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70mm Film Introductions
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Feature
film text by: Wolfram
Hannemann,
Sheldon Hall,
Jasper Sharp, Joe Dunton, Sir Christopher Frayling,
Duncan McGregor,
Tony Sloman and
Bill
Lawrence |
Date:
26.03.2011.
Updated
28-07-24 |
"Goya" by Wolfram Hannemann
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Wolfram
Hannemann introducing "Goya". Image by Thomas Hauerslev
To start with I would like to quote from
an article written by Peter Ahrens in a newspaper called "Die Weltbühne"
after the film’s East German premiere in September 1971:
„GOYA takes a special place within the film production of the GDR as
well as those of the socialist countries. It occurs to me that the
technical possibilities of large format photography and modern colour
materials have been used in a convincing way, thus proving their
suitability for art movies.“
Well – what more can we ask for? But I warn you – "GOYA" will be
a tough one for most of you because it will be presented in its original
German language version with the added attraction of French subtitles!
Let me tell you a bit about the film’s director, Konrad Wolf.
Konrad Wolf was born in 1925 as the son of Friedrich Wolf, who was a
Jewish communist as well as a writer. In 1933 the Wolf family first fled
to Switzerland, then to France. At the end of 1934 the family reunited
in Moscow, where Konrad and his brother Markus became citizens of the
Soviet Union. Due to the Nazi regime in Germany Konrad’s father lost his
German nationality. Two years later the other members of the family also
lost their German nationality. In 1942, aged 17, Konrad Wolf received
his conscription order to serve in the Red Army, where he became a
translator. After the war he first worked as a correspondent for a
newspaper in Berlin before becoming Head of Department of Arts and
Culture as well as press censor for the Soviet Military Administration
of Sachsen-Anhalt in Halle. From 1949 to 1955 he studied the art of
Directing in Moscow. 1952 he resigned as citizen of the Soviet Union and
accepted citizenship of the GDR. From 1955 until his death in 1982 he
was working as a director for the DEFA studio.
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More
in 70mm reading:
•
Widescreen Weekend 2011
•
Gallery:
2011
•
Mission
Report
• WSW Home
• Through the Years
• The Best of WSW
•
Academy of the WSW
•
Creating the WSW
•
Planning the WSW
• Projecting
the WSW •
Home of
CINERAMA
•
Projecting CINERAMA
"It's Bloody
Marvellous" Widescreen Weekend 2011
Internet link:
laserhotline.de
wolframhannemann.de
Wolfram Hannemann
Talstr. 11
70825 Korntal
Germany
Fon: +49 (0) 711 832188
Fax: +49 (0) 711 8380518
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"GOYA" was made in 1971 and won Konrad Wolf a Special Prize at
the Moscow International Film Festival as well as GDR‘s National Prize
First Class. It was filmed in 70mm by cinematographers Werner Bergmann
and Konstantin Ryzhov as a two part film. It took more than one year in
pre-production. 3000 costumes had to be made and loads of requisites
were used. Among these were 80 paintings by Goya, which were copied in
their original size by the studios‘ painters, especially Alfred Born.
Location filming took place in Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, the Crimea and the
Caucasus. The cast included actors from eight different countries, most
of whom would perform in their native language. Two language versions
were made for release. The music score was recorded in Leningrad and the
dubbing was done in Berlin-Johannisthal. Some months after its premiere
director Konrad Wolf decided to cut his film from 161 minutes down to
134 minutes. The latter version is the only one remaining.
When asked in an interview about his intention in directing "GOYA"
Konrad Wolf replied: „I was not primarily interested in accentuating
Goya’s art. I was much more interested in the human being, who struggles
with the times and circumstances he is living in and who eventually
confronts them. I was never interested in making one of those artist
movies trying to give answers as how the genius of an artist has to be
understood or how works of art are made or why they are made. I thought
that Goya was much more interesting as a complex human being. Nowadays
we do not have a lot of really objective documents from that time, but
Goya’s paintings can be regarded as objective documents from his time.“
So be prepared not to see your typical historical epic but a piece of
arthouse cinema. Nevertheless it certainly will make a lot of impact on
our deeply curved screen – the way this film was intended to be seen.
The print, by the way, is most likely the print which was originally
shown at the „Kinopanorama“ cinema in Paris. According to
Francois Carrin, who
supplied the print, this 70mm print is still in good shape and even
features color thanks to the Orwo film stock.
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"Dersu Uzala" by Jasper Sharp
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Jasper
Sharp introducing "Dersu Uzala". Image by Thomas Hauerslev
text coming soon
It’s a great honour to have been invited to introduce this film
"Dersu Uzala", the sole title this weekend to have been directed by a
Japanese filmmaker, and as such, it fits into my current research at the
University of Sheffield about widescreen cinema in Japan, or at least to
some extent. Because in reality, we can’t honestly describe "Dersu Uzala"
as a Japanese film, produced as it was in the Soviet Union and funded by
Mosfilm, that country’s largest film and TV production and
post-production facility. As far as I can work out, there was no
Japanese money involved.
We can however describe it as an Akira Kurosawa film, despite the
Russian casts and locations.
As Kurosawa’s long-term script assistant Teruyo Nogami writes in her
autobiography Waiting on the Weather, the production agreement Kurosawa
signed with Mosfilm stipulated “"Dersu Uzala" is a Soviet film. However,
the creative opinions of director Akira Kurosawa will be respected one
hundred percent.” Though the Soviet screenwriter Yuri Nagibin receives a
co-writing credit, by Nogami’s account, Kurosawa was vehemently opposed
to Nagibin’s script and its attempts at bolstering the action sequences
to make a more dramatic film, and the production instead went ahead with
Kurosawa’s original scenario.
Only five Japanese crew members accompanied Kurosawa to the shoot in
Russia, on December 1973: Nogami herself, Kurosawa’s Japanese producer,
Yoichi Matsue (who would work alongside his Russian counterpart Nikolai
Sizov), the assistant directors Tamotsu Kawasaki and Norio Minoshima
(the former mainly a stage director especially requested by the Russians
due to his fluency in the language), and last but certainly not least,
there was the director of photography Asakazu Nakai, a veteran of the
industry whose first film credit came as early as 1933. Nakai first
worked with Kurosawa as early as 1946, filming his "No Regrets for Our
Youth". Like Kurosawa, Nakai spent the bulk of his career at Toho
Studios, and worked with Kurosawa on almost all of his films since this
- "Stray Dog" (1949), "Seven Samurai" (1954), "Throne of Blood" (1957), all
the way up to "Red Beard" (1965), Kurosawa’s last film for Toho studios.
One notable exception was "Hidden Fortress" (1958), Kurosawa’s first
widescreen film, films in anamorphic TohoScope.
Anyway, a bit of background about Kurosawa’s faltering career that
pushed him towards "Dersu Uzala". The Japanese film industry was not in a
healthy state in the 1970s – in 1975, cinema attendances were 15%
percent of their peak year of 1958, a decline widely attributed to the
prevalence of television. Studios were largely specialising in
exploitation genres, with the gritty gangster movies of Kinji Fukasaku
at Toei and the softcore Roman Porno sex films of Nikkatsu perhaps
typifying the nation’s cinematic output of the era – not dissimilar to
other industries such as the UK, for example.
It is indicative of the climate of the times that another of Japan’s
great directors, Nagisa Oshima, used French money to realise his only
major works of the decade, In the "Realm of the Senses" (1976) and
"Empire
of Passion" (1978), while both Shohei Imamura and Seijun Suzuki only
realised one feature each during the 1970s.
By this stage, Toho Studios no longer had the resources to mount such
epic productions as "Seven Samurai", and Kurosawa left the studios after
his final film for them, "Red Beard", in 1965. After that came a series of
serious career mishaps. He was supposed to be directing the Japanese
segments of the Hollywood account of Pearl Harbour, "Tora Tora Tora", but
was fired from the production and replaced by Toshio Masuda and Kinji
Fukasaku. The film was eventually released in 1970, the same year as
Kurosawa’s self-produced "Dodesukaden", about the lives of a group of
people who live on a rubbish dump.
"Dodesukaden" was Kurosawa’s first film in colour. It was distributed by
Toho, but was a commercial and critical failure. Suffering from severe
depression, on 22 December 1971, Kurosawa attempted suicide by slashing
his wrists and throat. Fortunately he survived, and in early 1973, he
was approached by Mosfilm to make essentially his only film of the
1970s, realised with Soviet funding.
Throughout his career, Kurosawa was heavily inspired by foreign
literature, and particularly Russian, directing Dostoevsky’s "The Idiot"
in 1951 and Gorky’s "The Lower Depths" in 1957. The invitation must have
been a particularly welcome one.
I won’t say much about the story of "Dersu Uzala", except that it was
filmed on location in Eastern Siberia and was based on the 1923
autobiography of the same name by Russian explorer Captain Vladimir
Arsenyev about his life-changing encounter with a member of the Goldi
Tribe, the ‘Dersu Uzala’ of the film’s title, in the first decade of the
twentieth century. An earlier Soviet version had already been films
once, by Agasi Babayan in 1961.
There are a few things worth noting about the production. The shoot
began in May 1974 and wasn’t a particularly easy one by all accounts,
lasted about 9 months, most of which was spent in the midst of Siberia.
The actual town used as a base for the production was named Arsenyev
after the author. By the end of the year, with the film way
over-schedule, Kurosawa and crew returned to Moscow to complete the
final shots – for example, the scenes involving the tiger.
The director was already in his sixties at this stage, so not a young
man. Surprisingly, despite being filmed in 1974, it was actually only
Kurosawa’s second colour film. Because of this, the rapidly changing
weather conditions made shooting very difficult, trying to achieve a
sense of continuityof light and colour between shots.
Also, Kurosawa had a lot of problems both using the very heavy 70mm
camera equipment in the midst of the wilderness in which he was
shooting, but also, dealing with Russian working methods. Apparently a
large proportion of the footage he shot came back from the labs with
holes punched into the centre of the frame to tell him it was not good
enough to use, and he was forced to reshoot whole sequences long after
they were originally filmed.
Whether any of this is detectable in the finished film is another matter
as despite these problems, the film won the Grand Prix at Moscow Film
Festival in 1975 and the Best Foreign Language Film Academy Award in
1976, and led to resurgence in overseas interest in Kurosawa.
