Allen Dace

John Box
Britain's finest film production designer, who worked epic magic on big-budget movies from Lawrence of Arabia to Zhivago



THE film production designer and art director John Box became the man directors went to when they needed magic on an epic scale — like moving an entire country to the other side of the world.
Mark Robson called in Box when his latest project, The Inn of the Sixth Happiness, seemed to have run aground. Ingrid Bergman was all set to go to China to make the film, a true wartime story in which the British missionary Gladys Aylward helped 100 Chinese children to escape the Japanese invaders. But shortly before the film-makers’ scheduled arrival, the Nationalist Chinese leader Chiang-Kai-shek objected to references in the script to “bound feet”, the practice of breaking and binding girls’ toes to give the distinctive, teetering walk Chinese men found attractive. Chiang wanted to project an image of his country as a modern 20th-century country.



Robson pointed out that it was a true story, set in the past, and refused to remove the references, and so it fell to Box, the film’s relatively untried art director, to find somewhere to double as China. He chose Wales.

“It was down to me — how the hell do you make this bloody movie,” Box said later. “There was a huge amount of money involved with Ingrid Bergman’s salary.”

In one of the most audacious chapters in film-location history, Box built a walled Chinese city at Nantmor in Snowdonia. “All the bombers going in and all the rest of it was all done in Wales . . . I just had a feeling that Wales and Chinese watercolours had an affinity.”

The move was so successful that Wales became a regular stand-in for Asia, in everything from Carry on Up the Khyber (1968) to Lara Croft Tomb Raider: The Cradle of Life (2003).

John Box built a reputation as a man who could work wonders on location, transforming the unlikeliest of places into somewhere on a different continent. He was perhaps British cinema’s most distinguished art director and production designer — the person responsible for the physical appearance of the world in which the drama unfolds.

Box worked regularly with the great British directors David Lean and Carol Reed and won no fewer than four Oscars — for Lawrence of Arabia (1962), Doctor Zhivago (1965), Oliver! (1968) and Nicholas and Alexandra (1971). It is no surprise that he also won three British Academy Awards, though it reflects the richness of his career that they were for three entirely different films — A Man for All Seasons (1966), The Great Gatsby (1974) and Rollerball (1975).

His most notable films often had period settings, which were frequently lavish. His sets for Reed’s Oliver! however showed that he could bring lavish and imaginative design sense to Dickensian poverty. The film was shot in Shepperton Studios, though many thought the sets were real locations. Most of all, his designs were evocative — all those rags in Oliver!, all that snow in Zhivago, all that sand in Lawrence. His approach seemed to complement that of the famously perfectionist David Lean.

Initially he felt that the scene in Lawrence of Arabia when Omar Sharif makes his entrance as a distant figure riding across a hazy desert was bland. He ordered that the camel path to the well should be painted white and bordered with black pebbles to focus the viewer’s eye on Sharif.

Afterwards Lean told Box, “You’ll never do a better bit of designing in films — ever.”

Lean later wrote: “The painted path to the well and the black tongues of pebble pointing towards the approaching figure was a created pattern, a design, which was part of the drama. Not an affectation. No one noticed it, but I’m quite sure it helped contribute to the impact of the sequence.”

It became one of the most celebrated shots in cinema history.

Born in Hampstead in 1920, John Allan Hyatt Box was only a few years old when the family went to Ceylon, where his father worked as an engineer, building roads and bridges. When he was about 12 he returned to England, with his mother and younger brother. Shortly after their arrival his mother died of a tropical disease, and he was raised by relatives.

Box trained as an architect, but enlisted in the Royal Armoured Corps during the Second World War, served in France, was mentioned in dispatches and ended up as an acting colonel at the age of 25. He retained a clipped moustache and conversational style, reminiscent of the military, though his thinking was by no means regimented.

After the war Box entered the film industry and worked as a draughtsman, initially for Two Cities Films, on the likes of the Cecil Parker drama The Weaker Sex (1948) and the comedy Adam and Evelyne (1949), with Stewart Granger and Jean Simmons. Other early films include Anthony Asquith’s The Importance of Being Earnest and Disney’s The Story of Robin Hood and His Merrie Men (both 1952). He was promoted to art director on The Million Pound Note (1953), a Ronald Neame comedy with Gregory Peck.

There had been a brief wartime marriage, and Box met his second wife, the costume designer Doris Lee, on The Black Knight (1954), a medieval adventure that starred Alan Ladd and was shot in Spain and Wales, which were to become Box’s regular haunts over the years.



His reputation as an expert in conjuring up exotic settings developed after The Inn of the Sixth Happiness (1958) with Reed’s adaptation of Graham Greene’s novel Our Man in Havana (1959), which was shot at Shepperton, The World of Suzie Wong (1960) and then Lawrence of Arabia.

Lawrence, shot in Jordan, Morocco and Spain, was the first of three films Box made with Lean. It was followed by Zhivago, A Passage to India (1984) and an abortive attempt at a new version of the mutiny on the Bounty, later filmed with Mel Gibson and Anthony Hopkins. For Zhivago Box built the protagonist’s country house in Spain. Outside the countryside was covered in white plastic sheets and white marble dust to represent snow, and bushes and trees were whitewashed and covered with cellophane so they would glisten.

Winter got into the house too. Box’s interior designs were inspired by Scott’s hut in Antarctica and shot on a studio set. The set was coated in hot wax, which was sprayed with cold water to solidify it, creating the effect of frost. Another scene, of the Red Army charging across a frozen lake, was created on sheet iron in a Spanish field, with thousands of tons of crushed white marble and a moored rowing boat to complete the effect.

Norman Jewison’s Rollerball marked a departure from big-budget period dramas. James Caan played the star of a new futuristic sport, a violent mix of hockey, basketball and motocross. Box not only designed the arena, but also helped to devise the game. The film was remade a couple of years ago. His other notable films include The Cockleshell Heroes (1955), Of Human Bondage (1964), Travels with My Aunt (1972) and Sorcerer (1977).

He returned to Wales for The Keep (1983), Michael Mann’s underrated tale of the supernatural set in the Carpathians during the Second World War, and for First Knight (1995), in which Sean Connery was King Arthur and Richard Gere was Lancelot. He might have hoped for a better swansong, but it was fitting that he should end his career in Wales.

His wife died in 1992. He is survived by two daughters.

John Box, film production designer, was born on January 27, 1920. He died on March 7, 2005, aged 85.

Marky B

It is unfortunate that people like John Box tend to get unheralded in the media. I would like to think in the advent of his death,a tribute should be made for John on television,highlighting his career to display the craftsman he was. [img]style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/clapping.gif[/img]
Ta Ta
Marky B [img]style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/thumbsup.gif[/img]

I once shot an elephant in my pyjamas - how he got in my pyjamas,I'll never know

Allen Dace

Oddly enough there were 3 John Box films on simultaneously on British TV last Saturday afternoon :
BBC2 had 'Inn Of the Sixth Happiness'
ITV1 had 'Doctor Zhivago' and
Five had 'The World Of Suzi Wong'.

The obituary doesn't mention that he was made an OBE (which was the least he deserved).