Freddie Francis (1917-2007)

[DB7]

Freddie Francis


Oscar-winning cinematographer who created distinctive look of films from 1960's Saturday Night and Sunday Morning to 1989's Glory

Sheila Whitaker
Tuesday March 20, 2007
Guardian Unlimited

Scene from The Elephant Man, photographed by Freddie Francis
Francis returned to cinematography with The Elephant Man after several attempts at direction

The American film critic Pauline Kael wrote: "I don't know where this cinematographer Freddie Francis sprang from. You may recall that in the last year just about every time a British movie is something to look at, it turns out to be his." That was when British cinema was once again bursting upon an unsuspecting world and Francis, who has died aged 89 following complications after a stroke, was photographing, in black and white, such films as Joseph Losey's Time Without Pity (1957), Jack Clayton's Room at the Top (1958) and The Innocents (1961), Jack Cardiff's Sons and Lovers (1960), for which he received an Oscar, and Karel Reisz's Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1960).

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Francis was born in Islington, London and attended technical school where he studied engineering but, realising that the chances of his being able to build bridges was minimal, he pursued his interest in photography and cinema and got himself apprenticed to stills photographer Louis Prothero, for whom he set up lighting and carried 10" x 8" cameras. He became a clapper boy at Elstree Studios, graduating to loader and focus puller and later camera assistant at Gaumont-British.

During the war he was assigned to the Army Film Unit, and on demobolisation he became a camera operator at Denham on films such as Powell and Pressburger's The Small Back Room and Gone to Earth. He returned to Elstree in the same capacity and his films there included John Huston's Moulin Rouge and Beat The Devil. In 1954 he worked on René Clement's Knave of Hearts and Bernard Bernhardt's Beau Brummel and then, in 1956, became director of photography for the first time with A Hill in Korea (which coincidentally was Michael Caine's debut).

After The Innocents, he turned to direction, partly because he wanted to direct and partly because, as he said, as a cinematographer if one wasn't constantly working one didn't earn enough, and he didn't want to have to work with directors for whom he didn't have any regard. Aside from photographing Karel Reisz's Night Must Fall in 1964, he did not return to cinematography until 1980.

He directed Two and Two Make Six in 1962, an innocuous little comedy, ("I decided to do a film with a script I didn't much like. Stupidly, I thought that I could make a good movie anyway. But, of course, you can't."). This was followed by some uncredited scenes in The Day of the Triffids, including special effects, and then The Brain (1963), the first of the titles shot in two-language versions (English and German).

In 1962 he directed the Hammer horror film, Paranoiac, whose success brought him more projects from Hammer Studios, and later Amicus, which he took to acquire a reputation as a director. Unfortunately, he became typecast as a horror director, a genre for which he said he had no particular affinity and, indeed, never watched horror films. His technique was probably the equal of the great horror director, Terence Fisher, who was working at Hammer at the same time, and he has his fans, but it is generally considered that his output was inconsistent, ranging from the very good to the execrable.

Some of the films, such as The Evil of Frankenstein (1964), were anything but successful on any level, but Nightmare (1963) and Dr Terror's House of Horrors (1964) saw him more nearly on form, as did The Skull and The Psychopath (both 1965), Dracula Has Risen From the Grave (1968), Tales from the Crypt (1971 - a big commercial success), The Creeping Flesh (1972, particularly notable for one of Peter Cushing's best performances), and The Ghoul (1975), produced by his son, Kevin. He also occasionally wrote and directed under the pseudonym of Ken Barnett.

Much of his success he (probably rightly) attributed to the fact that "these films are 99% visual ... most of the films that I do, these so-called psychological thrillers, depend on the ability to tell one's stories with the camera." (He considered The Skull was one of his best films visually.) But there were some pretty disastrous productions and he returned full time to his first love, cinematography, when he shot, in stunning black and white, David Lynch's Elephant Man. He re-established his cinematographic reputation with such films as Karel Reisz's The French Lieutenant's Woman (1981), Edward Zwick's Glory (1989), for which he won his second Oscar, Martin Scorsese's Cape Fear (1991), for which he also shot the model work in the US and David Lynch's the Straight Story. He also shot two TV movies, The Executioner's Song (1982) and David Mamet's A Life in the Theatre.

