IVAN PASSER

(10 July 1933 - 9 January 2020)

The Czech writer-director Ivan Passer, who has died aged 86 from pulmonary complications, was part of the Czech New Wave of filmmaking in the 1960s. Until then a political stranglehold prevented filmmakers from expressing their own perhaps controversial views. Passer was part of a group that included Jirί Menzel, Jan Nĕmec, Vera Chytilová and Miloš Forman, for whom he wrote Loves of a Blonde and The Fireman’s Ball. It was, however, a short-lived hiatus because, when the Soviet Union invaded Czechoslovakia in 1968, the government shutters went back up against personal artistic freedom. Some of the Czech directors moved to the US where they found it easier to work. After a short subject, A Boring Afternoon, and the feature Intimate Lighting, Ivan Passer left Czechoslovakia and made his next film in the US. Born to Win (1971) starred George Segal as a former hairdresser and petty criminal. This was followed by Law and Disorder with Carroll O’Connor and Ernest Borgnine as two disenchanted New York cops, and Ace Up My Sleeve, based on a James Hadley Chase novel, with Omar Sharif as an embezzler. Silver Bears featured Michael Caine and Cybill Shepherd in a comic crime story about money laundering. More criminal activity in Cutter’s Way, with Jeff Bridges uncovering a possible murderer. Passer had a change of subject for Creator, with Peter O’Toole as a scientist trying to clone his dead wife. Haunted Summer featured the threesome that were Lord Byron, Mary Shelley and Percy Shelley. Pretty Hattie’s Baby about a white girl adopted by a black family was made but never released. It starred Alfre Woodard who was also in The Wishing Tree, playing a woman returning to her black roots in Savannah. Passer also directed a number of TV movies including a biopic on Stalin with Robert Duvall, a version of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Kidnapped with Armand Assante, and a remake of Picnic from the play by William Inge with Bonnie Bedelia and Josh Brolin. Passer’s last film was Nomad: The Warrior, made in France and Kazakhstan in 2005. Ivan Passer’s US films were not exactly personal statements of the sort he might have made in Czechoslovakia, but he was a good journeyman director of genre movies. He later became a professor of film at the University of Southern California. Passer was married to Eva Lίmanová and they have one son, Ivan Passer Jr.

MICHAEL DARVELL