Charles Crichton

By Quentin Falk

Charles Crichton is perhaps best remembered as the director of the unlikely blockbuster hit A Fish Called Wanda, made when he was seventy-seven years old. But the most significant part of his career was spent at Ealing Studios in the 1940s and 1950s, working on such beloved comedies as Hue and Cry, The Lavender Hill Mob and The Titfield Thunderbolt. Nonetheless, as this pioneering study of Crichton’s work reveals, his filmmaking skills extended way beyond comedy to wartime dramas and film noir, and his adaptability served him well when he made the transition into primetime television, working on popular shows such as The Avengers, Space: 1999 and The Adventures of Black Beauty. Featuring first-hand testimony from colleagues ranging from Dame Judi Dench and Petula Clark to John Cleese and Sir Michael Palin, this riveting account of Crichton’s fascinating life in film will appeal to film scholars and general readers alike.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Release date: Jun 29, 2021
• ISBN: 9781526149947

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Anthony Asquith TOM RYALL

Richard Attenborough SALLY DUX

Roy Ward Baker GEOFF MAYER

Sydney Box ANDREW SPICER

Jack Clayton NEIL SINYARD

Lance Comfort BRIAN MCFARLANE

Terence Davies WENDY EVERETT

Terence Fisher PETER HUTCHINGS

Terry Gilliam PETER MARKS

Derek Jarman ROWLAND WYMER

Humphrey Jennings KEITH BEATTIE

Launder and Gilliat BRUCE BABINGTON

David Lean MELANIE WILLIAMS

Mike Leigh TONY WHITEHEAD

Richard Lester NEIL SINYARD

Joseph Losey COLIN GARDNER

Carol Reed PETER WILLIAM EVANS

Michael Reeves BENJAMIN HALLIGAN

Karel Reisz COLIN GARDNER

Tony Richardson ROBERT SHAIL

J. Lee Thompson STEVE CHIBNALL

Michael Winterbottom BRIAN MCFARLANE AND DEANE WILLIAMS

Four from the Forties: Arliss, Crabtree, Knowles and Huntington BRIAN MCFARLANE

QUENTIN FALK

Manchester University Press

Copyright © Quentin Falk 2021

The right of Quentin Falk to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

Published by Manchester University Press

Altrincham Street, Manchester M1 7JA

www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978 1 5261 4995 4 hardback

First published 2021

The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for any external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Cover image: Stanley Holloway and Alec Guinness in The Lavender Hill Mob (1951), courtesy of StudioCanal

Typeset by Newgen Publishing UK

To Alison Valentine and Joseph Peter

& for the Crichton family

Also by Quentin Falk

Travels in Greeneland: The Cinema of Graham Greene, Quartet Books, 1984; revised and updated 1990; 3rd edition revised and updated, Reynolds & Hearn, 2000; 4th edition revised and updated, UPNG, 2014

The Golden Gong: Fifty Years of the Rank Organisation, Its Films and Its Stars, Columbus Books, 1987

Last of a Kind: The Sinking of Lew Grade (with Dominic Prince), Quartet Books, 1987

Anthony Hopkins: Too Good to Waste, Columbus Books, 1989; 5th edition revised and updated, Virgin Books, 2004

Albert Finney: In Character, Robson Books, 1992; 3rd edition revised and updated, Endeavour Press (online only), 2015

Cinema’s Strangest Moments, Robson Books, 2003

Television’s Strangest Moments (with Ben Falk), Robson Books, 2005

Mr Hitchcock, Haus Publishing, 2007

The Musical Milkman Murder, Blake Publishing, 2012

Mr Midshipman VC: The Short, Accident-Prone Life of George Drewry, Gallipoli Hero, Pen & Sword, 2018

