In consequence, he was commissioned by American film-maker Herbert Kline to film events for a documentary called Lights Out, covering a Goebbels rally and the burning of a synagogue, for which he was briefly arrested.

[14] However, he also noted that its restrictive studio system headed by Michael Balcon, in which outside work was not normally permitted, made it impractical for him to attempt to begin a career as a director, something which he had considered.

[15] His early films as a cinematographer included such classic Ealing comedies, notably Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949), The Man in the White Suit (1951), The Lavender Hill Mob (1951), and The Titfield Thunderbolt (1953).

He was particularly praised for his flexible, high-contrast cinematography for the horror film Dead of Night (1945), and for his bright, colourful West Country summer landscapes on The Titfield Thunderbolt.

[8] Apart from filming, Slocombe worked also on developing plans for shots, visiting prisoner-of-war camps in Germany as part of pre-production for The Captive Heart (1946).

[16] For Saraband for Dead Lovers (1948), shot in Technicolor, the production team settled on a muted, gloomy style unusual for the time, which Slocombe in 2015 considered as among his best work of the period.

[17] The style of the film, about a doomed extramarital affair in 17th-century Germany, was variously praised as unconventional and criticised for being excessively symbolic, while also leaving exterior and interior shots poorly matched.

[18] A special effect shot he created was a scene in Kind Hearts and Coronets, in which Alec Guinness, playing eight different characters, appeared as six of them simultaneously in the same frame.

[19] He found widescreen equipment sometimes restrictive, finding the Technirama camera system used on Davy (1958) "a block of flats" and difficult to compose shots with.

Slocombe later remembered shooting inside Kilmainham Gaol, a genuine closed prison, and finding the experience unpleasant: "the real thing, there is something quite terrifying about it.

[2] Roger Ebert particularly praised his work on Jesus Christ Superstar (1973), writing that it "achieve[s] a color range that glows with life and somehow doesn’t make the desert look barren.

"[28] Janusz Kamiński, cinematographer on Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, said that he deliberately shot the film to emulate Slocombe's visuals, in order to create an appearance of continuity with the previous pictures.