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.