posted 03-20-2014 06:13 PM                       

quote: The Daily Telegraph

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Oswald Morris was a cinematographer who tamed John Huston and shot through smoke screens and silk stockings

Oswald Morris, who has died aged 98, was an Oscar-winning British cinematographer whose career bridged the cinematic shift from the mood-infused chiaroscuro of the 1940s silver screen to the lush celluloid palette of the Technicolor productions of the latter half of the 20th century.

Morris, along with Freddie Young, Jack Cardiff and Christopher Challis, was of the generation of cinematographers who learnt their trade as cinema developed around them. He filmed more than 50 features, including perennial favourites such as John Huston’s early take on Moulin Rouge (1952), the country house puzzler Sleuth (1972) and the 1974 James Bond outing The Man with the Golden Gun. In the years before standardised film industry practices and technical advances, such as Steadicams and digital enhancement, Morris found that lighting and shooting movies was often an exercise in logistical flexibility, ego management and technical invention.

He won his Academy Award for Fiddler on the Roof (1971), a shoot on which he slipped a silk stocking over his camera lens to gain the distinctive sepia-tinged visuals. The film was, he said, “a cameraman’s dream because it had everything a cameraman could wish for.” Filming Norman Jewison’s musical — in which Chaim Topol plays a Jewish peasant attempting to marry off three of his daughters in pre-revolutionary Russia — allowed Morris to take a cinematic journey through the seasons. “We have winter with rain, winter with dull weather, winter with snow. We have dawns, sunrises, hot summer days, cold winter days, sunsets and nights,” he said. “Now I can’t think of anything, except possibly a storm, that one couldn’t have put in this film from a photographic point of view.”

Morris would defuse actors’ demands as adeptly as he would soften the light in which they were bathed. “I would chat them up before filming started and ask if they had any hang-ups,” he explained. “You bypass the director and form a relationship with them. Sophia Loren was as nervous as a kitten when I worked with her in 1957. She said, 'I don’t look good in profile. I have a pointed nose’. So we developed a code: I would grimace whenever she was going into profile.”

Directors could be equally tricky. He worked on eight films with the notoriously difficult John Huston. “I did use to go up and say, 'John, we have a problem’,” remembered Morris on publication of his memoirs Huston, We Have a Problem (2006). “He would always say: 'Well, kid,’ — he always called me kid — 'what are you going to do about it?’ and I’d go and find a solution. We always came up with something in the end.”

Oswald Norman Morris was born on November 22 1915 in Ruislip, Middlesex, where his father ran a newsagents and encouraged his son’s interest in film (they shot amateur shorts in the garden by the outside lavatory — calling them Bogside Productions). Oswald attended Bishopshalt School, working as a projectionist in a local cinema on his holidays, before joining Wembley Studios, alongside a young Michael Powell, in the early Thirties. Moving up from clapper boy to camera assistant, he worked on American Fox Film Company productions of “quota quickies” — fast turnaround features made to meet the legal requirement on British cinemas to show a quota of British films.

During the Second World War he served as a pilot in Bomber Command, in raids over France and Germany, winning a DFC in 1943. While he was filming The Odessa File in 1974, a German “grip” asked him whether he had ever visited Hamburg. “Yes,” replied Morris, “the last time I was 20,000 feet up”. Later on in the war Morris was transferred to Transport Command and given the job of taking Field Marshall Sir Alan Brooke on a global tour, which included a stop-off in the Crimea where Brooke attended the Yalta Conference. For this he was awarded an AFC.

On being demobbed Morris joined Pinewood Studios, where he worked alongside Ronald Neame (who called him “probably the greatest cameraman in the world”) and David Lean, who employed him behind the camera on Oliver Twist (1948).

In fact, Morris had the unique privilege of twice putting Charles Dicken’s orphan in the frame. As cameraman on Lean’s adaptation he was given the task of creating a point-of-view shot of Oliver being punched in the face. “The only way I could think of to achieve this was to use a pram,” recalled Morris. “I couldn’t run with the camera as it would be too unsteady. So I climbed in, and David Lean gave me a push. The punch went right into the lens.” Two decades later he was the director of photography — responsible for the entire look of the production — on Carol Reed’s film of Lionel Bart’s musical Oliver! (1968).

In 1952, Morris “broke every rule in the book” while shooting Huston’s Moulin Rouge. On being interviewed for the job at the Dorchester Hotel Morris asked Huston how he envisaged the completed film would look. “I would like it to look as though Toulouse-Lautrec had directed it himself,” replied Huston. Morris shot using strong, light-scattering filters on the camera, which had never been used before. “We also filmed every set full of smoke so that the actors always stood out from the background,” he recalled. “The Technicolor people hated it.” Their tune changed, however, on the film’s positive reception. “The head of Technicolor in America wrote to Technicolor in London congratulating them on the wonderful colours in the film. No mention of me.”

In addition to his win for Fiddler on the Roof, Morris was Oscar-nominated a further two times: in 1969 for Reed’s Oliver! and in 1979 for Sidney Lumet’s The Wiz (a sequel to The Wizard of Oz). He also won Best Cinematography Baftas on three consecutive years, for the family saga The Pumpkin Eater (1965), Sydney Lumet’s anti-establishment drama The Hill (1966) and the John le Carré adaptation The Spy Who Came in From the Cold (1967). He made his last film, The Dark Crystal, in 1982.

Film directors, he claimed, were a rare and varied bunch. “The top ones are a breed apart. David Lean would quiz me over every shot, while John Huston was so laid-back that for Beat the Devil he simply told me to shoot it as a 'shaggy-dog film’ and I had no idea what he meant. But what links them is that they are always receptive to ideas. They listen to people.”

Unlike many cinematographers, however, Morris never wanted to join their ranks. “I didn’t want to have to deal with actors,” he said late in life. “If the acting is bad, blame the director. If you can’t see what’s going on, blame the cinematographer.”

Morris was appointed OBE in 1998 for services to cinematography and the film industry and made a Bafta Fellow in 1997.

Oswald Morris married first in 1939, Connie Sharp, his childhood sweetheart who died in 1963. In 1966 he married, secondly, Lillian Fox, a film script supervisor who died in 2003. He is survived by a son and two daughters of his first marriage.

Oswald Morris, born November 22 1915, died March 17 2014.

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