The idea of covering camera lenses with silk stockings to give an earth-toned quality in the 1971 film Fiddler on the Roof should be credited to the cinematographer Oswald Morris, rather than the director Norman Jewison (obituary, 23 January).
Before taking his customary week’s holiday before the start of a new project, Jewison asked Ossie to produce any colour style tests he thought fit. As he and I recounted in the co-authored memoir, Huston We Have a Problem, Ossie was facing nothing but brown: in people’s clothes, their houses and their individual faces. “It was like putting varnish on a painting,” he said.
Remembering the success he had using silk stockings on Goodbye, Mr Chips, Ossie dispatched a colleague to Zagreb, who triumphantly returned with a wriggling mass of ladies’ stockings in the largest sizes; these obviated seams and provided tops that gave the widest canvas as camera gauzes. He then shot thousands of feet of test film, rushed the reels through a London laboratory within 36 hours, and was ready for Jewison on his return.
There was no reaction on the first reel, a sort of “mmm” on the second and, at the third, a burst of “Gees”. “Ossie, that’s it! That’s the way our Fiddler should look!” exclaimed a delighted Jewison. After that, Ossie could do no wrong, and anything he suggested was agreed without demur. Ossie’s brilliant ingenuity on Fiddler deservedly won him the cinematography Oscar that year, even though the much-favoured The French Connection was in the same frame.
