Michael Relph; Independent obit
Hyfler/Rosner
Multi-talented film producer and set designer
02 October 2004
Michael Relph was a key figure of the British film industry
for over 40 years. Multi-talented, he was an art director,
scriptwriter and director, as well as the producer of such
classic films as Kind Hearts and Coronets and The Blue Lamp.
As a production designer, his work contributed to the
persuasive mood created by such films as Champagne Charlie
and Dead of Night, and his sumptuous designs for Saraband
for Dead Lovers won him an Oscar nomination.
In 1943 he worked for the first time with the director Basil
Dearden, and the two were to form a fertile
producing-directing team that was to last for nearly 30
years. Their films together included some of the most
trenchant and courageous of the era, such as Sapphire, which
dealt with racial prejudice, and Victim, the first
mainstream film to deal with homosexuality. For many years
Relph was Chairman of the British Film Institute Production
Board.
Born Michael Leighton George Relph in Broadstone, Dorset, in
1915, he was the son of the actor George Relph, who was
primarily a stage star but will be remembered on screen for
his portrayal of the train-mad vicar in The Titfield
Thunderbolt (1953). He was educated at Bembridge School, and
began his career in 1932 at the age of 17 as an assistant
art director at Gaumont-British, where he worked under the
man described by Michael Powell as "probably the greatest
art director that films have ever known", Alfred Junge. The
studio's head was Michael Balcon. "He was a friend of my
family," Relph told the historian Brian McFarlane, "so there
was a spot of nepotism involved."
He eventually moved to Warner Brothers at Teddington as art
director on Maurice Elvey's Who Killed John Savage? (1937),
and then had co-designing credit on two comedies directed by
Roy William Neill, the Max Miller vehicle Everything Happens
to Me and the Reginald Purdell/Claude Hulbert farce Many
Tanks, Mr Atkins (both 1938). Of the 30-plus films he
designed at Warners (mainly quota quickies), the most
distinguished film was Arthur Wood's They Drive By Night
(1939), a masterly thriller starring Emlyn Williams, its
powerful atmosphere due in part to the art department's
recreation of the nocturnal world of lorry drivers,
all-night roadhouse cafes and dingy apartments.
Relph had a simultaneous career as a set designer for the
West End theatre, starting with Arthur Macrae's Aldwych
farce Indoor Fireworks (1934). He was particularly prolific
during the Second World War years, fashioning sets for such
prestigious productions as Saloon Bar (1939), with Gordon
Harker, the revue Up and Doing (1940), John van Druten's Old
Acquaintance (1941) and two hit comedies, Quiet Wedding and
The Man Who Came To Dinner (both 1941).
Other credits included Watch on the Rhine and The Petrified
Forest (1942), Heartbreak House and They Came to a City
(1943), The Last Summer and Love in Idleness (1944), and The
Years Between (1945). Post-war credits included Frieda
(1946), September Tide (1948), Relative Values (1951) and
The White Carnation (1953).
In 1942 he joined Ealing Studios, where Michael Balcon was
now in charge:
I was very pleased to end up at Ealing, because Balcon had a
reputation for promoting people from the ranks, as it were,
and this encouraged me towards producing.
After working on My Learned Friend (1943), the last film of
the comedian Will Hay, he designed three films directed by
Basil Dearden. The Bells Go Down (1943) was a lively tribute
to the Auxiliary Fire Service, Halfway House (1944) an
intriguing ghost story, and They Came to a City (1944) an
adaptation of a work that Relph had already designed for the
theatre. His stylised sets for this static version of J.B.
Priestley's allegorical play helped keep interest alive in
the talkative piece. For Alberto Cavalcanti's Champagne
Charlie (1944) Relph convincingly recreated the world of the
Edwardian music hall, and the film was praised particularly
for its period detail.
Having created an eerily chilly hotel for Halfway House,
Relph provided perfect settings for the even more disturbing
portmanteau thriller Dead of Night (1945). Particularly
effective is the elaborate room of a past age that appears
so hauntingly in the cursed mirror of Robert Hamer's
sequence - one of the most unsettling ghost stories ever put
on film. Memorable too are the night-club and backstage
settings for the celebrated tale (directed by Cavalcanti) of
the ventriloquist who becomes possessed by his dummy.
