Quote of the Day: Upping the ante-rooms

Legendary production designer Ken Adam discusses designing the Marquess of Queensbury’s reception room for THE TRIALS OF OSCAR WILDE, after the budget had run out:

“Well, it was hard because a) the money had run out and b) I didn’t have time to do research about what Queensbury’s castle in Scotland looked like. So what I decided to do was a complete stylisation using all the classical elements of the St. James’s Theatre and the Café Royal. The only new design element was a very tall, slender French window with a circular top at the end of the set. Then I used Georgian doors from the St James’s and I painted the whole floor like Siena marble. I had a very good painter and it was beautifully done. Then I had the idea of treating the set in two colours only — terracotta for the walls, and everything else in black — because it was after the funeral. I talked the director, Ken Hughes, into dressing all tyhe actors in black. And the whole set was built in a forced perspective. It was the first time that I got recognition for my work from the critics and others: Luchino Visconti was President of the Moscow Film Festival in 1961 and he gave me first prize for best design.”

a) Adam often seems to have done his best work in desperate circumstances. The strongest, strangest set in DR. NO, the first of the many Bond films he designed, is the bare room with the round skylight — Dr. No’s ante-room. It was built for £450 as an afterthought, and it supplies the just note of stylisation that later Bond films built from.

b) Ken Hughes is an underrated filmmaker and I must do more about him. I’m hoping the forthcoming BBC series on British B-movies will show some of his cheapies. I find his bloated extravaganzas like CHITTY CHITTY BANG BANG and CROMWELL rather endearing, but I have a feeling his best work might lie in his low-budget crime thriller output. I haven’t even managed to see the bigger-budget extensions of that, JOE MACBETH and THE SMALL WORLD OF SAMMY LEE.

c) My friend Lawrie once loaned a flat to Hughes and got complaints from the landlady about some kind of unspeakable parties… Lawrie called Hughes “the dirtiest man i ever met.” All simply too, too intriguing!

d) The quote up top comes from Ken Adam The Art of Production Design by the esteemed Professor Sir Christopher Frayling. I know that’s the correct way to give him his titles, but I have a sneaking preference for “Sir Christopher Professor Frayling” and I have a feeling that if I ever meet the poor man that’s what I’ll call him, whether I intend to our not.

Ken Adam.

Things I read off the screen in “They Drive By Night”

This is the 1938 British movie THEY DRIVE BY NIGHT, not the 1940 Raoul Walsh one with the same title. Walsh’s film is a searing drama about truck drivers. Woods’ film is a crime thriller that isn’t really about truck drivers at all, which is maybe part of the trouble with it.

Lots to read in this movie! Maybe that’s what they mean by British cinema being in thrall to the literary tradition. Nearly every plot point gets reported in the papers and then shown in print onscreen. Also, the busy studio-based world of the film, a very convincing and atmospheric creation, is alive with advertising, signage and print of all kinds. In one exciting scene the hero flees past a shop selling “everything”, plastered with product names and so busy that the human eye goes spastic trying to take it all in.

Newly released from prison, good-hearted crook Emlyn Williams goes to see a friend who runs a SNACK BAR.

Many are the ads for Player’s Cigarettes in this film! I won’t reproduce them all or you will be hypnotised into craving the Smooth Smoke Doctors Recommend, and I don’t want that on my conscience. The items offered by CHARLIE’S include TEAS, you will note. For a hard-boiled crime drama, this film shows quite a lot of tea being drunk. It’s an odd effect.

Graham Greene praised TDBN, saying it was “on a level with the French cinema” — Greene was a great fan of PEPE LE MOKO – which rather misses the point. What it’s blatantly trying to do is mimic American levels of pace, vigor and aggression. The dialogue is a weird mixture of British (girls = judies) and U.S. slang. The plot races along with casual abandon, driven by outrageous coincidence and a hunger for action, but moving in loosely structured fits and starts. Greene wouldn’t have minded the coincidence — check how, in Gun For Sale (filmed as THIS GUN FOR HIRE) the fugitive assassin hero happens to get on a train with the girlfriend of the detective leading the hunt! The man chiefly responsible for TDBN’s coincidences is film editor Derek Twist, who rescued Michael Powell’s THE EDGE OF THE WORLD in the cutting room, and adapted this script.