His achievements as a director, variable as they were, did not go unnoticed by his peers: Martin Scorsese is quoted as saying that he wanted him to photograph Cape Fear because: "The main thing was Freddie's understanding of the concept of the gothic atmosphere ... He understands the obligatory scene of a young maiden with a candle walking down a long hall towards a door. 'Don't go in that door!' you yell, and she goes in! Every time she goes in! So I say to him 'This has to look like The Hall', and he understands that." (One has only to look at, for instance, The Ghoul to see what Scorsese meant.) Francis's desire to shoot the film arose out of his memory of the atmosphere of the original 1962 version. "Anybody can photograph a film - you can just put lights on and make an exposure. I want the challenge of creating an atmosphere and the right frame for the director."

Other admirers of his directorial work also emphasise the way in which he was able to transcend essentially silly material. In the late 1960s he also directed some TV series, including episodes of The Saint and Man in a Suitcase, and had hoped to direct the feature film Death Masque, a bio-pic of Edgar Alan Poe but on which the screenwriter, whose original project it was, refused to allow any changes.

As a photographer, Francis always considered himself to have had three mentors - the great cameraman, Freddie Young, who he considered to not only have influenced him but the entire British industry, John Huston and Michael Powell. Francis's career involved a relatively high degree of filming in black and white and, to some extent, his reputation was founded on it.He later remarked that he really didn't know anything about colour: "I still photograph things in black and white, but the fact that it's colour stock means they come out in colour. I know that sounds rather facetious ... but I prefer to think in terms of light and shade than in colour."

He always saw his role as cameraman as of being of service to a director: in his young days, he said, he heard too many cameramen tell directors that they couldn't produce the effect they wanted: Francis always produced whatever was required, only warning the director that it might take a little longer. On Glory, which was largely shot in muted blues and greys, they arrived at a beautiful wild beach where the battle which kills 50% of the black troop was to be shot, only to be told that because of two nesting birds they could not take any heavy equipment on to it and that there could not be any lights closer than half a mile. This meant that he had, at short notice, to use a Musco light, a high voltage, portable, lighting system with a tall boom which is mounted on a trailer: this was Francis at his most resourceful and creative. The night battle scenes are stunningly photographed in long shot and close-up, with images of light and dark, smoke, explosions, flares and dying men chillingly conveying the horror.

Francis rarely discussed the look of films with directors, since he tried to work with colleagues who were on the same wavelength anyway, and as he pointed out, he would read a script and it would already be photographed in his mind. (On The Innocents, Fox decided only two weeks before shooting began that they wanted it in Cinemascope, which must have caused a deal of re-thinking for both Jack Clayton and Francis ).

In later years, he felt that the lenses became too sharp - "all the magic is gone today" - and hated special effects ("I only did Dune because it was David"). When asked, in a Guardian interview in 1995, how he learnt his craft he replied "By doing it": in his case, "doing it" produced some of the finest examples of the cinematographer's art, for which many directors must be forever grateful.

Francis first marriage to Gladys Dorrell in 1940 was dissolved in 1961. He married his second wife, Pamela, in 1963. She survives him along with their son Gareth and daughter Suzanna, he also leaves a son Kevin from his first marriage.

· Frederick William Francis, cinematographer and film director, born December, 22 1917; died March 17 2007

[penfold]

Another of the Gods of British film passes on. Rest In Peace Mr Francis, and thank you for all those images.

[harryfielder]

I got to work with Freddie a few times and he was always a great laugh.
He loved to speak Cockney in front of the crew and knew a lot of the sayings.
When we worked on one set he said..''Aitch this is where you get shot and you end up on your chips'' ( chips and peas--Knees)

Kevin Francis I've known since our Randall and Hopkirk 1968 days...

RIP dear Freddie and thank you for your work...

Aitch,

[D Cairns]

Saw him talk a couple of times at the Edinburgh Film Festival. An amusing man.

On working with David Lynch: 'I would never say to David "You can't do that." I would only ever say, "Well, we COULD do that, but you won't see anything."'

