Tom Priestley Deliverance
Son of JB Priestley and film editor admired by great directors and Oscar-nominated for
TOM PRIESTLEY, who has died aged 91, was a highly regarded film editor who worked with Lindsay Anderson, John Boorman, Blake Edwards and Karel Reisz, and won several awards.
The fifth child of the author and playwright JB Priestley, he edited 16 feature films, including Morgan: A Suitable Case for Treatment; Marat/sade; Isadora; Deliverance; The Great Gatsby; The Return of the Pink Panther; Voyage of the Damned; Jubilee; Tess and 1984. He was also sound editor on nine films, including Roman Polanski’s Repulsion.
Priestley was a master of “rescue-editing” films that had become bogged down in post-production, typically because raw footage for some scenes did not cover all the shots needed to make a coherent narrative based on the screenplay.
He also enjoyed the challenge of unusual cuts, as in Karel Reisz’s 1966 comedy Morgan: A Suitable Case for Treatment,
starring David Warner and Vanessa Redgrave, into which he spliced footage of animals – clips from the 1933 movie King Kong, and shots of monkeys swinging gracefully from branch to branch – to express Morgan’s desire for freedom from conformity. Subtly echoing Eisenstein’s montage technique, it won Priestley a Bafta.
While working on John Boorman’s multiple-oscar-winning thriller Deliverance
(1972), starring Burt Reynolds and Jon Voight, Priestley recalled feeling at home on location in the remote northern Georgia wilderness among the Appalachian hillbillies, though the Californian film crew were “terrified”. The location was a “dry” county, and the cast and crew had to cross the border for a drink. Priestley himself was Oscar-nominated, and won another Bafta.
Interviewed by Roy Perkins for his 2004 book British Film Editors: The Heart of the Movie, Priestley scorned the “auteur” theory of the lonely creative filmmaker much favoured by film studies lecturers. “This is so unlike the experience of filmmaking,” he said, “that you wonder where they got it from.”
Thomas Holland Priestley was born in London on April 22 1932 to John Boynton Priestley and Jane, née Holland (Winifred to her family), who had been married before, to the humorist Bevan Wyndham Lewis.
Tom characterised his family as undemonstrative but much given to laughter. In the 1930s the Priestleys spent two winters on a dude ranch in Arizona, where they rode mules down the Grand Canyon, and Tom recalled bumping into George Bernard Shaw. Tom’s godfather was JM Barrie, who would play with Tom and his siblings, though the children later confessed to finding the creator of Peter Pan somewhat frightening.
JB Priestley would drive to Hollywood, pick up film scripts to doctor (insisting that his name did not appear in the credits) and rush back to the ranch – before, as he put it, the “magic money turned to dead leaves”.
During the Second World War the family was homeless, their Isle of Wight home, Billingham Manor, requisitioned by the Army, and their London home in Highgate damaged by a landmine. Tom shuttled between his prep school, which was evacuated to Herefordshire (where his mother was running a home for mothers and children); various holiday cottages, mainly in Cornwall; and a cottage in Oxford owned by the novelist Joyce Cary.
After the war he attended Bryanston, then read Classics and English at Kings College, Cambridge, and lived for a period in Athens, teaching English. His parents divorced in 1953 and his mother later married David Bannerman, an ornithologist, while JB Priestley married the archaeologist Jacquetta Hawkes. Tom’s career in film began as a floor-sweeper at Ealing Studios. “I wanted to try and find something that my father hadn’t done,” he explained.
For many years he divided his time between a flat in Notting Hill and a house in Marrakesh. He practised transcendental meditation and yoga, and held “souks” in his flat, selling Moroccan artisan goods. He was always ready with a friendly word to anyone and enjoyed convivial restaurant lunches.
He was president of the JB Priestley Society and the Priestley Centre for the Arts in Bradford. In an introduction to a new edition of JB Priestley’s Bright Day (1946), he observed that the novel combined two of his father’s major themes – time and family. The book, he wrote, “invites us to look back at earlier layers of ourselves, raise a lid or two of old trunks and peer inside our own dark cupboards”.
Applying that lesson to himself, he described how, as a film editor, he “reached the point where I felt I had achieved all I could, and was happy to escape the confines of the cutting room… I realised that I was boxed in, because I was only using part of myself, and life seemed to consist of the flickering images I saw in the lens of my editing machine. Instinct told me I needed to get out more into the world and reach out to people, so I began lecturing about editing and moved into the light.”
Tom Priestley, born April 22 1932, died December 25 2023