Ken Hughes

[julian_craster]

A neat summary of the career of Ken Hughes, from the DNB....

Hughes, Kenneth Graham [Ken] (1922–2001), film director and screenwriter, was born on 19 January 1922 at 53 Yates Street, Toxteth Park, Liverpool, the son of Clement Graham Hughes, formerly a cadet in the Royal Irish Constabulary, and later a sales manager, and his wife, Edith, née Kenny. Shortly after he was born, his family moved to south-west London, where he was educated. He later recalled that he ‘was mad keen about making movies when [he] was eight’ (Eyles, 42) and, with a camera his father bought him when he was 14, he made a short film that won an Amateur Cine World magazine award. He subsequently found work as a projectionist at the Prince of Wales cinema in the Harrow Road, later crediting this with giving him insight into film techniques. At sixteen he joined the BBC, graduating from sound-effects boy (very good at horses' hooves, he said) to sound engineer in 1939.

Hughes's career at the BBC was interrupted by war service in the Royal Air Force where he was transferred to a unit making training films, giving him his first film-making experience. The first film he directed was the privately made short Soho (1943), which he also produced, wrote, and photographed, and in the post-war years he made several documentaries for World Wide Pictures, some commissioned by government departments, including The Burning Question (1945) for the Ministry of Information and Beach Recovery (1946) for the War Office. For most of these he also wrote the screenplays, as he did for much of his career in fiction films, later claiming that ‘I only started writing in the first place to protect myself. No director is better than his script …’ (Hughes, 10). On 29 June 1946 he married Charlotte Gerda Paula Epstein, one year younger than him. She was then working as a secretary, and was the daughter of Leopold Epstein, solicitor. There were no children of the marriage, which ended in divorce in 1957.

Hughes's first feature was Wide Boy (1952), a typical B movie of the period (that is, the pre-interval film in a double-bill programme), its plot involving blackmail and a post-war nylons racket. At Merton Park studios in 1953 he embarked on a series of ‘Scotland Yard’ thrillers, running for about 30 minutes and benefiting from his crisp story-telling and adept use of the camera to suggest production values of a kind not allowed for in the films' budgets. With these Hughes established a track record for no-nonsense budget film-making, sometimes with a flair that hinted at more ambitious possibilities.

Hughes's B movies tended to the upper level of this rung in the production hierarchy, but he often gave them an added gloss by using Hollywood stars past their prime at home but still able to impart a sheen to British crime thrillers. Films such as Black 13 (1954) and The Brain Machine (1955), with indigenous leads such as Patrick Barr, were nifty genre entertainments in their undemanding ways. However, to add Hillary Brooke (in The House across the Lake, 1954), Richard Conte (in Little Red Monkey, 1955), Paul Douglas and Ruth Roman (in Joe Macbeth, 1955), Arlene Dahl (in Wicked as They Come, 1956), and Victor Mature (in The Long Haul, 1957) gave the films a less parochial resonance and lifted them from second feature to co-feature status in the billing. In all these films Hughes showed himself a proficient purveyor of tense narrative and of film noir stylistics: avowedly influenced by Hollywood, he gave an international fillip to tales of domestic crime and adultery. The House across the Lake, based on Hughes's novel High Wray (1952), maintained suspense admirably, invoking Brooke's persona of cool venality to excellent effect and eliciting a pre-Carry on subtlety from Sid James as her cuckolded husband. In Joe Macbeth, another dangerous wife acted out a Shakespearian scenario in an American gangland setting, with James this time doing service as Banky/Banquo.

Hughes directed several films for Warwick, the British-based production company set up by the Hollywood major, Columbia, including two comedy-thrillers with Anthony Newley, Jazz Boat (1960) and In the Nick (1960). His most notable work with Newley, though, was the one-man television play Sammy (1957), which Hughes also wrote and produced. This taut drama, of a flat-broke striptease promoter under threat from bookmakers to pay £200, was later successfully opened out as a feature film, The Small World of Sammy Lee (1963), returning Hughes to the Soho world of his first film.

Hughes's major work belongs to the 1960s, when he also did a good deal of writing for television series, such as Enemy of the State (1965). Having served his apprenticeship, he was entrusted with larger budgets and lavish productions. Perhaps his finest achievement was The Trials of Oscar Wilde (1960), for which he also wrote the screenplay. With Peter Finch as a paunchy, florid Wilde leading a strong cast, and with production design and cinematography that superbly evoked the late nineteenth century, the film far outranked the rival biopic, Gregory Ratoff's Oscar Wilde, filmed at the same time. The re-make of Somerset Maugham's Of Human Bondage (1964) was a troubled production on which Hughes replaced irascible Hollywood director Henry Hathaway, and only after Bryan Forbes had done some fill-in work. The result, while not dislodging memories of the Bette Davis–Leslie Howard version (1934), was not dishonourable, and the 1970 costume drama, Cromwell, meticulously researched by Hughes, was a soberly impressive job of recreation, with fine work from Richard Harris (as Cromwell), Alec Guinness (as Charles I) and Dorothy Tutin (as Queen Henrietta Maria).

None of the five directors involved with the inflated James Bond spoof, Casino Royale (1967), on which Hughes directed the Berlin sequences, emerged with credit. However, he acquired immense commercial if not critical réclame for his next film, the elaborate children's fantasy, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang (1968), based like Casino Royale on a story by Ian Fleming. Though grossly overlong, and syrupy in its characterization and songs, this has not prevented its becoming a children's classic. Hughes once said of it: ‘The film made a lot of money but that doesn't really make me feel any better about it’ (The Times).

Nothing in Hughes's subsequent career, much of it spent in the USA and in television, was as successful. Alfie Darling (1975) was an ill-advised sequel to the 1966 hit Alfie and his US film, Sextette (1978), starring the 86-year-old Mae West, was a camp disaster. At this stage West needed not so much a director as a cosmetician.

Hughes's was an uneven career, with some disappointments, such as the film he wanted to make in the 1960s about the Russian Revolution, but at his best he was an accomplished and unusually articulate maker of popular film. He spent his last years in Los Angeles, and in 1982 remarried his first wife, Charlotte (his second marriage having been dissolved in 1976). He succumbed to Alzheimer's disease and died in Los Angeles on 28 April 2001. He was survived by his wife, Charlotte, and daughter, Melinda, an opera singer.

By Brian McFarlane