Contents

LIST OF FIGURES

SERIES EDITORS’ FOREWORD

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Introduction

1Cutting for Korda: 1932–35

2Cutting for Korda: 1936–40

3The forties: Enter Ealing, 1940–45

4The forties: 1946–49

5The fifties: 1950–54

6The fifties: Exit Ealing, 1954–59

7The sixties: 1960–64

8The sixties: 1965–69

9The seventies: Downsizing

10The eighties: Ealing regained

APPENDIX 1: An attitude to direction

APPENDIX 2: Memories of a mentor

FILMOGRAPHY

SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY

INDEX

Figures

Frontispiece: Crichton in profile (credit: David Crichton)

1.1 Denham Film Studios (credit: Batsford/Patricia Warren)

2.1Ealing Studios (credit: Batsford/Patricia Warren)

3.1 David Farrar (left) and Ralph Michael in For Those in Peril (credit: Studiocanal)

3.2Crichton (left) with T.E.B. Clarke (credit: Studiocanal)

3.3Crichton (left) with Douglas Slocombe (credit: Studiocanal)

3.4Bill Blewitt and May Hallatt (centre) in Painted Boats (credit: Studiocanal)

3.5Basil Radford (left) and Naunton Wayne in Dead of Night (credit: Studiocanal)

4.1Harry Fowler (centre) with Joan Dowling (left), Douglas Barr and Stanley Escane in Hue and Cry (credit: Studiocanal)

4.2Simone Signoret and Jack Warner in Against the Wind (credit: Studiocanal)

4.3Robert Beatty (left) with Crichton on the set of Another Shore (credit: Studiocanal)

5.1 (Left to right) Jane Hylton, Petula Clark, Diana Dors and Natasha Parry in Dance Hall (credit: Studiocanal)

5.2Pendlebury (Stanley Holloway) and Holland (Alec Guinness) embrace in The Lavender Hill Mob (credit: Studiocanal)

5.3Dirk Bogarde and Jon Whiteley in Hunted (credit: Moviestore Collection/Alamy Stock Photo)

5.4Godfrey Tearle and George Relph in The Titfield Thunderbolt (credit: Studiocanal)

5.5Flanked by Michael Truman (left) and Crichton (right), Sir Michael Balcon (centre) visits the set of The Titfield Thunderbolt (credit: Studiocanal)

5.6Crichton (centre) flanked by Herbert Lom and David Niven on the set of The Love Lottery (credit: Studiocanal)

6.1Yvonne Mitchell and Michel Ray in The Divided Heart (credit: Studiocanal)

6.2Jack Hawkins in The Man in the Sky (credit: Studiocanal)

6.3Anne Heywood and Howard Keel in Floods of Fear (credit: Christopher Weedman)

7.1Maurice Reyna as The Boy Who Stole a Million (credit: Maurice Reyna)

7.2Crichton (rear) with camera crew, including director of photography Douglas Slocombe (second left), camera operator Chic Waterson (front centre) and focus puller Robin Vidgeon (front right), track Pamela Franklin on The Third Secret (credit: 20th Century Fox/powerhousefilms.co.uk)

7.3Crichton relaxes on The Third Secret (credit: 20th Century Fox/powerhousefilms.co.uk)

8.1Tom Bell and Judi Dench in He Who Rides a Tiger (credit: Moviestore Collection/Alamy Stock Photo)

9.1Crichton with director of photography Peter Middleton (left) on a Video Arts shoot (credit: Video Arts)

10.1Crichton and John Cleese on the set of A Fish Called Wanda (© MGM/courtesy Everett Collection)

10.2Kevin Kline menaces Michael Palin in A Fish Called Wanda (© MGM/courtesy Everett Collection)

Series editors’ foreword

The aim of this series is to present in lively, authoritative volumes a guide to those film-makers who have made British cinema a rewarding but still under-researched branch of world cinema. The intention is to provide books that are up to date in terms of information and critical approach, but not bound to any one theoretical methodology. Though all books in the series will have certain elements in common – comprehensive filmographies, annotated bibliographies, appropriate illustration – the actual critical tools employed will be the responsibility of the individual authors.

Nevertheless, an important recurring element will be a concern for how the oeuvre of each film-maker does or does not fit certain critical and industrial contexts, as well as for the wider social contexts that helped to shape not just that particular film-maker but the course of British cinema at large.

