#hell drivers

MoMA is showing Marilyn Monroe but I'm not MoMA so Patrick McGoohan is all you'll get.

Hell Drivers (1957) Cy Endfield

Patrick McGoohan vs. Bill Savage (or Stanley Baker as some people call him).

I was halfway through watching Hell Drivers (1957) before it dawned on me this was Patrick McGoohan. I recognised nearly every other face in the cast (not hard to do as it includes Sean Connery, Sid James, William Hartnell, Herbert Lom and David McCallum among others) but couldn't figure out who this actor was.

Hell Drivers (1957) dir. Cy Endfield

Anyone visiting the headquarters of the Rank Organization at Pinewood in early January of 1957 would have found the studios operating at peak capacity, with films like High Tide at Noon, The Gypsy and the Gentleman, and Hell Drivers in pre- or post-production and others, like Zarak, on limited or general release. Hundreds of employs would have been toing and froing between soundstages, workshops and dressing rooms, scene docks and exterior lots, working hard to help create, from scratch, the Shakespearean "stuff" our dreams are made of. The irony of the inversion, from Prospero's memento mori to an artificial fantasy sold to millions was perhaps not lost on Rank executives and those who laboured under them.

Far more than the actual product, it was the marketing of the material, the selling of the dream, that proved to be Rank's lasting legacy. The bustling beehive may have impressed on the awe-struck visitor an image Rank were keen to project, of a globe-spanning entertainment empire, but the perfect picture belied a reality of decline underneath the shiny façade at the precise point in time, ironically, when the hiring of artists and other personnel reached its peak. The abundance of available talent, and the urgent need for Rank to advertise its capabilities, allowed the publicity department not only to mount Rank's own promotional strategy but to define the - albeit brief - era of Hollywood gloss in the British film industry.

Central to Rank's strategy as a self-styled entertainment empire was the photographic image. In addition to the obvious moving pictures this also comprised still photography, and here it was the easily mass-manufactured 8x10 studio portrait that lent itself in particular to advertising purposes. Reproduced in their hundreds, if not thousands, they would be distributed to advertising agencies, various media operations, sponsoring partners, and Rank-owned cinema chains to beguile potential audiences - so successfully, in fact, that they began to be appreciated in their own right, or as one marketing executive remarked, it was rarely if ever that one saw on the silver screen the "luscious confectionery" beckoning from the display boxes outside.

What made Rank's displays so uniquely irresistible in the eyes of adoring fans and competitors alike was their sheer visual impact: Cornel Lucas joined Rank in 1951, and his position at the time was something of a novelty - and considered an outrageous extravagance in an industry which continued for the most part to rely on hiring theatrical photographers on a film-by-film basis or as needed. Cornel Lucas, by contrast, was employed full time, with his own studio facility, a permanent staff of several electricians, hairdressers, and make-up artists, as well as an endless supply of sitters under varying degrees of duress. The free-lance colleagues of earlier times had been theatrical photographers in the tradition of 18th and 19th century theatrical painters of ornate tableaux, and we see the tradition continue certainly in the theatre but also in "staged" film stills until well into the 1950s and sometimes beyond (e.g. All Night Long, 1961).

Using a large-format Kodak "Model B" view camera, Cornel Lucas embarked on a busy schedule of three to four sessions for each day of the working week, helping the actors develop their on-screen character (experimentation was to an extent encouraged) and, crucially, helping them feel at ease with their Rank-assigned persona. In a view camera, the lens forms an inverted image on a ground-glass screen at the back. The photographer then has to calibrate light, shadow, and general composition to achieve the desired exposure, under a dark hood, in advance and from an upside-down, full-open aperture preview of what will hopefully be the final result. Once he is satisfied, the glass-plate is replaced with an 8x10 sheet of Kodak Super XX Panchromatic black & white film for maximum texture and tonal range. Other than cost and ease of reproduction, it is unclear if any artistic considerations influenced Rank's preference for monochrome photography, or whether it was a conscious decision on the part of the photographer to discard the well-worn utensils and standard techniques of previous decades.

Cornel Lucas has stripped away the scenery, and even most of the actor's own tools, by focusing the camera on his subject's face to the exclusion of nearly everything else. Neither can our eyes stray far from where the lens is pointed. The actor and his audience are locked in an intimate exchange of glances; nevertheless, it is an illusion of intimacy - and a one-way mirror for the actor. The captured character remains behind the fourth wall, in a state of public solitude. Constantin Stanislavski's definition of the actor's task before his audience would seem to suggest there is such a thing as a perfect moment that can be captured in a single photograph when in fact the opposite is the case: developing the character is a gradual process and Cornel Lucas has documented the journey over multiple sessions and in dozens of photographs, each capturing a unique moment along the way.

The exceptional, from Rank's perspective: excessive, abandon with which Cornel Lucas went to work on "G Redman" in January of 1957 has indeed remained something of an outlier in the Organisation's handling of publicity and in the industry as a whole. Against a backdrop of unlikely circumstances (rationing of fuel and paper, dwindling audiences), the sophisticated and, yes, laborious studio session was allowed to flourish for a brief period before it gave way to the more dynamic approach of the 1960s which introduced small-format, hand-held action shots, and new notions of immediacy and authenticity. By 1959, the Rank Organization as a Hollywood-style production company had ceased to exist, and with it disappeared the need - and the demand - for posed portraits. Free-lance still photographers now worked on the set alongside the actors, who could even be entirely oblivious of their presence.