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India and the Elephants: Chapter 4
I : Flaherty liked London, and we liked having him. In the very first days, with the EMB unit, he often spent the early evenings with us in The Coronet in Soho Street. As all through his life, he was overgenerous in buying rounds of drinks, and he became friends, by no means solely for this reason, with everyone in the unit. English beer never attracted him; Scotch was almost always his call, although later there was a Bacardi rum period. From 1931 until he left for America in 1939, Flaherty made the Cafe Royal brasserie his spiritual home when he was between films. It became a haunt for him as had the Coffee House Club in New York.
In the years before the war it was the only place in London habitually used as a meeting place by people in the various arts, show business, and journalism, with the odd progressive politician thrown in. One recalls in the smoky haze the faces of such people as Augustus John, Jacob Epstein, James Agate, Tom Driberg, Graham Greene, Frank Horrabin, Raymond Postgate, Liam O'Flaherty, A. P. Herbert, Gerald Barry, Nora James, Richard Winnington, Nina Hamnett, and many others.
Flaherty had only to spot you through the smoke among the crowd and he would wave you across to his table. As the evening wore on, the circle round him grew wider. More chairs were dragged up. More drinks appeared. Flaherty loved an audience, especially one that would listen to his fabulous tales. His sparkling pale blue eyes, his square but beautiful hands, his wide shoulders and bulky body, his magnificent, massive head with its silky white fringe of hair, and his rather high-pitched, almost nervous laugh, his constant chain of cigarettes from a box of fifty which he always carried with him, his shapeless, soft felt hat which he crammed on
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his head as he left-this was the physical image of Flaherty which one remembers vividly from that time.
Among those who were often around his table were Jacob Epstein, the sculptor; Hayter Preston, the journalist; John Dulanty, the Irish high commissioner in London; Newton Rowe, who had, of course, known Bob since Samoan days; Vaughan Wilkins, writer on Victoriana; Cedric Belfrage, the film critic; Margery Lockett, the educational film expert; Jack Moeran, the musician; Peter Gorer, the pathology research worker; sometimes Grierson, Cavalcanti, and others of the documentary group, and the ubiquitous J. P. R. Golightly.
One night an intense argument sprang up between Flaherty and Berthold Viertel, a Gaumont-British director of such films as Little Friend, The Passing of the Third-Floor Back, and Rhodes of Africa. A charming, highly cultured man with a quiet manner, Viertel was a man of the theater working in the cinema. Flaherty became infuriated by his dogmatic views on the precise use of the movie camera, where and how it should be placed to record to best advantage the acting taking place on the studio set. Neither gave in, Viertel, remaining calm, quiet, and mild-spoken, and Flaherty, becoming enraged and spluttering to find the right words of attack. They parted still arguing. Closing time stopped the battle. [1]
One evening, Flaherty expostulated on the inanity of a new Zoltan Korda film, The Drum:
The movie camera can show you one man. You can take it back and it shows you two men. You take it back further still and it shows you three men. You go on taking it back until it shows you ten men. But each time you take it back, the men may get more in number but they also get smaller in size and so lose their impact on you. The so-called crowd scenes in this film are plain stupid. You can't see what's happening. The man who made it just doesn't understand how to use a movie-camera.
Flaherty's tales from the Arctic, the South Seas, and other places he had been have become legendary. He could tell a story that lasted a full half-hour and hold his listeners for every minute of it. Like most gifted tellers of tales, he needed a responsive audience. He intensely resented any interruption. He was impatient with anyone who argued with him and became irate if contradicted. It is said that only two people could ever get the better of Flaherty in a talking match: Oliver St. John Gogarty and John Grierson. Grierson knew Flaherty's weaknesses better than most and could not resist the gentle art of goading, at which he is adept. Their verbal quarrels were fabulous.
The generosity of Flaherty is remembered by all who knew him. One typical example took place during the promotion of the Aran film. Tickets
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for the Albert Hall to see the Peterson-Len Harvey fight were at a premium, recalls Hugh Findlay, when suddenly Bob revealed that he had bought a box at a ridiculous price, and he invited everyone to share it with him. There are dozens of such stories, and they must all be believed. No matter how low in funds, Flaherty always insisted on being the host.
Unhappily, after the mixed reception of Man of Aran, Flaherty no longer came to The Coronet. Flaherty never liked English pubs except when he was gathering material and meeting "interesting" members of the more primitive orders. He did not know the common people, and we suspect that he only wanted to know the uncommon ones. He was infinitely more at ease in the Cafe Royal or the Coffee House Club than in pubs, saloons, and bars.
When Flaherty returned to London from promoting Man of Aran in the United States late in 1934, he soon met Alexander Korda, whose star was ascending in the British film industry. [2] In 1935, Korda was gathering a galaxy of talents. He loved to have around him a group of illustrious names. He accumulated prestige as some men accumulate antiques. He also accumulated antiques. Robert J. Flaherty was not an antique, but he was pure, unadulterated prestige. Among the many "greats" who decorated the Korda studios in that year were Douglas Fairbanks, father and son, Elizabeth Bergner, Paul Czinner, Leslie Howard, Robert Donat, René Clair, Paul Robeson, Nina Mae McKinney, Jean Parker, Laurence Olivier, Harry Bauer, Raymond Massey, Anthony Asquith, Gigh, Georges Perinal, and others. Many more were to visit and work in the rose garden at Denham before the great crash came, bringing hard times not only to Korda's company but to the entire production side of the British film industry.
It is not recorded how Flaherty and Korda came to meet this time. They had met before in Hollywood. But now Flaherty had an agent, T. Hayes Hunter, of Film Rights Ltd. Before the first interview took place, Hayes Hunter impressed heavily on Flaherty that as soon as the subject of a contract or money came up, Flaherty must remain silent and let his agent handle the matter. Korda and Flaherty got along like brothers. Finally, with his inimitable charm and magnetic powers of persuasion, Korda purred, "Now we are both of us artists, Bob, we understand each other, so you can safely leave the contract side of our friendship in my hands." Engulfed by the Hungarian's charm, Flaherty hastily agreed, leaving Hunter speechless with a fait-accompli on his hands. As a result, the contract contained clauses that gave Korda overriding supervisory powers. [3]
Flaherty always had the enthusiasm and confidence of a child when he met a producer whom he believed understood him. Only later did he, to his cost, have his trust destroyed, and then his gorge would rise. A short time after he met Korda, he underwent a hernia operation. Visiting him in a private nursing home, one found him sitting up in bed with a pile of pillows behind his head, looking more massive than ever. All he could talk
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about was the genius, the kindness, the artistic understanding of Korda, with occasional asides of vitriol for the Ostrer brothers and Michael Balcon of Gaumont-British. Four years earlier, his fulsome praise would have been for the latter. Now, after Man of Aran, he sometimes called them bastards and he did not care if the whole nursing home did hear it. Everyone ought to hear it. He could not understand why we had not cultivated Korda, whose integrity, he insisted, embraced the documentary conception.
When we told him we had patiently negotiated with Korda for two years without result, he brushed these remarks aside. At long last, he maintained, thumping the bed, after all his terrible experiences with Lasky and Fox and Thalberg in Hollywood and with those Ostrer brothers and that Woolf man in London, now he had found the producer who really believed in Robert Flaherty, and he had found him right under our own insensitive noses in England.
Mrs. Flaherty gives a different account of the coming together of Korda and Flaherty:
Wherever we took our camera, from one primitive scene to another, we used the native people as our characters and took our material from the stuff of their lives. We found what good actors native children can be, and how appealing they unfailingly are to an audience. So we had this idea-why, if we wrote a film-storv around extraordinary adventures that a native boy might have in his native environment, wouldn't it be possible to "star" that boy himself in the film?
