Fred F. Sears - Most Prolific Period

Most Prolific Period

His career kicked into high gear between 1953 and 1957, during which time Sears directed an astounding 29 feature films. He had successfully cracked the Hollywood system, and getting work was no longer a problem. Now, however, as Sears gained confidence in his craft, he began to make a series of dark, foreboding crime films, many shot on location and dealing with big-city corruption, vice and racketeering, in addition to several science fiction films, at least one horror film, the first full-length rock and roll musical and the first Latino musical, all on six-day schedules.

The Miami Story (1954) is a big-city crime thriller that deals with corrupt politicians. Sears and his crew shot much of the film on location, with Barry Sullivan in the lead role of Mick Flagg, a reformed gangster determined to clean up the corrupt metropolis. Sears then began production on what is arguably one of the most intriguing films of his brief career: Cell 2455 Death Row (1955), based on the autobiography of Caryl Chessman, the notorious “Red Light Bandit” of the early 1950s, who successfully acted as his own attorney in staving off a series of execution attempts by the State of California at San Quentin prison, only to finally die in the gas chamber on May 2, 1960.

In his last years Sears created some of his most interesting projects, such as 1955’s Teen-Age Crime Wave in which a group of marauding teenagers terrorize a rural family in the aftermath of a robbery; The Werewolf (1956), one of the best of the late Columbia horror films, with a surprisingly sympathetic performance from Steven Ritch, who is unwittingly transformed into a lycanthrope by a group of unscrupulous scientists; Fury at Gunsight Pass (1956), a truly bizarre western in which corrupt undertaker Peter Boggs (played by the ever-unctuous Percy Helton) conspires with a gang of desperados to rob the bank of a frontier town in the midst of a blinding sandstorm; and Earth vs. the Flying Saucers (1956), which remains Sears’ best-known film, immeasurably enhanced by Ray Harryhausen’s then-state-of-the-art stop motion special effects. It's also one of the few Sears films available on DVD.

He also directed the pop classic Rock Around the Clock (1956), featuring Bill Haley & His Comets, The Platters, Freddie Bell and the Bellboys and the Godfather of all rock-and-roll DJs, Alan Freed; Cha-Cha-Cha Boom! (1956), the first Latino/a musical, featuring Perez Prado, Luis Arcaraz and Manny Lopez with their respective orchestras, performing a non-stop medley of authentic pop hits, presenting the Latino/a public for the first time with positive images of their music and culture in a mainstream Hollywood film; Calypso Heat Wave (1957), which showcased Caribbean music and offered a young Maya Angelou her first screen role; and Escape From San Quentin (1957), a neatly constructed suspense thriller involving a prison escape using a stolen plane to fly over the walls of the infamous penitentiary.