DIGRESSION — Powell & Pressburger gave Twist his directorial break on END OF THE RIVER, a jungle drama with Sabu. In his highly readable 2-volume autohagiography, Powell blames Twist for the uninspired result, “making the Amazon basin dull”. But my friend Lawrie Knight, who was manning the communications centre back at Rank’s Denham Studios, told me that in fact Twist got sick after a few days and it was Powell himself who took over direction of the film. “And he ruined it. It was supposed to be about the slow pace of life on the river contrasted with the speed of city life, and Mickey directed the whole thing like a train.” Cinematographer Christopher Challis observed in his witty autobio, Are They Really So Awful?, that you couldn’t see the rain forest except by flying over it, so it proved surprisingly unphotogenic.

TRY OUR HOT \__/  \__/ THEY’R GRAND. Hot pictographs! My, that DOES sound grand. Instants later, our hero has stumbled upon an old flame, lying strangled, and goes “on the lam.”

I like everything about the above image. The ad for Woodbines proves the makers’ aren’t totally in Player’s pocket. The tiny sign saying “BLACK CAT” makes it for me, and the nuns. Emlyn Williams is an unlikely hero — he’s Welsh, playing working class, unhandsome, vaguely effete, and cast as a tough hero called “Shorty”. But he’s rather good. He has the advantage of unexpectedness. But British cinema didn’t know what to do with him. Like Robert Newton, he was tried as a male lead and found wanting. Just as Hollywood found a role for Newton (saying “Arrr!” a lot), so it was a Hollywood filmmaker who first saw Williams’ true potential — Josef Von Sternberg cast him in his abortive epic I, CLAUDIUS, as Caligula, a man so decadent he was “maybe even a little sissy, but not too much.”

NEWS THEATRE. That is such an exciting concept – a tiny tiny cinema devoted to newsreels. Next door to a shop selling “TOBACCOS”, so you can go in and smoke and make the projector beam stand out nicely.

Hiding out, suspected of a crime he — for once – didn’t commit, jailbird Williams is upset to find the feature attraction is all about MURDERERS. Is the “No. 17″ a homage to the Hitchcock film of the same name? Williams, a talented writer, helped script the original THE MAN WHO KNEW TOO MUCH for Hitchcock. He’s also the author of a horrifying but moving and brilliant true crime book, Beyond Belief, dealing with the “moors murderers” Ian Brady and Myra Hindley. Follow the link to see the iconic mugshot of Myra, which caused John Waters to remark, “She’s going to do an extra twenty years just because she didn’t get her roots done that week.”

But Williams’ greatest contribution to cinema is his play, Night Must Fall, which has been filmed twice. Williams wrote the part of the psychopathic Danny for himself to play, and he seems perfect for it. In movies, the role provided great opportunities for both Robert Montgomery and Albert Finney, who gave contrasting performances of great detail and intensity. Well worth a look — but I wish there was a third version starring the creator of the role.

“You come out of the movies and the world’s changed,” complains Steve Martin in PENNIES FROM HEAVEN. Emlyn finds this especially true: not only is it raining (a proper British downpour which will last for the next two reels) but he’s now officially wanted for murder. Bummer.

Grabbing a bus out of London — the conductor is “Billy Hartnell”, future film star (BRIGHTON ROCK) and TV’s first Dr. Who — our Emlyn winds up at the first of the film’s several Transport Cafes, where CAMP COFFEE is on offer but the long distance drivers inexplicably prefer tea. It was at “greasy spoons” like this that Anthony “Puffin” Asquith, top film director and son of the prime minister, would moonlight, helping out in the kitchen in order to pick up truckers. Emlyn is himself picked up by a trucker, and after numerous adventures, ends up — at another cafe.

Along the way there’s an altercation with what should be some “Truck Stop Dames”, but since this is England, we have to call them “Lorry Girls”, which doesn’t sound right, somehow.

