American Cinematographer - March 2000 - 44

A Man for All Seasons
on

Right: Morris
(atop train, at
right) and other
crew

the

busy streets of central London

portable

members
the

cameras.

would sit with

assess

damage after
staging a

the

an

handheld

"Freddie Francis
Arriflex

camera

shoulder, and I would read
newspaper," Morris recalls. "We

over

locomotive

and

concealed

with

my

crash for The

didn't have Walkie-Talkies in those

Seven-Per-Cent

days, so it all had to be done with
signals. On a given signal, we would

Solution
To

(1975).

capture the

the camera, Rene would cue
Gerard, I would drop the paper and
start

sequence, a
camera

assistant)

(and
were

mounted on the
front of the

Freddie would carry on over my
shoulder. The minute the shot was

engine. Bottom:

over,

An all-star

lineup of actors
and filmmakers
was assembled
for the 1961
adventure epic
The Guns of
Navarone. From

left: producer
Carl Foreman,
director J. Lee

Thompson,
actors James

Darren,

Gregory

Peck, Anthony
Quinn, Stanley
Baker and
David Niven,
and Morris.

I would put the newspaper up

and carry on reading." The film's
studio sets were constructed with a

washed-out, soft, pastel colors. In
those days, they had to knock the
contrast

order

to

down for television." In
retain

a

hard

edge and

strong blacks in the image for Moby
Dick, a black-and-white register was

incorporated in the final printing.
In addition to these experi¬
mental color productions, Morris
was also developing his skills in
black-and-white. Prior to the 1950s,
British
to

be

cameramen were

considered

specialists in either color

black-and-white, but

now

or

the chal¬

lenge was versatility. With the intro¬
duction

systems,

of

various

cinematographers also had

be

feature The Man Who Never Was,
directed

to Rome to
master

by Neame. The connection

work with the Italian

fourth wall to create a greater sense of

spatial reality for the actors.
This achievement led

of neorealism, Vittorio De

Tony

Richardson to invite Morris to shoot

Sica,

on

Stazioni
Termini
(Indiscretion). Producer David O.

Look

Selznick

was

Entertainer, two films that ushered in

unhappy with the

way

his wife, Jennifer Jones, and her co-

being
photographed, and Morris was given
the task of shooting all of the closeups. (The problem was that De Sica
star,

Montgomery Clift,

and his

cameraman,

were

G.R. Aldo,

were

using a 30mm lens for everything,
resulting in unflattering distortion in
the close-ups.)
Rather

widescreen

adept at using different picture
formats. Morris's first experience
with CinemaScope was on the 1955
to

with Huston led Morris to be invited

Knave

more demanding was
of Hearts, directed by Rene

Clement of France. This minor clas¬
sic features

some

innovative location

cinematography, including shots of
leading actors Gerard Philippe and
Joan Greenwood that were captured

Back

a new wave

in

Anger and

of hard-edged,

The

working-

class realism in British cinema. The

last few years

before black-and-white
cinematography was effectively
eclipsed by color proved to be partic¬
ularly creative for Morris. In 1961, he
photographed Stanley Kubrick's
acclaimed adaptation of Vladimir
Nabokov's Lolita, starring James
Mason, Peter Sellers and Sue Lyon;
Morris's work gives this story of a
relationship between a middle-aged
man and a young girl an appropri¬
ately romantic quality tinged with an
underlying sense of corruption.
Even more impressive is The
Hill, a tough and gritty World War II
drama set in a British prison camp in
North Africa, directed by Sidney
Lumet and featuring an all-male cast
led by Sean Connery. While shooting
on

location in Almeria in southern

Spain, Morris adopted

a boldly
experimental approach to the visu¬
als, underexposing the film by a stop
during shooting and compensating
in the

developing to produce a suit¬
ably hard and brittle look. "We used
no fill
lights, so you couldn't see the
eyes of some of the actors," he
explains. "The windows burned out,
and the sand

42 March 2000

was

hot and

overex-
American Cinematographer - March 2000

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