Charles Crichton

Quentin Falk, Brian McFarlane, Neil Sinyard

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781526149947
• Topic: Medios de comunicación y artes escénicas
• Subtopic: Historia y crítica cinematográficas

Charles Crichton is perhaps best remembered as the director of the unlikely blockbuster hit A Fish Called Wanda, made when he was seventy-seven years old. But the most significant part of his career was spent at Ealing Studios in the 1940s and 1950s, working on such beloved comedies as Hue and Cry, The Lavender Hill Mob and The Titfield Thunderbolt. Nonetheless, as this pioneering study of Crichton's work reveals, his filmmaking skills extended way beyond comedy to wartime dramas and film noir, and his adaptability served him well when he made the transition into primetime television, working on popular shows such as The Avengers, Space: 1999 and The Adventures of Black Beauty. Featuring first-hand testimony from colleagues ranging from Dame Judi Dench and Petula Clark to John Cleese and Sir Michael Palin, this riveting account of Crichton's fascinating life in film will appeal to film scholars and general readers alike.

Cutting for Korda: 1932–35

1

On 17 March 1936, following a severe winter, and just weeks before Alexander Korda’s extravagantly oversized new studio complex at Denham was officially due to open, fire ‘tore through two of the newly erected sound stages, destroying the roofs and sound-proofing’.¹ Anything between ten and fifteen fire brigades from all over Buckinghamshire, depending on which breathless report you believed – including dramatic aerial newsreel footage with its barked narration – attended the spectacular blaze that had started in the early hours of that Tuesday morning, eventually causing nearly £50,000 worth of damage, another severe financial blow – over £3m in today’s terms – to Korda’s already cash-stretched film empire.

Writing to his mother a month later, on 19 April, Crichton noted:

The studio is quiet. They are shooting in it for the first time tomorrow – some retakes of the ‘Miracle Man’ [HG Wells’s The Man Who Could Work Miracles]. Unfortunately they have not yet tried out the lighting apparatus and everybody is terrified we may have a fire again. So besides the ordinary call for the unit and actors, there is a call for all the local fire brigades. It would be a pity for Korda and Co. to be roasted alive.

Whether it was the spectre of fire or, more likely, the imminent, increasingly nightmarish prospect of editing over fifty-five hours of location footage from India on Robert Flaherty’s much-vaunted new feature project, Elephant Boy (based on Kipling’s original story, Toomai of the Elephants), Crichton was to be found musing, rather too world-wearily for a twenty-five-year-old, on the meaning of life – his in particular – earlier in that same letter to his mother:

Would you kindly explain to me 1. Why are there so many good things to do? 2. Why there is so little time to do them in? 3. Why it is necessary to work at fixed hours? Work is alright only one should just do it when one feels like it. It seems a shame to waste one’s life inside when one could be doing all sorts of peculiar things in all sorts of corners of the world.

In his fifth year of cutting for Korda, a claustrophobic occupation if ever there was one, Crichton, still months away from marriage later that same year, might well have been pining for the great outdoors of Canada where a few years earlier, before going to university, he had spent some months gold prospecting near St Felicien in the Province of Quebec. He wrote home at the time: ‘It is cold, it rains hard and we are working at the bottom of a bottomless pit which is full of mud … We have had to timber the sides to prevent them falling in. Every now and then somebody cries despairingly as he sinks beneath the mud, but always the relentless work in search of gold goes on.’ On reflection, his youthful observations seem now perfectly to serve as a metaphor for his future work as a film editor then later as a director.

Born on 6 August 1910, in Wallasey, just across the river from Liverpool, and less than a mile from the Irish Sea, Crichton was the second of four children (there were also twins who died tragically young) to John Douglas Crichton, known as ‘J.D.’, who, like his wife Hester, was of Scottish stock. Crichton senior, an unconventional man who often jauntily sported a black Basque beret rather than the traditional bowler on his way into the city, where he worked in shipping middle management, went off to war in 1914, fell down a hole and was wounded.

Crichton first attended a neighbourhood prep school within spitting distance of the Cheshire shore where he and his friends excitedly spotted the first camouflage ship ever seen in the Mersey, as well as scarred troops returning from the disastrous Zeebrugge Raid six months before the Armistice in 1918. He was then sent south to board at a boys’ prep school, St Piran’s, outside Maidenhead, where he was an exact contemporary of F.R. ‘Freddie’ Brown, who became an England Test cricketer. St Piran’s, which two of his grandsons would attend some seventy years later, had a fine reputation despite, it is said, the headmaster having a penchant for whisky, not to mention an abiding passion for the matron with whom he eventually ran away to open a hotel in Mousehole, Cornwall.

