Aces of the Camera — Victor Milner (1942) 🇺🇸

Aces of the Camera XIV: Victor Milner, A.S.C.

by Walter Blanchard

Twenty years ago a virtually unknown young cameraman approached Fred Niblo, who was then one of the Industrie’s greatest producer-directors, and asked for the chance of photographing Niblo’s next production. “You don’t know me, Mr. Niblo,” he said, “but I know I’ve got the ability to give you the best photography you ever had. Just to prove it, I’ll make you this proposition: let me work on your picture just one day. If when you see the rushes you aren’t satisfied with my work, you can not only fire me — I’ll pay whatever it costs to retake that day’s work!”

History doesn’t record what Niblo thought, but he probably reasoned that there might be something behind such enthusiastic confidence, and he could hardly lose, anyway (he didn’t realize that the earnest young man before him hadn’t enough in the bank to pay for even a single scene’s retakes!). At any rate, he agreed to the tryout. And for once, the Horatio Alger formula worked as successfully in life as in fiction: the first day’s takes proved conclusively that the young man knew his camera. So did the next day’s, and all those that followed. “Thy Name Is Woman” became the first of many notable Fred Niblo productions which bore the credit “Photographed by Victor Milner, A.S.C.”

That incident was probably the start of Vic Milner’s career as an ace cinematographer — a career that has since led to a well-earned Academy Award and universal recognition as “the old maestro of lighting.” But it wasn’t his real start in cinematography by a long shot. You can talk all you want to about the “instinct for photography;” Milner unquestionably had it: but before he could capitalize on it by meteorically gambling — and making good — on his ability to photograph a major super-production, he had to spend many long years learning and mastering the technique of the camera. He barned the hard way, too.

Rather more than thirty years ago Vic Milner was a gangly, red-headed operator in a New York “nickelodeon.” And as he cranked the show’s five flickery reels through the projector by hand, he fell in love with a picture. It wasn’t the shadowy image of any 1910 glamor-girl, nor the powder-punctuated heroics of a cowboy hero. It was an inconspicuous little “filler” — a Pathé travelogue.

This particular picture was a travelogue of the ice-packs of Spitzbergen. Whoever photographed it had done so exquisitely, capturing the fascinating interplay of dazzling highlight and almost opalescent half-shadows which heighten the other-worldly beauty of a sunlighted iceberg.

Again and again young Milner ran it through his projector, feasting his eyes on the strange beauty the camera had captured. Later, on another job, he ran it again. It crystallized his ambition to become a cameraman, and create more of such enthralling beauty with lens and light and shade.

The chance came when he got himself a job as an apprentice in the combined camera factory, laboratory and studio of the pioneer cine-engineer, Eberhard Schneider. Under Schneider’s tutelage, and that of his daughter, who ultimately became Mrs. Milner, the boy learned the cinema craft the hard way. He developed film, printed it, toned, tinted, spliced and edited it. Finally, he mastered the craft of operating a camera so thoroughly that his employer sent him out with a customer to photograph what was one of the first feature-length productions made in America — an independently-produced version of “Hiawatha.”

It was a success, and Cameraman Milner, now launched on a photographic career, next spent several years with another customer, encircling the globe making a series of travel-films. Then followed a long and exciting engagement with Pathé News, as one of America’s pioneer newsreel men. How he “covered” our brief war with Mexico in 1914, “staging” the battle of Vera Cruz when he arrived too late to film the actual fight, is an epic in itself, and one which he told most entertainingly in The American Cinematographer some fifteen years ago.

Switching to theatrical camerawork when his honeymoon brought him to California’s budding studios in 1918, he began the hard climb from an assistantship to the post of First Cinematographer. He made it so successfully that when the American Society of Cinematographers was founded in 1919, he, as a recognized First Cinematographer, was one of the fifteen Charter Members.

During his climb, he did what few, if any other members of the profession has had the courage to do. Arrived at a high place in his profession, he admitted he still had more to learn — and voluntarily dropped back to an assistant’s menial job for the sole purpose of gaining further experience by working with the man who was then acknowledged to be the industry’s greatest master of lighting — John F. Seitz, A.S.C.

It was after this “post-graduate course in cinematography” that he felt himself qualified to make his daring proposal to Director Niblo. No wonder he felt confident of making good! And no wonder, either, that from that day to this, he has stood always among the foremost members of the camera profession! Many of Hollywood’s greatest and most perfectly-photographed pictures have come from his cameras. During the years when Ernst Lubitsch was the kingpin of the Paramount roster of directors, and making history with the delightful Chevalier–McDonald [Maurice Chevalier | Jeanette MacDonald] musicals, Vic Milner photographed them. Today, when Cecil B. De Mille makes a picture like Reap the Wild Wind, he insists on having Milner at the camera. One of the Milner-De Mille efforts — Cleopatra — won the coveted Academy Award for the year’s best photography; virtually all the other have been Award nominees and near-winners in both the black-and-white and color groups.

Milner’s approach to his work is unique. He throws himself into each picture with the same nervous intensity you see in Toscanini’s conducting of a great symphony concert. When he is on a picture, he has time for very little but his work; he eats, and sleeps and dreams and lives with his on-the-set problems and aspirations. For to him, an assignment to photograph a picture is vastly more than a mere job: it is a solemn trust.

