4/14/2023 0 Comments Alfred hitchcock deathI don’t know whether we ourselves withdrew into another space time existence but you could never associate what you were seeing with your own life. There was the appalling smell, the whole atmosphere of depression, like the end had come. Sergeant Lawrie recalls haltingly: “There were half-dead people walking about, glazed eyes and absolutely dead. There were pits containing bodies of people as big as lawn tennis courts – babies, youths, girls, men, women, old and young, how deep we didn’t know.” It was painful to look at, pain that this could happen to people. Sergeant Lewis remembers driving into Belsen: “We saw a sight that shook us as nothing even in the sights of war had ever, ever, ever shown us before. Too painful to contemplate, but they were just ordinary soldiers doing their duty – Sergeant Mike Lewis, and Sergeant William Lawrie, both army cameramen. If that is what it is like on film, what must it have been like for the combat cameramen? I watched a preview DVD with alternating horror and distress, the tears never far away. ![]() This powerful film is now in cinemas around the country. The harrowing images of SS guards dragging emaciated corpses to mass graves, of a weeping woman kneeling and kissing the hand of her British liberator, of German civilians confronted with the vile acts of inhumanity carried out in their midst, were put into storage in 1945.Īlmost 70 years later, the British Film Institute, working with the Imperial War Museum and top flight director Andre Singer, has brought them back to life in a 75-minute documentary about the filming, inevitably titled Night Will Fall. Amid post-war political intrigue, the project was shelved. “Unless the world learns the lessons these picture teach, night will fall, and by the grace of God we who live will learn.”īut night did fall, on the film itself. Still, they kept the cameras rolling, to record the greatest act of man’s inhumanity to man (and woman, and child), for a documentary that would warn future generations what happens when a nation abandons belief in the sanctity of life.ĭirected by the future Granada TV chief Sidney Bernstein, with Alfred Hitchcock on board as an adviser and Labour politician – and psychological warfare expert – Richard Crossman writing the script, it was to be entitled German Concentration Camps Factual Survey. Combat-seasoned sergeants gazed in mute disbelief at scenes of mass murder, torture and depravity. Often at risk from enemy fire and armed with nothing more lethal than a cine camera, they sent the reality of war back home on film.īut nothing on the battlefield could prepare them for the horrors of the Nazi concentration camps. They captured the joy of freed people welcoming British Tommies, but also the wanton death and destruction of total warfare. She said she appeared on the show from 1955 to 1960, “whenever they needed a maid with a British accent,” according to the Post.Combat cameramen serving with the Allied forces fought their way across occupied Europe in the Second World War, filming liberation from the Nazis. Pat Hitchcock did appear in 10 episodes of “Alfred Hitchcock Presents,” according to Variety. ![]() She’d bring my name up, he’d say, ‘She isn’t right for it,’ and that would be the end of that.” Often I tried to hint to his assistant, but I never got very far. “He never fit a story to a star or to an actor. “But he never had anyone in his pictures unless he believed they were right for the part,” Pat Hitchcock told the newspaper. ![]() “I wish he had believed in nepotism,” Pat Hitchcock told The Washington Post in a 1984 interview. That was Pat Hitchcock’s most prominent character, according to The Hollywood Reporter. In “Strangers on a Train,” she played Barbara Morton, the sister of Ruth Roman’s character, Anne Morton. In “Psycho,” Hitchcock played Janet Leigh’s office co-worker Caroline, who offers to share her tranquilizers. Pat Hitchcock, ‘Strangers on a Train’ Actress and Daughter of Alfred Hitchcock, Dies at 93 - The Hollywood Reporter August 11, 2021
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