After Eureka Stockade Harry Watt had travelled to South Africa in search of new subjects to film. In Cape Town he wanted to make an adventure story about diamond smuggling but the script never worked out. From Cape Town he went right through Mozambique, crossed the Kalahari desert in a jeep and ended up in Kenya. On safari there he came across a hunter shooting zebras. Apparently the man was planning to turn the area into a cattle ranch and the zebras ate the grass, but Watt was appalled at the sight of these beautiful creatures lying around rotting and being eaten by vultures and gave the man a piece of his mind.
‘You sound like Mervyn Cowie,’ said the man.
‘Whose Mervyn Cowie?’ asked Watt.
‘He’s some guy up in Nairobi trying to get a national park to save the animals.’
It was, thought Watt, a terrific basis for a film. The result was Where No Vultures Fly (1951), a fictionalised account of Cowie’s story as a game warden so disgusted by the ongoing destruction of wildlife in East Africa that he decides to create a national park to protect them.
In the leading role Watt had Anthony Steel forced on him, an actor Rank were currently building up into a star. ‘I didn’t like him and didn’t want him,’ Watt admitted later. ‘He was just a stiff, beefcake bum. And a drunk at the same time.’ Playing opposite Steel, Watt and his producer Leslie Norman cast an actress who had appeared largely in B pictures and was currently out of work, Dinah Sheridan. But Balcon wasn’t enamoured with Dinah and, as the unit began preparing to shoot out in Africa, an order came through from Ealing to replace her. ‘We cabled back,’ said Watt. ‘And wrote, right, change Dinah Sheridan and you can change Harry Watt and you can change Leslie Norman, we’ll chuck our hand in.’ Balcon backed down.
The film was shot almost completely outdoors on location. However, close-ups for one exciting sequence, where Steel is up a tree threatened by a leopard, did have to be shot back in the studio. The art department built an exact replica of the tree used out on location and a leopard was brought in from London Zoo. For safety purposes the entire scene would be enacted inside a large circus cage that had been hired and erected on the stage and which had just the one entrance door. The plan was for Anthony Steel to climb up the tree while the leopard, which was to be drugged, would be placed on a flattened platform near to the actor, with a sheet of thick armoured glass between them. To get the animal used to the tree and the smell of the place it was decided to leave it at the studio overnight. ‘So they let it into the cage,’ reveals Tony Rimmington. ‘Shut the door, came back the following morning and it had torn the bloody tree to shreds.’
After the tree was hastily rebuilt, the dangerous scene was ready to go before the cameras. Steel climbed the tree, the drugged leopard was hauled back up onto this platform, and the sheet of glass positioned between them. ‘At ten o’clock they brought the tea trolley in for the morning break,’ recalls Tony.
‘So there they all were, the crew and everybody else inside the cage drinking their tea and eating cakes and buns. I was up in the art department when suddenly there was a bloody furore, everybody went to the windows and people were running out of the bloody stage like mad. The leopard had lost its balance and fallen out of the tree onto the bloody tea trolley with a terrific roar and of course everybody was trying to get out of this one little door in the cage. There was no Health and Safety in those days. It was mad.’
Chosen for the Royal Film Performance, Where No Vultures Fly was one of the top British money-makers of its year. Its success with the public Balcon put down to, ‘years of difficulties and restrictions on travel had created a rather claustrophobic feeling in Britain, and when they were over we felt an urgent need for the wide open spaces’. It was also an adventure story that appealed to the entire family, and that’s perhaps another reason for the studio’s success over the years. ‘The great thing about Ealing was they were family movies,’ believes Rex Hipple. ‘You could go to any one of their movies and take your mum or aunt and you’d never be embarrassed. That was basically the code of Ealing and, particularly, the code of Mick.’
