A neglected director in British film history, Lance Comfort started
his career as camera operator, sound recordist and animator of British
documentaries and medical training shorts. Comfort's first feature was
Penn of Pennsylvania (1941), an ambitious wartime biopic starring Deborah
Kerr. He followed this with the successful big-budgeter Hatter's
Castle (1941) featuring a young James
Mason. Comfort then delighted the folks in the cheap seats with
the rousing comedy Old Mother Riley, Detective (1943). Great Day (1945)
dealt with the visit of Mrs Roosevelt to a Women's Institute and the
unhappiness beneath the pastoral happy facade of village life.
He functioned as both producer and director of the gothic film Daughter
of Darkness (1948). Comfort found work dried up in a changed film industry
following the disastrous box-office failure of his romantic melodrama
Portrait of Clare (1950). Many of his post-war efforts during the 1950s
and 1960s were co-features, early television series and "B"
pictures, notably Eight
O’clock Walk (1953), Bang! You're Dead (1953), Make
Mine a Million (1959) and Tomorrow
at Ten (1964).
