by Joseph Hone
I didn’t so much identify with the actors or the dialogue as with a film’s mood, evoked by the photography, lighting, music, montage, the landscapes and sets. It was these that gripped me, and I wanted to create these technically inspired emotions myself. The real thrill for me often lay in the gaps between the action: the silent evocation of cobwebbed, curtained death-in-life in Miss Havisham’s mice-infested, decayed wedding-breakfast salon in Lean’s Great Expectations, the soundless leaf-falling cemetery road at the end of The Third Man, which parts the would-be lovers forever.
These silent scenes struck my heart. I suppose I had come to mistrust words – Dudgeon’s words to me at the school, nearly always a prelude to sadistic punishment; the whispered words of my minders behind closed doors which usually heralded some unhappy change for me, being packed off to my real parents in England or to camp with strangers. Words had often been a prelude to pain for me, punishing directions to do something or go somewhere unpleasant. These films, though they dealt in pain and betrayal, justified it, explained it, and of course romanticized it with swelling violins or zither music. I was not alone in my feelings of loss. It was all potently up there on the screen. Like millions of others I found in movies what I lacked, or thought I lacked, in life. I was different only in wanting to control the manufacturer of the drug.
But for the moment, in the wilds of County Galway, I wasn’t doing any of this movie creation. The best I could do, when I wasn’t keeping the crowds at bay, calling the actors on set and running round on every sort of errand for Ford and the other two assistant directors, was to watch how Ford went about creating these moods.
Ford was tall and thin, almost willowy in an English manner, in loose slacks, with legs that were long and supple as a dancer’s. Walking with him didn’t result in any vertical movement. He glided along, High Noon-fashion, in a white bawneen jacket, yachting pullover, tweed cap, black eye patch, with half a wet cigar rolling in his mouth. He must have been in his mid-sixties at the time: his sight not good, face deeply lined, hands discoloured. But there was an air of concealed alertness about him. His physical approach to anything was direct and full of quiet intent. No gesture was ever aimless or wasted. He handled inanimate objects – his cap, his cigar butt, his big pocket handkerchief – as if they were alive, small animals in his hands. He surveyed a landscape or a space on the set with his one good eye with a studied amusement or satisfaction, as if his visual impairment was a special advantage allowing him to see things hidden to normal vision. He passed through the physical world singling out and naming its virtues, as an archaeologist will detect and unearth a whole civilization beneath a desert. Ford had that gift, of making everything that happened in the moment important, as he did in his movies. You saw and heard things you’d never noticed or heard before.
All of this, though, I learnt much later. My first day with Ford brought other more obvious lessons. Ford, in common with other energetic directors from the old pioneering days such as Howard Hawks, had a rough and ready sense of humour, a broad locker-room wit, which he often employed for professional purposes, to draw a performance from an awkward actor or ‘blood’ some junior technician. These little slapstick performances of his occurred quite frequently during the next three months, a play within the play, during which everyone held their breath – for, if they did not promote smiles, they usually brought tears instead. I was the first to inspire one of these show-stopping theatricals.
Rain had driven us all into the big marquee near the cottage for lunch an hour early, and I had taken it upon myself, as assistant to the Master, to remain outside, peering at the bruised sky, waiting for a break in the clouds. When this came, I went inside and sidled up to Ford like a toastmaster. He was at the head of the top table, in the middle of a long story about the Old IRA – a lord at a feudal banquet, dispensing largesse to fifty or so of his minions. At what I, wrongly, took to be a break in the story, I whispered to him: ‘It’s brightening, Sir. I think we can start filming again now.’ There was silence. Ford turned and studied me very seriously for a moment. Then he put away his plate and got to his feet. He reached for his cap and started to fiddle with it in a humble way. ‘I’m afraid,’ he said to the assembly, ‘you’ll have to leave your dinners. Back to work. My assistant here tells me there’s been a break in the weather.’ Most people had started to move before Ford, with much amusement, sat down again and the others resumed their seats. It was a bad moment. But he had done me a service, in tempering my enthusiasm. I was less free with my advice to Ford afterwards.