Regarding the technical details of the film, it is being presented in
the 70mm format Sovscope 70 with 6-track magnetic sound. This is clearly
going to present us with a marked improvement over the US DVD from Kino,
released as far back as 2000, which is how I’ve experienced the film up
till now. In fact, the Artificial Eye release notwithstanding, which is
more or less the same as the one by Russian Cinema Council in Russia, it
seems we’re still waiting on the definitive DVD or Blu-Ray of the film.
Sovscope 70 represented Kurosawa’s first use of a wide-gauge format. The
three Japanese 70mm films until this point were filmed in
Super Technirama 70: Kenji Misumi’s
"Buddha" (1961) and Shigeo Tanaka’s "The
Great Wall" (1962), both pan-Asian historical epics produced by Daiei
studios, and the war film "The Pacific War and the Star Lily Corps"
(1962), directed by Kiyoshi Komori (aka Baku Komori) and produced by
Okura Eiga, the new company founded by the former president of Shintoho,
Mitsugu Okura, following its bankrupcy the previous year: Shintoho had
boasted the second highest grossing film of the previous decade in the
form of "The Emperor Meiji and the Great Russo-Japanese War" (1957),
Japan’s second anamorphic widescreen feature, and clear this was an
attempt by the showman producer to repeat this success. It was less
successful, and within a few years Okura Eiga had moved completely into
sex film production, a market in which it is still very active to this
day under its new name of OP Eiga.
Actually it should be pointed out that Super Technirama was not strictly
speaking a 70mm format, since the films were shot in ‘standard’
Technirama (35mm anamorphic), and a portion of the image was
subsequently extracted and unsqueezed before being printed on 70mm film.
Looking at Jeffry L. Johnson’s
list on the in70mm.com website, the first
Russian 70mm film was around the same time as Japan’s "Buddha":
"The Story
of the Flaming Years" (1961). This is listed as the first ever film shot
in Sovscope 70, but Johnson also mentions it was rumoured to have been
shot in Todd-AO. Richard W. Haines in his book Technicolor Movies: The
History of Dye Transfer Printing claims that Sovscope 70 “was identical
to the Todd AO format” (pg 129). According to the Widescreen Museum
website, the crucial difference is that the negative was 5-perf 70mm
spherical, not 65mm. Both formats yield the same 70mm gauge print with
an aspect ratio of 2.20:1.
There’s an article in the March 1964 issue of the Journal of the Society
of Motion Picture and Television Engineers entitled “Cinematography in
the USSR” which gives some information on Soviet wide-gauge film
production, stating that: “Three studios release 70mm pictures: Mosfilm
in Moscow; Lenfilm in Leningrad; and Dovzhenko-Studio in Kiev. Within
1962-63 five 70mm pictures were released and in 1963 seven pictures were
scheduled for production. Currently, the wide-gage [sic] feature "War and
Peace" is being taken.…By the beginning of 1963 in the Soviet Union there
were 13 cinema theaters equipped with apparatus for 70mm stereophonic
motion pictures... The 70mm release is expected to increase gradually
and to constitute an important part in the total release of feature
films.”
In other words, and as Jeffry L. Johnson’s list demonstrates, 70mm
production and exhibition was a considerably more marked feature of the
Soviet film industry than in Japan.
Other widescreen formats developed in the Soviet Union include:
Kinopanorama – a three-projector, three-screen system developed between
1956 and 1957 and effectively the same as
Cinerama.
Circular
Kinopanorama– similar to Disney’s Circarama, in which film
from 11 synchroniously working cameras is projected onto a 360 degree
screen. There’s currently a working example of Circular Kinopanorama
technology in the All-Russia Exhibition Centre in Moscow, built in 1959.
A few other things before the film begins. "Dersu Uzala" was not the first
Soviet-Japanese collaboration. This came in 1966, when Keisuke
Kinoshita, a close friend and contemporary of Kurosawa, made "The Little
Fugitive" (or "The Little Runaway"), a co-production between Daiei and
Gorky Film Studio in Moscow of which I know little except the title.
(Note that like "Buddha", this co-production was an initiative of the
company’s internationally-minded president Masaichi Nagata).
There were over a dozen co-productions between Japan and the USSR during
the period from the late 1960s until the end of the Cold War in 1991,
including several documentaries of various lengths, animations such as
the three Adventures of the Little Penguin Lolo films from 1986-87, and
the features "Moscow, My Love" (1975), "Melodies of the White Night" (1976),
"The Way to Medals" (1979) and "A Step" (1989). I’ve not had the chance to
see any of these, nor do I know anything about them – as with Japan’s
co-productions with Hong Kong, it seems that such titles are considered
beyond the scope of scholars researching the national cinemas of both
countries.
On a final note, some have detected more than a passing resemblance
between the character of Dersu Uzala and Yoda of George Lucas’ Star Wars
films, who first appeared in "The Empire Strikes Back" (1980), some 5
years after "Dersu Uzala"’s release. This is quite possible, and goes
beyond just the superficial observation that both are wizened old men of
the woods prone to delivering strings of grammatically dubious pearls of
wisdom. If you think about George Lucas’ own relationship to Kurosawa
for example – not only has Lucas admitted that the robotic characters of
R2D2 and C3PO are based on the retainers in Kurosawa’s 1958 film "The
Hidden Fortress", one must remember too that Kurosawa’s next film,
"Kagemusha: The Shadow Warrior" , which was released some five years after
"Dersu Uzala", was only completed due to the efforts of Lucas and Francis
Ford Coppola who are credited as executive producers, after persuading
20th Century Fox to make up the shortfall in the production budget after
Toho studios ran out of money.
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"The Bridge on the River Kwai" by Sir
Christopher Frayling
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Sir
Christopher introducing "Kwai". Image by Thomas Hauerslev
Introduction to DAVID LEAN films, and specifically to "The Bridge on
the River Kwai"
WELCOME to the opening event of this year’s Bradford Widescreen Festival
at Pictureville —and warm congratulations, as ever, to the organisers on
putting together such a uniquely spectacular programme. As part of the
Festival, there are to be screenings of three David Lean films—"The Bridge on
the River Kwai",
"Lawrence of Arabia" and "Doctor Zhivago"—screened
as they should be screened, in their full glory. After all, David
Lean—especially in his later films—was one of the finest landscape
artists of the post-war period—the John Constable of the cinema—and it
is right that his landscapes be seen in the format they were intended to
be seen; not panned and scanned or in masked letterboxes or on
flatscreen televisions, however large.
I only met David Lean once—on 5th July 1985—when he was 77 years old. We
had lunch and spent part of the afternoon together.
The Royal College of Art was giving him an Honorary Doctorate in the
Royal Albert Hall and I was the public orator who gave his citation.
There was, and still is, a hallowed tradition at the College that when
they award a distinguished artist or designer an Honorary Doctorate,
they accompany it with a light-hearted oration which gently sends up the
‘victim’ at the same time as warmly celebrating his or her achievements.
This helps prevent the ceremony from becoming too pompous and
over-formal.
Anyway, I’d contacted one or two senior film people to glean some
background for this oration: remember, this was ten years before Kevin
Brownlow’s huge biography appeared and seven years before the
Restoration of "Lawrence of Arabia".
Sir Richard Attenborough (as he then was) called David Lean ‘the
greatest director of narrative cinema in the English language’: he’d
known Lean ever since being given his first film role in "In Which We
Serve". Michael Powell—later to become another Honorary Doctor of the
College—said I should mention how embattled David Lean could sometimes
be, with producers, writers, actors and cinematographers, for the best
possible reasons as an artist, because he was such a perfectionist, a
maddening perfectionist. He had also warned, in print, that David Lean
seldom looked you directly in the eye—he tended to make a point of
turning to one side to show off his magnificent profile, which was like
a face stamped on a Roman coin! A sculpted face.
Anyway, armed with these and other thoughts, this is what I said about
David Lean that morning in the Albert Hall. Imagine him standing in
front of me, in his scarlet doctoral robes, his Roman profile much in
evidence as he stands before the assembled congregation.
If there was such a card-game as cinematic happy families—matching the
names of the finest film directors to the films they’ve made—the David
Lean card would be the one that all the players got wrong. For inside
every Lean film, since the 1950s at any rate, has been a film of much
larger dimensions bursting to get out. It is clearly not so much with
Jack Sprat, as with his whole family, that the greatest of our film
directors identifies. Lean and large.
And at a time when the revival of the British film industry seems often
confined to the slim dimensions of the television screen, as if part of
a calorie-controlled diet, Sir David has continued his single-handed
mission to challenge the goliath of Hollywood with a rich body of work
that is epic in scale and—even more importantly—epic in stature, even
while remaining intimate.
After a Quaker childhood in Croydon, south of London, during which he
was never allowed to go to the pictures, David Lean entered the film
industry—as a tea-boy at Gaumont Studios in Lime Grove—in the late
1920s. He served his apprenticeship as an editor on the newsreels—and to
this day considers that editing possesses ‘a kind of magic… it’s the
most interesting part of film-making.’ His first assignments as a
director, during the second world war, were as a protégé of Noel
Coward—"In Which We Serve", "This Happy Breed", "Blithe Spirit" and the
classic "Brief Encounter", which is still shown in film schools around the
world as a model of how to edit a film, and from which Rachmaninoff’s
romantic Second Piano Concerto has never quite recovered. Then came his
adaptations of Charles Dickens—‘the perfect screenwriter’, as he has
said—laying down the ground-rules for the filming of Victorian novels
which have run, like a fine tweed, through BBC television ever since:
"Great Expectations" and "Oliver Twist"—only David Lean’s were darker, more
disturbing, more about post-war dislocation. In the middle 1950s, while
he was scouting locations in the obscure backwaters and backstreets of
Venice, for "Summer Madness" or "Summertime", he had a brief encounter with
Alexander Korda, which may have changed the whole direction of his
career: ‘Don’t ever be shy of showing the famous places,’ he was
advised. ‘Go for the really big effects. Don’t be shy of the Grand Canal
or St Mark’s because they’re thought to be a cliché. They’re not a
cliché for nothing. Put them up there on the screen.’ Now, such advice
could have led to epic films which were simply run of De Mille, Cecil B.
de Mille, but since the recipient was David Lean, it led to a series of
masterpieces which combine highly-skilled craftsmanship and technique
with sensitive direction—all on the largest possible canvas: "Bridge on
the River Kwai", "Lawrence of Arabia", "Doctor Zhivago",
"Ryan’s Daughter"—and
the most recent, ten years in the planning, "A Passage to India". As David
Lean said of Alexander Korda’s comments, ‘It was bloody good advice,
because you can easily end up in a dirty Venetian alley—and think you’re
being arty. You’re not. Show all the “eye-fulls”, but if you can in
unusual ways.’
