Though Death on the Nile 1978 with Peter Ustinov assuming the role of Hercule Poirot
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Though Death on the Nile (1978), with Peter Ustinov assuming the role of Hercule Poirot played in the first film by Albert Finney, was considered even better than its predecessor, the next two Christie movies, The Mirror Crack'd (1980) and Evil Under the Sun (1982), were less impressive.In 1975 Brabourne joined the board of Thames Television, and in the same year he was active as a member of Harold Wilson's Working Party on Films. "What Wilson did then," he said,was create a means of circulating money through the industry without taking government money, and it kept the industry alive. Starring members of the Royal Ballet performing Frederick Ashton's choreography, it was a completely dialogue-free movie that proved surprisingly successful at the box office:We were extremely lucky that Bryan Forbes was head of production at EMI. He thought it was a terrific idea and he was in the position to say that they would put up the money.Murder on the Orient Express (1974), a big hit, was the first of four Agatha Christie stories that Brabourne produced on film, with star-laden casts including such heavyweight names as Bette Davis, Ingrid Bergman, Lauren Bacall, Sean Connery, Elizabeth Taylor and David Niven. "We were years before our time," Brabourne commented wryly some years later.Brabourne's next movie, Up the Junction (1968) was a bleakly realistic tale of working-class travails. It was followed by another innovative movie of which Brabourne was particularly proud, Tales of Beatrix Potter (1971), the idea for which originated with Richard Goodwin and his wife, the designer Christine Edzard.
It occurred to me that this was really a modern play, a ballad of youth. So Tony and I talked to Zeffirelli, and when we said that, he said, "We must make this."The pay-per-view scheme, meanwhile, had collapsed when the Postmaster-General refused to allow the company to exceed the imposed limit of 150,000 customers. Brabourne remembered:It is one of those extraordinary films that people go on watch-ing. I've been getting a cheque every six months since it was made! It just goes on running and everyone likes it.Brabourne then became part of a company named British Home Entertainment, a cable service which planned to bring the arts, particularly theatre, film and opera, to viewers who would pay by putting coins into a meter. One of its coups was acquiring the rights to show the Cassius Clay/Henry Cooper boxing match to several thousand subscribers in London.For BHE, Brabourne co-produced, with Anthony Havelock-Allan, film transcriptions of stage hits which, if not entirely successful, preserved valuable parts of theatre history, such as Laurence Olivier's remarkable performance with Maggie Smith in Othello (1966) and the D'Oyly Carte Opera Company in The Mikado (1967).
The pair also produced Zeffirelli's energetic and flamboyant Romeo and Juliet (1968), a movie so perfectly attuned to the air of youthful rebellion in the Sixties that it became an outstanding success:The play had been ruined for me by seeing people in it who were much too old for the parts. That is a very important distinction and it was what I liked to do.John Brabourne's first film as a producer was Harry Black (put out in the United States as Harry Black and the Tiger):I had quite a lot of connections with India as my father was Governor of Bombay, and had been Viceroy for a short time, and my father-in-law was the last Viceroy. I wanted to make a film about India, and then found the book Harry Black [David Walker's 1956 novel] I took on Richard Goodwin as location manager. He had been born in India, and although he was only 23, he had such a way with people that I knew he could do the job. He built the camp, found the tiger and did all those things.Brabourne had met Goodwin when they both worked for Ian Dalrymple, and he later hired him to work on Seven Thunders:From then on, every step I took, Richard came with me. Our last film was Little Dorrit, in 1987, so we worked together for over 30 years, which in this business is very rare.Brabourne's next production was Sink the Bismarck! (1960), an exceptional war story for which Brabourne hired first-class talents including the writer Edmund H. North, the photographer Christopher Challis, the director Lewis Gilbert and, as star, Kenneth More.
I found that, al-though I liked to work with actors, I didn't really have a feeling for directing. Richard Goodwin says that the director makes the film but the producer gets it made. It was a film I always liked very much and Greene worked so hard, he really believed in it. I got to know him very well, and wouldn't have missed the experience for anything.He also served as production manager on the Powell-Pressburger film The Battle of the River Plate (1956) and several Daniel Angel productions including The Sea Shall Not Have Them (1954), Reach for the Sky (1956) and Seven Thunders (1957), on which he was associate producer, having meanwhile abandoned his initial ambition to direct:The things that interested me were the story, which is number one for me; the script is certainly number two; and the third really important factor is the editing.
"He put me in touch with [the producer] Ian Dalrymple," Brabourne recalled,who gave me a job on the escape story The Wooden Horse [1950] as a "production assistant", which was just a name to get me on the set. Described as "the society wedding of the year", it was also attended by the 600 employees of the Mountbatten estate.Mountbatten knew of his son-in-law's ambition to work in the film industry - in 1942 Brabourne had been an extra in the Dunkirk sequence of No?Coward's film In Which We Serve, based on the sinking of Mountbatten's ship the HMS Kelly - and after the war he introduced him to Alexander Korda. It is literally a runner, which is what I was at the beginning.Other films on which he worked as an assistant, location manager or unit manager included six produced by Herbert Wilcox, among which were Odette (1950), The Lady with a Lamp (1951) and "one or two very bad films, like Laughing Anne [1953] and Trouble in the Glen [1954], with Orson Welles in a kilt!" He also worked in the cutting room, and was production manager ("which involves all the financial matters") on an intriguing thriller filmed in Venice, The Stranger's Hand (1955):Graham Greene wrote the script. In 1946 he married Mountbatten's elder daughter, Patricia, in a ceremony attended by King George VI and Queen Elizabeth, with the Princesses Elizabeth and Margaret as bridesmaids.