The Light’s On At Signpost. George Fraser MacDonald

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СКАЧАТЬ “I suppose we were bloody young, too.” He reminisces affectionately about Roland Culver, Guy Middleton, and Trevor Howard; in the background Henry VIII is hauling an enormous mattress onto the grass and collapsing on it, robes, staff, and all.

      Lemonade is served from a large urn; Harrison, whom one naturally associates with wines of rare vintage, looks doubtful, but exclaims after an appraising sip, “Not bad, really.” He tries for a refill, but the tap yields nothing, so between us we up-end the urn to get the dregs and manage to extract two paper cups-full. Harrison sighs contentedly, savouring the bouquet, and wonders when lunch is.

      A buffet has been set up in a tent, and Fleischer, Heston, Harrison, Stark, Mark Lester, and I help ourselves, Heston unbelievable without his robe; he is clad in long johns with an artificial potbelly strapped on. Graham Stark is worried about his lines: is his accent right, is he doing them well? I assure him that not since Barrymore’s Hamlet … and he cheers up sufficiently to ask Fleischer if his Shropshire accent is acceptable (I gather he has been researching Will Somers, Henry VIII’s jester). Fleischer, who wouldn’t know a Shropshire accent from Cantonese, says so long as he’s comprehensible, that’s fine. Mark Lester’s nervousness is wearing off.

      After lunch discuss children with Heston, and the question of which other monarchs he might possibly play. Since he is a dead ringer for Edward I – bone structure, height, and presence – I suggest that he’d make a fine Hammer of the Scots, but have a feeling he’d rather play Robert the Bruce.

      Meet Harry Andrews, whose father, it transpires, was from Scotland, and who glows when I praise his performance as a Scots RSM in The Red Beret. Watch him and Julian Orchard shooting with Heston and Harrison. Fascinated by Fleischer’s directing technique: after one rehearsal he says quietly: “You’re trying too hard, Chuck.” Heston nods gravely and moderates his style. “Very good, Chuck; that’s it.” Fleischer is very neat and precise as he moves quietly round the set, relaxed, amiable, and taking every opportunity to praise, especially young Mark. “That’s good, Mark, that’s very good.”

      As the afternoon wears on and the shadows cast by the sun change, Jack Cardiff makes mysterious adjustments to his equipment so that no passage of time will be visible in a scene lasting no more than a minute or so. This is a vastly more technical business than I had realised.

      Heston has got shot of his make-up and is pacing in a track-suit, looking like a decathlon winner. He is one year older than I am, God help us. We adjourn to a Tudor archway, through which young Mark has to be pursued by angry citizens. Endless rehearsals, as Mark practises barging into people, but the star of the show is a stout extra, whose job it is to be jostled and register astonishment. As the rehearsals progress, he expands his moment of mild surprise into something resembling Tod Slaughter going into overdrive in Murder in the Red Barn, with clutching of brows, staggering, rolling of eyes and cries of “What the hell?” Mark runs himself silly, Fleischer advises patiently, Nigel Wooll (assistant director), keeps crying, with eternal optimism: “All right, here we go, this time. Quiet, please, everyone, here we go … oh, quiet, for God’s sake!” Finally we do go, Mark hurtles past the stout extra who is going to win a supporting Oscar or die in the attempt, and B. H. Barry, the sword expert, tells me how he is working out the fight sequences, giving a different theme to each one.

       Part of the production was to take place in Hungary, which necessitated two visits.

      To Budapest to go location-hunting with Fleischer, Spengler, and crew members. Our principal quest is for a church interior which can pass for Westminster Abbey in the coronation scene – not easy, since Hungarian churches have a rather Byzantine look, being decorated with splendid colours over walls and ceiling. Eddie Fowlie stands in one vast cathedral nave surveying the rainbow riot which covers the echoing interior, and remarks: “We could spray this lot with plastic, easy. Peel it off after, no bother.” There is no end to the enterprise of the British film technician, but I doubt if the local Dean and Chapter would take kindly to having their church repainted, even temporarily.

      Scour the countryside for anything, architectural or natural, which might bear a resemblance to sixteenth-century England, and are rewarded in Sopron, a town up near the Czech border, which has some Tudorish-looking streets and frontages. Further exploration of the area is called off when we find ourselves being sternly regarded over the hedge by Czech frontier guards armed with tommy-guns. The team go back to Budapest, while I am driven to Vienna to catch a plane home, waiting patiently at the Austro-Hungarian border crossing while the guards take my passport away for three-quarters of an hour. Later, when I mention this to Nigel Wooll and speculate on what takes them such an unconscionably long time to deal with passports, he says: “I think they just read them.”

      This sounds plausible; I suppose time hangs heavy at East European frontier posts.

      Stay one night in Vienna, and am disappointed to see that the Danube is not in the least blue, but insanitary grey.

      Back to Budapest, with Kathy, to see some shooting and do possible rewrites. Fleischer tells us over lunch that they have had considerable trouble with Olly Reed. It seems he got into a fight and finished up in a police cell; talk of deportation, but he was released on a promise of good behaviour. Then he had annoyed Fleischer by making a nuisance of himself at Mark Lester’s eighteenth birthday party, and had provoked a new crisis by breaking the nose of a rugby-playing friend. The Gellert Hotel, on the Buda side of the Danube, refused to have him back, so he is now in our hotel, the Intercontinental, which is on the Pest bank. Apparently he changed hotels not by taking a taxi across one of the bridges, but by wading and swimming the river in the middle of the night, arriving in the Intercontinental lobby clad only in mud and waterweed. It says much for his persuasive powers that the management allowed him to stay instead of throwing him back. Possibly they were impressed by his line that his behaviour was nothing out of the way, and in England no one would have thought twice about it.

      The Salkinds throw a big party for the unit in the Intercontinental ballroom. Kathy looks smashing in green silk, and I feel terribly conventional in my best suit among all these glamorous bohemians, but feel better when Oliver arrives in what is plainly his best suit, blue serge with waistcoat and club tie (black with thin orange stripes; who’s that?) He is only slightly canned, accompanied by his wife and daughter, and carrying a bunch of bulrushes – possibly a souvenir of his Danube crossing – which he distributes (“reeds”, get it?) Raquel Welch receives one graciously (so much for the tales that she and Oliver don’t get on; mind you, I can’t see them as close friends). As before, she struck me as being a nice, sensible woman, by no means a sex goddess. She is tired, after a day of interviews, and demands wearily: what do the press want of her? She doesn’t like being photographed or questioned on set, which is hardly surprising, and obviously believes (not without justice, I dare say) that the newspapers hope to be able to report her as difficult and temperamental.

      Mark Lester is a nice lad, prattling to us about his part (both of them) and assuring Kathy that the film will have to be the next Royal Command production. He is only slightly tight, which for an eighteen-year-old is pretty creditable in the circumstances; his parents have been out once, for a week, and I wonder who keeps an eye on him. To my surprise he has about fifteen films behind him; another overnight sensation.

      Kathy, as usual with her reporter’s instinct, has found the most interesting person at the party – a delightful, very old lady who speaks only French and turns out to be Pierre Spengler’s grandmother. We converse with difficulty, but gather that in her opinion Pierre does all the work (“beaucoup de travail”) which I think is probably true on the production side. She cannot take alcohol or chocolate, but she and Kathy share a plate of ice cream.

      Fleischer introduces Lalla Ward (Princess Elizabeth) and Felicity Dean, a stunningly pretty blonde who is Mark’s sweetheart on screen; you could, as Dick says, eat her with a spoon. СКАЧАТЬ