The big attraction at WALLY’S CAFE is the TEAS again:

British tea-drinkers are strongly advised not only to DRINK, but also to ENJOY their MAZAWATTEE TEAS. You have to remind them or they’ll forget, you know. The film now gets on with the lorry-based action, fifteen minutes of it, after which it moves on, having justified its title to its own satisfaction. Winning over a dubious trucker, bumping into an old friend who’s a dance-hall hostess and friend of the murder victim, and escaping from police, Emlyn makes the headlines again — stick with me, this is ABOUT TO GET WEIRD.

I question the “glamour girl” part slightly, but not as much as I question the other “top stories” — MERMAID WEEPS and DON’T SUCK YOUR PEN! Remember, this is 1938. Europe is poised on the brink of war. And the paper devotes its front page to a penny-ante murder story, a sobbing water nymph, and advice on what to not suck. BIZARRE. Oh wait, it’s the Daily Mirror, that explains it.

These aren’t quite as good, but HANDBOOK TO GUIDE VOLUNTEERS and RADIO JERKS FINANCE HITCH are still pretty interesting. This is a completely unnecessary newspaper montage anyway, recapping the action we’ve just seen, and introducing headlines we’ll get to see later.

Now the plot swerves into PIEGES / LURED territory, with Emlyn’s lady friend attempting to ID the real killer from among the clients at the PALAIS DE DANSE where she works. It suddenly becomes clear that the movie could have usefully omitted Emlyn altogether and made her the hero. The pretentious French of PALAIS DE DANSE was a British tradition — nearly all dance halls were known as “the palais“, it seems.

In an American movie the professional dance partners would be prostitutes, disguised for the sake of the Production Code. And I guess they are here, too. Some of them sound pretty POSH though. Now the film tips its hand, revealing the TRUE KILLER — Ernest Thesiger. Yes, red-blooded, testosterone-fuelled Ernest Thesiger is strangling dance hall girls with silk stockings and then going home, slipping into his housecoat and leering at hardcore pornography:

PARIS NIGHTS. Disgusting! The film devotes the rest of its running time, apart from the matter of rounding off the plot, to Ernest’s reading material. Apart from the odd house number (Ernest resides at No. 3), we only get to read what Ernest has read. His literary sloppy seconds, as it were.

MODERN DANCE AND THE DANCER, and THE STOCKING PARADE. It’s beyond depravity! Ernest plays Walter Hoover, a retired schoolmaster and pub bore who lectures the local drunks on the niceties of psychopathology, explaining how the killer derives a thrill from wielding power over life and death. “You do give things a queer twist!” remarks a regular. Maybe because the psychobabble is, for once, coming not from a pipe-smoking Lew Ayres type prof, but from an actual murderer, it’s surprisingly reasonable.

Thrillingly, the flick affords us not one but TWO glimpses of Ernest’s library, where he keeps his many leather-bound volumes. The room no doubt smells of rich mahogany. And semen.

SEX IN RELATION TO SOCIETY sounds hilariously dry and vague, but SOCIAL CONTROL OF SEX EXPRESSION is the real winner. Havelock Ellis was a real author, wasn’t he? (He was — I just read up on him, and he’s bloody fascinating. Click on his name.) So these aren’t mock-ups, but perhaps items from the Sinister Library of Derek Twist. “You do give things a queer Twist!” But there’s more to come:

CROOKED PERSONALITIES IN CHILD HOOD AND AFTER — well, that “AFTER” certainly covers everything. TWENTY HUMAN MONSTERS sounds like a damn fine read, likewise THE THRILL OF EVIL, but it’s SEX IN PRISON that makes me choke on my Mazawattee Tea. That’s so frank I can’t believe they even included it. Is it the novelisation of William Dieterle’s SEX IN CHAINS, I wonder?

And this is from Ernest’s scrapbook of murder, hidden behind the porn. BEDROOM MYSTERY is a fine, fine headline. Unfortunately, since Ernest has clipped out and saved all the bits relating to his crimes, he’s failed to preserve the advice DON’T SUCK YOUR PEN! Perhaps this will be his downfall.

