cover image Seventy Light Years: A Life in the Movies

Seventy Light Years: A Life in the Movies

Freddie Young. Faber & Faber, $27 (192pp) ISBN 978-0-571-19793-4

A palpable enthusiasm for the technical aspects of film animates this amiable but slight autobiography by the late cinematographer. Young's distinguished, long and varied career included a can-do apprenticeship at Gaumont Film Studios in WWI-era England; helping Hitchcock on a montage sequence for the 1929 thriller Blackmail, one of Britain's first sound pictures; and working on a wide array of films under such directors as Carol Reed, Richard Brooks, Vincente Minnelli and John Huston. Apart from its sharp snapshots of famous directors, the book is lean in anecdotes about actors, although Young worked with some of the best. Aside from bemusement over Elisabeth Bergner's prima donna behavior and Elizabeth Taylor's freezer full of Mexican food on the Russian set of The Blue Bird, the focus throughout is on the mechanics of filmmaking. For example, Young tells of developing a mechanism to keep a camera lens clear while filming in a driving rain--an invention he devised while shooting Ryan's Daughter on the tempestuous Irish coast. In discussing his work on David Lean's Lawrence of Arabia and Dr. Zhivago, movies that dazzled in large part because of their cinematography, Young typically does not mention Peter O'Toole's star-making turn as T.E. Lawrence and says of Zhivago's Julie Christie only that, although she is ""not terribly striking"" in person, she ""comes alive"" on screen. Instead, Young delivers low-key but amusing reminiscences about the technical challenges he overcame. For example, Dr. Zhivago was shot in Spain, so icicles fashioned of candle wax, whitewashed trees and tarps strewn with snow-like marble dust were pressed into service to evoke the long winters of Russia. As sketchy and anecdotal as this memoir may be, Young's excitement about his craft proves infectious. (Sept.)