Arthur Bickerstaffe Woods was an English film director with 27 credits between 1933 and 1940. Woods' films were mainly quota quickies but were diverse in style, from light comedy and musicals to dark crime thrillers. His most acclaimed film is 1938's They Drive by Night. By the end of the 1930s Woods was gaining a reputation as one of Britain's most promising and versatile young directors, but put his career on hold to volunteer for war service in the Royal Air Force, the only British film director to do so. He was killed while on active service in February 1944, leaving his potential largely unfulfilled.
Early life
Born into a wealthy shipping family in Liverpool, Woods was educated at the exclusive Downside School in Somerset before enrolling to study medicine at Christ's College, Cambridge at the behest of his father. Before completing his studies however, he dropped out to join a travelling repertory company. Aged 22, he obtained employment with a documentary film unit and gained experience over the following few years. In 1929 he picked up his only screen acting credit in the film Lost Patrol. On 27 August 1932 at the Brooklands School of Flying he was awarded the Royal Aero Club aviator certificate #10735.
Directing career
In 1933, Woods joined British International Pictures, becoming the company's youngest director. His first solo assignment On Secret Service was well received. This was a thriller, but Woods spent the next four years making comedies and musical films before starting also to take on crime films, starting with The Dark Stairway, made in 1937 and released in early 1938. Many of his films involved collaborations with producer Irving Asher, cinematographer Basil Emmott and screenwriter Brock Williams, while another frequent association was with actress Chili Bouchier. As was the case with many non-prestige British films of the 1930s, little attention or care was given to Woods' films after their original cinema run, and most of his films from the mid-1930s are now considered lost. In 1938 Woods returned to the thriller genre with They Drive by Night. This was still a quota quickie, but exceptionally dark and bleak in tone and execution. They Drive by Night has survived, and later assessments rate it very highly. Paul Moody of the British Film Institute summarises the film as: " is presented as the site of all that is wrong with society – a place where a convict is the closest one can get to a hero, where a young girl can be murdered in her own home, and where a pillar of the community is actually a murderer." Time Out reviewer Robert Murphy wrote: "The fusion of quirky British realism and slick Hollywood melodramatics produced a real gem. Woods...takes the workmanlike story of a petty criminal...and invests it with an atmosphere of unrelenting wind, rain and gloom which makes the average American film noir look bright and breezy by comparison." Woods' reputation was further enhanced by the 1939 spy drama Q Planes and his final film Busman's Honeymoon, a Dorothy L. Sayers adaptation.
