Every December, Turner Classic Movies does this montage-y thing where they give you a runthrough of all the film people who've passed away over the last year. I always dread it, because each year I find that someone I really respect and admire has made the list -- and I had no idea they were gone.
This year was no exception. It was Freddie Francis, the British ace cinematographer and horror director. His specialty was black-and-white widescreen stuff, and THE INNOCENTS (we lost Deborah Kerr this year, too) and THE ELEPHANT MAN show what a master he was. Francis claimed to approach everything as if it was black-and-white, thinking in shade and texture rather than color. His color work in stuff like GLORY, Scorcese's CAPE FEAR and THE STRAIGHT STORY demonstrate that.
But he also directed. Typecast pretty quickly as a horror director, he made several films for Hammer (EVIL OF FRANKENSTEIN in 1964 and 1968's DRACULA HAS RISEN FROM THE GRAVE, for example)and the bulk of the anthology films like TALES FROM THE CRYPT that Amicus cranked out in the Seventies.
He quickly learned that even a good director has a hard time rising above a bad script, and this plagues a lot of his directorial work. But they always LOOK great, with a lot of the story told visually. THE SKULL and CREEPING FLESH are good examples of his visual flair making the most of a lackluster screenplay.
Over the course of my film-geek adulthood, I've searched out almost anything he ever touched -- from great pictures like SONS AND LOVERS to trash like VAMPIRE HAPPENING -- and I've always been fascinated by his use of shadow and the incredible places he decides to place his camera. These days, Freddie Francis is well-served by DVD, and something like THE INNOCENTS would make an ideal way to discover what a great artist he was -- and show off the spiffy widescreen HD TV you got for Christmas. And, of course, THE SKULL has that cool device where the camera looks out, POV-style, through the eye sockets! Good stuff.
I can feel a real Hammer Horror binge coming on.
2 comments:
I always have ‘a shadow of the doubt’ in director’s talent when the quality of films inconsistent. That type of directors usually owe their success to their team. Which, probably is a whole different talent - to cast and inspire the team.
Good point. Francis' work as a director, when it's good, is due to great actors, a decent script and Freddie really putting his visual flair to good use. When it's bad, it seems he was saddled with a terrible script that John Ford couldn't have done anything with, and Freddie understandably seems uninterested. And to top it all off, he didn't like horror films.
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