Guy Hamilton: Larks and lady-killers

If James Bond ever retires, he'll probably buy himself a place like Guy Hamilton's: a gin-pink modernist slab jutting from the peak of a Mallorcan mountainside, complete with Cinemascope picture windows, curvaceous swimming pool, basement screening room and cocktail bar – behind which the director sits, trickling Campari into a tall glass stacked with ice cubes. Next to him, perched on a padded barstool, is Mrs Hamilton – better known as Kerima, the impossibly glamorous actress who planted a passionate kiss on Trevor Howard in Carol Reed's Outcast of the Islands (1952). It's aperitif hour, and the Hamiltons are regaling me with stories about their years jetting between locations (the one about Roger Moore is too scurrilous to repeat).

Guy Hamilton's CV reveals a speciality – those big-cast, big-budget yarns that busted blocks between the Fifties and the Eighties, and have been preventing families from arguing with each other on Christmas afternoons and bank holidays ever since: The Colditz Story (1954), Goldfinger (1964), Battle of Britain (1969), Diamonds are Forever (1971), Evil Under the Sun (1982). If you've seen them once, you'll probably have seen them half a dozen times. And the current cinema still betrays his influence. If you sat through Dark Blue World, you might have noticed that the best aerial scenes have been snipped straight from Hamilton's Battle of Britain. I ask him if he received a fee, but he just laughs.

Here's another measure of the memorable nature of his work. Later this summer, Mike Myers' Goldmember will occupy the multiplexes. But it might not be an appropriate tribute. For Hamilton, the Austin Powers swinger is Bond's antithesis. "I was always pushing to remind people that James Bond was Commander Bond, RN," he asserts. "He was a member of the establishment. I spent a long time, for instance, persuading Roger Moore to get his hair cut short." You might recall that in Goldfinger, when Sean Connery goes to the fridge to retrieve something chilled for the soon-to-be-electroplated Shirley Eaton, he declares: "My dear, there are some things that just aren't done, such as drinking Dom Perignon 53 above the temperature of 38 degrees Fahrenheit. That's just as bad as listening to the Beatles without earmuffs!" Connery's natural sensuality ameliorates the crustiness of the line: try to imagine Kenneth More saying it.

Hamilton was born in Paris in 1922, and determined from an early age to make his living behind a film camera. His father, a press attaché to the British embassy in Paris, was equally determined that his son should become a diplomat, until a meeting with Anna Neagle at a gala event for Herbert Wilcox's Victoria the Great (1937) persuaded him that not all film people were crooks and swindlers. So, when Guy Hamilton was 17, he rolled up at a film studio in Nice and asked for a job. He got one, in the accounts department, but was quickly transferred to the studio floor. The coming war interrupted this apprenticeship: he was forced to flee France on a collier boat bound for North Africa. Among his fellow refugees, sleeping on heaps of coal and living on emergency rations, was Somerset Maugham. Hamilton recalls observing as the author's butler made his employer tea in an empty corned beef tin.

The Second World War echoes throughout Hamilton's work. If he was eager to remind audiences that Bond was a veteran whose intelligence career had continued into a more permissive age, he was equally keen to use the cinema to look squarely back at the conflict in which both he and the Commander had participated – and always with a certain wry humour. Ask Hamilton about his war experience, and he'll tell you about some terrific adventure as though it was a trip to the newsagent. Like, for instance, the time when he was serving with the 15th Motor Gunboat Flotilla, a clandestine unit which rescued British airmen marooned in enemy territory, and got left behind on the shores of Brittany...

"We walked through the night to get well away from the beach we'd landed at," he recalls, "so we wouldn't give away the fact that it was being used for operations. Then we contacted the Resistance and they took us in hand. First we stayed with a Breton family, but that got too hot for us. When the Germans came snooping round they moved us out into this deserted shepherd's hut in the middle of a forest. The Germans knew that we were around somewhere, but we evaded them, and were picked up four weeks later. I had a month's holiday in Brittany." Before he returned home, however, his Resistance hosts took him to play skittles in a pub packed with Nazis. "On the way out, the lady of the estaminet said to the Resistance boys, 'Your friend isn't from round here, is he?' They said I was from Brest. 'Oh, that explains it,' she said, 'because he's got a slight accent, I couldn't place it.'" And wasn't it rather terrifying to be having this conversation in a room full of German soldiers? "The three Resistance guys thought it was hilariously funny. My amusement was fairly limited."

It's the same mixture of authenticity and larky humour that you find in his films. In Battle of Britain, for instance, when Edward Fox bails out of his plane after a battle sequence and crash-lands in a suburban cucumber frame. A boy rushes out to him with a box of cigarettes. ("Thanks awfully, old chap," says Fox, as the battle rages above.)

This tone is particularly strong in The Colditz Story, the project that – after assisting Carol Reed on The Third Man, John Huston on The African Queen, and directing a number of B-features – propelled Hamilton into the big league. The film was made in close co-operation with veterans who had survived a spell within the castle's walls, but the script contains more than a nip of dormitory humour. There's a scene in which John Mills conceals the absence of an escapee by running from one end of the inspection line to another, just like a schoolboy trying to make a double appearance in the end-of-term photograph. There's also the concert party in which a gang of kilted soldiers belt out "My Heart Belongs to Colditz" to an appreciative audience of prisoners and guards. "Oh," remarks a German officer, played – like most German officers in British films of the period – by Anton Diffring, "I see you have the British humour." The film gave Colditz a permanent place in the popular imagination: before, so few had heard of the prison that studio executives suspected that the public might think the picture was something to do with coal dust.

"I thought that Colditz was funny. It has a schoolboy enthusiasm to it," says Hamilton, "but we did behave a little like that. Everybody was a bit facetious, and the typical English thing is to make jokes in order to pretend you're not frightened. There were a couple of things that we wanted to put in which we had to leave out, because the audience would think it was ridiculous. But they really happened." And he relates how the inmates were locked up in the nearby village hall while their captors searched the castle from the turrets down, pulling up floorboards and garnering a monstrous heap of escape-related paraphernalia: Nazi badges carved from soap, home-made German uniforms, items of improvised tunnelling equipment. The guards' triumph was short-lived. Locust-like, the POWs had stripped the village hall of useful material, and marched back into their cells with their trousers packed with possibilities. "If we'd shown them removing the lead from the loos and ripping the upholstery from the armchairs, people would have thought it was like something from a Carry On film."

The Hamiltons have lived on Mallorca for more than 25 years. Their villa was built with the director's fee for Superman the Movie, to which he was assigned – until the production's base switched from Rome to Pinewood. One of his ideas, however, did survive into the finished film: Lex Luthor's dastardly plot to buy the Nevada desert and use nuclear weapons to detach the East Coast from the American shoreline, leaving him with a huge tract of beachside real estate. Hamilton's less dastardly machinations have brought him a comfortable retirement, but he does have one quibble. When he and Kerima first arrived on the island there were only three cars in the village below, and the hillsides were tree-covered and unspoilt. Over the past 10 years, their peaks have been smothered by holiday homes, and the village is choked with traffic. No prizes for guessing the nationality of these colonists. The Germans have invaded, and the joke isn't lost on Guy Hamilton.

Guy Hamilton's 'The Colditz Story' has been released as part of Warner Home Video's British War DVD Collection.