Conversations with jack cardiff

‘Jack Cardiff lit an actress with the caressing strokes of a Renoir—or rather, I should say a Degas, whom he copied at the Louvre while we were doing the interiors of Fanny at Boulogne Billancourt, in Paris. Yes, Cardiff was a painter concerned with delicate contrasts, contours and depth and also the balance of colours. He used light for drama and for romance. He worked with almost feminine minutiae, little touches of light here, little touches of light there, I felt part of a beautiful canvas.’

JBYou worked next on The Diary of Anne Frank [1958], but you were only responsible for the location work. Is that right?

JCYes, I worked just on the locations in Holland. The director was George Stevens,¹ but I was working with George Stevens Jr, who was his son and one of the film’s producers. He wasn’t just a kid though; he was a very mature, well-educated and interesting man—a very nice man to work with. So for the location shooting there was just him and me and one or two others, and we had no specific actors because they had finished all of the main shooting. This was just pure location work, which included the house of Anne Frank and one or two scenes of people going through the streets and other external shots.

They had hired an actual truck from World War II. It was a restored van of the sort used for taking away the prisoners of war or rounding up those that were to be sent to the concentration camps; the sort of thing that these poor people would have seen on their streets all the time. We got a number of extras who were chosen because they were particularly thin, and then they were given these dreadful clothes that they had to wear—sort of like prison pyjamas.

JCNo, no, before that. Although I did read it again when I was asked to go out there and work on the film. It was quite an incredible tale. I was very deeply involved in the story and felt such a deep sympathy for the girl.

JBThis was less than fifteen years after the actual events of World War II. So you were resurrecting some fairly recent memories …

JCThat’s right, yes. And, in fact, a really weird thing happened to us. This woman, who lived in a house in the centre of the town, had just gotten ready to do her shopping. She got her bag and left the house. She came down the steps to the street and right in front of her was our van with about fourteen ‘prisoners of war’ with their heads all shaved and looking very thin and dirty. Now this poor woman had been in that position herself. She had had her camp number burned on her arm and had been a long time recovering from the experience, and she thought that she had gone mad. Well, she screamed and screamed and screamed. They ran up to her and in the end managed to make it clear to her that it was a film being made, but what a nightmare for her. Can you imagine what that must be like to really think that you had gone mad? It brought back everything so vividly because it all looked so real.

JCYes, we did some night shooting at the real house. In fact, we shot all night once, as we had a lot of odd shots to do that tied in with what had been shot for the film so far on the Hollywood sets. They didn’t have anything like the actual house to use in America, so we were doing all of that work. Anne Frank was, as you will know, hidden in a secret room at the very top of the family house, although actually it was several rooms together, almost like a tiny apartment, but very cleverly hidden.

Those were the rooms that I walked about in at night. We weren’t shooting in those rooms because they had already shot those interior scenes on the sets in Hollywood, but during the various breaks that we had, I wandered about the house. I remember seeing the wall where she had puts marks during those two years to show how she was growing. Just pencil marks, but they were still there.

The location shoot in Amsterdam for The Diary of Anne Frank (1958)

Also there was the tiny window that she had to look through—all she could see outside was a large tree, and that same tree is still there, of course. It was very strange and one had a feeling of being there with her. It was so vivid. It was completely silent, as all the tourists had left for the night.

JBIn some ways, it is a story of hope, yet the audience know the outcome. Does that change the way a director has to approach making a film like The Diary of Anne Frank?

JCWell, obviously the audience knows there is no way out. The director can’t keep Anne alive, unless you create a structure where the film ends before her capture and murder. But then the audience still know that she is going to be killed, so there is not much you can gain from trying something like that. The Diary of Anne Frank is so amazing in itself— it is so pathetic and horrible—that it stands up in its own right.

JBYou later met Anne’s father, Otto Frank.

JCNo, not later, it was at that same time [as the film] that I met him; we had lunch together. It was during this lunch that he told me that he knew the name of the person who had been responsible for giving the family away. Now that shook me! I didn’t ask him who it was, partly because the name wouldn’t have meant anything to me anyway, but also I felt it was in slightly bad taste to ask.

A few weeks ago in the newspaper, I read that Otto Frank had been implicated in the betrayal himself. That is hard to believe. Really hard to believe.