Although the series is director-orientated, the editors believe that reference to a variety of stances and contexts is more likely to reconceptualise and reappraise the phenomenon of British cinema as a complex, shifting field of production. All the texts in the series will engage in detailed discussion of major works of the film-makers involved, but they all consider as well the importance of other key collaborators, of studio organisation, of audience reception, of recurring themes and structures: all those other aspects that go towards the construction of a national cinema.

The series explores and charts a field that is more than ripe for serious excavation. The acknowledged leaders of the field will be reappraised; just as important, though, will be the bringing to light of those who have not so far received any serious attention. They are all part of the very rich texture of British cinema, and it will be the work of this series to give them all their due.

Acknowledgements

I am particularly grateful for the support, encouragement and active assistance of many distinguished contemporary chroniclers of British cinema, and Ealing Studios in particular, including Professors Charles Barr, Robert Murphy, Andrew Spicer and John Wyver, but especially Professor Neil Sinyard and Dr Brian McFarlane who together first championed this project. When I finally began to put finger to keyboard, I would recall Steven Spielberg who once wrote, ‘we steal from the same people, providing of course they are the best people’.

Researching and writing a biography before and during the time of COVID-19 about a man who died more than twenty years ago on the cusp of ninety years of age required in many cases impressive feats of memory, so many thanks to the following, who worked with Charles Crichton front and back of camera, for their recall: Steve Abbott, Steven Webb, Jonathan Benson (1939–2020), Andrew Birkin, Christian ‘Kits’ Browning, Michel Ray de Carvalho, Petula Clark, John Cleese, Gregory Dark, Dame Judi Dench, Simon Hume, Paul Knight (1944–2020), Robert McKee, Peter Middleton, Sir Michael Palin (and for his kind permission to quote from two volumes of his diaries, Halfway to Hollywood, 1980–88 and Travelling to Work, 1988–98), Miguel Pereira, Maurice Reyna, Edina Ronay, Martin Stephens, Linda Thorson, Maggie Tree, Robin and Angela Vidgeon, and Dr Jon Whiteley (1945–2020).

For their help with research and access: Jeff Billington, Paul Brown Constable, Drummond Challis, Mike Dick, Dr Ben Falk, Alan Lowne, C.J. Kuhl and Said Mosteshar, Muirne Mathieson; Massimo Moretti of Studiocanal for the use of Ealing Studios material (permission for the use of other photographs was sought and obtained where possible); Roger Moston; Storm Patterson, special collections co-ordinator, British Film Institute (BFI) Reuben Library; Tilly (Tremayne) Peacock, Professor Duncan Petrie, David (Lord) Puttnam; Caitlin Quinlan, London Film School; Patricia Warren; and Dr Christopher Weedman.

For the following extra research ‘tools’: Tuesday Documentary: Ealing Comedies, BBC, 1970; Omnibus: Made in Ealing, BBC, 1986; British Library and British Newspaper Archive; Times Digital Archive; Internet Archive Digital Library; iMDB.co.uk; Talking Pictures TV; Brian McFarlane’s towering An Autobiography of British Cinema; and most crucially of all, Crichton’s interview with Sidney Cole and Alan Lawson on 14 December 1988, for the remarkable, still ongoing, British Entertainment History Project (historyproject.org.uk). The extensive extracts I have used were, on occasion, subject to (I hope) sensitive amendments on spelling, punctuation and syntax for greater ease of reading.

Final thanks must be reserved for my regular library research assistant, Richard Tedham; Matthew Frost and Jen Mellor at Manchester University Press; at Newgen Publishing, project manager Charlie Clark and copy editor Kelly Derrick; my agent Jane Judd for her advice and friendship across thirty years; and David and Jamie Crichton, who also kindly allowed me to reproduce ‘An Attitude to Direction’ as well as use some private family correspondence dating from 1929 that helped put some extra flesh on the bones.