Next up was His Excellency (1952), directed by Robert Hamer, a disappointing comedy about a former leader of a dockers’ trade union, played by Eric Portman, who is appointed to the post of governor of a British Mediterranean island colony. Working on that film, in strange circumstances, was Peter Musgrave. After his arrival at Ealing, Peter worked for just a year as a trainee sound editor before he got his call-up papers for National Service at the age of eighteen. Employers could seek permission from the government to allow them to keep an apprentice on in order for them to complete their period of training. They were still going to have to do their National Service but it could be deferred. ‘Now one or two clever people like Jonathan Bates, who was the novelist H. E. Bates’ son, Ealing valued him enough to get deferment,’ claims Peter. ‘And there were a few others, too. I knew I wasn’t valuable to the studio so I didn’t ask for deferment.’
When his National Service came to an end, Peter returned to Ealing ready to work again.
And the cutting-room manageress, who was a fake genteel woman called Katie Brown with a phoney genteel accent said, ‘Oh no, no, you left us.’ I said, ‘I was called up you know.’ And she said, ‘Yes, but you left before you need have,’ because I said I wanted a month’s holiday before I went into National Service. So she used that as a reason for not re-employing me. I went back home with my tail between my legs.
A furious Peter rang the union, ‘because in those days union membership was absolutely compulsory. Ealing didn’t like the union but they had to accept it as all studios did’. Peter explained his case to the union representative and received a very sympathetic hearing. ‘This is disgraceful,’ the man on the phone said. ‘They’re obliged to re-employ you, and of course they’ve got to pay you the correct rate. The two years you spent in the RAF count towards your promotion, so you are now to be paid as a fully qualified assistant.’ The rate was something like £4 for the first year, £4 10 shillings the second year, £5 the third year, then you jumped to around £7. Fantastic, thought Peter, he’d hit the big time. ‘That’s what Ealing should have paid me had they re-employed me.’
A couple of weeks went by and Peter began to worry. It was obvious Ealing weren’t going to take him back so what was he going to do; he’d no other contacts in the business, how was he even going to start to find a job? As it turned out, the union ran an employment register that people like Peter could submit their name to and it wasn’t long before the phone rang. Ironies of ironies, the first job offer came courtesy of Ealing Studios.
‘Are you available to go to Italy?’ asked an anonymous voice.
‘I think you’re speaking to the wrong person,’ Peter answered politely. ‘I’m waiting to come back into the cutting rooms.’
The voice carried on, ‘No, no. We know who you are. Come and see us.’
Ealing had just bought a new British machine called the Leevers-Rich recorder; indeed they were the first feature studio to buy one. Up until then everybody had recorded on 35mm black-and-white film. Sound stock was a different stock to picture stock but it was still 35mm and ran at exactly the same speed, which is why you have clapperboards so you’ve got a clap on the picture and a clap on the sound and the editor knows where the two synchronise. This all meant that you had to have an enormous sound truck wherever you shot on location, pretty much the length of three cars, complete with its own dark room and heavy cables running out from it to the microphones. So Ealing thought, what a great idea this Leevers-Rich recorder was, brilliantly compact, just two cases, making things a lot easier out on location. His Excellency was going to be the first film to utilise the new system.
Ealing contacted the union telling them that because they’d bought this new machine they would only require two sound people on the picture. The union official almost had a seizure.’ The union agreement clearly states that there are to be four people on camera and four people on sound, so we don’t care what you’ve bought, it says here four people.’ Ealing tried stamping their foot and appealed to the British Film Producers’ Association, which as an employer’s group were on Ealing’s side, but unfortunately they couldn’t help; Ealing had signed this agreement and therefore had to abide by it. In an attempt at compromise, Ealing told the union they were prepared to take three qualified sound people, ‘Plus we’ll take Peter Musgrave because he’s the cheapest around.’ Steady on, thought Peter, reminding Ealing of his time at the studio and that he really should be on proper rates. ‘No, no, no,’ they said. ‘This is a separate contract, we’re not recognising that you had anything to do with the cutting rooms here, we are employing you for this one film only and we’ll only pay you what you were getting when you left us.’ So Peter got a depressing £4.50. ‘They were that mean.’
