Lewis Gilbert
Prolific British director of films including Reach for the Sky, Alfie, Educating Rita and Moonraker
LEWIS GILBERT, who has died aged 97, was among the most commercially successful, if critically unfashionable, of British film directors. He directed celebrations of wartime heroism – The Sea Shall Not Have Them (1954), Reach for the Sky (1956) and Carve Her Name with Pride (1958) – and was responsible for such quintessentially British comedies as Alfie (1966), Educating Rita (1983) and Shirley Valentine (1989). He also directed three James Bond spectaculars: You Only Live Twice (1967), with Sean Connery, and The Spy Who Loved Me (1977) and Moonraker (1979) with Roger Moore.
Gilbert directed more than 40 films, a considerable achievement considering the insubstantial nature of the British film industry, many of which he also produced and co-wrote. That he did so is largely due to his pragmatic attitude towards material and his lack of extravagance, which made him popular in Hollywood. “I’m really somebody like a doctor who you call in when you want the patient to live, as it were,” he said. “And in that way I think I’ve lasted.”
He imposed little as a director, allowing narrative and acting to carry his films. When these were strong, he succeeded. He was at his best with simple stories of individual endeavour, as was evident with his films set in the war. “The war was the biggest single influence in my life,” he said. “I think it was natural in the years after the war to make films that were part propaganda and part portraits of heroism. If you see these films now you might giggle a bit, but I think that they provide a very true picture of feelings of the time.”
Reach for the Sky, in which Kenneth More gave a classically rigid performance as the RAF ace Douglas Bader who overcame the loss of both legs, and Carve Her Name With Pride, with Virginia Mckenna as Violet Szabo, a British spy executed by the Nazis, are perhaps the best of these, although they lack the honest passion that might transform the biopic into a lasting work of art.
Gilbert’s later attempts at sensitive themes could be dire. Friends (1971) was a un-nutritious slice of corny sentiment, inexplicably successful at the box office, with Sean Bury and Anicée Alvina as teenage lovers who run away to a country cottage where they have a child.
Seven Nights in Japan (1976) was a ludicrous though perhaps prophetic romance, with Michael York as heir to the British throne falling in love with a geisha while on shore leave in Tokyo; while Not Quite Jerusalem (1985), a version of Paul Kember’s play in which an Israeli girl and an American fall in love on a kibbutz, was unkindly known as “Carry on Terrorist”.
Despite the varied quality of his output, Gilbert had a reputation as an actors’ director. He considered that this stemmed from his understanding of actors’ insecurities (he had started out as an actor). Two of Michael Caine’s Oscar nominations came in films directed by Gilbert, and he also extracted sensitive performances from More (“a marvellous guy … always looking out for the small-part actors”), Susannah York, Dirk Bogarde and Margaret Lockwood. He had particular respect for Connery, who he felt was trapped by his image as Bond when he “really is the James Mason of his time”.
Also in Gilbert’s favour was his refusal to compromise British material with trans-atlantic casting. He resisted pressure to award Tony Curtis the lead in Alfie (Gilbert had repeatedly pointed out that it was a Cockney role) and demanded instead the unknown Caine. Later, he rejected the suggestion that Dolly Parton take the lead in Educating Rita and, thankfully, opted for Julie Walters.
“Film is really a piece of entertainment,” he said. “There are only two criteria for surviving in this business; you can either be a big artistic success or a big commercial success. You are lucky if in some time in your life you enjoy both. And I suppose I’ve been lucky in that way.”
Lewis Gilbert was born in London on March 6 1920. He began his career as a child actor in silent films, making his last screen appearance in The
Divorce of Lady X (1937). Shyness drove him to find work on the technical side of films and he moved into direction when Alexander Korda appointed him third assistant on 21 Days (1937).
During the Second World War he worked for the RAF’S documentary film unit and afterwards he began to work full time as a director.
In 1957 he directed More in The
Admirable Crichton, a version of the play by JM Barrie in which a manservant of a shipwrecked aristocrat proves more adaptable than his master. In Ferry to Hong Kong (1959), which was marred by plot absurdities, Orson Welles gave a hammy performance in a weak stab at a high-seas epic.