We set about to write a story. The first one we wrote was of a Spanish boy and it was based on an actual happening-the pardoning by public acclaim of a famous Spanish fighting bull in the bull-ring. Our story, following the adventures of the two together, developed the devotion of the boy for the bull up to his pride and agony in the final life-or-death scene. . . .But we were uncertain of the bull; we were uncertain whether we could show a bull on the screen and make him so convincing in his lovability as to be sufficiently appealing and sympathetic. [4] (F. Flaherty 1937:4)
Flaherty had stumbled on the bull story in Mexico City and had written it up at Santa Fe. He is alleged to have tried to sell it to Douglas Fairbanks and Korda in Hollywood after returning from Tahiti in 1930. It would seem, however, that the Flahertys had worked further on "Bonito, the Bull" in Berlin in 1931 and that the locale of the story had been shifted from Mexico to Spain. Mrs. Flaherty continues:
With what animal, we asked ourselves, would it be easier to do this? Why, of course, with that great lumbering, antediluvian pet that
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greatest oddity and most peculiarly engaging of all Gods, creatures on earth-the elephant! Our story shifted instantly to India. What more intriguing than the adventures of a little Indian boy on a big Indian elephant in the jungles of India with all the jungle creatures?. . .This needed a producer, it must be admitted, of no little courage and enterprise. Fortunately there was such a one in London. There was Alexander Korda. Almost before we realized it, we found ourselves on his production schedule under the working title of Elephant Boy.
But, Mr. Korda now remembered, there was already a famous story of a boy and an elephant that almost everybody knew-Kipling's Jungle Book story of Toomi of the Elephants. Immediately the necessary arrangements were made between Mr. Korda and Mr. Kipling and the film rights to the character of Little Toomai and of Kala Nag and to the Kipling title were ours. [5] (F. Flaherty 1937:14-16)
David Cunnynghame (now Sir David), who was then a personal assistant to Korda, tells yet a third version. He recalls that Korda had been considering making Toomai of the Elephants as a film for sometime before this meeting with Flaherty and that if he had not been in England at that time, Korda would have brought Flaherty across from the United States to make the picture. He also confirms our belief that Korda and Flahertv had met in Hollywood in 1929. [6]
Flaherty and his eldest daughter, Barbara, set out for Bombay about the end of February 1935. Mrs. Flaherty was to follow six weeks later. David Flaherty and a production manager, Fred Elles, were already in Bombay. If this had been the complete unit, all might have come out well. But Flaherty had once again allied himself with the commercial side of filmmaking. No matter how deeply he believed in Kordas artistic integrity, Flaherty now found himself-for the first and last time in his career-the kingpin in a comparatively large-scale production. Before leaving England he was involved in long script conferences with Lajos Biro, the Hungarian writer and old friend of Korda's, who worked as a script editor for London Films. A professional cameraman, Osmond H. Borradaile, was assigned to shoot the picture; fortunately, he was sympathetic to the Flaherty method. [7]
From the outset, in the minds of Korda and London Films if not in that of Flaherty, Elephant Boy was conceived as a big picture. As time went on and production started, the unit in India was to swell at times to at least fifteen non-Indian persons plus local assistants and helpers. The reasons why so many people became involved over the next eighteen months are complicated.
First, there was Monta Bell, a Hollywood film director whose credits at that time included The Worst Woman in Paris and West Point of the Air. According to Cunnynghame, "Korda first sent Monta Bell to work with Flaherty in India because he thought that Flaherty needed help in view of
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the very difficult conditions in which he was working in the jungle with elephants and a native boy." [8] Borradaile, however, recalls that Monta Bell had arrived in London and told Korda about a book recently published in New York called Siamese White, which was about elephants in general and a white ghost elephant in particular. Korda liked the idea of a ghost elephant and sent Bell to join Flaherty in India. "If it had not been such a tragic mistake," writes Borradaile,
the whole affair would have been amusing, for Monta Bell didn't take to the jungle and wanted to return to the bright lights as soon as possible. But he didn't get away before Flaherty received and read a copy of Siamese White, which turned out to be a story of a man named White who lived in Siam-no white elephant, no ghost elephant. It was all a bit embarrassing because an elephant had actually been whitewashed to play the ghost. All the footage shot on this blunder-and a good chunk it was-went into the ash-can. [9]
At a later date, Korda sent his brother Zoltan out to India. At first, Zoltan did not wish to be associated with the project but was persuaded by Alex to assume the responsibility. Teddy Baird was also dispatched from Denham to be the production manager, and Bernard Browne was sent as a second-unit cameraman when Zoltan Korda began to direct sequences on his own. As time went on, a full arsenal of cameras, lighting equipment, an RCA sound truck, and laboratory apparatus accumulated.
Wide publicity heralded Flaherty's arrival in India. He dined with the viceroy, Lord Willingdon, was most cordial, and even perhaps jokingly asked if the viceroy could play the part of Petersen Sahib. Flaherty then went off to northern India to spy out the land. While he was there, he received a telegram from the prime minister to His Highness, the maharajah of Mysore, in southern India, some eight hundred miles from Bombay, suggesting that his terrain and his elephants, both tame and wild, were admirably suited to Flaherty's needs. David Flaherty and Fred Elles had already surveyed Mysore and recommended it. No doubt the maharajah and his dewan (prime minister), Sir Hirza Ismail, had a good sense of public relations and knew that to have the film made in Mysore would be profitable in more ways than one. His Highness owned a royal zoo and offered to place at Flaherty's disposal a large and historic unused palace in which to live. Flaherty settled for the maharajah's suggestion. All the newspapers in India carried stories that Tooma of the Elephants was going to be made in Mysore and that the producer was now looking for a suitable young boy to play the leading part. Letters applying for the job streamed in. David Flaherty went off to search in the elephant camps in Mysore and Malabar, Cochin. Meanwhile, the unit began to settle into the place after it had been rid of its cobras. It was named Chittaranjah Mahal, or Elephant House.
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Flaherty complete with topi, had appointed himself a bearer, GUI Khan, a much-traveled man. His last sahib had taken him round the world, including Mamaroneck, New York, which was familiar ground to Flaherty. Writes Mrs. Flaherty:
We had to find one white character for our story, a white hunter of elephants, Petersen Sahib. There was no mistaking him when we found him, almost at once, in the person of an upstate coffee-planter, with a kind and competent, weather-bitten face, most photographable. He, Captain Fremlin, was actually a hunter-a shikari as they call them in India-and a very fine one, the best in Mysore; and a very fine shot. . . .Next we had to find our locations, i.e., to explore our surroundings for their picturable possibilities and decide where we were going to make our scenes. (F Flaherty 1937:34)
Thus right from the start the prescribed Flaherty method of finding the theme and story out of the environment-as had been the absolute rule up till then-was discarded in this new picture. The group arrived in Mysore with the story ready-made, or so they thought.
The negative and the rushes were processed in a laboratory they established in the old servants' quarters at the palace. "It was a bold enterprise," says Borradaile,
hoping to do all our processing in an old building without air-conditioning or filtered water supply, and with the exception of one man, a completely inexperienced staff. The one experienced technician soon found the task too much for him, however, and he returned to New York. Then we were fortunate to acquire an Indian, by name Sayne, who had worked in a European laboratory and he proved to he admirable. We had no developing machinery; all the film was developed in shallow tanks on 200 ft. racks, except for the sound track which was sent to Bombay for processing. Shooting tests for the labs, by the way, accounted for a big proportion of the negative exposed in India. (F. Flaherty 1937:34)
Mrs. Flaherty continues:
There was to be no stint of people and everything possible to help us make the picture and make it quickly; which was all very good fun for our large Indian staff; for our confreres from London as well, who were enjoying the whole thing with us. I wish you could see us here; you who saw us in Aran! How you would open your eyes! [Mrs. Flaherty was writing to her two younger daughters who were at school in England.] It is so different that we hardly know what to do
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about it-so many people about, doing for us all the things we have usually had to do ourselves-a fleet of cars flying here and there, a lorry as full of people as a Sunday School picnic plying daily from town (two miles) to our "bungalow"; thousands of cameras; thousands of racks bristling with tripods; a stills department with two assistants and I don't know how many still cameras; thousands of carpenters, electricians, tailors, bearers, coolies, sweepers, mahouts, animal-trainers, clerks, accountants, interpreters-you would think we were a b-y factory!
