John Huntley
The Guardian; August 11, 2003
John Huntley
Film expert, writer and historian who started as Alexander Korda's teaboy,
worked for the BFI and established a movie archive
Brian Baxter
Monday August 11, 2003
The Guardian
It would be apt, yet somehow inadequate, to describe John Huntley, who has
died of cancer aged 82, as a writer and film historian, since he was above
all a film enthusiast and an educationalist in the broadest sense. He
regarded cinema as a source of delight and information, never concerning
himself with what he perceived as pretension.
It was Huntley's enthusiasm and energetic desire for mass communication
which made him a stimulating talker, a rather carefree administrator and a
cornucopia of information. It was because of his dislike of bureaucracy and
narrow intellectualism that he fell out with the British Film Institute,
where he had worked successfully for many years. As the organisation
descended into chaos during its internecine conflicts, from the mid-1970s
onwards, Huntley became one of the earliest of its numerous casualties.
Characteristically, he bounced back after an acrimonious parting and
embarked on a successful freelance career.
He was born in Kew and left school at 16 after his school certificate.
Mundane clerical work was followed by a job as a teaboy at Denham Studios
under Alexander Korda. He also spent five weeks at the Royal College of
Music in 1939. Then he joined the RAF, served as a wireless air gunner with
Bomber Command and flew on Sunderland flying boats with Coastal Command. It
was with the RAF in 1944, that he began working with film.
He lectured at various camps, showing educational and other material while
writing for RAF journals and external publications, including the pioneering
Penguin Film Reviews under Roger Manvell. He also contributed to Sight And
Sound and was correspondent for the American Film Music Bulletin.
In 1947, his first book, British Film Music was published and he returned to
work at Denham and Pinewood Studios, then controlled by the Rank
Organisation. Under the conductor and composer Muir Matheson he became a
music and sound assistant on numerous films including Laurence Olivier's
Hamlet (1948); David Lean's Oliver Twist (1948) and Michael Powell and
Emeric Pressburger's A Matter Of Life And Death (1946) and The Red Shoes
(1948).
He also published his second book British Technicolor Films (1949), before
becoming involved with the South Bank's Telekinema at the 1951 Festival of
Britain. This spawned the National Film Theatre, under the BFI's auspices.
His stint there as a programmer from 1952 was characterised by a concern for
a broad-based audience - including school groups. It was then and there that
I first encountered John as a lecturer - and subsequently at BFI's summer
schools. It was to take me some years to realise my new-found ambition, and
have his job as an NFT programmer. By that time he was a key member of the
BFI executive and head of its regional development.
The BFI director, Stanley Reed, shared his missionary zeal and having just
joined the BFI as press officer, one of my tasks was accompanying this
formidable duo during a hectic eight-year period when some 36 regional film
theatres were launched. Guests as diverse as Irene Handl and Harold Pinter
were inveigled into attending the screenings and providing the opening
speeches.
The BFI's expansion, including a second NFT in 1970, was largely the result
of the open-minded approach of Huntley, Reed and the NFT controller Leslie
Hardcastle. But turmoil within the organisation led to Huntley's departure
in 1974 and Reed's retirement, initiating two decades of decline. Huntley
resumed his writing career with a further book (with Manvell) The Technique
Of Film Music, How Films Are Made (with Reed) and Railways In The Cinema,
for which he certainly needed no assistance. He continued lecturing at the
NFT, the Festival Hall and throughout Britain.
He joined forces with the theatrical agent and producer Richard Jackson and
expanded his career into radio and television, with programmes such as
Clapperboard for Granada and innumerable radio shows - lately Radio 4's Back
Row. His jovial manner, booming voice and ability to talk amusingly kept him
busy well past retirement age.
In the mid-1980s, with his daughter Amanda, he set up the Huntley Film
Archives using material collected from many sources - including, to its
chagrin, the BFI - to service TV programmes, his video productions and
lecture tours. Within a decade they had to move to larger premises in north
London. He updated his books on railways and continued his stage
presentations never losing his spontaneity or the energy that inspired
audiences and fellow enthusiasts for the most magical of the arts. He was
divorced; he is survived by his two daughters.
Nigel Fountain writes: In the early 1990s, visiting Cheltenham, I saw a
dog-eared shop window ad. "Lancs And Yanks," it said "an illustrated lecture
on RAF Bomber Command and the USAAF". It was by John Huntley - of whom I had
never heard. Concluding that it would be attended by eight people, a dog,
and odd, I went along on that wet, windy night.
I was directed to the overspill. The town hall was packed out. The strongest
impression of the 600 there, listening, rapt, to Huntley was of a group from
that demobilised army of technologists who had comprised this country's
industrial base. "You suddenly realise the enormous skill that was there,"
Huntley said to me after the lecture, "the extraordinary dedication to
making pieces of machinery work." Among the film footage, Huntley showed an
RAF training film which, by its very stiltedness, brushed against the
mundane horror of life and death as aircrew - "so pathetically human," said
Huntley - and a 1943 colour promo movie for Boeing, complete with Lana
Turner clones as Rosie The Riveter. Throughout Huntley was the enthusiast,
but the realist too, hinting at what great Victorian popular lectures must
have been about.
I never got to any other of his planes-and-trains tours but they seemed to
trace a route map of industrial decline. Around that time the great de
Havilland factory at Hatfield had become rubble - and he had done a show
nearby, to a huge audience. He had been irritated about the vast press
coverage of the then recent Windsor Castle fire. "Hatfield," he observed "is
about personal tragedies, a lot of people would say 'bugger Windsor, when do
I get my bloody job back?'" He was, indeed, a real education.
· John Frederick Huntley, born July 18 1921; died August 7 2003
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