Now the film continues to become derailed and unstuck, as the climax hinges on whether Emlyn can lick Ernest in a fight. IN A FIGHT — get your minds out of the gutter. Since we’ve already seen Em knock Er for six with a single mighty chop, there’s not much suspense in this. Ernest is a fey cat-loving schoolteacher(”Come here, my subtle one,” he coos at a kitty) while Emlyn may be a shorty but he’s a hardened crim. “Ernest Thesiger could be overpowered by his own kittens,” remarks Fiona. Emlyn beats them to it, and the film’s glossolalia serves up one final message: 

The Chills #3: “Look out!”

Some scenes make you feel like your brain has been extracted, and carved into a crude trumpet, and some Jazz Angel is blowing the most beautiful celestial music through its neural passages. It is then that we speak of The Chills.

Roger Livesey goes to heaven.

Regular Shadowplayer Alex Livingstone nominates this classic sequence from Powell & Pressburger’s A MATTER OF LIFE AND DEATH (AMOLAD for short), which ably shows off Pressburger’s superb story construction (one thing Powell definitely needed help with), Roger Livesey’s authoritative-but-loveable performance, Jack Cardiff;s cinematography (with Christopher Challis shooting second unit on the bike crash) and oh, many many other things. Alex wrote:

i nominate the bit in a matter of life and death where roger livesey crashes his motorcycle and dies, only to turn up in heaven and save the day. i can’t watch it without my breathing getting disrupted - i always wind up gasping and a bit wet-eyed, as if i’ve stuck my head into a supermarket freezer and inhaled really hard

on a more puerile note, when marius goring meets roger livesey for the first time he makes a little noise of agreement like someone honking a clown’s nose

Into each film some rain must fall, and I would regretfully note that Bob Arden’s scene in the ambulance with Kim Hunter is maybe one of only two ropey performances in P&P’s oeuvre — but hey, he’s in good company, the other is Laurence Olivier in FORTY-NINTH PARALLEL as a French-Canadian trapper with what sounds like a Pakistani accent. It’s a cameo that makes P&P fan David Mamet thank God that Olivier was prevented from starring in THE LIFE AND DEATH OF COLONEL BLIMP (because Winston Churchill didn’t approve of the script).

Arden was later thrilled to be cast in MR ARKADIN by no less than Orson Welles (according to my friend Lawrie Knight, a drinking buddy of Arden’s), then less than thrilled when the film took years to open in the UK, and even less than less than thrilled when his own performance in it was singled out for unflattering comment. But Arden is arguably effective in that role: for whatever reason, Welles seemes to have aimed to make Arden’s character as unappealing as possible, and he exploits all Arden’s worst qualities, both physical and performaive, to do it.

Arden never became a star, but he earned a regular living playing Americans in British films for the rest of his days.

Roger Livesey is terrific in THE LEAGUE OF GENTLEMEN, but really he owes Powell his place in cinema. Nobody else would cast him at first — extraordinarily, they didn’t like his voice.

Lawrie didn’t really have warm memories of Livesey. When they met, Lawrie was a junior assistant on AMOLAD and Livesey asked him what he’d done in the war. When Lawrie said he was in the air force, Livesey ’sort of made a face, and said “That explains it.”‘

Lawrie never knew what was behind this hostility, but I just found out. Good old Wikipedia:

At the outbreak of World War II, Livesey and Jeans were among the first volunteers to entertain the troops before he volunteered for flying duties in the R.A.F. He was turned down as too old, so he went to work in an aircraft factory at Desford aerodrome near Leicester to “do his bit for the war effort”.

The rejection must have rankled! Poor Roger. But that failure to attain active service is what made him available to star in COLONEL BLIMP, and thence to IKWIG and AMOLAD. And thence to immortality.

More suggestions for pulse-pounding, spine-tingling moments of cinematic greatness will be cheerfully received.

Polteroid

 

This is my dear friend Lawrie. I’ve spoken of him before — assistant on THE RED SHOES, BLACK NARCISSUS, A MATTER OF LIFE AND DEATH, THE PASSIONATE FRIENDS…

Also onetime chairman of Films of Scotland and, somewhat bizarrely, producer of an animated Pink Floyd music promo in Holland.

