The Independent (30/Nov/2007) - Obituary: Peter Handford

(c) The Independent (30/Nov/2007)

Peter Handford: Master of sound location shooting who won an Oscar for "Out of Africa"

Peter Handford pioneered the use of original sound recording in the heady days of the British New Wave. Not only did he record the soundtracks of some of the finest British films of all time, but in 1985, having come out of semi-retirement, he won an Academy Award for Best Sound on Out of Africa. He also left an enduring legacy to railway historians by recording, and therefore preserving, the sounds of the great steam engines, and ensuring their release on a record label which he himself instigated.

Born into a vicarage family in 1919, Handford was determined on a career in films from an early age, and at 17 managed to secure a job as an apprentice sound camera loader for London Films at Denham Studios, learning his craft on the job on such films as MGM's A Yank at Oxford (1938).

With the outbreak of the Second World War, Handford volunteered for the British Expeditionary Force and spent time in the Army Film Unit, including shooting footage of the D-Day landings. Reverting back to sound after the war, he achieved his feature break and first screen credit on the Italian-shot Black Magic (1949), starring Orson Welles as Cagliostro, officially directed by Gregory Ratoff but with Welles's uncredited help. The same year, Handford recorded Under Capricorn for Alfred Hitchcock and the huge commercial success Maytime in Mayfair, the first of nine features for the prolific producer-director Herbert Wilcox throughout the 1950s.

Handford became known for the skilful recording of usable location soundtracks, valuably delineating aural atmosphere on such movies as the Richard Widmark noir classic Night and the City (1950) and other such combinations of studio and location shoots as the war films The Gift Horse (1952) and Seagulls over Sorrento (1954). The director David Lean asked for him on the major location shoot Summer Madness (1955), the Katharine Hepburn romance filmed almost entirely in Venice, for which Handford utilised his wartime experience of shooting synchronous sound to develop a new method of recording soundtracks on location.

The producer Jack Clayton then hired Handford and his equipment on three British location and studio-shot farces in 1956, Sailor Beware, Dry Rot and Three Men in a Boat, and when Clayton himself made his feature début as a director, he took Handford with him in what became the most important British film of its period, the 1959 Room at the Top, which virtually single-handedly ushered in the British New Wave, utilising realistic situations filmed on natural locations with adult dialogue and, importantly, original sound – location sound actually recorded on location. The film was an international triumph for all who worked on it, not least for Handford as sound recordist.

Handford became known as the master of sound location shooting and in swift succession recorded soundtracks for the finest achievements of the New Wave. In 1960 he was sound recordist on Sons and Lovers, The Entertainer and Saturday Night and Sunday Morning; in 1963 he worked on Billy Liar (on which he met the actress Helen Fraser, whom he later married) and the multiple Oscar-winner Tom Jones; and in 1964 The Pumpkin Eater; Darling (1965) and Morgan: a suitable case for treatment (1966) marked the end of the great period, as former New Wave directors edged towards the mainstream.

A collaboration with the director Joseph Losey followed, which included such films as The Go-Between (1971), The Romantic Englishwoman (1975) and Steaming (1985), Losey's last film. Alfred Hitchcock, for whom Handford had recorded Under Capricorn back in 1949, made a point of personally seeking him out, especially tracking him down in Suffolk, to ask him to do the sound on Frenzy (1972), Hitch's first British film for 25 years.

Sidney Lumet's Murder on the Orient Express (1974) and Fred Zinnemann's Julia (1977) followed, but after the unfortunate experience of working with the director Michael Cimino on the commercial disaster (but aesthetic triumph) Heaven's Gate (1980), Handford decided to take a sabbatical from a rapidly changing film industry, and worked freelance for Anglia Television in Norwich, supplying location sound for local news reports.

He was rescued from Anglia's "Farming Diary" by a telephone call from the director Sidney Pollack, who wanted him for Out of Africa (1985). Not only did Handford provide usable location dialogue, but he also travelled deep into the bush, recording African atmospheres and animal and bird sound effects, and the resultant soundtrack brought him the 1985 Academy Award for Best Sound, a highlight of a long career.

The Oscar led to other international assignments, including two more in Africa, Gorillas in the Mist (1988) for the director Michael Apted, and White Hunter, Black Heart (1990) for its director and star Clint Eastwood. Hope and Glory (1987) and Dangerous Liaisons (1988) were also prestigious, but after Havana (1990), again for Sidney Pollack, Handford decided to retire.

He worked on his garden and archived his wondrous collection of sound recordings, supervising the transfers of his unique steam train effects onto CD, and lodging his whole collection with the National Railway Museum in York. "I've always loved trains, steam locomotives," he said. "I love the sound of trains because that's what gives them their aura and mystique. You can get a sense of the weight and power of these mighty machines from the sound they make when they are puffing up an incline."