 Cinematographer Georges Périnal entered films in 1913 as assistant cameraman in Paris, winning acclaim for the films he shot for René Clair from the later 1920s, including Sous les toits de Paris (France, 1930), before coming to England to work for Korda in 1933.
He is responsible for the black-and-white sheen of such important London Films productions as The Private Life of Henry VIII (d. Alexander Korda, 1933) and Things to Come (d. William Cameron Menzies, 1936), as well of its Technicolor adventures, The Drum (d. Zoltan Korda, 1938) and The Four Feathers (d. Zoltan Korda, 1939), and the fantasy The Thief of Bagdad (d. Michael Powell, Ludwig Berger, Tim Whelan, 1940).
He is thus a major contributor to the prestige arm of prewar British cinema, not to speak of the wartime glory of The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (d. Powell & Pressburger, 1943) and the postwar peak of The Fallen Idol (1948), Périnal's camera colluding with Carol Reed's vision of a child's world in alarming disarray.
If his 1950s work is generally less distinguished, that is the fault of the films rather than his.
Brian McFarlane, Encyclopaedia of British Cinema
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