For sheer endurance and perseverance, Rex Hipple’s own personal journey to Ealing is unlike anyone else’s. As a local lad he would pass the studio every morning on his way to school and often dreamt of one day working there.
It was a wonderful thing to just gaze down that road and watch all the activity going on. I remember one day there was a huge 60-foot-long low trailer going in. How it got round that corner I will never know because Ealing had a very small front entrance. Only recently I was sent a DVD copy of The Big Blockade with Will Hay, and I couldn’t believe it when I saw this bloody great Hampden bomber. At last, I thought, I’ve found out what it was that was being delivered to the studio all those years before.
Rex left school at fourteen in 1942 and tried several times to get a job with the studio, but couldn’t even get past the front gate. ‘The commissionaire, Robin Adair, I got stopped by him all the time, I couldn’t get past him.’ Unlike others mentioned in this book, whose father happened to belong to the same gentleman’s club as Mick Balcon, or happened to be on friendly terms with such and such who could put a good word in for them, Rex was a nobody really, just an ambitious working-class kid anxious to get on.
But I had no introduction, I had no one to talk to. If I could have gone in as a post boy, because several of the chaps I met in there started as post boys, that would have been all right. I was trying to go in as something, anything, but I couldn’t get past the gate and I couldn’t get past the unions. They were very tough at that time.
Coming to the realisation that Ealing was perhaps beyond his reach, Rex looked elsewhere and got a job at the Q theatre in Richmond, just as a general help, not knowing the first thing about theatres. A year later he became assistant stage manager at the Theatre Royal in Brighton, before going on to work at the London Coliseum. Still determined to work in films, Rex decided the best thing to do was to try and find employment as a cinema projectionist, ‘because it was the nearest thing to movies you could get and it was a wonderful place to watch films and get an insight into how they were made’.
After working for both the Gaumont and Odeon chains, in some of those huge old picture palaces that could seat 1,500 people and had their own restaurants, Rex heard there was an opening for a projectionist at Denham Studio’s preview theatre. He ended up staying there for two years, progressing to working on the scoring stage with people such as the acclaimed conductor and composer Muir Matheson. Out of the blue one day, as his term of employment was coming to an end, Rex was asked if he fancied doing a fortnight’s holiday relief over at – would you believe it – Ealing. ‘So I finished at Denham on the Friday and on the Monday morning I was over at Ealing running music rushes. So that was wonderful, I was finally at Ealing, even though it was only a fortnight’s holiday relief, which incidentally turned into six years. I just stayed there.’ It was a case of once you were in, you were in, as he’d secured his union ticket already while at Denham.
For the majority of his time at Ealing Rex worked at re-recording and sound effects, anything that could be done live, like footsteps, falls, etc. ‘I did all the screams in The Cruel Sea for the sailors on the Compass Rose,’ he reveals. ‘I did it live and then the dubbing editor took it away and just cut it into the print where Jack Hawkins slams the voice pipe down when he hears the screams of the sailors in the water.’ Again on The Cruel Sea the boss of the sound department, Gordon Stone, collected about twenty of Ealing’s staff, many of whom had been in the army, to march up and down outside so it could be recorded for a scene in the film of a company on parade. ‘Well,’ recalls Rex. ‘We were marching down this road between the stages when one of the crowd artists came out and started complaining that this was their job, they should be doing that, and Stone replied bluntly, “None of you can march, these guys are all ex forces. Buzz off!”’
These crowd artists could get quite militant at times. During the filming of The Captive Heart, there was a scene of the POWs staging a bonfire to celebrate the end of the war. This was done in the studio with a real fire provided by the effects people. Among the extras were a few genuine soldiers and airmen. Actor Jack Warner was standing next to an ex-pilot and they were chatting away when there was a disturbance. A bunch of the crowd artists were holding a meeting and after a couple of minutes they all walked out en masse. Warner went to find out what was wrong and came back to tell the pilot that the crowd artists were asking for danger money because of the fire. It was then that Warner noticed the medal ribbons the pilot was wearing. ‘He shook hands with me, turned around and walked straight out of the place. Who could blame him? He had seen more danger than the others were likely to see during the whole of their lives.’