Cavalcanti's Nicholas Nickleby (1946) was Relph's last film
solely as production designer. Cavalcanti had produced
Halfway House and had noted how well Relph and Dearden
worked together:
He thought I was a good influence on Basil, that I was able
to direct his amazing technical skills into the right
channels. So Cavalcanti suggested to Balcon that he should
team Basil and myself. Basil was a very easy person to work
with and I was able to convey any creative ideas I had
through him. We complemented each other, I think, and also
we loved making films.
(Relph's billing on most of their early films was as
associate producer, since Balcon, who would allow the team
to originate and develop projects, but had the final say on
everything, received production credit.)
Relph both designed and produced Dearden's moving drama The
Captive Heart (1946), with its convincing depiction of a
prisoner-of-war camp, then he produced Dearden's 1947
version of the play Frieda, which forcefully addressed the
attitudes of a middle-class British community to a German
war bride (Mai Zetterling).
It was followed by Saraband for Dead Lovers (1948), a lavish
account of the tragic love affair between Sophia Dorothea,
wife of George Louis of Hanover (later King George I) and
Count Philip Konigsmark. Relph both produced and co-designed
the movie, and won an Oscar nomination (with his
co-designers Jim Morohan and William Kellner) for colour art
direction and set decoration. "It was a magnificent-looking
film," said Relph,
but it wasn't a success at the time. We were trying to get
away from the Gainsborough-type costume picture, which was
totally unreal, and to do a serious historical epic. I think
the public probably wasn't ready for it and also it ended up
being a bit heavy. I was very pleased to get an Oscar
nomination for the set design. It was Ealing's first colour
film, shot on three-strip Technicolor, and was very
expensive for those days.
Relph then made the only Ealing film he produced without
Dearden, Robert Hamer's masterpiece, Kind Hearts and
Coronets (1948). With Hamer and John Dighton's deliciously
droll script, the tour de force of Alec Guinness in eight
roles, the superb central performance by Dennis Price, the
sparkling support from Valerie Hobson and Joan Greenwood,
and its immaculate production design, the film remains one
of the glories of British cinema.
After another portmanteau film, Train of Events (1949),
Dearden and Relph made one of their most popular films, The
Blue Lamp (1949), starring Jack Warner as PC Dixon, who is
cold-bloodedly murdered on the eve of his retirement by a
delinquent (Dirk Bogarde). Bogarde said,
It was the first of what we would call today cinéma vérité;
the first true, on-location, movie we ever made. I think
they built the policeman's flat but everything else was done
in Paddington Green police station and the White City
dog-racing track.
The Blue Lamp won the British Academy Award as best film of
the year, and was to inspire the later long-running
television series Dixon of Dock Green.
Cage of Gold (1950) was a more conventional melodrama but
benefited from Jean Simmons's central performance. Relph
said,
Some people at Ealing were inclined to make a film every
three years or so, waiting for the perfect subject for their
reputations. But we had a big staff working there and we had
to keep the studio going. Basil and I were always stepping
in with some subject or other. It mightn't have been the one
subject in the world we really wanted to make, but it kept
the studio working.
Pool of London (1951) was another film made primarily on
location, and was notable for its documentary-style footage
of the city's dockside, and for featuring a black actor
(Earl Cameron) as the most sympathetic character.
Relph received co-writing credit on I Believe in You (1951),
a look at the work of probation officers in which Joan
Collins had her first important screen role. His father,
George Relph, played a cameo in the film, though his son
later had some harsh words to say about stage acting of the
period:
The upper- or middle-class stage acting then looked
ridiculous on film, when you think of the realism that
people like Cagney were bringing to the cinema at the time.
My father was a distinguished stage actor and he always said
that British stage acting was an absolute killer as far as
film was concerned. British stage acting in the Thirties and
Forties was almost totally middle-class and it was just not
transferable to the screen.
The team's penchant for multi- storied vehicles was apparent
again in The Square Ring (1953), with its boxing-hall
setting, and Out of the Clouds (1955), set in a fog-bound
airport. Their final film for Ealing was The Ship That Died
of Shame (1955), in which former servicemen after the war
use their old gunboat for smuggling:
The ship, in a sense, represented what people had done with
the country they had inherited after the war.
