by Stephen Vagg
John Guillermin (1925-2015) would rank among the most unfairly-forgotten film directors of the late twentieth century. Despite making such classics as The Towering Inferno, Death on the Nile, 1976’s King Kong, and The Blue Max, Guillermin is little-known outside film buff circles. That looks set to change with the publication of a new book compiled and edited by his widow, Mary, called John Guillermin: The Man, The Myth, The Movies.
There’s no work about a film director quite like it, at least none that I’ve read. It’s a collection of writings on Guillermin, including autobiographical pieces from the man himself, essays by various authors on different Guillermin movies, and several chapters from Mary that alternate between memoir, spousal biography and cinematic analysis. The picture that receives the most attention is not one of the blockbusters, but little-seen 1965 drama Rapture, which the director regarded as his favourite movie. It’s an unusual, idiosyncratic, fascinating book about a neglected artist of immense talent; it’s also a love story.
I spoke with Mary over the phone from her house in Los Angeles. “I met John ten years after directing gave him up, as he put it,” she told me. This was the late ‘90s, a decade after Guillermin made what turned out to be his last feature, The Tracker with Kris Kristofferson.
“I was involved with an independent publisher and invited to a dinner party in London where I lived. John was in England with a script and was meeting with an Italian producer. He happened to be at this party, and I saw him across the room and thought ‘wow – he’s handsome’. He heard me talking and he said he knew we were both intense and had strong mood swings. We recognised in each other a largeness of personality. He extended his stay for a few weeks in London and we fell in love.”
The couple married in 1998 and stayed together until his death in 2015.
“When I met him… ‘bitter’ is perhaps a strong word… but he didn’t like any of his films except Rapture,” says Mary. “In 1998 he said, ‘I’ve only made one good film and only half a dozen people have seen it’.
“He felt like a frustrated artist. He felt he had many more films like Rapture in him but because of his temperament and the way he lived his life (he took the work that came to support his family) he knew he had unused talent. He was modest.”
Mary said her husband’s emotional state at the time was complicated by two recent traumas: the death of his son in a 1984 car accident, and the end of his first marriage, to actor Maureen O’Connell (who had featured in Guillermin’s superb 1957 film, Town on Trial).
“He said ‘Don’t marry me, I’m impossible’ and he was, but he changed,” says Mary. “He worked on himself. He put effort into changing and into communicating and making the marriage work.
“I think a lot of my purpose was in helping him adjust because he wasn’t adjusted. He never wanted to give up directing. He didn’t even appreciate his own films or career, so I spent years trying to help him. We have this sense of feelings of purpose and feelings of accomplishment. It was very challenging and difficult.”
Part of the reason Mary Guillermin’s book is so invaluable, is that her late husband rarely granted interviews, even during his twilight years.
“He would say, ‘They won’t want to hear things from an old curmudgeon like me.’ He didn’t want to teach or write about his life. He couldn’t use his career to change how he related to it. So, it had to be companionship. When I wasn’t training or working we were just together all the time. We enjoyed it as much as we can, given that we both had depression but luckily never at the same time.”
Mary says her husband was finally able to manage his depression by giving up on the film industry for good. “The last script he tried to write – I always used to help him – I really didn’t like it. I said, ‘I can’t work on this’. Something about that stopped him writing but it was the best thing that ever happened in the last years of his life. When his creative juices weren’t fired up he didn’t have depression. He didn’t have those highs and lows. The last three years of his life, he was less mobile, he was mellow, he was content. I know it wouldn’t have happened without me and the love we had for each other.”
Mary says Guillermin’s attitude to his own body of work – previously very critical – gradually softened.
“After we got together, I found that he didn’t have a copy of his films. So, I decided to collect copies on VHS. When watching them he would say things like ‘I don’t remember a single shot’ and ‘not bad’. Sometimes, he would say ‘not bad’ in a pleased way. His attitude to his films mellowed later in life – he thought they were good pictures. “
After Guillermin passed away in 2015, Mary decided to honour his memory by editing and compiling John Guillermin: The Man, the Myth, the Movies.
“The big stimulus for the book was that I didn’t agree with the sentiment that he’d only made the one good film,” says Mary.
“I thought there was a lot of art in his films. At some point, I started looking to see what there was written about him. Only a few paragraphs here and there, and they were entirely about his temper. The whole entry on Wikipedia was about his bad temper. After his death it was fuller, but I knew he wouldn’t want to be known just for The Towering Inferno.
“My book was trying to establish that he had a style but also that as a man he had a lot of trauma as a child. He was bullied by his peers and beaten by his school masters and prefects and lived in terror and was really damaged by that.”
The book pays overdue serious critical attention to what was by any measure a remarkable body of work. Guillermin started in British B pictures in the late 1940s, and within a decade established himself as one of the leading directors in England. He shot on locations all around the world, including Africa (Tarzan’s Greatest Adventure, Shaft in Africa, Sheena), Ireland (The Blue Max), France (Rapture), Canada (Mr Patman), Egypt (Death on the Nile) and Czechoslovakia as it was being invaded by Russians (The Bridge at Remagen). Stars like Richard Attenborough, John Mills, Richard Todd, George Peppard and Tanya Roberts gave career-best performances in Guillermin movies.
The book is no hagiography, though. Mary Guillermin is remarkably frank about her husband’s flaws, including his notorious temper and long battle with depression.
“He was verbally aggressive,” she admits. “Some of this came from the trauma but also the fact that he’s French not English – at his memorial someone told me about a director this century who came from France and said ‘people are always telling me I’m shouting and that I’m angry and I don’t understand it’. People don’t understand passion. John was passionate. This person had a lot of pain. That’s part of the bigger picture. He’s honest about the terror behind the mask. I knew the sensitive John and the angry John. He was incredibly passionate.”
The book is part-memoir from Mary herself. Notably, she writes with compelling honesty about her sexual abuse as a child. “It happened a long time ago,” she said. “It confused me, it was a sweet experience in many ways. I don’t think I’m alone in thinking it was consensual and I was responsible in some way. There wasn’t any violence about it except for the psychological violence. But I eventually realised he [the abuser] was responsible, not me.” This experience means that her late husband’s film Rapture has particularly personal resonance for her. “Watching a tender relationship in Rapture, I cried every time,” she says. “Seeing her [the female lead] being cherished rather than abused – I found it very healing.”
Mary Guillermin describes her late husband as “a wildly difficult but passionate and exciting, loving and tender contradiction of a man. He is still, five years after his death, the love of my life, and I am thrilled to have brought this collection of wise and knowledgeable voices of film to bear witness to his talent and accomplishments.”
John Guillermin: The Man, The Myth, The Movies certainly does that.
