A work in constant progress (and occasional regress).
Born:
December 3, 1908
Died:
May 17, 1970
Nigel Balchin was an eminent 20th-century novelist and screenwriter. Born in Wiltshire in 1908, he had a successful early career as an industrial psychologist. Whilst seconded to Rowntree’s, he was intimately involved in the launch of Black Magic chocolates. During World War Two, Balchin worked first for the Ministry of Food and later for the Army, ending the War as Deputy Scientific Adviser to the Army Council, with the rank of Brigadier. Balchin’s wartime employment provided him with plenty of original and interesting material and served as the springboard for his career as a novelist. Between 1942 and 1962 he produced a string of commercial and critical successes, including Darkness Falls From the Air, The Small Back Room, Mine Own Executioner, A Sort of Traitors, Sundry Creditors, The Fall of the Sparrow and Seen Dimly Before Dawn. He also found fame as a scriptwriter, adapting several of his own works, including Mine Own Executioner, and writing screenplays for films such as Mandy, Twenty-Three Paces to Baker Street, The Man Who Never Was (for which he won the 1956 BAFTA) and The Singer not the Song. In addition, Powell and Pressburger produced a highly acclaimed film version of The Small Back Room in 1949. Nigel Balchin died in London in 1970.
Novel:
1947 Mine Own Executioner
1949 The Small Back Room
1960 Suspect
2005 Separate Lies
Screenplay:
1947 Fame Is the Spur
1947 Mine Own Executioner
1949 The Small Back Room
1953 Malta Story
1955 Josephine and Men
1956 23 Paces to Baker Street
1956 The Man Who Never Was
1960 Circle of Deception
1960 Suspect
1961 The Singer Not the Song
2005 Separate Lies
Writer:
1947 Fame Is the Spur
1947 Mine Own Executioner
1949 The Small Back Room
1952 Mandy
1953 Malta Story
1955 Josephine and Men
1956 23 Paces to Baker Street
1956 The Man Who Never Was
1959 The Blue Angel
1960 Circle of Deception
1960 Suspect
1961 Barabbas
1961 The Singer Not the Song
2005 Separate Lies
Most data and links to images for the Movies section come from TheMovieDB (TMDB).
Additional data for Film Titles come from The Open Movie Database (OMDb).
At least one plug-in comes from IMDb.
Data are -- hey, it's a plural -- subject to the limitations of their sources. (For example, TMDB search results currently max out at 20.) I am limiting myself to free data sources for now. (No, a "free trial" is not free.)
While much of the above data are retrieved directly from outside APIs and other such sources, data from American Film Institute (AFI) and British Film Institute (BFI) were manually entered the old fashioned way into a MySQL database. Re BFI I took the following liberties:
Regarding profile removals and data corrections:
Filtering is applied here to film projects flagged as "adult" by TheMovieDB. Pending "popular demand" I am contemplating a login and profile system with preferences (such as whether to allow adult images to appear) and permissions (such as data entry).
Whereas the overall purpose of this website is to serve as a personal demo/portfolio/workshop of web and data skills, this Movies section is not meant to compete with or substitute for far more definitive movie websites.
Whether or not he still clings to an award which he won in 1986 as a film critic for his college's newspaper, Jeffrey Hartmann is not responsible for the texts of overviews and biographies supplied by external data sources.