JBThe film was shot in CinemaScope. Wasn’t there a danger of losing the sense of claustrophobia with such a large-format film?

JCWell, I never liked CinemaScope because when I used it myself as a director I always found that you couldn’t get the intimacy that you might want. The Diary of Anne Frank would have been much better in 185³, where you can go closer, much closer.

During the first couple of years after CinemaScope started, they said that you couldn’t go closer than 5 feet 6 inches from the camera, which is a long way away. When I used it on my films, I had a system going where I got hold of some cheap little lens adaptor from someone in the camera department and that allowed me to go a little bit closer. I tried doing some inserts where I was only about 2 feet away and I found that if I used a lot of light—really fierce light—and I stopped down on the diaphragm [lens aperture], it just held the focus. I tried it on one of the actresses, but she obviously didn’t like being burned up by a lamp; it got so hot.

I must say I was relieved when I got away from using CinemaScope. The system didn’t last long.

JBThere are also framing issues with very wide-screen formats.

JCThat’s the big problem. If you had a close up with, say, just the top of the shoulders at the bottom of the frame, then the rest of the screen would have these huge blank spaces at either side. It was very good for group scenes; you could really go to town with those and have a whole group of people, which was wonderful.

JBDo you think it was purely a gimmick?

JCOh no. I think they really thought it had something going for it. There was an element of a gimmick perhaps, but it was genuine enough and many people really liked it. It was also at this time that they introduced sound which went around the whole cinema, and that was great too. It all gave a super-realistic effect. Panavision now is the accepted format, which gives 2.35:1. And, of course, now with digital it is quite different again. I don’t know how it is all going to end up.

Mike Todd⁴ was involved in many of these sorts of innovations. It was so tragic when he was killed in that flying accident. I had spoken to him just before he died and he had asked if I was interested in shooting one of his pictures. I had only just rekindled my ambition as a director, so I turned him down, and I was sorry I did that, but I was just so keen to direct my first picture.

JBYour long-standing friendship with director Richard Fleischer began with The Vikings [1958].

JCI forget how we first met, but he had the most wonderful sense of humour. He was laconic and quiet and he would just say things that made you giggle. I took a liking to him at once. He is a very sincere person. He had been to one of the very good universities in America and had also studied to be a director at university in California. He had a good mind and was very un-American in many ways.

JBBut it wasn’t exactly a film without its problems, was it?

JCThe biggest problem he had on The Vikings was that the actor, Kirk Douglas, was also the producer. At least he was one of the producers; basically he was the man that owned the picture.

JBActor-producer can be a lethal combination …

JCYes, it can.

JBYou shot on location in Norway, which must have had its own set of difficulties too.

JCWe had a lot of adventures on the fiords where we made The Vikings. We had a houseboat, rather like on The African Queen, but not quite so disastrous. The cabins were all together and Kirk had the cabin next to me. I could hear him sometimes at night when I was trying to get to sleep, arguing with Dick about the next day’s scenes. Kirk always wanted to do it a certain way and Dick was always fighting him.

JBWhen Kirk Douglas wasn’t fighting Dick Fleischer, did he fight his co-star Tony Curtis? How did they get along?

JCOkay, but what happened was that Kirk owned the story and had a script written, which was very good and he went around trying to get it off the ground. The usual problems happened and it wasn’t easy, but eventually someone agreed to put up the money, but insisted that Kirk as the star wasn’t enough, and it needed two stars to make it box office. So poor old Kirk took that on the chin and looked around for another person.

He approached Tony Curtis and he agreed, but he didn’t like his part and really wanted the part that was intended for Kirk. So again Kirk agreed, and they signed the contract, but before they started making the film, Kirk did a bit of rewriting and carefully adjusted the script so that he again had more than Curtis.

Tony Curtis and Jack Cardiff, with Jack’s son, Peter, on location with The Vikings (1958)

JBDidn’t Curtis notice?

JCTony didn’t realize until halfway through the picture, and then he did a sort of slowburn take on it.

JBHis then wife, Janet Leigh,⁵ also starred in the film. Was that another condition of Curtis taking the role?

JCI don’t know, but she was very good in it. I had a young son, Peter, and when he was on location she used to look after him. She was a very nice person.

JBAnother long-standing friendship was born on the film: Ernest Borgnine.⁶

JCYes, he was a great guy. I saw him last year when he came over to England.

