Don Haldane; Pioneer director made Drylanders, the NFB's first feature in English
Hyfler/Rosner
Pioneer director made Drylanders, the NFB's first feature in
English
Using his documentary experience, he created a fictional
saga about the Canadian West that is considered something of
a classic. He later made the series Forest Rangers, films
for Disney and founded his own studio
SANDRA MARTIN
November 8, 2008
A pioneer in Canadian film, Don Haldane was one of our most
prolific directors and producers. Best known for Drylanders,
the National Film Board's first English-language feature,
Mr. Haldane also made hundreds of documentaries, directed
dozens of television series and made scores of industrial
films. If you wanted to film the building of the CN Tower,
recreate the discovery of the Copper Mountain ore deposit in
the Gaspé, savour the experience of riding the rails across
Canada with the Discovery Train or delight in the cultural
and architectural promise of Expo 67, then he was your man.
Mr. Haldane cast a young Gordon Pinsent as RCMP Sergeant
Brian Scott in the children's television series Forest
Rangers back in the early sixties. "I was your Mountie, I
served and protected," Mr. Pinsent said yesterday. Over the
years, the two men became friends in the tiny Canadian film
community.
"I don't know what was going on inside him, whether he ever
got churned up or stressed, but he was such a friendly man
as a director," said Mr. Pinsent. "He had a constant twinkle
in his eye and because he was relaxed, you were relaxed."
Describing Mr. Haldane's style as casual and affable, Mr.
Pinsent said he always gave actors plenty of room to explore
and enlarge their own interpretations. "It didn't matter if
the moments were stretching for others, they were certainly
not stretching for Don, but it never showed in his work. He
got the work done and got it done beautifully."
Mr. Haldane made Canadian film history when he was hired to
direct Drylanders with music by Eldon Rathburn and narration
by William Weintraub. Building on his documentary
experience, Mr. Haldane created a fictional saga about the
Canadian West, tracing the travails of a family moving to
the Prairies a couple of years after Saskatchewan's entry to
Confederation in 1905. Staring Frances Hyland as Liza Greer
and James B. Douglas as her husband Dan, the film follows
their lives as homesteaders, battling scorching summers and
bitter winters as they doggedly harvest the land, achieve
prosperity in the 1920s and succumb to the desperation of
drought and the Depression of the 1930s.
Forty years later, Mr. Douglas still remembers the
excitement of being cast as the lead in his first feature
film. Drylanders was shot on location in Swift Current,
Sask., in 1961 with the cast and crew housed in the local
Skyline Motel. Ironically, considering the film's storyline,
there was a drought in Saskatchewan at the time, all of
which gave the crew a powerful thirst as they retired to the
motel after a day's shooting.
Looking at the previous day's footage every morning was an
"incredible experience for a young actor," because Mr.
Haldane, "one of the most brilliant of our early directors"
would point out quirks and give him acting tips. "If you
look at that film now, you can see that I am getting better
as I go along," said Mr. Douglas, who went on to appear in
at least a dozen industrial films for Mr. Haldane's
Westminster Films.
Donald Alexander Haldane, the only child of William Haldane
and Anne Langill, was born in Edmonton four months after the
outbreak of the First World War. His mother was a
schoolteacher and his father a soldier. Shortly after her
son's birth, she took a job in a one-room school house in
Hainstock, a small community near Olds in southern Alberta.
That's where mother and son spent the next five years, while
William Haldane was overseas as an infantryman with the
Canadian Expeditionary Force. He had a viciously bloody war
and came home shell-shocked and alcoholic in 1919. He was
never much good at earning a living after that, or at being
a father to his only son.
Don went to primary school in Olds, then Camrose Normal
School, where he excelled as a defenceman on the local
hockey team and seriously thought about dropping out of
school to play professionally. His mother put an end to that
notion, at least until he had a high-school diploma.
Nevertheless, he was a desultory student until drama was
made an elective part of the Grade 9 curriculum.
The woman behind the change was Elizabeth Sterling Haynes, a
co-founder of the Banff School of Fine Arts (now the Banff
Centre for the Arts), and Alberta's provincial drama
specialist. Part of her job was to encourage and coach local
drama groups. At Olds High School, she cast Don in a small
part in James M. Barrie's A Kiss for Cinderella and, a few
years later, gave him the lead in George Bernard Shaw's Arms
and the Man. When his performance received a rave in the
Olds Gazette, he hung up his skates, according to his
memoir.
After high school, he trained as a teacher, taught for three
years at Sundre School, and attended the Banff School of
Fine Arts for six weeks in the summers of 1936 and 1937.
That's where he came in contact again with Mrs. Haynes, his
drama mentor. She encouraged him to apply to the Yale Drama
School, which he did with her endorsement, winning a place
as a special student because he didn't have the prerequisite
undergraduate degree.
He arrived in New Haven, Conn., in late September, 1938, and
spent the next three years majoring in direction under such
greats as Theodore Komisarjevsky and Otto Preminger. After
watching Mr. Haldane's direction of Chekhov's The Marriage
Proposal, Mr. Preminger delivered a bankable piece of advice
in his thick Austrian accent: If you are directing a comedy,
make sure you cast actors who have a sense of humour.
After Yale, he moved back to Canada, where he got a job
working as an actor and stage manager at the Lakeshore
Summer Theatre in Lachine, Que. When the weather turned and
the theatre closed, he found work in all sorts of jobs from
demolition to selling china at Eaton's. Serendipitously, he
was walking down the street one day in Montreal when his
shoelace came untied. Bending over, he ripped a crucial seam
in his pants and noticed an establishment across the street
called Trott the Tailor. Mr. Trott, whose first name was
Bill, and his wife, Marion, were significant players in the
black artistic community in Montreal.
