Roy Ward Baker RIP

Roy Ward Baker
Roy Ward Baker, who died on October 5 aged 93, made A Night to Remember, the classic 1950s film about the sinking of the Titanic; was instrumental in making Marilyn Monroe a Hollywood icon; and fell out with Dirk Bogarde.

08 Oct 2010

During the 1950s, Baker was responsible for a string of popular successes, including Morning Departure (1950) and The One That Got Away (1957). A Night to Remember (1958), though, was the highlight of his career. A faithful depiction of the drama, heroism and horror of the sinking of the Titanic, shot in black and white, with a script by Eric Ambler and containing historical footage of the ill-fated ocean liner, it demonstrated Baker's aptitude for creating claustrophobic atmosphere and won a Golden Globe for best foreign English language film in 1959.

Before filming started, Baker watched every previous cinema version of the Titanic story, observing that most were romantic fantasies that used the liner merely as background (a view he later took of James Cameron's 1997 blockbuster Titanic).

For A Night to Remember Baker and the producer, William MacQuitty, insisted on authenticity and historical accuracy, with interiors and exteriors of the ship modelled on contemporary plans and illustrations, and a 300ft section of the vessel's port side constructed in a field at Pinewood.

Baker flew to Bermuda to persuade the actor Kenneth More, filming The Admirable Crichton there, to star as Second Officer Charles Lightoller; having recently taken the role of the legless war hero Douglas Bader in Reach for the Sky (1956), More was one of the most popular screen idols of the day with an appealing "never say die" image. For Baker's new picture, More headed a huge cast of 92 speaking parts and some 1,500 extras.

Teaming Baker with MacQuitty and Ambler was fortuitous because all three had moved from making sombre wartime documentaries into commercial feature film production, bringing with them the values of stoicism and emotional restraint; the notion of duty; and concern with the predicament of ordinary people under stress.

A Night to Remember placed Baker in the first rank of directors outside Hollywood, and confirmed him, in the opinion of the film historian Professor Jeffrey Richards, as "one of the unsung auteurs of British cinema". For his part, Baker declared A Night to Remember to be "my best film and my favourite film".

Choreographing the icebergs on a Pinewood backlot was child's play compared with directing Marilyn Monroe for Twentieth Century Fox in Don't Bother to Knock (1952), a melodrama about a mentally deranged babysitter. Baker was not happy when he discovered that the aspiring starlet had been chosen to play the lead. He did not know much about her, and the little he had seen left him with no illusions about her talents as an actress. Moreover, he felt that, at 25, she was too old for the part, which was supposed to be for a 19-year-old girl.

The experience of directing her turned out to be even worse than he had feared. Marilyn Monroe would go nowhere without her drama coach, Natasha Lytess, who would stand beside the camera, grasping her abdomen and growling: "It comes from here!"

Baker became so frustrated by her interference that he persuaded the studio head, Darryl Zanuck, to dispatch a memo to the star which read: "You have built up a Svengali, and if you are going to progress with your career and become as important talent-wise as you have publicity-wise, then you must destroy this Svengali before it destroys you."

When it came to shooting the film, Baker decided that the best tactic was to promote Monroe not as an actress, but as a celebrity who did not need to act. The tactic worked. The film became a box office hit and made Marilyn Monroe a household name.

But Baker's life as a director was rudely interrupted after The Singer Not the Song (1961), an unintentionally high camp Western based on a novel by Audrey Erskine Lindop. The film, which Baker directed for Rank studios, detailed an intense relationship between a bandit (Dirk Bogarde) and an Irish Roman Catholic priest (John Mills).

Baker never wanted to direct it, suggesting the studio gave the job to Luis Bunuel; but Rank insisted and Baker found himself being dispatched to Spain with Bogarde. Bogarde, too, had been reluctant to make the film and, as he was the only star of any standing whom Rank had on their books for such a role, he used his position to insist on his own conditions and generally play the prima donna. The only matter on which Rank refused to budge was the casting of John Mills as the priest. "I promise you," Bogarde told Baker, "if Johnny plays the priest I will make life unbearable for everyone concerned."

