Harold F. Kress was born in
Pittsburgh,
Pennsylvania. He was the son of Samuel Kress and Sophie Siegelman. The family moved to Los Angeles, where his father ran a restaurant in Hollywood. Kress was studying to become a lawyer at the
University of California, Los Angeles until he unexpectedly received an opportunity from
Irving Thalberg to work in the editing department at the
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM) film studio. In that same year Kress worked on four other films. In the words of
Tony Sloman, "MGM was the glamour film factory, the Rolls-Royce of Hollywood, and they put a new movie into production every 10 days. Kress's six (
sic) films of 1939 (including Richard Thorpe's
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, as supervising editor) proved he could work well under pressure and was unfazed by glamour. In 1940 he went on to edit
Andy Hardy Meets Debutante, one of
Louis B. Mayer's favourite series episodes,
Comrade X, starring the studio's pride and joy, the king of Hollywood himself,
Clark Gable, and two extremely successful
Jeanette MacDonald-
Nelson Eddy vehicles titled
Bitter Sweet and
New Moon. The success of these films thrust Kress into the top rank of MGM feature editors." Kress worked for thirty years at MGM. Although he directed a few documentaries and made a stab at directing features, his real niche was as an editor, where he was one of the most respected editors in the industry.
Ronald Bergan noted that "working as he did in the commercial cinema, he was an adherent of the 'invisible cutting' and 'editing for continuity' school rather than the 'dynamic montage' techniques developed by early Russian cinema or the iconoclastic editing styles derived from the
French New Wave."
Family He was married to Zelda Raphael, and predeceased her. They had one son,
Carl, who also became a film editor. After suffering from cancer for a number of years, Kress died in Palm Desert, California, on September 18, 1999, at the age of 86. ==Awards==