David Peers has never forgotten the advice his father gave him when he announced one day his intention to make the cinema his career – don’t go into the film business, it’s a mad world! So, of course, he did. David’s father certainly knew what he was talking about. Victor Peers entered the film industry as a youngster in 1919. By the early 1930s he was production manager on several films for Gaumont-British, and for a time was general manager at Pinewood Studios. In 1946 he joined Sidney Bernstein and Alfred Hitchcock at Transatlantic Pictures and worked uncredited on Rope (1948) and Under Capricorn (1949). Much later he was one of the founder directors of Granada television. David had grown up around film people, it had been so much a part of his life that when he left the army in 1947 he really didn’t want to do anything else, in spite of his father’s warning. ‘So I decided to follow in his footsteps rather than to follow his advice and I asked him if he would give me an introduction to get me started.’
The name he was given was John Croydon, who had recently been appointed head of a subsidiary company of Rank to make a succession of quick and cheap B pictures in a studio that had been converted from a former synagogue in Highbury. The idea was to utilise the services of members of what became known as the Rank Charm School, actors such as Christopher Lee, Anthony Steel and Diana Dors. ‘I got a job as third assistant director at £2 12 shillings a week. And of course I made the tea. But I also helped to make some pictures and began to learn the craft of film production.’
In the summer of 1948, Rank closed the subsidiary company down and David found himself out of work.
After several weeks of unemployment I thought maybe my father was right and I should get out of the film business. Nothing much appealed to me. I was unqualified for any academic post and so I turned in desperation to the thing nearest to hand, an ironmonger’s shop in Croydon. They turned me down saying I would never make a shop assistant.
Then, out of the blue, he was contacted by Elstree Studios, who were about to put into production a film version of the West End hit musical The Dancing Years by Ivor Novello. Again hired as a third assistant director, much of the shooting took place on location in Vienna, which at that time was still under four-power control; America, Britain, France and Russia, each controlling its own sector and movement between each sector was not easy. The film, which was directed by Harold French and starred Dennis Price, turned out to be a flop, but David found it enormous fun to make, save for one incident at a nightclub called Maxims. Still somewhat naive about the ways of the world, when a hostess joined David’s table he allowed her to order champagne, which it turned out he didn’t have the money to pay for.
The manager was called and I had to forfeit my passport, which was, in the circumstances, a crazy thing to do. The next morning I had to confess to the producer that I had lost my passport. Dennis Price heard about this and in a show of bravado went down to the club the next evening to reclaim it. The manager promptly called the police and Dennis was thrown into jail. For the film having its leading man in jail was not exactly a minor mishap and it was soon discovered I was the culprit. I thought my film days were over, but the producer coughed up the money and my precious passport was returned. And Dennis, enjoying the whole episode, came back the next day. For the rest of the shoot I kept a very low profile.
Returning to England, the search began for another film job. David’s father was on friendly terms with Balcon and a few choice words on the right occasion led within weeks to David landing a job as second assistant director on Passport to Pimlico.
‘In many ways the second and third ADs had the greatest fun. They would be concerned with ensuring the artists turned up at the right time for Make-up, Hair and Wardrobe. Often this meant a six o’clock call at the studio. They would also have to organise any crowd scenes.’ David’s main job on Passport to Pimlico was to look after the crowds of extras on location and there were often several hundred of them.
If large numbers of people were involved, we would divide them up into sections; each one having a crowd marshal. Communication was normally done by mega-phone or visuals, such as flags. Cues were vital and the first assistant director started it off from his position next to the camera and it would be relayed down the line. Anticipation was the key, for an error by part of the crowd coming in too late or too early could mean the whole shot being done again; an immense amount of wasted time.
Ealing was nothing if not efficient; the schedule and, of course, the budget loomed large in everybody’s minds. ‘We tried to shoot about two and a half minutes of useable film a day,’ recalls David. ‘The key to success was getting the first shot of the day in the can before nine o’clock. That would then set the tempo for the rest of the day. So we tried to schedule the first shot as an easy one. Today in the commercial world one might get ten seconds in the can if one was lucky. The number of takes, too, was much more disciplined in the old days. Today forty or more takes is not unusual. Whereas back then ten takes would be near the maximum.’
