RIP Jack Cardiff

The best film I’ve seen all year is “A Matter of Life and Death”.  Released in 1946, it marked an artistic high point in both the collaboration of writer/directors Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger and British cinema in general.  Set at the tail end of WWII its story of a RAF pilot pleading for his life in a celestial court has many of the trappings of Hollywood fantasies of the period but few of the cloying, sentimental excesses.  Conceived and designed as a piece of propaganda to ease tensions between the United Kingdom and visiting American servicemen the execution transcends this agenda, taking on big questions about love, mortality and fate in a quirky, uniquely British manner.

Not the least of “A Matter of Life and Death”’s strengths is its cinematography.  Michael Powell always resisted doing the obvious so rather than following the likes of “The Wizard of Oz” by rendering his after life in colour and ‘reality’ in black and white he insisted on the opposite.  The man he charged with this task, the director of photography, was Jack Cardiff.  Cardiff died a fortnight ago, aged 94.

Active until almost the end of his life, Cardiff contributed commentary on most of the Powell and Pressburger DVD releases of the last few years.  A camera operator on their 1943 film “The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp” he was promoted to the top job on “A Matter of Life and Death” and subsequently won an Oscar for his brilliant colour work on “Black Narcissus” (1947), a movie whose technical challenges were considerable given that it was set in the Himalayas but shot entirely in a London studio.

Other career highlights for Cardiff as a cinematographer include Powell & Pressburger’s masterpiece “The Red Shoes” (1948), Alfred Hitchcock’s underrated “Under Capricorn” (1949), Joseph L Mankiewicz’s “The Barefoot Contessa” (1954), and a miraculous example of technicolour photography in the most arduous of locations, John Huston’s “The African Queen” (1951).  Cardiff was also, allegedly, Marilyn Monroe’s favourite director of photography, establishing a rapport with the often grumpy goddess during  filming of the Laurence Olivier directed play adaptation “The Prince and the Showgirl” (1957).

Of course as a working professional Cardiff’s credits also include a lot of crap.  It is a depressing thought that his special talent was employed to shoot the likes of “The Wicked Lady” (1983), “Conan The Destroyer” (1984) and, most disgracefully, “Rambo: First Blood, Part II” (1985).  History does not record whether Sly Stallone held Cardiff in the same high esteem as the divine Marilyn.

Cardiff also dabbled in direction, co-helming John Ford’s last decent film “Young Cassidy” (1965) and having a cult hit with the psychedelic Marianne Faithful vehicle “Girl on a Motorcycle” (1968).  His most distinguished effort as a filmmaker was “Sons and Lovers” (1960), a moody, atmospheric DH Lawrence adaptation that gets closer to spirit of the great writer than any other.