Читать книгу Dream Repairman - Jim BSL Clark - Страница 8

The Innocents

The shooting of The Innocents began on location at Sheffield Park, a country house near Brighton, which was doubling for Bly House. Deborah Kerr played the governess; Michael Redgrave, the childrens’ uncle; Megs Jenkins, the housekeeper; and Peter Wyngarde the evil Quint.

It was a real pleasure to edit since Jack had a very certain approach to his material, having worked out everything beforehand. He was a perfectionist who left nothing to chance and was very precise in his approach to work. He was, in fact, a very complex personality. The iron fist in the velvet glove.

Jack had worked on a variety of films after war service. After John Huston’s Beat the Devil, which was a Romulus film with the Woolf brothers, Jack wanted to try directing. He was given a long short film to direct, The Bespoke Overcoat, which was the story of a Jewish tailor and was sufficiently effective to allow Jack to move on to Room at the Top, which was a big hit for him and highly influential at the time. It was a landmark in British cinema though it did not actually start the kitchen sink wave, which had its real roots in the Free Cinema Movement started by Karel Reisz, Tony Richardson, and Lindsay Anderson. But Room at the Top was perhaps the first of its kind to get a large overseas distribution.

Jack was a big drinker who used to tipple quite frequently all day—mostly brandy—and he was a chain smoker. He mesmerized me, having a Svengali effect. He was absolutely revered by the crew, and I cannot deny falling under his spell. I’ve always been attracted to the voices of people, and Jack had a particularly mellifluous way of talking.

He’d been married a few times, and I remember Jimmy Ware telling me about when he was living in a London apartment just beneath Jack and his then wife, Christine Norden, who was a well-known actress. One night there was the most frightful noise above and this huge row was going on. He was hurling the furniture around, and they split up shortly after that. He later married Haya Harareet, an Israeli actress who was in William Wyler’s Ben Hur. She gave up acting when she married Jack.

The script of The Innocents was based on William Archibald’s play and was adapted by John Mortimer. The final version was given to Truman Capote, with whom Clayton had worked on Beat the Devil.

Truman was a character, and Toby Jones’ take on him in the film Infamous is as near as any living person could get to that mixed up, mercurial, twisted, funny, camp person. I had a few lunches with Jack and Truman, who made me laugh so much I forgot how bad the Shepperton restaurant food was.

Truman had already written In Cold Blood, but he couldn’t publish it yet. He would sit and fret about this. “I called the Sheriff last night,” he’d say. “They won’t swing yet. I can’t publish until they swing.” It was only later that I discovered he’d had a relationship with one of the killers; but from his anxiety, it seemed he couldn’t wait for the man to go to the gallows.

Jack and I became good collaborators and eventually close friends away from the studio. This was partly because we lived near each other.

Jack, who was divorced at the time and living with his mother, had a house in Marlow, Buckinghamshire, while I had moved my children and housekeeper away from Ealing and into Bourne End, only a few miles away. My thinking then was that the country air and the local school would be better for them. I boughta pleasant house on an estate that had a large garden through which a stream ran. It was close by the Thames and quite idyllic. Later I discovered that Tom Stoppard was also living nearby with his first wife and the ex-Ealing editor Peter Bezencenet was also there. This was a close-knit community, prettily designed in the early twenties by a builder who had been to Venice.

Jack Clayton and I worked together very well on The Innocents, partly because we both enjoyed the material. He was meticulous, and he knew that I was too. His approach to editing was wildly different from Stanley Donen’s. He would run the cut footage every night after shooting. It was a very relaxed routine. We would run the rushes at lunchtime with the crew, and every evening about seven, Jack would send his assistant, Jeanie Sims, to the bar for drinks, then we’d run the film as it stood. Obviously, each evening, it grew a bit. He didn’t come into the cutting room all that much, but would give me his notes each evening, which I would then attend to during the following day, so it was a true collaboration.