David had enormous fun making Passport to Pimlico but when it finished there was no permanent job for him at Ealing, so he found himself once again unemployed. But he would soon find a way back to the studio.
According to Balcon, Monja Danischewsky ‘Did as much as any of us to put Ealing on the map’. The youngest son of a Russian émigré family, Danischewsky joined Ealing in 1938 as their publicity man, at first on his own and then heading his own department. He was mercurial, highly intelligent, a renowned wit and infectious company. Michael Pertwee, a scriptwriter at Ealing, recalled a dinner party at an exclusive restaurant when Danischewsky’s wife fainted and laid her head in a plate of fish. ‘Don’t worry, everybody,’ said Monja, quick as a flash. ‘Brenda’s motto is: There’s no home like plaice.’
Friends with the most influential editors in Fleet Street from his days as a journalist, to whom he fed stories about the studio and its productions, Danischewsky also did much to raise the whole level of cinema advertising, particularly in regard to Ealing’s highly original and innovative poster campaigns, which became some of the most striking and recognisable in the history of British film. According to Michael Relph, ‘Balcon could not move without him’.
After ten years in the job, however, Danischewsky wanted a change, having grown bored over in the publicity department. He’d seen friends and colleagues from sundry other departments get promotion and direct or write films but never him. ‘Monja always wanted to be a scriptwriter,’ claims Alex Douet, whose mother worked for him. ‘He was a very flamboyant character.’
Over the years Danischewsky, or Danny as everybody called him, had threatened to resign on numerous occasions, only to be talked into staying. This time he was going to walk unless he could produce his own movie. Even though that year’s production slate was at bursting point, Balcon didn’t want to lose his erstwhile friend and told him that if he could find a good enough subject, he’d squeeze another one in. Danny had recently come across a wonderfully whimsical book by Compton Mackenzie called Whisky Galore, a fictionalised account of a real event that occurred in 1941 when a cargo ship laden with 50,000 cases of Scotch whisky ran aground off the coast of Eriskay in the Outer Hebrides and much of the booty on board was appropriated by a group of Scottish islanders.
With Ealing’s stable of directors all busy, Danny had to look elsewhere and came up with a perplexing candidate, a man who had never directed a feature before, Alexander Mackendrick. Born in Boston, Massachusetts in 1912, Mackendrick was only six years old when his father died and he was given over to his grandfather, who took the boy back to his parents’ home city of Glasgow. He would never be reunited with his mother. Trained in graphic design, Mackendrick gained some film experience while attached to a specialist camera unit in Italy during the war. Back in civvy street he worked in advertising until Basil Dearden and Michael Relph brought him to Ealing to work as a storyboard artist. ‘I can remember Mackendrick coming into the studio for his first interview,’ says Norman Dorme. ‘My early impression of him was of someone very confident, conceited almost. He turned out to be an excellent director.’
Balcon wasn’t at all convinced of the choice. Yes, he did enjoy giving newcomers a chance, but this was a huge gamble, teaming a novice director with a novice producer, it was a recipe for disaster surely. ‘You know nothing about production, dear boy,’ Balcon said to Danny one day. ‘And now you are proposing to have a director who knows nothing about direction. You go and get yourself a chap who’ll make up for your own ignorance.’ Looking beyond the studio walls, Danny offered the film to Ronald Neame but he turned it down. Eventually, he got his own way and Mackendrick was installed as director. Before leaving to start work Danny was called into Balcon’s office to be told, ‘For God’s sake, dear boy, don’t let me down.’
The entire film was shot on location on the Isle of Barra in the Outer Hebrides, at Mackendrick’s insistence. A local church hall was converted into a studio with crude soundproofing. ‘Many of the sets you see in the film were built and shot in this church hall,’ confirms Ken Westbury, who worked on the camera unit. Ingenuity was exemplified in other ways, too. For example, in a scene where somebody knocks on the front door of a house, the crew took a door frame and even a section of a set out onto a location, perhaps overlooking some picturesque bay, to do the reverse shot of the person opening the door from the inside; the original house itself was probably located several miles away.
