I’ve read many times in the course of this research on Robert Krasker, BSC that the greatest year for feature films was 1939, when the young Australian was still undergoing his apprenticeship to French Director of Photography Georges Périnal as his camera operator at Alexander Korda’s London Film Productions in Denham, Buckinghamshire.
It wasn’t long afterwards that Robert Krasker became a Director of Photography in his own right and began receiving high praise for his work on major feature films like Henry V and Odd Man Out during the golden age of British filmmaking that encompassed the 1930s and 1940s.
Krasker’s reputation in Europe and the UK grew steadily when The Third Man was released there and then exponentially in the United States after he received an Oscar statuette for his work on The Third Man in 1951.
He soon became the go-to cinematographer for American producers and directors wanting to make movies in the more novel environs of Great Britain and the Continent.
Krasker offered them his unique multi-linguistic, multicultural, multinational background, his understanding of light forged in the laser-beam sunshine, jet-black shadows and rippling shallows of Denham in Shark Bay, his Parisian secondary-level schooling, and his French and German tertiary education in art and photography.
His early artistic and technical skills as demonstrated in Henry V’s Technicolor and The Third Man’s monochrome in the 1940s had matured by the 1960s as screens became wider and allowed for a different way of seeing that better reflected the deep spaces and wide horizons of his childhood’s shimmering seafronts and searing desert landscapes.
Billy Budd’s widescreen monochrome depicted shipboard intimacy against vast sea and sky, while its immediate predecessor El Cid pictured vast armies against painterly landscapes in lush 70mm Super Technirama Technicolor.
At the end of the studio era and before the full-blown emergence of the New Hollywood, 1962 stands out as a pivotal year in film history. Many movie buffs have anointed 1939—the year of Gone with the Wind and The Wizard of Oz—as the greatest in cinema history. Other critics have enshrined other years or decades as their personal favorites. But the honor should really belong to 1962, a single year that saw an explosion of provocative cinema that has never been equaled. Although 1939 may have been the golden year of the Hollywood studio era, with a plentiful number of high-quality entertainments, the output that year did not come close to matching the breadth and depth of movies released in 1962. …
Page 1, ‘Cinema ’62: The Greatest Year at the Movies’, by Stephen Farber and Michael McClellan, Rutgers University Press, New in Paperback edition, 15 March 2024, ISBN-10: 1978840721, ISBN-13: 978-1978840720, ASIN: B085727JF8.
Had David Lean not sacked Robert Krasker from Great Expectations after filming its often-praised outdoors opening sequence, might have the Australian DoP later teamed up with the English director for Lawrence of Arabia given his understanding of desert sands and laser-beam sunlight?
What had changed? In Hollywood, costs have risen astronomically, and so major studios produce fewer movies, a trend that was already emerging in the early 1960s. When the budgets are so high, risks are also going to be kept to a minimum. The reason that movies like Freud, Long Day’s Journey into Night, and Billy Budd got made in 1962 was that these “highbrow” projects didn’t represent much of a financial risk. The studios simply couldn’t go broke by produc- ing them. The prestige they accumulated by tackling these arty subjects was worth the minimal financial losses they might incur. …
Of course the peak of the year’s epic moviemaking was David Lean’s Oscar-winning masterpiece, Lawrence of Arabia.
Pages 5 and 6, ‘Cinema ’62: The Greatest Year at the Movies’, by Stephen Farber and Michael McClellan, Rutgers University Press, New in Paperback edition, 15 March 2024, ISBN-10: 1978840721, ISBN-13: 978-1978840720, ASIN: B085727JF8.
After filming Guns of Darkness in black and white for Anthony Asquith in the autumn of 1961, Krasker’s projects were shot only in colour with the much later exception of the Gertcha television commercial directed by Hugh Hudson.
In mid-October of Farber’s and McClellan’s “greatest year at the movies”, 1962, Director of Photography Robert Krasker, longtime Camera Operator John Harris and Director Anthony Mann flew to Los Angeles for a Panavision promotion then began filming Ultra-Panavision Technicolor epic The Fall of the Roman Empire in Spain, wrapping production in August of 1963.
Another reason to exhume Billy Budd is to appreciate the black-and-white cinematography of Robert Krasker, an Australian notable for his expressionistic black-and-white achievement on The Third Man in 1950. Ustinov and Allied Artists had been forced to economize by filming in monochrome, and the nautical scenes stand in sharp contrast to the lavish Technicolor of Mutiny on the Bounty. But Krasker’s expertly shot seascapes fit the smaller scale of Billy Budd. …
These Technicolor cinematic extravaganzas seemed the best cure for the industry’s ailing box office; they were designed to lure dwindling audiences away from their black-and-white television sets. MGM invested in an overseas remake of DeMille’s silent King of Kings (1961) by European producer Samuel Bronston (El Cid, The Fall of the Roman Empire) …
Page 142, ‘Cinema ’62: The Greatest Year at the Movies’, by Stephen Farber and Michael McClellan, Rutgers University Press, New in Paperback edition, 15 March 2024, ISBN-10: 1978840721, ISBN-13: 978-1978840720, ASIN: B085727JF8.
Had Robert Krasker’s health held up after shooting his third widescreen Technicolor epic with Anthony Mann, The Heroes of Telemark, might he have continued in that direction or taken a radical turn towards the new styles of filmmaking that were coming into play with the collapse of the traditional Hollywood studio system that followed on from 1962?
Alas, we’ll never know, and Krasker’s sudden medically-demanded exit from feature filmmaking after The Trap went some way towards ensuring his star would darken while many of his contemporaries took on the challenge of a new way of working in film and extended their stellar careers into the 1970s, 1980s and beyond to work with new generations of directors and different forms of storytelling.
The Robert Krasker Project 