We've got a little elephant boy David picked up somewhere over in Malabar. He is the most endearing kid you ever saw. He is supposed to play around the yard, but no, he much prefers hanging around where Daddy (Flaherty) is and David, whom he adores, and with me. He is as bright as a dollar: learning something every minute. . . .We have three others besides, that we have gathered from here and there all over the country to try out for Toomai. They are all adorable youngsters but every one of them too thin....
There is one boy among them whom Bordie (Mr. Borradaile, our chief cameraman) brought in the other day; found him at the elephant stables. He is different from the other sprightly little sprouts. He is rather pathetic, more reserved, an orphan. His mother's family came from Assam, where the people are part Mongolian. His name is Sabu. (F. Flaherty 1937:46)
The unit went out on an elephant hunt to one of the maharajah's hunting pre-serves at Karapur, to stay in a luxuriously appointed hunting lodge and guesthouse.
Sabu had to come with us, a little mahout boy we picked up at the Maharajah's elephant stables, who has been gradually eclipsing the three other boys for the part of Toomai. Arrived at camp, he set at once to work, helping David with the lamps, helping the bearers with the beds, turning the sheets neatly and smoothing them, so busy and happy showing us what he could do. . . .
And when we fussed with him over his costume, pulled him and poked him, tucked up his dhoti and wound and rewound his puggeree (making him look worse and worse), he took charge of the matter himself and told us what he wanted. He came out finally before the camera and all of us, as we stood around staring, perfectly businesslike, self-contained, serious, not a child at all. Perhaps it is because he is an orphan. . . .
If we could only operate the cameras from elephants' backs in the jungle! We have to get the wild elephants moving through the forest. Our script demands also that we get two tuskers fighting. The fight
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can be staged in the mating-season, says our Jemadar. Wild tuskers will be decoyed into an area trenched around by a four-foot trench, an insuperable obstacle to an elephant because he cannot span it and cannot jump. The decays will be tame cows, and that the fight will ensue is, according to everyone, a foregone conclusion. If the tuskers are evenly matched it will be a great show. Prince Jaya has already spoken for a front seat!. . .
One more day in camp to see the elephants swim the river and to talk with Jemadar, the chief of the mahouts of the Kakankote camp and the best trainer of elephants in the country. . .
Sabu, transfigured, was in his element, thoroughly at home, ordering the elephants about, mounting them, riding them, sitting there as on a throne from which he looked down upon us common mortals. It is here, by the way, near Kakankote, that he was born. His mother died when he was a baby. His father taught his elephant to rock the baby's cradle-to rock the baby himself in his trunk. It is even said that a wild elephant came out of the forest and played with the child!
Sabu waved. There was no longer any doubt who was to be our elephant boy! (F. Flaherty 1937:58-61)
Flaherty built a special relationship between the boy and himself. He must have sole control over Sabu if he was to get out of him the performance he needed for the film. When making Moana, he had cultivated the idea that the islanders on Savaii should regard him as the Big White Chief. Only if they revered him and respected him could he get them to do what he wanted. In Mysore, Flaherty liked to make Sabu think of him as God. He allowed no one else in the unit to show him affection. The same had happened with Mikeleen on Aran and was to happen with Napoleon in Louisiana. Yet it is curious that Flaherty never was the one who discovered these children.
"I sometimes have an uncanny feeling about Sabu," continues Mrs. Flaherty.
This is the boy we imagined way back in '29 when we were writing the story in Germany. [10] We wrote down in so many words; "He is a little orphan boy and hanger-on of the Maharajah's stables." And then we wrote: "His father died, and the beloved elephant who had been in the family since his grandfather's time, went mad with grief and broke his chains and went off into the jungle."
And now here is Sabu in the flesh, a little orphan Indian boy, ward of His Highness's stables. And they have been telling us the story, how when his father died his elephant grieved so much that no one could do anything with him and there was nothing to do but take him into the jungle where he ran away-our imagined story and Sabu's
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true story almost identical. It was as we were writing our story that all this happened to Sabu, six years ago. (F. Flaherty 1937:75)
A. K. Sett, honorary personal assistant to Sir Hirza Ismail, the prime minister of Mysore, in June 1935, remembers his first visit to Mysore conducting a distinguished guest, Sir Mohomed Zafrulla Khan, a member of the viceroy's council. He writes of his meeting with Flaherty:
Accompanied by the Prime Minister and many officials and reporters, we arrived at the old and rambling palace of ample proportions with large garden. Mr. Flaherty was at the door to greet Sir Zafrulla and Sir Hirza. His wife, slim and gray-haired, dressed in a sweater and skirt, her head protected against the southern sun by a topi, assisted by others, was shooting a picture of our visit to their Studio. Sir Zafrulla and Sir Hirza spent a lot of time in the studio with Mr. Flaherty's unit, inspecting the various cameras and their gadgets, costumes, the make-up department, the recording-machines and a hundred and one things that go to the making of a single full-length movie. . . .
My most treasured memory of this day is of Sabu. He was introduced to the distinguished guests in a typical American manner. He was not ushered in and made to shake hands but he made his appearance slowly, astride an elephant [11] and there he stood in the middle of the large compound for all the world to see him. He was about seven, or maybe a little older. Very thin and naked save for a small lungi wound round his legs and his head tightly covered with a white turban in the typical southern way. . .The manner in which he handled the ponderous, lumbering elephant was enough to stir one's confidence and trust in him. [12]
In October 1935, with five months gone and little shooting achieved (largely owing to bad weather), the monsoon broke and Flaherty started filming in earnest. The unit moved to its chosen village of Melkote, but on the way an alarming incident took place.
Elephants, cars, trucks, cameras and crowds of villagers with their carts and bullocks and flocks are all bunched together when Irawatha suddenly took a dislike to the tusker next to him, let out a roar and gave him an awful push and dig with his tusks. The poor tusker squealed and gave a great bound. His mahout came tumbling off and rolled in the dust. . . .Little Sabu, perched all alone on Irawatha, was whacking away at his head with the goad. . . .The poor tusker, down behind and up at the head, had his tusks jammed in the thatch-roofing
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of a house so that he couldn't move. Irawatha would have finished him, but just then the Jemadar stepped in, suddenly appearing between them. Facing Irawatha, he put a hand on each great tusk. It was an astonishing sight-Irawatha mad, with already a taste of blood. . .and the Jemadar, with nothing but a little stick in his hand. . .pushing Irawatha back. (F. Flaherty 1937:76-77)
The elephant had to be chained after this, and when Sabu had to ride him alone for the film, a mahout was hidden under the pack-cloth. It soon turned out that Irawatha was musth (crazy), and a substitute elephant had to be found. Irawatha's condition was, however, turned to good purpose, as Mrs. Flaherty records: "We took pictures of the poor creature in his painful, uneasy state, and it made him look just as we want him to look in the story when he is 'grieving his master"' (F. Flaherty 1937:81).
In November, after further delays caused by the little monsoon, but with the opening sequence shot, the unit moved to the jungle where they were to remain for several months. The location was Karapur, with a bungalow lent by the maharajah, and surrounded by a large camp. They soon had the good fortune to capture a wild tusker-"an extraordinary film property," as Mrs. Flaherty remarks. The script called for a scene in which Kala Nag runs amok and smashes everything, but Flaherty was doubtful how to achieve this. For "elephants are so incredibly slow and deliberate in their movements-so willing and intelligent but so deliberate-for filming in action he is the most peculiarly awkward material." So they built a camp of bamboo huts for the tusker to break up.
