Alastair McIntyre

Alastair McIntyre (2 April 1927 – 1 May 1986)'Obituary: Alastair McIntyre', Film and TV Technician, June 1986, p. 10. was a British film editor and sound editor, best known for his association with the director Roman Polanski, for whom he worked on six films between 1965 and 1979. He was involved in over 40 film productions in a career that spanned three decades, including 14 credits as an editor.'Alastair McIntyre', British Film Institute. Retrieved 16 September 2021.
== Early career ==
Alastair McIntyre was born in Oxfordshire in 1927. His first opportunity to work in the film industry came upon being employed by the editorial department of Ealing Studios, where he gained experience as an uncredited assistant on Thorold Dickinson's 1952 film Secret People (film), which featured Audrey Hepburn in a notable supporting role. Thereafter, McIntyre was an assistant editor on several other Ealing productions, including I Believe in You (film) (1952) and The Cruel Sea (1953 film), before beginning his career as a sound editor on Basil Dearden's crime drama The Ship that Died of Shame (1955). Over the next ten years he was responsible for the sound production and dubbing of several classic British films, such as Dunkirk (1958 film), Room at the Top (1959 film), SOS Pacific (1959) and Whistle Down the Wind (film) (1961). The directors that McIntyre worked alongside during this period included Charles Crichton, Leslie Norman (director), Jack Clayton, Sidney Gilliat, Anthony Asquith, Guy Green (filmmaker) and Bryan Forbes. While at Ealing he was known as 'Mac', with an approach to his work that one colleague described as "pretty forthright and without frills – he had little time for the fashionable mystique of the cutting room."
== Work as film editor == 
=== Gutowski, Polanski and Repulsion === 
McIntyre's role as an editor began in 1962 on the low-budget film Station Six-Sahara, which was directed by Seth Holt and starred Carroll Baker, Denholm Elliott and Ian Bannen. Station Six-Sahara was one of two films then being financed by the fledgling production company CCC Film London, but so little profit was generated by either venture that the company was soon liquidated by its West German owner, CCC Film.Tim Bergfelder, International Adventures: German Popular Cinema and European Co-productions in the 1960s (New York, NY: Berghahn Books, 2005), pp. 127-8. Although CCC Film London's Polish chairman, Gene Gutowski (who was also the executive producer of Station-Six Sahara), was badly affected financially by his firm's collapse, he nevertheless joined forces with a young compatriot named Roman Polanski in order to make more films.Gene Gutowski, With Balls and Chutzpah: A Story of Survival (Bloomington, IN: Iuniverse Inc., 2011), pp. 187-8, 198-9, It was Gutowski who, as a producer, was responsible for setting up Polanski's first English-language feature, Repulsion (film), in Britain in 1965, and together they invited McIntyre to work as the film's editor.
Repulsion was a technically challenging film to make: one of the key scenes, for example, involved a close-up of a girl's eye as shown in a photograph, which required McIntyre to take three very complex shots – the original zoom shot of the eye in the photograph; another zoom shot involving a gigantic blow-up of the photograph; and then a final shot using a miniature camera that could get "right into the girl's eye" – and join them together using 'invisible' dissolves.Ivan Butler, The Cinema of Roman Polanski (London: A. Zwemmer Ltd., 1970), p. 78. This arduous task did not prevent him from appreciating Polanski as a versatile, innovative filmmaker, remarking approvingly to the author Ivan Butler in 1970 that
Polanski watches over the editing as closely as over everything else, keeping a tighter hold than most people I've worked for: but this does not mean he never allows his editor any freedom of expression. Once he became familiar with my work, everything became much easier. He knows what he wants, and it is my job as editor to give him exactly that. His enthusiasm is infectious. He'll hammer a nail into the floor better than the carpenter: I think that at first this was partly because when he came over here and made Repulsion he knew hardly any English at all, and it was easier to show someone how he wanted a job done than to explain verbally.Butler, The Cinema of Roman Polanski, pp. 189-90.
Polanski, in return, valued McIntyre's knowledge and experience, commenting in 1986 that "Alastair was my first editor outside of Poland on Repulsion and he was to me, of course, more than an editor, because he guided me through all of this unknown industry; it is not the same in Poland as it is in England or anywhere else. I had never seen a Moviola before; we used cutting tables."
=== Later work for Polanski ===
Polanski's next film was Cul-de-sac (1966 film), which was shot on location at Holy Island, Northumberland. Because of the difficulties inherent in living together on a remote island for a long period of time, tensions soon erupted among the cast and crew during filming: the leading performers (Françoise Dorléac, Donald Pleasence and Lionel Stander) all came to loathe each other, the lighting cameraman Gilbert Taylor punched the actor Iain Quarrier in the face, and a strike was threatened in protest over Polanski's treatment of Dorléac while filming a beach scene.<ref>Roman Polanski, Roman by Polanski (New York, NY: Morrow, 1984), pp. 228, 244. McIntyre – later described by Harlan Kennedy in American Film (magazine) as "genial" and "voluble"Harlan Kennedy, 'Tess – Polanski in Hardy Country', American Film, October 1979. americancinemapapers.com. Retrieved 16 September 2021. – was one of the few reassuring presences on set, and Polanski subsequently recalled his editor enlivening many scenes in the island's pubs with his "hilarious Scottish vocal act".Polanski, Roman by Polanski, p. 227.
