Sidney Hickox

Hickox started out as assistant cameraman at the Manhattan Biograph Studios in 1915, followed by two years of wartime photographic work with the U.S. Naval Air Service. He joined First National after 1919, graduating to director of photography by 1927. When Warner Brothers absorbed that company in 1930, he stayed the course for the bulk of his career (until 1954), then worked primarily in television until his retirement in 1971. Hickox was best known as an action photographer, who excelled shooting the gritty, moody crime films and melodramas, in which Warners tended to corner the market. He collaborated particularly well with another action specialist, the director Raoul Walsh. Hickox had the uncanny ability to make productions, shot on a modest budget, look a lot classier. His best films cover the period from 1942 to 1954. They include the boxing drama Gentleman Jim (1942); the films noir To Have and Have Not (1944), The Big Sleep (1946), Dark Passage (1947) and White Heat (1949); and, finally, the sci-fi cult classic Them! (1954).