Distinctive and innovative director Bernard Vorhaus was born in New
York City in 1904. After graduating from Harvard University he became
a screenwriter for Columbia and Fox. With the arrival of talkies he
moved to England and began to direct films of his own. With the arrival
of sound he moved to England in 1929, working initially making quota
quickies for producers such Juluis Hagen
at Twickenham Studios.
Of these early features, Vorhaus is best remembered for The
Ghost Camera (1933), Crime
on the Hill (1933), Dusty Ermine (1936) and The
Last Journey (1936). When Hagen’s studios went bankrupt in
1938, a penniless Vorhaus accepted an invitation from Herbert J. Yates
to return to America to work for Republic Pictures on low budget features.
During the war, Vorhaus volunteered for the Air Force Motion Picture
Unit, and made training documentaries on technical matters, as well
as public information films. In the late 40s he continued to make ‘B’
features, for Republic and independently, some, such as The Affairs
of Jimmy Valentine (1942), The Spiritualist aka The Amazing Mr X (1948)
and So Young So Bad (1950) are still remembered fondly today. Active
in left-wing politics, Vorhaus found himself working under increasingly
difficult circumstances during the McCarthy era witch-hunt, and eventually
he was blacklisted, having been named by Edward Dmytryk before the HUAC.
Although he attempted to continue making films in Europe, he was hounded
by the American authorities, and eventually he gave up film-making,
and settled in London in 1951 as a property developer.
