for a start and, once there, you were expected not to leave, unless you had the misfortune of being told to do so.
Ealing was a microcosm of British society, reflected in the pictures they made. The celebrated Ealing comedies were mostly written and made by public schoolboys or university graduates, and major decisions were made at roundtable conferences chaired by Sir Michael Balcon, who was responsible for Ealing’s rise and fall.
The studio was class ridden. You knew your station and stayed in it or incurred wrath in high places. It was such a small world that everyone knew everyone else’s business. A big sign exhorted us to great effort, just like something you might have seen in China during the Cultural Revolution. It read “The Studio That Pulls Together” and was in big black letters up on the wall of Stage A.
I was in the cutting room with sound editors Mary Habberfield and Nick MacDonald. They were preparing tracks for The Titfield Thunderbolt, one of their lesser comedies that was directed by Charles Crichton. My duties were largely centered around the rewinder. I had to rewind the reels and also learned how to use the Bell & Howell foot joiner, a massive iron pedal-operated device. This was a machine you had to respect or it would have your fingers.
I was so thrilled at being there that I would willingly do anything but I soon learned not to give opinions or to be even faintly critical. I also learned to fear Mrs. Brown, the massive head of the “cuttin’ room.” Mrs. Brown never sounded a “g” in her many pronouncements. Her office was at the far end of the cutting block on the first floor, up a short flight of stairs. Her sister was in charge of the negative cutting room as Ealing always cut it’s own negative.
Mrs. Brown bullied her sister dreadfully. In fact, she bullied everyone under her, while bowing and fawning to those above, particularly Sir Michael, whose rushes were always at 12 noon precisely. Mrs. Brown presided over the rushes (the first prints made of a movie after a period of shooting) and would not hold back her feelings if anything went amiss or, God forbid, any assistant was late delivering the material.
It was always an anxious time for us. Perhaps the labs had delivered late or the first assistant had problems syncing them up. Whatever the reason, there was usually a queue of frantic assistants waiting to leap onto the joining machine, dash through the reel, and hope that the joins would hold. Sometimes they flew apart and then there’d be the devil to pay and a trip up the stairs to Mrs. Brown’s office.
This was before magnetic film. Optical sound was on a different spool, so action and sound were separate and kept in sync by the edge numbers that the assistant would put on every foot of film, using the Moy edge-numbering machine. These numbers, identical on action and sound, would allow the editor to keep the film in sync and to easily recognise what he was handling, since the edge number contained the slate number, the take number, and the footage. Occasionally the numbering block on the Moy would get stuck and, unless the assistant was very wide awake, this would go unnoticed, requiring you to then erase the incorrect numbers, using a solvent that would be banned today because it could give you a “high” and eat your lungs.
Ealing was fine if you’d been to boarding school. It was run on the same hierarchical lines. Sir Michael was the headmaster; the producers, directors, writers, and heads of departments were the senior staff; and everyone else were the students in varying degrees of seniority.
Being a trainee, I was at the bottom of the ladder but would gradually claw my way up. Working at the studio was pure heaven, and I met wonderful people there. It was the equivalent of today’s film schools, though better since I had the incredible incentive of working on actual films for major cinema release.
Those not prepared to muck in weren’t tolerated. I recall a university graduate entering the cutting room who didn’t last long. He found the task of joining one piece of film to another tedious. Naturally he wanted to be a director and could not tolerate the notion of spending his days in that way, repetitive work requiring no intellect at all. My attitude, however, was somewhat different. Yes it was dull work, but it was a necessary part in the making of a picture. It taught me little or nothing about the editing of films, I learned that later, but I felt part of the team and I enjoyed the company.
I was soon moved onto the sound of The Cruel Sea, at that time the most ambitious of the Ealing pictures. Charles Frend was directing this epic naval story, based on a best-selling novel by Nicholas Monsarrat. Jack Hawkins was the lead actor, and the film editor, just up the corridor, was Peter Tanner. I worked under the sound editor Gordon Stone. I admired Gordon tremendously, not only because he was good at his job, but because he had a wonderful sense of humour that infected us all.
We all worked long hours getting The Cruel Sea ready for mixing. Ealing had its own sound department and the head mixer was Steven Dalby. In those days, the final mix of a film was an extremely tense affair, quite different from the systems we now use. Because magnetic film was not yet in common use, all of the sound was optical, so the dialogue tracks, normally three or four, were negative or neg cut. The negative cutting of a film is the final act of putting the scissors to the negative and assembling it to match the positive print that you’ve edited. A fine cut is the absolutely final version of the film that goes to neg cut. Once it was neg cut, it was cut for good.
The editor would cut the dialogue using the rushes and normally split this into two tracks in order to create sound overlaps. When the film was fine cut, these dialogue tracks would be neg cut, since they were shot on optical negative stock and returned for the mixing process. Any post-synched dialogue would be cut separately and we, therefore, ended up taking several dialogue tracks into the dubbing room.
We normally had two prints made up by the lab, using one print for rehearsals (it’s not just actors and musicians who rehearse) and conserving the other for the actual final takes of the reel. Rehearsals were long and arduous since the intention was to iron out any problems and allow the mixers to learn the reel thoroughly before going for a take. If mistakes were made during final recording, the reel had to be restarted. Quite apart from the dialogue reels, the music tracks were also optical and given similar treatment. The sound effects were often laid up in reels or were looped, like a background of birdsong, running water, or light wind might be taken from a continuous loop of film, the join carefully “blooped” to avoid a click when it passed over the sound head. Blooping was a procedure that was an absolute pain for all of us assistants because the blooping ink used to go all over our clothes. It was, however, necessary in those days before magnetic. Every join, so that it should be soundless when it went over the sound head, had to be blooped. You would paint with opaque black ink, a triangular image on the positive optical track of the film itself. If you didn’t bloop the join, it would make a popping noise.
Eventually when the mixers had balanced everything and the director had approved, they would go for a take and, at that moment, the tension increased. Mistakes were now costly. Being a sound mixer in those days was ulcerating, though, if a reel had been going well before errors were made, the good section could be saved and used, since it was possible to neg cut the final mix too.
One of my tasks as the junior assistant was to carry the spools of film over to the mixing room. This involved picking up perhaps ten spools of film, a heavy load. The editing rooms at Ealing were on the first floor and connected to the projection booths and the dubbing room by an iron gantry that was partially open to the elements. It was said that projectionists, if caught short, would piss over the side. Legend had it that one had once showered Sir Michael as he entered the theatre below.
One wet evening, we were mixing late and I was carrying a reel of tracks over to the mixing room, when I slipped, sending several spools of film falling over the gantry and into the muddy earth below. What a quandary! I raced down and gathered up what I could. The tin lids had mostly fallen off and the tracks were wrecked. I knew there were people waiting for them. There was nothing for it but to carry those sodden and ruined tracks back into the room and apologise. All work was abandoned