One learnt most from Ford not by talking to him (nearly always a hair-raising experience) but by watching how he looked at the set or a landscape, pondering how he was going to move his actors in or against it. For his greatest gift was his ability to narrate visually: to place and relate people unerringly – in their homesteads, barracks, their landscape, whatever; and giving them an identity, not through dialogue (which he kept to a minimum in his films), but by recreating their emotional history in their movements, gestures, customs, songs and dances, or anything else that displayed their physical link with life. His vision, from a lone horseman in Monument Valley to the mechanics of bridling a horse, was so accurate that you were convinced of an absolutely authentic spirit of person and place. He caught the essence of the matter; and the hell with the facts. Indeed, latterly Ford could not see well at all. He never looked through the viewfinder or watched the daily rushes, and he rarely looked at the script. It seems that what he’d long ago learnt to do was to mount the whole film in his head, shot by shot, then link the story closely with the location, get his stock company of actors together, and then have someone come in and photograph the result. The only piece of film lore I ever heard pass his lips was: ‘Everything’s all right with a picture so long as the audience isn’t conscious of the machine.’
All that spring we filmed throughout the west of Ireland, each week or so moving on to a new location: in Galway town and Limerick, at Lough Cutra Castle near Lady Gregory’s ruined home at Coole Park, and finally at Kilkee, a little seaside resort on the Atlantic, the terminus for Percy French’s famous West Clare Railway. Location shooting is a caravan that packs up each evening when the light goes yellow – the modern version of the old travelling circus, complete with temperamental fat ladies, strong men, performing animals and dangerous high-wire acts. And like a circus our unit died each night in a hundred anonymous hotel bedrooms, and had to reassert its corporate identity every day anew. Sometimes, hanging around in the rain on blank days, one doubted that the co-operative will would ever return to start the circus up again.
Ford would confine himself to his hotel bedroom, incommunicado, with his box of Havana cigars that Ernie O’Malley, his sidekick and Old IRA friend, carried about with him. The production manager and the accountants shouted long distance on the telephone, or loomed ominously in the lobby; actors wandered about brokenly, all got up and nowhere to go; the electricians and lower orders played cards and covertly drank stout by the neck behind the mobile generator. The one thing Ford (a Trojan on the bottle himself when he wasn’t filming) vehemently prohibited on location was drink, a diktat which did not go down well with some of the Irish actors. Only one of them, the famous Irish comedian and panto star Jimmy O’Dea, had the better of Ford over this, in a scene I witnessed that would have been a pearl in any of Ford’s films. O’Dea, a rubicund pixie of a fellow hardly five feet tall, was having a quiet bottle of stout in the back bar of the hotel after his first day’s work when Ford – all six-foot-two of him, glowering, cap pulled down over his ears – surprised him, saying: ‘Now Jimmy, let’s start the way we mean to go on. Put that drink down.’ O’Dea’s nose rose a fraction over the bar as he fed himself some more liquid. ‘I will not,’ he said. ‘Me time’s me own, after business hours.’ ‘That’s enough now, Jimmy. I’ll send you back to Dublin.’ ‘Right you are. Just say the word.’ O’Dea held his ground and Ford retired. O’Dea had his glass of stout every evening. Ford co
uld be matched, but you had to be Jimmy O’Dea to do it.
When we got to film in Galway town, in an alleyway near the river, Ford was setting up a scene outside a murky doorway in the pouring rain – the rain supplied by the town watering cart (cameraman Bob Krasker was very keen on town watering carts and big ten-kilowatt arc lights behind the corner, with which he’d so brilliantly evoked ruined Vienna in The Third Man). This was a scene in which an IRA man, keeping watch outside the door, was to walk across the alley, look both ways and return. No dialogue. For some reason there wasn’t a bit-part actor available for this role, and Ford approached me. ‘All right, Hone, you’re the right size and suitably suspicious-looking. Get to make-up. And wardrobe – they’ll have a dirty trench coat and a slouch hat for you.’ ‘Make-up, Mr Ford? A trench coat?’ I was astonished. ‘You heard what I said.’ ‘To act, you mean?’ ‘Yes, to act, Hone – the IRA man.’ ‘Yes, Mr Ford, of course.’