There was one scene where Ernest was supposed to be thrown to the dogs in a pit, and these were savage-looking dogs—quite terrifying. But the keeper couldn’t make them growl or bark; they were just sleepy. They tried flicking stones at them, but they were just bored, almost yawning and going to sleep. It was a terrible problem.

But then Tony came on the set to watch and he was wearing a funny hat that he had just picked up. When the dogs saw him, they went mad! We quickly started the scene and it was wonderful. What had happened was that the hat had belonged to one of the dogs’ other keepers, whom the dogs hated—so when they saw that hat, they went mad! Method acting for dogs.

JBDid Richard Fleischer encourage you in your directing ambitions?

JCDick knew I wanted to direct and he was one of my best friends in the film business. In fact, he asked me to direct a scene one day, just to see how I would handle it. He was convinced that I could direct, and he knew the 20th Century Fox people and suggested that they give me a break. He never admitted afterwards that that’s what happened, but I believe it’s a true story.

JBAnd so, five years after the failure of the William Tell project, you did finally get another chance to direct. The film was Intent to Kill [1958].

JCFunnily enough, I found a press cutting just this morning for Intent to Kill. It said, ‘This is different; I like it!’ It did have some good reviews. It didn’t become a smash hit, but it was interesting.

JBYou shot it in black and white.

JCThat’s right. I think we were using Mitchell cameras. I had a lot of ideas scenically for Intent to Kill, but I didn’t bother myself too much with lighting. I hadn’t worked with Desmond Dickinson⁷ before, but he was quite good. Looking back on it, it’s quite possible that most of that crew was hired because they were quite cheap. I didn’t realize that at the time—I was just happy to go on the floor and direct the film. The unit was extremely good.

JBDidn’t it seem strange to be shooting in black and white after so long working in Technicolor?

JCNot really, no. As a director I was more concerned with the script and the actors and whatever. It was not an easy subject and we had to go to Canada on location. It was an interesting picture with Richard Todd⁸ and Betsy Drake.⁹ I enjoyed it.

JBHow did your next film as a director, Beyond This Place [1959], come about?

JCWell, once you have done one, it is always easier to get another. I must have had an agent at the time and he probably got it for me.

It was not a big picture and it was done, I think, by quite a small company. It was an interesting story and very low budget. It was definitely in the category of a minor film. It was based on the Oscar Slater¹⁰ murder story.

JBWere you finding directing tougher than you had thought you would?

JCIt wasn’t difficult to make, just a straightforward low-budget picture and it certainly didn’t hit the headlines.

I do remember that Van Johnson¹¹ played the lead, and he was a very strange man. Very nice to work with and quite charming, but for some reason he would love to sleep. He had a dressing room and he seemed to sleep all the time. He was extremely young and fresh and he was never late, he wasn’t the type to be up all night at parties; he led a very sedentary life. But nevertheless he used to sleep all the time.

Directing an unconscious Herbert Lom—Intent to Kill (1958)

More snow on Intent to Kill (1958)

JBWhat films were inspiring your work at this time?

JCI went to see lots of films. Orson Welles in the marvellous Citizen Kane; Spencer Tracy

was another favourite of mine; and Charles Laughton too. They had a certain idiosyncratic manner that stamped their personality on the screen. It was always a lesson to see films because you learnt what worked and what didn’t. One of the things that always offended me was overacting. The essence of a good actor is that he under acts for the camera. It is so important.

JBAre you always watching films for their technique? Can you watch a film just for entertainment?

JCOh yes, definitely just for entertainment. I live near a good cinema now, and also we sometimes tape things that I think I should see. I have become a bit lazy because the whole thing of going out to the cinema is less attractive as the years go on.

JBYou’re not a purist about watching films on the big screen, then?

JCNo, but I quite agree that at the cinema, when you see a film on a big screen, with the space around you, you really feel the audience reactions. So I would always much rather do that.

JBDid you have problems with overacting on Beyond This Place?

JCA little. I remember one time Van Johnson was doing a scene: he was supposed to have come from America to find out what has happened to his father, because he has disappeared. Someone tells him that his father is in jail for murder. So now we cut to Van Johnson’s face; Van wasn’t a great actor and he made this huge ‘Ahhhhh!’ face. I said to him, ‘Please don’t do that. Don’t show any emotion at all.’ A sharp camera cut to his face would convey the shock and it didn’t require overacting.

