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BERLIN AND INDUSTRIAL BRITAIN
Grierson knew Flaherty's methods; .£2,500 might be exhausted in prehminary shooting before a foot of usable film was taken. He knew that he could only employ Flaherty for a short period and he devised a way of using him to the best purpose, limiting his expenditure.
Basil Wright was going out to shoot his first film, finally known as The Country Comes to Town, some of the locations of which were in Devonshire. Grierson said that it would help Flaherty in shooting a film about Industrial Britain to go to Devon and watch Basil Wright shoot his film about cows. He was as much concerned with what Flaherty could teach his young men as he was with what Flaherty might ultimately shoot.
'So I found myself,' recalls Wright, 'driving Flaherty whom I regarded with immense awe in a dilapidated Buick two-seater roadster from London to Exeter and points west. He was extremely nervous and round about Runnymede he said this was because he had been deeply affected by Murnau's death in California.
'But when he reached Camberley, he said he was in need of refreshment. I pulled into a pub and here the unpredictability of the great man hit me for the first time. I wanted to reach our Devon location as soon as possible ; but over pints of bitter (which I think he didn't like but drank for experience) he saw a shove ha'penny board. He wanted to know everything about the game. More interesting is that before he even learnt the rules, in a tactile series of gestures he had appreciated the qualities of the board, the silky smoothness of the wooden surface and the craftsmanship of the brass strips which, carefully hinged, separated one "bed" from another. As soon as he betrayed his interest, we became involved in a series of games.1
'With a lot of, as I thought, nervous tact, I finally got him back into the car. He soon fell into a doze and I took the BasingstokeStockbridge run at full speed, passing my favourite pub whose architecture and position in a glorious landscape would have caught Flaherty's eyes, if they had not been shut.
'After an indifferent lunch at Salisbury, I could not get away before he had seen the Cathedral. We drove to the Close. He was rapt
1 At The Highlander, the Dean Street pub which succeeded The Coronet, as the documentary 'local', Flaherty became a shove ha'penny adept. It was the sort of skill he loved.
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