Little Marlow, 2021

Frontispiece: Crichton in profile

Introduction

Beyond respectable, albeit mostly respectful, entries in various film reference books, Charles Crichton, despite being one of Ealing Studios’ most prolific and successful directors, has tended to be regarded more as a footnote than at the forefront of British cinema in the forties and fifties. If he had not, so belatedly, achieved such a startling success aged seventy-eight with A Fish Called Wanda in the eighties, one fears he may well have been ignored altogether by some serious film historians. But not even that late flowering has been enough to convince, say, the venerable David Thomson who, after finding space for other Ealing alumni such as Robert Hamer, Alexander Mackendrick, Cavalcanti and Basil Dearden, still considers Crichton unworthy of mention after nearly forty years and six weighty editions of his influential New Biographical Dictionary of Film.

Happily, The Encyclopedia of British Film does try to restore the balance, citing Crichton as ‘the quintessential Ealing director, the man who made the films most affectionately associated in the public mind with the studio, combining a whimsical imagination with a flair for surface realism … His was a gentle talent but at its best his work also exhibited an underlying structural shrewdness and a sharp observer’s eye.’¹ Philip Kemp in Directors in British and Irish Cinema is also happy to give credit where it is due, even pausing to praise some of the film-maker’s less well-known titles among his baker’s dozen for Ealing, as well as noting his editing skills ‘letting a scene tell its story with terse economy but no loss of lucidity’.²

Yet, for the most part, Crichton still remains for many just a directorial bit player, a journeyman at the creative end of British cinema, almost as if helping to craft a few Ealing comedies, perhaps most notably Hue and Cry and The Lavender Hill Mob, on the one hand and, more than thirty years later, keeping an Anglo-American cast on track in A Fish Called Wanda, a sort of Ealing-style reboot, on the other, somehow comprised the sum total of his cinematic contribution. So perhaps the problem, as some might still see it, is that Crichton was less an artist, rather more just an effective, collaborative, craftsman without a describable style or vision, simply a contributor to a canon rather than one of its defining lights. But why should ‘craftsman’ and ‘artist’ be mutually exclusive anyway? For Crichton, however, I would instead like to offer a phrase, ‘gifted workhorse’, coined by my favourite film critic, the late Roger Ebert, when he once described the great Michael Curtiz.

I will also argue that not only is Crichton’s own sixty-year career ripe for an in-depth review and reassessment in its own versatile right, but that, in its entirety, it serves as an almost perfect barometer for the vagaries of British cinema’s ‘climate’ across almost seven decades following fast on the advent of talkies in this country.

Crichton’s film ‘school’ was Denham Film Studios where, under a foreign-born mogul, Alexander Korda, domestic movie-making grew up and first attained international recognition; his postgraduate ‘academy’ was Ealing Studios, soon to become firmly in the vanguard of indigenous independent production as cinemagoing boomed during, and immediately after, the war years. Then, as American film finance began to flee the UK industry while, at the same time, ‘youth’ became the creative prerequisite, Crichton, like so many others of an age, found some solace, first, in independent production, then in filmed television. Eventually, having, as a working director, long outlasted all his contemporaries, Crichton returned triumphantly to the big screen for a home-grown comedy, funded – naturally – by Hollywood.

I met Crichton for the first and only time after I had been commissioned by the Guardian to write an article about A Fish Called Wanda when it was filming court scenes in Oxford. Thirty-something years later, my precise recollection of the occasion would probably have remained quite hazy if it had not been for vivid reminders of that set visit and, in particular, my close encounter with Crichton, conjured up again during separate interviews with John Cleese and Sir Michael Palin in the course of researching this book.