Asked if he'd worked his way up from camera assisting or continuity: 'Well, assisting, certainly, but continuity is no job for a gentleman. Not that I've anything against continuity girls: two of my ex-wives were continuity girls!'

Or was that three?

[smudger]

The opening scenes of French Lieutenant's Woman, on Lyme Regis Bay, are unforgettable, as is the claustrophobia of daytime in The Innocents (you convince yourself most scenes in the film takes place at night - in fact, they take place in creeping daytime...), and, in The Elephant Man, the wonder of seeing a true black-and-white film world created in an age of bland colours ...

Genuinely a master.

[DB7]

A master of atmospheric b&w cinematography and director of some interesting low-budget psychological thrillers too. Shame that his passing will go largely ignored.

[Marky B]

Freddie Francis - a giant of the British cineman:R.I.P.
Ta Ta
Marky B

[ChristineCB]

Such a range of films and I love some of those Hammer Films that were dismissed, if only because of the colorings, sets and photography.

And Peter Cushing.

[Hackett]

Originally Posted by DB7 A master of atmospheric b&w cinematography and director of some interesting low-budget psychological thrillers too. Shame that his passing will go largely ignored.

Very True. If he was a painter he would be up there with Gauguin.

[smudge]

Thanks to this obsession of a hobby, I had the pleasure of corresponding with Freddie Francis a few times. I would like to add a further honour to him aside from acknowledging his brilliance as a cinematographer.

Freddie Francis was a true gentleman, cast in the same mould as the late Peter Cushing.

Freddie always had something positive to say about anyone I asked him about, when talking about his amazing career. Circumstances meant that I missed one of his lectures that I'd planned to attend. Fast forward two or three weeks and there was a letter from Freddie on the mat, enclosing a cassette recording of the entire event to make sure I'd not missed out. Similarly, he sent me cuttings from his own collection to illustrate particular things we'd been talking about.

An amazing talent and a great bloke ; we've lost one of the best. Rest in peace Freddie.

With the greatest respect,

Smudge

[Dave Rattigan]

Great shame. His directorial efforts were never as sophisticated, thematically, as those of Terence Fisher, say, but he had great visual flair. A film like Dracula Has Risen from the Grave is full of stunning images.

[Dave Rattigan]

For a sample of Francis's great visual style, see this gallery from Dracula Has Risen from the Grave. Great stuff.





Incidentally, although the photographer in DHRFTG was Arthur Grant, the effects shown above were achieved using Freddie's filters, first used to great effect in The Innocents.

[julian_craster]

Obituaries from today's papers......


