 One of the first important British cameramen, John Jaffray Cox started his
career in 1913 as an assistant to the director Lewin Fitzhamon. Cox later
refined his craft during a highly prolific five years at Stoll between 1921 and
1926, when he photographed numerous films for director Maurice Elvey. His
profile was raised considerably when he moved to British International Pictures
(BIP) at Elstree and worked regularly with the studio's star director Alfred
Hitchcock, beginning with The Ring in 1927. Cox subsequently shot all of
Hitchcock's films at BIP.
He proved an adept and versatile collaborator, skilled
in both the expressionist lighting techniques and inventive cinematography which
the visually oriented director demanded. The Ring, as Donald Spoto points out,
is marked by an innovative use of blurred images, overlays, dissolves and double
exposures; the arrival of the fishing boats which opens The Manxman (d.
Hitchcock, 1929) has a spontaneity and a realism which is rare in dramatic
British films of the period, while Blackmail (d. Hitchcock, 1929) contains a
great deal of fluid camera movement despite being otherwise constrained by early
sound production techniques.
Hitchcock left BIP in 1932 and Cox found himself working on less satisfying
productions as the studio concentrated on its rather low-rent but popular mix of
comedies and operettas. He subsequently joined Gainsborough, where he was
immediately able to work with more creative directors like Robert Stevenson, Roy
William Neill, the young Carol Reed, and Hitchcock again on the The Lady
Vanishes (1937). By the 1940s Cox had become the studio's senior cameraman,
specialising in a mixture of sober realist dramas including Frank Launder and
Sidney Gilliat's documentary-inpsired vision of life on the home front, Millions
Like Us (1943), and the more highly charged melodramas which made the studio's
reputation during the period, including Madonna of the Seven Moons (d. Arhtur
Crabtree, 1944) and The Wicked Lady (d. Leslie Arliss, 1945).
The photographic style of the melodramas is rooted in an economical lighting
design with an underlying expressionism that becomes more obvious at key moments
of conflict and tension. Madonna of the Seven Moons, for example, utilises two
contrasting visual styles, each corresponding to an aspect of the fractured
psyche of Phyllis Calvert's central character. The meek and demure Maddalena
inhabits brightly lit bourgeois interiors while her alter ego, the fiery and
sensual Rosanna, lives in a shadowy world of excitement, romance and danger at
the Seven Moons Café, conveyed via an imaginative interplay of light and shade.
Bolder visual touches are also used sparingly for maximum expressive effect - in
The Wicked Lady we cut to an extreme close-up of the eyes of Lady Barbara
Skelton (Margaret Lockwood) as she commits murder; later, as she lies dying of a
gunshot wound, the camera unexpectedly cranes back and up and out of the window,
leaving her alone and isolated in her wickedness. Unfortunately, the signs of
economy are also rather visible in The Wicked Lady, with poor back projection
sequences of the principals out riding and some very obvious day-for-night.
By the late 1940s Gainsborough was under new management, and Cox was
gradually eclipsed by younger technicians such as Stephen Dade and Reg Wyer. He
ended his career shooting light comedies, including a number of Norman Wisdom
vehicles, for director John Paddy Carstairs.
Duncan Petrie
This entry is taken from Duncan Petrie's The British Cinematographer (BFI, 1996). Used by permission.
|
FILM & TV CREDITS
