American art director, born in Mexico City and educated at Polytechnic
High School in Los Angeles. Ed Carrere spent the bulk of his career at
Warner Brothers (1932-57, 1962-70), where he worked on several films
for the directors Raoul Walsh and
Michael Curtiz. He initially joined
Warners as a draftsman in 1932, thereafter undergoing a long
apprenticeship before graduating to full art director in 1947. His best
work encompasses lavishly produced period dramas,
(Die Liebesabenteuer des Don Juan (1948)
and
Der Rebell (1950)),
or gritty, realistic melodramas and crime thrillers featuring New York
architecture and jazz club settings
(Der Mann ihrer Träume (1950),
Dein Schicksal in meiner Hand (1957)).
For his most famous assignment, Ayn Rand's
Ein Mann wie Sprengstoff (1949), Carrere
created modernistic Bauhaus-style skyscrapers using matte paintings,
models and miniatures and incorporating designs by the American
architect Frank Lloyd Wright.
He again demonstrated his sense of visual style in his final work on
Sam Peckinpah's
The Wild Bunch - Sie kannten kein Gesetz (1969), effectively
juxtaposing two socio-economically different townships on either side
of the border, equally caught up in the violence of the Mexican
Revolution.