Freddie Francis
Cinematographer and Hammer director whose career revival followed the toss of a coin
The Independent
Published: 21 March 2007
Frederick William Francis, cinematographer and director: born London 22 December 1917; married 1940 Gladys Dorrell (one son; marriage dissolved 1961), 1963 Pamela Mann (one son, one daughter); died Isleworth, Middlesex 17 March 2007.
Freddie Francis was acknowledged as one of the world's finest cinematographers, with a film career that spanned 50 years. But he was also a director of Gothic horror films, with a string of Hammer chillers to his name. It bemused him that his photographic achievements, as a key figure in the British New Wave and the recipient of two Oscars, came to be regarded as of secondary importance to his exalted position in the pantheon of terror. As he once observed, "While I have some rather good credits as a cinematographer, I get more recognition for all of those ghastly horror movies."
Francis was born in Islington, London, in 1917. His uncle was a keen amateur photographer and allowed the youngster to borrow his cameras and process his own pictures. But Freddie hankered after a career in engineering - "I had this romantic notion of building bridges across great rivers in remote countries." That all changed when he was asked to write a school essay on a hobby. He chose film-making as his subject, visited the Gaumont-British Studios as part of his research, and was hooked for life.
Leaving school at 16, Francis took up an apprenticeship with a stills photographer. As luck would have it, his father, a bookmaker, knew the foreman at British International Pictures, who told him they were looking for a clapper boy. Freddie Francis jumped at the opportunity and progressed to film loader and then to focus puller. When the Second World War began, he joined the ranks of Carol Reed and Freddie Young in shooting propaganda and army training films.
It was all invaluable experience and within weeks of being discharged in 1946 Francis was in East Africa handling location work on The Macomber Affair, directed by Zoltan Korda. Returning to England, he was placed under contract as a camera operator and also came under the wing of the director Michael Powell, whom Francis later acknowledged as one of his mentors.
Another early inspirational figure was John Huston. Together they collaborated on seven pictures, including Moulin Rouge (1952) and Beat the Devil (1954). When Francis decided it was time to strike out on his own, Huston hired him as second-unit and effects photographer on Moby Dick (1956). After that Francis was recommended to several producers and earned his first solo credit as director of photography on A Hill in Korea (1956), the war film that also introduced Michael Caine.
After such successful "kitchen sink" dramas as Room at the Top (1958) and Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1960), Francis was gaining notice as one of Britain's top lighting cameramen, a reputation that was sealed when he received an Academy Award for Sons and Lovers (1960), although Francis himself considered his work on The Innocents (1961), the haunting screen adaptation of Henry James's ghost story, to be the best he ever did. On that production he met Pamela Mann, the continuity girl and one-time assistant to David Lean, who would become his second wife.
At the peak of his powers, Francis expressed a desire to take up the director's mantle, not for any great artistic purpose, as he later confessed:
In Britain you can't make a decent living as a cameraman unless you keep working all the time, and I didn't want to keep working all the time. So I thought I'd earn more money as a director.
In 1961 Francis got his chance, with a now thankfully forgotten British comedy, Two and Two Make Six. But it was his uncredited work on the big-screen version of John Wyndham's The Day of The Triffids (1962) that brought him to the attention of Hammer, which hired him to direct the psychological thriller Paranoiac (1963).
This led to other credits for the famous horror studio, notably The Evil of Frankenstein (1964) and Dracula Has Risen from the Grave (1968), the most commercially successful film Hammer ever made. Inadvertently, Francis had become one of the most prolific exponents of British Gothic horror of the 1960s. This was an irony indeed, for he harboured no particular interest or fondness for the genre - to him these were merely assignments, although many, including Dr Terror's House of Horrors and The Skull (both 1965) and Torture Garden (1967), are viewed today as classics.
By 1968 Francis had directed some 12 fantasy films, of varying quality. One, The Deadly Bees (1966), proved such a nightmare that Francis seriously considered leaving the industry. Although he rebelled against being so rigidly typecast, he continued to work in the genre, and indeed found it was all he was being offered. His work in the early 1970s ranged from the masterful, in the case of The Creeping Flesh (1972), which reunited him with the Hammer stalwarts Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee, to the decent, with Tales from the Crypt (1972), a popular attempt to bring the gore-drenched EC horror comics of the 1950s to the screen, to the downright abysmal, with Trog (1970), Joan Crawford's final film.
On the brink of quitting, Francis was persuaded to direct two period horror films for Tyburn, an independent company formed by his son Kevin. Alas, The Ghoul and Legend of the Werewolf (both 1975) failed to recapture the glory days of Hammer and, apart from occasional forays into television, Francis's directorial career lay dormant for 10 years.
In 1980 Francis finally returned to what he loved and did best, cinematography. David Lynch wanted him for The Elephant Man but was advised against it because Francis hadn't photographed a film for 15 years. In the end Lynch narrowed it down to Francis and one other person and decided to toss a coin. It was heads and Francis was again back at the forefront of his profession, and high-profile productions such as The French Lieutenant's Woman (1981) and Dune (1984) cemented his reputation as one of cinematography's finest practitioners.
In 1985 Francis returned to both directing and Gothic horror with The Doctor and the Devils, a reworking of the Burke and Hare story that was based on a 40-year-old screenplay by Dylan Thomas. After its poor reception and that of another film, Dark Tower (1987), so abysmal he asked for his name to be removed from the credits, Francis concentrated solely on cinematography, working predominantly in America, notably on the remake of Cape Fear (1991) for Martin Scorsese, who chose Francis because of his ability to create a sense of Gothic atmosphere, and the Civil War drama Glory (1989), for which Francis received his second Oscar, making him one of very few cinematographers to have won Academy Awards for both black-and-white and colour work.
In 1998 the American Society of Cinematographers presented him with its International Award, an honour from his peers that Francis described as "an absolute highlight in my career".
Robert Sellers

