Walter Lassally
Cinematographer and key figure in the British ‘New Wave’ who won an Oscar for Zorba the Greek
WALTER LASSALLY, who has died aged 90, was an Oscarwinning film cameraman who fled Nazi Germany and became a key figure in the British New Wave movement of the 1960s. Although best known for his work on gritty films of social realism like A Taste of Honey (1961) and The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner (1962), both set in dreary provincial postwar Britain, Lassally earned his Academy award for his cinematography on the Mediterranean island of Crete for Michael Cacoyannis’s Zorba the Greek (1964) starring Anthony Quinn.
Lassally prevailed against pressure from both Quinn and Cacoyannis to make the film in colour, and while Zorba is best remembered for Quinn’s performance in the title role as well as the music of Mikis Theodorakis, it was Lassally’s virtuosic camerawork that gave the movie its visual splendour; it ranked it among the most stunning ever shot in black and white. “[His] unfiltered camera gets the hard, barren look of the island scene,” enthused The New York Times, “the crowded villages, the stark, rocky shoreline and the sun-baked, windscoured hills.”
Although Zorba the Greek was an outstanding commercial success, Lassally tended to operate outside the mainstream of feature production, finding greater creative opportunities on the fringes.
He first emerged from the Free Cinema group of the 1950s, makers of unconventional films that emphasised authentic working-class culture as an antidote to bourgeois life, a fleeting phenomenon which soon evolved into the New Wave with films like Room at the Top, Look Back in Anger (both 1959) and Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1960).
In the early 1960s it was to Lassally that the director Tony Richardson, turned when filming A Taste of Honey and The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner, both shot entirely on location to achieve the necessary degree of realism. Slag-heaps, canals and smoking chimneys were all grist to Lassally’s black-and-white palette when capturing the stark melancholy of the landscape.
Having been turned down for the cinematographer’s role on Look Back
in Anger on the grounds of being too inexperienced, and failing to land the same job on Saturday Night and Sunday Morning,
Lassally had finally achieved his breakthrough into first-feature films. In A Taste of Honey, partly filmed in rainy Manchester, he achieved a look of gritty realism by the use of naturalistic lighting, shooting the interior scenes on grainy stock and filming some of the exterior ones in a hand-held, roving documentary style.
On their next collaboration,
The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner, also shot on location, Richardson was refused permission to film at a real borstal, so Lassally photographed the exteriors of the boys’ reformatory at a large country mansion in Surrey. His images of the liberating effect of early morning runs intercut with recollections of shabby urban confinement made a striking contribution to the film’s polemic.
On the exuberant Tom Jones (1963), based on Henry Fielding’s picaresque novel and starring Albert Finney in the title role, Lassally matched technically everything that Richardson achieved artistically. “We didn’t want to make Tom Jones look like a Hollywood epic,” he recalled, “so we agreed to incorporate the style of A
Taste of Honey.” With staging, costumes and locations impeccably in period, Lassally again applied state-ofthe-art camera techniques, reprising the use of three hand-held cameras as well as filming overhead shots from a helicopter.
He maintained that Tom Jones was the first film of its size to be shot totally on location and in colour. To achieve the pastel tones seen by cinema audiences, he fixed a fragment of fine net, salvaged from a 1920s hat veil, on the lens of his Arriflex camera, to give his landscape and figures the soft-edged appearance of a watercolour.
After his 1960s heyday, Lassally found most of the 1970s professionally depressing. Of the 12 films he shot between 1971 and 1977, two remained unreleased, one was left incomplete, one was shelved and two were recut by different directors. But the decade marked the start of his long association with Ismail Merchant and James Ivory, beginning with Savages (1972), which opened to mixed reviews but which remained one of his favourite films.
His other Merchant-ivory productions include (1975), and Heat and Dust (1982), set in India, in which Lassally lent the 1920s sequences a soft period glow that contrasted with the more brightly lit look of the modern scenes.
Walter Lassally was born in Berlin on December 18 1926, the son of an engineer who made industrial and training films. Arriving in England as refugees in June 1939, the family settled at Richmond in south-west London, where young Walter haunted the Plaza and Regal cinemas. Watching his father at work, and occasionally allowed to turn the handle on his animation bench, by the age of 15 he knew he wanted to be a film cameraman.
On leaving school in 1944 he wrote to every studio asking for a job as a clapper boy. Meanwhile, he found work at a stills studio, and then as a general dogsbody with a company making 16mm documentaries and medical films. In 1946, through the intervention of his father, he was taken on as a clapper boy at Riverside Studios, working on a film called
Dancing with Crime (1947), with Richard Attenborough in his first starring part.
In 1949, with Derek York, he formed a company called Screencraft to make a film called Saturday Night, about a young man just out of the Army looking for love in the fleshpots of the West End. It started as a 20-minute short, but got longer and longer as production continued spasmodically over four years; in the end it was never finished, as Bryan Forbes, playing the discharged soldier, had decamped to America. But it led to Lassally’s first job as a lighting cameraman, on a government public service film.
In 1954 he landed his first major lighting camera job on a feature film, Gavin Lambert’s Another Sky, shot on location in Morocco. As an enthusiastic follower of the Free Cinema movement, with its rejection of the stereotyped approach of commercial cinema, Lassally photographed several such films, including Lindsay Anderson’s portrait of Covent Garden,
Every Day Except Christmas (1957), and Karel Reisz’s We Are the Lambeth Boys
(1959).
With the New Wave on the wane by the late 1960s, Lassally remained greatly in demand on the strength of his Oscar, but one of his American films from that era, Something for Everyone (1969), starring Michael York and Angela Lansbury, failed at the box office. When it turned up later in Britain, retitled Black Flowers for the Bride, it fared little better.
He ventured back into the mainstream when Steve Mcqueen’s company asked Lassally to film the motor racing epic Le Mans (1971), only to be fired six weeks into a 14-week shooting schedule after complaining that no script had materialised. In the wake of the fiasco, Lassally confessed that “it wasn’t really my cup of tea”.
He spent much of the late 1970s in the US, often working on films made for television, including Too Far To Go (1978), adapted from short stories by John Updike, and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn for PBS.
In 1980 he began work on the controversial Pakistani film The Blood of Hussain, but the producer-director Jamil Dehlavi ran into funding problems during the shoot. Unable to pay Lassally and his crew, Dehlavi completed the film himself as producer, director, cameraman and actor.
Lassally’s filming of the detective story The Perfect Murder (1988), shot on location in Bombay, received critical praise, as did his work on The Ballad of the Sad Café (1991), in which he used filters to create stark Edward Hopperlike effects. In all he worked on more than 50 feature films and countless documentaries as well as television commercials.
Having retired from camera work, in 2013 Lassally made his acting debut as a British expatriate writer settled in Greece, based on Patrick Leigh Fermor, in Before Midnight, the third in Richard Linklater’s acclaimed triptych of films.
Lassally once observed that if photography in a film draws too much attention to itself, it has failed. He ended his memoirs, Itinerant Cameraman (1987), by pointing out that “the real author of the effects that critics so admire is often God.”
In 1998 he moved to the village of Stavros on Crete, and latterly to nearby Chania, where Zorba the Greek was filmed.
As well as his Oscar (the award itself was destroyed in a fire in 2012), Lassally received an international achievement award from the American Society of Cinematographers in 2008.
Walter Lassally, born December 18 1926, died October 23 2017