Rex found there to be a great atmosphere at Ealing, and got on well with many of the people who worked there, most of whom were genial and easy going sorts. ‘I saw Michael Balcon every day. He was a charming man who seemed to be approachable, not for me, but for those who needed to I think his office door was always open. And there were people like Seth Holt, a lovely man, very unassuming, no airs or graces. They were just very nice people and you worked in a lovely environment on what I think generally were very good products. Ealing was a special place. For me personally, nine years of queuing up to get there and when I did get there it was exactly what I’d hoped it was, a joy. So for me it was the end of the rainbow.’
Following the haphazard Whisky Galore shoot, Alexander Mackendrick believed he’d blown his chances of ever getting another directing job. At the studio’s weekly round table meetings Balcon would turn to everyone getting opinions until he got to Mackendrick, then his face would slightly drop, ‘And Sandy … er, ye-e-es … Ah, what were we talking about, everyone?’, and carry on the discussion. When Whisky Galore was put into post-production and Balcon pondered on what its fate was to be, Mackendrick was demoted to second unit work. This turned out to be a blessing in disguise, because it was now that he really began to learn his craft, working for other directors without the burden of responsibility. Then when Whisky Galore became an unexpected hit, his confidence returned and preparations began for his next film.
The result arrived in cinemas barely two months after The Lavender Hill Mob and was another classic Ealing comedy. The Man in the White Suit (1951) manages to satirise both boardroom idiocy and trade union intransigence in its tale of hapless scientist Sidney Stratton (a brilliant Guinness again) whose invention of an indestructible fibre has the result of putting millions of textile workers’ jobs at risk. It was based on a play by Mackendrick’s cousin Roger MacDougall and adapted by John Dighton of Kind Hearts and Coronets fame and Mackendrick himself.
As usual, the script was sent for approval to the British and American censors. In this instance, the American censor proved itself to be unduly prudish in their attitude, as demonstrated in these written observations sent to Balcon: ‘We direct your particular attention to the need for the greatest possible care in the selection and photographing of the costumes and dresses for your women.’ It continued: ‘The production code makes it mandatory that the intimate parts of the body – specifically the breasts of women – be fully covered at all times. Any compromise with this regulation will compel us to withhold approval of your picture.’ They even baulked at the image of ‘a stout man’ on his way to the toilet. ‘We ask that the unbuttoning of his waistcoat be eliminated.’ The words ‘damn’ and ‘bastard’ were also frowned upon. As was the scene in which Sidney’s flame, Daphne (Joan Greenwood), is more or less asked by the textile industrialists to prostitute herself to prevent him from marketing his product. Balcon must have used all his persuasive skills here because the scene was ultimately allowed to remain intact in the film.
Mackendrick was of the opinion that slapstick of the kind he was attempting in The Man in the White Suit was frequently unsuccessful, either failing to work out as intended or taking too much time to shoot, because the effects, props and physical action were not fully prepared and rehearsed in advance. To this end he approached the physical comedy elements of the film with the utmost meticulousness. Ronnie Taylor, who worked on the camera unit, was particularly impressed by Mackendrick’s professionalism. However, Ronnie did observe how sometimes his approach to film-making did ruffle a few feathers.
When Sandy was given the film to make he came out with some fairly outrageous ideas and he was a bit snubbed by the establishment of the old Ealing gang of directors. Here was this new boy on the block, coming up with new ideas and he was slightly put to one side and people ignored him slightly and said he’s a bit barmy because he’d got these radical ideas. There was a feeling that he was a mad young director. But I and many others like me thought he was fairly advanced in his thinking.
One wonders if there wasn’t an element of mischief-making with some of the characters in the film. It has been suggested that Guinness’s scientist is really Mackendrick himself, the free-thinking auteur whose vision is held back by the staid conservatism of Balcon and the Ealing old guard. Birnley, the paternalistic mill owner, is said to be based on Balcon. Indeed, on set Mackendrick reportedly guided the actor playing the role of Cecil Parker to ‘model yourself on Mick’. There was also talk that Mackendrick based Frank, the shop steward, on Sidney Cole.
