(from:
Gordon Armstrong - National Publicity director - 20th Century
Fox film corp. - Made for the launch of "Take a hard ride" 1977)
----------------------------------------
The career of
Anthony M. Dawson, who is known in his native Italy as Antonio
Margheriti, seems to be paralleling that of the Hollywood director Don
Siegel.
For almost 30 years, Siegel made film after film on low budgets and tight
schedules. Then, with "Charley Varrick" he shot up into the big time
and was able to claim multi-million dollar budgets from his backers.
Simultaneously, the early, low-budget movies were being revived to grant
acclaim.
Today Siegel is a cult figure.
Similarly, a cult is developing around the early work of Anthony
M. Dawson -
Margheriti, especially around the films he made on shoe-string budgets in the
1960's. These films were usually Science Fiction or Macabre subjects, but
sometimes they were a fusion of both, a genre which Dawson pioneered and made
his own. The titles speak for themselves: "Spacemen"
(1960), "The
Outsider" (1961) with the late Claude Rains, "Golden Arrow"
(1962) with Tab Hunter and Rossana Podestà, "Dance Macabre" (1963)
with Barbara Steele, "The Virgin of Nuremberg" (1964) with Podestà
and Christopher Lee, "God Said to Cain" (1965) and
"Mr. Invisible"
(1970). In 1966 he made a linked quartet of SF films simultaneously in the
course of the year "The Diaphanoids",
"The wild, wild, wild
planet", "Snow Man" and
"Planet on the Prowl".
Dawson lives outside Rome in a villa on the Appia Antica and, although much of
his work has been done in Rome, he has filmed too in France, Spain, Switzerland,
the Far East and America. He is prolific and commercially very successful.
"TAKE A HARD RIDE", his first big-budget movie, was filmed on location
in the Canary Islands. In the 1970's he has made "Blood for Dracula",
"Flesh for
Frankenstein", "Ming Ragazzi" and
"Whisky and Ghosts",
and before "Take a hard ride" he made "Blood Money".
Born in
Rome, he studied science at school and his first interest was in the
field of special effects. In fact, his first job was to simulate, for a
documentary film, the Messina's earthquake and tidal wave, which took place in
1908. He became a leading practitioner of special effects and, in 1967 won first
prize in this field at the Prague Film Festival technical section. Before
turning to directing he wrote several screenplays. Dawson considers "Dance Macabre" to be his most interesting film of
the 1960's. It is particularly popular with film societies and has been shown in
the national film theatres of London and Paris. He is pleased that the Studios
are giving him larger budgets now, but he resists the aura of big-scale movie
making. During the making of "Take a hard ride" he was told that there
were 80 people crew on a particular location. He asked that the number of
technicians be reduced to a bare essential. Directing, for him, is an intimate
dialogue between the camera and the actors.
Gordon
Armstrong