Sir David Lean has become famous for the care he takes over selecting
and photographing just the right location, the right landscape for his
dramas—the ‘eye-fulls’—and presenting them in the right way, even if the
location is in a completely different part of the world to the one where
the story happens to be set. Many’s the pilgrim who has visited
ODingle Bay in the West of Ireland, to look for the sun-baked sandy beaches of
"Ryan’s Daughter"—only to discover that many of these sequences were
really filmed on the Cape Town coast of South Africa, on either side of
Table Mountain. Where "Lawrence" was concerned, locations included Jordan
and Morocco—and Almeria in Southern Spain: the arrival of Omar Sharif on
a camel —filmed from a quarter of a mile away, with a 500mm telephoto
lens, looking like a shimmering mirage and on the soundtrack the
‘ker-flump’ of a camel’s feet—one of the most memorable entrances in the
history of cinema, if not the most memorable—this was filmed near Petra
in Jordan. As for "Doctor Zhivago", apart from a few minutes of screen
time filmed by a second unit in Finland and Canada, the whole of the
film was shot in Spain, with the help of much marble dust for the snow
and a lot of shaving cream and rock salt on the costumes for those
Moscow minutes. Oh, and don’t go looking for The Bridge on the River
Kwai in Thailand!
The point is that the locations he chose were just right, for what the
films were trying to achieve. Whether this Englishman abroad chose the
Arabian desert, the Steppes of Russia, the West of Ireland or India at
the time of the British Raj as the real or imagined settings for his
films, they all set visual standards to which the best of world cinema
could and can only aspire…
Sir David doesn’t like film critics very much—he once said, ‘I wouldn’t
take the advice of a lot of the so-called critics on how to shoot a
close-up of a pot of tea’—but he has always commanded enormous respect
from his fellow-practitioners, and he has enormous respect for the best
of them.
All the more reason why we should add to his many honours the stoutest
honour the College can bestow—
Ladies and gentlemen: SIR DAVID LEAN.
(Applause.)
As it turned out, David Lean didn’t quite know how to react to this
oration. He enjoyed the laughter of the proud parents and partners
sitting in the Hall, and the real sense of celebration, but as someone
who didn’t do well at school—he preferred photography and natural
history—and never went on to university, and who certainly felt the lack
of it, he took his academic honours very seriously. His younger brother
Edward was much more academically bright—went to Oxford—and David still
had a bit of a complex about this. He was also surprisingly thin-skinned
about criticism. So there were a couple of prickly moments as we
processed out of the Albert Hall together and over to lunch. And Michael
Powell was quite right. His profile was astonishing, as if sculpted,
especially when he frowned.
Anyway, the ice eventually broken, we had a long lunch together back at
the Royal College of Art and had the chance to talk—albeit briefly, and
sometimes interrupted by adoring film students—about tonight’s film,
"The Bridge on
the River Kwai", one of my all-time favourites. So here are my
memories of our conversation.
We talked first about the original book—a satirical novel called The
Bridge Over the River Kwai by Pierre Boulle, a French
engineer-turned-novelist who during the Second World War had been
captured by Japanese forces in Indochina and who’d started writing about
his experiences shortly after the War. The novel centred on the
obsessive character of the British commanding officer Colonel Nicholson,
who in 1943 makes it a point of honour—and of troop morale in the prison
camp—to construct the finest bridge he can across the River Kwai, to
carry the Burma-Siam railway. The fictional bridge was located on the
Burma frontier, some two hundred miles from where the actual bridge had
been built in Thailand. The novel, Lean recalled, presented Nicholson as
something of a military snob, with a lot of dry jokes at the expense of
the British, such as when Nicholson refuses to have his bridge
painted—because that would only attract the RAF! So he felt the novel
needed serious adapting for the screen. Not least because its ending was
something of an anticlimax—with the bridge suffering minor damage and
only the train being hit.
The original script was by Carl Foreman, who had written "High Noon", been
blacklisted as a Communist sympathiser and who had originally optioned
the novel for Alexander Korda, having spotted its potential. But his
adaptation was, David Lean seemed to remember, too much like an
adventure story—like an ‘Eastern Western’—and not enough of a detailed
character study of Nicholson and Saito. But Foreman’s script did invent
an American character —Shears of the US Navy, who escapes and
returns—and who wasn’t in the original book.
This original script was reworked by Michael Wilson, another victim of
the blacklist. He wrote the final script—give or take a few drafts—with
David Lean, but when the film eventually won an Oscar for ‘Best Adapted
Screenplay’, it went to the novelist Pierre Boulle, who hadn’t written
any of the screen plays, and who didn’t in fact speak much English,
because Foreman and Wilson were on the blacklist and therefore to be
treated as non-persons. 1985 was the year when their names were at last
put back on video prints of the film—‘Screenplay by Carl Foreman and
Michael Wilson’—and when it was agreed they should both be awarded
posthumous Oscars. About time too. Oh, and Alec Guinness’s name was in
future to be spelled correctly—with two `ns’ rather than one—which it
wasn’t on the first-release American prints and press-kits.
Where the leading actors were concerned, producer Sam Spiegel had
originally approached, for the part of Colonel Nicholson—it was
said—Noel Coward, Laurence Olivier, Ralph Richardson, Anthony Quayle,
Ronald Coleman, and James Mason before settling on Alec Guinness with
two ‘ns’. Variety in fact announced that Charles Laughton had been
slotted for the part, but anyone who has seen "Spartacus" will know just
how much of a diet he would have had to go on, to play a half-starved
prisoner of war. Alec Guinness—who wasn’t at all sure about the part,
thinking it was still anti-British—always claimed that David Lean’s
first words to him, on arrival at the location in Ceylon, were: ‘They
sent me you and I wanted Charles Laughton.’ David Lean always denied
this. But their relationship was certainly tense. At the British Film
Institute’s 50th anniversary dinner in London’s Guildhall, Orson Welles
famously remarked that he too had been offered the part. He was over
twenty stone in weight at the time, though somewhat less in the
mid-1950s! I guess this only goes to show that everyone wants a slice of
a success. The part of Shears was apparently offered informally to Cary
Grant, Montgomery Clift and Gregory Peck before William Holden was
signed. Sessue Hayakawa—a 68-year-old Japanese star—who had been a
silent-film matinée idol and had worked in London and Hollywood, but who
still didn’t speak much English—he learned his part phonetically—was
cast as the Japanese commandant Colonel Saito—a man who is the mirror
image of Colonel Nicholson in the script, equally constrained by his
code of honour and his military culture, a man who David Lean intended
to be impressive rather than a caricature. That is an important thought,
given the recent terrible events in Japan. Impressive, rather than a
caricature.
Since we were having our lunch at the Royal College of Art, most of all
David Lean was interested in talking about one of his abiding passions:
the romance of design and engineering. He recalled that he was
fascinated at the time he made "Kwai" by stories of scientific or
engineering innovation. A few years before, he had started planning a
film about ‘the exploration of space’ with author Arthur C. Clarke, but
nothing had come of it. Maybe "2001" was to be the eventual result.
Instead, David Lean had made "The Sound Barrier", about an experimental
British jet-plane, which will fly faster than the speed of sound. He was
later to reminisce that as he walked along London’s Curzon Street on his
way back to the cutting-room, he would often look up, see a silver
jet-plane whooshing overhead and say to himself, ‘Bloody marvellous. It
is bloody marvellous.’ A great British achievement, the jet engine… The
romance of planes and steam trains had stayed with him, from his
childhood.
Then in 1957, he made "The Bridge on
the River Kwai". He felt a neglected
aspect of both novel and film was that this was at one level the story
of two completely different approaches to military engineering and
bridge-building from the points of view of planning, design and working
methods. The British approach was epitomised by Captain Reeves, one of
Nicholson’s team who before the war had been a public works engineer in
India. The Japanese approach was epitomised by the low-ranking military
engineer, a long way away from the sophisticated capital who—as Reeves
blurts out at one point—in the book: remember it was a satire—‘has never
even heard of soil resistance; and who gapes when you mention pressure
tables and who can’t even talk the King’s English’. This man’s ambition
is to bodge together a temporary structure consisting of two rows of
piles set into the riverbed, crowned with a tangle of mixed timber with
extra wood laid on top to cover areas of weakness. It doesn’t matter to
him if the bridge falls down in a few days, or weeks, so long as it has
done its immediate job. But Colonel Nicholson has other plans, to show
these ‘shoddy amateurs’ a thing or two about good old British
engineering.
In the film, Lean said, the resulting full-sized bridge, made out of
round timber—sketched by art director Don Ashton and engineered by Keith
Best of Husbands of Sheffield (as the opening credits proudly
stated)—had a three-frame profile deliberately resembling the Forth
Railway Bridge; which was, as Best was to put it, ‘totally unlike the
actual bridge with its series of trestle bents’. A classic of
engineering. But it was there to symbolise the best of British
engineering 1890-style. The timber in it was dragged by elephants across
a river situated about sixty miles from Colombo in Ceylon—now Sri Lanka,
a place called Kitulgala—and the bridge was built between June and
December 1956, looking as though it had been entirely handmade. They’d
originally intended to film in Thailand—but the location scouts thought
the river didn’t look wild enough—so Ceylon it was. In order to support
a twenty-five-ton locomotive with carriages, which it had to, some steel
wire ropes were concealed between the halved logs, and the lower section
of the main posts had to be socketed into rock, braced together and
surrounded by underwater concrete. So the bridge as engineered was given
a little assistance. Steel wires were clad in logs.
In the film, Nicholson proudly stands by a wooden plaque on the
bridge—in readiness for the opening ceremony—which reads: ‘Designed and
built by soldiers of the British Army, February-May 1943’. We later see
it floating down the Kwai, a symbol of the strange ‘madness’ which led
up to it. The hapless Japanese military engineer who is originally
assigned to the project—and who in the film seems to be useless at
either engineering or man-management—has been publicly humiliated, and
has possibly even committed suicide as a result. Colonel Saito
himself—also a qualified engineer, it transpires, who spent time at the
‘London Polytechnic’—is not much better at the job. Both of them locate
the bridge in the wrong part of the river, where the bottom consists of
soft mud. In a key scene, the businesslike British team—with the aid of
designs, technical drawings and tables of figures—shows Saito how to
build a proper bridge, in time for the arrival of the railway. With only
three and a half months to go, against the clock, it is never explained
why they construct an elaborate Forth Bridge look-alike. That’s because
the look is a symbol.
