ABSTRACT
On its initial release in 1955, Passage Home, a nautical drama starring Peter Finch and Diane Cilento, was described by one critic as ‘a film made with considerable if impersonal accomplishment’. 1 The same phrase could well be used to sum up the career of Passage Home's director, Roy Ward Baker. By the time of Passage Home, Baker was already an experienced film-maker with nine features to his credit, an eclectic mix of thrillers (The October Man, 1947;Paper Orchid, 1949; Highly Dangerous, 1950), a domestic comedy (The Weaker Sex, 1948), a romantic fantasy (The House in the Square, 1951) and a submarine drama (Morning Departure, 1950). Three of Baker's films had been made in America for 20th Century-Fox, giving him the opportunity to work with Marilyn Monroe (in Don't Bother to Knock, 1952) and to become one of the few British film-makers to direct a 3D film (the thriller Inferno, 1953). After Passage Home – ironically Baker's first film after his return to Britain – the director would go on to make the prestigious Titanic film A Night to Remember (1958) along with another thriller (Tiger in the Smoke, 1956), a comedy (Jacqueline, 1956), a war film (The One That Got Away, 1957), one difficult to classify generically (The Singer Not the Song, 1960), and a social problem film (Flame in the Streets, 1961). In the early 1960s, he switched to television work and then from the late 1960s onwards directed a series of low-budget horror films – including The Vampire Lovers (1970), Scars of Dracula (1970) and Asylum (1972) – for the two main British horror companies of the time, Hammer and Amicus.
