 The director-editor partnership is often unusually close, and the one between
Humphrey Jennings and Stewart McAllister seems to have been particularly so.
Despite very different backgrounds, they had much in common, having built
similar reputations as unconventional and often temperamental outsiders within
the generally more collegiate GPO Film Unit.
Although their major collaborative period spanned just five years, it produced many of Jennings' enduring
masterpieces - while the fact that McAllister shared the director/editor credit
for Listen to Britain (1942) offers clinching evidence of the value placed on
his work. Despite little evidence that McAllister was present during shooting
and none that he 'co-directed' in any literal sense, sound recordist Ken Cameron
stressed that '"his contribution was at least 50%. I mean, certainly, without
Mac it wouldn't have been the film it was. It's probably a trite thing to say
that he made more contribution than Humphrey, but in a way he did."
Thanks to Dai Vaughan's exhaustive research ('Portrait of an Invisible Man',
BFI, 1983), we now know much more about a shadowy backroom figure whose
contribution was sometimes entirely unacknowledged, and whose name was often
pruned to 'S McAllister' to cram it onto an already credit-packed screen. Born
in Wishaw, Lanarkshire, on 27 December 1914, McAllister studied painting at the
nearby Glasgow School of Art from 1931-36, where he met the future animator
Norman McLaren. Their joint discovery of Eisenstein and Pudovkin at the Glasgow
Film Society inspired them to make their own films. Following experiments with
painting directly onto celluloid, they made Seven Till Five (1933), a look at a
day in the life of Glasgow Art School that showed a clear Soviet influence on
its rhythmic cutting. After a scholarship-funded European tour, McAllister
followed McLaren into the GPO Film Unit in August 1937, where he initially
worked on stills, posters and graphics.
His first onscreen credit was as 'assistant' on The Islanders (d. Maurice
Harvey, 1939), for which he shot the lyrical Inner Farne sequence and liaised
with the Eriskay islanders, though he was apparently not involved with the
editing. However, he must have picked up some cutting-room experience, because
the film bearing his first editing credit, Men of the Lightship (1940) is very
accomplished, especially during a sequence in which a seagull's cry heralds a
German attack on the East Dudgeon lightship, whose captain is then hit by
bullets to the accompaniment of 'flashes' of his loved ones. These creative
additions triggered blazing rows with the film's more conventionally-minded
director, David MacDonald, who ultimately left the project before completion.
McAllister's other outstanding non-Jennings credit in this period was Target for
Tonight (1941), whose director Harry Watt would later comment: '"As an editor,
Mac was a perfectionist. He'd work away on his own, night and day, to get what
he wanted. And for a director, who has battled to shoot a sequence in difficult
conditions, to see his somewhat shoddy efforts come to life and perhaps take on
a new shape, is incredibly exciting.'"
McAllister and Jennings were colleagues for a considerable time, but their
first direct collaboration is believed to be London Can Take It! (1940). By the
time McAllister had cut Words for Battle and The Heart of Britain (both 1941),
he and Jennings had become close enough friends to holiday together in
McAllister's native Wishaw, during which time they hatched the idea that became
Listen to Britain (1942). While overseeing what comes across from
Crown Film Unit memos as an ambitious expansion of a similar concept, entitled
Morning, Noon and Night ('"an impression of one day in the life of the British
Commonwealth in wartime'"), McAllister remained Jennings' preferred editor,
cutting Fires Were Started, The Silent Village (both 1943) and The Eighty Days
(1944).
McAllister's career then stalled. Morning, Noon and Night, which should have
made his individual reputation, was ultimately written off at a substantial
loss. He edited the footage that the Allied forces had shot on liberating
the Nazi concentration camps in 1945 for a project intended to be overseen by
Alfred Hitchcock, but that too was abandoned after reaching the fine-cut
stage. Most damagingly, a trip to East Africa in 1947 to make a
documentary for the Colonial Office led to a row over the poor quality of its
footage. This was blamed on McAllister's use of non-union technicians,
leading to a permanent rift with the Crown Film Unit.
McAllister reunited with Jennings for Family Portrait (1950), but the
prospect of a long-term revival of their partnership was scuppered by Jennings'
untimely death. However, by then McAllister had already edited Berth 24
(1950), British Transport Films' first production, after which he was employed
there full time as a senior editor and later as a producer and sometimes
uncredited narrator: his Scots burr accompanies The Land of Robert Burns (1956)
and the whimsical I Am A Litter Basket (1959). He would remain at BTF
until his death from liver cancer on 27 November 1962.
Michael Brooke
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FILM & TV CREDITS