Filming took place between September 1956 and April 1957, rather longer
than originally intended. James Donald—as the medical officer—in fact
flew home before the finish, so in the final big shot he had to be
substituted by a stand-in. The film opened in October 1957 in London and
December 1957 in New York. It was a story set in 1943, during the Second
World War. But by 1957 the comments about Japanese engineering—David
Lean recalled—had become topical in a very different way when British
engineering was seriously losing ground on the global stage, and this
would not—he felt—have been missed by contemporary 1950s audiences in
the know. As Colonel Nicholson says in the film about his bridge:
‘Would you have it said that our chaps can’t do a proper job? One day
the war will be over and I hope the people who use this bridge in years
to come will remember how it was built and who built it.’
Major Reeves—a specialist in ‘pressure and soil resistance’—has earlier
responded to Nicholson’s plea for more orderly behaviour among British
troops in the prison camp by saying that one way of achieving this will
be by ‘teaching them [the Japanese] Western methods of efficiency’. And
the result will be a bridge for posterity, an example to British
visitors in the future—soldiers and civilians: ‘The elms of London
Bridge,’ says Reeves, ‘lasted six hundred years.’ There aren’t any elms
in the rainforest, but they’ll have to make do with freshly-cut timber,
the tall trees which resemble them—and one of which we see being felled.
So, under Nicholson’s command, there will be a new emphasis on increased
output, the division of labour, careful planning and design, accurate
mathematical calculations on site, proper foundations and a mixed
Japanese and British workforce. Major Clipton, the medical officer, is
bemused by this: ‘Must we build them a better bridge than they could
themselves?’ After all, this is a prison camp, isn’t it? A better bridge
could almost be construed as treason. The assumption throughout is that
British engineering and workmanship are indeed superior to their
Japanese counterparts—a better designed, more solidly-built bridge based
on more advanced calculations and man-management techniques. A 1957
message more than a 1943 one.
An important review of the film at the time—I subsequently
discovered—written by someone who had been a former Prisoner of War and
published in The Listener magazine—was to pick up on this very theme in
August 1959. It concluded that Japanese military engineers were more
than capable of planning and designing their own bridges—thank you very
much—and equally capable of making the British prisoners construct them
properly. To suggest otherwise was an example of Western, or British,
flag-waving:
‘Their [the Japanese] methods were always rough and ready, and often
very confused; but given the need to finish the nearly three hundred
miles of railway in less than a year, over a route which a previous
survey by Western engineers had pronounced insuperably difficult, and
with fantastically inadequate material means, the methods of the
Japanese were probably the only ones which could have succeeded… It
certainly seemed odd that Pierre Boulle should base his plot on the
illusion that the West still had the monopoly of technological skill,
when the Japanese capture of Singapore had made their ability to adapt
Western methods to their own purposes so painfully obvious.’
It is important to remember this context of reception—at the time the
film was released. And it was David Lean who alerted me to it, over
lunch at the RCA. I must admit this was an aspect of the film I hadn’t
noticed or thought about before.
But as I said to David, it was the very end of the film—so different
from the novel—that for me showed just how magisterial a director he had
become. It was subtle, ambiguous and in the end gave Colonel Nicholson
the benefit of the doubt. He stands up, badly wounded, brushes the dust
off his cap—of course—and stumbles towards the detonator. ‘What have I
done?’ Then he falls. Does he fall deliberately onto the detonator? Does
he fall and by mistake trigger the explosion? Is the end arbitrary,
accidental—or a moment of clarity at the point of death? This is great
cinema. And then the film ends as it began: with a hawk and a hawk’s-eye
view of the jungle and the stupid little humans who try and tame it.
‘Madness, madness.’
The film certainly made a big impact at the time—and not just because of
its box-office success, critical esteem and seven Oscars including Best
Picture, Best Director and Best Actor. It also made an impact on future
action films which had bridges in them. In fact, after "The Bridge on
the River Kwai", if a big-budget production took the trouble to build a
bridge, the chances were that they would take the trouble to blow it up
as well. More and more bridges—real ones, not computer-generated ones in
those days—went sky high. In the American Civil War in "The Horse
Soldiers" and "The Good, The Bad and The Ugly"; in the Mexican Revolutions
in "The Wild Bunch" and "Two Mules for Sister Sara"; in the Second World War
in "The Bridge at Remagen" and "A Bridge Too Far". And so on. Examples of
conspicuous destruction which seemed to become well-nigh obligatory, to
show off the talents of the explosives department.
As Jean Rouch—the French engineer, bridge-builder, bridge-destroyer in
the Second World War, ethnographer and film theorist—is reported to have
said: ‘Bridges in film seem to be there for the express purpose of being
blown up!’ With the demise of the Western and the Second World War film,
exploding bridges then went out of fashion in the 1970s—to make way for
other kinds of disaster movie.
The print we are about to see is a recent digital restoration, dating
from last year and taken from the original negative. This is the best
version there is. All known 35mm prints have deteriorated—and 70mm
prints, enlarged for "Kwai"’s re-release, do not seem to exist any longer.
So if you haven’t seen "The Bridge on
the River Kwai" before, you are in
for a treat. It launched David Lean as a bankable director on the
international stage: "Lawrence of Arabia" and "Doctor Zhivago" were to be
the indirect results. If you have seen it, enjoy again this intimate
widescreen epic which cost 2.8 million dollars to make but every frame
looks as if it cost a great deal more. The American Film Institute—in
100 Years…100 Movies—judged the film (in 1998) to be Number 13 of all
time. The Library of Congress in the same year deemed it to be
‘culturally, historically and aesthetically significant’.
As David Lean might have observed: ‘bloody marvellous!’ And he’d have
been right.
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Mr.
Anthony Reeves saying a few words about The David Lean Foundation. Image
by Thomas Hauerslev
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"The Dark Crystal" by Bill Lawrence
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Bill
Lawrence saying good morning to the audience. Image by Thomas Hauerslev
Good morning everybody. Most people here are here for the Widescreen
Weekend but a few people in the audience are here are as part of the
Museum’s education programme and have come to see some of the family
matinees. To those people in particular, you have stumbled into a very
magical kingdom, the magical and insane kingdom of the Widescreen
Weekend. What you are going to see as part of the main programme is
"The Dark Crystal". A lot of people in the audience know what 70mm
is and know what Cinerama is and what widescreen is, but for those
people in the audience who don’t know, and I know there are some very
young people in the audience, 70mm is a, brilliant, bright film format
the like of which you won’t see in any other cinema in the UK these day
sadly. We show films here every year in 70mm and in Cinerama. It builds
fans and we want young people to get more involved in the Widescreen
Weekend and come back year after year to see these wonderful old movies
even family movies like "The Dark Crystal". "The Dark Crystal"
was made by Jim Henson’s Creature Shop. Jim Henson is famous for the
Muppets and Sesame Street. It was shot in 35mm but was then then blown
up into 70mm. So what you will see is a lot more detail than you would
ever see on television, video or DVD and hopefully is a more intense,
enjoyable and exciting experience. But the first film you are going to
see, I have something I am going to read out from the Education
Department:
“This film was made last week in Muppet Madness. It was a very
successful weekend and it was enjoyed by all those who took part and
they are making more puppets today in the Museum until 4pm so if you
want to go and join them, then you can do.“
Have a great time, I hope you enjoy the short film beforehand and I hope
you enjoy "The Dark Crystal". And and to those people who don’t
come along the Widescreen Weekend normally, I hope you come back to more
films. Thank you.
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"How the West Was Won" by Sir
Christopher Frayling
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Sir
Christopher introducing "West" to an excited audience. Image by Thomas
Hauerslev
Text is here:
How The West Was Won
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"Dance Craze" by Joe Dunton
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Joe
Dunton introducing "Dance Craze". Image by Thomas Hauerslev.
[BILL LAWRENCE]
...I thought that was the Centenary of cinema wasn’t it, in 1996 I think
it was...and we never got round to actually doing it...
- So at last we’ve been in touch with Joe Dunton and we’ve put together
this event -
- We’re going to have a Q&A after the film, so please stay in the
auditorium after the film
- The film is delightfully short -
(Laughter)
- We’ll talk to Joe
(Laughter)
- God it’s ambiguous isn’t it - it’s ambiguous; I didn’t mean it that
way!
(Laughter)
- I’m just delighted when films are short
- It’s not How the West Was Won though, is it?
(Laughter)
- Anyway, Ladies and Gentlemen - Joe Dunton!
(Applause)
[JOE DUNTON]
- I feel a bit of a fraud really -
- It’s difficult because I’ve come from a sound background and a lens
background and I grew up on Oliver the Musical
- I actually worked 6 months on "Oliver" the Musical -
- Once you’ve done that you’re smitten by big pictures and -
- We were fighting at the time to get Technicolor to keep 70mm alive as
it were, mainly because for me you get six tracks of magnetic sound, you
know, and I came from a sound background as well as a television
background
- So the idea was I pushed Technicolor to keep the baths going and the
machinery going and with a good man there called Don Skinner - there was
an optical printer man
- Then I decided a lot of films were looking out of focus or soft focus
because it was a trend at that time - and Ossie Morris would put fog
filters and diffusion on that whole period of time – and Panavision
lenses were spuriously different – every one was a sort of – different
lens.
- So I came up with the idea to use old lenses but use the full aperture
which I did know at the
time was called Superscope or a poor man’s VistaVision - Disney called
it “Poor Man’s VistaVision” - and I never knew that. I just wanted the
biggest negative with the least blow-up to 70 millimetre.
- It’s in a 1.66 format and we shot it with all the lads from the camera
department. I mean this is not a camera crew; this is three of us on
camera - three camera operators - and all the rest of the helpers were
from my camera rental department.
- We used to get in the bus at night, [- - - -] film, each one of
different things
- And we actually went on a Freddie Laker plane to America - all of us
on a Freddie Laker plane - he’d just started to go - - - - The Beat in
America it was called the New English Beat at that time.
- And the way I did- did it (I’ll go on a little bit because it’s good
to see it) is that the Director Joe Massot - sadly gone from us now –
had made a film called The Song Remains the Same (the Led Zeppelin
picture)
- And he used to come back to Samuelson’s at that time and chat to me -
I was working; I never went home really -
- He’d chat to me and then about five, six, years later he goes [Lowers
voice] “Hello Joe”
- And he said his son had seen these bands and had said “You got to film
them Dad, you got to film them Dad”
- And that’s when we came together
- The Steadicam had just been invented - I operated Steadicam because I
was showing
everybody else how to work the Steadicam
- The Steadicam was invented, the high speed lenses were invented -
- The Zeiss lenses were 1.4 aperture, so this is all shot with slow film
- It was like 100 ASA film but shot at one-four
- And when we did the first [band] I said “Can I try my experiment?”
