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| Lindsay Shonteff, film director, was born on November 5, 1935. He died on March 11, 2006, aged 70. Perhaps the film director Lindsay Shonteff summed up his career best on his website, which welcomed visitors with the headline “Maverick or madman”. He made an impact in his twenties with the cult horror movie Devil Doll (1964) and had a five-picture deal with Columbia, but fell out with the studio and nothing came of it. Instead, he made a series of James Bond spoofs, about a secret agent called Charles Vine and latterly Charles Bind, which some fans rate more highly than the originals. But there was a falling-out with the distributor Rank, and Shonteff believed that the Bond producer Cubby Broccoli had put pressure on them behind the scenes to dump his films. Born in Toronto in 1935, Shonteff made a low-budget western called The Hired Gun (1961) in Canada and then pursued his career in England. Devil Doll featured a sinister ventriloquist (played by Bryant Haliday) and his even more sinister dummy. British censors considered the film too disturbing even for an X certificate and demanded cuts. Over the years Shonteff would repeatedly find himself re-editing films to meet censors’ demands. Devil Doll was greeted with mixed reviews, but is highly rated at least by some horror fans. Licensed to Kill (1965), which was co-written and directed by Shonteff, introduced the character Charles Vine, played in the first film by Tom Adams. Released on the back of the Bond films, it was renamed in the US as The Second Best Secret Agent in the Whole Wide World. Shonteff worked steadily throughout the 1960s and 1970s. He returned to the horror genre with Curse of Simba (1965), attempted to exploit the sexual revolution with Permissive (1970) and The Yes Girls (1971), and introduced a female private detective in Big Zapper (1973). The Charles Vine series had been continued by another director, but Shonteff took over again in 1977 by which time Vine had moved even closer to Bond by changing his name to Bind and had seemingly moved up the rankings in a film entitled No 1 of the Secret Service (1977), cheekily taglined “Zero is Never Beside His Name”. Shonteff also directed an adaptation of one of Len Deighton’s Harry Palmer novels, Spy Story (1976), with Don Fellows in the role made famous by Michael Caine. Shonteff continued to work sporadically in the 1990s and 2000s, but his later films were not widely seen. |
| QUOTE (William S. Wilson @ May 14 2006, 01:32 AM) |
| http://www.lindsayshonteff.com/ |