On 17 March 1936, following a severe winter, and just weeks before Alexander Kordaâs extravagantly oversized new studio complex at Denham was officially due to open, fire âtore through two of the newly erected sound stages, destroying the roofs and sound-proofingâ.1 Anything between ten and fifteen fire brigades from all over Buckinghamshire, depending on which breathless report you believed â including dramatic aerial newsreel footage with its barked narration â attended the spectacular blaze that had started in the early hours of that Tuesday morning, eventually causing nearly ÂŁ50,000 worth of damage, another severe financial blow â over ÂŁ3m in todayâs terms â to Kordaâs already cash-stretched film empire.
Writing to his mother a month later, on 19 April, Crichton noted:
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 Flahertyâs much-vaunted new feature project, Elephant Boy (based on Kiplingâs 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 â his in particular â earlier in that same letter to his mother:
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: âIt 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.â 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 âJ.D.â, 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 boysâ prep school, St Piranâs, outside Maidenhead, where he was an exact contemporary of F.R. âFreddieâ Brown, who became an England Test cricketer. St Piranâs, 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 â 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 â 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: âWe went to the Playhouse on Friday to see the Cambridge Festival Co perform âMarraigeâ [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.â 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 Crichtonâs 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 âterrible, awful films to which I used to drag my mother,â2 said Crichton. There were shining exceptions to the mediocrity, notably, he would later recall, two of RenĂ© Clairâs 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 âthe soufflĂ©-like qualityâ of those two particular titles.
He was also an enthusiastic member of the universityâs 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 âPuffinâ Asquith, whose own distinguished screen career began in earnest shortly before Crichtonâs.
The Film Societyâs brief was âto encourage âthe production of really artistic filmsâ by showing those which the trade deemed un-commercial or which the censor refusedâ.3
Considering retrospectively some of Crichtonâs 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 Societyâs most famous, silent, double bills, in 1929, at the New Gallery cinema in Regent Street: Eisensteinâs epic Battleship Potemkin (1925) paired with John Griersonâs 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 mediumâs 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 âsuddenly thought, to hell with it, all Iâm interested in is filmsâ.4 Gone were any doubts expressed mildly in another student letter to his mother: âI 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 â there are five. I understand the night he didnât go was Nov. 5th when more was happening outside than in.â 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.
âIf Korda had not come to England, the British cinema of the thirties,â noted Karol Kulik, one of his biographers, âmight 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 showmanâs talent.â5
The essential Englishness of Kordaâs new British-based adventure would be epitomised in the screen logo he dreamed up for his company â Big Ben, sited at the very heart of parliamentary democracy. But London Film Productionsâ first great success, The Private Life of Henry VIII, was still more than eighteen months away as âthe foundations of British hopes for waging a successful campaign against Hollywoodâs domination of world marketsâ,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 âquota quickiesâ, 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 â who would become the second Mrs Korda in 1939 â 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 âupâ, decided to try and get some useful advice...