Damned Good Show

by Derek Robinson

  In the summer of 1939, Paramount wanted him as second cameraman on a production of Robin Hood to be shot at various British castles. On the day that Britain declared war, an assistant producer phoned him. “Head office just pulled the plug,” he said. “It’s canceled.”

  “Splendid. Peace in our time, after all,” Blazer said. “Chamberlain will be pleased. Have you told Hitler?”

  “Glad you can see the funny side of it. You’re not on contract, Rollo, so we don’t owe you a bean. Just calling to say goodbye.”

  “This is not the Robin Hood spirit.”

  “And Hitler isn’t the Sheriff of Nottingham. What d’you reckon you’ll do now?”

  “God knows.”

  Thirty-four was the wrong age in 1939. Not old enough to have fought in the first war and not young enough to fight in this one. Men ten years younger than Rollo were being sent home by recruiting officers and told to wait. In any case, uniforms didn’t excite him. Sailors got drowned, soldiers got blisters, and airmen had to fly. Rollo disliked heights and distrusted airplanes. When a friend in the Ministry of Information told him that its Crown Film Unit needed a cameraman, he knew at once that this was the way to serve his country.

  He did his best. He filmed the British Expeditionary Force going cheerily off to France. He shot patriotic filmlets about what to do in an air raid, the correct way to wear a gas mask, how to use a stirrup pump on an incendiary bomb. It was hard to make the Phoney War exciting when it produced nothing but the blackout. How could you shoot the damn blackout? Then the war became real and he filmed what was left of the British Expeditionary Force, grimy and weary, many without weapons, a few without clothes, as they got off the ships from Dunkirk. He knew his footage would never get past the censors. They wanted shots of grinning Tommies, giving the thumbs-up. He filmed the dazed anger of a beaten army because it was history; it deserved to be filmed.

  For a few weeks he shot training films for the Home Guard. How to make a Molotov cocktail. How to stop a German tank by stuffing a potato up its exhaust pipe. How to garrote a stormtrooper with a rabbit-snare. Then Crown sent him to cover what Churchill was calling the Battle of Britain.

  The battle was unfilmable. For one thing it was two or three miles high, virtually invisible; for another, it was spread all over the south and east of England. If Rollo gambled and went to Essex, the battle that day was over Kent. If he went to Kent, the cloudbase was down to a thousand feet. Once he was lucky: the fighting was right above him and the sky was clear. Sometimes the sunlight flashed on a speck of metal. It was like watching very tiny minnows in a very clear stream. Machine-gun fire was like a stick rattled along a railing in another street. He shot what he could. Spitfires landing, Hurricanes taking off. A high mesh of contrails, as pretty as Chinese writing on blue paper. Nothing an audience would look at for more than fifteen seconds. Everyone was talking about invasion. Rollo abandoned the air war and explored the South Coast.

  Wherever he found the army doing anything interesting, he got ordered away. He showed documents to prove he worked for Crown Films, but they did not satisfy lieutenants and captains fresh from France where much sabotage had been done by Nazi parachutists dressed as nuns. Nobody had actually met a nun-parachutist, which showed how lethal they were: they killed on sight and left no witnesses. The best shot that Rollo could get was a profile of a sentry on a clifftop, from which he pulled back to reveal that the soldier was overlooking the empty Channel.

  In 1940, a lot of newsreels used that clip as shorthand for the invasion that never came. Rollo came to despise it. “Cliché,” he said. “Bad cinema. Movies should move. That’s just a lousy piece of celluloid.”

  2

  In place of the invasion came the Blitz.

  The raiders came by night in wave after wave. London was so near the Luftwaffe airfields in Belgium and northern France that sometimes the Heinkels and Dorniers and Junkers made two trips, returning to stoke up the fires they had started. Next morning, cameramen roamed the smoking streets. Rollo was in bed, asleep. He had been up all night, catching the action.

  Nobody at Crown asked him to do it. He went out because he couldn’t resist it, and because he reckoned someone should record the death of a great city, even if nobody survived to see his film. All the experts had calculated that the bombers must kill and maim hundreds of thousands of people. Warsaw and Rotterdam had been flattened like sandcastles; why not London? Each evening, as he left his Chelsea flat, Rollo was reconciled to the thought that, if and when he came back, there might be no flat and no Chelsea.

