Osmond Hudson Borradaile ^{28,185,186,187,190,193,195}

  General Notes:

Life through a Lens: Memoirs of a Cinematographer. (Books). (book review)

TAKE ONE , May, 2002, by James Forrester
by Osmond Borradaile

Edited by Anita Borradaile Hadley McGil-Queen University Press, 2001 $49 95

Life through a Lens is a record of a remarkable life. There are so few histories of cameramen - and their contribution to this visual medium is so colossal - that a book like this is priceless. It serves as a wonderful resource for the thousands of young people studying film history and for the those of us old enough to remember the films that Osmond Borradaile worked on.
Kevin Brownlow, the noted British film historian, neatly summarizes the obvious value of this volume in his cover comment. "This book would be noteworthy in itself simply for the fact that very few cinematographers left behind more than their body of work as testimony to them ability. Visual artists are not generally renowned for their skill with words." However, "Bordie," as he was affectionately known, wrote an exceptional memoir before his death in 1999 that deserves to reach a readership beyond the limitation of those interest in cinematography. Born in Winnipeg in 1898, he details his early years in Saskatchewan and British Columbia, a family tragedy prompting a subsequent move to California in 1914, and his need to quit school, which provided the motivation to his subsequent employment in the film laboratories of Hollywood.
Through persistents and a friendly reference, he started his film career as a camera assistant in Sam Wood's Paramount Studio unit, shooting silent films with Gloria Swanson, Rudolph Valentino and Clara Bow. His personal interest in aviation led to work as a camera operator on the Howard Hughes feature Hell's Angels, during the era when the name conjured up images of young men flying biplanes to riding Harleys. After the advent of sound recording, he took advantage of an opportunity to work at Paramount's European studio outside of Paries, where he was able to acquire sufficient feature-film credits to become a director of the Great Depression and moved its production facility to England, where Borradaile went to work for the Korda brothers at London Films.
During the 1930s and 1940s, Borradaile developed a reputation as "the greatest exterior camera artist in the world," according to fellow Canadian, actor Raymond Massey. Many classic British features such as The Scarlet Pimpernel (1934), Elephant Boy (1937), The Drum (1938), Four Feathers (1939), The Thief of Bagdad (1940), The Overlanders (1946) and Scott of the Antarctic (1948) contain his exquisite scenic footage. All of these productions required not only great skill as a cinematographer, but personal sacrifice and perseverance. There were no air-conditioned trailers, helicopters or canteen trucks on these expeditions. The chapter describing the shooting of The Drum in 1937, exemplifies the reality of second-unit work at that time. Borradaile and three assistants hauled an 80-pound, three-strip Technicolor camera, all their gear and 18,300 metres of temperamental stock over the Himalayas on pack mules. This was his first experience with shooting colour and the early stock was very sensitive to heat, a major headache when the temperature could soar to 40 degrees Celsius.

  Research Notes:

Longevity also seems to be alive and well in the following generation of the family but not the Dyson's. Lila's son, Osmond Borradaile, also was in his 90's when he died. He was an Oscar winner (shared) and a member of the Order of Canada. I don' t know much about Lila though except that her grandaughter bears her name and she works in film editing.
Ruth (Dyson) O'Doherty
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During the 1930s and early '40s, Osmond Borradaile was one of the most celebrated location cinematographers in the world -- almost a Frank Buck-type figure as a photographer, in terms of going to the ends of the earth to get usable footage for feature films.

Born in Winnipeg in 1898, he was raised and educated in Canada until the age of 16, when his family moved to San Diego, CA. Having decided that formal schooling wasn't the way for him to prepare for adult life, Borradaile took a job selling tickets and souvenirs at the La Jolla caverns, and later giving tours of the cave itself -- it was while doing this job that he chanced to see a movie, entitled Caprice, starring Mary Pickford, being shot. He befriended a member of the camera crew, and so impressed the man with his knowledge of photography and his eagerness to learn more, that he was urged to try and work in motion pictures. He picked up more experience on the other end of the business by working at a local theater, where he soon learned the intricacies of projecting film as well as operating a theater. But it was a casting director friend of Borradaile's mother that got him into the industry, as a laboratory technician at what was then Jesse L. Lasky Feature Plays -- this early start in the film business was interrupted by World War I, in which Borradaile served for three years, getting little for his patriotism except a case of trench fever. Luckily, after being mustered out in 1918, he found a professional berth back in Hollywood almost immediately, with the Lasky company, which had since become Famous Players-Lasky, which would soon become Paramount Pictures. He was soon learning about film processing and eventually got out of the labs and became an assistant to cameraman Al Gilks in a new production unit assigned to director Sam Wood, which scored a hit with its first release, Excuse My Dust, an auto-racing movie starring Wallace Reid. It was working on Wood's films, most of which involved extensive outdoor shooting, that Borradaile got his first experience of the special needs of location shooting, and of the special technical problems involved in matching material shot under natural light with that photographed under studio lighting. He also got to work with and know such legends as Rudolph Valentino and Gloria Swanson. Borradaile was the camera assistant on such renowned silent era films as Peck's Bad Boy (1921) and It (1927), and was the camera operator on such early talkies as Ernst Lubitsch's The Love Parade (1929) and Howard Hughes' Hell's Angels (1930).