At least he was given the same location allowance as everyone else, which was something like a fiver a week, and he was put up in the same hotel as the crew in Palermo. ‘But I was strictly told, you are not to come out on location each day. So I would hang around the hotel grounds, which went down to the Mediterranean. I learned to swim, it was lovely.’
On the one morning Peter did decide to venture out, the unit were shooting in a villa just across the street from the hotel. He spotted Stephen Dalby, Ealing’s head of sound, and another man he recognised as George, a very good sound engineer. George was sweating buckets and on seeing Peter a flood of relief came over his face. “Thank goodness you’re here,” he said, and asked if Peter didn’t mind helping a bit. ‘So I started to wind up these cables and Stephen Dalby beckoned me over and said, “Go back to the hotel at once, you are not to lift a finger on this production.” Steve was very much management now and if it had got back, or if I’d been able to say to the union, yes I did do a day’s work, ah, that proves you need four people, whereas the studio was determined to prove they did not need four people. Anyway, that was my very last contact with Ealing. They paid me off and never took me back into their cutting rooms.’
Peter continued to work in a freelance capacity as a sound editor and managed to carve out a highly successful career working on Orson Welles’ Othello (1952), The Innocents (1961), The Hill (1965), Alfie (1966), Legend (1985), The Living Daylights (1987) and GoldenEye (1995), among many others.
His Excellency represented Robert Hamer’s last film for Ealing. For the man who directed the classic Kind Hearts and Coronets, Hamer had never attained such creative heights again, largely due to his addiction to alcohol. Peter Musgrave recalls that on His Excellency, during lunchtime if the unit were shooting near to the hotel, but more usually at the end of the day when everyone came back absolutely sweating, Hamer would be the first in the bar.
He would drink something called a Negroni. And one day, because I was paid this location allowance, I thought I’d try a Negroni, and it nearly made me sick, it was absolutely vile. But Hamer would be in there and you could see that he was the worse for wear, I’m afraid. He did become an alcoholic. On Kind Hearts I don’t know if he was drinking, it’s such a well-directed picture, maybe he wasn’t yet an alcoholic, but sadly he did go downhill.
Ken Westbury tells a story about Hamer on His Excellency. They were shooting nights and it was a fairly large-scale sequence involving a mob rioting and attacking some dockyards. The assistant director called for quiet before yelling, ‘OK, turn over. Action.’ All hell was let loose, the extras playing the rioters went berserk, fires were lit in the background, guns went off and explosions. At the end of the shot the assistant director called Cut and looked around at his crew to see whether they had captured the action. “All right, camera, OK? Sound, OK? OK Robert … Robert? OK Robert?” Hamer suddenly bolted upright in his chair. ‘How the fuck should I know, nobody bothered to wake me up.’
Balcon always considered Hamer, ‘one of the most remarkable of the young men I gathered around me at Ealing’. But also held the view that as an individual he ‘rarely came to terms with himself, and it almost seemed that he was engaged on a process of self-destruction’. All around the studio he was well liked and respected. So what went wrong? Part of the problem was that after Kind Hearts, Hamer could never persuade Balcon to back any of the projects he wanted to make. One of these was an adaptation of Richard Mason’s novel The Shadow and the Peak, which he wanted to do on location in the West Indies with Vivien Leigh in the title role. Balcon bought the film rights but later decided it was a risky and expensive venture, not to mention the fact that sex was a pivotal element in the story, and just as it was about to start pre-production announced, ‘On second thoughts I’m not going to do this’, and scrapped it. That happened at least twice to Hamer; Balcon changing his mind almost at the last minute about doing one of his projects. According to Harry Watt, when Hamer was told the film had been rejected, ‘He went on the bottle and he never recovered’.
