Brian McFarlane,
Lance Comfort.
Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999.
ISBN: 0 7190 5484 2
225pp
£9.99 (pb)
Neil Sinyard,
Jack Clayton.
Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000.
ISBN: 0 7190 5505 9
289pp
£14.99 (pb)
(Review copies supplied by Manchester University Press)

Both of these titles are from the Manchester University Press series British Film Makers, which will eventually include not only volumes on stalwarts such as Launder & Gilliatt, but also on lesser known but no less talented directors such as Pat Jackson, J. Lee Thompson and Terence Fisher. The series is part of the current, almost obsessive, trend to document almost every aspect of British cinema history. The specific aim of the Film Makers series is to present short, authoritative guides to film-makers who have received less attention than their work warrants. Both Comfort and Clayton are what might be termed middle-rank directors: Comfort competent, professional and with occasional flair – a journeyman film maker whose career spanned the golden years of British cinema – and Clayton, better known, but who, because he made few films, has never really received the recognition he probably deserves.
Comfort’s career is typical of the long apprenticeship often required of the film maker before assuming the director’s chair. Beginning in 1925 he had a variety of jobs – stills photographer, lighting technician, and sound engineer – before directing his first film, Laddie’s Day Out, in 1939. During the 1940s, he chalked up some impressive credits – Penn of Pennsylvania (1942), Hatter’s Castle (1942) and A Great Day (1945) as well as lesser features such as Old Mother Riley, Detective (1945). Through the 1950s, his reputation for turning out fast-paced dramas led to a series of B movies – such as Man in the Road, (1956) Man from Tangiers (1957) and Breaking Point (1961) – not great cinema, but competently-made and entertaining. Unlike many middle-rank directors, as British film went into decline, Comfort embraced television and made himself thoroughly at home in the new medium. Through the mid-1950s, he was responsible for many episodes of Douglas Fairbanks Jr. Presents as well as episodes for the forgettable Assignment Foreign Legion and Martin Kane, Private Detective. Towards the end of his career, he directed seven episodes of the highly popular children’s series Ivanhoe for ITV. Comfort was not possessed of great originality, but as Macfarlane notes, he was a “craftsman who hurdled the shifting aesthetic requirements of British cinema with unassuming skill and a sympathetic awareness of human conflicts in a changing society” (170).

Jack Clayton has undoubtedly received more critical attention that Comfort. His Room at the Top (1959) was hailed as a major force in new British realism, and Truffaut claimed that The Innocents (1961) was the best English film since Hitchcock went to America. Although younger than Comfort, Clayton went through the same sort of apprenticeship. In the mid-1930s he was taken on as a third assistant director at Alexander Korda’s London Films, probably the most exciting of British studios at that time. In between making tea and running errands, Clayton began to learn the craft and worked on Conquest of the Air (1936), Korda’s ill-fated epic about the history of flight, Q Planes (1939) and Thief of Bagdad (1940), among other films. Called up for military service, he soon transferred to the Royal Air Force Film Unit working alongside several distinguished directors. In 1944 he directed his first film, the documentary Naples is a Battleground (1944) for the Ministry of Information. After demobilisation, he returned to the film industry working as an assistant director or associate producer on a number of features, including the prestigious Moulin Rouge (1952) and Beat the Devil (1954). Sinyard suggests that Clayton learned a great deal from John Huston whom he met on these productions.

In 1955 he directed his first feature film, the Bespoke Overcoat, and in 1959 came the opportunity to direct Room at the Top (1959), the film version of John Braine’s acclaimed novel. The film was widely credited with launching the ‘new wave’ which revitalised British cinema. In 1961 he directed the classic Henry James story The Innocents (1961), a film the critic Pauline Kael called “the best ghost story on film”. Surprisingly, after two major critical successes, Clayton back-pedalled and from then until his death in 1995 he made only six more features, including The Pumpkin Eater (1964) and The Great Gatsby (1974) ten years later. His last film, Memento mori (1992) based on the Muriel Spark novel, was made for BBC Television in 1992. As Sinyard shows, Clayton had a considerable number of unrealised projects, including a film based on the memoir of Battle of Britain hero Richard Hillary, The Last Enemy. Clearly, then, there was no flagging in Clayton’s ambition or imagination, rather increasing difficulties in bringing such projects to the screen. Sinyard suggests, that Clayton refused to compromise, that he insisted on making films on his terms, and that this and his ambition to expose prejudice and intolerance through film, made the money-men ‘jittery’, and understandably restricted his output.

Both of these guides are readable and informative, and both have detailed filmographies. While McFarlane is insightful and obviously sympathetic to his subject, I felt that he sometimes struggles to fill the pages. Lance Comfort destroyed his papers shortly before his death, and this and the fact that Comfort has received such little critical attention clearly left McFarlane with some serious gaps, despite the full co-operation of Comfort’s son. Sinyard, however, had full access to Clayton’s papers and is thus able to offer a more detailed study. Nevertheless, both volumes offer a good deal to students of British cinema and certainly fill a few more gaps in the history of British cinema.

Michael Paris
University of Central Lancashire, UK.

Created on: Tuesday, 7 March 2006 | Last Updated: 7-Mar-06