Eric Ambler's work in films is rarely discussed, even though he served the industry with distinction throughout his writing career. Shamefully, he has no separate entry in the BFI's ScreenOnline website, supposedly the 'definitive guide to Britain's film and TV history'. True, many of the films associated with Ambler in one way or another were made beyond these shores. But his contributions to, for example, Carol Reed's The Way Ahead, David Lean's The Passionate Friends and Charles Frend's The Cruel Sea was surely enough to have ensured him an honoured place in UK film.
Memories, it appears, are short. For back in November 1996, Eric Ambler was the invited guest of the 40th London Film Festival. Then aged 87, Ambler's fragile but still substantial figure, immaculately turned out in dark suit, blue shirt, yellow tie, along with highly polished black shoes, made its way carefully on to the stage of London's National Film Theatre, where he was to be interviewed by Philip French, then as now the film critic of The Observer. The occasion was in connection with the Festival showing of an archive print of The Way Ahead (1944), the classic film that he scripted with Peter Ustinov for Carol Reed. Also in the LFF programme was the newly restored version of The New Lot, an official British Army training film shot the previous year and intended to show 'how not to ill-treat new recruits', which he also scripted. Produced by the Army Kinematograph Service, it was long believed lost, a copy turning up in 1993 in the archive of the Indian Ministry of Information!
When he had joined the Royal Artillery back in 1940, the 31-year-old author was already the highly successful writer of six novels, including The Mask of Dimitrios and Journey into Fear. He was asked for his occupation. 'I'm a writer,' he said. 'Yes,' said the recruitment officer, 'but do you do anything?' Later assigned to the Army Film Unit, his first task was a project to explain the most efficient way to pack a landing craft - 'You don't have to make it entertaining. People will be forced to look at it!' they were told. An astonishing array of talent was available to make the film. It included not only Reed, by then known for The Stars Look Down and Night Train to Munich, along with the young Ustinov, but also Thorold Dickinson (already director of The Arsenal Stadium Mystery and the original UK version of Patrick Hamilton's Gaslight). By some curious military logic, the unit was later handed over to the Directorate of Army Psychiatry - 'Not for treatment,' said Ambler, quickly - where, soon after, work started on The New Lot. Congratulated by Philip French on this film's somewhat subversive concentration on the lower ranks, Ambler replied, 'Oh, we were all for subversion.' The film also features what is probably Ambler's one and only appearance as an actor - as a gunnery instructor in a scene with Bernard Miles.
Much of the interview was concerned with the film career that followed. He moved on to work with John Huston, then part of Frank Capra's Special Coverage film unit involved with the invading American forces in Southern Italy. Ambler remembers the instructions from Capra to capture the welcoming Italian townspeople as 'exquisitely' as possible. A little later, a proposed collaboration with Hitchcock under David Selznick came to nothing as it became clear that Hitch 'looked for inexpensive writers who would do what he wanted'. Even later, of course, Ambler would marry Joan Harrison, for many years a key Hitchcock collaborator and eventually executive producer of the TV series Alfred Hitchcock Presents.
Clearly by now much enamoured of the film business, he abandoned fiction and went on to work on a series of films for the Rank Organisation. Here he remembers David Lean, for instance, with whom he worked on The Passionate Friends (1948), obsessively concerned with the shot content of a script. 'Blah blah blah,' Lean would say when he reached the dialogue. Such experiences lead to a gradual disillusionment with film. He returned to fiction in the early 1950s. He described his feelings of fright as he began work on what many believe to be one of his finest books, Judgement on Deltchev (1951).
Of his own books as films, he was less than enthusiastic. He described the book The Mask of Dimitrios (even then, still his favourite novel) as being 'sold like pounds of tea'. He 'naively supposed that they would film the book'. Unencouraged that the script would be by Frank Gruber - 'he'd written over 60 Westerns' - he later heard that director Jean Negulesco was delighted by the final version, though more over the cost ($600,000) than by the accuracy of the adaptation. In the film, Ambler discovered, the supposedly dead Dimitrios 'was Zachary Scott'.After the war, when Ambler eventually saw the film, he was physically sick.
But still the film work came. The left-of-centre Ambler, under pressure from Michael Balcon to write the script of Nicholas Monserrat's The Cruel Sea but unhappy with the raw material, sat down to write a full analysis of why he didn't like it, 'thus working out my objections'. The script he eventually wrote was nominated for an Oscar in 1953. It remains his favourite script for the cinema, despite the finished film being 'murdered by cutters'. But it was his (finally uncredited) experiences on the long-gestating Mutiny on the Bounty (1962 - eventually) that convinced him that he was a writer not a filmmaker. He described his extensive original research into the mutiny, introducing much new and authentic material into the basic film story, foundering finally on the escalating demands of Marlon Brando. 'His demands went up and up - but he knew less and less what he wanted. Finally,' said Ambler, 'I decided that I never again wanted to see another foot of film.'
Which was just as well. To come were the prize-winners The Light of Day (filmed as Topkapi), Dirty Story and The Levanter, as well as the late masterpieces Doctor Frigo, Send No More Roses (The Siege of the Villa Lipp in the USA) and the autobiography, the wonderfully titled Here Lies. Towards the end of the interview, Ambler revealed that he was working on his first new novel since The Care of Time (1981). Sadly, it was not to be. Eric Ambler died almost two years later, on 23 October 1998, in his flat in Marylebone, aged 89, mourned by thriller writers across the globe.
This article, in a slightly different form, first appeared in CADS 30, March 1997.
Ambler scripts
- 1943 - The New Lot
- 1944 - The Way Ahead
- 1947 - The October Man
- 1948 - The Passionate Friends
- 1950 - Highly Dangerous
- 1951 - The Magic Box and Encore
- 1952 - The Card and The Cruel Sea
- 1953 - Rough Shoot
- 1954 - The Purple Plain and Lease of Life
- 1956 - Yangtse Incident and Satan's Veil (story only)
- 1957 - The Eye of Truth (for Hitchcock's Suspicion TV series)
- 1958 - A Night to Remember
- 1959 - The Wreck of the Mary Deare
- 1960 - Checkmate (TV series: idea only)
- 1962 - Mutiny on the Bounty (uncredited)
- 1970 - Love Hate Love
Ambler novels as film or TV (film title and source novel where different)
- 1943 - Background to Danger (Uncommon Danger) and Journey into Fear
- 1944 - The Mask of Dimitrios and Hotel Reserve (Epitaph for a Spy)
- 1963 - Epitaph for a Spy (TV series)
- 1964 - Topkapi (The Light of Day)
- 1976 - Journey into Fear
- 1984 - Eine Art von Zorn (A Kind of Anger)
- 1989 - A Quiet Conspiracy (The Intercom Conspiracy? - TV series)
