Page 16 - FILM STUDIOS CROPPED

Twickenham Studios can fans who scribbled their mes- opponent, and I could have
sages of undying love for the Fab Four all over the studio gates.
My first visit to Twickenham was in 1957 when Tempean’s horror movie, Blood Of the Vampire, was on the lot. Barbara Shelley was the beauti- ful damsel-in-distress strapped to a rough wooden table while the evil Dr. Calistratus (Sir Donald Wolfit ) was using her for fiendish experiments as his lat- est human guinea pig aided by his deformed, one-eyed assis- tant, Carl (Victor Maddern).
In 1960, Saturday Night And Sunday Morning was in produc- tion under the Woodfall (Har r y Saltzman and Tony Richardson) banner, based on Alan Sillitoe’s acclaimed novel of life in the industrial English Midlands and starring a young Albert Finney with Shirley Ann Field and Rachel Roberts. Marking the feature directorial debut of for- mer film critic Karel Reisz, always a stickler for realism, considerable footage was shot on Nottingham locations before returning for studio interiors. It was a seven week shoot with Freddie Francis (later to become a successful director himself) behind the camera. He had previously lensed Room At The Top, and his current assign- ment was another notch in his successful career.
Having made both A Hard Day’s Night and The Ritz at Twickenham, Dick Lester turned now to a costume romp, Royal Flash (1975), based on George MacDonald Fraser’s best-seller with Malcolm McDowell in the starring role of the caddish anti- hero, Captain Harry Flashman. (Author Fraser had already adapted the swashbuckling Alexandre Dumas’ Three Musketeers novel into two screenplays for Lester).“We shot the whole Flashman film in nine weeks,” McDowell told me, “including four on location in Bavaria. The duelling scenes with the drawbridge we shot here at Twickenham Studios when we returned to London. I don’t think that Alan Bat es , my
rightfully claim to be Britain’s oldest surviv- ing studio and has had many changes of own-
ers and titles over the years. The first being the London Film Company (founded in 1913 by Dr. Ralph Tennyson Jupp, a North of England doctor and cinema owner); it then became the Alliance Company; then Astra film Company and finally, in 1928, Twickenham Film Studios under producer Julius Hagen as chair- man and managing director.
A piece of film history was made when Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s literary classic Rodney Stone became the first movie to be shot at the new studio in 1913 under the title of The House Of Temperley with Ben Web s t er in the leading role. Twickenham soon became a magnet for the big stars of the day including Ivor Novello, who made a silent version of the operetta, The Bohemian Girl there in 1922, along with Glad y s Cooper, C. Aubrey Smith, Ellen Terry and Constance Collier, directed by Harley Knoles, and the studio block now known as the Novello Lodge still carries his name to this day.
Many distinguished interna- tional directors have worked at Twickenham in recent decades including Sidney Lumet, Roman Polanski, Melvin Frank, Ken Russell, Lewis Gilbert, Val Guest, Richard Attenborough, Ken Loach, Franco Zeffirelli, Carl Foreman, John Huston, Joseph Losey, Sam Peckinpah, Nicolas Roeg, Peter Yates, Walter Shenson, John Sturges, Karel Reisz and John Schlesinger - an impressive array of talent by any studio’s standards.
But for its public image, Twickenham’s greatest claim to fame was when the Beatles made their first feature film on its stages in 1964 with A Hard Day’s Night, followed a year later by Help, both directed by American Dick Lester. When word got around, the studio was besieged by hundreds of female
done the duelling scenes any- where but in a studio and I was trained for three weeks by William Hobbs, fight director for the National Theatre. Dick uses multi-cameras and works very quickly which is his distinctive style. You have to be fully fit. Planning the movements are very important, but that’s what the cinema is all about, move- ment rather than words.”
The Amicus thriller The Deadly Bees (not to be confused with Michael Caine’s enduring classic The Swarm) starred Frank Finlay and gorgeous blonde Suzanna Leigh in this tale of a plague of killer bees with Freddie Francis in the director’s chair. The bank vault heist drama, Loophole, brought together American star Martin Sheen with Britain’s Albert Finney and Susannah York under John Quested’s direction. And David Jas on appeared with Imogen Hassall and Dave Prowse in White Cargo at Twickenham long before The Darling Buds Of May brought him TV stardom.
Some of the industry’s fore- most directors favoured Twickenham over other UK stu- dios. Apart from regulars Lester and Reisz, there was John Schlesinger and Hollywood vet- eran John Sturges, renowned for his classics The Great Escape and The Magnificent Seven. Among the stars were Warren Beatty, who starred in and directed Reds in 1981, while seven years later Madame Sousatzka brought his sister, Shirley MacLaine, as the epony- mous piano teacher of the title over to the studio.
In 1978 Twickenham hosted Richard Gere for Yanks, his first British film. “Yanks is the sixth film we’ve made together as a team,” Schlesinger told me, referring to his producer, the late Joseph Janni. And talking of Americans, Twickenham played host to others destined for future stardom when John Sturges arrived for The Eagle Has Landed, based on Jack Higgins’ best-selling novel of a German attempt to kidnap
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Stills courtesy BFI Stills & Posters/Twickenham Studios Archives/Rank/Iain McAsh/Graffiti/Foyer/All copyright owners acknowledged where known.