Cinema Retro's John Exshaw remembers a highly talented and often under-rated director.
“Don was first-class . . .
a really good film director. [He was] extremely capable, and he was very, very
interested in everything that he did. . . . He used to come well-prepared with
what he was going to shoot. . . . I don’t ever remember having problems with
making a [Don Sharp] film move and making a sequence move that one might have had . . . and
that’s why I’ve always had a lot of respect for Don, because the scenes that he
produced, they played so well.†– Eric Boyd-Perkins, editor (Hennessy, et al.)
“I will remember Don for
his determination to bring together the often disparate elements of a cast and
crew to produce a movie that was true to the intentions of its producer and
author: he was a true servant of the medium. Perhaps most of all I will
remember his patience and unfailing good humour. I had some of the best times
of my working life on the films he directed and I will remember him with great
affection.†– Richard Johnson, actor (Hennessy, et al.)
“Very, very calm. Very
calm and knew exactly what he wanted.†–
Sir Christopher Lee, actor (The Face of
Fu Manchu, et al.)
“He was one of the great
technicians in the business. He really was a very competent director in terms
of budget and schedules . . .†– Peter Snell,
producer (Hennessy, et al.)
“I kept using Don because
his films came in on budget and were without exception very successful. On top
of that he was a most agreeable person of very good character – no tantrums –
clear headed – resourceful; a gentleman too.†–
Harry Alan Towers, producer (The Face of
Fu Manchu, et al.)
It
was with great sadness that I learned of the death of Don Sharp, who passed
away, aged 90, in Cornwall on 14 December last year. I first met Don (and his
delightful wife, Mary) at their home in London in 2007, having arranged to
interview him about his career, and in particular the two films which I regard
as his finest, The Face of Fu Manchu
(1965) and Hennessy (1975). He seemed
quietly pleased that someone else shared his own good opinion of those films,
having, in the past, been mainly interviewed about the three films he made for
Hammer (The Kiss of the Vampire,
1963, The Devil-Ship Pirates, 1964,
and Rasputin, the Mad Monk, 1965).
In
a different sense, of course, I’d met Don many years before, through his films,
which always left an impression, no matter how unpromising the basic material;
I can well remember scanning the TV guides and making a point to watch anything
‘Directed by Don Sharp’. In those days, the TV schedules were full of the type
of British second-feature films that Don made, but his always had something
different – a sense of style and movement, in a word action – that made them stand out from the dross.
It
is worth emphasising how rare that quality was in British films of that period.
While Terence Fisher is justly celebrated for directing the most famous Hammer
films, his forte was atmosphere, combined with a certain classical rigour in
both composition and cutting derived, one imagines, from his years as an
editor. Seth Holt and Michael Reeves both made stylish and memorable
contributions to what, for the sake of immediate convenience, we’ll call the
horror genre, but the majority of British films in the horror-thriller field
were usually both dull in concept and laboured in execution, to put it kindly.
Don,
however, had a special talent for infusing his films with both atmosphere and
movement. His best horror movies (namely The
Kiss of the Vampire and Witchcraft,
1964) are perhaps the nearest British equivalent to those of Jacques Tourneur,
while his thrillers, particularly The
Violent Enemy (1968), Callan
(1974), and Hennessy, often bring to
mind (again as a British equivalent) the work of Don Siegel. Indeed, had Don
been “taken up†by Hollywood, it is easy enough to imagine him bringing a
similar vigorous style and economy to material like Dirty Harry (1971) and Charley
Varrick (1973) as his more-celebrated American contemporary (and he’d
certainly have been more comfortable than his fellow Don with the British-made
spy thriller The Black Windmill,
1974).
Even
when Don was handed a pure pot-boiler, such as Curse of the Fly (1965), he was able to raise it above the
ordinary, as demonstrated by the eye-popping credit sequence (achieved by the application
of a pressure hose to a gelatine window) and the careful composition and
lighting throughout. It may be a silly film (and Don certainly regarded it as
such), but the point is, it’s a well-made
silly film.
Given
that Don, unlike Fisher and Holt (and Siegel, who worked for years in the
Warner Bros.’ montage department), did not come to directing via the cutting
room, it seemed obvious to ask him how he developed his ability to make even
the most threadbare material come to life on the screen. His answer, needless
to say, was as interesting as it was surprising.
