Pen Tennyson - Film Career

Film Career

Tennyson entered the film industry in May 1932 after his mother introduced him to C.M. Woolf, the business partner of producer-director Michael Balcon. He began his career as a camera assistant under Balcon at Gaumont British Studios at Shepherd's Bush. He developed a very close relationship with Balcon which lasted for the rest of his life; Balcon's children both later commented that their father "regarded him as a son".

At Gaumont, he was assigned to assist Hitchcock on the original 1934 version of The Man Who Knew Too Much, on which he met his future wife. He also assisted Hitchcock on the 1935 version of The 39 Steps with Robert Donat and Madeleine Carroll; during filming, Hitchcock reportedly humiliated Tennyson by pretending that Carroll had refused to be carried across the Scottish marsh set by Donat, and he forced Pen to don Carroll's wig and costume and double for her in the scene.

Tennyson followed Balcon when he was appointed head of production at the former Associated Talking Pictures, newly renamed as Ealing Studios. Under Balcon, Tennyson's made his first feature as a director, There Ain't No Justice, a gritty contemporary drama about a young boxer, which writer Matthew Sweet describes as "one of the first British films of the sound era to make a serious attempt to represent the lives of working-class Londoners".

Tennyson's second film, The Proud Valley (1940), starred Paul Robeson as an American sailor who goes to work in a Welsh coal mine and is co-opted into the town's choir. It marked Robeson's return to films after a two-year hiatus, which had been precipitated in part by his bad experiences on his first British film, the colonialist epic Sanders of the River, which he subsequently disowned for its racism.

The impending war forced Balcon and Tennyson to tone down the radical political content contained in the original script of The Proud Valley, and on its release its commercial prospects were sabotaged after Robeson spoke out about the Nazi-Soviet pact of August 1939 and Britain's unwillingness to unite with the Soviet Union against Germany. According to later revelations by Michael Foot, Robeson's comments enraged press baron Lord Beaverbrook, who placed the actor on a secret blacklist (which also included Noël Coward), boycotting any mention of the film or its star in his newspapers.

Tennyson's final film was the wartime propaganda piece Convoy (1940), which starred Clive Brook and stage actress Judy Campbell, who retained bitter memories of her poor treatment by the Ealing crew, which included having her eyebrows forcibly shaved off by the Ealing make-up man.