- So I tried my experiment, then they rented a cinema in Southampton -
just gate-crashed a cinema - to see the rushes, because I said if you
don’t like it, we won’t make a film; you know, we won’t make a film -
- You take all the pressure off who’s got the rights, who’s going to
look lovely, who’s not going to look lovely -
- Anyway - we showed it in the cinema in Southampton and they all sang
along with the piece
- [- - - -] it didn’t have sound, but they all sang along with the music
(Laughter)
- And that spread to every other band
- So in the end I think we had thirteen bands
- It’s a bit – I don’t want to associate it with How the West Was Won
but -
(Laughter)
- What it’s done is capture the moment in time, you know
- And I look at this film, it’s thirty years since it’s been shown,
there’s only one print – this is it; there’s no more 70mm prints
- Printed from the negative -
- As I say – it ran at the Dominion Tottenham Court Road for two weeks I
think, that’s all we had in the Dominion
- It went on release in the United Kingdom -
- I got fed up with the - this is not a Rank Organisation [cinema] is
it?
(Laughter)
- I got fed up with the Rank Or-
- And someone in America said I really like the film
- So I sent him all the prints -
- So all the prints went to America; it became like a Rocky Horror 2
version on the midnight circuits, on a Saturday night
- And it’s got a huge following; it’s got a lovely following
- I won’t mind if any of you don’t like it and leave!
(Laughter)
- Because for me it’s a special moment
- It was technology for me
- We started Super 35; Greystoke was after this film, and shot Super 35
- They actually made 18 prints off the negative on Greystoke - 70mm
prints
- It kept 70mm alive, a little while
- And that’s where we are now
- Thank you for coming, and I can answer any more questions after the
break
- I hope you enjoy it and I hope you stay (Laughs)
- But it captured life -
- The intro is a Look at Life intro, which was a spoof really -
- Everybody thinks it was a documentary but I actually meant it as a
spoof, because I used to go to the cinema and we all used to see Look at
Life films, didn’t we?
- So – it was a spoof on Look at Life (Laughs)
- But everybody classed it as a documentary - I still class it as a
feature
- It speaks a length, and you know, it’s there for history hopefully
- Anyway – I won’t go on any more, but I’ve got plenty more if you want
any answers -
[Applause]
also see: The Making
of "Dance Craze" by Joe Dunton +
Joe Dunton Q/A
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"Lawrence of Arabia" by Wolfram Hannemann
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Wolfram
introducing "Lawrence" to a near-sold out Pictureville. Image by Thomas
Hauerslev
"LAWRENCE OF ARABIA" from 1962 is
widely regarded as a masterpiece in filmmaking by movie lovers all
around the world and it is a prime example for big screen entertainment
in the truest meaning of the word. That is because its director David
Lean was one of those rare artists who really knew how to use the 65mm
format to full advantage. No wonder that it still takes one‘s breath
away when seen almost 50 years later.
And that although "LAWRENCE OF ARABIA" encountered a lot of
problems regarding its running time from the day it premiered at
London’s Odeon Leicester Square. Soon after that it was cut by some 20
minutes and it even lost another 15 minutes when it was re-released in
1971. David Lean personally supervised the first cuts that brought the
film down to 3 hours as he wanted it to enjoy more showings per day.
During the 1989 restoration, he would later pass blame for the cuts onto
the film’s producer Sam Spiegel. According to an interview conducted by
Robert Valkenburg with the film’s composer, the late Maurice Jarre, the
film had a running time of 40 hours, that is 2400 minutes, when it first
was screened for a selected number of people in a Hollywood Studio prior
to its initial release. It was only in 1989 when Robert Harris undertook
the task to restore the
film that a version became available which is said to come very close to
the version shown at the film’s premiere. This will be the version we
are screening tonight. The print was made only a couple of years ago.
The former Dolby SR encoded magnetic soundtrack was replaced by a
6-track discrete DTS digital track.
With location filming in Marocco, Spain, Jordan, England and the USA,
"LAWRENCE OF ARABIA" was photographed in
Super
Panavision 70 from May 1961 until October 1962. At 1963‘s Academy
Awards ceremony the film was honoured with seven Oscars, including Best
Sound, Best Music Score, Best Editing, Best Cinematography, Best Art
Direction / Set Decoration, Best Director and Best Picture. In addition
it was nominated in three more categories, for which it did not receive
the award. Those were: Best Actor in a Leading Role – Peter O’Toole (the
award went to Gregory Peck for "TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD"), Best
Actor in a Supporting Role – Omar Sharif (the award went to Ed Begley
for "SWEET BIRD OF YOUTH") and Best Writing, Screenplay Based on
Material from Another Medium – Robert Bolt and Michael Wilson (the Oscar
went to Horton Foote for "TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD"). Michael
Wilson, by the way, was not granted his nomination until 1995 when it
was found that the then blacklisted writer shared the screenwriting
credit with Bolt. Wilson’s name should appear together with Bolt’s name
in the print you are going to see.
The role of Sherif Ali (played by Omar Sharif) was originally intended
for Horst Buchholz but he was forced to turn it down owing to his
commitment to Billy Wilder's movie "ONE, TWO, THREE". So Alain
Delon came in and tested successfully. However he suffered problems with
the brown contact lenses required for the role. The role went to Maurice
Ronet but was replaced after difficulties with his French accent and his
Arab dress. David Lean is reported having said "He looked like me
walking around in drag". Ronet was bought out of the film for four times
the amount that Sharif was paid for his performance
Marlon Brando was signed for the role of T.E. Lawrence in 1960 but
dropped out to take the role of Fletcher Christian in "MUTINY ON THE
BOUNTY". Anthony Perkins was also briefly considered for the role
before it was offered to Albert Finney, with whom the production company
conducted an extensive and very expensive screen test. It was agreed
that it was excellent, and Finney was offered the part but turned it
down, as he did not want to be committed to the long-term contract he
would have been required to sign. However, Albert Finney's screen tests
in Arab costume as T.E. Lawrence became one of the most requested
viewing items in Britain's National Film Archive. It is told that
casting Peter O’Toole as Lawrence was due to Katharine Hepburn urging
producer Sam Spiegel to cast him.
Alec Guinness had a life-long interest in T.E. Lawrence, and had played
him in a production of Terence Rattigan's play "Ross" on stage. Guinness
wanted very much to play Lawrence, but David Lean and Sam Spiegel both
told him he was too old. Laurence Olivier was the original choice for
Prince Feisal, and Guinness was shifted to that role when Olivier turned
it down.
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Cary Grant was Sam Spiegel's first choice for General Allenby, but David
Lean convinced him to cast Jack Hawkins due to his work for them on
"THE BRIDGE ON THE RIVER KWAI".
With regards to the film’s musical score, David Lean wanted Malcolm
Arnold to write the music, while Sam Spiegel wanted William Walton to do
it. Both composers turned down the chance to work on the film. So
Maurice Jarre was hired to write the dramatic score, Aram Khachaturyan
was to handle the eastern themes and Benjamin Britten was to provide the
British imperial music. Neither Khatchaturian or Britten were able to
properly get involved so Sam Spiegel hired Richard Rodgers to fill in
the musical gaps. When Spiegel and Lean heard Rodgers' compositions,
they were hugely disappointed, so they turned to Jarre to see what he
had done. The minute Lean heard Jarre's now-classic theme, he knew they
had the right composer. Jarre was given the job of scoring the whole
film - in a mere six weeks. Although the film credits list Sir Adrian
Boult as the conductor, composer Maurice Jarre actually conducted every
note of this recording. Sir Adrian's name was listed for contractual
reasons, apparently because he was the chief conductor of the London
Philharmonic Orchestra at that time.
The
mirage lens. Image by
Thomas Hauerslev
One of the real stars in the film, however, is the camerawork by Freddie
Young. In the 80s I had the pleasure to meet him in his small apartment
in London. Freddie was way over 80 back at that time and told me with a
big smile that his 16 year old son loves to run 16mm films backwards.
When talking about "LAWRENCE OF ARABIA" he was very excited
telling me that when the film was shown for the first time on British
television there were black bars at the top and bottom of the screen,
which is called Letterboxing nowadays. He didn’t trust his eyes – it
felt too weird for him. But don’t worry – the presentation on this
screen here won’t have these confusing black bars! By the way: to film
Omar Sharif's entrance through a mirage, Freddie Young used a special
482mm lens from Panavision. Panavision still has this lens, and it is
known among cinematographers as the
"David Lean lens".
It was created specifically for this shot and has not been used since.
The collaboration between Freddie Young and David Lean continued for
another two films: "DOCTOR ZHIVAGO" and
"Ryan's Daughter",
the latter of which I would love to see a new 70mm print being presented
as part of a future Widescreen Weekend!
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When the restored version of "LAWRENCE OF ARABIA" was released in
1989 in London’s Odeon Marble Arch in 70mm it was due to director David
Lean’s specific wish that the fantastically curved screen was taken out
and replaced by a flat screen. Obviously he disliked the kind of
distortion that the curved screen gave to his film. Although I always
have a lot of respect for an artist’s decision I was very sad about the
loss of Marble Arch’s curved screen. It was the most impressive cinema I
have ever been to at that time and I still have lots of fond memories
about the screenings I attended there.
Let me close my introduction with two nice trivia items which are
appropriate for our wonderful widescreen weekend audience.
First: do you remember that funny little film made in 1988 set in the
mid-60s in which the film’s main character and his girlfriend are
leaving a cinema and you can clearly see the front of house of that
cinema advertising the film it is showing: „Lawrence of Arabia“
and underneath that you can spot the magic sign „70mm“. The film in
question is "BUSTER" and Phil Collins starred in the title role.
Second: who was responsible for creating the name „Lawrence of Arabia“
which subsequentially started making a legend and myth of T.E. Lawrence?
No one less than Lowell
Thomas, who as a reporter accompanied Lawrence and would become
later one of the driving forces behind Cinerama. In fact the role of
journalist Jackson Bentley as portrayed by Arthur Kennedy was created as
a reference to Lowell Thomas.