Cleese explained how it seemed that after just three days on the set directing Wanda, it was as if Crichton had somehow ‘shed seven years. He just loved directing’.³ Suddenly I could recall Crichton’s almost palpably youthful enthusiasm for the job in hand, which was complemented by, in my mind’s eye, Palin’s colourfully accurate physical description of the man himself, who had some years earlier suffered a stroke and since been plagued by a bad back. Said Palin: ‘He walked with a stick, smoked a pipe and spoke as if he had a mouthful of something he couldn’t quite swallow, firing his words out preceded by a certain juggling of the jaw.’ ⁴

Cleese had, of course, been very much responsible for Crichton’s renaissance having, more by good luck than judgement, first collaborated, albeit abortively, with him, at the back end of the sixties. Then, when, at the height of Python’s success, Cleese co-founded Video Arts in the early seventies, he eventually made sure that Crichton, now in a long and apparently endless dry patch between features, came on board to direct some of Video Arts’ most successful corporate and training films. These along with his prolific TV work through the seventies and early eighties, became a sort of extra showreel for Crichton ahead of what would then, thanks to Cleese’s continuing support and encouragement, turn out to be the box office phenomenon that was Wanda.

But for all Wanda’s remarkable success, Crichton’s reputation still, for most people, principally revolves around his long involvement years earlier with Ealing Studios and, in particular, the brand that became known as ‘Ealing comedy’. ‘Our theory of comedy – if we had one,’ Sir Michael Balcon wrote in his memoirs, ‘was ludicrously simple. We took a character – or group of characters – and let him or them run up against an apparently insoluble problem, with the audience hoping that a way out would be found, which it usually was. The comedy lay in how the characters did get around their problem.’⁵

If that definition then suggests a degree of homogeneity with the comic results, or that somehow its principal practitioners were creatively cut from exactly the same cloth, nothing could be further from the truth. Ealing’s four best comedies – Kind Hearts and Coronets, The Lavender Hill Mob, The Man in the White Suit and The Ladykillers (five, if you also count Hue and Cry, which actually spawned the term ‘Ealing comedy’), while adhering loosely to Balcon’s comic criteria could not be more different in their content and execution.

While it may be convenient to ascribe a group identity to Ealing’s creatives beyond the general similarity in age and experience, it is, certainly as far as Crichton was concerned, misleading, as he told Sight & Sound magazine in 1951 during a round-table discussion among a number of the film-makers: ‘I don’t accept the premise of this discussion implying that all our pictures have the same signature tune. Bob’s [Hamer] personal style is as different from mine as Charles Frend’s from Basil’s [Dearden]. We choose different kinds of subjects and treat them in a completely different way.’⁶

Two of Crichton’s best if, generally, long-forgotten Ealing films were most definitely not comedies, Against the Wind and The Divided Heart – actually, best films, period – both had a World War II background. Also both featured, unusually for Ealing fare, very strong female roles. Although lighter in tone but still spiced with some realism is his Dance Hall, set post-war and, arguably, the studio’s most significant addition to the distaff stakes.

Crichton’s versatility clearly extended way beyond just ‘Ealing comedy’ and any subsequent forays into humour and satire (Law and Disorder, The Battle of the Sexes, etc). Starting with Hunted in 1952, about a killer on the run, followed by Floods of Fear, The Third Secret and He Who Rides a Tiger, Crichton also established an extremely significant niche in Brit ‘film noir’, deliciously redolent in all those titles. But they, along with his later contribution to hours and hours of popular filmed television, including Danger Man, The Avengers, The Adventures of Black Beauty and Space: 1999, tend to remain, for the most part, unacknowledged.

‘Wirral-born movie legend dies’, the Liverpool Echo, the family’s ‘local’ paper, recorded hyperbolically on 15 September 1999, the day after Crichton died in London aged eighty-nine. But beyond newspaper headlines, a rash of generous obituaries, and my own short encounter, it has been quite tough to try and nail down the man himself behind such prolific credits in film and television. Even the two long and often fascinating interviews he gave post-Wanda to the British Entertainment History Project (then known as the BECTU Project) and to Dr Brian McFarlane for his Autobiography of British Cinema tended to be long on modesty yet a little short on process.