It was exciting. He was tethered by ropes from both hind-legs to a tree and the ropes were about sixty feet long so that he had a good range. The question, of course, was whether or not the ropes would hold him. The cameras. . .were all fixed in a row on top of a high platform, which would come down like so much matchwood if the tusker ever got at it. . . .Well, it didn't happen that way. The ropes held, and it was rather a pathetic scene. After plenty of smashing we called it off, for fear the poor tusker, straining and straining at his ropes would do himself in. He had taken one crashing fall. (F. Flaherty 1937:92-93)
Now came the major problem of the production-to film a genuine herd of wild elephants. There were plenty of herds about, one of them reported to be of extraordinary size. The forests in which these herds wandered had in the past been the scene of many elephant drives or keddah, and Flaherty decided that only by staging a special keddah could he get the scenes he wanted.
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We decided to have. . .a real keddah in the traditional style; to call all the villagers from miles around to make a small army (11,000 actually) of beaters, to pair these with jungle men, and to call out the forest officers to captain this army: to build the stockade and runways-an engineering feat of timber (10,000 pieces) and rope (9 tons); of digging, chopping, hauling-with hundreds of carts and all the work-elephants engaged. It sounded like a tremendous undertaking for just a film. (F. Flaherty 1937:104)
The keddah consisted of a funnel-shaped stockade some six hundred feet long leading to an inner stockade seventy-five feet in diameter. Each stockade had a gate made to "swing like a trap and crash down by cutting rope." Theoretically, the operation of the preliminary keddah was simple. The beaters were to drive the herd across the river past the cameras, then in due course drive them back across the water and into the stockade.
The first attempt was a failure probably because the herd was averse to crossing the main road, which was between them and the river. Flaherty decided to drive them across an open jungle glade, and the camera emplacements were reerected on this new location. But darkness fell before the cameras had turned a foot of film. Nevertheless, the herd had now been got into a strategic position for the actual drive, which finally took place on January 4, 1936. What happened is best described by Mrs. Flaherty:
From 2 P.M. our orders were to be in our machans (camera platforms erected in the trees), absolute silence, no smoking. . . . Our Machan was crawling with red ants, stinging beasts, almost as bad as bees, and was exposed to the sun without shade of a branch or twig. . .we could hear them coming. . .shouting, clapping, shots. . .volleys of shots and the clear, high, exciting "wind" of the bugle. . .staccato explosions of shots. It sounded like a battle. It came directly at us with a rush.
Our big lenses were pointed, like machine-guns, at the shore, raking it up and down, not to miss the first rush breaking cover. Then bang, bang! There they came. But only for a moment, half a moment. They turned downstream out of sight, out of sight they crossed the river below us, and before we could even change our lenses. . .there they came pounding along directly under our machan, a bellowing, lurching sea of rushing backs, pouring into the stockade. (F. Flaherty 1937:125-26)
Nevertheless, eighty wild elephants were captured, and in the end all the required material was filmed. But the result was a radical change in the story line of the script.
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When we saw our rushes a miracle appeared on the screen-no semblance of a drive but instead these most extraordinary creatures, as if in the heart of their mysterious jungle, "going places". Where were they going? Why, to the Elephant Dance, of course, just as it is in Kipling' story. So we remove our story all around this elephant dance. All we need to complete the illusion is their feet in action. All our camp of 25 tame elephants has gone into training like a ballet chorus-to learn to dance. Isn't it a quaint life? [13] (F. Flaherty 1937:136)
Before we leave the Indian location, some reminiscences by Osmond Borradaile, the cameraman who photographed the film at Flaherty's direction, round out the account:
Flaherty's character was both an asset and a detriment to his filmmaking. His love for people regardless of color or creed, and his consideration for their shyness and feelings, made him easily acceptable to all people-even the primitive, shy people of the Mysore jungle soon knew he was not to be suspected or feared. But his generosity and respect for the feelings of others allowed people to take advantage of him, and often he was a victim of people of various standards of life who imposed on his kindly feelings.
His love of freedom and his dislike for any form of restrictions regarding film-making made it very difficult for him to follow a written script or even a continuity of sequences. His great enthusiasm and energy made him restless and eager to start new sequences before he had finished the one he was engaged in at the time. His quick eyes would pick up little details which he immediately realized would bring interest and charm to the screen if properly filmed-such as the huge elephant straining while being goaded by the little Toomai to pick up the heavy teak-log, or the gentle searching by the tip of the elephant's trunk as it feels for the sleeping boy buried in the pile of leaves just in front of the feet of the great beast.
Flaherty was courageous and willing to take risks himself, but he loathed to see others subjected to the risk. He nearly went frantic watching Sabu riding his swimming elephant across a flood-swollen river. Although assured by the Jemadar and mahouts that there was no danger, he could not bear to watch the scene where a baby crawls out on to the roadway before a train of advancing elephants. [14]
This incident is also referred to in a letter Flaherty wrote to Korda:
Dear Mr. Korda,
Since cabling you last Sunday we have been shooting continu-
174 Robert J. Flaherty
ously with perfect weather and good results. The monsoon has at last passed away, and I expect no hold-up from weather from now on.
Mr. Biro ever since we first started the story has been nursing a pet scene which I was rather reluctant to undertake. The scene in question is onein which, while Little Toomai is proceeding through a crowded street on his elephant, the elephant inadvertently walks, over a baby. We tackled the scene last week. Having secured te mothers consent, we placed the baby in the street and called on Sabu and his elephant. There were hundreds of people about, all intensely curious. We started our cameras. Irawatha, looking like a walking mountain, approached. The tip of his trunk went down and momentarily sniffed at the baby. Then on he came. Each of his ponderous feet were thicker than the baby was long, Slowly he lifted them over, the baby looking up at him, too young to understand, of course. Then the elephant's hind feet came on. The first one he lifted over slowly and carefully; but the second foot came down on the baby's ankles.
I never heard such a yell in my life as that which came up from te hundreds of staring native onlookers. Someone swept up the baby, while our camera-crew made a circle round it to keep the crowd back, jammed it with its mother into a motor-car and raced off to the hospital. I thought there would be a riot, but fortunately nothing happened; and before we had the cameras struck, the car came racing back from the hospital. The baby was smiling and the mother was smiling.
When we ran the picture that night, we could see that the elephant, as soon as he had felt the touch of the child's feet, had thrown all his weight on the outer rim of his foot. He is truly a marvellous elephant. He picks up our Sabu by his ankle, holds him up in the air, and walks around with him. He picks him up in his trunk and does what we were repeatedly told would be impossible-lands him up on his head, on his back, or wherever the boy tells him to.
(Please do not mention this incident of the baby to the press. I have already been accused of trying to drown a boatload of wild Irishmen on Aran!)
Everyone is happy here. There has been no sickness at any moment, and I believe that every last man is in high spirits over the film.
. . .Yours sincerely,
Robert Flaherty. (Griffith 1953:121-22)
Borradaile also notes that although Flaherty had a Newman-Sinclair camera in India, he rarely used it during the production. Borradaile used a Vinten camera, which he operated himself. The only footage shot by Flaherty that appeared in the final film was the mother-and-baby-elephant
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bathing sequence. "He frequently tried to use long-focus lenses but his panning with them was too jumpy to be used. I had complete freedom in the handling of the cameras. . . . We had a number of Indians in the crew-assistant-cameramen, grips, props, and, of course, the first-class lab technician. I often look back on this Indian crew as one of the best I've ever worked with anywhere."