And now, ladies and gentlemen, let me invite you to follow Peter
O’Toole, Omar Sharif and Anthony Quinn into the big desert – in
breathtaking 70mm and 6-track
DTS digital sound.
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"Doctor Zhivago" by Wolfram Hannemann
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Wolfram
introducing "Doctor Zhivago", and being
arrested by Mark Lyndon and Sebastian Rosacker. Image by Thomas Hauerslev
In a world of guns and ice
there is the great voice of battle
and the greater silence of lovers.
Based on Boris Pasternak’s Nobel-Prize winning novel about the Russian
Revolution, "DOCTOR ZHIVAGO" is both a vast panorama of a nation convulsed
by war and the intimate drama of one man’s struggle to survive. That man
is Zhivago – poet and surgeon, husband and lover – whose war-disrupted
life touches and alters the lives of many, including Tonya, the gentle
woman he marries, and Lara, the woman he cannot forget.
Hailed by critics around the world as the greatest literary achievement
of the 19th century, Boris Pasternak’s novel was actually suppressed in
Communist Russia at the time of its completion. Smuggled out of the
country almost page by page, the manuscript was published first in Italy
in 1957 and then in the USA in 1958. That same year Pasternak was
awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. The announcement thrilled the
literary world and focused international attention on the quiet genius.
But inside the Soviet Union, Pasternak became the center of a vast
political controversy. The government-controlled press turned against
him, The Soviet Writer’s Association expelled him, and the Communist
authorities informed him that if he left the country to accept the
award, he could not be permitted to return. After much soul searching,
Pasternak wrote a now famous letter to Premier Khruschev: „I am bound to
Russia by my birth, my life and my work. For me to leave my country
would be to die“. He declined the prize, and remained in Russia, where
he died in 1960.
Many studios had sought the screen rights to the novel, but producer
Carlo Ponti obtained them directly from the Italian publisher with the
intention of casting his wife, Sophia Loren, in the role of Lara, and
contacted MGM. In the tradition of so many great epics that preceded it,
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer spared no expense to bring "DOCTOR ZHIVAGO" to the
screen. The studio wisely chose master filmmaker David Lean to direct
Robert Bolt’s screenplay and rounded up an outstanding all star cast
including Alec Guiness, Rod Steiger, Julie Christie and Omar Sharif.
Lean was immediately taken with the prospect of directing this movie. He
said: „When I read the book, it was the characters that first captured
my imagination. They are fascinating people, all of them, and their
personal stories are highly dramatic ones.“ Lean felt that the Russian
Revolution itself was a towering historical event, one which had not yet
been truly depicted in a motion picture. With regards to casting Ponti’s
wife Sophia Loren, however, David Lean claimed that she was 'too tall'
for the role.
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Mark
Lyndon and Sebastian Rosacker represented the Red guards. Image by Thomas
Hauerslev
Yvette Mimieux and Jane Fonda were rejected for the part of Lara as
well. When asked if he thought Sarah Miles would make a good choice for
the part of Lara, screenwriter Robert Bolt is quoted to have said "No,
she's just a north country slut". Bolt would later marry Miles. In the
end David Lean cast Julie Christie as Lara after seeing her in "BILLY
LIAR" and on the recommendation of John Ford, who had directed her in
"YOUNG CASSIDY".
Lean's first choice for the title role was Peter O'Toole who declined,
citing the gruelling experience of having made "LAWRENCE OF ARABIA" with
Lean. Dirk Bogarde and Max von Sydow were considered for the title role
before Lean offered the role to Omar Sharif who was taken by surprise
having previously asked Lean to cast him as Pavel Antipov (Pasha)
After a month went by with Marlon Brando failing to respond to David
Lean's written inquiry into whether he wanted to play Viktor Komarovsky,
he offered the part to James Mason, who accepted. Lean, who had wanted
to cast Brando as „Lawrence of Arabia“ already, decided on Mason as he
did not want an actor to overpower the character of Yuri Zhivago. Mason
eventually dropped out and Rod Steiger accepted the role.
David Lean wanted Audrey Hepburn to play Tonya, but was so impressed by
Geraldine Chaplin's audition that he cast her on the spot.
And to conclude the casting couch information let me tell you that
Ingrid Pitt appears throughout this film in five different uncredited
bit roles.
Carlo Ponti wanted to shoot the film in the Soviet Union, but the
government refused his requests. So Lean and production designer John
Box travelled thousands of miles through Italy, Yugoslavia, the
Scandinavian countries and Canada, seeking the most suitable places for
filming, eventually choosing Spain as the primary location. The studio
constructed a ten-acre representation of Moscow just outside Madrid, and
built other large exterior sets 175 miles north of the city where, in
order to film certain scenes, they imported 60 railroad cars,
constructed a dam, and completely diverted the course of a river.
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Red
guards approaching from East to arrest Wolfram. Kindly, but firmly, escorted back to Row G by red guards. Image by
Thomas Hauerslev
The shooting exceeded the ten month schedule because of David Lean's
wish to capture the different seasons during which the story took place.
Filming took place during one of the mildest winters in Spain, leading
to delays and the need to simulate snow with marble dust and plastic
snow in the height of summer. The actors had to have their faces dabbed
by make-up artists every few minutes because of their sweating.
To obtain critical winter scenes, Lean moved the company to the majestic
Rocky Mountains of Canada and the northernmost regions of Finland where
they worked in sub-zero temperatures to capture spectacular snow and
blizzard footage.
Released in 1965 Hollywood was too overwhelmed by "THE SOUND OF MUSIC" to honor
"DOCTOR ZHIVAGO" with the Best Picture Oscar, which it would have
most likely won in any other year. However, it did not leave the
ceremonies empty-handed. Awarded with 6 statuettes, the picture also
earned the accolades of hundreds of critics worldwide and went on the
be MGM’s second biggest grossing picture since "GONE WITH THE WIND".
During its initial run in Stuttgart, Germany, where I come from, it kept
the city’s best 70mm theatre busy for several months. And this happened
in a lot of other places around the world as well.
When David Lean told the studio that he wanted Maurice Jarre to provide
the score, he was told, "Maurice is very good on sand, but I'm sure we
have someone better on snow." Jarre, of course, won the Oscar for best
original score for this film and the soundtrack sold more than 600,000
copies during the film's initial release. The score, as originally
conceived by Jarre, was very divisive in form and color. When the film
was edited to its present 3 hours and 17 minutes, much of the score’s
character was consequently altered. Jarre recalled being very upset
because the film’s edits resulted in what he considered an overburdening
repetition of „Lara’s Theme“. Soon after the film opened, he realized
that artistry must often give way to commercial success as he heard
patrons whistling his theme while exiting the movie houses.
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According to Freddie Young, before he reluctantly agreed to take the
director of photography job following an exhausting collaboration on
"LAWRENCE OF ARABIA", David Lean had a major falling-out with the previous
director of photography, Nicolas Roeg, over creative differences. After
Young took over, an additional two weeks of photography was required to
re-shoot the scenes that Roeg had shot.
Both "LAWRENCE OF ARABIA" and "RYAN’S DAUGHTER" were
filmed in 65mm Super Panavision while the film in-between, "DOCTOR ZHIVAGO", was only blown up
from 35mm Panavision anamorphic for budget reasons. On all three films
Freddie Young worked as Director of Photography. I once met him during
my stay in London and asked why it was decided to shoot "RYAN’S DAUGHTER"
again in Super Panavision after "ZHIVAGO" was filmed in 35mm. He said:
„That was David Lean’s decision. I could not tell the difference between
the blow up and the original large format film – David could!“
So now it is up to you to judge whether you can tell the difference
between a film print and the version you are going to see today, for it
will be a brand new 4k digital print presented on the installed 2k
digital projector. Hopefully it will be so good that some of you may
spot director David Lean reflecting in a glass door as Yuri Zhivago gets
off a trolley and enters a house.
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John Barry & "The Lion in Winter" by Duncan
McGregor
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Duncan
McGregor introducing The Lion in Winter. Image by Thomas Hauerslev
JOHN BARRY – THE LION IN WINTER INTRODUCTION
The New Year rolled in for me with the sad news that John Barry had
died. As we had already agreed to programme the "Lion in Winter" for WSW,
then it seemed to make perfect sense that we dedicate this screening in
his memory and afford me the opportunity to give a very brief
retrospective of a truly distinguished musical career.
As a young boy of seven or eight who had yet to experience the impact of
a TV in his home and was therefore growing up with regular cinema visits
as my primary means of entertainment, I very quickly became aware of the
power of music in film and like many, it was the James Bond series which
first brought Barry’s music to my attention.
I immediately started collecting those soundtracks after watching the
likes of "Goldfinger", "Thunderball" and "You Only Live Twice" and started
searching out his other scores with a childlike eagerness that captured
my imagination and ensured that from the point on, my life would always
be devoted in a minor – though often major way – as an avid collector of
film soundtracks and it was John Barry who I am grateful to for pushing
me down this avenue.
John Barry Prendergast was born in 1933 to a classical pianist mother
and a father who started out first as a projectionist and who ended up
with his own small chain of independent cinemas in and around the city
of York.
Therefore the very fact that cinema was in Barry’s blood – literally
from the get-go – ensured a lifelong love of film as he spent virtually
every day at the cinema and which afforded him the opportunity to become
immersed in a fantasy world of film on the big screen.
The same effect that John Barry had on me in a musical sense pretty much
happened to him from the age of six, whereby he became fascinated with
film music spending so many hours in his father’s darkened theatre and
was inspired by the likes of Bernard Herrmann,
Miklós Rózsa and Max
Steiner.
In his early teens he was taught by the head projectionist at their
family’s main cinema in the heart of York how to thread film, perform
reel change-over’s and carry out the basics of film projection – you can
see the obvious link for me! – which further integrated his total love
of cinema.
In 1953 he went to do his National Service where he ended up playing
trumpet, as well as taking up a correspondence course where he learnt to
arrange jazz, which often feature in a range of styles when listening to
many of his scores during the nineteen sixties and much later.
Starting up his own group – the John Barry Seven – he worked constantly
performing live and writing many of his own tunes before securing
regular work in the popular domain of television and the pop music
arena. One of the artists he worked with in the late fifties was Adam
Faith who landed the lead role in "Beat Girl" (1960) and with Barry set to
score the music it was this movie which set him upon his film path.
With "Dr No" (1962) the Bond producers felt that something was still
lacking in terms of the music score written by Monty Norman and it still
needed an edge. Enter John Barry (who never got to see the film at that
time) but who arranged the now classic Bond theme with a dynamic, up
beat, brash and jazz fused interpolation which set the pulse racing and
which firmly helped to identify the character of James Bond. The rest as
they say is history, whereby he became part of the overall DNA of Bond.
