Arts & Culture
Standing in the light
Published 12 March 1999
Freddie Young worked with Hitchcock on Blackmail and Lean on Lawrence of Arabia. Chris Peachment recalls the century-long career of a great cinematographer
Freddie Young had one hell of a life. He died last year at the age of 96, and so was very nearly as old as this century. Born in 1902, only six or seven years after the invention of cinema, he got his first job in 1917 at an ugly building near where he lived in Shepherd's Bush, London, opposite the Lime Grove Baths where he and his brother used to go swimming. It was the Gaumont film studio. He knocked on the door and was greeted by a man in a white coat with mauve edges. When he said that he wanted a job in the film industry, the man asked him what he could do. Young replied that he liked to take pictures with his Kodak Box Brownie. "Right," said the man. "Start work tomorrow."
Eighty-one years later, Young had 161 films to his credit as director of photography, three Oscars, an OBE and an honorary doctorate from the Royal College of Art. He began by working in the processing lab, a job he reckoned indispensable to being a good cameraman. By 1919 he was manager of the lab, and developing First Men on the Moon from the H G Wells story with a new process that involved hand-tinting the frames with colour.
Anyone who tried to start a union in those days was automatically fired. When the ACT (Association of Cinematographic Technicians) was finally formed in 1933, with its strict demarcation rules, Young was the only man on the sets who was still allowed to bang in nails with a hammer or do a stunt if he wanted.
He had a hand in both Blackmail and White Cargo, the first two sound films made in Britain. For Hitchcock's Blackmail he directed a series of montages - horses galloping, a train, feet walking - which were originally silent but which had sound added within a month. He had already noted Hitch's taste for sadistic practical jokes, which usually involved testing handcuffs on some poor stooge and then "losing" the key.
His first taste of the high life came in 1939 when shooting Nurse Edith Cavell for Herbert Wilcox in Hollywood, with Anna Neagle in the title role. He stayed at Laguna Beach with Lee Garmes, who was famed for his expressionist work with Josef Von Sternberg and Marlene Dietrich such as Shanghai Express, but who also had a sideline in avocado farming. He also encountered Gregg Toland, who was then working with Orson Welles on Citizen Kane, and they discussed the different ways of filming in deep focus (a process that most people think was invented by that film, but which in fact had been around for many years).
The most crucial meeting of Young's life, though, was on the set of George Bernard Shaw's Caesar and Cleopatra in 1940, where David Lean was a co-director. Throughout the 1940s and 1950s Young worked with the likes of Vincente Minnelli (Lust for Life), Mark Robson - and Ingrid Bergman - (Inn of the Sixth Happiness) and Carol Reed (The Young Mr Pitt). But it wasn't until 1960 that he got a call from Lean about a project on the life of T E Lawrence.
For the famous shot of Omar Sharif's entrance, riding through a mirage to the waterhole, Young plundered Panavision's technical plant for a 500-millimetre telephoto lens that no one had used for years. Lean more or less left him to his own devices, albeit with careful instructions, and there is not a single shot in the film that Young thought conventional or boring. Lean, who had trained as an editor, never shot any more footage than he needed to cut the film together - an interesting contrast to the likes of Stanley Kubrick, who would spend months doing 85 takes of one scene.
After the heat of the desert (it was 110 degrees most days; there were many cases of heat-stroke and one electrician had a heart attack), Lean took Young to Spain to shoot Dr Zhivago. Hundreds of tons of marble were ground to dust to represent snow, with white plastic sheet and whitewash being used on the trees. Rod Steiger was covered in rock salt, with shaving foam on his beard, for his first entrance. The famous sheet of ice covering the door of the cattle truck, which the inmates shattered with a shovel, was made of candle wax. The shot of which Young was most proud, though, was of Julie Christie's hand, first seen by Zhivago through a window surrounded by darkness. Lean later wrote a letter declaring that it was one of his favourites.
And then there was the final film for Lean, the famously troubled Ryan's Daughter, during which Robert Mitchum nearly committed suicide from boredom and the Irish weather drove everyone so crazy that they ended up filming in South Africa. Young even adapted a spinning piece of glass which he had seen on a ship's bridge in order to keep the rain off the lens. The device can still be hired to this day.
It was a fascinating life, then; but Seventy Light Years, the newly published book in which it has been recorded, suffers from one major drawback. It is written in an "as told to . . ." format. Now, no one expects a director of photography to be able to write his own autobiography. But the formula results in a single stream of monologue which actually reveals very little about its subject other than a string of events. (There is, for instance, barely any mention of his first and second wives or his children by them.) This is the laziest form of journalism, and it tends to avoid any discussion of the finer points or feelings of a person's life, or to bring in any outside opinion on them. For example, one would dearly like to have heard the director Nicolas Roeg's thoughts on the man who was once his mentor. No doubt Faber saw this as just another useful addition to its vast, rather unwieldy list of film books, but it's an easy option and Freddie Young deserves a more penetrating account of his life.
"Seventy Light Years" is published by Faber & Faber at £17.99
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