This routine involved my assistant editor, Mary Kessel, picking up the rushes from the labs each morning. She’d then get to the studio quickly, collecting the sound transfers and synching them up so that they were ready for projection by eight. This was a hard task, but was very helpful to the director, particularly if he was in the middle of a scene.

This way of working left no time at all for a social life, but since neither Jack nor I were attached at that time and the summer evenings were pleasantly warm, we would repair to the bar, which faced the big garden at Shepperton, to continue drinking and talking about the picture. Often we would close the bar before driving home. We were both lucky not to get breathalysed. It was a very concentrated time. Jack had to be up early too. He had extraordinary stamina, especially in relation to booze and would often have a brandy and soda at his elbow.

During the shooting of the picture, Jack became fond of pigeons, which were used very often as prop birds fluttering around the garden set. I don’t know if he was keen on these birds before, but after the film was shot, he had a large aviary built in his garden and soon became a national authority on certain species of pigeon. It was an odd hobby and he pursued it until he died.

The film was shot very well by Freddie Francis in black-and-white Cinemascope, with Pamela, his wife-to-be, on continuity. We soon got down to serious editing. Like Stanley, he preferred making judgments in the theatre rather than the cutting room. Mary Kessel reminded me that Jack would review everything he had shot after he had seen my rough cut. This meant that the assistant had to rejoin all the trims and spares into reels, since Jack viewed in the theatre. Nowadays I still encourage directors to do this, so they can be certain to have chosen the very best sections, but present day video techniques have, thankfully, rendered the need to join everything obsolete.

Jimmy Woolf was once again producer of the film, but it was really Jack’s picture through and through.

After Room at the Top, there had been a long wait until he decided what he should do next. Jack was never one to make hasty decisions. He’d been highly influenced by John Huston and perhaps his sadistic sense of practical joking came from that period. Jeanie Sims, his personal assistant, was often the butt of these jokes. Jeanie had been Huston’s personal assistant before that. She had been badly burned as a child, leaving her with scars on her hands and face. She was also, quite naturally, terrified of fire. So Jack, equally naturally, made it his business to try and set Jeanie alight as often as possible. He would go to enormous lengths, preparing bonfires that Jeanie would supposedly be put onto. Jack had a perverse sense of humour. Sometimes it was very funny and sometimes not, and I think he learned a lot of that from Huston. The creativity and time that Clayton and Huston would invest in elaborate practical jokes was almost certainly a product of boredom, because making movies can be terribly boring. Gradually the picture was completed in a spirit of total harmony. We all loved it and working with Jack was nothing but pleasure. It seems not to have been a very hard job, since we had worked on it during the shooting, but we had certain problems with effects. The scene in which Miss Giddens prowls the house at night was not easy to perfect, and Peter Quint’s first appearance at the window was also hard. This was reshot a number of times. We were after the kind of shock effect that David Lean and Jack Harris had achieved in Great Expectations and I don’t think we ever quite reached it, but the picture was a fascinating exercise in suspense and unspoken threats, all of which the editing assisted. At the time, we had no idea we were working on a classic, which is what The Innocents has become.

I was also able to indulge in some rather cunning dissolves, somewhat influenced by George Stevens’ A Place in the Sun. These would not be simple mixes of equal length. A 4-foot mix is the norm, but these would last 15 or 20 feet, the images gradually merging. I referred to them as lopsided mixes since the overlaps were nonstandard and often there would be a third image in there too, so these mixes were like mini montages. I didn’t always get them right the first time, and the optical house had its problems, but the results were very pleasing to Jackand myself.

We were also much helped by the music which Georges Auric wrote for the picture and a splendidly atmospheric effects track that sound editor Peter Musgrave created. He was one of the first to use electronic effects. We all thought these were inspired at the time, adding the necessary accompaniment to Miss Gidden’s night prowl, but when heard now they sound oddly anachronistic, putting the film firmly into the late sixties, away from the Edwardian period that had been so carefully created.

