Craig McCall (2010)

At the start, nonagenarian Jack Cardiff notices a photograph of Bogart on a shelf by his desk and remarks that ‘Bogie’s dead’.  Then he looks up at a row of his own photographs of screen beauties.  ‘She’s dead,’ he says, of each one – Marilyn Monroe, Ava Gardner, Audrey Hepburn – until ‘She’s still alive’, when he reaches Sophia Loren.    Craig McCall’s documentary was, according to Wikipedia, seventeen years in the making.  It’s not surprising that a good number of the interviewees are now dead too – Kathleen Byron, Charlton Heston, Kim Hunter, John Mills, Moira Shearer.  Cardiff himself died, at the age of ninety-four, on 22 April 2009.  McCall’s film appeared last year and was screened by Film 4 on the second anniversary of Cardiff’s death, followed by two of the most famous achievements of his long and illustrious career as a cinematographer, Black Narcissus and The African Queen.   If this all sounds miserable, it doesn’t give anything like an accurate impression of Craig McCall’s labour of love, which mixes, in a thoroughly enjoyable way, Jack Cardiff’s reminiscences with information about his life and the art of cinematography and contributions from people who worked with Cardiff or who, like Martin Scorsese, didn’t but revere him just as much as those who did.  Thelma Schoonmaker, Scorsese’s editor and Michael Powell’s widow, supplies a link that’s emotionally satisfying.  The son of music hall entertainers who made his debut as a child actor in silent films in 1918, Cardiff looks to have been a happy man, and he’s wonderfully youthful.  It’s not just that he still has all his marbles – as well as showing an excellent memory, he talks often and interestingly about his passion for art and the influence of paintings on his style behind the camera.  His light blue eyes are bright and clear.  I think it’s Kirk Douglas who says Cardiff at work always had the eyes of a young boy eager to discover more.  He still had them at the end of his life.

McCall clearly has huge admiration and affection for Cardiff so it’s not surprising that he doesn’t ask much about Cardiff’s career as a director post-Sons and Lovers – or about the fact that the film-makers Cardiff worked with after he’d given up directing and gone back to working as a cameraman don’t compare with those whose films he photographed in the 1940s and 1950s.  Although Scorsese has good things to say about Young Cassidy (1965), a drama (which I’d not heard of) based on the life of Sean O’Casey, the pictures Cardiff made through the sixties and early seventies aren’t a distinguished list.  (Sons and Lovers is so good, however, that I’d have liked to hear more about how much Cardiff thought his ability to direct actors was innate or how much he felt he learned it from watching other directors.)   One of the last entries on his CV is Rambo:  First Blood Part II (1985); in the period before he turned to directing, he worked with, among others, Hitchcock, Welles, Mankiewicz and King Vidor – as well as the Archers and Huston.   Yet Cardiff spoke very positively about working on the Rambo film and the enthusiasm seemed quite genuine.  He gives the impression of loving his work so much that he just always wanted to keep working, and never stopped finding it worthwhile.

23 April 2011