Barry often referred to the larger than life exploits of Bond, which
demanded music to match, as “million dollar Mickey Mouse music” but
which still demanded highly disciplined writing. His arrangements,
musical innuendo and use of a strong brass section added to the overall
excitement during a decade in full swing. As Michael Caine commented;
“If you consider that the 60’s was a revolution, then musically the
Beatles led the pop scene and Barry the world of film scoring”.
I believe we are all influenced at an early age and being born at the
very start of that decade, if I had to pick one score that captured my
imagination more than any other, then it was the film with one time Bond
George Lazenby, "On Her Majesty’s Secret Service". With a new and
different Bond the producers were looking for something fresh and he
well and truly delivered. With a frenzied pre-credits fight sequence and
screaming trumpets to match, he then opted to drop the traditional theme
song, whereby the main titles utilized something new - the moog
synthesizer. This helped create a pulsating staccato beat over the
opening titles which set the adrenaline pumping and never let go and up
until the very recent "Casino Royale", the only Bond film which had an
emotional undertow.
This was brought to bear by the very tender and emotive We Have All the
Time in the World and whether it be the vocal arrangement as performed
by Louis Armstrong or the heart rending string arrangement – for me sets
this score on its own.
A winner of five Oscars and the most successful composer of the 20th
century, he could always be relied on to capture the heart of a movie
and embellish the narrative. Time does not permit me to cover in any
real depth here his plethora of film scores, but good examples would be
"The Ipcress File" and the seemingly dreary, run-of-the-mill world of
Harry Palmer. Represented musically, his character is achieved with the
use of a cimbalom (a Hungarian instrument), which had a beautiful solo
sound and conveyed perfectly the loneliness and isolation Harry Palmer
suffers as the film progresses and which was another of Barry’s
strengths whereby his music could always progress the narrative, but
never get in the way of it.
One other asset was his inherent ability to capture the atmosphere of a
film right at the start and steer the audience in the right direction,
Sydney Pollack’s "Out of Africa" being a prime example.
Pollack stated that for many years prior to asking him to write the
music for Africa, that he often used to use temp tracks of Barry’s music
to overlay his films and set the right tone, before inevitably realizing
that it was time to hire him.
Pollack initially tried using various styles of African music for his
epic before realizing none of it was working and Barry commented that it
wouldn’t as it failed to deal with the core relationship of the Redford/Streep
characters and also the general sense of loss underlying the film.
Barry said he would often use his own sense of loss in helping to convey
what Meryl Streep feels losing Redford, her home and ultimately, her
love of Africa.
Growing up during the Second World War and the enormous loss of human
life which almost everyone was affected by at that time imprinted itself
firmly upon his mind and it was experiences such as these which he would
use to musically subjugate an audience whilst helping the film
immeasurably.
"Dances with Wolves" on the other hand is about the loss of the west and
at this point in his life, Barry had been for ill for two years, so was
the first thing he’d written in quite some time, yet the beauty of this
score shines through. The use of harmonica for the John Dunbar character
and the stirring use of horns played very high, adds a dramatic and
powerful effect.
For him music was a very personal thing which when done well carries the
mood of a film and keeps things in context. He scored so passionately
that the process was a very exhaustive one and he taught himself never
to fall in love with the first thing you write. He would shut himself
away to focus and concentrate intently, in order to deliver a musical
palette that works for each individual film.
And so to today’s screening written towards the end of the sixties
decade and for which Barry received his third Oscar. Many film composers
are basically writing the only classical music that people now hear,
because actual classical music isn’t infectious or stimulating enough
for the general person to understand and back then John Barry utilized a
symphonic 120 piece orchestra and a 40 strong choir.
Written by James Goldman (brother of noted screen writer William
Goldman) and based on his own stage play this was a screenplay par
excellence which allowed the acting talents of O’Toole, Hepburn, Hopkins
and Dalton to excel with the acerbic wit, dark humour and verbal
juxtapositions to which we are all treated.
Anthony Harvey directs with real zest and was nominated for an Oscar
(the film was nominated seven times and received three) for James
Goldman and Katherine Hepburn, in addition to Barry. I still think to
this day that Peter O’Toole thoroughly deserved the Oscar for best
actor, but alas, it was not to be.
The film is very much a period piece yet stylistically dramatic. Barry
had once studied with Francis Jackson at York Minster where he learnt
choral music and who also taught him the rudiments of harmony and
counterpoint, which are put to great use here.
Yet for me one of Barry’s key strengths in composing was using
restraint. In so many of the current crop of films we hear to day, they
have wall-to-wall sound and a seemingly incessant use of music. John
Barry had a natural gift and the ability in knowing when to let a film
breathe and allow the action or dialogue to speak for itself and The
Lion in Winter puts this to the test extremely well.
I hope you enjoy Barry’s opening salvo!
Thank you.
Duncan McGregor.
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"Operation Crossbow" by Tony Sloman
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Anthony
B Sloman introducing "Operation Crossbow". Image by Thomas Hauerslev
Good morning everyone, and it's my pleasure to welcome you to this last
day of the 2011 Wide Screen Festival here at Pictureville:- the second
part of this unofficial tribute to George Peppard - or for those of you
with more recherche tastes - the second part of the salute to Anthony
Quayle in 70mm… And so to "Operation Crossbow" in 70mm, as indeed it was
when it opened in London at the Empire, Leicester Square, in 1965, and
where I saw it with great pleasure on transfer at the late lamented
Metropole cinema, Victoria, once home to "Spartacus", "El Cid",
and "Lawrence Of Arabia." - "Operation Crossbow" was
indeed the title, but, after its premiere, MGM America had other ideas:-
dismayed by a less-than-boffo opening and concerned that punters would
confuse the title with one of the then-popular hospital dramas or
perhaps a biopic about William Tell, and encouraged by their own success
with the "Man from UNCLE" features, variously called "One Spy Too
Many" or "The Spy With My Face", MGM distribution changed the title
"Operation Crossbow" to "The Great Spy Mission", and business
went from less-than-boffo to next to zero. The title was swiftly changed
back, but the damage was done.
In Europe, however, where star Sophia Loren, top-billed, held more sway,
the film was, both initially and on various re-runs, often double-billed
with other MGM successes.
Now, you may not think of MGM as the first studio when it comes to epic
war dramas, and, to a degree, you'd be right, for MGM today is largely
remembered for its musicals and melodramas, both romantic and period.
But let me remind you of MGM's war record: they began with a stunning
success with "The Big Parade" in 1925, and during World War II
delivered smash hits such as "Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo" and
"Mrs. Miniver", and of the latter Winston Churchill once said "Mrs.
Miniver had done more for the war effort than a flotilla of destroyers".
To contextualise "Operation Crossbow": it was made when all-star
war mission features had already been popularised by two massive popular
and artistic successes, both for Columbia, 1957's "The Bridge On The
River Kwai" (which many of you will have seen this very weekend),
and 1961's "The Guns Of Navarone", titles so successful that
their very names became household words.
Italian producer Carlo Ponti was married to glamour queen Sophia Loren,
who had won the Academy Awards in 1961 for a war movie "Two Women",
an MGM release worldwide, and had access to a screenplay by two
experienced Italian screenwriters Diulio Coletti and Vittoriano Petrilli,
about the Allied destruction of the German bomb factory at Peenemunde,
base for the notorious V1 and V2 flying bombs, source of much
destruction in World War II. Concurrently, 1963's Mirisch production
"The Great Escape", had been a massive success, despite a downbeat
but heroically optimistic ending, with which I'm sure you are all
familiar. Ponti, shrewd producer that he was, realised that, towards the
mid-1960's, that there could be an international market for the epic spy
movie set in wartime, starring his gorgeous wife, that could be cross-collaterised
with another production of his that MGM were co-funding and
distributing, "Doctor Zhivago", which some of you may have seen
yesterday…
The backstory to "Operation Crossbow" was truly remarkable, and
really goes back to 1930, in New Mexico, where one man could have been
said to represent the whole United States rocket programme: US scientist
Dr. Robert Hutchings Goddard, who was granted $200,000 by the Guggenheim
foundation to fund rocketship development in America. Goddard's initial
attempts at rocketing were none-too-successful, but eventually he
invented the likes of gyroscopic control; movable veins for steering
rockets; the addition of a removable nose-cone for information storage;
and most important of all - the development and application of a liquid
fuel system.
Now, the US government respected all of Goddard's ideas for a
far-reading rocket programme, each of which would become crucial to the
eventual German rocket programme. How come? Well, astoundingly, for the
sum of 10 cents each, German scientists were able to purchase each one
of Goddard's patents. 10 cents each, the cost of handling by the US
patent office! It was one of history's greatest bargains, not to mention
strangest ironies, and formed the background to the plot of the film
that you are about to see. But Goddard's plans for what were to become
the V1 and the V2 were only the beginning - "Operation Crossbow"'s
ultimate target was to be the V10, the weapon known to the Nazis as the
'New York' rocket - a missile capable of devastating that very city
entirely, the abortion of which rocket was the great triumph of the
action known as "Operation Crossbow" - but at what cost…
Carlo Ponti and MGM decided on Britain's Michael Anderson to direct.
Anderson, who by the way is now 91 years old and lives in Toronto, had
worked his way up from a studio tea boy to world class director, having
been chosen by Michael Todd to direct the Oscar-winning
"Around the World in 80
Days", with its top-star cast and 50 featured star cameos, and
was also known for his work with Gary Cooper, particularly guiding the
star through his fatal illness in "Naked Edge".
But Anderson's worldwide reputation was really secured by his superb
1956 film "The Dam Busters", starring Richard Todd as Guy Gibson,
which was followed by two other films also starring Todd, which
capitalised on Anderson's flair for suspense:- "Yangste Incident"
and "Chase A Crooked Shadow", and many would cite "Shake Hands
With The Devil" starring James Cagney as Anderson's finest feature.
For "Operation Crossbow", therefore, Michael Anderson was a
first, and superior choice - just note those 'Scope compositions, ideal
for rockets and flying missiles! Film buffs might also note the reunion
with Richard Todd, albeit in a minor, but key part: just wait for that
telling close-up, in a scene with other ABPC co-stars Sylvia Syms and
John Fraser, all three billed on a single credit card at the beginning.
