Charles Crichton

British director Charles Crichton entered the industry as an assistant editor for Alexander Korda's London Films, working on four pictures helmed by the Korda brothers (including "The Private Life of Henry VIII," which featured Charles Laughton's Oscar-winning performance) before earning his first credit as editor on Zoltan Korda's "Sanders of the River" (1935). He moved to Ealing Studios in 1940 and eventually made his feature directing debut with "For Those in Peril" (1944). Beginning with his breakthrough film , the delightful "Hue and Cry (1946), Crichton became established as a key architect (along with the likes of Alexander Mackendrick, Henry Cornelius and Robert Hammer) of the eccentric style of the Ealing comedies, sophisticated satires of the late 40s and 50s. His most remarkable effort was "The Lavender Hill Mob" (1951), with frequent Ealing headliner Alec Guinness as a bank clerk who plots a robbery. Both "The Titfield Thunderbolt" (1953) for Ealing and "The Battle of the Sexes" (1959), a non-Ealing movie starring Peter Sellers, were also first-rate.