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The Prince and the Showgirl

The Prince and the Showgirl was made at Pinewood in 1956. Jack Harris had rooms in the old editing block where, years later, I would cut The World Is Not Enough. I shared it with him and Des Saunders.

I had a bench and a Robot joiner. This small device, unlike the Bell & Howell foot joiner, which I’d mastered at Ealing, could be placed almost anywhere. It scraped the emulsion from one side of the film and applied the film cement as the second part of the device was clamped to the first. Thus the film was scraped and joined. Not exactly a daunting task.

The Robot was the last of the cement, or hot, joiners. Soon it was replaced by the Italian tape joiner, which is still in use. It required no scraping, no cement, and lasted for years. The Italian joiner also avoided losing a frame when an edit was made, so it was goodbye to the “black buildup.”

Working on this movie was fascinating from many points of view and has been well documented elsewhere, but being a junior member of the team, I could watch the egos at work.

In the beginning, Olivier and Monroe were great chums, but, going into the project, he must have been unaware of the influence that Marilyn’s drama coach, Paula Strasberg, had on her. This lady, the wife of Lee Strasberg of the Actors Studio, would sit on the set and watch every take with great attention. She was a formidable size and always dressed in black. When Olivier would call “cut,” Marilyn would ask Paula for her comments, never the director.

After a couple of weeks of this, Olivier was beside himself with rage, but the Strasberg presence, would not be moved.

So, gradually, the wheels fell off the relationship between star and director. The rest of the film, at least nine weeks of it, was spent within this dreadful atmosphere.

Marilyn had only recently married Arthur Miller, who was with her more often than not. She had a dressing room on the stage and one of our jobs was to escort her, daily, to the projection room where she saw her rushes, very often with her husband and the film’s producer, Milton Green.

So either Des or I would knock on her door about 5:30 and she’d walk with us down the long corridor at Pinewood, often clutching a copy of the collected poems of Dylan Thomas, which I never saw her open. She was very shortsighted and wore glasses until she was in front of the camera.

On the very last day of filming, Marilyn had reluctantly agreed to shoot some retakes that Olivier demanded. The crew sat around all morning waiting for her to arrive, which was not unusual, and when she did, she distributed champagne to everyone, which was fine, but caused even more delay and more frustration for Olivier, or ‘Sir’ as we called him.

She finally did appear in costume, ready for work, but was, by now, quite pickled. Olivier, out of spite, perhaps, printed everything they shot that afternoon, most of which was useless as Marilyn was bumping into the furniture and unable to act.

In the end, Jack Harris used about 6 feet out of 2,000. I have often pondered the lost opportunity to remove those rushes from the cutting room and secrete them in my garage for future use. Of course none of us knew the star would soon die, nor that she would become a screen idol and that these feeble rushes would have been worth a great deal.

Working on the post-production was good fun and, for me, quite important since Olivier had decided I should not be confined to the Robot joiner and elected to promote me to Footsteps Editor.

He had, I assume, discussed this with Jack. In those days, the recording of footsteps was an arduous task. Every sound of movement in the film had to be reproduced to separate it from the dialogue for foreign dubbed versions. We looped up the film into sections that could be endlessly repeated and a “virgin” magnetic loop of the same length was also cut to match.

In the recording studio, the footstep artist, normally the late Beryl Mortimer, would select a pair of shoes and a surface and then “walk” through the scene in sync with the actor on screen.

If other sounds were involved, such as a kiss or movement of props, they would be done on a second loop and, thus, the effects were built up. Dinner party scenes were dreaded. In America this procedure is called Foley, presumably after an inventor of that name.

When everything was recorded, the assistant would re-assemble the loops into their full-reel length so that the tracks could be used in the dubbing theatre.

This then was my task on the final stages of The Prince and the Showgirl. While Des Saunders concerned himself with finalising the film and dealing with the composer, I would be involved with the sound editors who were fitting all the effects and attending to the dialogue. Nowadays composers have their own music editors.

Olivier played a significant part in my career, though I never knew him well. Having promoted me on The Prince and the Showgirl, he gave me back some of the confidence I lost going from editor to second assistant and I would later edit two films he appeared in: Term of Trial (1961) and Marathon Man (1976).

Jack Harris, one of the most sought after editors of his day, was also a supreme influence. Olivier trusted Jack implicitly to cut his film.