For the crowd scenes local inhabitants were hired as extras. According to the actor Gordon Jackson, by the time they’d all packed up to go back to Ealing the locals had become complete experts about movie-making. ‘I remember the postmistress. Sandy Mackendrick said to her, “You stand over there.” And she said, “No, no, I wouldn’t be in this angle, I wasn’t established in the last shot.” They were very quick to catch on.’
Ken particularly delighted in the shoot. It was rare for an Ealing film to stray further than the confines of London. And he especially enjoyed working with Mackendrick. ‘He was absolutely brilliant, so talented. I loved just standing and watching how he did things, and being so nice about it all.’ What impressed Ken most was Mackendrick’s visual panache. ‘He’d trained as a commercial artist and he would explain a setup he wanted, the framing of a scene, and if people couldn’t quite get it he’d take his sketch pad out and draw it, absolutely perfectly, and they’d go, oh, I know what you mean now.’
He could be exasperating, however. Norman Dorme heard from the prop master on the film that some of the crew complained about how Mackendrick was always choosing locations that were almost impossible to get to. ‘This guy told me, “He’s up on this bloody mountain which only him and a mountain goat can get to and he wants us to put the camera up there!” Sandy was difficult in that respect, he knew what he wanted and these old established Ealing people didn’t want to put themselves out too much.’
There were also frequent clashes with Danischewsky over what the moral tone of the film should be. The Presbyterian Mackendrick held the view that the islanders were in the wrong and sided with Basil Radford’s character of the harassed Customs and Excise official, while Danny held the more majority view that the islanders should be portrayed as the charming and feckless heroes of the story. There were other problems, too. Because Balcon had squeezed Whisky Galore into his scheduling, Mackendrick only had the use of a largely inexperienced crew. And then there was the script. Danischewsky had employed Angus MacPhail to write the first draft, but Mackendrick was never satisfied with it and Herbie Smith, the film’s focus puller, remembers arriving on Barra, ‘and the first thing was Danny tore up the script and said, “We’ve all got two days off, Sandy wants to rewrite it.”’ Gordon Jackson also recalled one day Mackendrick suddenly announcing to the unit, ‘I’ve decided I’m not making a comedy, I’m making a documentary of island life.’
The curse of all films made on location struck next, the weather. It rained almost incessantly. The plan was if it rained, filming would take place indoors, but the weather was so bad that eventually the cast and crew found themselves inside the converted church twiddling their thumbs with nothing to do because all interiors had been completed. It wasn’t long before they were behind schedule. Mackendrick was convinced the whole thing was doomed. ‘It was absolutely terrifying and I remember getting up in the middle of the night and crawling on my hands and knees to the only public phone box on the island to call my fiancée to complain that I was thinking of committing suicide. Instead of sympathy I got a bawling out. “It’s only a stupid bit of film.” So I went back to sleep thinking, an ideal wife for a movie director.’
Given how much the film is revered today, Whisky Galore came within a hair’s breadth of being an unmitigated disaster and not being seen by anyone, according to Robert Winter who worked on the editing.
When the rushes were assembled, Ray Dicks and myself, who were assisting the editor Joseph Sterling, tried to put the film together according to Sandy’s shooting script, but it didn’t make any sense. Mick Balcon asked that the completed rough cut be presented and then called in Robert Hamer, Harry Watt, Charles Frend, Charles Crichton and Sid Cole, who was the supervising editor for Ealing. Mick asked Sandy about not only the structure, but where missing shots were. He then asked Sandy to go to Paris for a couple of weeks and got Sid Cole and Charles Crichton to try and get a picture for him. Ray Dicks and myself ordered all the outtakes and N.G.s (‘no-good’ takes) to be printed up. Sid Cole spent time creating the montage sequence of hiding the whisky and the love scene on the beach with Joan Greenwood.
