Dallas Bower

Dallas Bower (25 July 1907, London – 18 October 1999, London) was a British film and television director and producer.

After early employment as the sound technician on Alfred Hitchcock's first sound movie Blackmail (1929) Bower joined film impresario Paul Czinner, producer of As You Like it, starring Laurence Olivier. Bower joined the BBC's experimental television unit in 1936 and presented broadcasts of several Shakespeare plays before TV trials were terminated in wartime. He then directed the Ministry of Information's film division and in 1941 joined BBC Radio where he produced a radio version of the Russian film Alexander Nevsky, starring Laurence Olivier and with music by William Walton. The same group later made the film Henry V, with Bower as executive producer and the radio script he and Olivier had broadcast before the war.

Returning to British films after the war, Bower made a colour film of Alice in Wonderland in 1949 (restored 50 years later by the US Museum of Modern Art.) He later produced the first British TV commercials.

A lifelong member of the Savile Club, Bower married Violet Collings with whom he had one son and two daughters.

Selected filmography

Director

• The Path of Glory (1934)
• Rope (1939; TV)
• Alice in Wonderland (1949)
• The Second Mrs Tanqueray (1952)
• Doorway to Suspicion (1957)

Soundman

• Blackmail (1929)

External links

• Dallas Bower at the Internet Movie Database