  It didn’t happen. London was not obliterated. It was thoroughly spattered with high explosive, and sometimes the spatterings merged to destroy whole streets, but more often the bomb-strikes were as thoughtless as raindrops. It was no safer to stand in Hyde Park than it was to sit in the Café de Paris. There were stray craters in the park, and one night the Café de Paris got blown to blazes, along with the band, the singer and the customers.

  Random havoc.

  The phrase come to Rollo Blazer at the end of a long night of wandering devastation, when he realized that this military operation had no plan, no system, no shape. The bombers might skip one street and strike the next: kill here, spare there. Or neither. Or both. Or some other witless combination. All these shuddering blasts and blazes added up to an idiot tantrum: random havoc. He was on his way home when he turned a corner and saw a doubledecker bus standing on its nose in a hole, quite upright. He filmed it and thought: You could bomb every bus route in London every night for a year and this wouldn’t happen again. Two years. Ten. A church clock began to chime and it could not stop. The bell was cracked. It sounded old and weary and touched with despair, and it made a perfect soundtrack. In fact it was beyond perfection, the sort of cinema you wouldn’t dare put in a script in case it looked corny. This wasn’t corny, it was heartbreaking, it was the world turned upside down and tolling its own death. What made it utterly heartbreaking was the knowledge that it wasn’t even cinema, because Rollo wasn’t shooting with sound.

  His boss at Crown was an ex-advertising man called Harry Frobisher. Frobisher hadn’t slept much, he’d had to walk most of the way to the office, and when he arrived Rollo Blazer was waiting, asking for a sound recordist to work with him.

  “I don’t need your sound,” Harry said. “Shoot mute, I’ll dub in my own sound. Fire bells, bombs exploding, anything.”

  Rollo told him about the bus and the church. “You can’t dub that,” he said. “You haven’t got a cracked bell on record.”

  “If I need it, I’ll send someone to record it.”

  “Too late,” Rollo lied. “Delayed-action bomb in the crypt. Whole place is a heap of rubble now.”

  Frobisher was a bulky, untidy man with a lumpy, warty face, the kind that no barber would want to shave. His mouth was permanently set in a slight twist that made him look as if he had just made an unwise decision. He was stuck with his face. He didn’t care what people thought of it. If it made them nervous, too bad; he got on with running his section of Crown Films. He ran it well.

  Rollo wasn’t nervous but he knew when to say nothing.

  “I’m short of good soundmen,” Harry said. “Also short of lunatics. Only a maniac would work with you. You should be dead by now.”

  “I’m very careful,” Rollo said. “I always wear a tin hat.”

  “Come off it. I’ve seen your stuff. It’s terrifying. Even mute, it scared me.”

  Rollo was pleased. “Imagine what sound would add.”

  “You haven’t got a storyline.” Harry left his desk and went to the window. “Bombed buildings. People are sick of seeing bombed buildings. I can see two from here. Three.”

  “I’ve got human interest. Firemen, wardens, coppers. It’s a film about London. I just want the audience to hear the voice of London.”

  “This isn’t the only Blitz, you know. Liverpool, Plymouth, Bristol, Coventry, Southampton, Birmingham, they’re getting hammered too. Why don’
t you go and film them?”

  Rollo scratched his stubbled jaw. They both knew it was an unfair question. It came from weeks and months of bottled-up fear and anger generated by living in a city always under attack and helpless to defend itself, except by flinging up a vast number of anti-aircraft shells which didn’t seem to deter the raiders and which fell in the form of whistling, jagged shrapnel that clattered off rooftops and roads and broke windows and occasionally struck and killed a wandering Londoner.

  “We’re supposed to be boosting morale,” Harry said “Do your worst, Fritz—London can take it. That sort of thing. What you’ve shot looks like hell on earth.”

  “Well, it is hell. But hell perfectly framed and in sharp focus and steady as a rock. Now, with sound—”

  The window panes vibrated noisily to the curt grunt of a distant explosion. Harry picked up a pair of binoculars. “Lambeth,” he said. “Or maybe Camberwell.” He focused on a column of smoke, climbing and bending with the wind. “Five hundred kilograms, probably. Jerry does it deliberately, you know, to put the wind up the rescue squads.”

