Charles Crichton

Charles Crichton (1910-1999), British film director, usually considered to be at his best in comedy. He was born in Wallasey, Cheshire, and in 1931, after leaving university, joined London Films, headed by Alexander Korda, in the cutting rooms. He soon became known as one of the finest film editors in the business, and worked on several of Korda’s major productions before moving to Ealing Studios in 1940. He made his directorial debut with a war film, For Those in Peril (1944), but found his true métier with Hue and Cry (1946), the first of the classic run of post-war Ealing comedies. It was scripted by T. E. B. Clarke, as was Crichton’s best-remembered film, The Lavender Hill Mob (1951), in which Alec Guinness starred as the meek bank clerk turned criminal mastermind.

To these and other Ealing comedies Crichton brought the skilled editor’s sense of pace and timing, and a lightness of touch that, at its best, recalled the 1930s comedies of René Clair. But his range also extended to serious films: for the dour, realist war film Against the Wind (1948) he created an atmosphere that conveyed both tension and the drab discomfort of the undercover agent’s existence, while The Divided Heart (1954) explored the moral complexities of a war-torn Europe and Hunted (1952), a killer-on-the-run thriller, offered Dirk Bogarde one of his best early roles.

With the demise of Ealing Studios in 1959, Crichton’s career, like those of most of his Ealing stablemates, seemed to stall. He directed a diverting Peter Sellers comedy, The Battle of the Sexes (1959) and a couple of underscripted psychological thrillers, then retreated into anonymous television work. In 1988, however, he made a wholly unexpected comeback: John Cleese, for whose company, Video Arts, Crichton had made corporate videos, backed him to direct A Fish Called Wanda—in effect a latter-day Ealing comedy, albeit with rather more sex and violence than Ealing under Michael Balcon would have countenanced. An international smash hit, it provided a heartening conclusion to Crichton’s film-making career.