The testimony from surviving colleagues and collaborators dating back from between thirty to all of seventy years has inevitably been sketchy at times. It was therefore with some excitement that, thanks to Crichton’s surviving family, I suddenly found myself in possession of two invaluable documents. The first, from the turn of the sixties, was a speech he gave to students in Liverpool about film-making in general, and The Lavender Hill Mob in particular; the second, dated a decade later, appears self-explanatory, ‘An Attitude to Direction’, and reveals more about his modus operandi than any interview.

‘There is no room for egotism in cinema,’ he writes.

The more selfless a director may be, the more forcefully will his personality emerge on the screen. The novice director is sometimes confused by his reverence for the cinema d’auteur and feels that it implies a need to exercise a tyrannical control over his colleagues.

But I take it that it that cinema d’auteur is a term used to describe a film dominated by the creative vision of one personality in contradistinction to the slick machine-made picture, which used to come from the Hollywood factory.

This vision is not impressed upon the film by the use of strong-arm methods. Film is a gregarious medium and the director should be sensitive to the artistry of others and create for them a sense of freedom so that their talents can be fully expressed within the framework of his conception of the whole.

The whole essay is included at the end of this book in Appendix 1, outlining a no-nonsense approach to film-making, which would prove so helpful to aspiring directors like Argentina’s Miguel Pereira who benefited from Crichton’s expertise when the latter taught classes at the London International Film School (later London Film School) around the turn of the eighties. Pereira, who would go on to become an award-winning film-maker in his own right, recalls the Crichton ‘touch’ in Appendix 2.

Other clues to Crichton’s preferred career path and mindset were contained in a short but informative eulogy written at the time of his death by his younger brother, Patrick. The child of parents both sharing Scots heritage, his mother Hester was the niece of a one-time president of the Royal Scottish Academy. This, suggested Patrick, helped his brother ‘inherit the ability to see in pictures.’ When the family went on holiday it was often to Ballachulish, set spectacularly in the Highlands, where Crichton’s ‘pictorial ability developed fast by taking photographs which were memorable’.⁷

At university, ‘Charles became more and more interested in the cinema as an art form; his fascination with comedy owed much to the films of René Clair, but he was also drawn by the documentaries of Cavalcanti and John Grierson.’ Continued Patrick: ‘Charles regarded comedy seriously; he would say, Comedy is creation; tragedy is all too easy, it is but a reflection of life. When he did direct films of serious content he was deeply involved emotionally, as with The Divided Heart. But in some ways he despised himself for showing that emotion; perhaps it was all part of his distaste of pomposity.’

The late Alexander Walker, one of Britain’s best and acutest post-war film commentators, who had followed Crichton’s career from the critic’s own journalistic origins in Birmingham, provided a typically idiosyncratic epitaph, when he wrote: ‘Crichton himself was a bit of a rebel against respectability … but always within limits, dear boy, nothing to smash the furniture.’⁸

Robert McKee, the American screenwriting ‘guru’, whose Story Seminars have attracted a legion of film-makers for well over thirty-five years, first met Crichton in 1992 when they were invited to work together on an ultimately abortive film project. McKee had, coincidentally, been using A Fish Called Wanda as his ultimate comedy teaching tool ever since first seeing it four year earlier and revelling in the way ‘it demonstrated,’ he told me, ‘every single brilliant principle of comic execution’.⁹

McKee said: ‘Because he began as an editor, he was a genius of precision. In terms of comedy he understood the underlying dynamics of a laugh, plus the integrity of the characters. He was always asking, is this true, is this honest? Can I believe this? With comic exaggeration, of course. From the bottom up, he understood the personal and social tensions of great comedy, and he had that precise execution of jokes.’¹⁰

I cannot resist ending by reproducing in full the contents of a handwritten letter sent by Crichton to Dr Brian McFarlane who, a year earlier, in 1992, had interviewed the film-maker in London for his book, which was still some years away from publication. Based in Australia, Dr McFarlane had mailed Crichton his interview comprising a short introduction followed by a Q & A format.

Dear Dr McFarlane,

Many thanks for sending me the material about ME, which you wish to use in your forthcoming book.

