The next few films out of Ealing had something of a continental flavour about them. Frieda (1947) concerned an RAF officer returning home to a small English town with a German bride, the girl who helped him escape from a prison camp, but they both face prejudice and hostility. It was an interesting premise; the critic of the Sunday Pictorial thought the film, ‘Something of a cinema rarity – a film which stimulates intelligent thought and argument.’
Director Basil Dearden, however, faced the problem of finding an English-speaking German actress to play the title role. When no suitable candidate could be found in Germany – no surprise given the fact their cinema industry had been decimated and inactive for years – Balcon happened to catch a screening of the Swedish film Torment (1944) at an arts cinema and was hugely impressed by the performance of the little known Mai Zetterling, and he brought her over to London.
Mai’s English was poor at first but she quickly settled down, although she was dismayed by the behaviour of her co-star David Farrar, who she claimed always seemed to be late for his morning call. ‘When we, on time, went to fetch him in the morning, we would find him idly sipping champagne.’
According to Alex Douet, who was the clapper loader on Frieda, Mai was very closely monitored during the whole of filming by her actor husband Tutte Lemkow. ‘Mai was very young at the time and a very pretty girl, so Tutte never took his eyes off her.’ Alex also remembers that the studio arranged for two different endings of the film to be shot, one in which Frieda stays behind in England with her husband, the other in which she returns alone to Germany.
Alex was just seventeen at the time of the making of Frieda and had only recently left school. Killing time before National Service, his mother, who worked as a secretary for Monja Danischewsky in the publicity department, managed to get him an interview with Hal Mason. Luckily someone in the camera department had been called up themselves and Alex was brought in as a replacement at £3 10 shillings a week; ‘of which I gave my mother ten bob.’
At first Alex found the size of the studio a little overwhelming, and some of the people a bit intimidating, especially general manager Hal Mason. ‘He was a bit of a toughie, but he was the sort of man that Balcon needed to deal with the unions and to keep productions on schedule. But to a seventeen-year-old he was a pretty godly figure, like a headmaster.’ What lingers most vividly in the memory though is the sense of adventure of it all; not long out of the classroom, Alex was travelling abroad with film units and film stars. ‘It was quite exciting for a teenager, I must say.’ Straight after Frieda, Alex went to Belgium to shoot Against the Wind (1948). ‘We did location work in a little town called Bouillon in the Ardennes and, at the time, the place was still pretty well ruined. It wasn’t a very good film to be truthful. It was photographed by Lionel Barnes, who was a good solid photographer without being anything very brilliant.’
Against the Wind was a story about the Belgium resistance, so again Ealing required the services of a European actress. It was Françoise Rosay who recommended an unknown young actress who had recently appeared in a film directed by her husband, Jacques Feyder. Her name was Simone Signoret. Director Charles Crichton and the film’s associate producer, Sidney Cole, flew over to Paris to meet with her at the bar of the Georges V hotel. The pair were so taken by Simone they phoned Balcon that night full of enthusiasm and she became the only leading actress Balcon ever cast in one of his films without a prior meeting or introduction.
Simone arrived at the studio with no pretensions to glamour whatsoever; she wore no make-up, dressed in plain clothes and was slightly overweight. ‘But she immediately captivated all of us who came in contact with her,’ said Balcon. Against the Wind was not a success, but Simone went on to have a distinguished career in French and international movies. Alex thought her to be something of a ‘prima donna. But a rather splendid actress I thought. I also remember that she and Gordon Jackson, who in the film are supposed to be having an affair, there was such an extraordinary lack of anything between them. I think it was pretty obvious in the film actually. There was no chemistry there at all.’
Saraband for Dead Lovers (1948) was a milestone for Ealing, an impressive romantic period melodrama about a doomed royal love affair set against the backdrop of the seventeenth-century court of Hanover, it was the studio’s first film made in colour. Over the years, filming in black and white came with its own unique set of problems as Norman Dorme recalls. ‘In the early days the white collars on a dress suit were bright yellow because they would photograph more white in black and white than white did!’ On Saraband Ealing were using the Technicolor process and Norman remembers that a middle-aged woman by the name of Natalie Kalmus was on set every day. The wife of Technicolor founder Herbert T. Kalmus, Natalie was credited as the ‘colour supervisor’ of virtually all Technicolor features made from 1934 to 1949. ‘A strange woman,’ claims Norman. ‘She had to approve what we were doing, but that was bullshit really. There were certain things that you had to be careful with, some colours would photograph stronger than others. It was about getting the balance right. But I think a lot of nonsense was talked about Technicolor because it was a relatively new process.’
The film’s star was Stewart Granger, on loan from Rank, who, when he arrived on the set, was somewhat dismayed to see that producer Michael Relph had all the scenes sketched on a large board, including all the actor’s positions and moves.