  “I know.”

  “Puts the wind up me, I don’t mind admitting.”

  “Be grateful to the bomb-disposal squads, then. Hell of a good story there.” Rollo yawned and stretched. “Of course it comes best from their own lips.”

  Harry put the binoculars back. “You never give up, do you? Okay. If we’ve got anyone crazy enough, you can have a sound recordist.”

  “You won’t regret this, Mr. de Mille,” Rollo said. “The German box office alone will be worth millions.” Harry wasn’t listening. “Film those bomb-disposal guys while they can still talk and you can still shoot,” he said. “Now leave. You stink like a bonfire.”

  Later that day, Rollo got a message from Frobisher: Try Freddy Kelly, with a Hammersmith address. It was dark by the time he rang the bell. A youngish woman said she was Freddy Kelly. Now that was a surprise.

  Even in 1940, when women were replacing men in all sorts of jobs, Rollo had never known a female sound recordist. He didn’t like the idea, and when he looked at this example he didn’t like the example. Not nearly ugly enough. Good-looking young women were a pain and a nuisance during filming: that was his experience. They couldn’t write clearly, couldn’t add minutes and seconds, lost things you asked them to keep, and banged their nails in the clapperboard. They whispered and giggled when you wanted silence. Worst of all they distracted the attention of men who had jobs to do. That was the ultimate sin: women were not serious about filming. The better they looked, the worse they behaved. Freddy Kelly was a tallish blond, hair short and shaggy, with the kind of face that made greengrocers put an extra apple in her bag, free. Arms and legs to match. Two bumps on her chest, as God intended. Hopeless. No use to anybody.

  He stopped just inside the house. He knew she would make a scene, so he might as well say it and go. “You’re not what I want,” he said.

  “Well, you’re not what I want,” she said. “But who said life was fair?”

  They went into the living room and did not sit.

  “Nothing personal,” he said. “Let me explain—”

  “No, let me explain, I can do it faster. First, I haven’t got the strength and this is a tough job, I might hurt myself. Second, I haven’t got the experience and this is a difficult job, tricky sound, I wouldn’t know how to handle it. Third, I’m young and innocent, the men can’t swear while I’m around and that bloody well pisses them off. Fourth, I need a separate lavatory or I burst into tears. Fifth is usually something vague and embarrassed about the curse.” She spoke calmly and easily. “There,” she said. “Have I covered everything?”

  “Why call yourself Freddy?”

  “Same reason Archie Leach calls himself Cary Grant. To get the work.”

  Rollo looked at framed photographs on the mantelpiece. He recognized some people: directors, cameramen, actors. She wore slacks and a leather flying-jacket; she blended in with the men. “Why work with me?”

  “It’s what I do for a living.”

  “Living? Filming the Blitz? You want to die?”

  “It hasn’t killed you yet.”

  That convinced him. She was too cocky, too mouthy. “You’re not strong enough,” he said. He picked up his hat.

  “You’re probably right. Look: before you go, do me a favor, please. Just carry that table into the kitchen for me.” It was a dining table, square, thick, mahogany, with legs like tree-stumps. “Please.”

  It wasn’t a favor, it was a challenge. A sensible man would have smiled and walked away. Rollo felt tricked and it made him angry. He grabbed the table and heaved. It felt chained to the floor. He staggered two paces and couldn’t make three. The table hit the floor with a crash that made the blackout blind slowly roll up. She switched off the lights. In the darkness he sprawled on the table. Tiny stars cruised about his vision. “Your sodding table,” he said. “It’s buggered my back.”

  “Well, you didn’t bend your knees enough, did you? It’s lucky I’ve got two strong shoulders. Your camera goes on one and my sound stuff on the other.”

  He slid off the table and sat on the carpet. Faintly, like a dog howling in a distant village, a siren sounded; then, like other dogs, other sirens copied it.

  “Hadn’t we better be going?” she said.

  It was a small raid: a dozen aircraft. Confused by thick cloud and rain, they bombed the suburbs and left. Scattered damage. Nothing there for Rollo. He took his female soundman to a pub.

  “So what’s your real name?” he said.

