The Cine Technician (1943 - 1945)

March— April, 1943 THE CINE-TECHNICIAN 33 he was starting with a man called Martini who was just opening a studio, and asked Jack to deputise for him there whilst he worked out his fortnight's notice. Jack obliged, and at the end of the fortnight Fisher changed his mind and Jack stayed on at £4 a week. In fact he was there until war broke out, and managed to get Percy Strong started there too. Nothing particularly exciting happened to Jack during the war. He joined up in 1914 with the London Scottish and got in with the transport, which meant that he had horses to look after, and that suited him down to the ground. In tact he refused the chance of a commission, as that would have meant leaving his beloved horses, and finished the war, as he began it, a plain stripeless private. One wartime coincidence for him happened at Bishops Stortford. He was sitting in his billet when the door opened and in walked Percy Strong : neither of them even knew that the other was also in the London Scottish. After being demobbed, Jack went straight back to the film business, picked up again with camerawork where he left off, and it wasn't long before he struck lucky and got a job at Stolls, where he stayed until 1926. Stolls was about the steadiest and most successful British company in those days and a very pleasant place to work in at that. Jack at this time was using one of the famous hand-turn Debries and he worked on year after year on a succession of good straightforward films with such stars as Matheson Lang, Olive Brook and Jameson Thomas. At this time he w:orked mostly with Maurice Elvey, and Jack remembers with particular pleasure the yearly film trips they had abroad, to the Kiviera or Switzerland or Morocco, when they basked in the sun, lived like fighting cocks and, as a by-product, made films. The most awful moment Jack ever had arose from one of those trips. They'd been shooting in Switzerland on a Maurice Elvey picture, Running Water, and the others having gone ahead. Jack was coming back to England with the results, about 2,000 feet of undeveloped negative. When he reached Paris the taxidriver loaded the tins in a wooden box on to the front of the taxi and secured them by a rope. Now anyone who's been to Paris knows what tin' taxi-drivers are like: it wasn't long before in taking a corner at 40 they smacked the pavement, the rope burst and forty or so valuable tins of undeveloped negative went rolling around the streets of Paris. However, everything turned out all right : Jack managed to salvage all the tins and get them back to England safely. So things went on until one day in 192(5, as he was walking down the corridor at Stolls, he was hailed by the newly arrived business manage]' and told he was getting too much money, and it was proposed to reduce his salary from £15 to £10. " Thanks very much, " said Jack, reaching for his hat and leaving Stolls for good, and with it the new business manager — Bruce Woolfe. A few days later, as he was walking down Wardour Street, Norman Walker hailed him and told him that B.I. P. was just setting up in production and that he'd have a good chance of a job there. So along he went, and sure enough landed the job at £30 a week. His first few films there were not so hot, though they included The Four Feathers and a pleasant trip to Morocco for a bit of nonsense called The White Sheik, but shortly after that he began his long and fruitful partnership 'with Alfred Hitchcock. Hitch had started in the film world writing titles, and later worked in the cutting room, but now he had recently made The Lodger for Gainsborough and the great success of that had sent him to B.I. P. with a fat contract. He had his own cameraman, C . . M , who was generally regarded as a cut above the ordinary run of cameramen and Hitch had promised to get him £50 a week at B.I. P. Well they'd been shooting for two or three days when M found out that he wasn't going to get £50 a week, and walked out in disgust. The next day they sent for Jack, told him they'd got a lovely new Mitchell for him and he was to work on Hitch's picture. That was all very well until Jack found out what his first day's assignment was to be: they were making The Ring, with Carl Brisson, and they'd built a lovely Fun Fair for it out on the lot. Jack's first day's work, with a hand-turn Mitchell he'd never used before, was a sequence of 18 camera dissolves of the various Fun Fair sideshows. Jack sweated blood over that day's work and didn't sleep at all that night. But when they saw the rushes next day, everything had turned out all right, and after that Jack was the white-headed boy. He was Hitchcock's cameraman right the way through, until Hitch left B.I. P., on that fine sequence of films that included The Ring, The Manxman, Blackmail and Murder. Of all the directors he has worked with, Jack liked Hitch best, for his quick mind, lively ideas and workmanlike way of setting about the job ; they were always going into conference together and thinking up new narrative gags and camera treatment. And it is a measure of their adaptability that when sound arrived, in the middle of shooting Blackmail, they could turn the whole production over to a talkie with a minimum of fuss. They had already done three weeks' shooting, but luckily at 24, with a motor-driven camera, so that they could use most of the stuff already shot. Those were the days when there were no blimps and the camera had to be enclosed in a travelling cabin, and Jack still treasures to this day the cover-picture of a German film magazine showing Hitch, Anny Ondra and himself (sitting in the cabin and complete with the little moustache he