Francis’ wartime pictures included Maxillo Facial Surgery, which detailed how front-line army doctors dealt with disfiguring wounds, and training films for anti-aircraft personnel - photographed with infrared stock during actual air raids.
During the war, British film entered a renaissance period, as filmmakers such as David Lean, Michael Powell and Emeric Pressberger and others came to the fore. "The industry was in much better shape," Francis recounts, "and just two weeks after I was discharged in 1946, I was on my way to East Africa to do location work on The Macomber Affair, an American picture directed by Zoltan Korda and starring Gregory Peck and Joan Bennett."
Soon after, Korda took over British Lion Studios and Francis was placed under contract as a camera operator. He later operated for Christopher Challis, BSC on a several productions for director Michael Powell, including The Small Back Room and Tales of Hoffmann, and for Oswald Morris on such films as Moulin Rouge and Beat the Devil, directed by John Huston. "I got along very well with John, and he gave me a very free hand as an operator," Francis says. "We did seven pictures together, but in 1955 I finally told him I had to start shooting on my own, so he brought me in as the second-unit cameraman on Moby Dick to shoot all of the miniatures and the whaling footage. After that, I was recommended to a couple of producers, and I did A Hill in Korea [1956], my first film as a director of photography."
After such sucessful ’kitchen-sink dramas" as Room At the Top and Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, Francis’ work began gaining notice, resulting in his next project. Based on D.H. Lawrence’s autobiographical novel and directed by famed cameraman Jack Cardiff, BSC, Sons and Lovers (1960) depicts societal repression in a small coal-mining town during the early 1900s, focusing on an artistically gifted young man (Dean Stockwell) whose romance with a young farm girl could doom him to a life in the mines.
While Cardiff earned an Oscar nomination for his efforts, Francis’ CinemaScope camerawork bested the other nominees in the Academy’s Best Black-and-White Cinematography category. As noted in the May 1961 issue of AC, the picture has "unusual visual beauty and is marked by photographic ingenuity throughout that easily makes it one of the finest monochrome photographic achievements to come along in some time."
Admirer John Bailey attests, "When I was just starting to become aware of the visual aspects of filmmaking - through such films as La Dolce Vita and Wild Strawberries - I actually thought that artful films had to be made in a foreign language. Then I saw Sons and Lovers, and I was knocked out by the poetry and visual beauty of the film. The camerawork was unlike anything I had seen before in an English-language movie."
The picture’s widescreen frame effectively adds a momentous sweep to the landscapes surrounding the intimate drama. Perhaps taking cues from Gregg Toland’s work on Citizen Kane, Francis deftly used deep-focus techniques with his complex compositions to suggest the characters’ shifting relationships and emotions - a feat made even more difficult by the day’s slow anamorphic lenses. The stunning results were only possible though the use of Kodak’s fast Tri-X stock.
Asked if he’d had any trepidation about shooting a picture for a distinguished cameraman such as Cardiff, Francis offers, "I had nothing to fear, because Jack had never shot a black-and-white movie! He’d been an operator for many, many years, but he came to prominence though his work in Technicolor. And to his everlasting credit, I never had any interference from Jack on that film. He asked me to shoot the picture because he’d liked my work on Room at the Top, so he knew I was up to the job."
Francis’ subsequent production was The Innocents, based on author Henry James’ thriller The Turn of the Screw. "That is one picture I’m still very happy with," the cinematographer says. "The director, Jack Clayton, was a very dear friend, and we had to overcome many technical hurdles during the project."
The film was made for 20th Century Fox, and the use of their proprietary CinemaScope process was mandatory. Francis recalls, "We only found out about that a few weeks before shooting started, following months of talking about how we were going to make the picture." The cinematographer found the 2.35:1 aspect ratio to be inappropriate, as the supernatural-themed story demanded a sense of entrapment. To help remedy the situation, he utilized graduated color filters (effectively used as neutral-density grads in monochrome) on both sides of the frame, which could be brought in and out during shots to concentrate viewers’ attention on the center of the picture.
In addition, "those old CinemaScope lenses also couldn’t focus very close, but Jack wanted the camera to be in tight with the actors. We had to use a lot of light to build up the stop and increase the depth of field. We had a huge garden set built on the stage at Shepperton Studios, and we couldn’t get nearly enough light on it for the stops we wanted, so I had the art department paint one side of the foliage silver and white to create a false highlight. That way, our fill could be what our key would have been. We had to do all kinds of tricks like that."
Soon after shooting the Hammer Studios production Never Take Sweets from a Stranger, Francis took stock of his career as a cameraman. "There was a financial consideration there," he admits. "Cinematographers working in England didn’t make a lot of money. Even after I won the first Academy Award, my fee wasn’t that much, relatively speaking. You had to keep working all the time, and if you weren’t careful, you’d end up working on films you didn’t really want to do. After Sons and Lovers, people asked me if I wanted to direct, so I thought I’d try it. But my first film was a bit of a disaster."
Francis’ directorial debut was the 1961 romantic comedy Two and Two Make Six. "I’d been promised that I could change the script, but it didn’t come off that way," he explains with a wry smile. "At the time, directors had to be approved by the National Film Finance Corporation, which put up the money for production. They’d approved me because of my reputation as a cameraman, but I knew that I’d never get another chance if I backed out of the picture."
The film was a box-office disappointment, but Francis’ second feature, a thriller entitled Vengeance, was a success. He followed it by directing over 20 features in fewer than 20 years, primarily working for Hammer, Amicus and other British studios specializing in the horror genre. Richly atmospheric, a number of these modestly-budgeted films are now considered classics of their kind: The Evil of Frankenstein (1964) features the seemingly undefeatable scientist vowing to continue his experiments; the anthology film Dr. Terror’s House of Horrors (1965) offers five separate stories featuring a werewolf, a vampire, a man-eating plant, voodoo and an a disembodied hand; Dracula Has Risen from the Grave (1968) trails the infamous Count as he plots revenge.
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