A work in constant progress (and occasional regress).
Birthplace:
Tunbridge Wells, Kent, England, UK
Born:
January 1, 1919
Died:
January 1, 2004
John Kruse (1921–2004) was an English film and television screenwriter, director and novelist. He is mostly remembered for his work on ITC classic TV series The Saint, as well as several films of the franchise, and as the author of the best-selling novel Red Omega. John Kruse was born in England and educated at Harrow. His father, Jack Frederick Conrad Kruse, was a captain in the Royal Navy and close associate of tycoon Lord Rothermere, founder of the Daily Mail. A wealthy couple, Kruse's parents lived between London and the French Riviera, but the 1929 Crash greatly damaged their fortune. During World War II, John served as a liaison officer in India, the Middle East and Italy. After the war, he returned to England to find his home bombed, his parents dead, and no family business. At the age of twenty-six, he began a new career from scratch. He joined Pinewood Film Studios as a clapper boy and, during the next seven years, progressed to become cameraman, at the same time working nights to perfect his writing. His short stories began to appear in magazines in Britain and the United States in the early fifties; some of these stories were later developed into screenplays. Hell Drivers (1957) was his first credited film, based on his own short story and co-scripted with director Cy Endfield. By 1954 Kruse had switched to full-time scriptwriting, working in over a dozen of films. Starting in the 1960s, he also wrote many hundreds of episodes for British and international TV shows, including The Avengers, Shoestring, Colditz, The Persuaders!, and most famously The Saint, starring Roger Moore. In 1981, Kruse abandoned screenwriting and moved to Almuñécar, in Granada, Spain, where he began a new career as a novelist. He published three novels. The first one, Red Omega (1981), became a best-seller—a Cold War spy thriller involving a CIA plot to murder Stalin using a rogue agent from Extremadura who survived the gulags. It was later followed by a sequel, Long Live the Dead, and Hour of the Lily, an epic story of love and war in Russian-occupied Afghanistan. After these three novels, Kruse took up painting. He died in Almuñécar in 2004.
Director:
1960 October Moth
Loader:
1948 Anna Karenina
1960 October Moth
Screenplay:
1948 Anna Karenina
1957 Hell Drivers
1960 October Moth
1968 The Fiction Makers
1971 Assault
Story:
1948 Anna Karenina
1957 Hell Drivers
1960 October Moth
1968 The Fiction Makers
1971 Assault
Writer:
1948 Anna Karenina
1957 Hell Drivers
1960 October Moth
1968 The Fiction Makers
1971 Assault
1971 Revenge
1974 Mission: Monte Carlo
Screenplay:
1962 The Saint
1978 Return of the Saint
Story:
1958 The Adventures of William Tell
1959 Interpol Calling
1962 The Saint
1963 The Human Jungle
1978 Return of the Saint
Teleplay:
1958 The Adventures of William Tell
1959 Interpol Calling
1962 The Saint
1963 The Human Jungle
1978 Return of the Saint
Writer:
1957 Hawkeye and the Last of the Mohicans
1958 The Adventures of William Tell
1959 Interpol Calling
1962 The Saint
1963 The Human Jungle
1971 The Persuaders!
1972 The Protectors
1977 The Professionals
1978 Return of the Saint
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.