According to Rex Hipple, Mackendrick also liked to populate his films with members of Ealing’s own staff in small background character parts. One of the more colourful members of staff used by Mackendrick in The Man in the White Suit was the studio nurse, Sister Ross. ‘She was an ex-Eighth Army nurse,’ recalls Rex.
My God you didn’t waste her time. You weren’t a malingerer around her. She was very tough. She always wore her Eighth Army cape over her ordinary nurse’s uniform, and she would come into the canteen at lunchtime and the first thing she’d do is go round and open all the windows to get some fresh air in because it was always a bit fuggy.
One of the real headaches that faced the film-makers was the film’s final scene where Sidney’s suit disintegrates as he’s running away from an angry mob. Anthony Mendleson, Ealing’s costume designer, tried everything to make the effect work – cotton wool, pouring acid on the material – with absolutely no success. At the point of giving up, someone in the art department came across a huge roll of corrugated, compressed tissue paper, the kind you have on the top of chocolate boxes. It was ideal, and several suits were made out of the material and each came away into pieces perfectly. ‘It saved my life,’ Mendleson later confessed. ‘But what on earth was it there for in the first place?’ Apparently it turned out that this huge roll of compressed tissue paper had been left in the studio stores for years by some war department. It was what they had made sanitary towels out of for the Wrens.
Once again the critics were full of praise for Ealing’s latest product: ‘More ambitious than some recent Ealing comedies,’ opined the Monthly Film Bulletin. ‘It will certainly remain one of the liveliest and most interesting experiments in British films this year.’ And Richard Mallett in Punch thought: ‘The combination of an ingenious idea, a bright, funny and imaginative script, skilful playing and perceptive brisk direction has resulted once more in a really satisfying Ealing comedy.’
Christopher Barry also worked on the film, as assistant to associate producer Sidney Cole, chiefly setting up location visits to cotton and fabric factories, as well as other location scouting in and around Lancashire. ‘Sid Cole was a likeable-enough chap and very approachable but he and I did not get on too well on a train journey up to Lancashire during which he tried to persuade me to join the Communist party.’
Christopher’s memories of Mackendrick are altogether more pleasant, especially his friendliness and approachability and, of course, his creativity and the intensity of his work.
These were feelings very much shared by Alec Guinness, as both men had the same devotion to painstaking detail. It was the kind of professionalism that Guinness felt was lacking in other areas of Ealing, especially in their treatment of actors. Although he referred to the studio as having ‘a cosy atmosphere’, Guinness always felt that Ealing was the domain of directors, writers and producers, and that the actor came very low on the list of importance. On several occasions Guinness almost died on the set of an Ealing film due to what he believed to be lack of concern for the wellbeing of the artist. We have already heard of the time he nearly fell from the Eiffel Tower, but there are two other prime examples; both took place on Kind Hearts and Coronets. First is the famous balloon sequence where he was playing Lady Agatha D’Ascoyne. At first Guinness was quite excited by the prospect of going up in a balloon, but wasn’t entirely convinced by the safety of the exercise and went to speak to the producers to see if he was properly insured. ‘You’re well covered,’ they said. The sum was £10,000, not nearly enough, Guinness thought, should the unthinkable happen and his wife and son needed to be looked after.
Guinness informed the producers that he wouldn’t go up more than fifteen feet in the air unless they raised the insurance to £50,000. It was at this point they got a bit huffy and said, ‘You will have Belgium’s greatest balloonist concealed in the basket with you so you can’t possibly come to any harm.’ Guinness couldn’t care less, and when it came time to do the shot he insisted on being let down once the balloon had ascended a mere few feet. ‘Contempt was written on all faces,’ Guinness later confessed.
And so Belgium’s greatest balloonist had to get into Guinness’s costume and take his place as Lady Agatha. The cameras rolled, and all looked to be going well until a fierce gust of wind whipped the balloon away at great speed and completely out of sight. ‘The poor man was found some fifty miles away,’ recalled Guinness, ‘floundering in a long skirt in the Thames estuary, where he had been forced to ditch.’