I am returning the first two pages with minor corrections, which I think should be made. I am, of course, flattered by your assessment of my work though I think you are a wee bit harsh about The Titfield Thunderbolt – I have just heard from a chap who has seen it 124 times!!! (The poor railway buff)

I do not like those pages, which deal with our meeting. The edited version of the interview may make sense to you and me but I think not to the reader.

I would eliminate them but understand you do not wish to reduce your word count and so I will try hard to send you suggested amendments in time for your February deadline. Unfortunately I have just had a seriously unpleasant operation and my head is full of porridge.

Very best wishes for the success of your book.

Yours sincerely,

Charles Crichton

(PS Have not included your page 2 as it seems okay)

Even at eighty-three, ever the editor.

Notes

1Brian McFarlane (ed.), The Encyclopedia of British Film (Methuen, 2003), p. 169.

2Philip Kemp, ‘Charles Crichton’ in Robert Murphy (ed.) Directors of British and Irish Cinema: A Reference Companion (BFI, 2006), p. 127.

3Interview with the author, 14 August 2019.

4Interview with the author, 11 February 2020.

5Michael Balcon, A Lifetime of Films (Hutchinson, 1969), p. 158.

6Sight & Sound , studio supplement, Spring 1951, p. 9.

7Interviews with David Crichton throughout 2019 and 2020.

8Evening Standard , 22 September 1999.

9Interview with the author, 20 November 2019.

10 Ibid .

On 17 March 1936, following a severe winter, and just weeks before Alexander Korda’s extravagantly oversized new studio complex at Denham was officially due to open, fire ‘tore through two of the newly erected sound stages, destroying the roofs and sound-proofing’.¹ Anything between ten and fifteen fire brigades from all over Buckinghamshire, depending on which breathless report you believed – including dramatic aerial newsreel footage with its barked narration – attended the spectacular blaze that had started in the early hours of that Tuesday morning, eventually causing nearly £50,000 worth of damage, another severe financial blow – over £3m in today’s terms – to Korda’s already cash-stretched film empire.

Writing to his mother a month later, on 19 April, Crichton noted:

The studio is quiet. They are shooting in it for the first time tomorrow – some retakes of the ‘Miracle Man’ [HG Wells’s The Man Who Could Work Miracles]. Unfortunately they have not yet tried out the lighting apparatus and everybody is terrified we may have a fire again. So besides the ordinary call for the unit and actors, there is a call for all the local fire brigades. It would be a pity for Korda and Co. to be roasted alive.

Whether it was the spectre of fire or, more likely, the imminent, increasingly nightmarish prospect of editing over fifty-five hours of location footage from India on Robert Flaherty’s much-vaunted new feature project, Elephant Boy (based on Kipling’s original story, Toomai of the Elephants), Crichton was to be found musing, rather too world-wearily for a twenty-five-year-old, on the meaning of life – his in particular – earlier in that same letter to his mother:

Would you kindly explain to me 1. Why are there so many good things to do? 2. Why there is so little time to do them in? 3. Why it is necessary to work at fixed hours? Work is alright only one should just do it when one feels like it. It seems a shame to waste one’s life inside when one could be doing all sorts of peculiar things in all sorts of corners of the world.

In his fifth year of cutting for Korda, a claustrophobic occupation if ever there was one, Crichton, still months away from marriage later that same year, might well have been pining for the great outdoors of Canada where a few years earlier, before going to university, he had spent some months gold prospecting near St Felicien in the Province of Quebec. He wrote home at the time: ‘It is cold, it rains hard and we are working at the bottom of a bottomless pit which is full of mud … We have had to timber the sides to prevent them falling in. Every now and then somebody cries despairingly as he sinks beneath the mud, but always the relentless work in search of gold goes on.’ On reflection, his youthful observations seem now perfectly to serve as a metaphor for his future work as a film editor then later as a director.