  “Kate. Kate Padaszczlavski. From Wloctawek.”

  “And where the hell is Wloctawek?”

  “Between Torun and Krosniewice. Poland.”

  “Oh. That Wloctawek.”

  “My dad came here from Poland. Nobody can pronounce Padaszczlavski, so I took mum’s maiden name. Kelly. From Ballyduff. What else can I tell you?”

  Rollo drank some beer. “You scared of bombs?”

  “Who isn’t?”

  “Good. Scared tells you when you’re in the right place. Death makes great movies.”

  She cocked her head. “Death plus a big budget.”

  “Money’s no object. We’ve got hundreds of bombers, thousands of bombs, a city in flames. Makes Gone With The Wind look like a smoky chimney”

  “Begorrah,” Kate said. “As they say in Wloctawek.”

  They worked the Blitz for the rest of the winter and into spring. They made a good team. Both were Londoners; Kate had grown up in the East End, Rollo was at home in the West End. They filmed the destruction of entire communities in the slums and the burning of famous landmarks in Soho and Mayfair and Knightsbridge and Chelsea. Kate had a nose for trouble. One terrible night, when Rollo was black with smoke and wet with spray from firehoses and ready to quit, she persuaded him to walk up the Strand and down Fleet Street. St. Paul’s cathedral was pink as salmon in the glow from the buildings burning on three sides. They filmed it from the roof of an abandoned pub. The soundtrack collected the woof and thud of guns and bombs, and the steady rumble of collapsing roofs and walls. “Eat your heart out, Selznick,” Rollo said. A week later they were shooting in the London docks. A fire-float pumped a pattern of high, white jets onto an oil storage tank, trying to cool it. “Pretty picture,” Kate said. While Rollo was filming, a stick of bombs hurried down the dockside and the blast knocked them over. When they got up, the oil tank was belching flames. Rollo wiped dust off the lens. He filmed blazing oil spreading across the water until it surrounded the boat and in the end he was filming white jets spouting out of waving red fire.

  “Did you get that?” he asked

  “I got the oil fire,” she said. “Sounded like an express going through a station.”

  Smoke was coming down like a rich black fog. Soon it blotted out the fire-float.

  Rollo and Kate were not callous, nor greedy for sensation; too much sensation came their way, unsought. The Blitz was a thing of terror, shot
through with agony and heartbreak and the obscenity of casual maiming and killing. They saw this. They saw things that sickened them so much that they couldn’t film any of it. On the other hand, it was all happening and therefore, nausea permitting, it deserved to be filmed. They were ready every night. As soon as the first rusty groan of the first air-raid siren began to climb toward its roller-coastering wail, they felt what everyone felt: a gut-tightening dread. Here comes death. But they also felt a keen professional interest. Rollo was right: death made great movies.

  They filmed fires and explosions, and the people who fought them and survived them. They got stories from a policeman wearing a cape that had been stiffened by a shower of molten lead; from a woman saved after two days under the rubble of her home; from ambulance drivers who drove on tires shredded by broken glass; from rescue workers, and wardens, and sappers who dug out and defused unexploded bombs. The Blitz went on and on. Many people who took shelter saw no point in coming to the surface: they lived in caves and cellars and disused tunnels. Rollo and Kate filmed them too. Perhaps such people were right, for toward the end of spring the raids grew heavier. After the night of March 19, 1941, Germany Calling said that more than four hundred bombers raided London. Nobody argued. On April 16 it was over six hundred; three nights later, over seven hundred. One bomber, a Heinkel 111, made a mess of some deer in Richmond Park, but not before it had killed its own crew. Rollo and Kate were lucky that night; doubly lucky. They filmed it, and it missed them.

  Kate saw it first. “Look up there,” she said. The Heinkel was lazily spiraling down a searchlight beam as though each was hypnotized by the other. Rollo filmed, and tried not to breathe. He knew this was one of the classic shots of war. A wing spun away, and the bomber exploded. Pieces fled into the night. Each piece trailed flame. A man said, “Jesus Christ Almighty.”

  The searchlight was nearby; and when, after a few seconds, the beam vanished, the night seemed huge and the burning bits looked tiny. Soon they too disappeared. Rollo lowered the camera. “Did you get that voice?”