Fred F. Sears - Partnership With Sam Katzman

Partnership With Sam Katzman

Sears’ speed and prolificacy soon brought his name to the attention of both producer Sam Katzman and Columbia Pictures president Harry Cohn. In 1952 Katzman teamed Sears with veteran serial director Spencer Gordon Bennet for Blackhawk. With a running time of 242 minutes, or slightly more than four hours, and a production schedule of 28 days, Blackhawk was the acid test for Sears’ directorial skills. The 15-chapter serial went off without a hitch, and Katzman made Sears an offer. Sears would spend the rest of his brief career working for Katzman’s Clover Productions or Wallace MacDonald, another “B” Columbia producer, who was slightly less penurious than Katzman.

Decisively breaking from the Western genre by design, Sears campaigned for a less transparently generic assignment, and was rewarded with Last Train From Bombay (1952), a straightforward thriller set in India, starring Jon Hall, then at the peak of his small-screen fame as the title character in Ramar of the Jungle. Last Train from Bombay was so successful as a second-feature that Wallace MacDonald rushed Sears into production of Target Hong Kong (1953), another Oriental thriller, again with an espionage-centered narrative, but with the much more capable Richard Denning in the lead. Sears’ next film, however, marked a genuine step up for the director. Ambush at Tomahawk Gap (1953), although a western, was shot in Technicolor and featured Sears’ first top-flight cast: veterans John Hodiak and David Brian, as well as a very young John Derek, then under contract to Columbia as an actor.