Borradaile described the final day of production:
The scene I shall always remember of Flaherty was when we were leaving our jungle camp for the last time and driving to Mysore City, a 40-mile drive we had got to know and love very much. Just the two of us were in the car. . . . Bob was quieter than usual and I looked sideways to see him wiping tears from his cheeks. I stopped the car and asked him if he was all right? He wiped more tears away and said, "Oh, hell, Bordie, its just because we are leaving all this beautiful country and I never expect to see it again." [15]
Exactly when Alexander Korda took advantage of the supervisory powers included in his contract with Flaherty is not clear. After Flaherty had left for India, Korda stated: "For nine months I heard absolutely nothing. Of course, I heard from the business-manager. . .and money had to be sent to India, but still we had optimism but. . .you know, when you spend money for eight, nine months and no film comes back, you start to get worried." [16]
A no doubt apochryphal story says that Korda sent Flaherty a cable asking what was happening, and Flaherty replied: "Tests going well." Raul Tabori writes: "The original budget [of Elephant Boy] was £30,000, but when the cost reached £90,000 Alex became somewhat alarmed and sent his brother Zoltan to India. . . . The many months had produced only 2,500 ft. of film and another 7,000 were needed" [17] (Tabori 1959:193-94). Production manager Teddy Baird recalls that when he was sent to India in the spring of 1936, about twelve months after Flaherty had arrived there, Zoltan Korda was already with the unit. [18] Whether he had been appointed as co-director is obscure, but doubtless it was he, on his brothers behalf (and possibly that of Monta Bell), who called for the story changes Mrs. Flaherty mentions in her book. David Flaherty recalls that Zoltan Korda appeared to have been sent out to supervise Monta Bell, who was already the supervisor, and that Zoltan's ideas about the story differed from Bell's, and both differed from Flaherty's. "In the final weeks," adds David, "three separate units were frantically shooting three different stories!" [19]
By June 1936 all filming was completed, and some three hundred thousand feet had been shot, Flaherty's record total. Many synchronized sound and dialogue scenes had been recorded, none of which was ever
176 Robert J. Flaherty
used except for some of the background sound effects. The unit sailed for England, leaving Baird to conduct a two-day sale of all the impedimenta collected during the fifteen months of production. At the last moment Flaherty was anxious to ship an elephant back to England with him (reminiscent of the mutilated basking shark in GB's window!), but this idea offended even Kordas sense of publicity.
While Flaherty had been away, however, the red light had begun to flash over the Korda kingdom at Denham. Prestige was no longer of such immediate necessity as quick cash returns from a world market. Korda and his associates scrutinized Flaherty's Indian material to see how it could be made into a picture quickly. John Collier, a young novelist who had as yet worked on only one film for Korda, was calied in. He writes,
Korda, as producer, had not thought it necessary to furnish Flaherty with a script, nor had Bob, as director, felt impelled to insist on having one. [20] He had shot some marvellous backgrounds. We ran some 17,000 ft. of them and, of course, the absence of a story was noticeable. It was suggested that a very simple story should be devised, such as could be shot (in the studio and on the lot) in about 5,000 ft. of screen-time and that this should be grafted into an equal amount of Bob's material. Korda declared that this involved 29 impossibilities; however, it was done. [21]
Some studio sequences were directed by Zoltan Korda; a professional actor, Walter Hudd, was cast as Petersen Sahib in place of Captain Fremlin (greatly distressing Flaherty); some elephants were hired from ipsnade Zoo; model shots were put in hand for the "elephant dance"; a studio editor, Charles Crighton (later a director at Eating Studios and elsewhere) took over the gigantic task of editing the Indian material; and London's East End cafes were scoured for black men of any nationality to play in the scenes staged on misty, cold autumn nights by the banks of the River Colne. Sabu was taken in hand to perfect his English. "The studio went wild about him," writes Mrs. Flaherty, "His acting amazed them; they called him a genius. They insured his life for £50,000 and set their best writers to work writing for him the story of another film" [22] (F. Flaherty 1937:138)
We should have thought that Flaherty would have kept well away from all this stupidity, but on the contrary he was much present. Tabori writes,
The actors had to spend nights and nights in Denham Woods, complete with elephants and distracted assistant-directors. Poor Sabu, in a loin-cloth, almost froze in the October cold and had to warm himself between takes at a roaring fire. Allan Jeaves, the veteran actor who appeared in more Korda pictures than almost anybody else (because Alex "liked his mug") recalled how Korda used to come down in the
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early hours, complete with walking-stick, to encourage his brother. But even the Korda charm could not extract the wayward elephant that got stuck in the river. Robert Flaherty was a great help to all at 4 A.M., with a bottle of whisky in his pocket-and Alex smiled as usual. (Tabori 1959:194)
Elephant Boy was Flaherty's last association with commercial film production except for a brief flirtation with Cinerama just before he died.
The story of Elephant Boy requires no space because the film had no theme. Sabu as Toomai introduces the picture in the studio with an apologia for what is to come. Then we go to India, where Toomai is set up on Kala Nag, the tallest elephant of all Mysore. The monkeys are chattering in the trees. The incident of the elephant stepping over the baby in the street, the sequence of elephants washing in the river, and some monologues between Toomai and Kala Nag follow. Petersen Sahib is then seen recruiting elephants for the hunt, and little Toomai steals the occasion when Kala Nag sweeps him up onto his back. Toomai then prays to the gigantic Jain statue. A title introduces us to the jungle. A great herd of elephants is expected. A stockade is built to trap them, during which Kala Nag with Toomai displays his skill at timber lifting. After several more titles, a tiger kills Toomai's father, and Toomai is sent home by the great white hunter, Petersen Sahib. Kala Nag's new mahout brutally ill-treats the beast, which runs amok. Toomai returns to quiet Kala Nag before Petersen Sahib can shoot it. The mahout, whose leg has been broken by the mad elephant, demands its death. Toomai then slips away with Kala Nag at night into the jungle. The boy falls asleep, and the elephant steals off. Toomai wakes, searches for the beast, and stumbles on the secret dance of the elephants.
In the early morning, the boy and the elephant wake up by the river. A great drive by the hunters begins, and the herd of wild elephants is driven in a trumpeting stampede into the stockade. Everyone, even the great Petersen Sahib, proclaims Toomai a great hunter. The film ends happily.
The viewer is tempted to pick out which scenes are by Flaherty and which by Zoltan Korda. Doing so is easy. First, the studio scenes shot at Denham are obvious for their gaucherie. These include all the ingenuous dialogue sequences, the white hunter interludes, the unbelievable elephant dance, and the revolting ending sequence. If these are discarded as the crude and astoundingly bad pieces of filmmaking that they are, what remains is worth looking at. Surprisingly, a good deal remains, but it cannot save the film from being anything but a wretched piece of cinema by all standards; but it does contain some fine examples of Flaherty's work.
The sequences in which Toomai prays to the giant statue, the building of the keddah, and all the scenes of Toomai and Kala Nag in which there is
178 Robert J. Flaherty
no naive superimposed dialogue are beautifully handled in the most sensitive Flaherty manner. The climactic drive of the elephants into the keddah is exciting. Some magnificent back-lit shots of the massive animals charging into the river under the dark trees are memorable. One misses, inevitably, the individuality of Flaherty's own handling of the camera-his special use of camera movement-but Borradaile's photography is admirable. Nothing exists, however, to warrant the following description:
To make it, Flaherty spent over a year in Mysore, and he made full use of his peculiar genius for sympathy with and understanding of a foreign people. The fundamental difference between Indians and westerners lies solely in their respective attitudes to human beings. In the west, man has always been, and still is, the measure of all things. He considers that animals have no souls and are, therefore, vastly inferior to him. They simply exist for his pleasure: to hunt, to eat, and domesticate. The vegetable kingdom comes still lower in his opinion. The Indian thinks just the opposite: according to his view, everything has a soul, that is to say everything contains in itself a part of the great Universal soul. . . .
