The Cine Technician (1943 - 1945)

82 THE CINE-TECHNICIAN March— April, 1048 Edited by Frank Sainsbury CLOSE-UPS No. 20— JACK COX tlT/'EEP your lights pointed at the money. J\_ boy " is how Jack Cox sums up the wisdom gained in his thirty years' experience of camera work. And a very good motto it is too, if you extend " money " to mean not merely the stars of the picture, but whatever is most important to the film in any scene. The sudden and somewhat unexpected elevation of the cinema from the public to the saloon bar, from fish and chip shops to the Savoy Grill, from the back streets and the tenements to the parlour of the aesthete and the polite drawing rooms of the middle-class, meant an influx into the film world of a quite new type of middle-class technician, very different from the down-to-earth pioneers. No doubt they had something of value to bring, in their extra sensitivity and the niceness of their appreciation of the different shades of this and that, but their constant search for effect and pernicketiness over detail carried with it a definite loss to the film world in directness, simplicity and integrity. And so it is a very pleasant thing to meet a technician like Jack Cox who can easily hold his own with the arty boys when effect stuff is what is wanted (remember Blackmail and Murder?) and yet has kept from the old days enough honesty and common-sense to weigh up each job, decide what is important, and give it what it needs — realism or effect — without any frills. Jack Cox got his start in the film business in the tough old pre-last-war days, when if you wanted to say anything on the films you had to say it pretty loud and firm and clear; and a good job too. His sister was a great friend of Chrissie White and Jack used often to go roller skating with her and Alma Taylor at the rink at the Shepherd's Bush end of Holland Park Avenue. In 1913, when he was 16, Jack thought he's like to have a try at the film game. He'd always been interested in photography and had done all his own processing in a shed at the bottom of the garden at Chiswick — incidentally having once nearly killed himself there with sulphuric acid fumes. Anyway, Chrissie White sent him along to Cecil Hepworth, and Hep worth, who was of course at that time the big name in the film industry, passed him along to a man called Lewin Fitzhamon, who was busy churning out 400-feet epics. Fitzhamon said that he would take him on if he proved himself by tackling successfully a job he needed done — finding a wild bull in Walthamstow for one of his films. Jack, after holidays with his farmer uncle, was not at all daunted by this, and after a round of the Walthamstow butchers succeeded in locating a quite wild bull on a farm there. Anyway. Fitzhamon was delighted, and proceeded to engage him as assistant at the rate of 8/ a day, when working. This may not sound very much, but he was better off than the actors they used to hire. They only got 7/6d. a day : or, if they were called and filming didn't take place for weather or other reasons, 2 6d. Jack kept on with Fitzhamon for quite a time as assistant. Then one day they were down at Bognor filming a 400ft. thriller called The Pony Rescue. The heroine was marooned on a rock out at sea, and the boy star had to swim to her rescue on the back of a pony, which Jack had borrowed from the local milkman. There they were, all set up and ready to shoot, and no cameraman : apparently he'd decided to take a day off (his name was Gimber). At this point Jack steps forward and offers to do the turning, and from that day he's been a cameraman. Very sensibly, after deciding that lie wanted to be a cameraman more than anything else. Jack set about finding out all about it. He went to the Warwick Bioscope Trading Co. and for six months worked without pay in the lab. to get a good background. After that he went to the boss, professed himself ready to go out with a camera, and after a few^suct ful newsreel exhibitions was fully set up as a cameraman. There were not many regular jobs going in those days, but after a bit Jack struck lucky. A cameraman called Fisher told him that