--------------------------------------------------------

Freddie Francis
21/03/2007
Daily Telegraph

Freddie Francis, who died on Saturday aged 89, was one of Britain's leading cinematographers, whose credits behind the camera included Sons and Lovers (1960), for which he won an Oscar; he also directed more than 25 feature films, including several horror cult classics.
"I don't know where this cinematographer Freddie Francis sprang from," wrote the American film critic Pauline Kael in the late 1950s. "You may recall that in the last year just about every time a British movie is something to look at, it turns out to be his\u2026 in each case, with a different director." Summing up his own professional philosophy, Francis noted that "there is good photography, bad photography and then there is the right photography".
Frederick William Francis was born in Islington on December 22 1917. At school, a piece he wrote about films of the future won him a scholarship to the North-West Polytechnic in Kentish Town. After studying engineering (which he had hoped would be romantic but turned out to be a qualification to serve in an ironmonger's shop) Freddie began his film career at the age of 17 as an apprentice to a feature stills photographer.
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A year later he joined British International Pictures as a clapperboy, making his debut with The Marriage of Corbal (1936) for British and Dominions at Elstree Studios. His enthusiasm, ability to get on with people and his passion for the work meant eventual advancement to camera assistant, making "quota quickies" - the Board of Trade required that 45 per cent of all films shown in Britain should be British-made - and other "dreadful films".
When war broke out Francis had just finished the Carol Reed classic The Stars Look Down (1939), one of "the more classy pictures of my pre-war period". He left the production on a Friday and when war was declared on the following Sunday he joined the Army, hoping to be used in some kind of photographic capacity.
After some deliberation, Francis recalled, "the powers that be thought I would make a good clerk". Eventually he was assigned as a cameraman and director to the Army Kinematograph Unit at Wembley, where he worked on many training films.
Days after demob he became camera assistant on the African second unit for The Macomber Affair (1946), based on an Ernest Hemingway short story, and continued to work as camera operator on such films as Mine Own Executioner (1947), Outcast of the Islands (1951) and Angels One Five (1952).
For Francis the high points of this period were working for such directors as Michael Powell, on Small Back Room (1949), Gone To Earth and The Elusive Pimpernel (both 1950) and The Tales of Hoffman (1951); for Carol Reed, on The Fallen Idol (1948) and Outcast of the Islands (1951); and John Huston, on Moulin Rouge (1952), Beat the Devil (1953) and Moby Dick (1956), on which he worked as second unit cameraman for the whaling sequences and special effects.
In 1956 he graduated to director of photography on A Hill in Korea, from which he went on to photograph many classic British films of the 1950s and early 1960s, including Room At the Top (1958), Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1960), Sons and Lovers (1960) - for which he won an Oscar for best black and white cinematography - and the gothic classic The Innocents (1961), which remained his favourite film.
In 1961 he turned to directing with his first feature, Two and Two Make Six. Over the next 20 years he directed many films, mostly in the horror genre, for Amicus and Hammer Films.
These were always stylish and usually very successful; several have now become cult classics, such as Paranoiac (1963), The Evil of Frankenstein (1964), The Skull (1965), Dr Terror's House of Horrors (1965), Torture Garden (1967), Dracula Has Risen From the Grave (1968), Tales From the Crypt (1972), The Creeping Flesh and Tales That Witness Madness (both 1973) and Legend of the Werewolf (1975).
Francis always managed to collect a stellar cast, working, among others, with Joan Crawford, Rita Hayworth, Oliver Reed, Peter Cushing, Klaus Kinski, Michael Gough, Frank Finlay, Jack Palance, Burgess Meredith, John Hurt, Jack Hawkins and Sir Ralph Richardson.
In the 1960s Francis also directed episodes of such television favourites as The Saint and Man In A Suitcase.
He returned to cinematography when David Lynch chose him to photograph The Elephant Man (1980); Francis was then sought out by many leading international directors, including Karel Reisz, for The French Lieutenant's Woman (1981), Robert Mulligan, for Clara's Heart (1988) and Man in the Moon (1991), Ed Zwick, for Glory (1989) - for which he won his second Oscar - Martin Scorsese, for Cape Fear (1991) and David Lynch again, for Francis's swansong The Straight Story (1999).
Francis received many industry awards, including, in 1997, an international achievement award from the American Society of Cinematographers, and, in 2004, Bafta's special achievement award.
Freddie Francis married first, in 1940, Gladys Dorrell, with whom he had a son; in 1963 he married, secondly, Pamela Mann, with whom he had a daughter and a second son. All survive him.