Once you have grasped the significance of this outlook, you are halfway to an understanding of Indian art and life. You will realize that a human being is of no more importance than a canna lily. You will sympathize with a king who renounces his throne to become an ascetic and identify himself with nature. Robert Flaherty had realized and appreciated this Indian sense of unity, and has made you feel throughout the film that Toomai is identified with the jungle: that he is a part of the teak leaves and creepers and elephants, just as they are a part of him. (Chatwode 1937)
We suspect that this review was based on the rushes of the film, because it is not true of the finished film, which was not shown to the press until some three months after the article would have been written. The concepts she describes so hopefully vanished into the cutting rooms at Denham, never to reappear. They are non-box-office elements, which Flaherty may have captured but the Korda brothers eliminated.
II : EIephant Boy, released through United Artists, had its first showings in London and New York in April 1937. [23] Flaherty attended the London premiere, and went to Paris with Mr. and Mrs. Borradaile and Sabu for its opening at the Colisée Theatre. It was one of that year's official British entries at the Venice Film Festival, where it gained an award for best direction.
Like Man of Aran, its critical reception was very mixed. There was a
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major difference, however, between the two films. Man of Aran was completely Flaherty's film; he believed in it; it was what he intended it to be. Elephant Boy, was the Korda brothers' film; it was far from what Flaherty intended or indeed from what might have been made out of the material he brought back from India. The final film shattered his illusions that in Korda he had found the great producer who understood and believed in him. [24]
Oddly enough, the kindest words for Elephant Boy came from Flaherty's self-styled "critical attorney." Others were blistering, although their wrath tended to be directed at the Kordas rather than at Flaherty. Grierson wrote:
So established now is the tradition of Nanook, Moana, and Man of Aran, that filmic expectation lies with the old master who first taught us what a realist cinema could mean. A few directors like Capra are slick as the devil. A few greater ones like Griffith, Eisenstein and Pudovkin strike a gong in film history and teach us a new command of the medium. Fewer still, and these I think are the greatest directors, provide us with a whole philosophy of cinema-a fresh vision which, glancing past all questions of skill and technique and even sometimes past success itself, give us an inspired sight of things. Of these is Flaherty. Vertov talks of the kino-eye, but Flaherty, who never talks of it, has it. Those who like myself have known him for a long time remain in this sense his students. We can whack him in theory and outdistance him in economics but the maestro has caught the eye of the gods.
If ever proof were necessary how old-fashioned the Kipling idiom has become it is here in Elephant Boy. Walter Hudd, the pukka sahib Petersen, hunter of elephants, is Kipling to the bone. The patronage of the jungle is perfect. There is the fairy pomp of the sahibs and, to the rhetorical parlance tale of the all too fairy-tale hunters, are added the wood noted wild of the Oxford accent. But striding through the jungle in a golden truck is the other thing: Flaherty with his elephants and Toomai the boy. They are real and in the great tradition of cinema: seen and, with affection, felt. So far as I am concerned, nothing in cinema this year is likely to show anything like it, and despite the cluttering incidentals of Kiplingesque nonsense, I am grateful.
I find the film nicely symbolic for I have watched Flaherty for some years striding in just such isolation through the synthetic jungle of movie. One time picturing a Hollywood director "on his knees" before a radio in Samoa, trying to get the Coconut Grove orchestra from Hollywood; another time describing the exhortations of a producer after seeing the women of Moana "fill the screen with all they've got." Flaherty has been defending sometime or other against the synthesis all his life. He would call it "a sense of smell. . . ."
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It takes Flaherty to remind us that we film people live in two worlds and the two, Kipling fashion, do not often meet. The studio mind does not understand the realist mind, nor vice versa. One hopes continually a producer will arise who will take a genius for great observation like Flaherty's and combine it naturally with the orders of the studio. Korda has not in this case quite succeeded in being that producer. (Grierson 1937)
Less tolerant was Graham Greene:
Mr. Robert Flaherty is said to have spent more than a year in India gathering material for this picture: a scene of elephants washed in a river, a few shots of markets and idols and forests, and that is all. It cannot be compared in quantity or quality with what Mr. Basil Wright brought back from Ceylon after a stay of a few weeks. Elepbant Boy, has gone the same way as Man of Aran: enormous advance publicity, director out of touch with the Press for months, rumors of great epics sealed in tins, and then the disappointing diminutive achievement. In Man of Aran, a so called documentary, Mr. Flaherty had the islanders taught to hunt sharks for the sake of an exciting climax; there is nothing quite so flagrantly bogus in the new picture, but in all other respects it is inferior, even in the inevitable Flaherty skylines, against which elephants in single file tactlessly take up the graduated positions of those little ebony and ivory toys Indian administrators bring back to their female relatives at Cheltenham. With this exception, Mr. Flaherty's faults are negative: the more positive crimes, the bad cutting, the dreadful studio-work, the pedestrian adaptation so unfair to Kipling's story, must be laid at Denham's door.
The climax of Kipling's story of an elephant drive is the dance of the wild elephants which Little Toomai, the mahout's son, watched from the back of Kala Nag. The story is quite legitimately padded out up to this point with incidents. . . .This is all reasonable and necessary embroidery on Kipling's story, but Mr. Zoltan Korda, who is associated as director with Mr. Flaherty, has made nothing of these incidents. The episodes are not led up to, they just happen, and are over before you have time to feel excitement or even interest.
Kala Nag's attack on the camp should have been the first great climax of the picture, but through lack of preparation and rhythm in the cutting, the scene is thrown away. As for the elephant dance-I suppose the fault rests with the Indian elephants who will not dance as Kipling describes them, stamping heavy as trip-hammers, rocking the ground, though a little could have been done with music and we might have been spared the models. But what has no excuse at this
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point is the story construction. To use the gathering of the wild elephants; on the jungle dance-floor merely to resolve the problem of Petersen sahib who has got to trap a certain number of elephants for labor if he is to retain his job-this is to throw away the whole poetic value of the original. . . .
Kipling's mind, heaven knows, had its chasms; he was capable of crudities and cruelties, but not of that, and it is noticeable in this faltering and repetitive picture that it is only when Kipling speaks-in his own dialogue when Machua Appa apostrophises Toomai-that the ear is caught and attention held. "He shall take no harm in the keddah when he runs under their bellies to rope the wild tuskers; and if he slips before the feet of the charging bull-elephant, that bull-elephant shall know who he is and shall not touch him." Unwise, unwise, to let those weighted and authoritative syllables fall among the cheap china values, the "Presents from Mysore." (Greene 1937a)
Greene's review sparked off some correspondence (Wright 1937):
"Sir:-
Mr. Graham Greene enjoys a wide reputation as the most acute and reliable film critic in this country. It was therefore something of a shock to read his review of Flaherty's Elephant Boy, in which he does less than justice to one of the most important figures in the cinema today. Mr. Greene should by now be capable of distinguishing between the function of the producer and the function of the director. Instead, he blames Robert Flaherty for every thing which was not his responsibility, but Alexander Korda's.
The conflict between so personal an art as Flaherty's and the demand (possibly justifiable) of executives with an eye on the box-office raises an honest and genuine problem. Korda preferred to add to Flaherty's own genius the co-directional work of Zoltan Korda, and to shoot extra sequences at Denham. As producer, he no doubt had his own good reasons for doing so, and he also had every right to do so.
If Mr. Greene feels-as many may feel-that the resulting compromise is a disappointment, let him direct his able invective to the right quarters. It is quite unfair to blame Flaherty for this state of affairs.
One point more. Does Mr. Greene seriously believe that the sum total of Flaherty's work in India consists of "a scene of elephants washed in a river, a few shots of markets and idols and forests?" I am perfectly certain that if Mr. Greene were to see privately-and I hasten to add that I have not-all the scenes taken in Mysore, he would
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prefer to rewrite his review with a little more respect for Flaherty's unique feeling for cinema, his depth of human understanding, and, let me emphatically add, his intense personal sincerity.
