Then
the wondrous Denis Norden (one of the half-dozen people I would choose to join
me on a desert island) somehow finagled me into appearing in two films he had
written. The first, The Bliss of Mrs. Blossom, had me playing a clerk in a post
office, supporting Freddie Jones and the great comic and cartoonist Willie
Rushton. It was a fairly unremarkable experience, though I remember being
struck by the care with which the director arranged an amusing sticker on a
noticeboard behind me: perhaps it was there in case the audience got bored watching
us act.
?
The
other Norden gift, though, was rather more memorable because it gave me my
first experience of filming with a big Hollywood star. George Sanders was a
super-suave English actor who, along with James Mason, had cornered the market
in elegant-British-swine roles -, Our scene together required me to play the
manager of a tea plantation in the Far East having dinner with my employer
during a "native uprising," and the humour stemmed from our very
different reactions as the plantation villa was attacked: Sanders sitting there
quite unconcerned, drinking his soup, while bullets whizzed everywhere, hitting
the candlesticks and crockery; me frozen and terrified, vacillating between
trying to mimic his calm, and diving for cover (and instant dismissal from my
job). In those days before CGI, the action was for real: crockery and cutlery
were sent flying about, propelled into the air by jets of compressed air, and I
had to hold a (wax) drinking glass full of red wine steady as it was shot out
of my hand by a stunt man with a .22 rifle resting on the back of a chair, just
out of view. (I was, however, allowed to hold the glass at its base.) I was
touched when, at one moment, George Sanders actually stopped them shooting my
close-up as it was becoming too dangerous for me. I was also impressed a little
later when he insisted that some water that was to be thrown on him should be
really cold, to help make his reaction to it as genuine as possible. We all watched
him surreptitiously throughout the day as he gave the crew a master class in
languid elegance. Some years later I learned that he had committed suicide
because he was "bored." I admire insouciance greatly; this, however,
seemed to be taking it a bit too far.
?
John
Cleese "So Anyway" (2014)