[julian_craster]

From Times Online
March 22, 2007

Freddie Francis
Versatile Oscar-winning cinematographer who enjoyed a parallel career as the director of innovative horror films
December 22,1917 - March 17, 2007

A double Oscar winner, Freddie Francis had one of the most remarkable careers in British cinema. As a cinematographer he was a key figure in creating the look of a new type of gritty, social realist drama at the end of the 1950s and start of the 1960s, shooting the classics Room at the Top (1959) and Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1960) and winning an Oscar for Sons and Lovers (1960).
Latterly he developed his career in Hollywood, working on a wide variety of films with the likes of Martin Scorsese and David Lynch and winning a second Oscar for the US Civil War epic Glory (1989), a portrait of the bravery and sacrifice of black Union soldiers.
In between he enjoyed a successful career as a director. He is not the only cinematographer to become a director and then return to the specialism of the camera, but what is remarkable about Francis’s output as a director is that he specialised so heavily in horror movies, working for Hammer and Amicus, and becoming one of the best-known names in the genre.
He had a shot at Frankenstein, Dracula and psychological horror and helped to promote the concept of the “portmanteau” horror film — which presented a series of stories, normally loosely linked by a spooky narrator — beginning with Dr Terror’s House of Horrors (1965), in which Peter Cushing meets five strangers on a train and tells their fortunes with Tarot cards. The sub-genre and the title were affectionately spoofed by Steve Coogan on his television series Dr Terrible’s House of Horrible (2001).
Francis is revered by horror fans, though he maintained that his specialism was an accident and was dismissive of his work in the genre, and its fans. “The main reasons I got out of the horror genre were first that I never really wanted to get into it,” he told Sight and Sound magazine in 1992. “Those were the only films I was being offered as a director.
“I used to get invited to all these horror film festivals, and I’d start talking about the directors I most admire, the Billy Wilders and the William Wylers, and they didn’t know who I was talking about. So instead I’d start talking about the really great horror film directors, James Whale, Tod Browning and all these people, and they still didn’t understand who I was talking about. And I suddenly realised that most of these people were only interested in horror — not just horror films, but horror pure and simple. Well, you know, that wasn’t for me. I’m not a weirdo at all.”
Frederick William Francis was born in Islington, London, in 1917, and studied engineering before entering the film industry as an apprentice stills photographer at Shepherds Bush Studios in 1934. He gradually worked his way up through the industry at various studios, with spells as a clapper-boy and camera assistant.
The Second World War provided him with the chance to develop his career and he wrote, shot, directed and edited films for the Army, filming everything from drill and ack-ack installations to “operations on men who’d had their faces shot away”.
After the war he worked on several films as camera operator for Powell and Pressburger and the cinematographer Christopher Challis, including Gone to Earth (1950), and also for John Huston, serving as director of photography on the second unit for Huston’s spectacular Technicolor adaptation of Moby Dick (1956).
But it was with atmospheric black-and-white cinematography that Francis came to the fore, capturing the hunger, drive and rebelliousness of a new breed of postwar protagonist in the stark images of Room at the Top and most especially Saturday Night and Sunday Morning. Although Sons and Lovers was set in an earlier period, it shared some of the virtues of these films and this emerging movement. It was an exciting time for British films as they began to attract international attention and acclaim.
Francis’s skilful manipulation of light, shade, tone and atmosphere was also put to good use on The Innocents (1961), an adaptation of Henry James’s ghost story The Turn of the Screw, recently restored and rereleased to acclaim, and the psychological thriller Night Must Fall (1964). It was to be his last film as DoP for 16 years, but a sign of the course his career would take as a director.
He got his first chance to direct when he was called on to provide uncredited additional scenes for the sci-fi film The Day of the Triffids (1962).
