When during the Second World War it was decided that the cinema, through the Crown Film Unit, should mount a tribute to Britain’s merchant seamen the task was entrusted to Pat Jackson, a young man in his twenties who had never undertaken a project of such ambition.
Jackson not only wrote the screenplay, in which British seamen are marooned in a lifeboat in the North Atlantic as a German U-boat prowls nearby, but took on casting, editing and direction. The result was Western Approaches, a feature-length “story-documentary” which has gone down as one of the finest examples of the genre.
Western Approaches absorbed Jackson and his team for almost three years. He had finished the screenplay by the middle of 1942 but arguments about cost, which went up fivefold from the initial £16,000, and the hazards of filming in capricious weather, meant that Western Approaches was not given its premiere until the end of 1944.
Much of it was shot in the Irish Sea, on a lifeboat carrying not only the film crew and a bulky camera but the 22 marooned seamen. The cast were real sailors, not actors, recruited by Jackson from seamen’s pubs and missions. Unusually for a wartime documentary, the film was shot in Technicolor by a superb cameraman soon to establish himself in features, Jack Cardiff.
Jackson drew performances which were remarkably unstilted for men who had not acted before. British war films were often mocked for suppressing emotion but here the understated naturalism struck the right note. As the critic Richard Winnington wrote: “The film is devoid of heroics although it is impregnated with heroism.”
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Among the film’s admirers was the producer, Alexander Korda, who secured Jackson a contract with MGM in Hollywood. But the experience turned sour, and he returned to Britain where he directed a number of feature films without ever recapturing the quality of Western Approaches.
He was born Patrick Jackson in Eltham, Southeast London, in 1916. It was a comfortable middle-class upbringing until the early death of his father, who worked in the City, left the family almost broke and forced them to turn their home into a boarding house. But they still employed a butler.
Jackson was sent first to a prep school in Seaford, Sussex, and then to the public school, Bryanston, but survived only one term after catching a virus so severe that he was an invalid for the next two years. His schooling had ended at 16 and he had no qualifications.
His mother came to the rescue, pulling strings with Sir Kingsley Wood, the local MP and, as Postmaster-General, responsible for the GPO Film Unit which was at the heart of the British documentary movement. Jackson went to see John Grierson, the “father” of the movement, who gave him a job as a messenger boy. He joined the unit on his 17th birthday in 1933.
From there he graduated to assistant to Harry Watt on Night Mail (1936), a prototype of the “story-documentary” which celebrated the work of the mail trains. Jackson’s was the uncredited voice narrating the verse written by W. H. Auden: “This is the Night Mail crossing the border, bringing the cheque and the postal order.” The music for the film was by Benjamin Britten, with whom Jackson played tennis in spare moments.
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Jackson learnt his trade as assistant director and editor on other Watt films before getting his chance to direct on The Horsey Mail (1938), an information film about the postal service in a Suffolk village. At the outbreak of war he collaborated with Watt and Humphrey Jennings on The First Days, which captured the mood of Britain as it prepared for battle.
Jackson went on to direct short films on industrial diseases, the emergency hospital system and the work of ferry pilots before being recruited for Western Approaches. The GPO Film Unit was now the Crown Film Unit, effectively under the control of the Ministry of Information, but Jackson managed to transcend propaganda. His treatment of the German U-boat crew showed them as humans, not enemies.
After Western Approaches Jackson spent several fruitless months preparing a film about the Beveridge Report which had laid down the guidelines for the Welfare State. He remained committed to the story-documentary and wrote a paper for the Rank Organisation arguing for its survival. He was to be disappointed. The Crown Film Unit was run down and eventually abolished.
Hollywood, therefore, was an opportunity to move into features but Jackson found himself kicking his heels. After months of frustration, he wrote to Louis B. Mayer, the autocratic head of the studio, suggesting that Mayer was wasting his money and Jackson’s time. He added: “We must put a stop to this ridiculous situation.”
Jackson was offered a Lassie vehicle, which he turned down, and finally made a B thriller, Shadow on the Wall, starring Ann Southern as a murderess and giving Nancy Davis (later Nancy Reagan) her first film part. While in the US, Jackson met and married Kitty Talbot, from Boston, Massachusetts, only for a skiiing accident on the second day on their honeymoon to put him on crutches. He was glad to escape his Hollywood contract and return to England.
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His first British feature was White Corridors (1951), based on a wartime novel about the work of a Midlands hospital but updated to take account of the arrival of the National Health Service. Jackson’s documentary background was evident in the realistic style, the use of non-professionals alongside the regular actors, including Googie Withers and Petula Clark, and the absence of a music score.
The film also had several narrative strands, a device later used by hospital dramas on television. Well received by the critics, White Corridors was Jackson’s most successful feature, and his favourite film after Western Approaches. Although J. Arthur Rank had reservations, arguing that the small boy in one of the storylines should not have died, he offered Jackson a contract.
Jackson resisted the offer, fearing it would mean a loss of freedom, but struggled to make his way as an independent. His later features, such as the thriller, Don’t Talk to Strange Men, and the “old dark house” comedy, What a Carve Up!, with Sid James and Kenneth Connor, had their moments but were little more than commercial chores.
In the 1960s, with film work drying up, Jackson moved into television. He worked with Patrick McGoohan on the cult series, The Prisoner, and also directed episodes of popular series such as The Saint, Danger Man and Man in a Suitcase, escapist fare a long way from the documentary realism which made his reputation. His final assignment, in 1979, was a TV adaptation of Enid Blyton’s Famous Five.
His book, A Retake Please: Filming Western Approaches, an illuminating and often funny account of his most famous project, appeared in 1999. A restoration of Western Approaches is being undertaken by the Imperial War Museum.
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Jackson is survived by his second wife, the actress Lila Valmere, and two daughters of his first marriage.
Pat Jackson, film director, was born on March 26, 1916. He died on June 3, 2011, aged 95