Val Guest: Tributes

Val Guest directed several British films with musical content. These include:

Toomorrow (1970) starring Olivia Newton-John

Expresso Bongo (1960) Cliff Richard, Laurence Harvey

Life Is a Circus (1958) Flanagan and Allen, Michael Holliday

It's a Wonderful World (1956) Ted Heath, Dennis Lotis

Happy Go Lovely (writer only,1951) Vera Ellen

London Town (1946) (writer only) Sid Field, Tessie O'Shea

I'll Be Your Sweetheart (1945) Margaret Lockwood

Miss London Ltd (1943) Evelyn Dall, Arthur Askey

The Guardian Obituary

Val Guest by Christopher Hawtree

Tuesday May 16, 2006

'It is the duty of all respectable people to keep their names out of the paper." So the film producer, director and scriptwriter Val Guest, who has died aged 94, was told by his father when he announced that getting the part of the village idiot in a play called 'Unholy Orders' would be the harbinger of fame. Guest Sr. was to be disappointed; his son went on to get into the papers as the writer of more than 70 films, and the director of more than 50 - including Expresso Bongo and The Day the Earth Caught Fire.

Another misplaced interchange was with the Duke of Edinburgh, "What are you up to now?" he asked Guest. "I'm making a murder mystery with the Brighton police, sir." "How bloody boring," replied the prince, thus casting out unseen Jigsaw (1962), one of the finest postwar British crime movies and possibly the best depiction of the seaside town on film. Caught in its seedy corruption, Brighton emerges as a far cry from the bumbling world with which Guest had until then been associated. This was the one built around the eight movies that he co-wrote with George Marriott Edgar, featuring the great comedian Will Hay. Among them was Oh, Mr Porter! (1937), an evocation of remote Ireland but filmed in Basingstoke. Hay was so pleased to work with Guest that he gave him the director's chair he used for the rest of his career.

Guest was born in Maida Vale, London, spent some of his infancy in India, and was brought back to England shortly before the first world war. Educated at Seaford College, he lived for several years under the impression that his mother was dead. Even after his grandparents revealed that there had been a divorce, Guest led his father to think that he still believed the myth; later meetings with his mother were kept secret. A vivacious character, she had acted and published poetry. She also paid the first instalment on the typewriter from Selfridges by which Guest intended to escape from the book-keeping job in which his father had installed him at 15. He had also paid for his son's piano lessons, but forbade any playing after 7pm or for more than 15 minutes at a time. When his father remarried, Guest announced that he intended to follow the path of his mother. Not that Unholy Orders was more successful than Guest's own performance: his fly-buttons flew off as he escaped from a safe, to the audience's applause. But, as was to be the pattern of his life, adversity provided opportunity. One day, in the dressing-room, while plucking idly on a ukelele, he was asked by fellow-actor Ivan Keith (brother of Alan) what the tune was. Something of his own devising he replied - with which they formed a songwriting partnership. One of their first compositions, the Cuban Love Song, was to be bandleader Edmundo Ros's signature tune. In 1930 the songwriters signed a contract with the music publishers Feldman's on the day that Guest discovered he had been accepted by the RAF, an offer he declined. After that he augmented his songwriting income by writing for such magazines as Picturegoer and Film Weekly. On one occasion, he sang Ol' Man River on the stage of Drury Lane with Paul Robeson, who wanted to demonstrate the theatre's acoustics.

Guest's was a continually overlapping world: a meeting with the future movie star and director Ida Lupino led to a meeting with her uncle, Lupino Lane. Hence, just as the Feldman contract folded, Guest was able to take up Lane's offer to script - and appear in - the musical movie The Maid of the Mountains (1932), which Lane was directing. As well as scriptwriting, Guest ran the London bureau of the Hollywood Reporter, and produced journalism which brought him into contact with the director Marcel Varnel, who engaged him to work on No Monkey Business (1935), and a Vivian Ellis musical, Public Nuisance No 1 (1936), with the vivacious and inspiring Frances Day. In 1936 Guest met his first wife, Pat, and, with Edgar from 1937 to 1940, he also wrote four Crazy Gang comedies.