His first directorial credit came on Two and Two Make Six (1962), a romantic comedy with George Chakiris and Janette Scott, but it was quickly followed by a run of horror films and psychological thrillers, including Paranoiac (1963), with Scott and Oliver Reed, and The Evil of Frankenstein(1964), with Cushing, both of which he did for Hammer.
It was at Amicus, Hammer’s great rival, that he made his best horror films, however. Dr Terror’s House of Horrors was not the first portmanteau horror film, but it established a fashion within the genre, and Francis followed it with Torture Garden (1967) and Tales from the Crypt (1972), two films which have acquired a cult following. A quarter of a century later Francis would also contribute to the Tales from the Crypt TV series.
One of the few films with which Francis was completely satisfied was Mumsy, Nanny, Sonny and Girly (1969), a forgotten black comedy about homicidal children, which owed a little to Billy Wilder.
Other films as a director include The Skull (1965), The Psychopath (1965), Trog (1970) and The Creeping Flesh (1973), starring Cushing, with whom Francis worked repeatedly. He also made several films with his son, Kevin, beginning with the Hammer film Dracula has Risen from the Grave (1968), on which Kevin cut his teeth as a runner. In the film Dracula is staked with a crucifix and famously cries tears of blood. Kevin went on to become a producer, and his father made Legend of the Werewolf and The Ghoul (both 1975) for his company, Tyburn.
Cinematography is especially important in horror movies in establishing atmosphere and tone, and the genre provided Francis with great opportunities to exploit his experience and develop wider skills as a film-maker. Several of his horror films are now highly regarded by critics and academics, though even his admirers would admit that his output was inconsistent. Generally he seemed more comfortable with the portmanteau format and contemporary settings than with the traditional, full-length, Gothic, period horror.
The genre lacked the critical respectability of mainstream cinema, even more so then than now, and was far removed from the prestigious projects on which he had worked as cinematographer. In the late 1960s Francis had attempted to broaden his range in television and worked for Lew Grade’s ITC company on the action-drama series The Saint (1967-69), Man in a Suitcase (1967-68) and The Champions (1969), which all now also enjoy a cult following. By the mid-1970s, however, he was desperately unhappy with his lot and turned his back on the film and TV industries.
He was lured out of retirement by the US director David Lynch, who wanted his distinctive brand of monochrome cinematography for The Elephant Man (1980), his drama about the deformed John Merrick (John Hurt) and the English Victorian society in which he lived.
Francis said: “People were warning him ‘Oh, you should not get Freddie because he hasn’t done a film for 20 years’, but David said, ‘Well, it’s a bit like riding a bicycle, isn’t it?’, and off we went.”
The Elephant Man effectively launched the third act in Francis’s story. It won the Bafta award for best film and brought Francis the first of four Bafta nominations.
He returned very occasionally to directing, most notably on the Burke and Hare story The Doctor and the Devils (1985), with Timothy Dalton and Jonathan Pryce, but he found himself in demand as a cinematographer with leading directors on both sides of the Atlantic. Lynch called on his expertise again for the ill-fated sci-fi epic Dune (1984) and his charming little drama The Straight Story (1999), a sort of OAP spin on Easy Rider, with a sit-on lawn mower instead of a Harley.
Francis received Bafta nominations for The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1981), Glory (1989) and Scorsese’s Cape Fear (1991), though, strangely, he never won and had to make do with a belated special achievement award.
His later films underline his versatility as a cinematographer and put his status as one of the pre-eminent practitioners of his generation beyond doubt, while the reputation of his horror films has benefited from a gradual re-evaluation of the genre and were the subject of the book The Films of Freddie Francis (1991). He also co-wrote two books, Light ’Em Up: A Gaffer Remembers a Lifetime Making Movies (1996) and Inside Hammer (2001).
He was married twice and is survived by his wife Pamela, son, Kevin, and two children from his second marriage.

Freddie Francis, film director and cinematographer, was born on December 22, 1917. He died on March 17, 2007 aged 89

[ChristineCB]

Freddie Francis day on America-TCM, Friday...

No wonder I love this TV channel.