Harry Redmond Jr., a special effects artist and producer whose movie career reached back more than 80 years to the dawn of talking pictures, died peacefully at his home in Los Angeles on Monday. He was 101.
Redmond moved with his family – and with the movie industry – to California in 1926 and soon followed his father, film pioneer Harry Redmond, into the “picture business.” Starting in the prop department at First National, he moved to RKO Radio Pictures where he transitioned into the special effects field and worked on many of the studio’s fondly remembered pictures of the 1930s, including The Last Days of Pompeii, She, several Fred Astaire-Ginger Rogers pairings, and one of the most legendary films in history, King Kong. After his four-year stint at RKO Redmond went independent, creating effects for a remarkable range of movies from such directors as Frank Capra (Lost Horizon), Orson Welles (The Stranger), Howard Hawks (Only Angels Have Wings), Howard Hughes (The Outlaw), and Fritz Lang (The Woman in the Window). He would often work one-on-one with the director to provide a specific desired effect; in The Woman in the Window, Redmond and Fritz Lang together worked out the striking transition shot of Edward G. Robinson at the film’s end, doing it all in real time, in camera, with no cuts and no post-production work.
When World War II hit, Redmond left Hollywood and traveled to Fort Monmouth, New Jersey, to work at the Army Film Training Lab, where he had the unexpected pleasure of encountering several technicians who had actually worked with his father at the New York City studios back in the early 1920s. After the war he resumed his effects career with such films as A Night in Casablanca (the last true Marx Brothers movie), Angel on My Shoulder, The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, and A Song is Born. In the early 1950s, Redmond’s work on Storm Over Tibet began what would become a long and prolific association with producer Ivan Tors, spanning not only Tors’ early science fiction features such as Gog and The Magnetic Monster but also his succession of popular television shows, including Science Fiction Theater, Sea Hunt, Daktari, and more. Having assumed the role of Tors’ associate producer for the films Flipper, Clarence the Cross-Eyed Lion and Zebra in the Kitchen, Redmond increasingly began to chafe at the movie industry’s skyrocketing “above the line” costs, and retired from films in the late 1960s.
Redmond was preceded in death by his wife, Dorothea Holt Redmond, herself a pioneering production illustrator who worked on such classics as Gone with the Wind, The Bishop’s Wife, Limelight, and no less than seven Alfred Hitchcock pictures. He is survived by his son Lee Redmond, daughter Lynne Jackson, and a large and loving family.
On a personal note … as many of you know, I had the honor and privilege to conduct the only full-length interview that Harry Redmond ever granted, which took place in the late summer of 2008 not long before Harry’s 99th birthday, and was beautifully published in issue #146 of Video Watchdog magazine. The interview, itself a product of a wonderful and improbable series of events, led to a friendship between us over the last three years of Harry’s life that I will treasure for the rest of my life. I was humbled and honored when I was invited to attend the memorial service for Harry’s wife, Dorothea, in March of 2009, and again when I was included in Harry’s 100th birthday celebration in October of that year. As terrific as our telephone interview was, the opportunity for me and my brother to sit around the coffee table in Harry’s home and just listen to him tell a few more delightful stories from his amazing career, with that sparkle in his eye and that wonderful voice of his, was an experience beyond description, and will forever be a treasured memory.
So, to Harry, and no less to Lee and Lynne who embraced John and me like family … thank you, for everything.
Mark F. Berry (posted with permission of the Redmond family)
“You know, for some unknown reason, I just liked to work.” – Harry Redmond
October 15, 1909 – May 23, 2011
