In the course of researching this blog post today I learned something quite remarkable, that “legendary” Australian cinematographer Robert Krasker, BSC had actually “brilliantly” photographed half of one of the most beloved and famous films of the 1940s “Golden Age of British Cinema”, David Lean’s Great Expectations.
I had followed a reference in Kevin Brownlow’s book David Lean: A Biography that led to an audio interview with cameraman Nigel (Bob) Huke published at the British Entertainment History Project – “the largest single oral history archive of professionals from the UK’s Film, TV, Radio and Theatre industries“.
The revelation about the extent and nature of Robert Krasker’s involvement in the cinematography for Great Expectations is contained in the third part of a the interview, also referred by the History Project to as Side Three:
He now moves on to work on Great Expectations with Bobbie [Robert] Krasker, who is taken off the picture to be replaced by Guy Green [Interview No 233] He talks about the work on that film. … He then goes on to work with Bobbie Krasker on It Always Rains on Sundays.
I have listened to Side Three of the Bob Huke interview a couple of times now and will try to obtain full transcripts of the Huke, Green and Neame interviews Brownlow refers to in his David Lean book, and publish them here at The Robert Krasker Project.
Meanwhile here are the relevant pages and quotes from David Lean: A Biography of the Director of Doctor Zhivago, The Bridge Over the River Kwai, and Lawrence of Arabia, by Kevin Brownlow:
David Lean: A Biography …, Great Expectations, pages 213 and 214
The light on the marshes, and the problems with matching shots, together with the moods of the Thames estuary – one day as calm as a millpond, the next a surging ocean – resulted in several re-shot scenes and the firing of David’s cameraman, Robert Krasker. David remembered this situation with some embarrassment.
“You have to cast technicians as you cast actors,” he said. “Bob Krasker had photographed BRIEF ENCOUNTER and I took him on GREAT EXPECTATIONS. But I was devastated by the first two or three lots of rushes because the photography hadn’t got the guts I wanted for Dickens. It’s no good having those outsize characters, convicts and crooks and God knows who, in polite lighting. It doesn’t work. If you’re going to do Dickens you have to have very strong photography, black shadows and brilliant highlights. Bob’s rushes were flat and uninteresting.”
David told him that what he was doing seemed little different to BRIEF ENCOUNTER and that it needed to be “much more daring, huge great black shadows, great big highlights – over the top.”
Krasker was a brilliant cameraman, on that everyone agreed. Part of his trouble was the fact that he was shooting on the Medway in misty conditions which were bound to register low in contrast. But he had done exteriors in sunlight, and they, too, had disappointed David.
Ronald Neame, himself a former cameraman, also believed that Krasker was not on top of his form. Neame suggested that Krasker could resign because of ‘ill health’ and Guy Green would be hired to replace him. David said to Neame, “Well, can you arrange it?”
“It was one of the most awful things I’ve ever had to do in my life and as the producer I had to do it,” said Neame. “I said, ‘David and I feel we should make a change. I know it won’t affect your career and we’ll do it very quietly and discreetly.’ But obviously, Bob was very upset. To be taken off a film is a terrible thing.”17
“I felt very badly about the situation,” said David. “Guy Green had been operator with me on several pictures and I thought he was exceptionally good. He had done part of a film for Carol Reed [THE WAY AHEAD] and I took a huge gamble and said, ‘Will you take over?’ He did and won the Oscar for it.
“And then I saw THE THIRD MAN, which Bob Krasker photographed, and I thought, ‘Oh my God, what a terrible mistake I made. What an injustice.’ Carol got it out of him later, because it was wonderfully photographed, all the contrast and guts he didn’t have on GREAT EXPECTATIONS.”
Guy Green was working on a film directed by Stanley Haynes called CARNIVAL.
“David saw some of the rushes and said, ‘That’s what I want.’ That’s how I got involved,” said Guy Green. “But Bob Krasker was a wonderful cameraman. I don’t know what went wrong, maybe it was a personality thing.” 18
Guy Green exceeded everyone’s hopes. He insists that his lighting was straightforward but he cannot satisfactorily explain how he achieved some of the most impressive black-and-white photography ever seen.
