Roy Ward Baker is quoted as saying ‘realism is my forte’. But Geoff Mayer’s book reveals that over a fifty-eight-year career in film and television, Baker was much more than just a ‘realist’. Baker began as a ‘gopher’ at Gainsborough Studios in 1934, but he is best known for directing what is perhaps the definitive film on the Titanic disaster, A Night to Remember (1958). He also directed horror productions for Hammer Films, including The Vampire Lovers (1960) and Quatermass and the Pit (1967). He ended his career at seventy-two with an episode of the British television series The Good Guys (1992). It is due to this long and diverse career that Baker has not been embraced as an auteur, a filmmaker who is able to project a consistent personal vision across a range of films. However, in Roy Ward Baker, Geoff Mayer, of La Trobe University, situates Baker as an auteur, tracing the vicissitudes of his career to provide a comprehensive and intriguing study of the filmmaker and his films, as well as his industrial, social, and political contexts.

Mayer engages the reader by producing a carefully constructed investigation of Baker’s career, which includes a description of his initial experience of cinema. Baker was twelve in 1928 when his father bartered goldfish for tickets to the gala opening of MGM’s newly renovated Empire Theatre in Leicester Square. They watched a Movietone short sound film followed by Trelawny of the Wells, a silent feature accompanied by a ninety-piece orchestra. Roy Baker was so awestruck that he set his sights on becoming a filmmaker as soon as he could leave school.