The key protagonist is Duncan Sandys, real-life former MP and Cabinet
Minister, and he is essayed by Richard Johnson, who had scored heavily
for MGM in the war drama "Never So Few", resulting in a Metro
contract. Still with us today, Johnson is probably as well-remembered
for marrying Kim Novak as he is for reviving the Bulldog Drummond
franchise. Also under MGM contract was British New Wave star
Tom Courtenay, becoming no stranger to war epics, whose career at this time
also embraced "Doctor Zhivago" and "The Night Of The Generals".
Also watch out for the clever casting of distinguished war film
veterans: John Mills and Trevor Howard, both on our side of course, but
on the 'other' side there's Paul Henreid, Victor Laszlo himself from
"Casablanca", and Helmut Dantine, an MGM refugee from Greer Garson's
kitchen in "Mrs. Miniver".
Oh, and by the way, the print that you are about to see is a
French-subtitled one, the actual 70mm premiered in France at the former
Marignon Cinema on the Champs-Elysée (courtesy
François Carrin), so
German characters will be subtitled in French, not in English. I'm sure
that you'll all be able to cope.
Note too that "Operation Crossbow"'s George Peppard and Jeremy
Kemp would pair up again the following year, for 20th century Fox's
excellent World War I CinemaScope drama "The Blue Max".
In addition to superb casting, MGM and Carlo Ponti also greatly improved
the original Italian screenplay by bringing on board the credited
Richard Imrie, who turned out to be none other than the great Emeric
Pressburger, the 'other' half of Powell and Pressburger ("Imrie" is
another European form of "Emeric"). That script was then worked over by
Derry Quinn and Ray Rigby, who had done such a terrific job on the MGM
war drama "The Hill".
Oh, and a word about lighting cameraman Erwin Hillier, who had met
director Michael Anderson back in 1949 on "Private Angelo", which
Anderson had co-directed with Peter Ustinov, and went on to shoot no
less that 10 films with Anderson, before retiring in the sixties.
Michael Anderson himself went on after "Operation Crossbow" to
direct large-budget films with varied success, amongst them "Pope
Joan", The Shoes
Of The Fisherman and the science fiction cult hit "Logan's
Run", a remake of which is currently on its way to us.
And for MGM, well, "Operation Crossbow" presaged a run of
immensely successful war movies, all among Metro's - and, indeed, the
cinema's - biggest grossers: "The Dirty Dozen" and "Where
Eagles Dare" in 1969, followed by "Kelly's Heroes" in 1970,
all in 70mm with full magnetic stereophonic soundtracks, and "Dirty
Dozen" wasn't even shot anamorphically! And you could argue that
MGM's involvement in
"2001: A Space Odyssey" wouldn't have happened without the
precursor of "Operation Crossbow" - after all, many of the same
special effects personnel worked on both films at MGM's studios at
Borehamwood, Elstree, to whom, surely, we should pay tribute today with
this 70mm screening of "Operation Crossbow" - But for now, let's
hear the lion roar:-
Thank you.
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The Real Operation Crossbow
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"The Great Race" by Sheldon Hall
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"Professor
Fate of Curved Screens" - Sheldon Hall introducing "The Great Race".
Image by Thomas Hauerslev
As the “In Memoriam” section of Cineramacana so poignantly reminds us,
every year we have to say goodbye to more and more old friends. This
final screening of Widescreen Weekend 2011 is a tribute to three
recently deceased doyens of widescreen cinema: Tony Curtis, Dorothy
Provine and Blake Edwards, all of whom died in 2010. "The Great Race"
(1965) was the fourth and last of the films that Curtis and Edwards made
together, though it had originally been announced with Paul Newman in
the role of The Great Leslie; Newman dropped out to make "Lady L" (1965)
with Peter Ustinov, who had himself previously dropped out of Edwards’
"The Pink Panther" (1963), thereby allowing Peter Sellers to take over the
creation of Inspector Clouseau. Edwards had then stepped in at the last
moment to direct "A Shot in the Dark" (1964), which had not been planned
as a Clouseau vehicle but which became an ad hoc sequel to "The Pink
Panther" once Edwards came on board. "The Great Race" also reunited Edwards
with the star of his "Days of Wine and Roses" (1962) and Curtis with his
co-star from "Some Like It Hot" (1959), albeit with the billing reversed
(at least in most major territories), Jack Lemmon now getting the top
spot in the title credits when he had been third-billed in that earlier
film beneath Marilyn Monroe and Curtis. Come to think of it, after his
rise to stardom as a Universal contract player in the 1950s, Curtis
rarely seemed to be trusted to carry a major film by himself - he
invariably seemed to play second fiddle to the likes of Burt Lancaster
in "Trapeze" (1956) and "Sweet Smell of Success" (1957), Kirk Douglas in
"The
Vikings" (1958) and
"Spartacus" (1960), Cary Grant in Edwards’ "Operation
Petticoat" (1959), Yul Brynner in "Taras Bulba" (1962) and Gregory Peck in
"Captain Newman, M.D." (1963).
"The Great Race" builds on one element of the Clouseau films which
evidently appealed to Edwards (and on which the later Pink Panther
sequels elaborated): the resemblance of the main character to a cartoon
figure, able to survive absurd, outlandish situations amid a world which
otherwise seems broadly realistic - not unlike the Coyote and Road
Runner. With "The Great Race" the entire film is made to resemble a
live-action cartoon, on the largest possible scale, and in fact it
subsequently gave rise to not one, but two actual cartoon series on
television: Wacky Races and Dastardly and Muttley, the latter two
characters being directly inspired by Lemmon’s Professor Fate and Peter
Falk’s Max.
But "The Great Race" is not just a live-action cartoon. Indeed, it
contains a veritable Cook’s Tour of genres, paying fond tribute to the
cinema’s past (as you will gather soon enough from the opening titles).
It is, obviously, a homage to silent-era comedy, albeit on a budget Mack
Sennett could only dream of, climaxing with the biggest, most
spectacular custard pie fight ever filmed, a riot of colour and movement
which at least one critic compared to a Jackson Pollock action painting
come to life. According to publicity, over 2,500 custard pies were
thrown in the sequence, at least 75 of which hit Jack Lemmon. It’s also
a parody of silent melodrama, as Edwards’ description suggests, with a
scene between Tony Curtis and Natalie Wood evoking Rudolph Valentino’s
"The Sheik" (1921), not to mention Sigmund Romberg’s "The Desert Song".
Indeed, the film is also a musical, with two hummable songs, one of
which is accompanied by a bouncing-ball singalong caption. The first
half of the film includes a lengthy detour into the Western, with
Dorothy Provine as a saloon-bar hostess and the biggest barroom brawl
this side of "Dodge City" (1939). The British trade paper Kine. Weekly
marked the fiftieth anniversary of the Kinematograph Renters’ Society
with a paid advertisement juxtaposing a still from "The Great Train
Robbery" (made in 1903) with one from "The Great Race" (set in 1908). Much
of the second half is taken up with a full-scale spoof of swashbucklers
in general, with Curtis delightedly and delightfully guying his own
image (those fencing lessons Universal put him through came in handy),
and of "The Prisoner of Zenda" in particular. In fact, it’s a rather more
effective parody than the subsequent 1979 version of that story, which
coincidentally proved to be the last film of director Richard Quine, for
whom Edwards had written seven scripts at the beginning of his career,
and the penultimate one of none other than Peter Sellers. But perhaps
most of all, "The Great Race" is a comedy epic – or rather, an epic
comedy, one of several slapstick spectaculars made in the wake of "Around
the World in Eighty Days" (1956) centred on a race, chase or journey,
usually (though not always) in a period setting. They included the
Cinerama 70mm presentations "It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World" (1963, in
which Provine plays Sid Caesar’s wife) and "The Hallelujah Trail" (1965),
the Todd-AO roadshow "Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines"
(which opened the very same month, June 1965, as "The Great Race") and its
earthbound sequel "Monte Carlo or Bust!" (1969, also known as
"Those Daring
Young Men in Their Jaunty Jalopies"), which starred, among others, one
Tony Curtis.
According to files in the Warner Bros. Archive at the University of
Southern California, "The Great Race" cost $12,939,000 to produce, some
$2.3 million over budget, making it by far the most expensive comedy up
to that time and only the second-most expensive film Warners had ever
made (the most costly being the previous year’s
"My Fair Lady"). By the
end of November 1966 it had earned a worldwide rental of $18,291,000,
probably not enough to make a clear profit on production, distribution
and advertising costs ("Magnificent Men" earned about $30 million). Though
it was conceived and planned as a roadshow presentation, the film’s
world premiere engagement at the Pantages theatre in Los Angeles lasted
only four weeks with twice-daily performances, reserved seats and raised
prices before dropping down to continuous performances and normal
prices. This set the pattern for most of its U.S. engagements, including
New York where it opened at
Radio City
Music Hall in September. In
Britain and Europe, however, the film usually played as a roadshow in
70mm prints, often in Cinerama theatres, though it was not an official
Cinerama presentation (advertising sometimes misleadingly claimed that
it had been shot in
Super Panavision, though it was actually blown up
from Panavision). In London the film opened at the Coliseum Cinerama on
14 October 1965, running until 25 February the following year when it
transferred to the Astoria for a further four months before going on
general release in August 1966 on the ABC circuit. Some of you may
remember seeing it at the Casino Cinerama, where it played a single week
in May 1972 and another five weeks in August and September 1973. I first
saw it on television, on Boxing Day afternoon 1974, over the same
Christmas holiday when "Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines",
"Monte Carlo or Bust!" and "Chitty Chitty Bang Bang" (1968, showing on BBC1
while "The Great Race" went out on ITV) also made their U.K. television
debuts. But that’s another book that I’m writing!
One final thought. I can’t swear to the accuracy of this, but Blake
Edwards may well have directed more anamorphic widescreen movies than
anyone else. He made four CinemaScope films in the 1950s, "The Pink
Panther" in
Technirama (shown in
Super Technirama 70 according to some
unverified sources), and then from "A Shot in the Dark" in 1964 until
Edwards’ final film, "Son of the Pink Panther", in 1993, all but one of
his films (the 1967 television adaptation "Gunn") were shot in Panavision.
Two more of these - the undeservedly maligned musical "Darling Lili"
(1970) and the wonderful Western "Wild Rovers" (1971) - were blown up to
70mm as would-be roadshows that weren’t (in the United States, at
least). While you ponder the prospects of seeing those at some future
Widescreen Weekend, I have nothing more to add except - push the button,
Duncan!
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28-07-24 |
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