society: Who'll Stop the Rain? (1978, also known as Dog Soldiers), in which an ex-GI finds his marginal involvement with drugs in Vietnam sending his life back home spiralling out of control; The French Lieutenant's Woman (1981), eloquent in its treatment of the theme of repressed sexuality, even though Harold Pinter's script finds no proper answer to the problem of the dual-level narrative in John Fowles's source novel; Sweet Dreams (1985), Reisz's most perfectly realised and most underrated film, turning the unhappy life of singer Patsy Cline into the resonant tragedy of a couple caught between the devil of showbiz success and the deep blue sea of domestic bliss; and Everybody Wins (1990), an undeniably muddled adaptation of Arthur Miller's play Some Kind Of Love Story, which nevertheless makes a fascinating fist of the relationship between a private eye and a femme fatale as they evolve within the tangles of a film noir framework.
Though backed by extensive work on sponsored and advertising films, Reisz's career output was modest qualitatively as well as quantitatively, but consistent in its ambition, intelligence and skill in the direction of actors, with a catalogue of fine perfor mances coming to a peak with Meryl Streep in The French Lieutenant's Woman, Jessica Lange in Sweet Dreams and Debra Winger in Everybody Wins.
From 1991 to 2001, Reisz devoted himself to theatre direction in London (notably at the Almeida), Dublin and Paris. He won special praise for his productions of work by Pinter and Samuel Beckett, Michael Billington writing of Happy Days in 1996: "Reisz's production catches precisely both the integrity of Beckett's vision and the musicality of his language." Reisz also made Act Without Words for Channel 4's Beckett On Film season in 2001. His second wife, whom he married in 1963, was the American actor Betsy Blair; she made her mark in 1955 as the lonely wallflower in the Oscar-winning Marty. She and their three sons survive him.
· Karel Reisz, film director, born July 21 1926; died November 25 2002
The following correction was printed in the Guardian's Corrections and Clarifications column, November 29 2002

At the end of the above obituary of Karel Reisz, we mentioned that his second marriage was in 1963 to the actor Betsy Blair, adding that she and their three sons survive him. In fact the mother of his three sons is his first wife, Julia Werthimer, who was married to Reisz from 1953 to 1963. Apologies to all.