Leaving Ealing after His Excellency, Hamer’s next film was The Long Memory, which was made for Rank in 1953. Its star, John Mills, recalls during a night shoot on a barge Hamer falling into the Thames as he walked backwards with a viewfinder attached to his eye. With very little work on offer, Hamer’s friend Diana Morgan remembers him regularly going off on drinking binges, then ringing her up after weeks of silence to announce, ‘I’ve been found’. By the 1960s School for Scoundrels, Hamer was replaced by Cyril Frankel after collapsing drunk on the set. He never made another film and died three years later at the age of just fifty-two. According to esteemed film critic David Thomson, Hamer’s career ‘now looks like the most serious miscarriage of talent in the postwar British cinema’.
Joan Parcell had been working in Hal Mason’s office for a while before she got her chance to work on the studio floor as a production secretary. She’d been waiting for a chance to move into a more creative job and some of the people in Mason’s office she’d grown friendly with managed to get her union card. ‘That was the hardest thing to do, to get into the union. You couldn’t get a job as a production secretary unless you got into the union.’
There were usually three production secretaries working on whatever production was on at the time and much of their work was aligned to the continuity girl.
She gives you information every day as to what’s taken place, what scenes they’ve shot, what actors worked that day, any particular problems they’d had that day. They keep a daily record of all this and the production secretary has to type all that up. Then I had to do a progress report every day. The script itself was typed up by the typing pool, but if there were changes during shooting, which there were all the time, then I’d type those pages up and then between me and the assistant director we had to make sure that everybody got any new changes that were made.
Joan enjoyed her new job and the atmosphere and camaraderie that existed on the studio floor. ‘I loved it. It was really a family there. It really was.’ They were quite a sociable bunch, too.
Once a week some of us went down to the local swimming pool. We also used to play darts at some of the local police stations against the policemen. The studio had good relations with the police. We had dances every once in a while at one of the local halls. We also did a lot of sports, track and field, because there was a competition, once a year I think it was, against the other studios. It was held at Kodak’s main laboratories because they had an athletics field, and so we’d compete there against Pinewood, Shepperton, all the other studios. It was like a big sports day. To be honest we weren’t all that good, but it was a lot of fun. There was running, high jump, relays, hurdles, all kinds of things. Ealing also had a cricket team at one time, because I remember going to watch them. Hal Mason used to play.
Out of the many films made at Ealing, Secret People (1952) is perhaps the only film to have begun life outside of the studio. This political thriller was conceived by Thorold Dickinson, who after Next of Kin, rather than join the Ealing ‘family’ had decided to go freelance, directing amongst other pictures a version of Alexander Pushkin’s The Queen of Spades (1947), which Martin Scorsese has called a masterpiece. After several abortive attempts to interest other companies in Secret People, Dickinson brought it to Balcon who happily took it on as ‘a welcome blood transfusion, a stranger bride in a family tending towards inbreeding’.
A largely forgotten film today in the Ealing canon, its principal importance is that it gave the young Audrey Hepburn her first substantial film role, playing a young refugee in London who gets caught up in a political assassination plot. Some twelve actresses were tested for the part but at Audrey’s first audition Dickinson and his creative team all sensed that here was something out of the ordinary. Betty Collins remembers seeing Audrey that day.
She was in the corridor in the offices where I worked. I was walking along and saw her standing there, just by herself, looking very shy and demure, looking exactly as if she’d been interviewed but asked to go outside while they discussed it. I can see her now, standing there all by herself, waiting to be called back in. And I think, my God, the red carpet would have gone out a few years later.
Camera operator Ronnie Taylor remembers Hepburn on the film. ‘She was lovely. She was very inexperienced in those days, but you could tell there was a star in the making. In many instances it’s the cameraman more than the director who can recognise stars because something happens in the camera.’ Whatever impact she may have made in Secret People, Ealing allowed the young Audrey to fall through their fingers. ‘No one really knew how special she was,’ says Ken Westbury. ‘No one at Ealing realised her potential.’ To be fair, Ealing’s casting director, Margaret Harper-Nelson, did suggest to the studio that they put Hepburn under contract but she was told: She won’t go very far. A few months later, Dickinson directed a screen test of Audrey, which was sent over to William Wyler in Hollywood, who instantly fell in love with the actress and cast her in his forthcoming picture. A little over a year later Roman Holiday was released and Audrey was launched as one of cinema’s greatest ever stars.
