 Otto Heller began his career while serving in the Austrian Army, when in 1916
he shot the funeral of Emperor Franz Josef. He worked professionally in his
native Czechoslovakia from 1918 on dozens of films before shuttling between the
production centres of Prague, Berlin, Paris and London. In 1940 he moved to
Britain on a more permanent basis and became a British subject in 1945. An
instinctive rather than a technically motivated cameraman, Heller was initially
assigned to small independent features, including several for the Warner Bros
British studio, before making his mark in the late 1940s with two very different
productions.
Cavalcanti's They Made Me a Fugitive (1947), one of the 'spiv cycle' of films
of the late 1940s which drew a barrage of criticism for their portrayal of
sordidness, violence and corruption, was made at the Riverside Studios in
Hammersmith for Warners. While the direction is taut and the performances
impressive, it is Heller's noir lighting which gives the film much of its
atmospheric power. Walter Lassally was a young camera assistant on the film and
recalls Heller's approach as "a good contrasty, gutsy look which is all about
contrast, separation, tonal range and so on". His camera angles are frequently
low, with the light coming from either high or low sources, creating sinister
highlights and shadows in the faces.
Thorold Dickinson's Queen of Spades (1948). on the other hand, was made at
Welwvn Studios for Associated British Pictures. Adapted from the story by
Pushkin, it was produced by Anatole de Grunwald, who worked with Heller on
several occasions during the late 1940s, and features Anton Walbrook and Edith
Evans. As Jeffrey Richards notes, Heller used a variety of wide-angle lenses to
suggest space and width where the small sets could not accommodate it. Dickinson
was full of praise for his cameraman's contribution:
Many have remarked about the style of the film, how continental the picture
seems.... When the story went out of doors [the film was shot entirely indoors],
there was always a wind blowing. Mist was dense, snow abundant, tobacco smoke
almost impenetrable, artificial lighting by candles was always apparently from
below unless chandeliers were visible. The tempest evoked by the ghost of the
countess nearly blew the camera and its crew off the rostrum. Dust was thick as
after a sandstorm. Gems and silks glittered, rags and sores looked stinking. And
Otto Heller's camera captured it all while his camera operator Gus Drisse traced
camera movements of outlandish and intricate composition.
Heller's lighting in the film has a wonderfully Gothic sensibility and at
times resembles the kind of lighting used in the great Universal Studios horror
films of the 1930s. Shadows loom in interiors lit with simulated candlelight,
and the flashback story of how the young countess sold her soul is particularly
atmospheric, the Gothic lighting complementing Oliver Messel's elaborate
designs. There are also numerous bravura moments - the face of the statue of the
Virgin going dark as the countess prays for forgiveness, the baleful, wrinkled
face of the old countess (Evans) reminiscent of a corpse or a mummy, the
shock cut to the massive close-up of the dead countess's staring eyes, the
spinning light signifying the spirit of the countess entering the room. The
Queen of Spades remains a masterpiece of British horror, for its cinematic
inventiveness, to say nothing of genuine scariness. Created on a restricted
budget, the film has few rivals, and much of the credit for this must go to
Heller and his crew.
During the 1950s Heller proved as adept an exponent of colour as he was a
master of black and white. This is demonstrated across three key films of the
period. His lighting and camera angles on the three-strip production of The
Ladykillers (1955), directed by Alexander Mackendrick, owe more to They Made Me
a Fugitive than to Ealing studio orthodoxy, allowing an expressionistic use of
colour which aids and abets Mackendrick's desire to lampoon the film noir genre.
The arrival of the mysterious Professor Marcus (Alec Guinness) at the home of
Mrs Wilherforce (Katy Johnson) even evokes The Lodger (d. Alfred Hitchcock, 1926), his shadow first being
cast on a tobacconist's notice board advertising rooms to let, followed by his
silhouette at the old lady's door.
Heller followed this with Laurence Olivier's Richard III (1955), photographed
in VistaVision. Working closely with production designer Roger purse and art
director Carmen Dillon, Heller adopted a stylised approach, complementing the
deliberately artificial sets and studio exteriors, which he described as "a kind
of Eastman Color effect with Technicolor".
Like Hamlet (d. Olivier, 1948; shot by Desmond Dickinson), the film was
staged and photographed in depth with many long fluid takes, placing great
demands on Heller to create atmosphere while maintaining sufficient light levels
for deep focus. Appropriately sinister lighting effects enhance the murder of
Clarence (John Gielgud) and Richard's dream on the eve of battle when he is
visited by the ghosts of his victims. Only one VistaVision camera was available
for the battle sequences filmed in Spain, forcing Heller to shoot his coverage
on three Arriflex cameras with footage later blown up to VistaVision proportions
and printed horizontally.
His third great triumph of the period was Michael Powell's notorious Peeping Tom (1960), part of a
series of Eastman Color horrors produced by Anglo-Amalgamated described by David
Pirie as "truly Sadian films". Heller's photography makes a virtue of the visual
qualities of the Eastman stock, combining the muted tones of the drab London
streets with the more expressive blues, reds and yellows in the room where the
psychotic Mark Lewis (Karl Boehm) processes and screens the films of the murders
he has committed. The horror of this private space is contrasted with the bright
normality of the rest of the suburban house.
Heller reverted to high contrast black and white for Basil Dearden and
Michael Relph's social problem films Victim (1961) and Life for Ruth (1962), but
his most memorable subsequent work is on two films which helped to establish
Michael Caine as a major star. Alfie (d. Lewis Gilbert, 1965) is many ways a
sexually franker, metropolitan version of the 'kitchen sink' scenario, with its
central young man on the make in Swinging London. However, the film has a
slightly grubby quality which reflects the exploitative nature of Caine's barrow
boy lothario. In the same year Heller shot The Ipcress File for Sidney J. Furie,
based on the novel by Len Deighton. Caine was cast as bespectacled Harry Palmer,
an unwilling agent who is the antithesis of James Bond. The sets were designed
by Ken Adam (far removed from the high-tech stylised interiors of the Bond
films), and Heller gives the proceedings a suitably shabby and squalid look. The
film also abounds with forced angles - particularly extreme low shots - and
tilts., objects frequently obscure the audience's vision of both characters and
action. There is an important fight sequence in which the camera never leaves a
telephone box. Such techniques serve to underline a world of instability and
fragility over which Palmer (unlike Bond) is never able to assert his mastery or
control.
Heller was still working professionally when he died in 1970 at the age of
74.
Duncan Petrie
This entry is taken from Duncan Petrie's The British Cinematographer (BFI, 1996). Used by permission.
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