With terms such as "routine" and "workmanlike" often attached to brief critiques of his efforts, Fred F. Sears was a prolific director of B-movies and programmers in the 1940s and 1950s. By all accounts an efficient taskmaster well-liked by his actors and crew, Sears worked very fast – he was one of the favorite directors of Columbia Pictures' Sam Katzman, a producer known for his own unrelenting schedule of "quickies" which exploited the latest national fad in music or trend in teenage moviegoing tastes.

Frederick Francis Sears was born in Boston in 1913; he left Boston College in 1929 and became a dancer in vaudeville, a theater stage manager and sometimes actor. Following war service, Sears landed in Hollywood and won bit parts in such films as The Jolson Story and Blondie Knows Best (both 1946). He gravitated toward work in Westerns, and in particular, gained several roles in pictures starring Charles Starrett, aka The Durango Kid. Sears began his directing career with the Durango Kid film Desert Vigilante (1949), and went on to serve double-duty as both director and actor in several more westerns with Starrett through 1952.

In 1952 Sears co-directed (with Spencer Gordon Bennet) the 15-Chapter Columbia serial Blackhawk: Fearless Champion of Freedom, starring Kirk Alyn. Columbia's resident "king of the quickies" was producer Sam Katzman and he was so impressed with Sears' speed, proficiency, and ability to work with actors, that he gave the director a bigger slate of B-Movies to helm.

Sears quit the acting end of his career and concentrated on directing in a wider variety of genres, such as action-adventure (Last Train from Bombay [1952], Target Hong Kong [1953]), war (El Alamein [1953]), Cold War drama (The 49th Man [1953]), and crime (The Miami Story [1954], Chicago Syndicate [1955]). Sears also continued to turn out a healthy quota of Westerns, including The Nebraskan (1953), one of Columbia's entries during the burst of 3-D movies made in the early 1950s.

When Katzman jumped on the latest musical "fad" to hit the nation, Sears was there to direct Bill Haley and the Comets in Rock Around the Clock (1956). Not realizing Rock and Roll was to become a permanent music form from that point on, Katzman and Sears made other films to exploit new fads that some pop culture observers thought would supplant rock music, such as Cha-Cha and Calypso. The natural offshoots, predictably, were the Columbia quickies Cha-Cha-Cha-Boom (1956) and Calypso Heat Wave (1957)!

Sears was often at the mercy of the talent that the apparently undiscriminating Katzman would line up for his films. For Earth vs. the Flying Saucers (1956), Katzman met the price of effects ace Ray Harryhausen, the reigning expert in stop-motion animation. His lively and inventive work, which virtually defined the look of Flying Saucers for generations, elevated the picture to something as memorable and definitive as much more expensive pictures such as Paramount's The War of the Worlds (1953). Yet in the year following this minor triumph, Katzman and Sears saddled themselves with the most pathetic monster ever seen in an American 1950s science-fiction film when they farmed-out work to a Mexican effects outfit and came back with The Giant Claw (1957).

One of the best films Sears turned out at Columbia was Cell 2455 Death Row (1955), which starred William Campbell in a harrowing look at the life of a "Lover's Lane" killer, based on a book by Caryl Chessman, who for years awaited execution in California's gas chamber. Another of Sears' best-remembered films is the horror entry The Werewolf (1956), which he also narrated in a one-time return to acting. Containing some very effective shocks for the period, this movie benefits from Sears' moody lighting and a pace and tone that befits a much larger-budgeted film. With Steven Ritch's performance, the result is the most sympathetic monster to emerge from the string of 1950s sci-fi/horror hybrids.

Fred F. Sears died of a sudden cerebral hemorrhage in his office at Columbia Pictures on November 30, 1957, at the age of 44. So prolific was Sears that, at the time of his death, Columbia had no less than five movies he had directed "in the can." All were released posthumously in 1958.

by John M. Miller