The Cine Technician (1943 - 1945)

52 THE CINE-TECHNICIAN May— June, 1943 Edited by Frank Sainsbury ANTHONY ASQUITH must be one of the very few A.C.T. members who can claim to have spent a large portion of their childhood playing in the garden of No. 10 Downing Street with Megan Lloyd George as playmate. Practically the only one, in fact, I should say. For the first 30 years of its existence the cinema was hardly considered respectable in high-toned circles and it was not till after the great war that it began to attract the university-type man as a career. King Vidor, I suppose, was one of the first college graduates to go to work in Hollywood ; whilst in England Anthony Asquith, by joining the industry in 1926 and choosing film direction as a career, gaye the film world the final cachet of respectability. Today the impression you get is that the vast majority of Oxford and Cambridge undergraduates, together with the products of all the co-educational establishments and those " educated privately," are all as enthusiastic as good breeding will allow to grace the film business with the charm of their presence. And it must be said that they're an unmitigated nuisance and do very little but harm. What they forget is that it's not enough to have a university education, social connections and so-called artistic leanings to make a famous film director: if you're going to be any i at all, Mm need, like Asquith, enthusiasm, integrity, staying power and. perhaps most of all, the capacity really to care about what you're doing. But we can't blame him for their shortngs. On the face of it Tony's background would appear distinctly unpromising for a would-be film CLOSE-UPS No. 21 — ANTHONY ASQUITH director. His mother, of course, is the famous Lady Margot Asquith, one of the most refreshing personalities of high society oyer the past 40 years. His father, Herbert Asquith, was Prime Minister from 1908 to 1916. which accounts for Tony lning at No. 10, and during that period (the period of the Unemployment Insurance and National Health Acts) Lloyd George as Chancellor of the Exchequer lived next door, which accounts for him having Megan Lloyd George as playmate. The Asquiths were a big family of boys and girls mixed (his father had married twice) who all got on well together in a friendly no-nonsense kind of way, and Tony was the youngest of the whole lot. Their holidays they spent together partly at Downing Street and partly in the country on theFirth of Forth, between North Lerwick and the Forth Bridge. Tony always enjoyed Scotland and made particular friends with the local joiner, but on the whole he admits to being essentially a town bird, and a cockney at that. Tony went through the conventional process of education at Winchester and Balliol College, Oxford, and he was a Scholar (that is, bright boy) of both places. So far the dark shadow of the film game had not crossed his path at all, thou<j' showed signs of slipping by getting only Seconds instead of Firsts at Oxford, which was nearly unheard of for a Classical Scholar of Balliol. The trouble was that although he got on well with Plato and Aristotle lie couldn't get interested in history. As a matter of fact at this time his great love was music, and he had had hopes of taking it up permanently as a career. But by nov had convinced himself that he'd never be a great composer and reluctantly abandoned the idea. Oi course he always kept and still keeps his interest in music, as anyone can see who looks at the way he cut his films (when he used to cut them himself), for music and film-cutting are very similar crafts. Anyway, when he left Oxford he hail no very clear idea of what he wanted to do. The family had vague leanings towards the Law. which was somewhat of a family pursuit, but Tony knew very well that he wasn't suited for that. B never thought of films seriously until he was Oxford. and then not until he saw the old German The Golem with Paul Wegener. Then he realised for the first time that film could be used, as he