The second incident was, if anything, even more calamitous. In the scene where Admiral Lord Horatio D’Ascoyne goes down with his ship, nobly saluting until he is engulfed by water, Guinness had to have his feet attached by wire to the base of the tank in order for the effect to work. Robert Hamer thought it would be a nice touch to keep the camera lingering long enough to see the Admiral’s cap float away. Asked if he could hold his breath for thirty seconds, Guinness boasted that as a keen practitioner of yoga he could hold his breath for something like four minutes. Suitably impressed, Hamer left to set up the shot. When it was completed, the crew began to pack up the equipment, when someone suddenly remembered Guinness was still under the water. Four minutes had almost passed before he was released using wire-cutters. It’s hard to believe this actually happened, so breathtaking is the negligence involved, but it was a tale Guinness often told.
Again, on The Man in the White Suit Guinness came close to serious injury. The scene called for him to be suspended on a wire. When he raised concerns about the stunt – that he thought the wire inadequate to carry a man’s weight and that it might snap – the technicians laughed and told him to mind his own business. It will come as no surprise that the wire did snap and Guinness fell to the studio floor with a resounding thud. ‘All they said was, looking a bit surprised, “It shouldn’t have happened.” But they didn’t say sorry. That was the way it was.’
Returning to Ealing for Man in the White Suit was David Peers, who since Passport to Pimlico had gone freelance and worked on several pictures shooting in such far-flung locations as Egypt and South Africa. ‘It was a great life for a single chap with no commitments, and enabled me to continue travelling round the world at somebody else’s expense.’ Closer to home he worked on the second unit for David Lean’s The Sound Barrier (1952), shooting the aerial sequences. On Man in the White Suit, David was promoted from second to first assistant director, a job that entailed a great deal more responsibility.
The first assistant director was a mixture of organiser, enabler, communicator, trouble-shooter and pourer of oil. It worked better if his relationship with the director was close and sympathetic. I have worked with directors where there was very little empathy between us and I therefore did a bad job. But when there was a meeting of minds and a rapport, one could often second-guess the director’s intentions, anticipate his moves and guide the unit along smoothly.
Like many who worked with Mackendrick, David came away from the experience impressed. On his very first day on the film, and not knowing anything at all about the man, David walked onto the studio floor and saw a blackboard on an easel with a flipchart. He lifted it up and there was a drawing by Mackendrick of what he was going to shoot that morning.
As the first AD I had a number of questions to ask Sandy, but the answers were all in the drawing. He came from the world of advertising where they draw almost every frame of a proposed film for themselves, and for the client who might want to see what was going to happen. Sandy just transferred this from the advertising world to the film world. He did it every morning and, after a while, everybody would go and look at the flipchart and it was a wonderful help to all of us.
A few weeks after Mackendrick finished Man in the White Suit, Betty Collins came to work for him as his secretary. Betty had left school a little over six months before, not quite yet sixteen years old, and had gone to work in a fashion bureau in Bond Street. While there, she saw an ad for a job in a film distributor’s in Wardour Street. ‘I got that job and it was the most miserable job I’ve ever had in my life. The man I worked for was a real bully, and everything I did was wrong or I had to do again.’
Feeling miserable, one day Betty took a stroll in Walpole Park, which backed onto Ealing Studios, and through a wire mesh fence could see a hive of activity. ‘It was a very hot day and they had the stage doors open and you could see inside everybody was moving stuff around and pottering about and I thought, I’d like to work there.’
Emboldened, Betty wrote to Ealing asking if they had any jobs. After a few weeks she got a reply, asking if she’d like to come in for an interview. ‘And the next thing I knew, I was working for Sandy as a secretary, I think they call them PAs now.’ The very first assignment Betty remembers him giving her was to hunt down a particular book. ‘He gave me a small newspaper cutting, it must have been about an inch wide by about an inch long, and half the book title was missing. Then I had to go and find what the book was, where it was and where he’d seen it and then get it. So my first job was a little bit of detective work.’
Betty liked Mackendrick enormously, even though he was a little difficult to get to know, a bit withdrawn, ‘but very nice and very pleasant. I’m sure he had a temper but I never saw it’. And while he couldn’t be described as a taskmaster, he could be quite vague. ‘You’d have to be a bit of a mind-reader at times.’
