Alias John Preston

In 1955, Christopher Lee was working steadily and hard, appearing in about a dozen movies and television programs that year alone. Alias John Preston (1955) was the most notable because it gave Lee, as he later recounted, "technically my first leading role, as a mad businessman who goes off his chump beginning at the top of a table and finishing over a tombstone. For this I was paid the handsome, and by no means atypical, Danziger fee of seventy-five pounds." The Danziger brothers, Harry and Edward, were American producers who set up a film company, New Elstree Studios, in a former aircraft engine factory outside London. To say they were prolific producers of cheap quickies would be an understatement; they churned them out endlessly. Lee later explained: "It would have been physically possible, if the spirit hadn't weakened, to make a hundred and twenty films in a year for [them], because any film they made that lasted more than three days began to run over budget.... They made countless films and all but the top stars were induced at one time or another to work for them." Alias John Preston, which also features Hollywood actors Alexander Knox and Betta St. John, casts Lee as a businessman who arrives in a sleepy English town, only for his psychotic nature to emerge -- a characterization that foreshadowed the typecasting that would soon envelop the actor. As film historians Tom Johnson and Mark A. Miller later wrote: "Lee carefully calibrates his character to reveal gradually his mental unbalance. At first he seems relaxed and friendly, yet he nervously twirls his cigarettes as a vague hint that something is amiss. Soon, he suffers sweaty paroxysms of fear, as he stares into the camera and contorts his face with his hands. Such dramatic scenes offer the potential for unintended humor, but Lee intelligently underplays them to avoid snickers from his audience. For Lee, this is both a defining and an anticipatory performance of the many heavies he would portray." Indeed, Alias John Preston is a small film that was churned out quickly, but it gave Lee the chance to hone his craft, to learn to deliver a coherent performance under conditions that allowed for almost no rehearsal and very few takes. Lee later reflected: "I hardly can say I'm proud of my work in this one..., but it was a lead and led to other, better parts.... The role was a signal of things to come. My main memory is playing with Alexander Knox, who was, for a time, famous for playing U.S. President Woodrow Wilson. He gave the picture a certain legitimacy." By Jeremy Arnold SOURCES: Tom Johnson and Mark A. Miller, The Christopher Lee Filmography Christopher Lee, Tall, Dark and Gruesome