rfmcdonald | [URBAN NOTE] "Sidney Furie and A Dangerous Age" (Reply)

Torontoist's Kevin Plummer describes a failed attempt by one ambitious young man in the 1960s to make Toronto a film hub. Was he just too early?

“I wanted to start a Canadian film industry,” Sidney Furie told the Canadian Press in January 1962 from his self-imposed exile in England. “But nobody cared. There’s no pattern of distribution and nobody had any money to put up.” As an ambitious young man in 1957, Furie had written a screenplay and scrapped together a shoestring budget to film a movie in Toronto—years before Don Owen’s Nobody Waved Good-bye, the 1964 film now usually considered the birth of English-language Canadian filmmaking. Furie’s finished product, A Dangerous Age, about young lovers thwarted in their attempt to elope, was praised overseas—it screened at the Cannes and Venice film festivals, and led to Furie’s successful stint making pictures in England on his path to Hollywood. But neither A Dangerous Age nor Furie’s 1959 follow-up, A Cool Sound From Hell, have ever been shown commercially in Toronto.

Furie had wanted to make movies since the age of 12, but, as he told a reporter years later, “never thought I’d get around to doing it.” There was no English-Canadian feature film industry to speak of after World War II. While there had been a small boom of French-language pictures made in Quebec, such as Tit-Coq (1953), the National Film Board had been hesitant to compete with Hollywood or Britain. Instead the government-funded body concentrated on shorts, documentaries, and animation. There were scant resources available for filmmakers eager to break free of producing educational shorts to write and produce their own stories.

Some quit their jobs to form an independent production company—Julian Roffman and Ralph Foster, for example, were friends who’d both worked overseas for the NFB during the war, and created Meridian Films in 1954. “We have high hopes of filming some Canadian dramas—both for television and theatre showings,” Foster told a journalist in the mid-1950s. The pair bought the Community Theatre on Woodbine Avenue, south of Mortimer Avenue, and renovated the old cinema into a fair-sized film studio, stocked it with cameras, props, and rigging for lights, and invested in the country’s first video production centre. But with scarce financing for their entertainment features, Roffman and Foster too had to rely on documentaries, commercials, and industrial training films to make ends meet.

When Furie returned to his native Toronto in 1954 after studying drama and communications at Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Institute of Technology, he found work in television. In addition to writing scripts for the public affairs department at the CBC, his responsibilities, at least for a time, included selecting films to air on television, a happy duty that involved pre-screening—and studying—hundreds of movies.

Furie started a script about doomed teenage romance, intending it as a CBC Television play. But when his childhood ambitions returned, he decided develop it as a feature film he would direct himself. In the winter of 1957, with his finished script for A Dangerous Age in hand, Furie quit his job.