Rudolph Cartier
Born: 17th April 1904
Died: 7th June 1994

Rudolph Cartier joined the BBC as a freelance producer in 1952, joining the staff after several successful productions. In his interview with Michael Barry, the BBC’s Head of Television Drama, Cartier had criticised the corporation’s output as unadventurous, being over reliant on familiar theatre texts and adaptations. Barry was of a similar mind and took Cartier on to enliven the drama schedule. This he quickly did, establishing himself as one of the drama department’s leading producers. 

Cartier made a reputation for himself as a man more than willing to take on assignments which convention wisdom felt were too big or complicated for live television. He was a technical innovator, trying any means to give his productions a visual flair, to make them less static than was the norm of the day, and expand them beyond the confines of the electronic studio. To this end, he made effective use of filmed inserts, often recorded in unusual locations. At this time the role of producer was also that of director, so Cartier had near-complete artistic control over his work. 

He had worked with staff scriptwriter Nigel Kneale on his first production, Arrow to the Heart (1952), and it was with Kneale that he would have some of his greatest successes. The Quatermass Experiment famously gripped the nation in 1953, and Kneale and Cartier made good use of their limited production means. A 3D effect was created for a scene set in a cinema showing a 3D film by superimposing two pictures and the impossible spectacle of a writhing vegetable monster at the conclusion was realised with a glove puppet and a photographic blow-up of one corner of Westminster Abbey.  

Arrow to the Heart (1952)

By 1953, a BBC dramatisation of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four had been on the cards for a while, but the technical challenges it posed had kept it from fruition. After the success of The Quatermass Experiment, Kneale and Cartier were recognised as the men for the job. Kneale was allowed a year to prepare a script and Cartier was given resources unheard of for one television play. With Peter Cushing as Winston, Yvonne Mitchell as Julia, and Andre Morrell as O’Brien, the two-hour drama went out live in December 1954. The furore it caused did much to obscure the qualities of the production. Cartier directed Kneale’s adaptation with precision and under his control the cast imbued many scenes with a raw, edge-of-the-seat power. The result was, and is, captivating. 

On transmission, BBC - and newspaper - switchboards were jammed by callers protesting at the torture scenes. The drama was labelled a ‘horror comic’ in the tabloids and no less than four motions were tabled in Parliament - both for and against the BBC’s freedom in programming. The Corporation’s very independence was called into question, and staunch advocates of each position quickly appeared in newsprint. However, it was Orwell’s grim vision of ‘English Socialism’ that caused the most violent reaction, with the play venomously condemned in the pages of the socialist press. The Daily Worker called the drama ‘anti-human’, a ‘sick perversion’, and its appreciators ‘semi-literate’. 

Cartier in conversation with Peter Cushing, on the set of The Winslow Boy (1958)

In a piece entitled ‘Repentant? No, I am Proud!’, Cartier told the Daily Express that ‘it was right and wise to put this terrible vision before the largest possible audience. As a warning... against totalitarianism in all its forms such as Fascism, Nazism, Communism or McCarthyism.’ The tide started to turn in the play’s favour, and by the time the live repeat took place four days later, with Cartier being afforded bodyguards, as many calls of praise as complaint were received. It was a major turning point for television, proving the new medium’s power. 

Less than six weeks later, Cartier and Kneale’s next collaboration was broadcast. Cushing starred again, this time as scientist John Rollason, in The Creature (1955), an original take on the legend of the Abominable Snowman. Cartier’s unique skill at staging the impossible in the BBC’s cramped Lime Grove studios was fully stretched. For the scene of Rollason coming face-to-face with the yeti, Cartier had a diminutive actor dress in a duplicate of Cushing’s costume. Viewed from behind the actor, it seemed that the creature - really about six feet tall - towered several feet over Rollason. Although the critics were unimpressed, the Times review suggests that Cartier’s trademark epic style of staging was very much in evidence, with ‘vast snowscapes, fiercely howling wind, foreboding music, night flares shining in the mountain, [and] a whole monastery full of masked monks’. 

As scene from Quatermass II (1955)

Quatermass II (1955) called for far more location work and special effects. Cartier’s filming around a Shell oil refinery – doubling as a top secret manufacturing plant – is highly effective and creates an appropriately sinister atmosphere. Other plant scenes (some shot around the boilers in the basement of Lime Grove studios) have an almost film noir quality to them, whilst sequences of the workers’ attack on the plant take on an expressionistic air, recalling German film of the 1920s, on which Cartier cut his teeth.  

Quatermass and the Pit (1958/9) was the most ambitious of the Quatermass tales. Cartier used extensive pre-filming, matching his live studio and pre-recorded sequences so closely that the changeovers were invisible. The impressive conclusion is staged with rudimentary but effective special effects, model work, eerie radiophonic sounds, and newsreel footage of London burning in the Blitz. 

The 1950s also saw Cartier, a life-long lover of opera, popularise television opera with lavish productions like Salome (1957) and A Tale of Two Cities (1958). He would produce well-known operas such as these, plus new ones especially commissioned for television, such as Tobias and the Angel (1960). He was keen to produce new material specially written for television, rather than rely on adaptations as television had traditionally done, but aside from some operas and his work with Nigel Kneale, he made little progress in this area.

A Tale of Two Cities (1958)

Cartier’s most interesting work in the 1960s is that in which he portrayed the Second World War from the German perspective, a view all too uncommon at the time. With often-documentary plays like Cross of Iron (1961) and The July Plot (1964), Cartier depicted the resistance to the Nazis amongst some elements of the German military. With Stalingrad (1963) he portrayed the defeat of the German Sixth Army as experienced by all ranks, painting the absurdities of war with thick brushstrokes.

Cartier also tackled the holocaust in the plays The Joel Brand Story (1964) and Doctor Korczak and the Children (1962), the latter a compelling piece acted without sets, props or costumes. As an Austrian Jew, whose mother had died in one of the most notorious ghettos, these must have been particularly personal works for Cartier. He would also tackle anti-Semitism in a historical context with The Burning Bush (1967). In a similar vein, he would dramatise how the burning of the Reichstag had been attributed to the work of foreign Communists with Firebrand (1967) and tackle Catholic/Protestant intolerance with The Fanatics (1968). This is indicative of his deeply felt opposition to all forms of persecution and fanaticism, as could be seen in some of his early film work and was apparent in his comments on Nineteen Eighty-Four. 

The Captain of Koepenick (1958)

Due to new drama head Sydney Newman’s restructuring of the drama department, and his division of the producer and director roles, Cartier found himself having to take on some assignments in the 1960s that were not to his tastes. He tackled episodes of popular serials Maigret and Z-Cars, about which he was unenthusiastic. His surviving episode of Z-Cars, ‘Scare’ (1963), displays none of the series’ characteristically fluid camerawork, appearing stilted instead. More characteristic of Cartier was his lavish production of Anna Karenina (1961), with Claire Bloom and Sean Connery, and the epic drama-documentary Lee Oswald – Assassin (1966). 

By the early-1970s, Cartier’s output had slowed to a trickle of mostly stage play adaptations. He ended his career - still at the BBC, having rejected commercial television for his artistic principles - working with imported foreign programmes. He died in London on 7 June 1994, the very same day as another television pioneer: Dennis Potter. 

Cartier came to television at a crucial moment in its development, seeing beyond the perceived restrictions of the time and recognising the untapped potential of the medium. In exploiting its unique power he created the ‘televisual’, producing a number of bona fide ‘classics’ of television and setting a new standard for the medium.

© 2007, Oliver Wake