One thing that Betty liked was how well prepared Mackendrick was before he shot a picture. Not only would he have his flipchart on the set, as David Peers has described, but his own personal copy of the script would have the dialogue on one page all typed up and then there would be little drawings on the left-hand side illustrating every scene he was working on. ‘And he did them all himself. They were like a doodle to him but they were lovely little visuals.’
When she first started at Ealing Betty did feel a little intimidated arriving at such a prestigious and well-known studio, but was quickly made to feel at ease. ‘It was very friendly, and it did have a family feel to it, you knew everybody who worked there because it was all mainly permanent staff, there was nobody you didn’t know.’ Her office was situated alongside one of the big stages, upstairs on the first floor, which housed all the directors and their secretaries. In the first office were Leslie Norman and Harry Watt, then it was Betty, Sandy and Seth Holt, who Betty recalls with great fondness. ‘He was lovely, a nice man and great fun, we had lots of laughs. He had a great sense of humour and was very laid back.’ Next door to them was the office of Basil Dearden and Michael Relph. It was very compact and close-knit with everyone always popping in and out of each other’s offices. ‘You did move around quite freely,’ says Betty. ‘And you were quite welcome to go in and say hello and have a chat, because you knew them well enough to do that, to have a little gossip.’
Working mostly in the office, Betty recalls only ever going out on location with Mackendrick the one time and that was for The Maggie (1954) in Scotland. ‘They’d already started shooting, but the script wasn’t finished so I went up there to help tighten it up.’ That meant long nights sat at the typewriter as Mackendrick dictated. Being on location for The Maggie is one of the clearest memories Betty has of her days at Ealing, especially the time one of the film’s stars, James Copeland, took her out night fishing.
Betty would also be required sometimes on the stage when Mackendrick was making a film. Sat in the office one afternoon, Mackendrick called through asking for Betty to come down onto the set and bring a typewriter with her because he wanted to do some work. ‘So I’m busily going down carrying my typewriter, when suddenly I had the union men coming up to me, “Put that down! You’re not allowed to carry that. It’s not your job.” My God, you’d think I’d stolen the crown jewels.’
Nor was this Betty’s only run in with the unions.
The studio used to close down every year for two weeks and everyone would go on holiday. I think it was either Leslie Norman or Harry Watt who came to me, they were trying to get some script in shape, to ask if I would do a couple of days’ typing for them in the holidays because I wasn’t going away anywhere. I said, ‘That’s fine, I’ll do it.’ Anyway, when everybody got back I was called into the personnel manager’s office, Bill Beck his name was, and he’d got the union man there, who was a great big fat man, a bit of a bully, and he was rather dirty, I’m afraid, and smelt dreadful. And he was raging about me, saying they should sack me because I ran with the management, for doing these couple of days’ typing. Bill Beck was trying to calm him down. Anyway, it didn’t come to anything. That’s how it was.
There were three unions operating at Ealing. ‘There was ETU, which was the electricians’ union,’ recalls Norman Dorme. ‘There was NATKE, and then there was ACT, which was us, the art department, also the camera department, production department, all those. When you arrived at Ealing you were made to join one of the unions; you had to join if you wanted to work there. You weren’t given an option, really, they just said, join the union, and that’s it. This was resented, slightly, as you never felt that the union was there because you wanted it and it was there to protect you, you felt it was there just to be a bloody nuisance.’
Directors tended not to rock the boat when it came to the unions; all they were interested in was getting their pictures done, they certainly weren’t interested in getting into anything as vulgar as politics. ‘I remember fairly frequent ACT meetings in lunch hours,’ says Christopher Barry. ‘But I think that as long as the agreed working hours were stuck to and overtime was strictly controlled, life seemed pretty peaceful. Although I do recall one incident that happened on a film when a piece of a lamp fell off one of the gantries down onto the set. I instinctively called out ‘Watch it!’ and almost caused a strike, having the temerity to talk like this to an ETU member. There were also several left-wing people among the work force, notably communists Sid Cole and Ivor Montagu.’ Robert Winter recalls a lot of people in the studio distributing copies of the Daily Worker newspaper. ‘It was handed around in the cutting rooms. I didn’t know what it was all about. It was in sympathy with Russia, I suppose.’