Olivier himself was quite a distant man. He wasn’t seen very much in the cutting room. Jack would run the film for him on a regular basis and they would recut it together. At these screenings, Olivier would give Jack his notes, though I suspect they were very few because Jack would cut the film perfectly well thus lifting a huge burden off the director’s shoulders.

Indiscreet

After that experience, Jack took me on as his permanent first assistant for several years when Des Saunders moved on to direct episodes of Thunderbirds. It was during that period that we found ourselves at Elstree where Stanley Donen was directing Indiscreet. I knew of Donen from his musicals and was excited when Jack told me we’d be doing the picture. I was a huge fan, having sat through On the Town four times in the same day at the Empire, Leicester Square, including the stage show. Although Indiscreet was not a musical, it was a comedy with Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman and bound to be stylish. In fact I barely got to know Stanley on that picture, since he rarely came into the cutting room. I only saw him at rushes, though I did sometimes sneak onto the set, but this was not encouraged. I had to wait until post-production before getting at all close to him. We often had lunch with Jack in the Grosevenor restaurant which was adjacent to the studio. Stanley was the first person I ever saw eating yogurt. He had just finished another film with Cary Grant prior to Indiscreet, and the two of them were now in a partnership.

It’s curious now to think that Stanley was not much more than seven years older than I was. Having started directing early his experience was already huge, and he had an unmistakable aura of success hanging over him. Stanley exuded charm, and with his little southern boy accent was a pushover for people like me, always a sucker for a seductive voice. He was also impeccably attired, Savile Row style. In those days, directors didn’t wear jeans and t-shirts. They wore elegant suits and expensive shoes and ties. They looked like businessmen. Stanley was never one to hang about the set. He would describe the next setup and retire to his office until called for rehearsal. He was very much into the business of films and was buying up real estate in Los Angeles. All this made sense in a business where anyone’s future can be shaky.

Before filming began, I was told to call the production manager Al Streeter to make my deal. This was not a call I looked forward to because I was always nervous when discussing my pay. I asked for £25 a week—the top rate for an assistant editor. Jack Harris was a top editor and probably got £60 a week. There was silence on the other end and finally Streeter said, “And what makes you think you are worth that amount?” This rattled me and I stuttered some reply about being Jack’s regular assistant and having a family to feed. After another interminable silence, Streeter said, “What you should have said is ‘I’m worth it.’...” He then agreed to the price.

Indiscreet was shot at the ABPC Studio, and the second assistant editor was Terry Rawlings, who later became an ace sound editor and film editor. He and I waited for Jack to make his decisions which were, as usual, slow. The filming was almost entirely confined to the studio, though one big scene was shot at Greenwich and there were some romantic views of London on the Embankment.

I was appointed music editor and this was the first film to be scored by Richard Rodney Bennett. One evening I was instructed to run the film for him and Muir Mathieson at the old London Films building at Hyde Park.

Muir and I waited awhile and finally a breathless young man appeared, saying his plane from Paris had been delayed. Richard was only about twenty years old and still studying at the Sorbonne.

I have no idea how Stanley came to employ Richard, whose score was recorded at Elstree, but he turned down most of the music Richard had composed, except for one cue that involved a sort of mini piano concerto. When we were mixing the film, Stanley would call out “Jimmy! Bring on the blind pianist,” which meant another reprise of this particular cue. In the end very little of the score was used but that blind pianist cue was perfect.

Because we shared a mutual interest in musicals, Stanley agreed to allow me to interview him for a magazine called Films & Filming, for which I occasionally wrote. I remember he was very gracious about this and, although he asked me to send him a typescript before I submitted it for publication, he didn’t hold much back. He gave me a very detailed account of his early life, his desire to become a dancer, his start on Broadway, and his meeting with Gene Kelly, all of which I faithfully transcribed. The article was published at about the time that Indiscreet was released.

I never thought Indiscreet was a good movie. I found it a rather dull piece and very stagebound, but the public enjoyed it and it did well at the box office. For me, it wasn’t easy to sit through many times without falling asleep.

Once More with Feeling and Surprise Package

After Indiscreet, Jack and I went our separate ways. A few years later, however, Jack Harris and Stanley Donen worked together again on Once More with Feeling!, a less than brilliant romantic comedy featuring Yul Brynner and Kay Kendall. Casting Brynner in a comedy was, perhaps, a bit rash of Stanley.