I also recall that Twentieth Century Fox, who paid for the picture, seemed quite disinterested in it, much to Jack’s annoyance. I don’t think they ever previewed it. Maybe Jack’s contract disallowed that. There was a lot of anguish over the end of the picture, when the boy Miles dies in Miss Gidden’s arms. Jack was quite prone to agonising over scenes if he was uncertain of them, and we would run them over and over again, hardly changing a frame, until he felt reconciled to the sequence.

There were difficult days when I had become exhausted by the material, finally getting bored with trying to please Jack, and he was perhaps thinking that I didn’t care enough. His mood became extremely dark, and he was hard to live with. One incident, haunted me for years: When the film was completed and was to be shown to the magazine critics at the Fox preview theatre in Soho Square, Jack was much too nervous to attend and sent me and Jeanie along to report back to him about the critics’ reactions. The screening was held up for half an hour due to problems that a physically handicapped lady critic, Freda Bruce Lockhart, was having with her wheelchair. Since she was a much-respected figure, we delayed the screening until she arrived, thus making us late with our phone call to Jack, who was waiting at the studio. After the show, which was clearly successful, we went to the nearest pub with John and Penelope Mortimer, and Jeanie went to the phone to call Jack with the good news. She returned looking pale. Jack had been very unpleasant because she should have made the call at least thirty minutes earlier. He was going crazy, feeling like a prisoner in a condemned cell and gave her a terrible ticking off. We all commiserated with her and went our ways. The following day, Jack did not turn up at the studio as planned. Jeanie called me to his office, where a large-scale model of Bly house made of white plaster had sat for many months. It now lay in a mass of shattered pieces all over the office. Jack had smashed it to smithereens in his anger the previous night. When he did turn up, he refused to talk to either of us. The rift was healed gradually, but in some ways our relationship was never quite the same. I thought it was all frightfully unjust and became wary of him. I think I rather despised him for refusing to attend the screening, though he might have been right about that. Critics don’t normally like the director to be around when they view his work. Perhaps it should have taught me a lesson. I had become too close to Jack and had, perhaps, transcended the boundary that should exist between director and editor. This is in some ways a master and slave relationship, and although I had never tried to impose my own will on his material, perhaps he felt he had, in some way, lost his own picture. His only way to protect himself was by lashing out, not at me, but at some object close at hand. In spite of this, he asked me to work on his next picture, The Pumpkin Eater, which was only two years down the pike. A surprisingly short gap for Jack.

Charade

It was during the final stages of The Innocents that Stanley Donen went into production on his next picture, a romantic comedy thriller, Charade. It had been written for London, but at the eleventh hour there were some tax problems concerning the principal actors and the whole thing was moved to the Studio de Boulogne in Paris.

Charade had Cary Grant and Audrey Hepburn in the lead roles and an excellent list of supporting actors. The screenplay was good and the actors well cast. Walter Matthau, James Coburn, and George Kennedy all went on to become leading Hollywood stars.

It was a film with a slender story but masses of style and Peter Stone, one of the two writers, was on set all the time to alter dialogue if Cary required it. Peter had previously written for television but had no film production experience and he wanted to learn how movies were made. He also helped keep the atmosphere light. There was great camaraderie on the set between Stanley, Peter, Cary, and Audrey. She had no faults at all. In fact, it was a very smooth production, largely due to Jimmy Ware’s outstanding ability as an organiser in both languages.

Stanley had a very light touch as a director. He allowed the actors to do their thing and only interfered if it was vital. We never socialised with the actors unless they requested it. In France it was a ritual to throw a drinks party on the set every Friday after shooting, hosted by one of the actors. We celebrated Cary Grant’s sixtieth birthday on the set. At the end of shooting, Cary and Audrey gave each crew member a small gift.

The editing would be done in Paris during shooting and then move on to London for completion, so it was necessary for me to leave Bourne End and my children and stay in a hotel on the Left Bank in Paris for the duration of the shoot.