Once the rescue job was complete, Balcon still didn’t think he had much of a film on his hands. Whisky Galore was never intended to be a prestige production. According to Robert Winter, after the large financial layout on films such as Saraband for Dead Lovers and Scott of the Antarctic, which had not done well at the box office, Balcon wanted Whisky Galore to be made as cheaply as possible. He also intended to release it with little fanfare or expensive marketing. This came as something of a shock to many of the staff at Ealing, who liked Mackendrick enormously and thought he had huge potential. It was decided to take action. John Jympson was a young editor at Ealing whose father Jympson Harman was film critic for the London Evening News. ‘Harman got to hear about Whisky Galore,’ recalls Robert, ‘and asked whether it was going to be trade shown at the Odeon Leicester Square, as some of Ealing’s films were. And Mick said, “No, no way. It’s not a big film at all. And we won’t be able to sell it in Europe or America.” This got back to John, so he invited his dad and some of the press down to Ealing to take a look at the film and Harman and the rest of the critics wrote glowing notices and the thing just took off.’
Whisky Galore followed Passport to Pimlico into cinemas just two months later and was another hit. ‘Ealing never really had a profile before then at all, not at all,’ believes Robert Winter.
It was only after we made Whisky Galore that people started talking about us. Mick Balcon always wanted Ealing to have the same presence as MGM had, or Paramount, any of those other studios. He wanted to have the same kind of status. Nobody realised the popularity the public would give to these comedy films, and it really kicked off with Whisky Galore.
Mackendrick, however, always looked back on the film with a degree of disappointment. ‘It looks like a home movie,’ he once said. ‘It doesn’t look as if it was made by a professional at all. And it wasn’t.’
Danischewsky was to call the film, ‘The longest unsponsored advertisement ever to reach cinema screens the world over.’ Indeed, The Distillers Company Limited, a leading Scottish drinks and pharmaceutical company, were so happy with the film’s success and the resultant increase in usage of its product, they laid on a lavish dinner for everyone connected with it at the Savoy hotel. A bottle of whisky was given to each guest as they arrived, which they were expected to drink before the end of the evening.
What really surprised everyone was how popular Whisky Galore turned out to be in America, the first Ealing film to achieve any real measure of box office success there. The New York Times called it, ‘Another happy demonstration of that peculiar knack British movie makers have for striking a rich and universally appealing comic vein in the most unexpected and seemingly insular situations.’ Balcon remembers being somewhat thrown when a visiting American film executive described his film as a ‘sleeper’. Unfamiliar with the term, Balcon thought the executive meant the picture was putting the audience to sleep. He must have also been amused by reports that the American censor had insisted on a coda being inserted at the end of the film stating that the stolen whisky brought nothing but unhappiness to the islanders, even though quite the opposite was true in real life!
In America the film had played under the title of ‘Tight Little Island’, which worked quite well. Years later Danischewsky bumped into the American humorist James Thurber. ‘I wish I’d known you at the time, Monja; the right American title for the film is “Scotch on the Rocks”.’
The last of Ealing’s triumvirate of comedy masterpieces released in 1949 was the best of the bunch and widely viewed as one of the finest British films ever made, Kind Hearts and Coronets. In 1947 scriptwriter Michael Pertwee came across a forgotten Edwardian novel in a second-hand bookshop entitled Israel Rank by Roy Horniman. It told the story, with full-blown ‘Wildean’ excess, of a half Jewish, half Italian anti-hero who murders six people who stand between him and a dukedom. Pertwee gave it to Balcon to read in the belief it would make a highly original comedy. Balcon expressed severe doubts, but told Pertwee to write a treatment. The result was enough to convince Balcon of the project’s merits and Pertwee began work on a screenplay.
