Thomas Gerald Stanford (1924 – 2017) was an American film and television editor with about sixteen feature film credits. He won the Academy Award for Best Film Editing at the 34th Academy Awards for the film West Side Story (1961), which was only his second credit as an editor.[1] Long afterwards, West Side Story was listed as the 38th best-edited film of all time in a 2012 survey of members of the Motion Picture Editors Guild. The film's editing is also featured in Louis Giannetti's textbook Understanding Movies.[2][3]
Stanford's first credit as an editor was for Suddenly, Last Summer (1959), which was a major production by the independent producer Sam Spiegel. Excepting a 1955 film version of the opera Don Giovanni, any earlier work as an assistant editor wasn't credited. This was typical in the 1950s.[4] Stanford edited three films with director Sydney Pollack, including Pollack's first feature The Slender Thread (1965). Stanford's work on Pollack's feature Jeremiah Johnson (1972) drew the attention of critic Gene Siskel, who wrote "Oddly enough, it is the violent scenes, the ones that don't work within the story, in which Pollack excels. Jeremiah's battle with a pack of wolves, and, later, a pack of Crow Indians, are stunning examples of direction and editing."[5] In the 1960s, Stanford edited two films directed by Mark Rydell, including his debut The Fox (1967). Stanford's last film before his retirement was Split Decisions (1988).
^Giannetti, Louis D. (2018). Understanding Movies (14 ed.). Boston: Pearson. p. 160. ISBN9780134492087. OCLC950611437. Musicals are often edited in a radically formalist style, without having to observe the cutting conventions of ordinary dramatic movies. The editing of West Side Story is very abstract. The music, by Leonard Bernstein, and the dance numbers, choreographed by Jerome Robbins, are edited together for maximum aesthetic impact, rather than to forward the story. Nor are the shots linked by some principle of thematic association. Rather, the shots are juxtaposed primarily for their lyrical and kinetic beauty, somewhat like a music video.