Due to French crewing requirements, it was necessary to have a French editor on board, who wouldn’t edit, but would act as my assistant. I was not against this, but I stipulated that a man who spoke tolerable English would be preferable to a woman, having recently had problems with Mary Kessel on The Innocents. Mary, who was a good few years older than I, was always attempting to mother me, which was extremely trying. It seemed as if I could do nothing unless she approved. She also hero worshipped both Stanley and Jack, which upset me, and one day I said something to her which was, perhaps, a bit rough. The next I knew, she was out the door, saying she’d arranged for a replacement. Shortly afterward Jack Clayton called and asked where she was so I told him the story. He then contacted her and persuaded her back, though it was hardly his business. She returned and Jack sent bouquets of flowers to the cutting room. I was mortified and our relationship, which had lasted for years, was now completely over. I decided a change would be necessary on the next film.

After a few attempts, the French production office failed to secure a male editor, but finally came up with a female, who they said spoke good English and would on no account try to mother me or take over the editing. So, without meeting her, I reluctantly told the office to offer her the job, figuring it would only be for the three-month shooting period.

I settled into the hotel over a weekend. It had been arranged that the French lady editor would pick me up and drive me out to the Studio de Boulogne, since I had no car and was unfamiliar with public transportation in Paris. I also spoke very little French. So on the Monday morning the editor was there waiting for me. I recognised her at once as the same girl who had stood me up some years before on Once More with Feeling. It was Laurence Méry. Of course she claimed not to remember the incident, but I was certain it was her. In fact Laurence says that when she first saw me descending the staircase of the Lennox she said to herself, “Thank heaven he’s young!”

I started on the first day of photography, along with my crew. I had a Moviola shipped over from England since I did not want to edit on the French machine, the Mauritone, though it did have a great screen and we often used it for viewing rushes and cut scenes.

There was a sense of fun pervading the enterprise that made us all feel good. The hours were long for the editing staff because the picture was being shot according to French union rules. Shooting began at noon and continued without a break until eight in the evening, when the rushes were shown. The cutting room, however, would open up around ten in the morning, so that we were on hand should Stanley want to run material on the Mauritone. By the time our rushes had ended in the evening, it was around nine and we had just worked another eleven-hour day. But in Paris you can eat late and we were all younger then.

I soon became great friends with my French assistant, Laurence Méry, who had cut more films than I had. The editing routine in Paris meant many late evening meals in restaurants, and eventually we began a relationship, much to the growing curiosity of the unit who were dying to know whether we were an item or not. They half guessed it but never figured it out satisfactorily since we were quite distant with one another during working hours. In this case, my need not to be mothered hadn’t quite worked. It was soon clear to me, however, that the long gap since losing Jessie was about to be filled.

The picture did not start shooting in the studio, but on location in the French Alps at Megève, where the unit, mainly French, were quartered in a newly built luxury ski hotel. The first day’s shooting was achieved and everyone was happy but then fog descended making filming impossible for several days. The long-range forecast was poor. Not knowing when the weather would break forced the decision to pack-strike a set in Paris and load it onto camions for transport to Megève, a long and expensive haul.

Stanley also had me along with a Steenbeck flatbed editing table sent to location so that he could look at rushes. He rarely wanted to do this so I found myself walking about the slopes, in the fog, wondering what I was doing up there.

James Coburn was sent for, and they shot a scene in a garage with him. Stanley then thought we might also do the nightclub scene in Megève, but that required more parts of the set, which were in Paris. At great expense these were duly trucked up, but as the lorries arrived, the sun emerged from behind the clouds. The sets went directly back to Paris and we were back outside shooting the scene in which Cary first meets Audrey. Eagle-eyed viewers will see that all the closeups of the principals were done much later in the studio against plates that were shot in Megève.

Due to this week of hiatus, we all had a little holiday, walking, swimming, and relaxing. Just as well, since, after that, we hardly drew a breath for six months.