“It was a bit like painting, except that you start with a black piece of paper instead of white. What was exciting for me about black and white photography was making the actors come out of it – stereoscopically. I played the dark against the light all the time. Whenever the actors moved, the down side would always be silhouetted a bit. It got to be plastic somehow.
“There was a wonderful word called gamma, which meant the contrast factor of film. Many people used to put too much light on and it would always come out flat. I evolved the idea of using very little light and from very few directions. And I insisted they developed the negative to the proper gamma, so I got this rich black and white feeling. David was very complimentary about it. ‘I love it,’ he said, ‘because you put light on the actors and you can see them properly.’ It was true; in half the movies I see today I can’t see the actor’s faces and it drives me up the wall.
“The final result was partly John Bryan, partly David and partly old Charles Dickens.”
Although Bob Huke, who remained as camera operator after Krasker left the picture, grew to admire Green’s work, he said that much of the inspiration came from David.
“He talked to us about the photographic style. He said, for instance, when we shot the children, we would use 35mm lenses, and 24mm, which was the widest lens in those days. Even on close-ups we’d use the 35mm, so the set around them would seem so much bigger. But when we shot them when they’re grown-ups, we’d use longer lenses, 50mm and 75mm. So it was exactly the same set, but it was a vast, cavernous, shadowy place when they were kids, and it was a dreary, dirty, run-down house when they were adults.
“David had this fantastic ability, when discussing scenes or when he was blocking them, to find something extra to put in there that wasn’t in the script. He wanted to add something, to improve it. Sometimes he’d become quite desperate when he couldn’t find anything…” 19
The scene concerning old Miss Havisham – whose life is frozen at the moment of rejection, and who lives in her wedding dress, still seated at the dust-enshrouded wedding table – was a triumph of inspired art direction and cinematography.
…
Source Notes
Where a source note refers to an interview conducted by the author, the interviewee’s name is followed by the page number from the transcript of that interview. …
17 Ronald Neame, p.87.
18 Guy Green, p.12.
19 Bob Huke, p.2.
Robert Krasker had first worked with David Lean on Brief Encounter but after Great Expectations the two never worked together again. Dr Falk Schwarz writes in Farbige Schatten – Der Kameramann Robert Krasker that (in my initial translation from German to English):
There is no evidence that Lean and Krasker clashed during filming. Also strange is the fact that Krasker seamlessly chose David Lean’s rival, Carol Reed: as if the change had been planned beforehand.
Life can only be experienced in the moment and only understood in hindsight. Krasker never worked with Lean or Neame again. If Lean had continued to trust him, he might have had a global hit like Lawrence of Arabia, but not a global hit like The Third Man.
…
When Carol Reed heard that one of the top young people in motion picture photography had just been fired by his colleague, he immediately hired Krasker on Odd Man Out, which was also to be filmed at Denham Studios and was starting at the same time. Krasker was allowed to watch the film that he wasn’t permitted to make being shot in the studio next door, while wall to wall he photographed a film that he wasn’t initially supposed to make.
If Lean had not “sacked” Krasker from Great Expectations, might the two have gone on to work together in other films including Lawrence of Arabia?
Krasker grew up in Denham in Shark Bay, in a town sandwiched between the laser-beam sunlit sandy deserts of Western Australia and the scintillating light bouncing off the waterfront shallows of the Indian Ocean across from his home at 25 Knight Terrace, might the Australian have made an even better job of photographing Lawrence of Arabia?
David Lean: A Biography …, Brief Encounter, pages 198 and 759
Even when she [Celia Johnson] returned to what she described as “the awful factory dreariness of Denham [Buckinghamshire],” she continued to enjoy herself. She liked David and the other members of the unit, such as cameraman Robert Krasker, 15 and the feeling of victory was in the air.
While Carnforth Station was used for establishing shots, most of the film was shot at Denham studios. Exteriors were filmed in nearby Beaconsfield and, for the boating scene, at Regent’s Park in London.
…
15 Robert Krasker had succeeded Ronald Neame as cameraman. Born in Perth, Australia, in 1913, his parents came from France and Austria. Krasker had been camera operator to the great Georges Perinal on Korda’s REMBRANDT, THE FOUR FEATHERS and THE THIEF OF BAGDAD.
