Olly goes to Hollywood When Kenneth Cranham acted in Oliver!, he loved the American production values – and was photographed by Harry Secombe
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n 1967, I was given the role of Noah Claypole in the film of Oliver!. What luck. Five days’ filming at £50 a day – and, at the same time, playing Hal in Joe Orton’s Loot at the Criterion Theatre, which the previous year had won the Evening Standard Best Play award. I was 22 at the time. Jane Asher brought Paul McCartney to see Loot. He said most plays gave him a pain in the arse but he loved this one and wanted it to last longer. Meetings were even arranged between Joe and Brian Epstein, the Beatles’ manager, to discuss Joe writing the script for their next film. The late ’60s were like a surfboard that everyone, young and old, was riding, waiting to be enthralled by what the Beatles and their acolytes did next. At Shepperton, where Oliver! was filmed, they were also making a Swinging London ’60s film, called Salt and Pepper, starring Sammy Davis Jr and Peter Lawford. After work, Sammy and Peter would cruise the King’s Road together in an open-top car. The film isn’t shown much these days. But there is a compilation of Magnum images from the ’60s taken by Eve Arnold. One of them has Sammy Davis Jr, eyes closed, lost in reverie, wearing love beads, a real gone cat with a silver-clad, mini-skirted go-go dancer in attendance. It looks far more dated today than Oliver!. I went out to Shepperton before filming started, for a costume-fitting. On the train on the way back to London, I saw Judi Dench. I recognised her from having seen her at the Old Vic with Tommy Steele in She Stoops to Conquer. I introduced myself and we talked all the way back to central London. I asked her how long she’d been acting. ‘Twelve years,’ she told me. 16 The Oldie January 2022
Men in black: Leonard Rossiter and Cranham on set – by Harry Secombe
‘’Kin’ ’ell!’ I thought. ‘You can do it for that long?’ She was very gracious and kind. I felt blessed. Oliver! had American funding – and they knew how to spend it. They built Victorian London at Shepperton. There were streets, markets, bridges, riversides, quicksand, pools of mud, beer halls, Fagin’s den and all its warrens. And, in the distance, as far away as the eye could see, there was a railway bridge, with a real Victorian train chuffing across it. The backdrop of the Who Will Buy? sequence – which people think is a real Georgian square that they recognise – was just a façade. You opened one of the doors and there was just mud behind it. So much energy: hundreds of dancers;
Oliver Reed creeping about, frightening people – and succeeding. You blended into it all – you were wearing Victorian clothes in funereal black, with a top hat. It was like finding yourself in William Powell Frith’s masterpiece, The Derby Day. None of it was CGI. All of it was three-dimensional. After Oliver dares to ask for a move from the orphanage, he is offloaded by Mr Bumble, played by Harry Secombe, who leads him through the street, singing Boy for Sale. What amazed me was that the street had been built indoors, inside a soundstage. If you looked up, you could see the soles of the shoes of the men dropping artificial snow from above. A dog was set off across the ground, a