When the unit returned to Paris, Laurence and I took Walter Matthau out to dinner at La Coupole. He ordered some form of curry and they brought to the table, in advance of his meal, a dish of chili peppers that were extremely hot. Not seeming to care, Walter chomped his way greedily through the pile, talking about himself the while, and as he talked and chomped we watched his face grow redder and redder. He stopped talking, clutched his throat, and croaked “I’m dying!” He made a dive for the Gents. I followed him. Everyone around us realised something was up. In the toilet he vomited noisily into a basin, doused himself with water, drank some, vomited again, as the attendants watched, “Quel horreur” being the general tone. After a decent interval, Matthau, who was, at this point in his career, unknown to all the French who considered him just another crazy American, calmed down, bowed to all those who were still watching and making remarks that neither of us could understand, and together we marched back into the restaurant where Laurence was patiently waiting for us. By now he was well recovered. Walter sat down, a little puffed, but not phased, and proceeded to eat his curry.

James Coburn was a different sort of guy. With his wife, Beverly, in tow,Laurence entertained them in her bijou flat one evening, which was a tight squeeze. James was into a number of Californian fads at the time but had not, so far as I know, gone in for LSD, which Cary Grant had described to me one day on the set between takes. It was no secret that Grant had tried this drug under his psychiatrist’s supervision. He had often floated away from his body, which he could see vanishing beneath him as he buzzed around above himself. His one fear was that he might lose sight of his body. He did not suggest that I should try this drug.

After the shoot, the editing continued at Shepperton. Stanley took a much closer interest in the cutting than he ever had before in my experience. He probably sensed that he had a popular picture that he should nurture. The construction of the script was very tight. There was little slack in it. We did not have the nasty length problem that had plagued a number of pictures recently. Stanley was his own producer, as was Jack Clayton, and it was in his best interest to watch the money and not waste it.

He shot Charade in a perfectly straightforward manner. The rushes were actually quite boring to sit through, especially the dialogue sequences since he covered entire scenes in long shot, medium shot, and closeup without moving the camera. These dialogue scenes were entirely made in the cutting room. It was simply a matter of looking at each take several times, picking line readings from the best, putting them together and then adjusting. We also line cut a good deal to reduce the scenes and make them sharper. I had, by now, developed some little tricks of my own. For example, I would never let a character shut a door, allowing them to start to move the door but having the sound of the closing off screen. Later on I developed this more, so that actions, once begun, were very rarely completed. Of course films were cut far slower in those days and scenes had time to breath. I am still averse to overcutting and deplore the pernicious influence of commercials and pop videos on feature films. There are exceptions, certainly in scenes of action, but when dialogue scenes are cut up into mini cuts, the rhythms go to hell and the acting stops, as does my interest. Stanley would never have been that crass. He always had the most elegant sense of balance within a scene, as befits a master of the musical. And,when it came to comic timing, Cary Grant was another master. His throwaway bits of shtick were always worth watching. We don’t make them like that anymore. Today we don’t have many actors who can create those seemingly effortless performances that make the editor’s life easier.

Stanley Donen was much more relaxed during the whole of Charade, which had a lot to do with his home life. He had married the former Lady Beatty around the time of Surprise Package and was living the society life in London and in his country house in Buckinghamshire. He had a chauffeur and every other appurtenance of wealth and success.

He was also still very distant with the technicians. I had now cut three pictures for Donen, but barely knew him. Perhaps that was good, since getting too close to Clayton had upset the balance. The relationship between directors and editors is a close one and often a long one. It is complex like a marriage.

