 Leslie Norman was born in London on 23 February 1911, and entered the film
industry at the age of sixteen. In 1930 he joined British International Pictures
and edited Man from Chicago (d. Walter Summers). He worked as an editor throughout
the 1930s and co-directed a low-budget thriller, Too Dangerous to Live, in 1939.
After serving as a major in the sonic-warfare unit in Burma during the war he
joined Ealing Studios, where his first assignment was as supervising editor on
the Australian production The Overlanders (Harry Watt, 1946). He edited Nicholas
Nickleby (d. Alberto Cavalcanti, 1947) and Frieda (Basil Dearden, 1947), and teamed up
again with Harry Watt to produce more overseas adventures: Eureka Stockade
(1949), Bitter Springs (1950) and Where No Vultures Fly (1951). He also produced two of
Ealing's best non-comedies - Mandy (d. Alexander Mackendrick, 1952) and The
Cruel Sea (d. Charles Frend, 1953) - before competently directing The Night My
Number Came Up (1955), a thriller revolving around a nightmare about a plane
crash. It was critically and commercially successful, and Norman was borrowed by
Hammer to replace the blacklisted Joseph Losey on X The Unknown (1956).
After directing The Shiralee (1957), a drama starring Peter
Finch in the Australian outback, Norman returned home to make his best-known
film, Dunkirk (1958), a large-scale project made as an Ealing Studios production
for MGM. It was one of the last of such epics to be made in black-and-white and
failed to justify its heavy costs, but its honesty and lack of grandiloquence
has allowed it to age gracefully. When Ealing closed down, Norman returned to
Australia to make Summer of the Seventeenth Doll (UK/US/Australia, 1959) and
worked with Michael Balcon on another Second World War story, The Long and the
Short and the Tall (1960), a stage success which its director, Lindsay Anderson,
had hoped to bring to the screen himself. Norman was considered a safer pair of
hands and the producers played even safer by insisting that the film be shot at
Elstree rather than in the jungles of Burma.
Like most of Ealing's directors, Norman found it difficult to find projects
in the different climate of the 1960s. Spare the Rod (1961), starring Max
Bygraves, is a lively precursor of the huge commercial success To Sir with Love
(d. James Clavell, 1967), but Mix Me a Person (1961), starring Adam Faith, shows
Norman uncomfortable and wary of the emerging youth culture. Apart from his
uncredited co-direction of The Lost Continent (1968), Norman's subsequent career
was confined to television, where he directed episodes of The Avengers (ITV, 1961-69), The
Saint (ITV, 1962-69) and The Persuaders (ITV, 1971-72). Having survived cancer of the larynx, he died,
aged eighty-one, after suffering a seizure while driving near his home in
Knebworth, Hertfordshire, on 18 February 1993. His son is the television film
critic Barry Norman.
Bibliography
Bergan, Ronald, 'Leslie Norman', The Guardian, 23 Feb 1993, p. 10
McFarlane, Brian, An Autobiography of British Cinema (London: Methuen, 1992)
Norman, Leslie, 'Those were the Days', Film and TV Technician, Nov 1990, pp.18-19
Margaret Butler, Directors in British and Irish Cinema
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