JBAfter directing Beyond This Place, you returned to cinematography, working with Maurice Chevalier¹² and Leslie Caron¹³ on Fanny [1960]. Were you still hedging your bets?

JCWell, just a few weeks after I had finished Sons and Lovers, when I had been working on the editing, I had this call from Josh Logan,¹⁴ saying, ‘Jack, you must come over and work with me on Fanny.’ I explained that I was a director now, but he was a great wily showman in a way and he said, ‘Jack, do both—people will love you for it.’ He thought people would respect me more if I did both and that I mustn’t give up photography. I fell for that one, and he talked me into it. Since then, of course, I have done both; I have had pictures to direct or photograph as I went along.

Anyway, photographing Fanny was like a holiday after directing. A piece of cake.

Jack Cardiff directs Van Johnson and Vera Miles in Beyond This Place (1959)

JBHad you read Pagnol’s original trilogy¹⁵?

JCYes, and of course I had also seen the original French film version¹⁶. But the French version had been black and white, and pretty rough-looking in my opinion. It certainly wasn’t a beautiful thing, but it did have these big stars and it had been a very big success. So when Josh Logan comes along, there was an instinctive hostility from the French: ‘Here comes Hollywood trying to make something from one of our great masterpieces!” That was their attitude. But the ironic thing was that we had several French actors in our film playing the leads—Maurice Chevalier, Leslie Caron, Charles Boyer¹⁷

Maurice Chevalier was really more of a Hollywood star than a French star, though. So when the film came out, they said nothing could compare with the original. In actual fact, ours was a very beautiful film.

JBAnd I would say your film had a better cast than the 1932 Marc Allégret version.

JCIt has such a wonderful cast headed by Maurice and Leslie; it was such a well-known cast. With great respect to the original actress (Orane Demazis), I think that Leslie was very beautiful and a marvellous actress. I think it was very sad that Josh Logan’s version wasn’t acclaimed more than it was in France. It had fairly good success in America and in England.

JBWas Maurice Chevalier good to work with?

JCHe was so famous and so very well off that he could really afford to relax. I went to his house and he was a very nice man to know. He had several fauves¹⁸ paintings, which today would be worth millions and millions of pounds. He probably had half-a-dozen of the very best fauves that I have ever seen—not to mention a collection of Renoirs and many other bits and pieces. So he was pretty well off. He was very quiet and never threw his weight about.

JBAnd Leslie Caron?

JCShe had a natural grace, and was so much better than the original actress. Leslie really fitted the part because she so was so beautiful.

There was also one woman who played the part of the fish seller in the market place. She was such a wonderful character; a great big, fat, raucous woman who was an actress but who also owned a rather down-market dance club on the side. Lionel Jeffries¹⁹, who is a great chum of mine, was in the film, of course, and he and I were invited to go to this club. We went along with our wives, and there were a lot of lesbians dancing there, so I pushed Lionel toward one of these women and made him dance with her. He was furious with me, but then brought her back to our table to talk with us all. Lionel asked the most outrageous questions and it was a wonderful evening.

JBWere you mainly shooting in Marseilles?

JCYes, we were a long time doing the main shoot in the port at Marseilles, and then we moved to Dinard to get some more shots, and then we went to Paris to do the studio shots.

I think we used Marseilles to great advantage; we actually shot a lot of stuff on the waterfront and it was a very picturesque location. We had some wonderful effects. We shot one sequence from a helicopter where we zoomed in and out of the harbour at Marseilles.

Looking back on it, it was the most pleasant film in the sense that we were on location. Usually you have a pretty dull time of it, but on this film they had what was called ‘French Hours’, which meant that you didn’t have to start until 12 o’clock, midday. So for the actors and actresses, who usually have to be there at 5 am for their hair and make-up, this was a wonderful thing. It meant that they could go to parties and go to bed late, and none of it mattered! That is the horror of working on films for an actor; they have to get up so early in the morning. These ‘French Hours’ meant that we started at 12 and worked right though without a pause—without lunch because you would have it before you started—and finish at 7.30 at night. That worked beautifully.

Opposite: Jack Cardiff and Leslie Caron on location, Fanny (1960)

JBYou seem to feel that there are plenty of advantages to location work over studio shooting.