I took this picture on a visit to see Lawrie in hospital. I just happened to have a camera on me at the time, and it occurred to me that I had no photographs of my friend. He’d gone in for a minor operation and his heart had stopped, so it seemed like a good time to carpe diem and all that.

Lawrie is looking pleased with himself as he’s recently learned that he was dead for a few minutes, and he didn’t feel a thing. Having no religious beliefs (beyond a vague kindly feeling that religious people should be treated respectfully, like the disabled) he wasn’t afraid of death, and his wartime experiences (fishing bodies out the sea for the R.A.F.) had given him a lifelong obsession with mortality, but it was very reassuring to him that he had travelled up that stairway to heaven, however briefly, and not experienced any pain.

(Lawrie had prior experience running DOWN that stairway, doubling for David Niven in A MATTER OF LIFE AND DEATH.)

In the picture he’s seen just a few hours after this first death, and a few months from the final one. If you look hard, you can ALMOST see the pillow through his head.

But this isn’t the true Polteroid, READ ON.

In the last months of his life, Lawrie was visited by a few Spectral Ladies. “I was lying in bed, and there was this, oh, quite nice-looking middle-aged lady standing in the doorway in a long, oatmeal dress.” The experience was repeated, with a different woman each time. Apparently this is not uncommon with people nearing the end of their lives. They didn’t bother him at all, these phantasmal visitors, and in due course, Lawrie died.

I was unable to attend the funeral as I was directing a nightmarishly complicated and kids’ TV show in Glasgow, on an incredibly tight schedule. As is usual, the costume department had a Polaroid camera to snap the actors for continuity purposes. A picture had just been taken and the camera placed on a table when

FLASH!

it went off all by itself. This was startling to the costume assistant who’d just put it down, but not as startling as it was to me, watching the picture develop…

I don’t know what’s going on with my hair — it looks like a child’s drawing of a vole, folded in half. And the camera, being on a table at waist level, rather emphasises my GIRTH in a manner I’m not too happy about. But since nobody was physically operating the camera, I would have to say it’s a pretty well-composed shot. I think Lawrie was actually getting buried at the time this was taken.

SUPPOSEDLY.

It’s fun to think of Lawrie, enjoying the freedom from his wheelchair that he could previously experience only in his dreams, larking about on the set and distracting me from my job when I really needed my wits about me. I nearly got fired!

With all respect to my ace cinematographer Scott Ward, I find this humble, unflattering snap more interesting than anything else we managed to film on the set that day.

Euphoria #45: Call me

 

We are assembling a shimmering pyramid composed of delightful movie scenes that shine out from your memories and illuminate my foggy Edinburgh nights.  

A couple people* have been requesting a scene from Bill Forsyth’s LOCAL HERO. Since I, like Forsyth himself (!) don’t own a copy of it, I’m a slave to what’s already on YeTube. Fortunately, though NONE of the requested scenes are available, this one is.

Spoiler alert: it’s the end of the damn movie.

My old mate Lawrie remembered Forsyth in his very early days, making no particular impression on him, which was unfortunate since Lawrie was more or less running the Scottish film industry at the time.

The Times Online has an intriguing piece that does much to illuminate Foryth’s more curmudgeonly aspect. He’s known to be somewhat difficult — volunteering to teach at Edinburgh College of Art, then gruffly denying all knowledge of this — and had a bruising run-in with Scottish Screen, over issues of transparency. I think Forsyth was basically in the right on that one: there was probably no corruption, but it mattered very much that Scottish Screen didn’t seem to care whether people thought there was. The head of that organisation, Eddie Dick, complained to me, rather hurt by the whole thing: ”people think Bill is like his films, but there’s a very dark side to Bill.”

Forsyth always found directing agony, and his love of both Bresson and “experimental film” may have pulled him away from his natural talent for comedy. I have a recording of a moving TV masterclass Forsyth gave on Bresson’s AU HASARD, BALTHASAR where he talks with great emotion about the power of the film’s first few minutes, and you get a sense of B.F.’s frustration at not being able to reach the same exalted level: “You know these dreams you sometimes have when you can fly or you can flat down the street three feet off the ground? I remember having a dream about making a film. And it was the perfect film. It’s the kind of dream, when you wake up, you want to remember it, and remember how to do it… and you can’t. In this dream, I had made this film which was perfect, and fluid, and wonderful. I was reminded of it when I watched this film recently because that four minutes is kind of the way I saw the movie in my dream.”