Heart thumping furiously I went off to make-up, then wardrobe. My goodness, this was surely going to be my real break in pictures – as a movie actor, such as Robert Rossen, casting for Alexander the Great, had not allowed me. But Ford had seen the light and was now about to employ my hidden dramatic gifts. He’d be the making of me – as a new Montgomery Clift or a young Bogart, or at least as a member of his stock company back in Hollywood.
All togged up, the slouch hat at a rakish angle, I got into position by the doorway. ‘Right, we’ll rehearse it,’ Ford said. ‘Quiet, everybody!’ one of the assistants shouted. ‘You just walk out the doorway, Hone, look both ways, cross the alley, then walk back.’ We rehearsed it, satisfactorily it seemed. ‘Okay, QUIET! We’re shooting,’ the first assistant yelled. The arc lights fizzed into brilliant light, the town watering cart, attached to several sprinklers over the alley, started to spurt, the camera crew went into their preparatory litany: ‘Turn over … speed … mark it!’ and the clapper boy came out with his board. ‘Scene 78, take one!’ CLAP! Dead silence, except for the gentle rain. I slouched off across the alley, Bogart fashion, but halfway across I realized I was supposed to have looked both ways before I set out. Or was I? I stopped, undecided. ‘CUT!’ yelled Ford. ‘I’m sorry, Mr Ford – am I to look both ways at the doorway, or halfway across?’ ‘Either will do, Hone. Either,’ he said dryly. ‘Okay, we’re going again. First positions!’ the assistant cried. And I went back to the doorway. On the next take I looked both ways at the doorway, but thought to embellish my performance by looking both ways halfway across as well. ‘CUT!’ yelled Ford. ‘Once is enough with the looks, Hone. You’re not watching a tennis match.’ Another take. And this time I noticed the rain had increased. I could hardly see where I was going. I stopped again, nearly bumping into the camera. ‘I’m sorry, Mr Ford … I couldn’t see …’ Ford was on his feet now. ‘You know something, Hone? You’re more fucking trouble than John Wayne. Okay, let’s go again.’
We did another take and this time the rain was belting down from the sprinklers. ‘That’s better, Hone,’ Ford said. ‘But we’ll do it one more time, just to make sure.’ I did it again, and now the rain was really soaking me as I crossed the alley. But Ford was finally pleased. ‘Okay, cut – and print it!’ he growled. I came over to him, a drowned rat. Wet cigar rolling in his lips, Ford was smiling. Everyone was smiling behind the camera. Everyone was happy. Clearly I’d given a show-stopping performance. And of course I saw now why Ford had increased the rain on each take. I’d come to see already on the film how Ford provoked, ‘blooded’ young actors to get a really edgy performance out of them, and he’d been ‘watering’ me to get the same effect.
But then the doubt. I suddenly realized, with the smiles all round, and the laughs now, that Ford had been playing an elaborate practical joke on me, turning up the rain intentionally on each take so that I’d get absolutely soaked. I had to face it then – I wasn’t going to make it as a new Montgomery Clift. Though it seemed to me I’d made a damn good try at taking over from Humphrey Bogart.
The final two weeks’ filming in Kilkee of Percy French’s railway farce, A Minute’s Wait, were lovely days. We went out every morning on the old West Clare narrow-gauge railway, which was being closed down after we left, filming along the line – the squat Puffing Billy engine shrieking and bellowing for the last time across the stony landscape of West Clare, two canary-coloured wooden carriages full of yelling actors, the guard’s van packed with cameras and picnic lunches. At Kilkee there were scenes of slapstick and Irish railway blarney: porters falling over themselves, farmers’ wives losing all their chickens, lovers’ tiffs, a lot of drinking and ‘Are you right there, Michael, are you right?’ sung in the station bar. This blunt knockabout Irish comedy was very much to Ford’s taste, and he filmed it with relish and fluency, like a man interpreting a happy dream for the fiftieth time.
