Authors: Derek Robinson
“Come off it. I've seen your stuff. It's terrifying. Even mute, it scared me.”
Rollo was pleased. “Imagine what sound would add.”
“You haven't got a storyline.” Harry left his desk and went to the window. “Bombed buildings. People are sick of seeing bombed buildings. I can see two from here. Three.”
“I've got human interest. Firemen, wardens, coppers. It's a film about London. I just want the audience to hear the voice of London.”
“This isn't the only Blitz, you know. Liverpool, Plymouth, Bristol, Coventry, Southampton, Birmingham, they're getting hammered too. Why don't you go and film them?”
Rollo scratched his stubbled jaw. They both knew it was an unfair question. It came from weeks and months of bottled-up fear and anger generated by living in a city always under attack and helpless to defend itself, except by flinging up a vast number of anti-aircraft shells which didn't seem to deter the raiders and which fell in the form of whistling, jagged shrapnel that clattered off rooftops and roads and broke windows and occasionally struck and killed a wandering Londoner.
“We're supposed to be boosting morale,” Harry said “Do your worst, FritzâLondon can take it. That sort of thing. What you've shot looks like hell on earth.”
“Well, it is hell. But hell perfectly framed and in sharp focus and steady as a rock. Now, with soundâ”
The window panes vibrated noisily to the curt grunt of a distant explosion. Harry picked up a pair of binoculars. “Lambeth,” he said. “Or maybe Camberwell.” He focused on a column of smoke, climbing and bending with the wind. “Five hundred kilograms, probably. Jerry does it deliberately, you know, to put the wind up the rescue squads.”
“I know.”
“Puts the wind up
me
, I don't mind admitting.”
“Be grateful to the bomb-disposal squads, then. Hell of a good story there.” Rollo yawned and stretched. “Of course it comes best from their own lips.”
Harry put the binoculars back. “You never give up, do you? Okay. If we've got anyone crazy enough, you can have a sound recordist.”
“You won't regret this, Mr. de Mille,” Rollo said. “The German box office alone will be worth millions.” Harry wasn't listening. “Film those bomb-disposal guys while they can still talk and you can still shoot,” he said. “Now leave. You stink like a bonfire.”
Later that day, Rollo got a message from Frobisher:
Try Freddy Kelly
, with a Hammersmith address. It was dark by the time he rang the bell. A youngish woman said she was Freddy Kelly. Now that was a surprise.
Even in 1940, when women were replacing men in all sorts of jobs, Rollo had never known a female sound recordist. He didn't like the idea, and when he looked at this example he didn't like the example. Not nearly ugly enough. Good-looking young women were a pain and a nuisance during filming: that was his experience. They couldn't write clearly, couldn't add minutes and seconds, lost things you asked them to keep, and banged their nails in the clapperboard. They whispered and giggled when you wanted silence. Worst of all they distracted the attention of men who had jobs to do. That was the ultimate sin: women were not serious about filming. The better they looked, the worse they behaved. Freddy Kelly was a tallish blond, hair short and shaggy, with the kind of face that made greengrocers put an extra apple in her bag, free. Arms and legs to match. Two bumps on her chest, as God intended. Hopeless. No use to anybody.
He stopped just inside the house. He knew she would make a scene, so he might as well say it and go. “You're not what I want,” he said.
“Well, you're not what I want,” she said. “But who said life was fair?”
They went into the living room and did not sit.
“Nothing personal,” he said. “Let me explainâ”
“No, let me explain, I can do it faster. First, I haven't got the strength and this is a tough job, I might hurt myself. Second, I haven't got the experience and this is a difficult job, tricky sound, I wouldn't know how to handle it. Third, I'm young and innocent, the
men can't swear while I'm around and that bloody well pisses them off. Fourth, I need a separate lavatory or I burst into tears. Fifth is usually something vague and embarrassed about the curse.” She spoke calmly and easily. “There,” she said. “Have I covered everything?”
“Why call yourself Freddy?”
“Same reason Archie Leach calls himself Cary Grant. To get the work.”
Rollo looked at framed photographs on the mantelpiece. He recognized some people: directors, cameramen, actors. She wore slacks and a leather flying-jacket; she blended in with the men. “Why work with me?”
“It's what I do for a living.”
“Living? Filming the Blitz? You want to die?”