Don Sharp – The Philosophy
of Action
“Several
critics mention the energy in the work – not just with the action sequences but
the feeling of energy in the whole subject. Because you can’t do big action
sequences and then have flabby, everyday stuff round it. Those movies have got
to have a feeling of latent energy in there. . . . You can’t do action
sequences as an entity in themselves. They’ve got to be part of the way a whole
movie is developing. You’ve got to have, apart from energy, a very good sense
of editing, what a camera can do. . . .
“You’ve
also got to have a sense of timing – which is part of being an actor. You’ve
got to know, for example, a thing I was taught early in theatre – if there’s a
scene in a movie, in a play, that always gets good laughs, on a good night,
when there’s a good and laughing audience, you’ll get laughs in the build-up to
it, in the five or ten minutes beforehand, because it’s a good audience who’s
appreciative of what’s going on. On a bad night, when the audience are not
laughing, increase your pace, get them at the point. And this teaches you a
control of speed and how to control an audience. . . . Working with good
actors, you get a feeling of timing with them; although sometimes the timing
between them can be good but their overall pace, which is quite different, can
be wrong – its context in the film, because of the situation in the film,
perhaps there should be that little more urgency, therefore pace, in the scene.
. . .â€
“Energy,
cutting, timing, and an ability to have a visual of exactly what it’s going to
look like. But then, plenty of directors have got that, I would have thought,
so I don’t know why I was considered better by some at action. Also, I enjoyed
it. I think that’s part of it – that some directors, who may have been based in
drama, maybe as writer-directors considerably involved with the character and
the development, you know, felt that, well, we’ve got to have this [an action
sequence] in, I’ll have to do it. But they didn’t get the same enjoyment out of
it; it was a necessity rather than a pleasure. I always liked doing it, liked
doing action . . .â€
At
which point it seems appropriate to include Don’s recollections of perhaps his most
famous pure action scene, the
celebrated speedboat sequence in Puppet
on a Chain, and how he then turned an unreleasable film into a box-office
hit.
Don Sharp on Puppet on a Chain (1971)
“Puppet on a Chain was wonderful. I had
been out of work for about a year . . . and my agent, Dennis Salinger, rang and
said [producer] Kurt Unger is doing a movie in Amsterdam, from an Alastair
MacLean novel, and he wants a boat chase in it and he’d like to talk to you. So
I went and saw him, I read the script, and they sort of put the house lights on
the boat chase. And I said yes, but that’s not good enough [the chase as
described in the script]. “This is going to be a highlight of it,†they said.
But that’s why you asked for me, wasn’t it? So he said all right, will you do
it? And I said yes. He agreed terms with Dennis, and I went over and I chose
the location, I talked to the police, got the boats and worked with a wonderful
bloke there called Wim Wagenaar, who ran a restaurant and every year he had a
go at breaking his record of being on a kite behind a launch. And every year,
he broke the record. And I said, but you break it by so little! And he said,
well, I don’t want to go and do it too much because the people who are going to
be watching will wonder, is he going to beat it the next year? So, he said, I
beat it by just enough and then I come down. . . .
“And
Wim was driving one of the boats and he used to do jumping the boats in the
canal. Well, he and I got together and we sketched out a whole sequence, and
some of the things, other boatmen said you can’t do this. I wanted the boat –
his boat – to run up on to the back of another boat and push it along, you may
remember. They said, it won’t work, can’t do it. I said, all right, let’s try
it. And it did work! And we ran into bridges and came spinning round the corner
. . . And one time we had to wait for a little while because I had broken, I
think it was, four boat hulls and smashed about eight Mercury engines. And they
couldn’t get another one, they had to fly them in from Canada. It got a bit
expensive.
“Anyway,
the film was finished and they put it together and I get a ʼphone
call from Kurt. He said, Don, I’d like you come and have a look at something.
And he and a chap named Lenny Lane, who had put in the American money, said,
uh, what do you think of it? Bit of a mess, isn’t? I said. “Do you think
anything can be done?†he asked. “We’ve either got to spend more money and fix
it or we’ve got to cut our losses and not release it.†And he said it’s a great
shame because the boat chase is good and there are some good things in it. So I
said, first of all, give me a couple of days in the cutting room with it, to
look at it and make some notes, then I’ll tell you whether I think you can save
it. And they gave that to me and I spent quite [a number] of days, then I did a
list of what I thought had to be done. And they said yes, well, it’s going to
be a little bit expensive, but right, we can see why you want that and that –
let’s go to America and talk to the money people over there. So we did, and
they agreed.
