Karlson and mckenzie professional#
By 1940, he had spent time as a film editor, second unit director, assistant director, and had become a seasoned professional in the business. Young and brash, Karlson described his job as “washing toilets and dishes and whatever the hell they gave me” 4 and talked his way into a number of short-lived assignments as an assistant to directors Arthur Lubin, Henry Koster, Tay Garnett, William Wyler, Stuart Walker and John Ford, and successfully pitched a story idea to Will Rogers, who unfortunately died in a plane crash before the film could be made. To make extra money, he sold gags to comedian Buster Keaton, who then had his own studio, and started hanging around the Keaton lot.īy 1927, it was clear to Karlson that whatever interest he had in the law was minimal, and he quit one year before graduating to join Universal Pictures as a prop man. 3 Karlson then decided to pursue the law as a career as a more stable way of making a living, and attended Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles on a scholarship.
As he put it, “I had a one man show and never sold a painting”.
Karlson attended Marshall High School, later took painting classes at the Chicago Art Institute, and briefly pursued a career as a song and dance man, with little success. I was keeping a brewery going by a little whistle. I remember getting twenty-five cents to stand on a corner, and if the cop was on this side of the street, to whistle real loud, and if he was on that side of the street, just to whistle softly. I was born in Chicago, and I was raised in Chicago, and I went through the days of the killings and whatnot in Chicago. As he told Todd McCarthy and Richard Thompson in a 1973 interview, even as a youngster, he was intimately acquainted with the workings of the Chicago underworld. Karlson is also attracting more critical attention of late as a superb noir director – and if anyone deserves a box set of their key works, and a book length study of their career, Karlson is that person.īorn Philip Nathan Karlstein on 2 July 1908 in Chicago, Karlson knew from an early age just how tough the world really was. But in the end, even though many of his best films have fallen into the Public Domain, Karlson had the last laugh when his self-produced film Walking Tall (1973) made him a millionaire near the end of his life. For most of his life, except for a white-hot string of films in the 1950s, Karlson labored on films he had no real interest in, and was in many senses a victim of the Hollywood studio system, blackballed by Harry Cohn just as his career was getting off the ground. To call Phil Karlson a ‘forgotten’ director is sad, but apt. Issue 83 The Forgotten Master of Film Noirĭirector Phil Karlson’s best films – Tight Spot (1955), Five Against the House (1955), The Brothers Rico (1957), Hell to Eternity (1960) – present a consistent theme of betrayal, violence and revenge and an admirable bluntness of style.
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