He was, by Baker's account, as good as his word. "He was very nasty. Very nasty. Johnny didn't know what the hell was going on. He said, 'What's the matter with this fellow?' I said, 'He doesn't like you, that's the trouble.' He was determined to rough the whole thing up. And I had to do my best to restrain him."

Although it made money abroad – especially in Catholic countries – the picture was a costly flop in Britain, where reviewers were more interested in the cut of Dirk Bogarde's leather trousers than in the moral issues the film was trying to raise. It caused Rank to retreat into managing bingo halls and bowling alleys and helped to bring an end to the most successful period of Baker's career. In recent years the film's strong homosexual overtones have brought it cult status.

Roy Horace Ward Baker was born in London on December 19 1916 and educated in Rouen, France, and at the City of London School. As a boy he was fascinated by the wireless, and in 1934 he joined Gainsborough Pictures hoping to get a job in the sound department. Starting as a "gopher", he made tea for film crews, but soon worked his way up to production manager, location manager and was assistant director on Hitchcock's The Lady Vanishes (1938).

Baker was a commissioned officer during the war, but in 1943 became involved with the Army Kinematograph Service as a production manager and director on training and instructional films. During this time he met the novelist and screenwriter Eric Ambler, who became head of production for the unit.

Ambler had agreed to write and produce after the war a film for Two Cities, and requested that Baker direct it. The October Man (1947) – a taut, claustrophobic thriller about a man falsely accused of a crime – was the first of several collaborations between Baker and John Mills, who gave a compelling performance in the leading role.

Baker's next two films – The Weaker Sex (1948), a version of Esther McCracken's play about a family at war, and Paper Orchid (1949), a murder mystery set in the newspaper industry – were popular, but they were overshadowed by the success of Morning Departure (1950), also featuring John Mills. This film, about a submarine whose crew are trapped after it hits a mine, demonstrated Baker's skill at conveying tension in a confined setting.

Shortly after the film's completion, the crew of the submarine Truculent perished after their boat collided with a Dutch freighter on the Thames, and Baker partly attributed the success of the film to the fact that the Royal Navy approved it as a fitting tribute to those who had died. Other films in the early 1950s included Highly Dangerous (1951), a Cold War oddity in which bees are used as agents of biological warfare.

Morning Departure drew international attention to Baker's talent and prompted Darryl Zanuck to invite him to Hollywood, where he made Don't Bother to Knock (1952) and the 3D film noir Inferno (1953), starring Robert Ryan.

He returned to Britain for the latter part of the decade, working for Rank on Passage Home (1955), a moody nautical tale, and The One That Got Away (1957), a real-life story of a German PoW and serial escapee. Tiger in the Smoke (1956), about a group of embittered ex-servicemen, was a quirky, atmospheric thriller. Then came A Night to Remember (1958) and The Singer not the Song (1960). His last picture for Rank was Flame in the Streets (1961), adapted from Ted Willis's play, one of the first films to deal with racial issues.

For the next 25 years Baker worked in television, directing episodes of series such as The Avengers, The Saint, The Champions, The Persuaders and The Flame Trees of Thika.

His return to cinema in 1967 with Quatermass and the Pit began an association with Hammer studios. Other films for Hammer include The Anniversary (1967), a black comedy starring Bette Davis as a one-eyed malevolent matriarch; The Vampire Lovers (1970); Dr Jekyll and Sister Hyde (1971); and Scars of Dracula (1970). He also directed Asylum (1972) for Amicus.

Though he made his last feature film in 1980, he continued to work in television until the early 1990s on series such as The Irish RM and Minder. He retired in 1992.

In 2000 Baker published his memoirs, Director's Cut: A Memoir of 60 Years in Film, and in 2002 he sold his production files and letters at auction.

Roy Ward Baker married first, in 1940 (dissolved 1944), Muriel Bradford. With his second wife, Joan Dixon, whom he married in 1948 (dissolved 1987), he had a son.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/culture-obituaries/film-obituaries/8051801/Roy-Ward-Baker.html