It was when Robert Hamer was installed as director that things began to unravel. For a reason that Pertwee was never able to find out, Hamer took an instant dislike to him. ‘He hated me. He despised me as a writer, and detested me as a person. We only had to be in the same room and he would start to twitch.’ It soon became apparent that the two men would not be able to work together and Pertwee quietly withdrew. Despite the fact that he had found the source material and worked on early drafts of the script, Pertwee would end up with no screen credit. The final screenplay is credited to Hamer and John Dighton. Hamer’s hope for the film was, ‘to escape the unshaded characterization which convention tends to enforce on scripts’.
Not long afterwards, Pertwee left Ealing to go freelance. He had written a thriller play called Night was our Friend, which Balcon had promised to buy the film rights to and get Margaret Lockwood to play the murderous lead. When news reached Pertwee that Lockwood had passed on it, he got very drunk at the Screenwriters’ Club and poured out his woes to a gentleman he had previously never met. ‘I finished with the line, “And now that bitch Maggie Lockwood has refused to do it!” He listened courteously, which is more than I would have done in his place, for he turned out to be Margaret Lockwood’s husband.’
In the hands of Hamer and Dighton, the novel’s psychopath, Israel Rank, changed into Louis Mazzini, a Clapham draper’s assistant and distant heir to the D’Ascoyne dukedom, who decides to murder everyone standing between him and the family title in revenge for their cruel treatment of his mother.
The entire film is told in flashback from a prison cell, where Louis is waiting to be executed and is passing the time writing his memoirs. The result of Hamer and Dighton’s labours was, in Balcon’s words, ‘Surely the first “black” comedy made in this country.’ Indeed, writing in the influential Sequence magazine, Lindsay Anderson wrote of the film upon release: ‘Kind Hearts and Coronets is a very funny film and it gets away with a great deal. With so much, in fact, that its makers deserve salutation as pioneers in the little-explored territory of adult British cinema.’
In retrospect, the decision to ask Alec Guinness to play every member of the D’Ascoyne family can be seen as a masterstroke. And for that we have to thank Balcon himself. The producer was a keen admirer of the actor, having seen him many times in the West End and believed him to have great potential as a cinema actor. Following his film debut in 1946’s Great Expectations, Guinness had been put under contract to Rank, going on to play Fagin in David Lean’s Olivier Twist (1948), but the film was mired in controversy when Guinness’s portrayal was accused of being anti-Semitic, particularly by pressure groups in America. When Balcon heard that Rank didn’t have much in the pipeline for the actor, he requested his services for Coronets. Ealing’s deal with Rank entitled them to occasionally draw on the larger company’s pool of contract artists, and so this was simply arranged.
It was with some amusement that Balcon would later recall an encounter with a film executive at a social function at the Dorchester hotel. ‘“Mick, do you really believe you can make a film star out of Alec Guinness?”
“Yes, I believe that in the right parts he has a quality comparable to Chaplin.”
“Then you must be out of your bloody mind!”’
Guinness’s performance in Kind Hearts and Coronets is exceptional and the success of the film did much to propel him to the forefront of film character actors. Playing eight different roles did come with a unique set of challenges, however, as he told one contemporary reporter. ‘Quick transformation from one character to another has a disturbing effect. I had to ask myself from time to time: Which one am I now? I had fearful visions of looking like one of the characters and thinking and speaking like one of the others. It would have been quite disastrous to have faced the cameras in the make-up of the suffragette and spoken like the admiral.’ Indeed, during production Guinness often visited the cutting rooms to remind himself, by listening to sound loops, of the different voices of the various characters he was playing.
Perhaps the most famous scene in the film is where six members of the D’Ascoyne family, all played by Guinness, are seen together in one shot seated side by side in a church. With optical work still quite primitive, cameraman Douglas Slocombe made the decision to do the effect in-camera. How he achieved this was to place the camera on a specially built platform so it would remain completely still. He then shot a sequence with Guinness as one character and then rewound the negative, masking off what he had already done, before carrying out the same operation with the next character. It took several days to complete, largely because Guinness had to be made up each time and was often busy shooting with the main unit, so they would have to wait until he became available.