Jack had gone to Paris without me because this was a French production and he was required to have French assistants, but it was agreed that I could join the team when the shooting ended and they returned to England for the post-production work.

Because the film contained many classical music cues prerecorded in France, there was not much need for an additional score, but I was required to go to Paris with Muir Mathieson to look at the film.

We were at the bar in the Studio de Boulogne adjacent to the viewing room. It was near the end of the day and very busy. I met and chatted with a French girl who spoke reasonably good English. I arranged to meet her for a meal after the screening, but when the time came she had vanished and, sadly, stood me up.

Back in London, we were very close to mixing it when we heard that Kay Kendall had suddenly died. I had no idea she’d had leukemia throughout the shoot. It was kept amazingly quiet and we were all saddened. She was such a life force. Her death cast a pall over the whole enterprise.

Stanley and I became reacquainted when the film moved to London, though we saw very little of him at the time because he was already planning his next picture and courting his next wife. The picture was another Yul Brynner comedy, titled Surprise Package. Jack Harris found it impossible to contemplate such a thing. In fact, he became very depressed by the prospect of cutting another comedy with Brynner, whom he found totally unfunny. He was absolutely right.

So if Jack Harris wasn’t going to cut Surprise Package, I wondered who Stanley would turn to. I suddenly decided that it could be my big chance. I asked Jack for his advice and permission to put myself forward. It was pushy, perhaps, but seemed appropriate at the time. Fortunately for me, and my future career, Stanley was quite happy with this arrangement, though I still had to prove I could do the editor’s job to the satisfaction of one and all, including Columbia, who were footing the bill.

The picture was first shot on location in the Greek Islands and then at Shepperton Studios. It was in black and white, which was a pity since the locations were very attractive. Yul Brynner played a New York gangster who is drummed out of the mob and returned to his roots, where he becomes involved with Mitzi Gaynor and an exiled king, played by Noel Coward. It was based on a book by Art Buchwald, and the screenplay was by the legendary Harry Kurnitz.

I was so happy to be cutting a feature that I didn’t pay more than scant attention to the script, even though in those days the editor usually didn’t get involved with scripts, but simply sat back and cut the results.

In this case, as a novice, I was in double trouble since the film was being shot away from England and it was difficult to contact Stanley if I needed to discuss the rushes. So I just got on with it and put the thing together. I already had a fair inkling from Once More with Feeling that Yul Brynner was not God’s gift to comedy. His approach was loud or fast and very often both at the same time. The material piled up and seemed to get even less amusing than the script, which was itself already a travesty of a rather witty original.

Stanley returned and the studio shoot commenced. We would meet at rushes and some wisecracks would flow between Stanley and the crew. He was always ready with a running joke that would carry through the whole shoot, and the crew would pick up on that.

The one bit of genuine amusement was having some dealings with the great Coward. Here was a legend that never failed to live up to it’s reputation. He was genuinely witty and original. A hugely amusing man of style, charm, and taste. He never disappointed. Unfortunately his part in the movie singularly lacked the wit and style he displayed in life. He found trouble remembering lines and, in one scene with Brynner, went to an almost record breaking sixty-eight takes. He only stumbled through because Stanley finally broke the scene down to single lines. Putting all that together in seamless style was quite a test for the young editor and I rather dreaded the moment when I had to show the film to Stanley.

I was rarely on the set and Stanley was even more rarely in the cutting room. I don’t recall that he ever asked my opinion about anything and I don’t suppose I ever suggested that the film was not amusing. I must have been satisfying his requirements because shortly before we finished shooting and were walking into rushes one lunch time he turned to me and said “Jimmy, I’m going to start another movie very soon and would you like to stay on and cut it?” This could be deemed rash since he hadn’t yet seen too much of my work on his current picture. Of course I agreed without a thought, but we had a great deal to endure on the mistitled Surprise Package. I handed the film over to the sound editor, Peter Musgrave, and began work on the next picture. We were in adjoining cutting rooms so I was able to keep an eye on both movies.

If Surprise Package had been my debut feature without a follow-up, I might have been dead in the water, but moving headlong into another film before the current one was even mixed, saved my bacon.