In the late 1960s and early 1970s McIntyre edited three more films for Polanski – The Fearless Vampire Killers (1967), Macbeth (1971 film), and What? (film) (1972). Their final collaboration was Tess (1979 film), an Anglo-French production of Thomas Hardy's novel Tess of the d'Urbervilles which, due to Polanski's Roman Polanski sexual abuse case, was filmed in France rather than in England. Although McIntyre spent nearly a year meticulously trying to piece the film's narrative togetherSee, for example, Harlan Kennedy's descriptions of McIntyre at work with Polanski in the cutting suite. Kennedy, 'Tess – Polanski in Hardy Country', American Film, October 1979. americancinemapapers.com. Retrieved 16 September 2021., the finished result – despite being described by Variety (magazine) in its pre-release review as displaying "excellent" editing'Film Reviews: Tess', Variety, 7 November 1979, p. 18.For another positive critique of the film's editing, see the 17 February 1981 issue of the Boston Phoenix, which praises McIntyre and Priestley for creating a "rhythm that's transfixing". Stephen Schiff, 'Polanski's Pretty Baby', Boston Phoenix (Arts and Entertainment section), 17 February 1981, p. 10. – was not to the director's satisfaction. Having already brought in Tom Priestley (who was the sound editor on Repulsion) to help McIntyre meet the strict deadline imposed by the movie's producers, Polanski then enlisted another editor, Sam O'Steen, to come up with a drastically shortened second edit that could attract the attention of a distributor in the United States, where there were still no clear plans for the film's release.Polanski, Roman by Polanski, p. 438. When Polanski also rejected this new version as "like watching a film with every other reel left out", he turned to yet another editor, Hervé de Luze, who produced a cut that came in at 170 minutes, which was only 16 minutes less than the running length of McIntyre's original edit; it was this version that was eventually shown to British and American audiences from late 1980 onwards, over a year after the film was distributed in its initial form in France.Polanski, Roman by Polanski, p. 439.(In French) Didier Péron, 'Interview: Toujours raccord avec Polanski', Libération, 7 December 2012. liberation.fr. Retrieved 16 September 2021.
=== Other films ===
McIntyre was not only employed by Polanski during this period. In the late 1960s he worked on films for Don Chaffey and James B. Clark (director), and followed them up by editing a further two films on behalf of producer Gene Gutowski: A Day at the Beach (1970), an adaptation of a critically-acclaimed work by Heere Heeresma that was originally intended as a vehicle for Polanski before it was passed on to the unknown Moroccan director Simon Hesera, and which was only released for limited distribution by Paramount Pictures more than twenty years after it was completedBarbara Leaming, Polanski, the Filmmaker as Voyeur: A Biography (New York, NY: Simon and Schuster, 1981), p. 99. Suzan Ayscough, 'Polanski pic found in Par vault', Variety, 11 February 1993. variety.com. Retrieved 16 September 2021.; and The Adventures of Gerard (1970), taken from an Arthur Conan Doyle novel, which was directed by another young Pole, Jerzy Skolimowski – who, like Polanski on Repulsion, was at the helm of an English-language production for the first time.Gutowski, With Balls and Chutzpah, p. 255.
== Final years ==
In the early 1980s McIntyre worked as a tutor at the National Film and Television School in Beaconsfield, where he was popular with students and colleagues alike, while continuing to edit documentaries and instructional films. In April 1985 he was appointed to a full-time position at the School, but died just over a year later following complications from a stroke, leaving behind his wife, daughters, and a son. In a tribute, published in the pages of the industry journal Film and TV Technician in June 1986, Polanski described McIntyre as "first, a friend; a hard worker, loyal and like nobody else I met, fast. It was really thrilling to be working and to be with him."
== Selected filmography ==
=== As editor ===
* Station Six-Sahara (1962)
* Saturday Night Out (1964)
* The Black Torment (1964)
* Repulsion (film) (1965)
* Cul-de-sac (1966 film) (1966)
* The Fearless Vampire Killers (1967) 
* A Twist of Sand (1968)
* My Side of the Mountain (film) (1969)
* A Day at the Beach (1970)
* The Adventures of Gerard (1970)
* Macbeth (1971 film)
* What? (film) (1972) (Che?)
* The Lion and the Virgin (1975) (Lejonet och jungfrun)
* Tess (1979 film)
=== As sound editor ===
* The Ship that Died of Shame (1955)
* Who Done It? (1956 film)
* The Feminine Touch (1956 film)
* The Long Arm (film)
* The Man in the Sky (1957)
* The Shiralee (1957 film)
* Barnacle Bill (1957 film)
* Dunkirk (1958 film)
* Sea of Sand (1958) (dubbing editor)
* Nowhere to Go (1958 film)
* Room at the Top (1959 film)
* Left Right and Centre (1959) (dubbing editor)
* This Other Eden (film)
* SOS Pacific (1959)
* The Angry Silence (1960) (dubbing editor)
* Make Mine Mink (1960)
* The Millionairess (1960)
* The Mark (1961 film)
* Mr Topaze (1961)
* Whistle Down the Wind (film)
* The Quare Fellow#Adaptation
* Night of the Eagle (1962)
* Clash by Night (1963 film)
== Bibliography ==
* Bergfelder, Tim, International Adventures: German Popular Cinema and European Co-productions in the 1960s (New York, NY: Berghahn Books, 2005). 
* Butler, Ivan, The Cinema of Roman Polanski (London: A. Zwemmer Ltd., 1970). 
* Gutowski, Gene, With Balls and Chutzpah: A Story of Survival (Bloomington, IN: Iuniverse Inc., 2011). 
* 'Obituary: Alastair McIntyre', Film and TV Technician, June 1986. 
* Leaming, Barbara, Polanski, the Filmmaker as Voyeur: A Biography (New York, NY: Simon and Schuster, 1981). 
* Polanski, Roman, Roman by Polanski (New York, NY: Morrow, 1984). 
Category:1927 births
Category:1986 deaths
Category:British film editors
Category:British sound artists