Christian Nyby

Christian Nyby, the television and movie director who achieved acclaim as a film editor before moving into the director's chair, was born on September 1, 1913, in Los Angeles, California. He made his reputation as a cutter during the 1940s, when he worked with the great helmer Howard Hawks, winning his sole Academy Award nomination for the editing of Hawks' classic Western Red River (1948) (1948). Nyby first collaborated with Hawks as an editor at Warner Bros., on the director's adaptation of his friend Ernest Hemingway's novel To Have and Have Not (1944) (1944). He edited The Big Sleep (1946), both the original 1944 version and the recut version that put more emphasis on stars Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall that was released in 1946. In a real-life scenario similar to Robert Wise's cutting of Orson Welles's second masterpiece, The Magnificent Ambersons (1942), Nyby had to cut Red River (1948) on his own when director/producer Hawks had to go to Europe to complete another assignmen