Robert Hamer (Director)

Reviews of movies from director Robert Hamer

Looking for reviews of films directed by Robert Hamer? Cinafilm has a total of 891 reviews across 6 movies directed by Robert Hamer.

Movies from this director have generally received positive reviews and hold an average rating of 62%.

Kind Hearts and Coronets is Robert Hamer's highest rated movie, with a score of 83% based on 414 reviews.

The lowest rated film from Robert Hamer is To Paris with Love, with a score of 45% based on 3 reviews.

Director Biography

Robert James Hamer (31 March 1911, Kidderminster, Worcestershire – 4 December 1963, London) was a British film director and screenwriter. He was the son of the actor Gerald Hamer (1886-1972).

Hamer was won a scholarship to Cambridge University but was sent down (expelled) from Cambridge, and began his career in 1934 as a cutting room assistant and from 1935 worked as a film editor involved with such films as Hitchcock's Jamaica Inn (1939) co-produced by Charles Laughton. At the end of the 1930s, he worked on documentaries for the GPO Film Unit.

When his boss at the GPO Alberto Cavalcanti moved to Ealing Studios, Hamer was invited to join him there. He gained some experience as a director by substituting for colleagues and contributed the 'haunted mirror' sequence to Dead of Night (1945). He followed this with the three Ealing films under his own name for which he is best remembered: Pink String and Sealing Wax (1946), It Always Rains on Sunday (1947), both featuring Googie Withers, and the black comedy Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949), with Dennis Price and Alec Guinness.

Hamer died of pneumonia at the age of 52 at St Thomas's Hospital in London. An alcoholic, who was homosexual in an era when it was taboo in the UK, Hamer's career "now looks like the most serious miscarriage of talent in the postwar British cinema", according to film critic David Thomson.

Robert Hamer has directed films starring Alec Guinness, Laurence Naismith, Geoffrey Keen and Dennis Price.