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his wartime documentary work was quite fiercely at the cutting edge. Using an old clockwork Newman- Sinclair camera on a little bridge built across to the operating table, he’d be perhaps just a mile from the frontline in a forward hospital shooting literally “in-yer-face” grisly facial reconstruction operations to demonstrate a particular tech- nique. On another occasion the High Command, concerned about the alleged sluggish rate of anti-air- craft fire around London, wanted to photograph gun crews without them knowing. So Francis devised a method using a system of infrared filters which allowed the powers- that-be to see surreptitiously what was going slow in the gun pits. The result was apparently a dramatic increase in the rate of ack-ack fire around the capital.
The war over, and as one of the first in he was happily one of the first out, Francis soon found him- self firmly back in the business on location in East Africa shooting sec- ond unit footage for a Hemingway tale, The Macomber Affair. A plumb assignment apart from the fact that United Artists couldn’t decide who should be Gregory Peck’s leading lady. First it was Barbara Stanwyck then Joan Bennett with the Kenya contingent swapping suitable dou- bles at the speed cables kept hurtling east from Hollywood.
Once back in Britain, Francis and his cameraman sidekick John Wilcox were asked to join the cam- era departments at Shepperton and Isleworth’s Worton Hall which were now both owned by Korda’s British Lion. Beginning as operator on Mine Own Executioner, the next few years were frenetic working for cinematographers like Chris Challis and Ossie Morris under directors
such as John Huston with whom he made Moulin Rouge, Beat The Devil and, finally, Moby Dick.
When by the mid-50s he explained he wanted to graduate to DP himself, Huston, anxious to keep him on board, pragmatically put Francis in charge of second unit. So he then found himself, first, super- vising three camera units off Madeira for authentic whale footage followed by months in the tank at Elstree.
Eventually and not without effort Francis managed to extricate himself from the great director and after explaining to an oddly con- cerned producer that he could cope with black-and-white as well as colour, he made his DP debut (along with one of his bit players Michael Caine) in 1956 on A Hill In Korea. In fact the modest British war film, with Stanley and George Baker signalled the start of a stint which would mark out Francis as perhaps the world’s finest exponent of monochrome cinematography. Films like Room At The Top, Saturday Night And Sunday Morning, The Innocents and Sons And Lovers, which in 1960 earned him in his first Hollywood Oscar.
Cut to almost 30 years later when, after having received news of his first Academy Award via merely a transatlantic phone call during a lunch break, Francis was actually present at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion to collect his second stat- uette for the American Civil War epic, Glor y. There was an extra irony in the fact that the evening’s
principal prize-winner was Driving Miss Daisy, a film Francis had turned down because he was already committed to Glor y.
And his acceptance speech which generously intoned, “Glory be for Ed Zwick” carefully hid the fact that he and the director (who’d inherited Francis when he took on the project) had had their fair share of personal problems during shoot- ing. “It was only about halfway though the film,” Francis now recalls, “when I realised how much Ed didn’t want me to do it. He seemed to hate everything that I was doing. The end result proved, I think, whether I was right or Ed was right.”
Between his Oscars there was, of course, another entire career as a director of mostly cheap-and- cheerful psychological thriller and horror movies for the likes of Hammer and Amicus. Francis moved over to directing for purely mercenary reasons - “I did it because one got more money as a director.” The end result probably pleases die-hard buffs of titles like The Evil Of Frankenstein, Dracula Has Risen From The Grave, Paranoaic, Nightmare and Dr Terror’s House of Horrors more than Francis who admits more to quantity than quality. He sums them up best like this: “I got a cer- tain amount of enjoyment out of knowing that each of them was bet- ter than the script. That doesn’t mean they were good. Just that they were better than the script.”
His return to lighting after a gap of 15 years with The Elephant
Man in 1980 also had the ring of pragmatism: “I suddenly realised that the films I was directing, though often successful, weren’t being seen by the people who could further my career. Yet I must say that if I’d only done those films, I would still say I’d had a good life.”
And yet when more than 10 years after that he found himself alongside director Martin Scorsese on the megadollar Hollywood remake of Cape Fear with Robert De Niro, Jessica Lange and Nick Nolte, what did Marty want to chat about between takes? Francis’ old horror movies, of course.
Flanked in his career and life by Pam, ex-continuity wizard and his wife of more than 35 years, Francis now appears the very model of contentment.
In fact, he only rises to the bait when asked for his views on the present generation of cameramen in this country. “I have to say that I think the standard of cinematogra- phy in this country has gone down terribly and I attribute it mostly to training,” he almost snarls. Or, in his opinion, to the lack of it.
Admitting that the chances to rise from the ranks in the way earli- er generations were able are now rare, he likes to quote a recent stu- dent award recipient who told him: “I’ve just won a scholarship as a DP but I wish they’d taught me to be a clapper boy...” The point is, adds Francis, “there’s precious little chance now to gain real experience first on the floor so it’s a vicious circle, really.”
“My advice? Passion is the most important thing. Don’t get involved unless you want it more than anything else in the world then... and I wouldn’t want to shout this too loudly... go to America and
FREDDIE FRANCIS BSC
Photos: from left: Freddie Francis with longtime operator Gordon Hayman on the set of Doctor And The Devils; Albert Finney in Saturday Night And Sunday Morning; Trevor Howard in Sons And Lovers (Courtesy Moviestore Collection); Gregory Peck in Moby Dick (Courtesy BFI Stills & Posters)
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