Ewald André Dupont

Among his last films was the notorious sci-fi stinker The Neanderthal Man (1953).

In 1952 and 1953 he wrote 23 episodes of the TV series Big Town (1950) and directed two of them.

He eventually resumed his directing career with an offbeat minor film noir, The Scarf (1951), and a watchable precursor to The Flight of the Phoenix (1965), The Steel Lady (1953).

By the 1950s the only directing jobs he could get were on low-grade horror pictures like The Neanderthal Man (1953). The end of his career finally came in 1954, when he was fired from Miss Robin Crusoe (1954) for showing up drunk once too often. Four years later he died of cancer in Los Angeles.

After being fired from the set of Hell's Kitchen (1939) for slapping a junior member of the cast who had mocked his accent, Dupont spent most of the 1940s in Hollywood as a talent agent and publicist.

After 1933 he worked at different times for Universal, Paramount and Warner Brothers. Critical success proved elusive, as almost all of his assignments were low-budget second features.

His last film in Germany was Salto Mortale (1931), after which he was hired by Universal Pictures to make films in the US. Unfortunately, his career never really caught on there and he drifted from Universal to Paramount to MGM and then to Warners. . Things got so bad there that while directing Hell's Kitchen (1939) with the East Side Kids, he actually came to blows with at least one of the cast members; he was fired and replaced by Lewis Seiler. He didn't wok as a director for ten years after that, spending that time as a talent agent.

His first "talkie", the "Titanic" story Atlantic (1929)-- shot in both English and French-- was an expensive flop, due mainly to poor dialogue and stilted performances. His next two ventures, respectively in France and Germany, had an even worse critical reception. Dupont next tried his luck in Hollywood.

Crossing the Atlantic again, he signed with British National Pictures in 1928.

He briefly became their leading director, again demonstrating his visual flair with two prestige productions: Moulin Rouge (1928) and Piccadilly (1929). The latter was BIP's most expensively made picture up to this time. After the advent of sound Dupont's career began to falter.

He was particularly acclaimed for his film Variety (1925), which stood out for brilliant lighting effects and fluid camera work. Encouraged by his success, Dupont left Decla-Bioskop and joined Universal in Hollywood, but only completed one film.

In 1918 he was hired by Stern-Film-GmbH as an author and director for a detective serial with Max Landa. Up to that time he had never been inside a film studio. Over the next year he shot 12 of the serial's chapters.

German film director E. A. Dupont was an influential critic and newspaper columnist before breaking into the film industry. He wrote several screenplays and worked as a story editor for Richard Oswald before turning to directing in 1917. Over the next eight years Dupont became a respected exponent of the German expressionist movement.

Wrote his first screenplay in 1916, for Mein ist die Rache (1916). Within a year he had had 11 of his scripts turned into films.

Was considered an important film journalist in Germany in the 1910s before he became a director.