He was born in London in 1913 but brought up in Paris where his father was correspondent for the Daily Herald. A degree in Mathematics from the Sorbonne gives no clue as to the direction his life took.
He is Douglas Slocombe and he wanted to be a photojournalist. A visit to Danzig in 1939 to photograph the rising tide of anti-Jewish sentiment brought him to the attention of American film-maker Herbert Kline who sent him to film a Goebbels rally and the burning of a synagogue and then to Warsaw on 1st September 1939 when it was invaded by Germany. His escape from a train is as dramatic as the events portrayed in The Lady Vanishes, that he shot in 1979.
I had no understanding of the concept of blitzkrieg. I had been expecting trouble but I thought it would be in trenches, like WW1. The Germans were coming over the border at a great pace … We were trundling through the countryside at night. We kept stopping for no apparent reason, but we came to a screeching halt because a German plane was bombing us. After its first pass we climbed out the window and crawled under the carriage. The plane came back and started machine-gunning. A young girl died in front of us.
During the war he made films for the Ministry of Information and that led to a career at Ealing Studios that lasted until 1955. His output is astonishing both in terms of quantity and quality. Who would guess that a cinematographer from Ealing Studios would go on to be chosen by Joseph Losey, Stephen Spielberg, George Cukor and Trevor Nunn? Here are some of the films Douglas Slocombe made.
It’s an impressive roll call and he was still working in his mid 70s. He only died in 2016. His daughter, Georgina, was at The Italian Job at Holland Park on Wednesday evening and that is how I became interested in the remarkable achievements of Douglas Slocombe. In case you don’t know, the prison scenes in The Italian Job were shot in Kilmainham Gaol.
An extraordinary career. I watched ‘The Servant’ recently on the tv channel Talking Pictures’ (Freeview 81), which shows only old films. Many of them are sub-B movie (but nonetheless watchable for that), but there are some gems there, too.
Watching ‘The Servant’ reminded me that Dirk Bogarde once lived in a house adjacent to the grounds of Dr Challoners High School for Girls in Little Chalfont (I attended Dr Challoners Grammar School for Boys, its male counterpart down the road in Amersham-on-the-Hill) and was regularly mobbed by girls hanging off his garden fence in the hope of a glimpse of the Hollywood heart-throb. Girls who would only much later discover that their affections were somewhat missing the mark with Mr Bogarde.