“So
what I had to do – they had shot it all in natural locations: interiors of
clubs, interiors of warehouses and things, in Amsterdam. We couldn’t go back
and do that, so we had to rebuild, in Shepperton, beautiful bits of each set.
I’d say, that doesn’t work because that’s wrong, the shot should’ve been here
and she should have done this. So we had to get them [the actors] in, reshoot
it and get just maybe two or three shots out of the sequence to slot in.
Therefore the lighting had to match, the hair had to match, everything had to
match. And this was about four weeks’ shooting. And dear Jack Hildyard, who did
the lighting on it, the word went round the industry, you know, that we were
trying to save a movie by cutting in bits and pieces, reshooting parts . . .
And in the end, it all went together beautifully, was released and made a mint
of money! And I’m still getting the royalties for it being shown on television,
even now. But I got known then as ‘The Doctor’ . . .
“It’s
a pity, because the chappie who directed originally [Geoffrey Reeve, who died
in 2010] has gone on to produce some nice movies, and before this he had a good
career in shooting commercials. And he’s a talented man. But he didn’t have a story
sense then, as a director, and he and his camera operator, each set-up, you
know, a sequence that looked like part of a television commercial and wasn’t
there for the drama of it, or just to let the audience know what was happening.
And therefore I had to take parts out of, for example, a nightclub sequence.
Seventy-five per cent of it was fine; only when it came to the dialogue bits
between them did I have to go in and reshoot it, because it just didn’t make
sense – to shoot a couple of really good, important dialogue lines to do with
the plot in a shot between the legs of a dancer . . . That wasn’t exactly it
but I mean that sort of thing, you know. It was done for a visual effect.â€
[I
interject at this point to observe that, Don’s surgical efforts notwithstanding,
the finished film is still pretty undistinguished, a fact which only highlights
the brilliance of the boat-chase sequence.]
Yes,
indeed. Makes it more of a highlight, yes. The funny thing was that, when it
came out, Harry Saltzman and Cubby Broccoli, who knew Kurt Unger, said, how did
you do that boat chase? Because they’d never thought of one, and from that they
did Live and Let Die. And they spent
on the boat chase in Live and Let Die
more than we spent on the whole film, both units and the reshoot, on Puppet. They did it marvellously,
there’s no doubt about it, but cut, cut, cut . . .†(Earlier in our
conversation, Don had recalled the advice of Skeets Kelly, his camera operator
on Puppet on a Chain, “[who] always
said to me, don’t cut it into pieces if you can do it all in one. . . . I had
considered doing it in a couple of cuts, and Skeets talked me out of it. He
said no, there’s so much more impact if you don’t, because the audiences are
very intelligent these days, so au fait
with cinema, that they will know . . . But to go and do it in the one [shot],
it’s absolutely for real.â€)
[This
led on, inevitably enough, to the obvious question: Were you ever in the frame
for doing Bond? And if not, why not?]
“No.
Dennis Salinger put me up several times, because he was great friends with
Harry Saltzman; they were very close. But, no, I don’t know why. Perhaps he
thought I hadn’t done enough big work. . . . He was also very loyal to the
people who worked with him, you see. Peter Hunt, who was the editor and then
edited what was shot under the second-unit, he then gave him [the job]. To be
fair, you know, you’ve got to admire him for that; not a lot of loyalty around
in the business. I worked for Harry later on for a while. God, he was a strange
man. I’ll tell you about that another time. . . .â€
At
the end of one of our sessions, I asked Don, not entirely seriously, whether,
as an Australian and a lifelong cricket fan, he would rather have been Don
Sharp, director, or Don Bradman, Aussie cricketing legend. “Ah,†said Don, with
his customary wry smile, “there are lots of film directors, but there was only
one Don Bradman.†Which may well be true, in so far as it goes, but it seems to
me that while there may be lots of film directors, there was only one Don
Sharp, and thanks to his underrated and vastly entertaining body of work, he
will continue to be “at the crease†for years to come, to the delight of future
generations of film enthusiasts who will also feel ‘a taste of excitement’ when
they see the credit ‘Directed by Don Sharp’. As his daughter Katherine put it
to me, his was “a life lived fully and long†– or as I can imagine Don himself
saying, “Ten short of a century; not a bad knock . . .â€