I’ve often wondered whether film and book editors work in the same way. I am often curious if anyone has bothered to edit books at all or even read them. Like books, most movies can be helped or hindered by the editing. It is not just a matter of taking two pieces of film and splicing them together at an appropriate moment, though that is an important basic element. The technical aspect is only of so much importance. It is the approach to the material and the way the editor deals with the director that can be crucial to the outcome. Although the editor is not responsible for the final cut, he can help the director by guiding him. An editor can best make his point by skillfull demonstration. I have never believed in arguing with a director, which usually ends in bad feelings and hurts the film. But I do believe in cutting many versions of a scene to prove a point. Of course in the early sixties, the days of Donen and Clayton, this was rarely required. The paranoia that now surrounds post-production has made the whole procedure more nerve wracking and unsettling. There is much to be said for what now seems like a gentleman’s club atmosphere in which we worked. Time has altered all of that. Pictures are often rushed through post-production in weeks when we had months. Sometimes these rapidly completed pictures succeed and make money, thereby causing the studios to decree that expensive, long post-production periods are no longer necessary. They also point to television series cut on video in next to no time. This is the direction the money providers would like film editing to go and they will doubtless get their way.

The films I cut for Clayton, Donen, and later for John Schlesinger and Roland Joffé, were done with a different spirit. It was the film that mattered, not the budget. We all tried to work within the budget, but we would not compromise. The pictures were made with love and that is now hard to find in the editing rooms of the film world. I am told that the same is true for books—a sorry state indeed.

The excellent score for Charade was composed and conducted by Henry Mancini, and Hank, as he was known, was one of the most charming men you could meet. On the first day of recording, we met at CTS in Kensington Garden Square. He was introduced to me, walked into the studio, greeted the orchestra, picked up his baton, and they sight-read the title music without a mistake. It was sheer magic. The Charade theme, later with lyrics by Johnny Mercer, was heard for the first time. “It’s a standard,” I said to Stanley, who nodded sagely. I was quite right. I know a good tune when I hear one. The session was interrupted by lunch at a pub and then we continued. Everything was wrapped up in a couple of days, and Hank was back on the plane.

Charade was put together rapidly. Stanley took it to Los Angeles to show to Universal. They previewed it and he returned. Some tweaking was required to the final scene involving trapdoors in a Paris theatre and that was that. It was probably one of the most successful pictures Stanley directed in that period.

* * *

Having moved from Ealing to Bourne End during The Innocents, I now settled back into life on the Abbotsbrook estate. Although created by a spec builder who had fallen in love with Venice, the estate did not resemble Venice in any way, a stream with swans ran through it and the homes were rather mock Tudor in style.

I’d moved into Cornerways with a housekeeper, Mrs. Dring, a widow from Boston who my mother Florence had located for me. Mrs. Dring was charming and helpful. Kate went to school locally and my adopted son David was at a prep school near Newbury.

Laurence visited me in Bourne End after I returned from Paris. She soon christened it “Dead End,” because Laurence perceived it as a commuter belt area where people were interested only in domestic matters. There was no culture.

In deference to Mrs. Dring, Laurence stayed in the guest room. This situation quickly became tiresome, and she moved into my bed. Neither of us considered what Mrs. Dring might think.

Shortly after Laurence had returned to Paris and before we decided to marry, I was driving my mother to David’s sports day at prep school. Kate was in the backseat of the car. “Are you still sleeping with a board under your mattress?” my mother enquired. She was referring to a cure I had for backache. “No, he’s not,” Kate piped up, “Laurence didn’t like it.” Mother fell silent. She remained silent for the rest of the day, and we drove back to Boston without further reference to Kate’s remark. The following morning Mother came into my bedroom, looking haggard and drawn. “I didn’t sleep last night after what Kate said in the car.” I grunted a little. I was, after all, well over thirty. “Did I understand that you and Laurence slept in the same bed with Mrs. Dring in the house?”

In fact, we must have been really active since Sybil was conceived around this time. My mother said, “I will come to the wedding, but I will not enjoy it.”

Laurence and my mother tolerated one another, but I could not say they were close. Mother always said bad things about my wives. When I married Jessie, she described her as “attending the tin tabernacle,” a reference to the fact that she was Catholic and had a Russian mother. Laurence was Jewish and French. My mother would have preferred a nice English girl, who was not pregnant.