JCDefinitely! On location it brings everyone very much closer together, partly because they are forced to spend all of their time together. Locations are often very tough and can be quite horrific, and that is something that you have to go through together. Locations in the main are marvellous—you travel somewhere and you have to work hard. Tourists go back to their hotels at midday to escape from the heat, but film crews have to keep on working right through. It is always worth it.

JBHow were the Paris studio facilities at that time?

JCVery good. Quite excellent; in fact, they had everything.

JBHow did they compare to, say, Cinecittà in Rome that you had used for War and Peace?

JCRome was a different ballgame because they had these enormous studios at Cinecittà, but I had the feeling that they didn’t really have the facilities to make a series of big pictures, as they often relied on American productions, which came over and hired the studios. But on their own it was a pretty threadbare industry in Rome.

I had always admired the French technicians. Their system was not so hidebound as in England. At this time in England, the unions were very tough, so wherever we went we had to work by the rules very closely; otherwise, we were in deadly trouble. There was the story of a location shoot in Wales where the director wanted a door to be a different colour, and as they were in a hurry, they got the local painter to quickly paint it. When the studios found out, they stopped the production and had the studio painter come out and repaint the door.

It doesn’t happen so much now, but it certainly happened a lot in those days. So it was refreshing to be in Paris where, if you had a fairly logical argument why you wanted to take just one camera and an assistant out to shoot something quickly, then you could bend the rules and no one said a word—that’s what I liked about it.

JBThe film picked up a raft of award nominations²⁰ and you were again Academy Award-nominated for your cinematography.

JCYes, that was very pleasant. I had been so happy to photograph it because it was wonderful to work on and the net result was that it looked good.

JBDid you go to the Academy Awards ceremony this time?

JCNo, I have never been to the ceremony when I have been nominated. As always, I was already working on another picture, and I really couldn’t afford the time for a long trip.

JBDid the nomination make you question your decision to be a director?

JCI don’t know; that’s an interesting question. Inside me, I wanted to continue to direct, but that all depended on what subjects came up; I was just waiting for another assignment. I suppose I was on a kind of ‘sticky wicket’ at that time—I hadn’t made anything outstanding [as a director] and it wasn’t until I had made Sons and Lovers that I had more assurance that I would get more directorial jobs.

JBYou did immediately return to directing again after Fanny, making Scent of

Mystery [1960].

JCThe man producing it was Mike Todd Jr, and of course Mike Todd Sr was the big man of the moment. But his son was extremely nice to work with. Again, I’m sure this job would have come through my agent.

JBYou were working with another Korda on this film. You had Vincent as your art director …

JCYes, I had forgotten about that. He was a strange man. He was strangely out of character working as an art director, because he was more of a painter or an artist. He made beautiful designs, but he was an expensive art director because usually, if you wanted some paintings for a set, say, the art director would fake something, but Vincent would get the real paintings in. That made him very expensive as an art director. He was also very laconic and critical of everything.

Jack Cardiff shooting a car-rig on Scent of Mystery (1960)

Lighting the exteriors on Scent of Mystery (1960)

JBYou were doing your own cinematography on this?

JCI was supervising and most of it was easy enough. Really just exteriors, as we chased around these wonderful locations. This one was Technicolor.

JBNow Scent of Mystery was rather unusual: it was supposed to be released in a format called ‘Smell-O-Vision.’²¹ What attracted you to a film with such an outlandish gimmick?

JCI was very interested in doing a film that had dramatic smells in it. I had always had this sort of ambition to do something like that; but I had put it away on a shelf. So I really jumped at the chance.

JBWere the smells integral to the plot or simply a gimmick?

JCWell, the script was very well written and it really dramatized the smells. It was a murder mystery and, for instance, perhaps the murderer smoked a pipe, so that when he was hiding in a room and the audience smelled tobacco they would know he was there. It took place in Spain and it was like a gigantic chase. We literally went all over Spain shooting—it was fantastic, just like a giant travelogue.

JBHow was the system of smells supposed to work?

JCThe system was that we were shooting on a special wide film that had enough space for a soundtrack and also enough space for a ‘smell track’. They would set up under the cinema these vats of odours, things like sea ozone, tobacco, fruit, whatever, and each one was ready to be used. According to the smell track on the film, it would send a ‘get ready’ message and that would drop a bit of the smell into a groove that then went around the whole cinema. There were pipes along the back of all the seats that had little holes. As the cue came on the film, the smell would be shot out onto the people sitting behind.

