Edward Black (producer)

Black made two films for Korda, A Man About the House (1947) and Bonnie Prince Charlie (1948), which was a commercial failure. Black died of lung cancer on 30 November 1948 at the age of 48, shortly after the premiere of the second film. He was planning to make a film about the police force, To Watch and to Ward.

Black's relationship with Maurice Ostrer was not always easy and he also clashed with the Rank Organisation when they took over Gainsborough. In 1944, Black left Gainsborough to join Alexander Korda.

Black produced the first Gainsborough melodrama, The Man in Grey (1943) directed by Leslie Arliss. The movie was a huge success, making stars out of its four leads, Margaret Lockwood, James Mason, Stewart Granger and Phyllis Calvert. Black followed it with Fanny By Gaslight, with Calvert, Mason, Granger and Jean Kent, directed by Anthony Asquith.

He worked with actor George Arliss on Doctor Syn. In 1940, Arliss wrote about Black:

In January 1939, Gaumont signed a deal with 20th Century Fox.

Black was an advocate of Launder and Gilliat as writers, working with them on The Lady Vanishes (1938) and Night Train to Munich (1940). He gave them their first opportunity as directors.

In December 1936, Michael Balcon left Gaumont-British for MGM. In March 1937 Shepherd’s Bush studios and Gaumont-British Distributors were closed. However Gainsborough continued as a production center thanks to a deal with C.M. Woolf and J. Arthur Rank’s General Film Distributors. Black was in charge along with Maurice Ostrer. They made movies for Gainsborough and 20th Century Fox.

In 1935 he and Sidney Gilliat were associate producers on Tudor Rose. Black then took over the running of Islington studios.

In 1930 Black became an assistant production manager at Shepherd’s Bush and then studio manager at Islington.

His and his sons Ted, George and Alfred built up the cinema to a circuit of thirteen cinemas in the Tyneside area. In 1919 they sold them and set about establishing another circuit. In 1928 they told this to the General Theatre Corporation. When that was taken over by Gaumont-British, Ted became a cinema circuit manager. In 1930 he went into production.

Black was the third son of George Black, a property master at the Theatre Royal, Birmingham, who became a cinema owner. George Black became a manager of a touring waxworks show then travelling cinema; in 1905 he set up the Monkwearmouth Picture Hall in Sounderland - this was one of the first permanent cinemas in Britain. He bought two more before he died in 1910.

Edward Black (18 August 1900, Birmingham – 30 November 1948, London) was a British film producer, best known for being head of production at Gainsborough Studios in the late 1930s and early 1940s, during which time he oversaw production of the Gainsborough melodramas. He also produced such classic films as The Lady Vanishes (1938). Black has been called "one of the unsung heroes of the British film industry." In 1946 Mason called Black "the one good production executive" that J. Arthur Rank had. Frank Launder called Black "a great showman and yet he had a great feeling for scripts and spent more time on them than anyone I have ever known. His experimental films used to come off as successful as his others."