One Saturday the marquee from Harrods went up at Cornerways, and Laurence and I were married at Little Marlow Church. Sybil was born shortly after while I was editing Clayton’s next film, The Pumpkin Eater. Jack was a near neighbour and offended my mother by wearing casual clothes to our wedding and then compounding the felony by taking small children with him when he went to smoke in the back garden.

David and Kate were there and it was a family occasion. Laurence looked beautiful in her wedding finery, her family had come over from Paris and the sun shone all day. It was the start of a lifetime of happiness, though like all relationships it had its ups and downs.

FLASHBACK: Photogravure

My father had decided I should be apprenticed in the photogravure section of the factory that manufactured engraved cylinders from which the labels were printed. The department was under the strict rule of Mr. Booy, a small man with a big temper. Although I was the boss’s son, he treated me exactly like anyone else.

I lived at home and tried to adjust to small-town life. I joined an amateur theatrical group, the Boston Playgoers, and rapidly became their juvenile lead. This occupied most of my leisure time and introduced me to a circle of local folk who had a nucleus of like interests. We would repair to a inn after rehearsals where we drank too much beer. On Saturday nights, a few of the male members of the cast could be found getting drunk in the “men only” bar of the White Hart hotel. Women were consigned to the adjoining room with its wicker furniture. I would consume too much beer and then retire to my bedroom. The room would revolve as soon as I lay down and just in time I would get up to throw up in the hand basin. When this became a regular Saturday routine, I knew it was time for a change.

I had made a few trips back to Oundle, often to discuss my future with Arthur Marshall. He never once encouraged me to drop out of the family business and engage in something to do with cinema. When he was my age, he had wanted nothing more than to become a professional comedian. His parents had talked him out of that and, as a result, he had abandoned his desires and become a teacher, which he never regretted. He felt it was sensible of my parents to steer me toward a secure future in the printing business. That I eventually spurned his advice always amused me. It was only a couple of years afterward that Arthur abandoned teaching, left Oundle, and became secretary to Lord Rothschild; then he became part of Binkie Beaumont’s theatrical empire, and finally a television personality. He also never stopped writing humorous pieces for the New Statesman and the Telegraph. So much for his advice—which I never took.

The Boston Film Society had sprouted a production department. I had a16 mm Bolex camera and with the help of Charles Whittaker and others, we made a short silent film that we called Absconded. I volunteered to play the lead. It was shot on the marshes around Boston and concerned a Borstal boy who had escaped from the camp and was chased to his death by drowning. My friends played the police, who determined that there would be no way out.

The film ran for ten minutes and was awarded a prize in the annual amateur film competition. It was awarded to us by Harry Watt, the celebrated documentarian who was now making features for Ealing.

This success inspired us, in 1951, to make a much more ambitious piece that we called A Boston Story featuring Charles Whittaker as an American returning to his native town in Festival Year.

Before this, however, my father had decided I should go to the London School of Printing for a year, to learn the art of photogravure away from the confines of the factory. He contacted their south England representative and asked him to find suitable accommodation. For reasons I now find odd, this man booked me into a guesthouse in Bromley, Kent, which involved me taking a train each day to Charing Cross, a needlessly expensive journey and one that required me to take the last train home. This curtailed any fun I might find in the city, since the last train left at eleven. I had to put up with the bizarre and repressive life that existed in the guesthouse run by the Carters, a grim and obsequious couple lately released from the RAF, who made my life a misery. They ran their prim and proper establishment as if it were something to be treasured and revered. They were house proud and had something like a dozen guests, of which I was by far the youngest. Most of the guests were middle aged and escaping from something like wives or taxes. Some were business reps who used the guesthouse as a cheap hotel once a week when on their rounds of the area. All in all, it was a motley bunch of misfits, mostly men, who met over breakfast and dinner in sullen silence. I kept as far away from them as possible. The atmosphere was pure Graham Greene, and the Carters were a rigid couple who fawned over the regular customers while treating me with disdain and overcharging for my room and board. I never felt so lonely. Once I contracted a bad flu and had to remain in my room. They rarely came to check on me. Somehow I felt that to be sick in their establishment was considered a slur. There was always a problem with food. We were still strictly rationed and they continued to cook and serve up food that might have just passed muster in the NAFFI. It was a grim time and I longed to leave. Salvation beckoned when I contacted Dr. and Mrs. Booth. They invited me to a party and realised I was unhappy.