“It hasn't killed you yet.”
That convinced him. She was too cocky, too mouthy. “You're not strong enough,” he said. He picked up his hat.
“You're probably right. Look: before you go, do me a favor, please. Just carry that table into the kitchen for me.” It was a dining table, square, thick, mahogany, with legs like tree-stumps. “Please.”
It wasn't a favor, it was a challenge. A sensible man would have smiled and walked away. Rollo felt tricked and it made him angry. He grabbed the table and heaved. It felt chained to the floor. He staggered two paces and couldn't make three. The table hit the floor with a crash that made the blackout blind slowly roll up. She switched off the lights. In the darkness he sprawled on the table. Tiny stars cruised about his vision. “Your sodding table,” he said. “It's buggered my back.”
“Well, you didn't bend your knees enough, did you? It's lucky I've got two strong shoulders. Your camera goes on one and my sound stuff on the other.”
He slid off the table and sat on the carpet. Faintly, like a dog howling in a distant village, a siren sounded; then, like other dogs, other sirens copied it.
“Hadn't we better be going?” she said.
It was a small raid: a dozen aircraft. Confused by thick cloud and rain, they bombed the suburbs and left. Scattered damage. Nothing there for Rollo. He took his female soundman to a pub.
“So what's your real name?” he said.
“Kate. Kate Padaszczlavski. From Wloctawek.”
“And where the hell is Wloctawek?”
“Between Torun and Krosniewice. Poland.”
“Oh.
That
Wloctawek.”
“My dad came here from Poland. Nobody can pronounce Padaszczlavski, so I took mum's maiden name. Kelly. From Ballyduff. What else can I tell you?”
Rollo drank some beer. “You scared of bombs?”
“Who isn't?”
“Good. Scared tells you when you're in the right place. Death makes great movies.”
She cocked her head. “Death plus a big budget.”
“Money's no object. We've got hundreds of bombers, thousands of bombs, a city in flames. Makes
Gone With The Wind
look like a smoky chimney”
“Begorrah,” Kate said. “As they say in Wloctawek.”
They worked the Blitz for the rest of the winter and into spring. They made a good team. Both were Londoners; Kate had grown up in the East End, Rollo was at home in the West End. They filmed the destruction of entire communities in the slums and the burning of famous landmarks in Soho and Mayfair and Knightsbridge and Chelsea. Kate had a nose for trouble. One terrible night, when Rollo was black with smoke and wet with spray from firehoses and ready to quit, she persuaded him to walk up the Strand and down Fleet Street. St. Paul's cathedral was pink as salmon in the glow from the buildings burning on three sides. They filmed it from the roof of an abandoned pub. The soundtrack collected the woof and thud of guns and bombs, and the steady rumble of collapsing roofs and walls. “Eat your heart out, Selznick,” Rollo said. A week later they were shooting in the London docks. A fire-float pumped a pattern of high, white jets onto an oil storage tank, trying to cool it. “Pretty picture,” Kate said. While Rollo was filming, a stick of bombs hurried down the dockside and the blast knocked them over. When they got up, the oil tank was belching flames. Rollo wiped dust off the lens. He filmed blazing oil spreading across the water until it surrounded the boat and in the end he was filming white jets spouting out of waving red fire.
“Did you get that?” he asked
“I got the oil fire,” she said. “Sounded like an express going through a station.”
Smoke was coming down like a rich black fog. Soon it blotted out the fire-float.
Rollo and Kate were not callous, nor greedy for sensation; too much sensation came their way, unsought. The Blitz was a thing of terror, shot through with agony and heartbreak and the obscenity of casual maiming and killing. They saw this. They saw things that sickened them so much that they couldn't film any of it. On the other hand, it was all happening and therefore, nausea permitting, it deserved to be filmed. They were ready every night. As soon as the first rusty groan of the first air-raid siren began to climb toward its roller-coastering wail, they felt what everyone felt: a gut-tightening dread. Here comes death. But they also felt a keen professional interest. Rollo was right: death made great movies.