The Timespiece ends with a postcard Forsyth sent the interviewer, where he discusses the crossroads he faced back in the Lawrie Knight days:

“Either I would…spend the following decades tenaciously developing what was finally manifest as the gallery video-installation genre, or I’d make that slow backwards retreat into conventional cinema. We know what happened. To think that I might now have been the grand old man of international video art (probably with a pad in Berlin). Seriously, I don’t think I’d have relished that any more than my present perch as the retiring ploughman poet of Scottish cinema (living up a hill with some trout as neighbours), and with the one residing ambition of wanting to make people laugh.

“So, no regrets. At least I didn’t ever jump headlong into the commercial pool but studiously and cussedly patrolled just the margins. And thankfully I never did stop feeling like an outsider…

“You’ll appreciate that you have only yourself to blame for this letter. You prodded me awake in my cage, and being simply human, my first and only demand is to be understood.

Best wishes, Bill Forsyth.”

Like the scene above, and like much of Forsyth’s work, there’s a happy-sad feeling to this communique: melancholia euphoria?

*Vince Randaldi and Mike Reed.

“Ah, Jean!”

 

That’s what my late friend Lawrie would say whenever the subject of Jean Simmons came up. I mention it because I happened to notice it’s her 79th birthday.

Lawrie’s first movie as assistant was CAESAR AND CLEOPATRA, produced by an irascible and untalented Hungarian mogul/confidence man called Gabby Pascal. Pascal had managed to persuade the notoriously intractable George Bernard Shaw to grant him the film rights to his entire oeuvre. Turning up for the meeting in a pair of new yellow socks (”always wear something new to an important meeting”) Gabby convinced George of his genius, which GBS remained convinced off throughout their partnership, despite numberless proofs to the contrary. ‘What is your company called?’ asked Shaw, agreeing to the deal. ‘It can be called whatever you like, once you advance me the money to set it up,’ replied the Mittel-European with a beastly twinkle.

CAESAR was a massive super-production, with all the traditional wastage. ‘We exported sand to Egypt for the desert scenes,’ remembered Lawrie with wonderment, ‘– during wartime!’ A thousand sandals were made for Egyptian extras, who promptly ate them. ‘The soft leather was apparently quite a delicacy.’ Ancient Egyptian-sounding music was produced by the Ondes Martenot, one of the first electronic instruments. Huge murals were painted, then ignored by the camera because the director preferred blank walls.

On location, Lawrie sat in a tent and manned a radio, co-ordinating troops for Caesar’s battles. ‘Oh, the battles were a scream! We killed so many people,” he recalled fondly. “Twenty years later I was walking in London with my fiancee, when a grubby old man accosted us. “Remember me?” he said. I didn’t. He raised his hat. One ear was missing. Cut off by a sword in one of those battle scenes. The man said, “I got paid a fortune for that. I do hope we’re going to do another film soon. I’ve still got one ear!”‘

In C&C, Jean Simmons doubled for Vivian Leigh, being thrown into a water tank at Rank Denham Studios — in January. They hurled her in, she couldn’t swim, the man delegated to save her couldn’t swim either, she was eventually hauled out, shivering and bedraggled, to face a delighted Pascal, who was doubling as director. “That was vunderful, perfect, perfect! We do it one more time.”

(Remind me to tell you the one about Pascal and the camel sometime.)

On BLACK NARCISSUS, Lawrie got to know Jean better. ‘I used to help her wash the brown body make-up off in the bath,’ he said, dreamily. Sabu was very interested in her too, but Mrs. Simmons didn’t approve of him, so he went off with Jean’s stand-in instead and got her pregnant.’

(Sabu is a pretty well unique figure in British cinema — my students are usually surprised that we had an Indian star in British films in the 40s. We don’t have one now!)

As Lawrie reminisced, I remember thinking: ‘Jean Simmons. In the bath. Aged seventeen. Wow. I’m in the wrong line of work.’ And then, ‘Waitaminute! I’m in the same line of work.’

