[…]ut the First World War about young men going off and not coming back. PB-C: Yes. No this was the Second World War, but about a chap who had been shell-shocked in the First World War. DB: Ah. PB-C: It proved to me how difficult in some ways directing must be, for Directors because, I w[…]
[…] be firing all night like that in terrible conditions, the guns, all used to have a run ration. The ROM ration used to be the top of our three, seven shell cap, which is quite deep. It's quite a good ration. Now. Very unofficially, as none of my boys drink, drank, I used to send over a bottle to the[…]
[…] all arranged. In other words Beddington wanted, he had had a very narrow experience of film-making.  He had been Director of Publicity for Shell you see, and there was a Shell unit. And I think Beddington could only think really in terms of his own experience of film-making which was tota[…]
[…] millimetre in 1937 was a rich man's toy. We looked upon it as an amateur - you wouldn't even consider it in cinemas, you know - "16 mil. - pah!" But Shell were using it already, they were making a lot of their documentaries and I think my father realised it might be going that way. So the film with[…]
[…]y Roy Clark, who's a well known TV writer and he wrote it for Alec Guiness read the script. And there was another part in in the in the script that a shell shocked war veteran they only had two lines to say in the whole film. And he said I would like to play that part. It wasn't written for him that[…]
[…]used to live in er Churchill Street Gardens yeah, hmm. Peter Baylis, I liked Peter, I got on well with him and he and D'Arcy Cartwright who went into Shell Film Unit - D'Arcy.Alan Lawson: Yes.Leonard Harris: The others I don't think they ever came into the industry at all, I can't remember. And then[…]
[…] And if you read your history, and this can be confirmed, Himmler was there, and we had to, first of all, clear their breakfast table, where their eggshells were still been left, we were that near. In and that, of course, Lubeck at the end of the road was the Russian frontier, Bucha, Russian frontie[…]
[…]o Chatham and so on. And anyhow, this film was made and it was called Ship Safety and it was the idea to show that when you had a collision or when a shell penetrated the thing, the best thing is to shut the compartment door so that the ship...the water was contained to that particular section. And […]
[…]nd one for America. In England she had long hair and a sort of tape to her breasts, but for America she had to have a huge pair of bras full of cockleshells as a bra! [Laughing]Charles Drazin: And so you would play the scene twice, the American scene and the English scene?Manny Yospa: Oh yes, hmm.Ch[…]
