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So You Want to Be in Pictures

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As a young writer on the London scene in the busy thirties Val Guest promptly jumped from feature articles for the Hollywood Reporter to crafting screenplays. An interview with British director "Nipper" Lupino Lane, future star Ida Lupino's uncle, led to an invitation to work with him at Gainsborough Studios in London's Islington area.

Before Guest knew it he was a director himself in the busy Gainsborough milieu, providing initial acting breaks to the likes of his friend Michael Rennie and Jean Simmons. A star with whom he worked closely during the period was Margaret Lockwood, while his neighbor in the office next door for ten interesting years was none other than Alfred Hitchcock. When Guest set sail for the comedy realm he hooked up with celebrated London funny man Will Hay.

Film lovers will find this book a veritable feast chock full of anecdotes about London in an exciting era when Guest turned out products at a fantastic clip while helping in the war effort as well. Some of the most interesting pages of the book relate to how Gainsborough film folk such as himself continued turning out movies to enhance British morale by day and risked their lives as volunteer fire fighters by night amid unrelenting attacks by Germany's crack air force, the Luftwaffe, during the Battle of Britain. Guest chronicles how the British "stiff upper lip" was invoked through humor in the wake of attack as he swapped jokes with kindred spirit James Mason, the handsome and talented Yorkshire leading man, who also performed valuable night fire fighting duties.

A key point of Guest's life surfaced when an American leading lady from New Jersey took the West End by storm as she played to packed houses in Garson Kanin's comedy, "Born Yesterday." Guest ardently pursued dazzling blonde Yolande Donlan from the first time he saw her on stage and ultimately she became his wife.

With Yolande Donlan so popular in Britain from her rousing stage success it was only natural for Guest to star her in films, and so he did. In 1949 she starred opposite Michael Rennie in "Miss Pilgrim's Progress." One year later Guest directed Donlan in "The Body Said No" opposite Rennie and in "Mr. Drake's Duck" in which she appeared opposite another of Guest's long time friends from the London scene, Douglas Fairbanks Jr.

The fifties proved to be a highly productive decade for Guest as he worked with such celebrated performers in British productions as Bette Davis, Dirk Bogarde, Frankie Howerd, Peter Sellers, Ben Lyon and Bebe Daniels, Laurence Harvey, and Leo McKern.

In the sixties Guest also remained intensely busy, becoming an in demand globe trotting director and screenwriter. In 1961 his British production "The Day the Earth Caught Fire" with Janet Munro and Leo McKern resulted in him winning a British Academy Award for Best Screenplay. He recounts sitting at the Dorchester Hotel on award night next to a fellow nervous nominee who won as director in the Best Documentary category, a young filmmaker named John Schlesinger who would soon become famous for such films as "Darling", "The Midnight Cowboy" and "Sunday, Bloody Sunday".

In 1963 Guest scored one of his most impressive triumphs as he directed and wrote the screenplay for "80,000 Suspects" under his own production banner. The film was set in scenic and historic Bath and starred Claire Bloom and Richard Johnson along with Yolande Donlan.

The sixties was the decade of James Bond and Guest moved successfully with the tide as he produced, directed, and wrote the screenplay for the 1964 release "Where the Spies Are" with David Niven and Francois Dorleac. In 1966 he directed along with John Huston, Kenneth Hughes, Robert Parrish, and Joseph McGrath the James Bond spy spoof "Casino Royale" with an all star cast that included Peter Sellers, Ursula Andress, David Niven, Orson Welles, Woody Allen, Charles Boyer, and Jean-Paul Belmondo.

In 1971 Guest was approached by producer Robert Baker to direct "The Persuaders" television series starring Roger Moore and Tony Curtis. When he begged off, explaining that he had never worked in television, Curtis and Moore prevailed on him to change his mind and join them, which he did. Success resulted and soon glamorous Joan Collins was aboard on the team as well.

Guest then brings his fascinating chronicle into the present, revealing how, after much investigation, he and Yolande found their place in the sun in Palm Springs, the desert community some two hours by car from the movie capital. He notes how popular a favorite is has been with the movie set since the thirties, when tennis enthusiasts Charles Farrell and Ralph Bellamy launched the Racquet Club, after which scores of their Hollywood friends followed them to the desert community.

Val Guest has been part of the cinema's rich history following a successful London beginning that ultimately took him to points throughout the world as an established international filmmaker of distinction. It is a fascinating journey and readers are considerably richer in insight for taking it with him as we move from the sound stages to fascinating locations throughout the cinema world.

Val Guest must have known them all because one of the great joys of this book is his compulsive name dropping. One really gets a sense of the man and the kind of energy it takes to keep a show business, film career going for something like fifty years. One also senses Guest's underlining theme, reiterated in various ways all through the book, that remaining upbeat and good natured, even in the face of conflict and disaster, will do more for one's talent and career than anything. He made a lot of movies, some good, and many of them not, but his passion for the craft, the process of film making, and the people he worked with is undeniable. The book is chatty, very funny in places, and gives us a back stage history of the British entertainment industry for most of the 20th century.