Dream Repairman. Jim BSL Clark
smelly place with the kitchen on one side and the Gents on the other.
All the principal players were staying at a nearby country hotel, once the home of John McCormack, the great Irish tenor. Once a week Jimmy Ware and I would dine there, escaping from the dampness of Bray.
One night Jimmy Woolf entered the dining room, clearly saw us, and vanished. “He’ll be back” said Jimmy Ware and, sure enough, after a short pause, Woolf reappeared and invited us to his room for an after-dinner drink. It was no secret that Jimmy Woolf was homosexual, though just how active he was I never knew. He had a long liason with Laurence Harvey, now married, and was currently escorting Terence Stamp who was also in Term of Trial.
That evening in his apartment was a long and boozy night. He kept filling up the brandy glass, and it was clear he had no desire to retire to bed. We limped out of there in the small hours. A similar evening occurred on another occasion, though this time we were in Peter Glenville’s room, along with his companion Bill Smith.
Sarah Miles made her debut in this film and was eighteen at the time. She was mostly seen with her parents, though it was rumoured that she had an affair with Olivier, recently married to Joan Plowright. This was perfectly possible, but then Olivier was often rumoured to be cavorting with ladies and sometimes with gents.
Although I’d worked with Olivier in a minor capacity on The Prince and the Showgirl, I was amazed that he remembered me. We spoke about Jack Harris, whom he admired, and of Tony Richardson and the “new wave” in Britain.
Olivier had been in the stage and screen versions of The Entertainer and was a big fan of modern cinema. I did not get to know Signoret at all, but our paths did cross again much later in our lives.
Glenville was not a difficult director to edit for. In fact, he hardly appeared after we had finished the director’s cut. The finale of the film was a courtroom scene that he shot for several days and for which I had quite a mass of rushes. I assembled the material quickly in order to see if anything vital was missing before the set was demolished but this version of the scene hardly changed thereafter.
In the editing suite, Glenville was inclined to revert to baby talk and would say, “I think a little trimmy-poo here” and such comments, but he changed very little in the film after my first assembly, and it was completed rapidly at Elstree with a score by the French composer, Jean-Michel Damase, a friend of Glenville’s.
Term of Trial was hardly a big hit, coming near the end of the kitchen sink period and not being considered a very fine example, certainly not in the same league as Saturday Night and Sunday Morning or Room at the Top. Seen now, however, it fares better though is a slightly manufactured slice of life.
Certainly Glenville had little knowledge of reality. The child of a famous pantomime couple, he thrived in a theatrical world, and the casting of Signoret and Olivier was weird. I could not fully understand their role as a couple—their mutual attraction. It was Room at the Top revisited, but not as satisfying.
However, for me, it led to a most worthwhile and important film. Through Jimmy Ware, I was introduced to Jack Clayton who subsequently asked me to edit The Innocents, a version of Henry James’ celebrated ghost story The Turn of the Screw.
CHAPTER FOUR: THE INNOCENTS AND CHARADE
The Innocents
The shooting of The Innocents began on location at Sheffield Park, a country house near Brighton, which was doubling for Bly House. Deborah Kerr played the governess; Michael Redgrave, the childrens’ uncle; Megs Jenkins, the housekeeper; and Peter Wyngarde the evil Quint.
It was a real pleasure to edit since Jack had a very certain approach to his material, having worked out everything beforehand. He was a perfectionist who left nothing to chance and was very precise in his approach to work. He was, in fact, a very complex personality. The iron fist in the velvet glove.
Jack had worked on a variety of films after war service. After John Huston’s Beat the Devil, which was a Romulus film with the Woolf brothers, Jack wanted to try directing. He was given a long short film to direct, The Bespoke Overcoat, which was the story of a Jewish tailor and was sufficiently effective to allow Jack to move on to Room at the Top, which was a big hit for him and highly influential at the time. It was a landmark in British cinema though it did not actually start the kitchen sink wave, which had its real roots in the Free Cinema Movement started by Karel Reisz, Tony Richardson, and Lindsay Anderson. But Room at the Top was perhaps the first of its kind to get a large overseas distribution.
Jack was a big drinker who used to tipple quite frequently all day—mostly brandy—and he was a chain smoker. He mesmerized me, having a Svengali effect. He was absolutely revered by the crew, and I cannot deny falling under his spell. I’ve always been attracted to the voices of people, and Jack had a particularly mellifluous way of talking.
He’d been married a few times, and I remember Jimmy Ware telling me about when he was living in a London apartment just beneath Jack and his then wife, Christine Norden, who was a well-known actress. One night there was the most frightful noise above and this huge row was going on. He was hurling the furniture around, and they split up shortly after that. He later married Haya Harareet, an Israeli actress who was in William Wyler’s Ben Hur. She gave up acting when she married Jack.
The script of The Innocents was based on William Archibald’s play and was adapted by John Mortimer. The final version was given to Truman Capote, with whom Clayton had worked on Beat the Devil.
Truman was a character, and Toby Jones’ take on him in the film Infamous is as near as any living person could get to that mixed up, mercurial, twisted, funny, camp person. I had a few lunches with Jack and Truman, who made me laugh so much I forgot how bad the Shepperton restaurant food was.
Truman had already written In Cold Blood, but he couldn’t publish it yet. He would sit and fret about this. “I called the Sheriff last night,” he’d say. “They won’t swing yet. I can’t publish until they swing.” It was only later that I discovered he’d had a relationship with one of the killers; but from his anxiety, it seemed he couldn’t wait for the man to go to the gallows.
Jack and I became good collaborators and eventually close friends away from the studio. This was partly because we lived near each other.
Jack, who was divorced at the time and living with his mother, had a house in Marlow, Buckinghamshire, while I had moved my children and housekeeper away from Ealing and into Bourne End, only a few miles away. My thinking then was that the country air and the local school would be better for them. I boughta pleasant house on an estate that had a large garden through which a stream ran. It was close by the Thames and quite idyllic. Later I discovered that Tom Stoppard was also living nearby with his first wife and the ex-Ealing editor Peter Bezencenet was also there. This was a close-knit community, prettily designed in the early twenties by a builder who had been to Venice.
Jack Clayton and I worked together very well on The Innocents, partly because we both enjoyed the material. He was meticulous, and he knew that I was too. His approach to editing was wildly different from Stanley Donen’s. He would run the cut footage every night after shooting. It was a very relaxed routine. We would run the rushes at lunchtime with the crew, and every evening about seven, Jack would send his assistant, Jeanie Sims, to the bar for drinks, then we’d run the film as it stood. Obviously, each evening, it grew a bit. He didn’t come into the cutting room all that much, but would give me his notes each evening, which I would then attend to during the following day, so it was a true collaboration.
This routine involved my assistant editor, Mary Kessel, picking up the rushes from the labs each morning. She’d then get to the studio quickly, collecting the sound transfers and synching them up so that they were ready for projection by eight. This was a hard task, but was very helpful to the director, particularly if he was in the middle of a scene.
This way of working left no time at all for a social life, but since neither Jack nor I were attached at that time and the summer evenings were pleasantly warm, we would repair to the bar, which faced the big garden at Shepperton, to continue drinking and talking about the picture.