Secret People ended Ronnie Taylor’s association with Ealing, and quite frankly he was happy to be leaving.
It was very cliquey. They were all nice people but I didn’t really like the atmosphere there. It was very strictly run. And the Ealing cameramen were a bit more concerned with their position than those I worked with at Gainsborough, there was a bit of politics going on at Ealing and that came from the top. You also had the feeling that someone was looking over your shoulder all the time. I wasn’t miserable at Ealing, but there wasn’t the same freedom there was at Gainsborough.
After Ealing, Ronnie’s reputation as a camera operator continued to grow as he worked on a succession of major films such as Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1960); The Devils (1971), Barry Lyndon (1975) and Star Wars (1977) before going on to become a director of photography in his own right, winning an Oscar for Gandhi (1982).
Ealing featured two other future stars in their next film, I Believe in You (1952), directed by Basil Dearden, a drama that focused on the workings of the probation service. An eighteen-year-old Joan Collins was given her first major film role, following three screen tests, as a working-class girl gone bad, opposite another relative newcomer in Laurence Harvey as her spiv boyfriend. Hue and Cry’s Harry Fowler also appeared, preparing for his role by staying in a real borstal for two nights, ‘That was an experience to say the least.’ So, too, was acting opposite Miss Collins, an actress he described as ‘oozing something that was dangerous to have in British films at that time. One thing you were never allowed to be in British films was any hint of sex.’ Brief Encounter’s Celia Johnson also starred as a schoolmarmish probation officer.
Next to go on the floor for Alexander Mackendrick was Mandy (1952), a sensitive melodrama about a child diagnosed as profoundly deaf and the conflict this brings into her parents’ lives. The film came about after Balcon’s daughter, the actress Jill Balcon, read the true story of a deaf girl on the BBC’s Woman’s Hour. At first the corporation received a flood of complaints, mainly from expectant mothers upset that the subject was being trivialised, at worst exploited. However, as the readings continued, the reception changed from anger to praise as the story became one of hope and achievement as the child slowly learnt how to speak.
Ealing had a fine track record of representing children on screen and eliciting wonderful performances from them, notably Hue and Cry and The Magnet (1950), a minor comedy from the pen of Tibby Clarke about a young boy (the eleven-year-old James Fox in his film debut) who cheats another child out of his prized magnet only for his guilt to lead him to believe he is a fugitive from the police. Mandy, however, was very different; no carefree evocation of childhood innocence, this was hard-edged, and for such a daunting and challenging role a large number of child actors arrived at Ealing for screen tests, under the supervision of Mackendrick. Among them was a familiar face, someone Mackendrick had used a year earlier as the little girl who aids Alec Guinness’s escape from an angry mob in The Man in the White Suit.
Mandy Miller was barely six years old when she made that film, and only got the part through a colossal piece of luck.
My father, together with being a radio producer, also founded a square-dancing group who, with a band, would perform at a huge variety of events – it was very popular in the early 50s. And at one such occasion he met Michael Balcon who, when being told how keen my older sister was to become an actress, invited her with my father to visit his studios. When the day arrived, my mother was ill and so I had to ‘tag along’ too. During the morning we all went to the canteen and as luck (fate) would have it, Sandy Mackendrick was also in there having a coffee. And the story goes that he was in the throes of casting Man in the White Suit and when he saw me – probably across some enormous sticky bun – said, ‘That’s a funny face, I could use that funny face in my next film!’ How ironic that I was the one ‘discovered’ when all I was really interested in was ballet.