Yours etc.,
Basil Wright."
Greene replied:
In spite of Mr. Basil Wright's generous championship of Mr. Robert Flaherty, I am unrepentant. Mr. Flaherty was sent to India to direct a fictional film. A director several thousand miles from his studio and his producer must undertake some of the responsibilities of production as well as of direction, and nothing Mr. Wright mentions alters the fact that Mr. Flaherty has not delivered the goods-the right setting for a particular story. Mr. Wright exhibits what I can only call a religious faith in something he hasn't seen-the unused Mysore material. A critic must depend on the evidence of the eyes, and my memory of the bogus sharks hunt in Mr. Flaherty's last picture does not incline me to believe in his "depth of human understanding" any more than the melodramatic photography of Man of Aran convinces me of Mr. Flaherty's "unique feeling for & cinema." (Greene 1937b)
The most fulsome review of Elephant Boy came from the American James Shelley Hamilton, who had also lavished his adjectives on Man of Aran. His final sentence was: "For Flaherty has accomplished his customary magic and recreated one of those far-off places the ordinary person can only read and dream about, and put it vividly and beautifully" (Hamilton 1937). Hamilton, however, failed to say if he was referring to Denham or Mysore.
Elephant Boy, possesses one striking quality: of all Flaherty's films seen in retrospect, it is the most outdated and lacking in living essence. But such a result is reasonable to expect from a hybrid.
Little Toomai-Sabu-was brought to England for the studio scenes and, like the Aran Islanders, shown the sights of London, thereby creating excellent publicity for the film. David Flaherty colorfully describes the sightseeing:
He [Sabu] has been sculptured by Lady Kennet, painted by Egerton Cooper, has broadcast over the BBC and televised at Alexandria Palace. . . . Sabu has no illusions as to his future. He knows that the life of a boy star in the films is short. After Elephant Boy, another picture, another year, perhaps at the outside two. . . .When he goes back to Mysore, as he probably will one day, he will have added
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to his good earthy wisdom some of the knowledge that is power. (D. Flaherty 1937)
Sabu did go back to India, but he went to Hollywood first, and A. K. Sett recorded his metamorphosis:
Years later, Sabu dined with me informally and alone, at my ancestral home in Bombay and with Scotch before the meal and champagne during dinner. I told him how and where I first saw him and we talked of the nostalgic past and of persons who had either died or had faded into the shadows of obscurity. This time he did not make his appearance on an elephant. He arrived in a luxurious Cadillac. He was most elegantly clad, not in a tight turban and a skimpy lungi, I can assure you. And he spoke with a distinct American accent. [26]
Flaherty came back to the brasserie at the Cafe Roval, holding court, his always generous, warm-hearted self, picking up the check no matter how many might be there with him. He had added Indian tales to the repertoire such as the fabulous one about the cobra (see Appendix II). The Flahertys had taken a flat in Danvers Street, Chelsea, renting it from Mrs. Fleming who, with Sir Alexander Korda, lived in the same building. For a time, too, they stayed at a guesthouse in the country called Hurtmore Farm, at Godalming, in Surrey. And after the Elephant Boy debacle, until his departure to the United States just before war broke out, the documentary people in London again saw more of the man from whom they learned so much and regarded with so much affection. [27]
It was in the saloon bar of The Highlander, the new haunt of film people with its semicircular mahogany counter, its steep stairs down to the toilet, and its curious air of Victoriana brought up-to-date, that Flaherty became accomplished on the shova-ha'penny board. He never latched onto darts-they were in the public bar-but he did become a slave to a pin-table on which he would play for hours. During these same two years, he often joined a few of us later in the evening (if he had not wandered off to the Cafe Royal) at a strange little place called the Star Club on the first floor of an Italian restaurant called Castanos in Greek Street, which led off the south side of Soho Square. (The GPO film unit was housed nearby at No. 21 Soho Square, the Strand Film Company was at the old EMB units premises at No. 37 Oxford Street, and the Realist Film Unit, newly formed by Basil Wright [of which Flaherty became a director and remained so until his death), was located at 62 Oxford Street.)
Here would gather the older documentary people-Golightly, Legg, Elton, Davidson, Donald and John Taylor, occasionally Grierson and our
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selves. Flaherty would play for hour after hour on the billiards table and we remember his ferocious howl of rage when, after he had accumulated a vast score, he would knock over the red mushroom, which lost him the lot. Alternatively, he would work the fruit machine until it grew red hot. At late hours the club was frequented by shadowy strangers from Soho's underworld, who sat moodily drinking at the tables, wondering no doubt who and what we were, although Mr. Castano had presumably "cleared" us as being harmless.
It was a time of idleness for Flaherty-the longest time until then that he had suffered the demoralizing frustration of unemployment. For two and a half years, from when he quit work on the Korda film until he left for New York, no one asked him to make a film and he was unable to launch any new film project. Like some other documentary filmmakers, he turned to writing to help make a livelihood, but it never came easy to him. It was during this time that he wrote The Captain's Chair and White Master, both based on his memories and experiences in the Hudson Bay territory. Although vivid in visual metaphor, from a literary viewpoint they tend to become repetitious. Perhaps this extract from Grierson's review of The Captain's Chair puts it best:
And what is it but just a lot of life and a lot of death struggling out of the north--a Dane who puts all his money in a ship and drives it ashore by mistake, and elects to live in it thereafter, with the deck all cock-eyed and the winds of hell blowing through the gaping timbers-the epic ten year Odyssey of Comock the Eskimo, whose friend loses his wife in an ice-split, goes mad, and has to be murdered, with Flaherty, the old Greek, putting the murder off-stage, and keeping his story on the eyes of the madman. [28] Or is it Nucktie the Owl, the sissy Eskimo with the frizzled hair who had to see God to keep the tribal focus on him, and of course duly saw him, and how his fellow Eskimos got wise to the racket and began to see God too. And, keeping the narratives together, there is the story of the ship whose spirit broke: getting round the Bay and getting later and later, the rumors flying-God knows how-over a million square miles of advancing winter, the human disasters popping off like corks one after another all along the coasts of the Bay, and the sound of men screaming as loud as a war. I doubt if there are half-a-dozen writers in English who could match the scale of it. (Grierson 1938)
We are indebted to Denis Johnston, the Irish playwright, for reminding us that he adapted The Captain's Chair as a play for television for the BBC in 1937, when he was also a producer for the British Broadcasting Corporation at Alexandria Palace. Flaherty appeared in the program as the narrator and John Laurie played Captain Grant. "It was one of the earli-
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est television scripts to combine live performances with film-sequences," writes Johnston, "together with live and recorded sound. All of this is commonplace today, but The Last Voyage of Captain Grant, as we called it, was quite a small landmark in TV technique at the time, and Bob's appearance as the Narrator was one of the highlights in it." [29] At a later date, Orson Welles became interested in buying the film rights to the book, but at that time, 1942, his relations with RKO fell apart, and nothing happened.
During this period, Flaherty was commissioned by S. C. Leslie, of the British Commercial Gas Association, to produce a story idea for a film. He evolved a treatment about the adventures of a small Newcastle boy who stowed away on a coastal collier and after various adventures came to London. It was in some senses an adaptation of the "Boy and the Pit Pony" idea which Flaherty had been keen on earlier. The Gas Association story was turned into a full-length dialogue script by Cecil Day Lewis and Basil Wright. After many tests, a boy was found for the main part, but the imminence of war put a stop to the production. The script is still in existence, as is that of "Pit Boy."