Born on 6 August 1910, in Wallasey, just across the river from Liverpool, and less than a mile from the Irish Sea, Crichton was the second of four children (there were also twins who died tragically young) to John Douglas Crichton, known as ‘J.D.’, who, like his wife Hester, was of Scottish stock. Crichton senior, an unconventional man who often jauntily sported a black Basque beret rather than the traditional bowler on his way into the city, where he worked in shipping middle management, went off to war in 1914, fell down a hole and was wounded.

Crichton first attended a neighbourhood prep school within spitting distance of the Cheshire shore where he and his friends excitedly spotted the first camouflage ship ever seen in the Mersey, as well as scarred troops returning from the disastrous Zeebrugge Raid six months before the Armistice in 1918. He was then sent south to board at a boys’ prep school, St Piran’s, outside Maidenhead, where he was an exact contemporary of F.R. ‘Freddie’ Brown, who became an England Test cricketer. St Piran’s, which two of his grandsons would attend some seventy years later, had a fine reputation despite, it is said, the headmaster having a penchant for whisky, not to mention an abiding passion for the matron with whom he eventually ran away to open a hotel in Mousehole, Cornwall.

After public school at Oundle in Leicestershire – where fellow pupils included Peter Scott, Harry Llewellyn, John Whitworth, Michael Ashby and Kenneth Robinson, later, respectively, naturalist, show jumper, ace pilot, neurologist and Labour cabinet minister – then New College, Oxford, reading modern history, Crichton began to ponder various careers including journalism. He might well have proved a harsh theatre critic judging by an excerpt from one of a number of student letters to his mother in 1929 in which he criticised some of the performers and even a famed Russian playwright of a farce about matrimony and matchmaking: ‘We went to the Playhouse on Friday to see the Cambridge Festival Co perform Marraige [sic] by Gogol. It was rather disappointing, the acting was very badly overdone, only two actors one of whom was Robert Donat were any good. The costumes were hectic. The plot was poor. I understand that the Oxford Players are infinitely superior.’ Little could he have known then that within a couple of years he would find himself working in much closer proximity to the same Donat, then an emerging British stage actor, five years Crichton’s senior, who was about to make his screen debut for Alexander Korda. A regular filmgoer as silent cinema began to be overtaken by the talkies, mostly ‘terrible, awful films to which I used to drag my mother,’² said Crichton. There were shining exceptions to the mediocrity, notably, he would later recall, two of René Clair’s early masterpieces, the musical comedies, Sous les toits de Paris (1930), followed a year later while he was still up at Oxford, by Le Million (1931).

Asked years on what films or film-makers had influenced him, he would regularly cite Clair and ‘the soufflé-like quality’ of those two particular titles.

He was also an enthusiastic member of the university’s film club, and it is also likely he regularly attended screenings of the Film Society, which had been established in 1925 with among its founder members, another Oxford man, Anthony ‘Puffin’ Asquith, whose own distinguished screen career began in earnest shortly before Crichton’s.

The Film Society’s brief was ‘to encourage the production of really artistic films by showing those which the trade deemed un-commercial or which the censor refused’.³

Considering retrospectively some of Crichton’s own credits, which would often embrace a gritty, drama-documentary feel, it is fascinating to speculate whether he might have been present at, say, one of the Society’s most famous, silent, double bills, in 1929, at the New Gallery cinema in Regent Street: Eisenstein’s epic Battleship Potemkin (1925) paired with John Grierson’s brand new Drifters, an influential documentary about North Sea herring fishermen. The great Russian director also lectured at the same event.

If cinemagoing during, arguably, the medium’s most significant and thrilling transition, was the initial spark, then the fire seems properly to have been lit in the young man following a fateful confrontation when Korda and Co. came to Oxford. Thoughts of any other possible career path were now swiftly swept aside as Crichton ‘suddenly thought, to hell with it, all I’m interested in is films’.⁴ Gone were any doubts expressed mildly in another student letter to his mother: ‘I am not so sure it is going to be worth my while studying the flicks after all. It is rather a crowded business. I was talking to an undergrad yesterday who told me he had been to every flick in Oxford this week – there are five. I understand the night he didn’t