Daniel Mainwaring

Daniel Mainwaring, better known under the pseudonym Geoffrey Homes was a prolific novelist and screenwriter for Hollywood. Though he began his career writing hardboiled detective and mystery novels like his 1948 whodunit The Case of the Mexican Knife, he later penned a series of successful screenplays (61 in total, between 1941 and 1968), including cult sci-fi thriller Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956), and two classic American noirs – Don Siegel’s The Big Steal in 1949 and Ida Lupino’s The Hitch-Hiker in 1953 - both of which will be screened as part of the festival’s Mexico Imaginario section this year. His writing had both a complexity and a pitch-perfect ability to render the kind of small-town Americana that he was, ironically, accused of betraying when he was placed on the Hollywood anti-Communist blacklist – a register designed to prevent screenwriters and other professionals from obtaining employment due to purported Communist sympathies. Though he was damaged by this denouncement, he is remembered as a prolific, complex and brilliant author – “a much underrated writer and a really quite noble man” (Joseph Losey, 1985).

Festival Internacional de Cine de Morelia