By the time Mr. Haldane had climbed back into his repaired
trousers, he had agreed to start a theatre company called
The Negro Theatre Guild. He directed and produced Marc
Connelly's The Green Pastures, which played at Victoria Hall
in Westmount before moving to His Majesty's Theatre (now
defunct) on Guy Street, as a fundraiser for the Kinsmen's
Club's Milk for Britain Fund. Later, this troupe won several
awards, including prizes at the Dominion Drama Festival for
its production of Eugene O'Neill's The Emperor Jones.
These were treacherous times, so Mr. Haldane enlisted in the
Canadian Army in 1942, hoping to be posted to a service
entertainment group. Instead, he was sent to Camp Borden in
Ontario as a private in an infantry unit. After 18 months in
the army, he was bored with marching and transferred to the
Royal Canadian Air Force. He qualified as an air gunner,
with the rank of Pilot Officer, but was never shipped
overseas.
In the late forties, he married Lee Gordon, a young woman he
had met while he was stationed at Camp Borden. They both
worked in the film business in New York, although he did
have one assignment in New Mexico, where he directed a group
of films on the Navaho and Pueblo Indians. He also got a gig
as a commercial filmmaker for industry and chambers of
commerce, a role that saw him travel to more than 100 U.S.
cities and towns at a production rate of a film a week -
experience that would later be useful in the quick
turnaround schedules of live television.
After making films in the United States for several years,
including a job as dialogue coach-associate producer for
celebrated Montreal stripper Lili St. Cyr in a low-budget
movie set in Miami, Mr. Haldane was hired by Grant McLean in
1954 to make a documentary film about the Montreal Fire
Department for the National Film Board. That was the
beginning of his long career with the NFB, directing films
for the On the Spot/Sur le vif and Perspective series, such
as Alcoholism (1955), Case of Conscience (1956),
Saskatchewan Traveller (1956) and Fires of Envy (1957). He
worked on nearly half of the 26 programs in the Perspective
series.
In the late fifties, with his wife and British filmmaker Roy
Krost, Mr. Haldane set up a company in Toronto called
Westminster Films, named after the famous school in London,
which Mr. Krost had attended. Essentially, they were
filmmakers for hire, making movies for children, industry -
Noranda, INCO, CN, Expo 67 and Museums Canada were among
their clients - and charities, including fundraising
vehicles for the Hospital for Sick Children and the Canadian
Cancer Society. At the same time, Mr. Haldane accepted
freelance directing assignments. Over the years, he directed
episodes of many television series, including The
Beachcombers, The Campbells, The Edison Twins and The Forest
Rangers with Mr. Pinsent.
And he kept his links with the NFB, directing films such as
Canadians Abroad, about expatriates including Mordecai
Richler and Jean-Paul Riopelle. It was through a NFB
directing assignment that he met his second wife, Monica
Dudley. Born in England and trained at the Guildhall School
of Music and Drama in London, she had married a Canadian
Army officer near the end of the war and subsequently moved
to Canada. By the mid-fifties, she was divorced and running
the Lancaster Theatre Company in Vancouver, when Mr. Haldane
showed up on assignment from the NFB to make a film about
her company. Immediately entranced, he courted her for the
next seven years, until he and his first wife finally
divorced. He and Monica were married in the Caribbean early
in 1963 and their son Jonathan was born later that year.
Like most filmmakers, Mr. Haldane longed to work on features
and he got his chance with Nikki, Wild Dog of The North for
Walt Disney Productions in 1961. Catering to a family
audience, the film, which was written by Jean-Marc Rocher,
was a Jack Londonesque tale about a half-dog, half-wolf
named Nikki. She becomes separated from her owner and must
fend off bears and a trapper who wants her pelt, while
surviving the ferocious Yukon winter.
From the beginning of his career, Mr. Haldane was committed
to improving pay and working conditions for people in the
film business. In 1948, while in New York, he joined the
local chapter of the Directors Guild of America, but quit
after failing to persuade union executives to follow his
suggestions. Subsequently, he helped establish the Screen
Directors International Guild. After returning to Canada in
the late fifties, he became a founding member of the
Directors Guild of Canada. The Guild gave him its
Distinguished Service Award in 2003, a Lifetime Achievement
Award two years later and renamed the DSA Award in his
honour in 2007.
DON HALDANE
Donald Alexander Haldane was born Dec. 3, 1914, in Edmonton.
He died in Toronto General Hospital after surgery for colon
cancer on Sept. 21, 2008. He was 93. He is survived by his
wife Monica, his son Jonathan, his grandson Aiden and
extended family.
MWB
> Over the years, he directed
> episodes of many television series, including The Beachcombers, The
> Campbells, The Edison Twins and The Forest Rangers with Mr. Pinsent.
>
I grew up watching these shows.
http://www.geocities.com/forestrangers1965/index.html
It's obvious I have some serious problems. I remember The Forest Rangers was
sponsered by Maybaline....not that there's any thing wrong with that.
Every time they were going to jump out of a plane to fight a fire there was
a message from Maybaline.
GOD BLESS CANADA
GO FRIENDLY GIANT
Mark
davidmc...@gmail.com
David Uri
wrote:
nothing, in reply to a 2008 post from Mike.
Regards.
--
David Uri.
Please visit my town - http://allezblancs.miniville.fr
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