Jack Isaac Clayton[1] (1 March 1921 – 26 February 1995) was a British film director and producer who specialised in bringing literary works to the screen.
Starting out as a teenage studio "tea boy" in 1935, Clayton worked his way up through British film industry in a career that spanned nearly sixty years.
Clayton looked set for a brilliant future, and he was highly regarded by peers and critics alike, but a number of overlapping factors hampered his career.
He also gained invaluable editing experience assisting David Lean, who was the editor (and uncredited director) of the screen adaptation of Shaw's Major Barbara (1941).
[4] With funding from Romulus Films, Clayton directed his first full-length feature, a gritty contemporary social drama adapted from the novel by John Braine.
It established Clayton as one of the leading directors of his day, made an international star of lead actor Laurence Harvey, won a slew of awards at major film festivals, and was nominated for six Oscars (including Best Director), with Simone Signoret winning Best Actress, and scriptwriter Neil Paterson winning for Best Writing, Screenplay (Based on Material from Another Medium).
Among the titles he turned down (according biographer Neil Sinyard) were Sons and Lovers (Jack Cardiff), Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (Karel Reisz) and The L-Shaped Room (Bryan Forbes), all of which became major hits for their respective directors.
By a fortunate coincidence, Clayton was contracted to make another film for 20th Century Fox, as was actress Deborah Kerr, whom Clayton had long admired, so he was able to cast Kerr in the lead role as Miss Giddens, a repressed spinster who takes a job in a large, remote English country house; there working as the governess to an orphaned brother and sister, Giddens gradually comes to believe that her young charges are possessed by evil spirits.
Although Clayton was initially dismayed at Fox's insistence that the film be shot in CinemaScope (a format he greatly disliked) Francis was able to use it to great advantage, carefully framing each scene, and using innovative techniques, such as placing protagonists at the extreme opposite edges of the screen during dialogue scenes, or focusing on the central region while using specially-made filters to blur the edges of the frame, creating a subtle but disturbing sense of unease in the viewer.
Both Francis and Capote subsequently rated their work on the film as the best of their respective screen careers, and it has been widely acclaimed as a classic of psychological horror by many leading directors.
"[7] The Pumpkin Eater (1964) featured a screenplay by leading British dramatist Harold Pinter, adapted from the novel by Penelope Mortimer, and cinematography by Clayton's longtime colleague Oswald Morris, with whom he had worked on many projects during their days with Romulus Films; it also marked the first of five collaborations between Clayton and French composer Georges Delerue, and a film appearance by rising star Maggie Smith.
A psycho-sexual drama, set in contemporary London, it examined a marriage in crisis, with Anne Bancroft starring as an affluent middle-aged woman who becomes estranged from her unfaithful and emotionally distant husband, a successful author (Peter Finch).
In the capable supporting cast, Yootha Joyce as a psychotic young woman sitting opposite Bancroft under the hairdryers, delivered a performance that has been called by Clayton's biographer one of the "best screen acting miniatures one could hope to see.
[9] Clayton's fourth feature, and his first in colour, was an offbeat psychological drama about a family of children who conceal the fact that their single mother has died, and go on living in their house.
Although it was a commercial failure, it received a glowing review from Roger Ebert on its release, earned star Dirk Bogarde a BAFTA Best Actor nomination.
The biggest and most expensive production of Clayton's career, the film had all the ingredients of success – produced by Broadway legend David Merrick, it boasted a screenplay by Francis Ford Coppola, cinematography by Douglas Slocombe, music by Nelson Riddle, two of the biggest stars of the period in Robert Redford and Mia Farrow, and a powerful supporting cast that included Bruce Dern, Karen Black, Sam Waterston, Scott Wilson, Lois Chiles and Hollywood veteran Howard Da Silva, who had also featured in the 1949 version of the film.
It also fared well in major industry awards, winning two Oscars that year (Best Costume Design for Theoni V. Aldredge, and Best Music for Nelson Riddle), three BAFTA Awards, (Best Art Direction for John Box, Best Cinematography for Douglas Slocombe, and Best Costume Design for Theoni V. Aldredge), as well as the Golden Globe for Best Supporting Actress for Karen Black, and three further Golden Globe nominations, for Best Supporting Actor (Bruce Dern and Sam Waterston) and Most Promising Newcomer (Sam Waterston).
Peter and Kirk Douglas then optioned the rights to the book and Bradbury spent five months editing his unwieldy 240-page script to a more feasible 120 pages.
When he submitted his original cut, the studio expressed strong reservations about its length and pacing, its commercial potential and Disney took the unusual step of holding the film back from release for almost a year.
Clayton was reportedly sidelined (although he retained his director credit) and Disney spent an additional six months and some $5 million overhauling it, performing numerous cuts, removing the original score (to make it more 'family-friendly') and shooting new scenes (in some of which, because of the long delay caused by the reshoots, the two child stars were noticeably older and taller).
The most prominent casualty was the pioneering computer-generated animation sequence that was to have opened the film, which depicted the empty train bearing Dark's Carnival arriving in the town and magically unfolding itself into place.
The much-heralded sequence (which was discussed in detail in a 1982 edition of Cinefantastique) would have been the first significant use of the new technology in a major Hollywood movie but in the final cut, only one brief CGI shot was retained.
Delerue's soundtrack (which the composer considered the best of the music he wrote for Hollywood films) remained unheard in the Disney vaults until 2011, when the studio unusually gave permission for the French Universal label to issue 30 minutes of excerpts, from the original 63 minutes of studio recordings on a limited edition CD (coupled with excerpts from another unused Delerue score, for Mike Nichols' Regarding Henry).
Featuring a strong cast that included Smith, Michael Hordern, and Thora Hird, Memento Mori expressed quietly moving meditations on disappointment and ageing.
According to Neil Sinyard[18] Clayton was finally encouraged to make the film following the success of Driving Miss Daisy, "which proved that the theme of old age need not be box-office poison".
Tributes were delivered by Sir John Woolf, Harold Pinter, Karel Reisz, Freddie Francis, Clayton's editor Terry Rawlings, his agent Robert Shapiro, and actors Sam Waterston and Scott Wilson, with whom he had worked on The Great Gatsby.