The Cine Technician (1943 - 1945)

54 THE C I X E T E C H X I C I A X May— June. 1043 Bruce Woolfe did not consider Tony ready to direct yet. but he was allowed to supervise the production and to cut it. It was his first cutting job, and be had to manage with only a flat rewinder and an old projector, as they had no movieola. Shooting Stars turned out quite a success, so finally Bruce Woolfe agreed that he should direct his next script. Underground, and with that film, confirmed by his next, A Cottage on Dartmoor, he was launched as a full-scale film director. From then on he kept busy making films ; some good films, some not so good, with successes at one time and great disappointments at another. But the main point was, he kept on making films, thereby proving he was no dilettante ; and he kept his sense of craftsmanship and kept learning, thereby proving that he really cared for his job, , which is unfortunately only too rare in the British film industry. We have far too many "shooting stars " who last only a year or so and far too many "old hacks" disillusioned by years of routine. Anyway, with the coming of sound he moved with Bruce Woolfe to British Instructional at Welwyn, where he made his first talkie Tell England, from Ernest Raymond's book, and followed it with Dance, Little Lady from Compton Mackenzie's Carnival. About 1934 he went to GvB. to direct a very successful light comedy-musical The Lucky Number, with Clifford Mollison and Gordon Harker. Then followed, as for so many people in the film industry, those depressing years of slump, unemployment, false hopes and disappointment. Tony was unlucky enough to get tied up with Max Schach, and for four long years the only film he made was the unfortunate Moscow Nights, which he'd sooner forget all about. At the end of that time he was pretty well in despair, and it says much for his tenacity and staying power that he kept plugging away at the film business and didn't cut his losses and get out into something else, as with his connections no doubt he could so easily have done. I remember well the day in 1938 when he came to see me, and we had a drink together and he told me he was just on his way to an appointment with a man called Gabriel Pascal. and did I know anything about him. Well, we neither of us knew anything much about him then, but agreed that anything was worth trying once, and so Tony went along to see him. The result, of course, was Pygmalion, which was a tremendous success, made Pascal's name for him and put Tony back right on the map. As a matter of fact t.h;it meeting was just as fortunate for Pascal as it was for Tony: Pascal had been dickering with Lee Grarmes to direct Pygmalion, and with all due respect to Garmes as a cameraman it was Vsquith's direction of bhe film that made all the difference between success and failure. Once re-established by Pygmalion, Tony has been busy direct ing ever since. First he went to Sound City, his favourite studio, and made French Without Tears, Freedom Radio and Quiet Wedding. Then he went back to G.B. (to whom he is under contract for two films a year) and made Uncensored and. his .best yet, We Dive at Dawn. Next, back to Denham to make The Demi-Paradise, with Laurence Olivier, and today he's working on the script of his next one for G.B., Fanny by Gaslight. Of all the films he's made, Tony has a special affection for Tell England, or rather for one sequence in particular of it. This is natural enough, as it was his first talkie (though they did do a version of Cottage on Dartmoor with sound on disc). On this particular sequence he hardly left the cutting-room for a week on end, working away sound-cutting, as they had to in those days, without a four-way. This sequence, for which he has such a great affection as the child of his brain only, is the unsuccessful attempt of the "River Clyde " to land troops on the beaches of Gallippli by daylight. The whole of the sequence, incident for incident and word for word, had been built up from the official records and from eye-witness accounts, and they had gone to Malta to shoot it. Shooting was done very carefully and successfully, particularly of the troops trying to land from the barges under machine-gun fire. One little device which came off completely was to get a camera assistant to tie a Newman Sinclair round his neck by a handkerchief and then wade ashore with the troops. As he reached the beach, bullet holes tore across the sand in front of the camera, the assistant stumbled on to his knees and then turned on his back leaving the camera pointing at the sky, and at that moment a soldier, shot, appeared over the camera and fell full upon it. The result was a shot that made the whole scene come alive to the audience ; and the whole of the cutting too was aimed at maximum effect. For instance, where the four Turk machine-guns open fire on the barges, he took 8ft. lengths of shots of troops landing and frame-cut (alternate frames) into each of them 2ft. lengths of the firing of each machine-gun in succession. The result was a very successful effect of staccato superimpositions. Anyway, that is his favourite sequence, and I'm bound to admit that it came off completely. But I hope his affection for that sequence and a nostalgic feeling for his early days doesn't blind him to the fact that We Dive at Dawn is by far his best film to date, much better than Tell England, and altogether a very fine piece of work indeed. Xo doubt he misses from those early days the chance to cut Ins films himself (and in tact they do often need it these days') and he looks back with regret to those youthful times of enthusiasm for art ; but whatever he's lost in that way he's more than