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Critic’s Choice: A weekend of films by the little-known but fascinating Cy Endfield

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Los Angeles Times Film Critic

Kudos to the UCLA Film & Television Archive for putting together a series about little-known but fascinating writer-director Cy Endfield, an American whose progressive politics led to a career working in self-exile in England because of the shadow of the Hollywood blacklist.

Endfield’s best known film, 1964’s colonialist epic “Zulu,” the movie that made Michael Caine a star, is showing at 7 p.m. Sunday at the Hammer Museum’s Billy Wilder Theater in Westwood. But a better bet might be Saturday’s double bill, starting at 7:30 p.m., of two of Endfield’s earlier, more polemical films.

Both starring Stanley Baker and released in 1957, “Hell Drivers” (about long-haul truckers) and “Sea Fury” (about salvage operators) share angry titles and a sensibility to match.

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kenneth.turan@latimes.com

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