After public school at Oundle in Leicestershire – where fellow pupils included Peter Scott, Harry Llewellyn, John Whitworth, Michael Ashby and Kenneth Robinson, later, respectively, naturalist, show jumper, ace pilot, neurologist and Labour cabinet minister – then New College, Oxford, reading modern history, Crichton began to ponder various careers including journalism. He might well have proved a harsh theatre critic judging by an excerpt from one of a number of student letters to his mother in 1929 in which he criticised some of the performers and even a famed Russian playwright of a farce about matrimony and matchmaking: ‘We went to the Playhouse on Friday to see the Cambridge Festival Co perform “Marraige” [sic] by Gogol. It was rather disappointing, the acting was very badly overdone, only two actors one of whom was Robert Donat were any good. The costumes were hectic. The plot was poor. I understand that the Oxford Players are infinitely superior.’ Little could he have known then that within a couple of years he would find himself working in much closer proximity to the same Donat, then an emerging British stage actor, five years Crichton’s senior, who was about to make his screen debut for Alexander Korda. A regular filmgoer as silent cinema began to be overtaken by the talkies, mostly ‘terrible, awful films to which I used to drag my mother,’² said Crichton. There were shining exceptions to the mediocrity, notably, he would later recall, two of René Clair’s early masterpieces, the musical comedies, Sous les toits de Paris (1930), followed a year later while he was still up at Oxford, by Le Million (1931).

Asked years on what films or film-makers had influenced him, he would regularly cite Clair and ‘the soufflé-like quality’ of those two particular titles.

He was also an enthusiastic member of the university’s film club, and it is also likely he regularly attended screenings of the Film Society, which had been established in 1925 with among its founder members, another Oxford man, Anthony ‘Puffin’ Asquith, whose own distinguished screen career began in earnest shortly before Crichton’s.

The Film Society’s brief was ‘to encourage “the production of really artistic films” by showing those which the trade deemed un-commercial or which the censor refused’.³

Considering retrospectively some of Crichton’s own credits, which would often embrace a gritty, drama-documentary feel, it is fascinating to speculate whether he might have been present at, say, one of the Society’s most famous, silent, double bills, in 1929, at the New Gallery cinema in Regent Street: Eisenstein’s epic Battleship Potemkin (1925) paired with John Grierson’s brand new Drifters, an influential documentary about North Sea herring fishermen. The great Russian director also lectured at the same event.

If cinemagoing during, arguably, the medium’s most significant and thrilling transition, was the initial spark, then the fire seems properly to have been lit in the young man following a fateful confrontation when Korda and Co. came to Oxford. Thoughts of any other possible career path were now swiftly swept aside as Crichton ‘suddenly thought, to hell with it, all I’m interested in is films’.⁴ Gone were any doubts expressed mildly in another student letter to his mother: ‘I am not so sure it is going to be worth my while studying the flicks after all. It is rather a crowded business. I was talking to an undergrad yesterday who told me he had been to every flick in Oxford this week – there are five. I understand the night he didn’t go was Nov. 5th when more was happening outside than in.’ After film-making in his native Hungary beginning way back in 1914, followed by, variously, Vienna, Berlin, Hollywood and Paris, Alexander Korda, born Sandor Laszlo Kellner, and his much-travelled cinematic troupe, principally fellow expatriates like his brothers, Zoltan and Vincent, as well as scenarist Lajos Biro, finally fetched up in England at the turn of the 1930s.

‘If Korda had not come to England, the British cinema of the thirties,’ noted Karol Kulik, one of his biographers, ‘might well have taken a different course. For the rest of his career, Korda brought ambition, recognition, imagination and glamour to an industry that needed his optimism and his showman’s talent.’⁵

The essential Englishness of Korda’s new British-based adventure would be epitomised in the screen logo he dreamed up for his company – Big Ben, sited at the very heart of parliamentary democracy. But London Film Productions’ first great success, The Private Life of Henry VIII, was still more than eighteen months away as ‘the foundations of British hopes for waging a successful campaign against Hollywood’s domination of world markets’,⁶ were initiated by the much-travelled would-be mogul then still at the comparatively young age of thirty-eight.

As plans for Henry VIII gestated slowly, London Films dived headlong into production with a series of films, so-called ‘quota quickies’, in a deal with Paramount. The first of these was Men of Tomorrow, about a group of Oxford undergraduates and their aftermath, played by, among others, Emlyn Williams, Merle Oberon – who would become the second Mrs Korda in 1939 – and the aforementioned Robert Donat. Korda signed up the forty-two-year-old German actress-turned-director Leontine Sagan, then a very rare woman in an almost wholly male-dominated profession, probably because of her film, Maedchen in Uniform, set in an all-girls boarding school, which with its hothouse blend of homoeroticism and brutality had caused quite a stir on release in 1931.

As Sagan was shooting locations on Men of Tomorrow in Oxford, Crichton, still ‘up’, decided to try and get some useful advice...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Information
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Also by Quentin Falk
• Contents
• List of figures
• Series editors’ foreword
• Acknowledgements
• Frontispiece
• Introduction
• 1 Cutting for Korda: 1932–35
• 2 Cutting for Korda: 1936–40
• 3 The forties: Enter Ealing, 1940–45
• 4 The forties: 1946–49
• 5 The fifties: 1950–54
• 6 The fifties: Exit Ealing, 1954–59
• 7 The sixties: 1960–64
• 8 The sixties: 1965–69
• 9 The seventies: Downsizing
• 10 The eighties: Ealing regained
• Appendix 1: An attitude to direction
• Appendix 2: Memories of a mentor
• Filmography
• Selected bibliography
• Index