On the set for just one day, Mandy retains few memories of it, none of which are of Alec Guinness, with whom she played her scene. ‘But I do remember Duncan Lamont being really warm and nice and, most importantly, the generous supply of toffees (sugar rationing still in force then, remember!) which Charlie the props man kept doling out in order to muffle my Home Counties accent and hope it sounded more Lancashire!’
Returning to school and her beloved ballet, it was many months later when the casting agent from Ealing contacted Mandy’s parents to ask whether she would come in and do a screen test. Mandy admits to having been terrified by the prospect, but Mackendrick was never to forget the impact she made on that day. ‘Mandy’s performance was so astonishing that the unit was struck rigid, holding its breath, with this electrifying silence on the floor. I was in tears. Douglas Slocombe was in tears. And afterwards both of us said, cancel the rest, she’s it.’
As filming got underway, Mandy doesn’t think she felt in any way overwhelmed by the studios or the activities taking place. ‘Each department was small and cosy and I remember being made to feel as one of the family.’ A tutor was always on hand on the set and Mandy was required to undergo a study period each day in her dressing room.
As the film was shot during the winter months, I do remember the cold, the bomb-sites and the very particular atmosphere of the School for the Deaf in Manchester where we did a lot of shooting. But we could take cover whilst on location in what seemed to me HUGE Humber saloon cars and eat amazing bacon rolls.
The most vivid memory of the whole experience for Mandy was Sandy Mackendrick: ‘A most extraordinary man with a kind of wildness about him which I had never encountered and found a little awe-inspiring. But he was incredibly patient and gentle with me.’ However, during the rehearsals for the scene in which the deaf child makes her very first sound, a primeval scream, Mandy opened her mouth and nothing very much came out of it. Mackendrick wanted something dramatic at that moment, with the rising tension, so let out a loud and powerful scream himself. ‘I remember being scared out of my wits when HE screamed – it produced the desired results from me though!’
As for her co-stars, Mandy remembers Jack Hawkins, who plays the gifted teacher of the deaf school that the child attends, as ‘very kind and quiet and grandfatherly in a way’, whereas Phyllis Calvert, who played her mother in the film, was ‘warm and glamorous, even in purple lipstick for the exterior shots because of the brilliant arc lights I guess’. As for Terence Morgan, who played her father, Mandy admits to having fallen madly in love with him all decked out as he was in his Hawaiian pancake tan. ‘It was a bit of a letdown to see him pale-faced and unshaven in make-up first thing in the morning. The innocent joys of not requiring make-up at that age, although my plaits were always a problem for the continuity girl from take to take!’
When it opened, Mandy proved highly popular with audiences and was one of the most successful films of the year at the British box office. In the Sunday Times Dilys Powell thought it, ‘an extremely touching film, in spite of occasional obviousness in a plot never dull, and in spite of its subject never saccharine’. Much of its success is due to Mandy Miller’s quite remarkable performance, one of the most touching and heartrending ever given by a child actor. Looking back now, Mandy doesn’t think she felt daunted at all by acting in the film or faced any real challenges. ‘At seven I don’t think there were any. I guess I was just a child with an easy-going nature and a very vivid imagination!’
For the next ten years Mandy worked regularly in the cinema, and later on television. She also recorded the hugely popular song ‘Nellie the Elephant’ in 1956. In the early 1960s, after guest appearances in The Saint and The Avengers, Mandy retired from the business to begin a family and one gets the impression she never regretted the decision.
Those years of my participation in the magical world of film-making were so wonderful, though, and I have nothing but the happiest of memories of everyone I was fortunate enough to meet. I was treated, I think, probably a bit specially, but my mother was adamant that I was just a normal, VERY lucky little girl, and life returned to normal once filming was completed. I do remember the premieres, though, when I would have a special dress made, meet famous people of the period and often present flowers to Royalty … can you believe it?
One memorable souvenir from the Mandy shoot was that the pale-blue satin dressing gown she wore in the film was given to her on the final day of shooting. ‘And, of course, most amazingly, the title of the film was changed to my name.’