Euphoria #32: small boys

Edinburgh Filmhouse habitué David Watson (ever notice how everybody is called David?) nominates this little slice of grin-making cinema from the bottom of his heart:

It’s from Billy Forsyth’s classic GREGORY’S GIRL, and may be the most perfect example of a Little Moment to Induce Happiness that we’ve yet had. Tiny and jewel-like in it’s simple beauty, it has brought pleasure to literally plomzillions of people.

More like this, please! (And more Scottish films like this, too.)

The actor playing the ivory-tinkling headmaster is Chic Murray, a music-hall comedian of long standing. (Sample material: ”I had a tragic childhood. My parents never understood me. They were Japanese.”) My late friend Lawrie once ran an organsiation called Films of Scotland, the first official body for the promotion of Scottish cinema, and the worst job he ever had. At once point he was brought a proposal for a short comedy starring Mr. Murray.

‘”He’s the Coming Man,” they told me. I said, “Chic Murray has been the Coming Man since I was in short trousers.”‘

Despite his great popularity in Scotland (and we’re a tough crowd: after a hostile reception at the Glasgow Empire in 1918, comedian Mark Sheridan walked to Kelvin Grove Park and shot himself), Murray remained largely an unknown quantity elsewhere until the end, save for THIS MOMENT — proof that immortality can strike randomly, when we least expect it, like a moonlit rapist. All we can do is keep busy and await the moment.

Will I be saying more about this film? Yes, starting TOMORROW.

 

“It’s a small world, but I wouldn’t want to have to paint it.” ~ Chic Murray.

When Anecdotes Collide

 

I collect movie stories in my brain. Some of them may just be stories. But sometimes two stories link up, and we have CORROBORATION.

ONE:

A chap I know once worked on a commercial for Kwik-Fit, a garage company notorious for their cheesy musical T.V. ads. The cinematographer, bizarrely, was the great Douglas Slocombe, slumming it rather. My friend got a few stories out of the great man:

“I never use a light meter. I used to have one, but I was on a boat and I threw it at the director. It went over the side and I haven’t had one since.”

Now Slocombe measured the light just by looking at the shadow of his thumb on the palm of his hand.

When somebody asked Freddie Francis (Slocombe’s near-contemporary) about light meters, he said it was impossible to work without one. “You’ve got to bear in mind not just the difference in the light between 8am and 8pm, but the difference in your eyes.”

Anyhow, in Philip Kemp’s study of Alexander Mackendrick, Lethal Innocence, we hear about Mackendrick arguing with Slocombe about the lighting of a ship’s figurehead during the fraught shooting of A HIGH WIND IN JAMAICA. Slocombe hurled his light meter at his intransigent director. “I think it missed him.”

TWO:

My late friend Lawrie Knight worked in commercials after his career as an assistant director in British films such as THE RED SHOES. He recalled with awe his one glimpse of Orson Welles, emerging from a taxi in a foggy London street, swathed in cape.

Later that day he was in a recording studio and mentioned the dramatic scene. “Oh yes, Mr. Welles was in here today, doing a voice-over for fish fingers.”

Yet Lawrie was unaware, until I told him, of this famous set of outtakes:

 

(Incidentally, this clip has some of the smarter comments I’ve ever seen on Youtube: voice-over artists and directors supporting Welles against the ad people!)

THREE

The elusive Mr. Welles again. Many of you will have heard about how, while shooting OTHELLO, Welles ran up against various cash difficulties. The film was made “on the installment plan,” whenever Welles was able to raise enough cash by acting in other movies.

At one point, although the costumes had been made, they could not be delivered, due to a little matter of unpaid bills, so Welles brilliantly improvised the murder attempt on Cassio, staging it in a bath-house so that most of the characters would not require costumes, only towels or undies.

Flicking through the pages of Charles Drazin’s In Search of The Third Man, we learn that Welles, engaged by Alexander Korda to act in THE THIRD MAN, was charging his OTHELLO costume bills to the budget of THE THIRD MAN. (Some Welles fans would like to deny the confidence trickster side of his personality, I prefer to revel in it.) Knowing the importance of keeping your star happy, Korda shrewdly allowed this fraud to continue — until Welles had completed his scenes in Korda’s movie. Then he swiftly stopped payment.

