Leslie Norman came out of the cutting room and directed like an editor: plainly, on schedule, without fuss. At his best, in Dunkirk (1958), that plainness was the point; elsewhere it made him a reliable hand rather than a voice.
Fi1m perspective
Norman's habit was to keep the camera out of the way. He had spent his teens in the laboratories and cutting rooms at Warner Brothers Teddington and British International Pictures and was an editor by nineteen, and the training shows: he cuts for sense, holds a shot only as long as it needs, and does not ask a scene to mean more than it does. In a British war film of the 1950s that is rarer than it sounds.
He reached directing late. After the war, in which he served as a major in Burma, he joined Ealing as supervising editor and producer, working with Harry Watt on the studio's Australian and African pictures and producing The Cruel Sea (1953). His first feature as director, The Night My Number Came Up (1955), was a thriller that was well received, and the run that followed is where his reputation sits: X: The Unknown (1956), taken over from Joseph Losey at short notice for Hammer; The Shiralee (1957), with Peter Finch in the outback; and Dunkirk (1958), one of the last big black-and-white British war films.
Dunkirk is the one to see. Where other films of the period reach for brass and speeches, Norman keeps it level and lets the size of the thing sit unremarked, and we found that far more affecting than the films that shout, because the story is a retreat and a retreat does not want a fanfare. The Long and the Short and the Tall (1961) is a wartime drama in the same plain manner.
The limits are also clear. He was a safe pair of hands, which is a compliment with a ceiling: producers sent for him when a picture was in trouble, and what came back was competent rather than personal. When the material shifted under him, as with the youth culture of Mix Me a Person (1962), he looked lost, and Summer of the Seventeenth Doll (1959) never settles on a tone. From the mid-1960s he worked in television, on The Avengers, The Saint and The Persuaders, and our review of The Avengers (1961) rates the series highly without noticing him in it, which is roughly how his career went: the work was good and the director was invisible.
He retired in 1978. If you want to know what a good editor does when handed a whole film, watch Dunkirk and try to catch him at it. You will not.
Biography
Leslie Norman was a British film and television editor, producer and director. He began working in the industry in the early 1930s as an editor on numerous British productions, including several for British International Pictures, and later served as supervising editor on Ealing Studios films such as The Overlanders (1946).
After the Second World War he remained at Ealing, where he produced films including The Cruel Sea (1953) and Mandy (1952). He directed feature films such as The Night My Number Came Up (1955), X: The Unknown (1956) and Dunkirk (1958). From the 1960s his work was primarily in television, directing episodes of series including The Avengers (1961), The Saint (1962) and The Persuaders! (1971). His son Barry Norman became a prominent film critic.
