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Member LoginDavid Muir ACS BSC
1956: Australian feature films were few and far between in the 1950s. One of the few was Three In One, directed by Cecil Holmes and beautifully shot in black and white by Ross Wood (Snr) ACS, the same director and DOP team who had made Captain Thunderbolt in 1951. Cecil was also a political activist and documentary maker whose fascinating life can be read about in his autobiography, One Man’s Way, published by Penguin Books in 1986.
The legendary Ross Wood had also shot Strong is the Seed in 1949, Back of Beyond in 1954, and had been camera operator on some British films made in Australia. Ross went on to found his own production company, with studios in Paddington where some of today’s leading cinematographers got their training. Ross’ widow endowed the Ross Wood ACS Memorial Award to encourage innovation in cinematography - you can read all about on our website
The main camera used throughout the film was a trusty old 35mm Mitchell BNC, which I think may have been imported by Ealing Studios at the time when they were so confident of making British films here that they built Pagewood Studios - now demolished and the site of a shopping centre.
In those days the Mitchell was non-reflex, so shots had to be lined up during rehearsals with the camera body racked over to the right so you could look through the lens, checking what you were seeing in the external viewfinder. When it came time to shoot, the camera was racked back to the taking position and you relied on the side finder, which compensated for parallax by pointing closer or further away from the lens axis as the focus was pulled. This whole process required much skill and co-operation between operator and focus-puller.
Today’s younger camera people would find this system pretty crude and inaccurate, having been brought up on mirror reflex cameras! But the BNC was a great camera that served the worldwide industry very well for a long time. The image was rock-steady, thanks to double registration pins, and yet it was so quiet that on a few occasions I’ve heard of it being accidentally left running!
The Young Love/The City part of Three In One was particularly notable for the night exteriors shot around the Rocks area of Sydney. Ross Wood very effectively used the big old carbon-arc Brutes (fore-runner of today’s big HMIs) to dramatically back-light the actors and cast sharp shadows. The fill light often came from DuArcs, smaller lamps diffused with opal-glass, but the hissing noise of each lamp’s two sets of carbon rods burning away was not appreciated by the sound department on closer shots!
Three In One was a genuinely Australian film, based on three short stories, Henry Lawson’s Joe Wilson’s Mates, Frank Hardy’s A Load of Wood, and Ralph Peterson’s The City - which, at the time this end-of-picture crew still was taken on the 2nd of March, 1956 at Pagewood Studios, had the working title Young Love.
There is a saying that Growing older is a pain, but it sure beats the alternative! - and unfortunately many of those in this picture are no longer with us. With help from fellow survivors such as Warren Mearns, I’ve done my best to identify as many people as I can - but please excuse a few lapses of memory after more than 43 years! The numbers run vaguely left to right and up and down, so I hope you can follow the key.
By 1956 Ajax Films producer Brian Chirlian had already trusted me to shoot commercials and documentaries as a (20-year-old!) cinematographer, but I couldn’t resist the lure of features. These were so rare in those days that, if you wanted to work on one, you had to take any job you could get. In my case this meant being the stills photographer on the last section of this film, but it did give me a chance to see how well a feature crew could work together and how Ross Wood lit the film.
Because I did stills on this film and on Smiley, which Ross operated, he could never quite get it out of his head that I was a stills photographer, even 19 years later when I returned to Sydney with British Society of Cinematographers accreditation and having been DOP on seven features!
I look forward to seeing other members’ historic production photos in this magazine and hearing about the cameras and working methods prevailing when they were shot.
from Australian Cinematographer - Issue 6 - September 1999