I was in the habit of returning to Boston on weekends during this period, largely to avoid a weekend in Bromley, but I had few friends in the town at that time since most of them were away doing their National Service. I had been rejected by the doctors on account of my eczema, an unpleasant skin condition that had plagued me since childhood. So, although I avoided two years of army life, I was feeling isolated and separated from my friends, who occasionally appeared on leave and complained about their wasted years during which their real lives were on hold.

At some point during this year in London, I made the conscious decision to leave Bromley, which had become unbearable, particularly after a nasty incident when I was stuck in a railway compartment with a drunk who lunged at me and attempted to remove my trousers, saying boozily, “You’d make a fine centre forward!” There were no corridors on these trains and I had to wait until the train stopped to make an escape. Fortunately the man did not pursue me as I dashed outside, but it was unnerving to say the least and put an end to Bromley.

The following week I moved into a bed-sit just off Cromwell Road. Now I was living alone, in a tiny room with a gas meter and a hot plate. It was, however, all mine and it was a more central location.

Back in Boston we set out to make A Boston Story. This was filmed in black and white, and we added a soundtrack with music and narration. It included a visit to London where Charles was seen wandering around the Festival Gardens, though his mind was still in Boston. To say that this amateur movie was poor is an understatement, but we ran it for a few evenings at the Assembly Rooms in Boston. It was favourably received and then we gave it a decent burial.

I had now been appointed the Publicity Officer for the Federation of Film Societies, despite being only nineteen, and was often in provincial cities for weekend meetings. I also attended the Edinburgh Film Festival and reported on films that members might rent for their societies.

One blissful year I was invited to Biarritz to a Festival of Films Maudit that was organised by Cocteau and his cronies. The invite came from the British Council. I met Ralph Glasser and Derek Griggs and we travelled to Biarritz by train, stopping at St. Jean de Luze. It was my first time in France and it was a very heady experience. I was, as yet, unexposed to much of life, particularly as led by bohemians in France. I was warned not to dip too heavily into bottles of Pernod, which might put me away.

On the opening night of the festival, I forgot those warnings and ended up with my friends in a hotel suite overlooking the Atlantic, the temporary home of Denis Price, the English actor who had been in Kind Hearts and Coronets and who was a guest of honour. He had not heeded the drink warning either and, drunk as a skunk, declaimed a speech Noel Coward had delivered in In Which We Serve. By this time we were chucking champagne into the ocean, and I eventually passed out on a chaise longue, from which I was rescued by Ralph Glasser just as Price was about to commit a rash act. They bundled me out of the apartment, and I remained in my room for two days, missing many films and wondering what had hit me.

It was shortly after this that I decided to leave home. I called Francis Howard, who was now with Industrial Colour Films. He got me the job that took me away from Boston. My parents, instead of being vindictive, were both supportive. But my new job, fun though it was, did not last. The company went bankrupt within the year. It was “I told you so” from the family, but I was not to be so easily brought back to Boston.

I was out of a job, not a union member, twenty-one, and totally unknown. In those days, it was of paramount importance to belong to the union and it was the hardest organisation to join. The catch-22 syndrome persisted—no experience, you couldn’t join; not a member, you couldn’t get experience.

Dr. Booth had a keen interest in my career, or lack of it, knowing that Father was now paying my rent. One day he casually mentioned that a doctor he knew in the Borough was called if any medical attention was required at Ealing Studio and wondered out loud if it might be a good idea to suggest he mention my name to the head of Personnel.

My interview with Baynham Honri was the outcome of this conversation.