He moved to England in the early '30s and, in 1933, was hired by Alexander Korda at London Films. It was there that Borradaile finally started getting screen credit, as well as shooting the kind of material that would make him famous within the industry. He photographed the Oxford exteriors on Men of Tomorrow, and was a camera operator on The Private Life of Henry VIII and The Scarlet Pimpernel (1934); but it was on such movies as Sanders of the River (1935), Elephant Boy (1937), Drums (1938), and The Four Feathers (1939), all of which involved extensive shooting in Africa, India, and the Middle East, that Borradaile made his name, getting extraordinary footage from these locales and, in the case of Drums and The Four Feathers, achieving astoundingly good results with Technicolor film. Borradaile was involved with such early wartime propaganda movies as The Lion Has Wings (1939) and The 49th Parallel (1941), but was also one of those responsible for the dazzling look of the fantasy film The Thief of Bagdad (1940). He also shot location material used by Hitchcock in Foreign Correspondent (1940), and in 1946 journeyed to Australia to play a key role in the shooting of the wartime drama The Overlanders (1946). He journeyed from the sub-zero (Scott of the Antarctic) to the desert (Storm Over the Nile) during the late '40s and mid-'50s -- ironically, the latter movie was, itself, a remake of The Four Feathers that re-used some of the same footage that he'd shot in 1938.

Borradaile remained active intermittently during the 1960s, when he received his final screen credit, as the second-unit camera operator on Sidney Hayers' period Canadian adventure The Trap, and the 1970s, when he served as the cinematographer on Travelin' Light (1971). He died in 1999 at the age of 100.

Bruce Eder, All Movie Guide

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I'm with a television production company in Halifax, Nova Scotia. We are researching a new project that focuses on the professional life of cameraman Osmond Borradaile. He worked for Famous Players-Lasky (Paramount) from 1919 until 1929 when he moved to France to work for Les Studios Paramount and London Films later in the 1930s.
Do you have any knowledge of, or suggestions regarding the films of this notable cameraman. I would like to identify who holds the films and the copyrights, where they are and how I could contact the appropriate people. These are some specific titles: Excuse My Dust, Hippopotamus Parade, Sick-A-Bed, Peck's Bad Boy, Beyond the Rocks, The Great Moment, It, The Sea God, His Children's Children, North of 36, Fireman Save My Child, Hell's Angels (Howard Hughes directed), The Doctor's Secret, The Love Parade, Le General an Marco Le Clown.
Any insight you are able to provide is tremendously appreciated.
Ted McInnes
Victory Motion Pictures
15 Feb, 2001

  Noted events in his life were:

• Residence: 10 River Street, 1906, Medicine Hat, Alberta. ¹⁸⁷

• Immigration: from Victoria , B.C, 1 Jan 1914, to San Diego, CA. ¹⁹⁰ SS President, departed Victoria 1 Jan 1914

• Residence: Richardson Street, 1916, Victoria, B.C. Canada. ¹⁹⁵

• Occupation: Moving picture operator, 1916, Victoria, B.C. Canada. ¹⁹⁵

• Occupation: Photographer, Moving Pictures, 1920, Los Angeles, Calif. ¹⁸⁶

• Travel: Brisbane Australia to London, 17 Mar 1932, To England.

• Travel: New York to Southampton, 8 Aug 1938, To England.

• Travel: New York to Southhampton, 23 Dec 1945, To England.

• Travel: Mombasa Kenya to London, Nov 1947, To England.

• Travel: Liverpool to Quebec, 1949, to Quebec City.

Osmond married Christiane Berthe Lippens on 10 Sep 1931 in Paris, France.¹⁹⁰ (Christiane Berthe Lippens was born about 1906.)