Above all, though, the camera had to remain rock steady. ‘Nobody was allowed to touch it,’ recalls Ken Westbury. ‘I used to sit next to it all day making sure nobody knocked into it, while Dougie used to sleep in the studio overnight next to the thing. One slight movement on that camera would have ruined the whole effect.’
The only negative about Guinness’s acting tour de force is that it totally overshadowed Dennis Price’s superb playing of Louis Mazzini. Indeed, Price, at times, dons disguises to seek out his foe, at one point wearing ecclesiastical robes to play the Bishop of Matabeleland. Bizarrely, in 1957 Balcon received a letter of complaint from representatives of the ‘real’ Bishop of Matabeleland, who had recently been appointed. It read:
We have to inform you that we have been instructed by the bishop … who is very aggrieved and indignant by the portrayal (in the film). Our client appreciates that there was no Bishop of Matabeleland when the film was produced, but considers it should not have been exhibited in its present form after his appointment in 1953. He has endured extreme embarrassment in southern Rhodesia.
The film ends on a wonderfully ironic note. Louis walks free from prison and is accosted by a reporter (a very young Arthur Lowe) who wants to know if he intends to write his memoirs.
Suddenly Louis is gripped by the thought that he’s forgotten them and, as the credits roll, we see them resting on the desk in his cell. It’s up to the audience to conclude whether he gets away with it or not. In the American version, however, due to their tough censorship laws, most stringent of all being that crime must not be seen to pay, a specially shot sequence was inserted showing the damming papers being handed to the authorities. ‘Censorship in those days was particularly tough,’ says Peter Musgrave.
I did find though that the British censor was not only very strict, but also very learned, above where you’d expect your average audience to be. For example, in the film Dennis Price has had an affair with Joan Greenwood before she gets married to this oafish stockbroker. Nevertheless, Price has the cheek to turn up at the wedding reception. He walks in the room and there’s a slightly double-edged look between him and Joan Greenwood. The camera then tracks down this long table loaded with wedding gifts stopping at a pair of antlers, and there’s a close-up of a card saying they are from Mr Louis Mazzini, so he’s given the newlyweds a pair of antlers. Now to me, everybody else in the cutting rooms and I’m sure to the public this is totally lost; what’s the point of this. But it’s actually an old Italian sign for a cuckold. So Louis has presented this to the couple, having cuckolded the guy before she’s even married him, which in those days was utterly shocking. And the censor took the close-up out.
A streak of Puritanism ran right through the British censor at this time. Take this example from Passport to Pimlico. There was a shot of a sparrow resting on a loudspeaker that is constantly blasting out. The joke was that this little bird’s tiny act of rebellion against the bane of its life was to fly away and leave behind a little deposit. The censor wrote to the studio after watching this commanding, ‘The small white mark on the loudspeaker is not acceptable.’ It had to be removed.
With the release of Kind Hearts and Coronets, which Time magazine hailed as, ‘One of the best films of the year’, Ealing was operating at the peak of its powers. Its films, especially the comedies, had become renowned around the world. The New York Times described the studios as having ‘a genius for civilized humour’. For Balcon, the secret behind the success of the Ealing comedy films was the fact that they took place against a realistic background audiences understood and could relate to and, he wrote: ‘For the most part reflected the country’s moods, social conditions and aspirations.’ They were also seen by many as a reaction against post-war restrictions and government-enforced austerity. The British public had had enough of it and wanted to throw off the shackles of wartime restrictions and move to greener pastures. As Balcon said: ‘The country was tired of regulations and regimentation, and there was a mild anarchy in the air. In a sense our comedies were a reflection of this mood, a safety valve for our more anti-social impulses.’
Though the Ealing film-makers were radical in their points of view, in no way did they want to tear down the institutions they so gleefully mocked in some their comedies. They were merely a mild revolution, populated by the odd stray eccentric, also daydreamers, mild anarchists, and little men who long to kick the boss up the backside. ‘We had a great affection for British institutions,’ said Balcon. ‘The comedies were done with affection, and I don’t think we would have thought of tearing down institutions unless we had a blueprint for what we wanted to put in their place.’