They filmed fires and explosions, and the people who fought them and survived them. They got stories from a policeman wearing a cape that had been stiffened by a shower of molten lead; from a woman saved after two days under the rubble of her home; from ambulance drivers who drove on tires shredded by broken glass; from rescue workers, and wardens, and sappers who dug out and defused unexploded bombs. The Blitz went on and on. Many people who took shelter saw no point in coming to the surface: they lived in caves and cellars and disused tunnels. Rollo and Kate filmed them too. Perhaps such people were right, for toward the end of spring the raids grew heavier. After the night of March 19, 1941,
Germany Calling
said that more than four hundred bombers raided London. Nobody argued. On April 16 it was over six hundred; three nights later, over seven hundred. One bomber, a Heinkel 111, made a mess of some deer in Richmond Park, but not before it had killed its own crew. Rollo and Kate were lucky that night; doubly lucky. They filmed it, and it missed them.
Kate saw it first. “Look up there,” she said. The Heinkel was lazily spiraling down a searchlight beam as though each was hypnotized by the other. Rollo filmed, and tried not to breathe. He knew this was one of the classic shots of war. A wing spun away, and the bomber exploded. Pieces fled into the night. Each piece trailed flame. A man said, “Jesus Christ Almighty.”
The searchlight was nearby; and when, after a few seconds, the
beam vanished, the night seemed huge and the burning bits looked tiny. Soon they too disappeared. Rollo lowered the camera. “Did you get that voice?”
“Yes.”
“Sounded as if he'd seen a miracle.”
“Yes.”
“You can't script stuff like that. You can script the words but not the voice. It makes that shot universal. You could watch it in China or Brazil and still get the same kick.”
The raid was fading away, the guns giving up as the bombers turned south and droned toward home. The clouds above parts of London were as red as dawn, but dawn was still two hours away.
They stowed their equipment in the car. Rollo started the engine.
“If that fellow saying âJesus Christ Almighty' isn't on the soundtrack I'm going to kill you,” he said.
“You kill me, I'll tell the union and they'll get your name taken off the credits.”
“Credits?” he said. “Credits. I never thought about credits.”
Filmed by Rollo Blazer.
The idea kept him quiet for several minutes.
London was huge; it could afford to lose several hundred acres. It could even afford to lose its great buildings. The House of Commons was wrecked: seven bombs had blown it apart. Westminster Abbey was hit. So was Buckingham Palace, and the Tower of London, and the British Museum, and every railway terminus, and five hospitals, and all the churches in the City, and more. It was a long and gloomy list.
Everywhere Londoners looked they saw the ruins of landmarks in their everyday lives. What the Luftwaffe had done yesterday it could repeat tomorrow, and the next night, and go on repeating until the long-threatened invasion came. In the shattered shopfronts, handwritten signs said
Business as usual-London can take it.
The tired faces of the customers told a different story. To make matters worse, there were precious few luxuries in the shops. Rationing hurt.
For about a year now, in all of Europe, only Britain had stood against Germany and Italy. Defiance was a noble attitude, but it was lonely and painful and tiring, and many people wondered how it was going to win the war.
The Heinkel corkscrewed lazily down the searchlight beam, as if the light were winding it in. Abruptly it flung its little wings away and then it exploded. Bits of airplane fluttered, trailing flames. Noise of the explosion arrived, like a door slamming. The searchlight went out. The flames made bright scratches in the night.
The tail of the film flapped through the projector, the screen went blank white, the overhead lights came on.
“What did that man say?” Gunnery asked. “Right at the end?”
“He said âJesus Christ Almighty,'” Harry Frobisher said.
Delahaye yawned; it was stuffy in the viewing room. “Might run into trouble with the Church over that,” he said.
“People swear in the Blitz,” Gunnery said.
“Of course they do,” Delahaye said. “They say worse things than âJesus Christ Almighty.' But we're not going to repeat them in the cinema, are we?”
Timothy Delahaye was Minister of Information. The Crown Film Unit was one of his responsibilities. Normally he was happy to leave the running of Crown to its head, Blake Gunnery, who knew all about film. Gunnery's mother, widowed in the First War, had married an American film producer and raised Blake in California. At twenty-five he came back to England, made a string of successful B-movies, and then rashly invested all his money in an avant-garde production, a dark political thriller full of revolutionary camera-angles, exactly what Thirties audiences didn't want to see. Gunnery went bust. He still had one asset: the baronetcy which he had inherited from his father. When the top job at Crown Films became vacant, Timothy Delahaye was among those who interviewed him. The baronetcy clinched it. Gunnery never used the title, but he could
obviously be depended upon to serve the State.