The result would seem to be: a masterful piece of cinema flung together by Welles in a fit of inspiration to get himself out of a purely practical difficulty.

Drazin’s book is highly recommended, but Michael McLiammoir’s account of filming OTHELLO, Put Money in thy Purse, is even better. And then there’s Welles’ own documentary, FILMING OTHELLO. In some future Utopia where Welles’ heirs actually speak to each other, we shall have all the various edits of Welles’ OTHELLO together in a box set, with FILMING OTHELLO as the main extra. If we eat well and get some exercise, we may live to see this.

Not Of This Earth

 

So, my late friend Lawrie Knight was an A.D. on Powell and Pressburger’s THE RED SHOES. He had an odd set of duties, sometimes assisting Reggie Mills in the cutting room, (”I was the worst editing assistant –all my splices fell apart!”) sometimes helping co-ordinate crowd scenes. When the studio had a Royal Visitor, Lawrie was landed with the job of escorting the Princess around. “Why me?” he protested. “Because you’re the only GENTLEMAN in the unit,” he was told.

 An empty stage had been set aside for the dancers to practice on. As Lawrie showed the Princess in, a tiny figure started to pirouette towards them from the extreme distance. Robert Helpmann.

They watched as, like Omar Sharif in LAWRENCE OF ARABIA, which had not yet been made, the minute figure slowly grew, until Helpmann spun to a halt right before them.

“What’s your date of  birth?” demanded the dancer.

“Umm, September 22nd,” stammered Lawrie.

“Oh, another lovely virgin for me!” exclaimed R.H., dancing off.

Lawrie also set up the camera for the official cast and crew photo, setting the timer and running to the back of the group to appear in it himself.

But my favourite story concerns Anton Walbrook. The day after filming the big argument scene where he smashes the mirror, Walbrook asked if he could be shown the rushes. Lawrie took him to the screening room and asked for the relevant takes to be shown.

The film came on, but there was no sound. Lawrie made to go and find out what the problem was, but Walbrook indicated that it didn’t matter. So they sat and watched the footage with only a faint whirrr from the projector.

And, in the dark, Lawrie could gradually hear a whisper. “Marvellous. Wonderful. Oh, I’m fantastic.”

Which he was.

This fits nicely with Moira Shearer’s recollections of Walbrook as an elegant, slightly distant figure, wafting about in sunglasses. Once, as she sat dining in the hotel restaurant in the South of France location, Walbrook strolled by. “Ah, it’s beautiful, but it’s not our world, is it?” he sighed, and wafted on.

Well, Walbrook was a refugee, after all. Even after his death, in Germany in 1967, he had no last resting place: for thirty years his ashes were kept in a jar, before finally being interred in the graveyard of St. Johns Church, Hampstead, as he had requested in his will.

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In his not-always-factual autobiographies, A Life in Pictures and Million Dollar Movie, Powell claims credit for casting Walbrook in a series of films. His colleague, Emeric Pressburger “didn’t like homosexuals,” — and yet Pressburger wrote some vividly autobiographical material for Walbrook: Pressburger’s experiences as an exile surely informed Walbrook’s unbearably moving speech in the immigration office in THE LIFE AND DEATH OF COLONEL BLIMP. Powell obviously responded to Walbrook’s intensity and flexibility: who else could achieve the bitter melancholy of that monologue, the sly wit of his characterisation in OH…ROSALINDA!  and the strangulated angst of his last speech in THE RED SHOES?

“Actors are a third sex,” ~ Orson Welles. Certainly some of the most amazing actors have an ALIEN quality. The Shock of Recognition is a powerful thing, that kind of dramatic deja vu, but jamais vu is pretty amazing too — the Shock of Seeing Something You Never Saw In Your LIFE. Walbrook combines the two.

Maybe Walbrook’s most apt role isn’t in a P&P film at all — his otherworldly grace is perfectly suited to the “Ringmaster” character in Ophuls’ LA RONDE.