With Ealing sold, the couple moved to MGM at Elstree, where
Relph made his directing début with Davy (1957) starring
Harry Secombe and described by Relph as "not very good". Its
writer, William Rose, told the team of an idea he had for a
story about a couple inheriting a run-down cinema, and the
result was one of their most popular films, The Smallest
Show on Earth (1957). Virginia McKenna and Bill Travers
played the couple, who also inherit a staff comprising a
drunken projectionist (Peter Sellers), an eccentric cashier
who was an organ player in the silent era (Margaret
Rutherford) and an aged doorman (Bernard Miles).
Relph then directed Rockets Galore (1958), "rather a silly
thing to do - to make a sequel to Whisky Galore!" He also
directed Desert Mice (1959), a film about the escapades of
an Ensa troupe during the war. It was originally entitled
Every Night Something Awful until cinema-chain executives
objected, saying it would be asking for trouble. With a fine
cast of comedy players including Dora Bryan, Sid James and
Irene Handl, it should have been funnier, but there was one
haunting moment when the troupe appear in full costume, as
if in a mirage, to troops in the middle of the desert. Relph
later said of his directing:
It always boiled down to my getting the subjects on which
Basil wasn't particularly keen. And I am not really
temperamentally cut out to be a director. A director has to
have an enormous amount of patience and the ability to take
detailed pains, and I find it very difficult to do that.
Signed to a contract by Rank, the team was to make four more
exceptional films. Sapphire (1959), an uncompromising murder
mystery, with the victim a half-black girl passing for
white, was a scathing assault on racial prejudice that won
the team their second British Academy Award. "It looks dated
now," Relph told McFarlane, "because of the changes in race
relations since then, but it was a good film at the time."
The League of Gentlemen (1960) was an enormously popular
caper comedy in which Jack Hawkins played an ex-army officer
masterminding a bank raid in military fashion. It was
followed by the controversial and brave attack on the
pre-Wolfenden laws at the time regarding homosexuality,
Victim (1961), starring Dirk Bogarde as a blackmailed
barrister:
I think he was very courageous to do it and so was Rank to
allow us to make it at that time, because Dirk was one of
their biggest assets.
Bogarde said,
It was the first time a man had said he was in love with
another man on the screen. It was not in the script. I wrote
that bit. I agreed to do the film on condition that we put
in a scene at the end where the man says to his wife that,
yes, he did love a boy. We then couldn't find anyone to play
the wife, until Sylvia Syms, bless her dear little heart,
finally said, "No problem."
The film not only proved a commercial success, but helped
Bogarde make the transition from matinée idol to serious
actor.
The following year Relph and Dearden tackled the subject of
religious fundamentalism in Life for Ruth (1962), the tale
of a sick girl whose father (Michael Craig) will not allow
her to be given a blood transfusion. When the child dies,
the agnostic doctor (Patrick McGoohan) presses manslaughter
charges on the father.
Dirk Bogarde starred for the team again in an offbeat tale
of sensory deprivation and espionage, The Mind Benders
(1963), but Woman of Straw (1964) was a mild thriller
despite the high- voltage teaming of Sean Connery and Gina
Lollobrigida. The team returned to form with Masquerade
(1965), a lively spy spoof with Jack Hawkins and Cliff
Robertson as Foreign Office officials trying to kidnap a
young prince from a country with vast oil deposits.
Relph went back to designing with the opulent settings for
The Assassination Bureau (1969), which he also produced and
co-wrote, a whimsically melodramatic Victorian thriller with
Diana Rigg and Oliver Reed. The team's last film was The Man
Who Haunted Himself (1970), a sci-fi thriller starring Roger
Moore.
After Dearden's death in a car crash in 1971, Relph became
Chairman of the BFI Production Board, succeeding Michael
Balcon, and produced only three more films, Scum (1979), An
Unsuitable Job for a Woman (1981) and Heavenly Pursuits
(1986). He was also the executive producer of the television
series Treasure Houses of Britain (1985).
His son, Simon Relph, is a producer and former Chairman of
Bafta.
Tom Vallance
Michael Leighton George Relph, film producer and stage
designer: born Broadstone, Dorset 16 February 1915;
Chairman, Film Production Association of Great Britain
1971-76; Chairman, Production Board, BFI 1972-79; married
1939 Doris Gosden (one son; marriage dissolved), 1950 Maria
Barry (died 2003; one daughter); died Selsey, West Sussex 30
September 2004.