He worked on during the second world war, with the additional pressure of service in the fire brigade, from which he was duly excused as movie-making was judged to be morale-boosting. A short made for the Ministry of Information led to his directing a musical about an escort agency, Miss London Ltd (1943), with Arthur Askey, who had appeared in The Ghost Train (1941), co-scripted by Guest. Miss London Ltd began Guest's career as a director, cost him his first marriage, and resulted in as many as four movies a year. There was Murder at the Windmill (1949) and Mr Drake's Duck (1950), in which a married couple find that a uranium egg has been laid. The stars were Douglas Fairbanks Jr and Yolande Donlan, who became Guest's wife in 1955. The Runaway Bus (1953) was a variant on the device of multifarious people aboard a vehicle - including the young Petula Clark and Frankie Howerd. Guest made two films from the radio comedy series Life with the Lyons (1954) and The Lyons in Paris (1955), and two films based on the Quatermass TV series. The Quatermass Xperiment (1955) was followed in 1957 by Quatermass II.

In that year too came Up the Creek and Camp on Blood Island, one of the many productions by Hammer, a firm at whose inception he was present. In 1959 he returned to the Crazy Gang with Life Is a Circus, and made the Burma-war-based Yesterday's Enemy and the thriller Hell Is a City, both with Stanley Baker. He also began working with writer Wolf Mankowitz. One product of that collaboration that year was Expresso Bongo, with Laurence Harvey, Sylvia Syms and Cliff Richard. Another film with Mankowitz, the Fleet Street-based science-fiction thriller The Day the Earth Caught Fire (1961), featured the great Daily Express editor Arthur Christiansen. But with such an output the standards were volatile. Casino Royale (1967) had Guest as one of five directors - John Huston was another - involved in a star-drenched disaster, which shared the title but little else with Ian Fleming's first James Bond novel, and featured Mankowitz as one of the scriptwriters. When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth (1968) was an effort which remains something of an embarrassment to JG Ballard, the man who came up with the original idea. Toomorrow, a staggeringly dreadful movie featuring Olivia Newton-John, came and went in two days at the London Pavilion in 1970, accompanied by a lawsuit between Guest and producer Harry Saltzman. In the 1970s Guest scripted and directed episodes of the television series The Persuaders, The Adventurer and Space 1999, and two years later launched the Confessions series of anglo-porn with Confessions of a Window Cleaner. In 1982, for his last movie he revisited the wonderful 1939 Will Hay vehicle, Ask a Policeman, to woeful effect with The Boys in Blue. It featured Tommy Cannon and Bobby Ball. After that Guest and Yolande went to live in California. She and their son survive him.

Valmond 'Val' Guest, producer, director and scriptwriter, born December 11 1911, died May 10 2006

The Times

Val Guest

December 11, 1911 - May 10, 2006

Indefatigable British director whose oeuvre embraced everything from the brutal to the banal

VAL GUEST was a cinema all-rounder who worked happily within the studio system, cheerfully tackled whatever subjects came his way and had no higher ambition than to entertain. His career is notable for its longevity as well as its range. He spent more than 50 years in the industry and worked in most of its popular forms, from comedies to thrillers, science fiction, war films and musicals. If much of his output consisted of routine assignments, his comedy writing of the 1930s will endure, as will the films of his most fruitful period as a director, such as Hell Is a City (1960), The Day the Earth Caught Fire (1961) and 80,000 Suspects (1963). What his narratives lacked in subtlety — and he tended to use a broad brush — the best of them made up for in pace, energy and inventiveness. Guest started in the cinema as an actor but after a spell playing pimps and gangsters, and making little impact he turned, more successfully, to cinema journalism. In a lively and trenchant style he contributed industry gossip and reviews to a number of American magazines, most importantly The Hollywood Reporter, of which he became the London editor. Never lacking in cheek, Guest made contact with the director of a film he had savaged, Marcel Vernel, and got himself a contract as a comedy writer with the Gainsborough studio. Here he wrote, in collaboration, for leading comedy stars of the period, including the Crazy Gang, Arthur Askey and, above all, Will Hay. Guest’s credits appeared on eight Hay films, among them a comic masterpiece of the British cinema, Oh, Mr Porter! (1937).

