“Thief of Bagdad Three Quarters Shot”
Updated: 5 hours ago
“Came the war,” Peter Hopkinson wrote, “with the Thief of Bagdad three quarters shot.”
He was explaining to me what he was doing in army uniform filming Churchill in Cairo in 1943. That patch you see on his shoulder indicates his membership of the Army Film and Photographic Unit.
Three letters from the film mogul Alexander Korda, which Peter photocopied for me, trace the trajectory of a young film fan into uniform. The journey started in the summer of 1936.
That year, Korda had built a factory for make-believe at Denham, near Uxbridge in Middlesex. The first film to go on the floor at the brand-new studio was his biopic of Rembrandt, starring Charles Laughton in the title role. Korda himself had decided to direct the picture.
On Friday 28 August, the local newspaper, The Middlesex Advertiser and County Gazette, published a portrait of the mogul at work. It was the first of a series of biographical features devoted to the film-makers who – with the construction of not only Denham but also Pinewood Studios in Iver and the Technicolor laboratory at West Drayton – were flocking into this part of the Home Counties, just west of London.
“No man has done more to put the British film industry on its feet than he has,” the piece asserted. “He moves among his thousands of employees at Denham as a respected friend. Few men are so accessible. He is never too busy to see genuine people and is just as meticulous about an appointment with an ordinary workman in the studio as with a great film star.”
Peter, who then lived in Harrow, read the article, and on the very same day wrote a letter to Korda asking him for a job. Then only sixteen years old, he was just one of many film-mad kids who wanted to work at the new studio.
“From Harrow,” he recalled, “I had bicycled to its site, gazing entranced as the great sound stages rose high above the surrounding countryside. I had to get into this new British Hollywood.”¹
Hurrying to complete the shooting of Rembrandt, Korda got his secretary to write a reply, which unfortunately on this occasion had to be in the negative.
But only a few weeks later, Peter managed to get a job working as a clapperboy at the Associated Talking Pictures studio in Ealing – a more convenient bike ride into town, rather than away from it. He was paid £1 a week. His first day’s work, 6 October 1936, was on The Mysterious Mr Davis. A production that was renting space in the studio, the film was produced and directed by the French film-maker Claude Autant-Lara for a company called Oxford Films. But Peter quickly graduated to the George Formby and Gracie Fields musicals that were then the mainstays of the Ealing programme.
After a slump in the industry the following year, Associated Talking Pictures cut back production, and Peter was out of work again. “It’s a completely unsafe, insecure business,” his father correctly told him. “You had much better get a job in a bank with a pension at the end.”² But Peter was not going to compromise on what he wanted. Soon he was on his bike again, back to Denham.
This time he was lucky. He was taken on as a camera assistant for £3 a week. He was assigned to the production of The Citadel, which was being directed by the Hollywood director King Vidor for MGM, and then moved on to Korda’s production of The Thief of Bagdad.
He remembered whizzing across a sound stage on wires as a flying carpet bore him aloft with a light meter to measure the intensity of the giant carbon arcs needed for the great Technicolor camera (its three-strip optical system was no faster than about ISO 10).
He recalled too his last day on the production. The camera crew was filming the pink elephant that carries the Princess into Basra when suddenly the weather turned against them. “From the sky above, rain: the light too drab for the Technicolor cameras. In a tent we sat, and played cards, and listened to the radio. Hitler had invaded Poland.”³
That same day, Friday 1 September 1939, he received another letter of dismissal.
Peter’s unit was one of only several units that had been working in parallel, because Korda had been hurrying to get the film finished before the war began. William Cameron Menzies – one of several so-called directors working on the film (really, it was only Korda himself who was the real director) – continued that day to work with the 2nd unit, shooting Rex Ingram against blue backing for the sequence in which the Djinni takes Abu to the Temple of the Dawn, “on the highest peak of the highest mountain of the world”.
It was the 69th day of shooting. There were 47 more shooting days to come, which would be shot at Denham through into November. The last shooting day filmed there – of the All Seeing Eye exploding – was Saturday 4 November.⁴
But by then the fantasy was over for Peter. What he would have found awaiting for him, had he been able to look into the All Seeing Eye, was to arrived in Bagdad, in 1942, where he was attached to the 10th Army. And it was not to film a princess on a pink elephant, but to make to a documentary about the military land supply route from British-occupied Persia into the Soviet Union, now a wartime ally. And a few months later, he was with the 8th Army, filming the Battle of El Alamein.
Notes
The photographs of Peter photographing Churchill and holding the huge clapperboard (perhaps a reflection of a period when the synchronisation of sound was still a comparatively new discipline) come from his excellent book about his career in films, Split Focus, published by Ruper Hart-Davis in 1969.
Peter Hopkinson, Split Focus: An Involvement in Two Decades (Rupert Hart-Davis, 1969), p.11.
ibid., pp. 13–14.
ibid., p.17.
The production information about The Thief of Bagdad comes from the diary of its production manager David Cunynghame, to which his family granted me access when I was writing my biography of Sir Alexander Korda.