Granger’s first scene was opposite Françoise Rosay. No sooner had director Basil Dearden consulted the drawings and given Françoise her instructions, that she had to move to such and such a spot on the floor on such and such a line, than the French actress hit the roof. She wasn’t having any of it and refused to work under such restrictions. Granger quietly smiled to himself and suggested that it made better sense to do a quick rehearsal in order to work out the moves. For the remainder of the shoot the board of drawings was never seen again, the same went for Relph.
Location shooting took place in the city of Prague, where the historic cobblestone streets proved something of a hindrance due to the fact that hundreds of extras playing soldiers had been given cheap wooden clogs that made an almighty clatter when they had to march about. Costume designer Anthony Mendleson and his staff had to stay up all night gluing felt onto the soles to render them silent.
Mendleson was often called at the last minute to a set to correct or fix some unexpected problem. A couple of years later on Pool of London, a drama about a pair of sailors on shore leave caught up in a diamond-smuggling racket, there was something wrong with actress Renée Asherson’s cheap cotton dressing gown. Arriving on the set Mendleson couldn’t for the life of him see what the problem was. The director was Basil Dearden, who Mendleson didn’t find the easiest person to deal with, and when he asked what was wrong Dearden stared back blankly at him, ‘Well look …’ Mendleson took another look at Renée and it was then that he noticed it, her dressing gown and the wallpaper of the set were exactly the same colour and pattern! It was a chance in a million.
‘Well, what do you want me to do?’ asked Mendleson. ‘I can change the dressing gown …’
‘Oh there’s not time for that!’ said Dearden exasperatedly. ‘Well then you’d better change the wallpaper.’ Out came the spray gun.
One of Ealing’s most prestigious films was Scott of the Antarctic (1948), another film shot using the Technicolor process. Charles Frend was looking for a subject of genuinely epic proportion and was drawn to the story of Captain Robert Falcon Scott’s doomed expedition. From the outset Balcon wanted authenticity; survivors were contacted and interviewed and Scott’s widow was fully behind the project. Original photographs taken on the expedition were studied carefully in order for the sets and costumes to be replicated exactly. Also many of the cast were chosen due to their resemblance to the real characters they were playing: Kenneth More, James Robertson Justice, Derek Bond and a young Christopher Lee. For the role of Captain Scott himself, Balcon personally chose John Mills, the screen embodiment of stiff upper-lip Britishness. Mills accepted the invitation unequivocally; it was a role he had always wanted to play.
The cast and crew flew to Switzerland for location shooting on the Jungfrau, one of the main summits in the Bernese Alps. For the next ten days the actors trudged across treacherous snowfields at heights of 11,000 feet. It was exhausting work in spite of everyone having undergone strict training for weeks. Nothing can prepare for accidents, however, and Mills was almost killed shooting one particular sequence. On ‘action’ he simply had to walk fifty yards dead ahead across the virgin snow to a large rock, stop to surmise the horizon and then beckon his men with their sledges to follow. That part was easy: ‘I then took one step forward and completely disappeared from view.’ Mills had fallen down a crevasse. ‘As I hung swinging like a pendulum from side to side I looked down: beneath me the drop must have been at least 200 feet.’ Luckily his harness was tied securely to his own sledge and his fellow actors were able to pull him out.
To play Scott, Mills undertook rigorous research, speaking to the explorer’s son Peter, the renowned ornithologist and conservationist, who allowed the actor unhindered access to family letters and documents. Mills reached the conclusion that Scott was, ‘A fascinatingly complex character, a born leader, with tremendous physical stamina and courage.’ He was also moody and prone to fits of temper that couldn’t always be controlled. It was this side of Scott’s personality that Mills was forbidden to portray, for fear of upsetting surviving family members. Still, Mills later admitted that no other picture he made in his entire career had more of an influence and effect on him.
After Switzerland the unit moved to Finse in Norway, an isolated hamlet nestled within an expansive rocky valley 120 miles from Oslo where Scott himself had trained due to its arctic-like conditions. Some three decades later, George Lucas chose Finse to double for the ice planet Hoth in The Empire Strikes Back. On the camera unit was young Alex Douet.
Finse was an amazing place, right at the foot of the Hardangerjøkulen glacier. The Norwegian army helped us with supplies and transport. I think we went there in October because it was just beginning to freeze and every morning we would toil our way up through the scree up to the top of the glacier where we did most of the filming.
The weather that Mills and the crew encountered was certainly formidable; packed lunches often froze solid and two of the cameramen were flown home with frostbite after they took their gloves off and their fingers became welded to the machinery. It was sheer drudgery for weeks, up at five in the morning and a ninety-minute hike up the glacier to the plateau. Some days were so cold with fierce blizzards that filming was impossible.
Other times, however, incompetence or poor planning resulted in delays. This was something that Mills took up personally when he wrote to Balcon:
Conditions here are undoubtedly difficult. Charles is doing his best to get as much done as possible in the face of odds. I feel – and please treat this confidentially – that the organisation could be better. Yesterday we wasted hours on top of the glacier (with good weather conditions for shooting) waiting for things and people that were missing.
