Douglas Slocombe obituary

Douglas Slocombe, who has died aged 103, was one of Britain’s greatest cameramen – an award-winning cinematographer noted for his high contrast shooting and a key figure in British and American film from the heyday of Ealing Studios in the 1940s and 50s onwards.

Slocombe, who was entirely self-taught, had a career spanning more than 40 years and 80 films. He was nominated for Oscars for Travels With My Aunt (1972), Julia (1977) and Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981). Bafta recognised him with awards for The Servant (1963), The Great Gatsby (1974) and Julia, nominations for Guns at Batasi (1964), The Lion in Winter (1968) and Jesus Christ Superstar (1973), and a lifetime achievement award in 1993.

Born in London, Slocombe spent his childhood in Paris, where his father was a diplomatic and foreign correspondent for London newspapers, entertaining politicians and such luminaries as Ernest Hemingway and James Joyce. He graduated in mathematics from the Sorbonne, but his two preoccupations were film and journalism. When work on a French Alexander Korda production did not materialise because he lacked a work permit and his hopes of joining a Gainsborough Studios apprenticeship scheme were dashed, Slocombe ended up as a junior news editor at British United Press in London for three years, also writing (from London) a Paris newsletter under a pseudonym.

To compensate for this not terribly exciting job, he continued his childhood passion, photography, which had begun at the age of seven with a Kodak Box Brownie. He increasingly sold his pictures internationally and this prompted him to set up on his own as a stills photographer in advertising, meanwhile still selling to magazines such as Picture Post, Life and Paris Match and writing articles and short stories.

In 1939 he persuaded Life to send him to Danzig (the semi-autonomous city state that became the modern Polish port of Gdańsk), which was acquiring the reputation of being the most dangerous place in Europe. On his return, Herbert Kline, who was producing a documentary to be entitled Lights Out in Europe, asked Slocombe to return to Danzig to film. It was crucial this was done before his powerful photographs of, among others, black- and brownshirts terrorising the city, were published, which meant within three weeks.

After only a day’s camera training, off he went, capturing extraordinary images, including a meeting of SS stormtroopers being addressed by Joseph Goebbels. He had gained entry by stealing the press pass of a drunken journalist – something he always felt bad about. The noise of the camera halted Goebbels in mid-speech: Slocombe stopped filming, scurrying out at the end beneath outstretched arms making the Nazi salute before he could be stopped.

Slocombe was under constant surveillance, his hotel room searched every day (he used to put hairs on drawers and doors to check). On the same visit he was arrested while filming the firing of a synagogue, held overnight and interrogated in a Gestapo building before managing to talk his way out. The Polish embassy, which had been smuggling his footage to London, warned him not to return to his hotel and helped him across the border into Warsaw where, in August 1939, he was joined by Kline.

A few days later the city was bombed and they joined a refugee train for Romania which was also bombed, Slocombe filming the horrific scenes. They travelled north for days using a horse and cart, and made it to Riga in Latvia before the Russians sealed the border, then home via Sweden.

Slocombe continued his still and newsreel work on the Maginot Line and in Amsterdam where, in May 1940, he filmed the German invasion. Kline then introduced him to Alberto Cavalcanti, a leading figure at Ealing Studios which had an agreement with the Ministry of Information to use war footage for morale-boosting films.

For the next three years, Slocombe was on board destroyers, aircraft carriers, including HMS Illustrious, in Atlantic convoys, and with the Fleet Air Arm and RAF, finding his flights in open cockpits so exhilarating that after the war he gained a pilot’s licence. Some of his footage appeared in features such as The Big Blockade (1942) and San Demetrio London (1943).

When Cavalcanti got him into Ealing Studios proper it was the beginning of an extraordinary career. His first leap into feature films was as a camera operator on Champagne Charlie (1944); then he lit sequences in Dead of Night (1945). His career went on to include such wonderful black and white titles as The Captive Heart (1946) and, in 1947, Hue and Cry, The Loves of Joanna Godden and It Always Rains on Sunday, before he moved into colour with Saraband for Dead Lovers (1948).

On this film, Slocombe ignored Technicolor’s conventional wisdom, not to say insistence, of shooting with flat lighting, and instead used the kind of high contrast that characterised his work in black and white. The result was a stunning example of the beauty of Technicolor, which audiences had the pleasure of seeing in a restored print at the 1991 London film festival. Throughout his career Slocombe continued to light colour sets as though they were black and white.

In 1949 he shot Kind Hearts and Coronets, in which Alec Guinness played all the D’Ascoyne family members who appear together in one scene. Not wanting to use printing processes which he felt were not adequate to the task, Slocombe covered the scene in the camera. This meant shooting Guinness as one character, then rewinding for the next appearance. The shooting took three and a half days (Guinness’s different makeups took three hours each) and the lighting had to be consistent, the different positions matted in and out and the camera nailed rock solid in its place.

Slocombe continued with Ealing until the demise of the studio in 1959, shooting such classic titles as The Lavender Hill Mob and The Man in the White Suit (both 1951). In the 1960s, during his freelance career, he was responsible for stunning examples of the cinematographer’s craft such as Freud (1962), A High Wind in Jamaica (1965), Dance of the Vampires (1967), The Italian Job (1969) and the Indiana Jones trilogy. Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989) was his last project.

In later years he also shot commercials, enjoying the different discipline they required, and in 1981 was a member of Cannes film festival jury.

Slocombe’s wife Muriel predeceased him. He is survived by their daughter, Georgina.

Douglas Slocombe, cinematographer, born 10 February 1913; died 22 February 2016