STILL WITH US: RONALD NEAME
by Ian Whitcomb
Ian Whitcomb is a highly respected performer,
composer, and music historian. You can find all of his CD's, DVD's, Books, and
Songbooks by clicking here,
or by going to
ianwhitcomb.com
In the bitter January of 1960, thanks to a
family friend, I was hired as “Fifth Assistant Director”-- meaning tea boy
and dogsbody -- for “Tunes Of Glory”, filming at Shepperton Studios,
Middlesex. The stars were Alec Guinness and John Mills and I was terrified of
them.
I was also terrified of the director, Ronald Neame. I
had just left Bryanston, snotty-full of foreign film history, and here I was
with another headmaster. His eyebrows were burning bushes, his voice deep with
tremulous authority. He directed in a suit and tie. The crew wore donkey jackets
and cloth caps. I wore a duffel coat which didn’t go down well. Nothing went
down well, especially when I voiced Pudovkin’s theory of montage loudly on the
set. “Shut up”, said the First Assistant Director. “Shut up for keeps”.
His name was Colin Brewer. I haven’t forgotten any of their names, not one. I
was fat and I
argufied, despite a stammer. Our director spoke to me only once and it was all
about tea.
“Tunes Of Glory”, which I dismissed at the time as
buttoned-up British theatre posing as cinema, is now considered a classic. I
think it’s marvelous. I treasure my copy of the script. It’s given pride of
place in my Los Angeles library. And I’ve discovered that Ronald Neame, now a
hearty 92, lives not too many miles away in a cozy Mediterranean style hilltop
home overlooking Beverly Hills. He has a working fireplace and an attractive and
reasonably new and young American wife.
Los Angeles has become a resting place for directors from the
golden age of British cinema -- the period from the 1940s until the blitz of the
Beatles and Bond. Old bones, which would be endangered in England’s damp, bake
nicely
in our everlasting sun: there’s Ken Annakin who in the 1940s directed Jack
Warner and “Cheerful” Charlie Chester in “Holiday Camp”, there’s Val
Guest who directed Frankie Howerd and Cliff Richard and Quatermass, there’s
Guy Green
who directed “The Angry Silence” under producers “Dickie”
Attenborough and Bryan Forbes. When I met Val Guest he told me he went to
Seaford College: “And I could have gone on to Stowe”. I asked Ken Annakin
where he lived:” Beverly
Hills, of course. Where else?”.
The way I get to the veterans is to approach them at the
regular retrospectives we have at the Egyptian Theatre on Hollywood Boulevard. I
don’t really mind having to join the line of cineastes, a motley snake of
drooping bachelors with screen-tired eyes and veal skins. I like being near the
old British directors because a comfort radiates from them, making me clench my
fists and dismiss flashes of winding and hedged Dorset lanes and Devon bays with
distant prospects of tempting shipwrecks.
When the host calls the veterans up on stage there’s no
stopping them. Dismissing helping hands and Zimmer frames they race up, grab the
mike, and take us to a bygone screenland of airless romance where bobbies speak
in Mayfair accents, drinks stand ever-ready on sideboards in luxury flats, and
where no black man dares to tread.
Ronald Neame’s working world, though, was a cut above the
Grub Street of Soho cinema. He’d photographed Bernard Shaw for “Major
Barbara”. He’d been one of Noel Coward’s “little darlings”, together
with David Lean, making the films “In Which We Serve”, “Blithe Spirit”
and “Brief Encounter”. There’s a photo of him sharing a joke with the
Queen mother. He spent three terms at Hurstpierpoint.
I learned all this recently at an extended drinks session at
Mr. Neame’s bar in his hilltop house. A mutual friend had wangled me in on the
pretext that I was writing an appreciation for “Sight & Sound”. If I’d
admitted “The Oldie” the name could have brought trouble from his ever-close
guardian wife.
For two lovely hours I sat on a bar stool and listened as Mr.
Neame reminisced, standing firm but friendly in hairy tweeds and a silk cravat,
constantly refreshing my whisky glass. He wasn’t stingy with his own glass
either. Everything was whisky, including his voice. It was all very comfy.
Soon I was calling him Ronnie. But did he remember me? A loving glow shot from
his face as the surreal sun did its usual quick bunk. He was now positively
avuncular. “I’ve learned to look at life from the other persons point of
view, you know. A good thing for a director.” Then he talked.
His father, a commercial photographer, let him in on the
secret of composition: “The ‘S’ line -- it flows!”. Later Elwin Neame
was killed while riding his motor bike. His mother was Ivy Close who became a
silent screen star before retiring to Glendale (a dull Los Angeles suburb). His
brother became too friendly with the Isherwood/ Auden crowd and came to a sticky
end. “I became a bit of a fatalist after all this”.
Meanwhile he’d entered the silent film industry, learning
to hand-crank the camera at 16 frames a second (he demonstrated this from
behind the bar), helping to photograph Alfred Hitchcock’s “Blackmail”,
England’s first talkie.