On the last evening Ford suddenly arrived at the smallest of the three Kilkee hotels where I and the other junior technicians were quartered. We were just starting a chicken dinner, and he asked if he could join us. And then he did an unexpected thing. ‘What about some wine?’ he asked the waitress. ‘Red or white?’ she said, thinking her description detailed and the choice lavish. But Ford seemed to know about wine and together we went down to the cellars, where we found racks of wine and some fine vintages. In Irish provincial hotels there was an idea that the fresher the wine the better, like milk, and so this old wine had lain there for decades. I remember we had two bottles of fine old Paulliac claret at the hotel’s usual price for any bottle of wine, seven and sixpence – about forty pence now.
But what I most remember was Ford raising his eye patch in the bad light of the cellar and scrutinizing the labels, fingering the old bottles. There was nothing of the wine snob in his gestures: for him these bottles were beautiful objects, and the wine inside was even more to be honoured – an elixir, full of old custom, toil and taste, part of a precise landscape, some great vineyard in the south. He might just as well have been handling a finely-balanced revolver or stroking the flanks of a proud cavalry horse. And that was what I learnt most from Ford – to forget all the machinery of the cinema, the scripts, lights, the mechanical tricks; the only real trick was to get out into the world and look at things properly and handle them well.
Hubert, meanwhile, wasn’t greatly pleased with my new movie career. After the filming was over, and in the light of a piece in the Irish Times by a journalist, Leslie Deakin, about my working with Ford, Hubert writes, in the latter part of a letter, to my grandfather in the summer of 1957:
I dare say Leslie Deakin’s rather fanciful account of Joe in the Irish Times will have annoyed you by its inaccuracies rather than pleased you by its praise. I think he may prove a creditable grandchild to you and he the one with the least stable background. Pamela [‘Mary Poppins’] Travers has committed herself to Camillus, and I understand that the other two [Geraldine and Antony]have had some money left them.
Joe dropped in here with Bob French and Leslie Deakin who may well be the source of most of the flattering inaccuracies about Joe that appear in the press. Leslie Deakin is a bustling, talkative, go-getting character and at present seems to be pushing Joe hard along in the usual good-hearted, vulgar cinema, theatre-television-BBC way of doing these things. We think it frightful but it appears to be universal, and Joe I think has an inner integrity which will survive these ghastly orgies of nonsense.
A little severe, but Hubert didn’t understand films, and didn’t like them. On the very few occasions he went to the pictures with us as children – to The Wizard of Oz I remember – he would call out loudly in the middle of some scene: ‘Who’s that girl? How did she get there?’ ‘Shhssh! Shhssh, Hubert!’ No, Hubert wasn’t a movie man. But why be so hard on the movie and theatre business? After all his brother-in-law, famous theatre director Tony Guthrie, was in something of the same vulgar line of country. Hubert himself, in the early thirties, had made one of the best translations of The Cherry Orchard, which Tony produced at the Old Vic wi
th Charles Laughton, Ursula Jeans, Roger Livesy, Marius Goring, James Mason and other rogues and vagabonds. So Hubert must have had some theatrical experience, although it was to do with Chekhov’s great play, not with the sentimental goings-on of Judy Garland in The Wizard of Oz – or with John Ford, equally sentimental, back on the ‘oul sod’ in County Galway. But I think the main reason for Hubert’s resistance to my career in the picture business was that, with my ‘fatal charm’, it would be very bad for me – as emerges in the earlier part of the same letter to my grandfather:
Dear Joe,
Peggy and I have just been revising our extremely unimportant wills (we leave everything more or less to Julia) and think, though our motive may irritate you a bit, that we ought to tell you that we find with a good deal of sadness that we won’t be able to leave anything of consequence to Joe. We are enquiring if one of us could take out a small life insurance on his behalf but it would amount to very little, just an indication that he had not been forgotten and we shall leave him a few personal things and that is all.
Well, we don’t know and you had much better not tell us – it is no business of ours – if you or Vera are leaving anything to Joe; we only want you to know that we can’t, though if by some highly improbable event we did come in for money, we should try and do something for him. He has behaved very well to us, and though he has a very difficult and talented temperament and is, both in his virtues and his vices, totally unlike either of our families, I think it unlikely that we shall quarrel with him or feel anything but affection and interest in him and his concerns.