JBHow were they planning to fit out all of the cinemas?

JCThat’s a good point. The trouble is, the cost is enormous.²²

JBBut no one had really thought about that?

JCThat’s the incredible thing: no one seemed to!

JBHad you tested the smells out?

JCWell, after some weeks of shooting things were going very well, and I suppose I was as guilty as anybody for not asking about the smells, but I took it for granted that they would be okay. The smells were being produced by some professor in Switzerland.²³

I should, as the director, have asked to see this working; but I didn’t. I gathered that the inventor was working away like mad and it would all be ready in time. Before we started work, I should have insisted on having some idea of the smells. But I was told it would be fine …

It was a three-month schedule with a $4 million budget, which was a lot of money then. So we had been working away and I said to Mike Todd Jr, ‘Have you actually smelled the effects yourself?’ and he said he hadn’t, but he was sure it was going to work wonderfully.

JBSo even the film’s producer hadn’t checked?

JCNo, so I suggested he got some samples and he got in touch with Switzerland, and after a couple of weeks, we received a box of samples in little glass tubes. They were all labelled: apricots, sea ozone, whatever. We took a sniff, and everything smelled like a cheap perfume. Nothing like they were supposed to, and nothing like anything but a rather cheap perfume! This was a disaster, so Mike phones the professor, who says not to worry about it because it will all be all right on the night.

So there’s nothing else we can do. We have the cast, we have the crew and it’s costing $4 million. So we finish the film.

JBAnd was it ‘all right on the night’?

JCNo! The first screening for the press was going to be in this specially built cinema in Chicago. On the big night everything smelled like cheap perfume. It was an utter disaster. I never met that bastard, but I wish I had. He was obviously a phoney.

We opened the film up in New York and the critics laughed at it. It was a complete flop because of this idiot who let us all down.

Jack Cardiff, Denholm Elliott and Diana Dors on location in Spain for Scent of Mystery (1960)

JBBut this was a big film with some big stars …

JCWell, it was not a bad film at all and yes, a good cast. Liz Taylor was in it; she was married to Mike Todd²⁴ at the time. She was sort of one of the producers; not a fully-fledged producer, but she was part of the company that was producing the film. So because of that she agreed to appear in the last scene of the picture. That was the mystery: who is this woman? And in the last few moments, you meet her and it turns out to be Liz Taylor.

Peter Lorre²⁵ was in it, and Denholm Elliott. The two of them are literally running all through the film.

JBDidn’t you almost kill off Peter Lorre with all the running?

JCHalfway through the picture, I had gone out for dinner and my assistant director came in and said, ‘Jack, Peter Lorre’s dying.’ You can imagine my feelings.

I rushed around to the hotel and there was Peter laid-out on a table and he was gasping for breath, his great big belly going up and down. We were in Córdoba and, as it happened, there was a surgeons’ convention going on. So about four or five of them came around and they were all shaking their heads, and they all thought he was going to die within half an hour. Suddenly one of the doctors suggested we try bloodletting. This was like going back two or three hundred years! So as we had nothing to lose, they tried it, and amazingly enough it worked. By 5 o’clock in the morning, he had recovered consciousness.

JBBut you didn’t let him do any more running …

JCNo! Because he was now so weak there was no way he could keep doing all of this running. So the company advertised in Madrid for a double and extraordinarily enough they found a man who looked exactly like him. So we just used Peter for the close-ups.

JBWhat are the odds of finding a Peter Lorre lookalike in Madrid?

JCA million to one! But they got one.

Discussing a scene with Denholm Elliott and Peter Lorre for Scent of Mystery (1960)

JBBut ultimately you didn’t get to be the first ‘Smelly’?

JCNo, because at the same time some producer character had bought a Japanese film that he dubbed and he called his film The First Smelly. And he opened it a couple of days before ours came out in New York. All he did was put a couple of buckets full of incense at the air conditioning intake and flood the cinema with the smell.

JBAnd Scent of Mystery didn’t really work as a story without the smells?

JCYears later, it did suddenly appear as a film on its own without the smells and it was running at the Coliseum cinema in London²⁶. It was really nothing without the smells because the scenes were geared up for and written for the smells. Tragic.²⁷