“A cruel practical joker -- never liked them played on him, mark you!”. Soon
he knew all about key lights, flags, barn doors, set-ups and so he was ready to
work steady as a cameraman, which he did throughout the 1930s on a litter of
quota quickies before graduating to George Formby and Ealing comedies. By the
time he got the call to photograph Noel Coward up to his neck in an oily studio
sea full of sailors (“In Which We Serve”), Neame had learned to disguise the
fact that a camera was present. “Real storytelling, with no interfering egos.
Today it’s become ‘I Am A Camera’”.
On the Coward pictures so far David Lean had been both his
director and partner (“Actually, my very close chum”). But Lean persuaded
him to produce, which he dutifully did on “Brief Encounter”, “Great
Expectations” and “Oliver Twist”. He came to regret being a producer, but
Lean had a kind of magnetism and it was hard to say no to the great man.
“David loved his cameramen and he tolerated actors. But he loathed producers
and so I became the enemy.
‘What’s he doing on my set? Get him off!’”. He got consolation from
helping to turn the writing of Coward and Dickens into craftsmanlike
screenplays. “I was a jack of many trades -- all except directing”. This he
fell into in the easy way
that was the very stuff of the golden age of British film: an executive
suggested he direct a little thriller starring Hugh Williams and Neame said
alright. In the 1950s he made most notably “The Card” and “The Horse’s
Mouth”, both starring Alec Guinness. And both produced by our family friend
John Bryan whom I’d been taught to call “Uncle”.
When I left Bryanston in 1959, flush with cinema-as-art
theories, I told Uncle John I intended to be a film director. “You’ll have
to start at the bottom”. That’s how I came to be hired as Fifth Assistant
Director on “Tunes Of Glory”.
Neame had broken off his reminiscing to admire the
technicolor sunset. He remarked that he was feeling peckish and felt like his
favourite meal of roast beef, Yorkshire pudding and treacle tart. His wife shook
her head. I felt like treacle tart too -- but I needed to exorcise “Tunes Of
Glory”.
“Ah yes -- my best one, I feel. Alec’s, too. You
know, we wanted him to play Colonel Barrow, the martinet, but Alec used his old
excuse: ‘I have to come out of a different hole’. He’d just been the
Colonel in David’s ‘River Kwai’, you see. ‘Let me play the
redheaded boozer Scot and I’m your man’. Of course we agreed. And then he
recommended Johnny Mills for Barrow and again we said yes, yes. We rehearsed for
two weeks -- an unheard of thing at the time. Johnny used a harsher voice than
his normal one -- based it on Field Marshall Montgomery. Oh, it was an easy
shoot because we were all friends, all professionals......
It wasn’t easy for me. I wanted to tell him my side. I
wanted him to remember me, to connect....
To talk of the tin sheds they called studios, of the dreary
corridors with government gray walls and lower strip of RAF dull blue, of me
waddling along them covered in ink, clutching crumpled mimeographed camera calls
for tomorrow’s shoot, of being goosed en route by a stuntman who I thought was
a pal, the one that told me most of the actors in this film are poofs, of making
my way across the stage where were strewn stage hands puffing fags, doing the
pools, talking of last night’s telly or dog-racing whereas in the far corner
under ethereal lighting, as if in a shrine, the creative team was shooting under
Neame’s direction. So near and yet so far! “Quiet on the set! And shut
up, Ian”, shouted Colin Brewer, First Assistant Director, and they all
laughed.
“You silly boy -- you’ll never make Fourth Assistant if
you can’t collate mimeographs”, said Maureen, the bitchy production
secretary when I finally reached the office. “Too much reading of those
weighty tomes”, sneered Patrick, the production manager. “Not Pudovkin
again, is it?” Maureen said, “ Now go and earn your keep as our unit
runner” and issued orders for tea and cakes and bacon sandwiches,
pronto, because an important meeting was imminent.
Upon my return I was amazed to find them all sitting in the
office -- director, producer, writer, stars -- discussing how to end the film
with a suitable climax. And at this stage! I was about to suggest a good twist
when in my excitement I dropped the tray on the company and many were wetted.
“There’ll be repercussions”, said Maureen. I reported to Uncle John’s
office high above the drabness of production with a view of an 18th century
ornamental garden and a signed photo of David Lean on his oak-panelled wall.
“The reports are not promising. You must learn to take your progress in the
industry slowly, step
by step, year by year...”
“You seem in need of another one. Let me refresh your
glass”. I apologized and said I must be going. I repeated my name at the door.
Always a gentleman, he smiled and walked me to my car as if we had just met, as
if I was a reporter who must be respected.
A few months later I went to the signing party in Hollywood
for his just-published autobiography, “Straight From The Horse’s Mouth”.
In the queue was a loud man with a carnation who impersonates Christopher Robin
for a living; I also heard the braying of Stanley Von Frankenstein who claims he
went to Eton. Some sullen Rastafarians were helping themselves to guacamole
and staring at the proceedings with incomprehension. When I at last reached
Ronald Neame he smiled in recognition. I opened my copy of his book at the title
page. Then, after a little thought, he wrote: “To Ian, my Fifth Assistant
Director. But why did you have to spill the tea?”
Ian Whitcomb is a highly respected performer,
composer, and music historian. You can find all of his CD's, DVD's, Books, and
Songbooks by clicking here,
or by going to
ianwhitcomb.com