Many people have recollections of Flaherty in London at this time, and all remark on his generosity. For a time he must have been able to live on his savings from the Korda film, and it is said that "his profit from Elephant Boy ran to several thousand dollars, the largest amount he had made up to then on a movie" (Taylor 1949). This figure, however, probably refers to his share of the returns and not to his fees as a director in India. But whether in the Cafe Royal, the Star Club, or at his home, he was munificent in his gifts. He would gather a group of people with him, collect some liquor, and the entire company would return to his home for a garrulous evening.
Flaherty was delighted when he "discovered" the Players Theatre Club, which had been started in 1936 in historic premises at No. 43 King Street, Covent Garden, by Leonard Sachs and Peter Ridgeway. The show consisted of a chairman who introduced a number of individual turns or sketches, usually musical and burlesquing the Victorian music hall. The first chairman was Alex Clunes, who was later succeeded by Leonard Sachs and Don Gernmell. Song sheets were distributed to the audience-who could drink at tables-and the chairman bandied his wit with members of the audience who came night after night for the sake of gentle bar-racking. Many performers who have since become well known had their first chance at the Players. Among visitors were the Duff-Coopers, Marlene Dietrich, the Lunts, Vincent Sheean and, oddly enough, De Valera.
Flaherty became a well-known figure at the Players, always with a party. He found the place characteristically English. But he always had, we suspect, a fondness for the mystique of the English tradition, an affection for the courtly way of life.
At the time of Munich it came as a shock to Cedric Belfrage to find that
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Flaherty was a supporter of Neville Chamberlain. He could not fit it in himself, he said, to believe that the German people wanted war. He was under the current American delusion, says Newton Rowe, that British diplomat and statesmen were fiendishly clever and would outwit Hitler. In point o fact, and we think that all who knew him would agree, Flaherty was wholly apolitical. To us, the betrayal of the Czechoslovakian people came as a numbing shock. We remember even now the shameful words as they came over the radio in the saloon bar in The Highlander.
But to Flaherty, who had not known World War I at close hand, the thought of appeasement was perhaps acceptable because he did not believe that mankind could be so futile as to betray itself again. In the Canadian far North he had been untouched by the war years of 1914-19 in a way that would have been impossible if he had been a European. Like many Americans who remained at home, World War I to him had an unreal quality that made it very distant, and that distance grew with the years. All Europe had been deeply hurt by that war; America had taken part only in the final throes.
To someone who came to know the Flahertys well in London from the time of the Aran film on, this feeling of Bob's was certainly not that of physical fear. "To him," says Winifred Holmes, "the war was to come as a crucifixion: It was a betrayal of all that he held to be true in mankind. He could not believe that it could be real and possible. He just had to get away from it-when it finally came." [30]
But although Flaherty found it impossible to face up to the fact that another world war was imminent, Mrs. Flaherty, who, it will be remembered, anticipated the world economic collapse of 1929, now foresaw the coming conflict. "Mrs. Flaherty came to ask my advice as to what to do," says Newton Rowe, "and I remember the declaring of war to be an absolute certainty in my mind. I advised her to go back to America at once and buy a farm. That is just what she did." [31] Barbara, the eldest daughter, had married and become Mrs. van Ingen and had gone to live in India. Frances and Monica went back to the United States with their mother in September 1938. Flaherty moved into a large, comfortable studio just at the back of the old Chelsea Church.
Both Jack and Winifred Holmes visited him a good deal there, taking their daughter. Mrs. Holmes recalls especially Flaherty's great concern with children. He always found presents for them. He had a capacity for giving them great confidence in themselves. At the same time, he expected them to cooperate by making themselves scarce when he was not in the mood for them. Many people, each in his or her own way, showed affection for him. Olwen Vaughan, then working at the British Film Institute, called daily and got breakfast for him. Osmond Borradaile recalls the following anecdote:
India and the Elephants 187
His love of the good things of life, good food, theatre and good companionship demanded that he had some funds, but his generosity often put him in embarrassing positions. I recall one such occasion. His family had returned to the States. . . . Funds he had expected were late in arriving. He telephoned me and told me his predicament. I went to see him and lent him what he thought would be enough to see him through until the expected funds arrived. We then went out to a little pastry shop in Chelsea to get something for tea. It was spring and in the window of a little flower shop we saw the first sweet-peas of the year-a huge bowlful of blooms. Bob could not resist going in to see them more closely; he buried his face right into them, inhaling their fragrance. Then he turned to the salesgirl and said, "They are lovely, I'll take them." The girl and I were both amazed when he added, "Yes, all of them." So I saw more than £5 paid for a bunch of flowers. While enjoying tea and the scent of the sweet-peas, I hoped that the expected funds would arrive before the blooms faded and would need replacing. [32]
"After the parties at the studio," says Hayter Preston, "it was sometimes necessary to stay the night, which one did by sleeping on the floor. When you woke up in the morning, you would always find a new toothbrush in cellophane and a box of fifty Balkan Sobranie cigarettes beside you, thoughtfully placed there by the host." [33] "He was," adds.Newton Rowe, "forever emptying the ashtrays."
In January 1939, the eminent French director Jean Renoir visited London, and a reception and screening of his films was given at Film House, Wardour Street. During his stay, Flaherty gave a party for him in his Chelsea studio. The two became great friends. Renoir arranged for Flaherty to be invited to Paris by the Cinématèque Française, where a performance was prepared by Mary Meerson (the widow of the admirable French art director) of his films to a select audience of filmmakers, artists, and intellectuals. A year or two later, when Renoir and his wife Dido, had to flee France, Flaherty-by then in New York-was the first person to welcome them to America and to use his influence to help them. [34]
During the early summer of 1939, while John Grierson was in New York, he was visited by Frances Flaherty, who was anxious about her husband in London because of the threat of imminent war. She bluntly asked Grierson if he would go across to England and literally bring Flaherty back home-which Grierson did. But to pave the way for success, he sowed the seed in the mind of Pare Lorentz, head of the newly formed U.S. Film Service, to initiate a major film about American agriculture and to invite Flaherty by telegram to come back and make it. [35] When the telegram arrived Flaherty was elated.
188 Robert J. Flaherty
Two nights before he finally left London in mid-August 1939, Flahertv gave a wonderful and memorable party at his studio. Hayter Preston, Harry Watt, Olwen Vaughan, and the Holmeses remember the occasion well, as no doubt do others whose names have not gone on the record. It was a party, we are told, that fitted the occasion. There were a dozen crates of Islay Mist and huge steak-and-kidney pies that were ordered from the Cafe Royal.
"The following day," says Winifred Holmes, "we felt we couldn't let Bob just leave London on the wave of a party, especially as there had been so many there who had no real affection for him but who were not averse to drinking his liquor so generously provided but which he at that time could ill-afford. So we went round to see him. He was alone, trying to sort out a tableful of unpaid bills and wondering how he was going to raise the money to pay them. A lot of people helped." [36] He also owed income tax and co~uld not leave the country until it was paid. Some others helped.
The day before he departed, Flaherty announced to Hayter Preston, who had shared the studio with him for the last two months, that he must give him a present to commemorate the occasion. "He went out of the room for a moment," says Preston, "and then came back with an old copper coffee-pot, which he insisted I accept. It was the one he had had with him during the making of all his films, including Nanook." [37]
Meanwhile, Grierson
had returned to London and fulfilled his promise to Mrs. Flaherty,
although Flaherty never knew that it was Grierson who had inspired
Lorentz's telegram. The two of them left Southampton on July 26
on the Empress of Australia for Canada. "Flaherty
was worried," recalls John Taylor, "because he had left
some work unfinished for a publisher for which he had had advance
money. He hoped that Grierson would help him complete the writing
on the voyage." [38] Some days later, Grierson delivered
Flaherty safely to Frances in the Windsor Hotel, Montreal. Adds
Grierson, "At that moment of reuniting, I was the most forgotten
man in the world." [39]