Balcon replied:
Your letter of Sunday came as rather a shock to me. Of course I knew that the unit was facing difficulties. What does worry me, however, is the suggestion that the organisation is not all that it should be. This is something we rather pride ourselves upon at Ealing.
For authenticity, Frend shot the film in continuity and so by the end the actors’ beards had grown to an absurdly bedraggled lengths so that they all looked like extras from a Viking film. On their last night in Finse, permission was given to shave them off and the actors all returned from their private bathrooms to the hotel bar, ‘looking like a group of very young French poofs, with baby pink cheeks and scarlet lips,’ as Mills described it. Their Norwegian guides, who’d worked closely with the cast for weeks, could hardly contain their mirth and everyone got sloshed, ending up under the table as dawn rose.
Returning to Ealing, the frosty landscapes had been painstakingly duplicated. Norman Dorme worked on the film and remembers the Antarctic cyclorama that was set up all around the stage to create the illusion. ‘There was a ramp up to horizon height all round, so wherever you looked it went right up to the horizon and that created a forced perspective.’ The special effects crew sprayed the set with an artificial mist that made the actors gag and cough and they had to suck on foul-tasting lozenges to make their breath appear frozen. After experimenting with salt, the snow was replicated using a foamed urea-formaldehyde compound brought to the studio in slabs, broken up by machines and then blasted everywhere by a ten-foot diameter fan. Norman doesn’t think anyone on the crew had to wear protective goggles. ‘We didn’t bother with things like that, Health and Safety didn’t exist then, there was no such thing, you looked after yourself. Still, it wasn’t a very pleasant set to work on.’
In total three cameramen worked on the film, Osmond Borradaile took a three-man camera unit to Antarctica returning with some spectacular exterior shots; Geoffrey Unsworth handled the location shooting; while Jack Cardiff took control of the camera in the studio. Alex remembers Cardiff, regarded today as one of the most remarkable cameramen in British film, whose visual brilliance added immeasurably to such classics as Black Narcissus and The Red Shoes, as ‘an agreeable fella’, and ‘someone who knew exactly his own mind’. Charlie Frend, however, was different: ‘I thought he was a slightly distant man.’
Robert Winter also worked on the film and recalls the afternoon in the dubbing theatre when they ran the rough cut of the film for Balcon. ‘Mick turned to John Mills and said, “What do you think of it?” After a long pause John replied, “I think it’s monumental.” There was another long pause, then Mick said, “You mean it’s a heap of shit!”’
Scott of the Antarctic was chosen as 1948’s Royal Film Performance and premiered at the Empire, Leicester Square. A worthwhile film rather than a particularly distinguished one, there is no denying it is certainly well crafted and acted, and the bleak white vistas are enhanced by a majestically desolate score from Ralph Vaughan Williams, which the composer wrote without watching a single frame of the film, relying only on photographs taken from the ill-fated expedition and reference books.
While Halliwell’s indispensible Film Guide calls it a ‘stiff upper lip saga par excellence’, the film was not a box office success and performed particularly badly in America. ‘The American public has no interest in failure,’ wrote Balcon. ‘Even if it is heroic failure, and certainly they do not easily accept other people’s legends.’ Early signs were not good when the script was submitted to the US censor, which at the time took a dim view of the portrayal of suicide on screen. Writing back they suggested that Captain Oates’ gallant sacrifice, of walking out of a tent into a blizzard with the famous words – ‘I am just going outside, and may be some time,’ be amended. Hopefully Balcon told them where to go. In any event, the scene remains in the film.
Scott of the Antarctic proved to be Alex’s last hurrah at Ealing as he was called up for National Service shortly after filming ended. He had enjoyed his time at the studio immensely; coming as he did from boarding school, the hierarchy of a film unit wasn’t all that different, with everyone knowing their place. ‘There was a hierarchy at Ealing, there had to be discipline, and people like Dearden, Crichton and the others were a cut above the rest of us. I thought it was fine, I thought it was comparatively easy going, but then I’d had ten years or more in a boarding school.’
What did surprise him though was the almost iron grip that the electrical union had on production. ‘Everything would be slowed down in order to get another hour’s overtime, “double bubble” they called it. What the ETU (Electrical Trade Union) said governed to some extent the pace of the production. It was a very strong trade union. They were powerful people.’
When he came out of the Services, Alex did not re-enter the film business, realising it held no real charm for him. ‘I didn’t have any ambition to go into the cinema, which was just as well because I didn’t have any aptitude for it either. The technical side of film-making I found wasn’t particularly interesting and I certainly didn’t have any creative spark that was going to produce anything very much.’ Alex instead went into the business world and later taught history at a university. It’s a decision he never regretted, but he looks back with fondness and a little pride at having contributed, however small, to a little piece of Ealing’s history.