Once I have the full transcripts of the Nigel (Bob) Huke, Guy Green and Ronald Neame interview transcripts in hand I will publish them here at The Robert Krasker Project, but I will see if I can do a partial transcript of Side 3 of the Huke interview the old-fashioned way by ear and hand and will share it on this page in the meantime.
Meanwhile please feel free to do your own listening.
Fact Checks
- “Born in Perth, Australia, in 1913” – Robert Krasker was born on 21 August 1913 in Alexandria, Egypt while on a stopover there to visit relatives during a business trip from Western Australia to Europe and back and his birth was registered in Perth, Western Australia on their return in early 1914.
- “his parents came from France and Austria” – Leon and Mathilde Krasker née Rubel were born respectively in Tulcea in Romania and Chernivtsi, now in Ukraine but formerly in Austria. Child refugees from the pogroms in eastern Europe, they were raised and educated in Paris, met and married there then after living in Hackney, London, moved to Subiaco in Perth and Denham in Shark Bay, Western Australia.
Links
- Australian Dictionary of Biography – Robert (Bob) Krasker (1913–1981) – “By this time considered to be among the front rank of cinematographers, he shot the celebrated Brief Encounter (1945), scripted by (Sir) Noël Coward and directed by (Sir) David Lean. This film was as sensitive and small scale in black-and-white as Henry V had been epic and celebratory in colour: Krasker was equally accomplished in both genres. The association with Lean ended mortifyingly when the director fired him from Great Expectations (1946), claiming that his work was ‘too polite’ and that he wanted something ‘harder’. Krasker’s memorable rendering of the film’s opening graveyard scenes remains, however, an indication of what might have been.”
- BBC News – Entertainment: Charles Crichton: A legend of British film – “Movies such as these marked Crichton out as a genius of the era, capturing exactly the mood of the times. Hollywood soon beckoned, but his career suffered a setback in 1962 when he was forced to quit the set of Birdman of Alcatraz after a row with the star, Burt Lancaster.” – Robert Krasker, BSC was apparently Crichton’s pick for Director of Photography on Birdman of Alcatraz.
- BBC News – Entertainment: Best 100 British films – full list – “1 The Third Man (1949, Carol Reed), 2 Brief Encounter (1945, David Lean),
5 Great Expectations (1946, David Lean), 18 Henry V (1944, Laurence Olivier) ” – Robert Krasker, BSC photographed four films on this list. - BECTU History Project – Guy Green
- BECTU History Project – Nigel (Bob) Huke – “Interview notes: He [Huke] now moves on to work on Great Expectations with Bobbie [Robert] Krasker, who is taken off the picture to be replaced by Guy Green [Interview No 233] He talks about the work on that film. He also talks about ‘package deals’ and money. There is an amusing story concerning David Lean/Merrill White and Phil Samuels. He then goes on to work with Bobbie Krasker on It Always Rains on Sunday. He then goes on to talk about Cavalcanti’s Brazil project.” – Fact Check: Douglas Slocombe was the Director of Photography for It Always Rains on Sundays but Robert Krasker and Bob Huke did extra cinematography for the film after principal photography had wrapped, according to Huke. Neither Krasker nor Huke were credited for their work on the film. Both then went on to work on Uncle Silas aka The Inheritance.
- BECTU History Project – Ronald Neame
- IMDb – Brief Encounter
- IMDb – David Lean (1908-1991)
- IMDb – Great Expectations
- IMDb – Guy Green (1913-2005)
- IMDb – It Always Rains on Sunday
- IMDb – Robert Huke (1920-2002)
- IMDb – The Inheritance, original title Uncle Silas
- Internet Archive – An autobiography of British cinema: as told by the filmmakers and actors who made it, by Brian McFarlane, 1997
- Internet Archive – David Lean: A Biography of the Director of Doctor Zhivago, The Bridge Over the River Kwai, and Lawrence of Arabia, by Kevin Brownlow, 1997
- Wikipedia – BFI Top 100 British films – “1, The Third Man, 1949, Carol Reed; 2, Brief Encounter, 1945, David Lean; … 5, Great Expectations, 1946, David Lean” – Robert Krasker, BSC photographed three out of the ten BFI Top 100 British Films, surveyed in 1999 – numbers 1, 2 and 5.
The Robert Krasker Project 