julian_craster

From The Times
July 20, 2007

Images from heyday of British cinema found in filing cabinet
Dalya Alberge, Arts Correspondent


A photograph of Alec Guinness in the character of Fagin, taking a break with
a cigarette during filming of David Lean's Oliver Twist 60 years ago, is
among a treasure trove of unpublished photographs from the heyday of British
cinema that has been unearthed.

More than 5,000 historic images, dating from the 1930s to the 1970s, have
been discovered in a vault at Pinewood Studios, Buckinghamshire. Two
battered old metal filing cabinets, which had remained unopened for as long
as anyone can remember, were found to be wedged full of images.

Some of the photographs are so early, they are still on glass plates. Others
appear on strips of negatives.

There are shots of the biggest stars of the era, including Dirk Bogarde, who
found matinee-idol fame as heart-throb medical student Simon Sparrow in the
Doctor films and critical acclaim as an actor in classics such as The
Servant.

The unpublished photographs show him sharing a joke with Brigitte Bardot
with whom he starred in Doctor at Sea in 1955. There are also previously
unseen images of a handsome Bogarde relaxing with a cigarette in his
dressing-room in the late 1950s and bespectacled - filming Esther Waters in
1947 - with a block by his shoe to fix his position at a time when cameras
could not move with ease.

The discovery - which also includes images of Gregory Peck, Laurence
Olivier, Kenneth More and Lean, among many other actors and directors - was
made by Morris Bright, while researching Pinewood Studios: 70 Years of
Fabulous Film-making, a lavish 384-page book on the history of the studio
which is published this week.

Speaking to The Times yesterday, he recalled that the images had not been
catalogued and most bore numbers that did not appear to correspond to
anything.

"The old filing cabinets didn't look as if they'd been opened for 30 or 40
years," he said "People had walked past them for years. They were just two
battered old cabinets. I thought I'd seen it all, having written books over
ten years. But to stumble across such pictures for the first time is
incredible." He will publish a large number of the photographs for the first
time in his book, which has a foreword by the Oscar-winning actress Dame
Judi Dench, a former Pinewood Studios actress.

She writes in the book: "Such images have been painstakingly researched to
bring us more than just the usual shots of our favourite films and it is
these behind-the-scenes images that really captivate."

Other unpublished images show Trevor Howard - who made his name as the
romantic lead in Lean's Brief Encounter in 1945 - messing about with the
beautiful French actress Anouk Aimée, showing her the finer points of
cricket during a break in filming Golden Salamander in 1949.

Directors also feature prominently in the archive. Alfred Hitchcock, master
of the thriller genre, was caught unawares while in a music recording
session for Frenzy, his first British film in two decades, made at Pinewood
in 1971.

On being shown the photographs of Hitchcock and Bogarde, John Russell
Taylor, the film historian, said: "I have never seen any of these images
before. The Hitchcock one is particularly interesting because it's quite
rare to have him caught off-guard and looking like a person, rather than
playing Alfred Hitchcock, which is what he usually did."