Gilbert returned to more comfortable territory for Sink the Bismarck! (1960), a fine example of the stiff-upper-lip drama (again with More), although the ships were plainly models and some of the footage obviously newsreel. He followed this with the competent, if strangely unpleasant HMS Defiant (1962), a tale of mutiny which, as one critic put it, “authentically if superficially recreates the days of pressgangs, maggots and the cat”.
In 1966 came Alfie. “Paramount backed Alfie,” said Gilbert, “because it was going to be made for £500,000, normally the sort of money spent on executives’ cigar bills.” Caine gave an immaculate performance as the cockney Lothario, whose philandering is halted by tragedy from which he gains a new maturity. The film’s sexual frankness – and performances – made it highly popular, and it was nominated for five Oscars.
The next year Gilbert undertook his first Bond film, You Only Live Twice, in which 007 went to Japan, assisted by a script from Roald Dahl. In this and his subsequent Bond outings, Gilbert, encouraged by the producer Cubby Broccoli, moved the series into the realm of spectacle, with Bond no longer a cynical agent but a fantasy figure.
Gilbert shot on some of the largest sets yet constructed – in You Only Live Twice the volcano used as the villain’s base was the size of a football pitch – using painstaking special effects and a battery of cameras. He confessed that the size of the films’ budgets confused him at times. “You’re tempted in a big set to put more stuff in,” he observed. “You say, God, this cost so much money. I must try to justify it.”
The sets and stunts dominated the plot, which could change in mid-shoot on a technical whim. The enormous logistics left little room for giving actors direction, and the results were received with condescension by the critics, but became yet more profitable.
Roger Moore made his debut as Bond in The Spy Who Loved Me (1977), which took the genre into sometimes witless self-parody, with 007 and a glamorous Russian spy attempting to eliminate a megalomaniac shipping magnate possessing the usual sprawling secret missile base.
The film’s only compelling creation was Jaws, a monstrous hit-man with metal mandibles, who proved so popular that he was revived (and given a girlfriend) in the next film, Moonraker (1979), in which Moore investigated the disappearance of a space shuttle.
It began improbably with Bond being shoved out of an aircraft without a parachute and surviving, and quickly signalled its parodic intent when our plastic hero, locating a secret laboratory, discovered that to gain entrance he must whistle the theme from Close Encounters of the Third Kind.
Gilbert said that he was perplexed to find the films better critically received the more spectacular they became. “It may be that it’s grown into the realm of pop-art now, and that the critics feel that they can take it seriously in that genre. The next day you’re probably saying to yourself, ‘What the hell was all that about?’ It doesn’t matter much.”
In between the Bond films Gilbert made Operation Daybreak (1975), which he thought a “realistic and very downbeat” film about the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich (it was certainly grim). It was shown only briefly in America and was so badly cut that “it wasn’t worth talking about”.
In 1983 he had a great success with Caine in Educating Rita, Willy Russell’s Liverpudlian Pygmalion, with Julie Walters as a housewife hell-bent on self-improvement, and Caine as the besotted tutor. The film received three Oscar nominations and the Bafta award for best film.
He filmed a companion piece in 1989, Russell’s comedy Shirley Valentine, in which Pauline Collins gave a virtuoso performance as a Liverpudlian housewife fleeing into the arms of Tom Conti’s Greek bar-owner. As usual, Gilbert’s directorial style was nonchalant, even anonymous, permitting the story and performances to shine through. It won a Bafta and was nominated for two Oscars and three Golden Globes.
Stepping Out, in 1991, with Liza Minnelli, was an adaptation of a successful stage play by Richard Harris, but it lacked the emotional focus of his work with Russell, and failed.
Gilbert continued to work in his ninth decade. His final film, Before You Go (2002) with Julie Walters, was a comedy which explored the lives of three sisters at the funeral of their unloved mother.
His memoir, All My Flashbacks: The Autobiography of Lewis Gilbert, Sixty Years a Film Director, was published in 2010.
Lewis Gilbert, who was appointed CBE in 1997, married Hylda Tafler in 1952 and they had a son. She died in 2005.