Lance Comfort

Director Lance Comfort began his film career as a camera operator. He also worked as a sound recordist and animator, mostly in British documentaries and medical training films. His first feature was the big-budget but slow-moving Courageous Mr. Penn (1942), a biography of 18th-century political leader William Penn, starring Deborah Kerr, which was derided in some circles in the US for its many wild historical inaccuracies. He did somewhat better with A.J. Cronin's Hatter's Castle (1942) with James Mason, which was quite successful. He went for lowbrow comedy with Old Mother Riley Detective (1943), one in the string of "drag" comedies with Arthur Lucan in his standard Old Mother Riley character. The series was successful in the UK, but was a complete bust in the US (you'd be hard-pressed to find any American film historians who have even heard of them, let alone seen them). In 1948 he produced and directed the somewhat noir-ish Gothic drama Daughter of Darkness (1948), but he blew it big-time with the disastrous reception to Portrait of Clare (1950). It lost so much money that Comfort's career never recovered from it, and the only work he could scrape up afterwards were quickie "B" pictures and episodic TV series. He made his last film in 1965 and died in Sussex, England, in 1966.