That trust, as Milner sees it, is two-sided. “On the one hand,” he points out, “the producer has entrusted me with the responsibility of getting his investment of perhaps two or three million dollars onto the screen in saleable celluloid. On the other hand, the public who, collectively will invest as much or more money in buying their way into the theatres to see that picture have, by implication, at least, entrusted to me the responsibility of bringing to them in the most perfect form possible the entertainment which producer, writers, director and players have created for them on the set. Either way you look at it, if I fail in my work of putting the picture on film in the best way possible, I am failing those trusts.

“The same thing applies to the way I photograph any given star. The producer has spent a lot of money building up a star like, say, Claudette Colbert. The public, whose support has made her a success, has an equally big investment in the way she looks on the screen. I’ve got to use my knowledge of photography, lenses and lighting to protect both of those investments, and see to it that she appears at her best in every scene.”

With an attitude like this, it is no wonder that Milner is his own severest critic. Repeatedly I’ve seen him come from rush-print screenings looking the picture of dejection. To his friends, he’d disgustedly assert that he’d lost his grip — that somehow he couldn’t balance his lighting at all — that his exposure and compositions were all wrong — that his assistant could have done a better job than he did. Yet at the same time, everyone in the studio — executives, players and fellow-cinematographers — would be singing his praises for the superb skill he had shown in difficult work! Seldom, if ever, have I seen him completely satisfied with even his best work, or willing to admit he couldn’t have done it a bit batter.

He seems equally at home in any key of lighting or visual mood. He has achieved brilliant success with somber, low-key dramas like the original “Way of All Flesh” or “The Man I Killed;” yet at the other end of the scale, his skill in sparkling, high-key lightings for smart comedy-dramas like the Lubitsch musicals or the more recent Lady Eve and “My Life With Caroline” is acknowledged as perhaps the industry’s foremost.

If you press him, he’ll admit that, in black-and-white, at least, his preference is for the sparkling high-key work in which he so greatly excels. But his real preference is for color. His first three-color Technicolor effort, “North West Mounted Police,” was a stout contender for last year’s Academy color Award; his recently-finished Reap the Wild Wind is said to be one of this year’s most sensational Technicolor releases. He is anxious for further Technicolor assignments, for to him, color is the coming medium.

“Each time I’ve finished a color picture,” he points out, “and gone onto a black-and-white production, I had a scene of futility as I viewed the rushes. No matter how hard I tried, my work in black-and-white left me with an instinctive feeling something was missing. There was — both the added reality of color, and the fuller artistic scope color affords the cinematographer.

“Isn’t it logical to believe that the public feels the same way, too, if perhaps only subconsciously — especially since any of them can put a roll of Kodachrome into his home-movie camera and make his own pictures in color? Certainly, after seeing a star like Madeleine Carroll or Paulette Goddard in color, there’s a let-down in seeing her in black-and-white — a feeling some vibrant dimension is missing.

“I’m sure it’s only a matter of logical progression until all our major pictures will have to be made in color. Maybe not Technicolor, but in some three-color process equally good or better.

“From the cinematographer’s viewpoint, color is certainly the next step. Fourteen or fifteen years ago, just before sound came in, we were fast approaching the peak of perfection in black-and-white camerawork. Our better pictures reached incredible heights in their perfection of mood, roundness and tonal values. Then came sound, and the advent of panchromatic film, which gave us new problems to overcome, new conditions to master.

“Since that time, we’ve done it. Today, we’re fast approaching, if we haven’t actually reached, a virtual saturation-point in our artistic and technical progress in black-and-white camerawork. We’ve got to keep on progressing in some direction, for we certainly can’t stand still.

“Color, I think, is the avenue for that next progression. Most of the men who have had experience photographing modern color productions will, I am sure, agree with me. It gives us a new medium— a new means of expressing ourselves both dramatically and pictorially — a new and visual realism.

“I think the men who have so far made color productions will agree, too, that there has been a good deal too much of a mystery made of color-photography. My own experience — and that of most of the others — indicates that color is, if anything, even easier than black-and-white. But it calls for painstaking technique, and a genuine understanding of photographic fundamentals — lighting, exposure and composition. Above all, it calls for inherent good taste.

“Most of this talk about a special ‘color sense’ is just publicity. Of course there are some few people who don’t seem to show any sense at all about color-combinations, like your neighbor who insists on wearing a purple tie with a green shirt: but I think good taste covers it much better than any term like ‘color sens-a.’ And as we make more and more color films, I’m confident we’ll see it proven that any capable cinematographer who has ordinary good taste is potentially an equally good color cinematographer. After all, good photography is essentially a matter of knowing the fundamentals — lighting, composition and exposure. And those fundamentals apply with equal force to all kinds of photographic picture-making, whether you’re making your picture in movies or stills, on orthochromatic or pan film — or in black-and-white or in color.

“Details may change with the times and the media available: fundamentals never will. Run any outstanding picture of fifteen or twenty years ago today, and if your eye can penetrate beneath the surface differences caused by improvements in materials and equipment, you must honestly admit that scenes which were fundamentally good photography then, are still good photography today, though today we could do it better because we’ve better materials with which to work.

“Tomorrow, we’ll have yet better materials— one of which, I’m sure, will be increased use of color. But none the less, the basic factors of light-balancing, exposure and composition, which make a picture good or bad today, will still be the governing factor twenty years from now. And the men who know those fundamentals needn’t fear any of the superficial changes that are bound to come!”

That, we’d say, looks like a pretty good summary of the reasons why Victor Milner, who learned his photographic fundamentals the hard way, is one of the leaders of his profession.

End.

—

—

—

see also entries of the Aces of the Camera series

Collection: American Cinematographer February 1942