Guest turned to directing in 1942, normally doubling as his own screenwriter. His first assignment was a wartime propaganda short, The Nose Has It, in which Arthur Askey warned the nation about coughs and sneezes spreading diseases. There followed more films with Askey and other lightweight fare, the best of which was a period musical, I’ll Be Your Sweetheart (1945), with Margaret Lockwood. As modestly conceived as the rest of his work, but giving pleasure to young audiences, were two films based on the William stories of Richmal Crompton. Guest continued to service comedians, writing material for Sid Field, launching Frankie Howerd’s film career in The Runaway Bus (1954) and putting on screen the popular radio family of Bebe Daniels and Ben Lyon.

A 1949 comedy, Miss Pilgrim’s Progress, marked Guest’s first collaboration with Yolande Donlan, a vivacious American actress who had come to Britain to work on the stage. She went on to appear in several more of his films, getting her best part in Mr Drake’s Duck (1951) as a farmer’s wife whose duck provokes a military alert by laying a uranium egg. Guest and Donlan were married in 1954 and formed an enduring partnership, both personal and professional. The family atmosphere extended to their films, where Guest built up a stock company of favourite actors, including Wilfrid Hyde White, Leo McKern, Reginald Beckwith and Sid James.

Having enjoyed a long spell with Gainsborough, Guest moved in the 1950s to Hammer, where he directed more than a dozen films though none in that studio ’s celebrated horror genre. His first substantial Hammer project was in science fiction, The Quatermass Xperiment (1955) an adaptation of Nigel Kneale’s groundbreaking television serial. Its popularity soon led to a sequel. Guest also helped to further Peter Sellers’s career with Up the Creek (1958) and discovered a taste for the lurid and melodramatic in two war films. The Camp on Blood Island (1958), the study of a Japanese prison camp commander, was criticised for its brutality, while Yesterday’s Enemy (1959), set in the Burmese jungle, was unusual in eschewing music and relying on natural sound.

Similarly daring — if an affront to palaeontology — the characters of When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth (1970), his last Hammer film, use an invented caveman language throughout. Although one of Guest’s own favourites, Expresso Bongo (1960), which starred a young Cliff Richard, was a softening of Wolf Mankowicz’s waspish stage play about the moulding of a pop star, critical opinion has been more impressed by a thriller of the same year, Hell Is a City, distinguished by its hectic pace, vivid use of stark Manchester locations and quirky characters. The same virtues were later displayed in Jigsaw, a murder story set in Brighton. Guest’s most flamboyant film, The Day the Earth Caught Fire, imagined that two nuclear explosions had shifted the orbit of the earth and sent it hurtling towards the sun. Told through two Fleet Street reporters, with Arthur Christiansen, the legendary Daily Express Editor, playing their boss, it was a gripping mix of thriller and science fiction.

In not dissimilar vein, 80,000 Suspects had the city of Bath crippled by a smallpox epidemic. Guest continued to be active into his seventies, but without adding to his reputation. Casino Royale (1967), a big-budget, misconceived spoof on the James Bond cycle was loved only in retrospect, and was not made any more intelligible by Guest’s falling-out with the notoriously difficult Sellers. Guest eventually sacked him and cancelled his remaining scenes.

Guest was no stranger to films where the chief purpose was to get young women in their underwear, starting with Murder at the Windmill in 1949. But witless sex films such as Au Pair Girls (1972) and Confessions of a Window Cleaner (1974) were a sad anti-climax to a career that, in its unpretentious way, had served the British cinema well.

When opportunities in the cinema became scarcer, Guest turned to television, directing episodes of such series as The Persuaders! (1971), with Roger Moore and Tony Curtis, and Space 1999 (1975). His best work for the small screen was Dangerous Davies, the Last Detective (1981), a comedy thriller with a sprightly performance from Bernard Cribbins. In 2001 his autobiography, So You Want to be in Pictures , was released, a collection of anecdotes set mostly in his early career.

Valmont (Val) Guest, film director and screenwriter, was born on December 11, 1911. He died on May 10, 2006, aged 94.

The Independent Obituary

Val Guest Film director and screenwriter whose work ranged from Crazy Gang comedies to sci-fi and thrillers

Obituary by Denis Gifford

Published: 15 May 2006

Valmont Maurice Guest, film director, actor and writer: born London 11 December 1911; married 1955 Yolande Donlan (one son); died Palm Springs, California 10 May 2006.

Discipline was the key to Val Guest's film work. He liked to create the original idea for a film or adapt a novel he had enjoyed. He would spend a solid four weeks writing the script. He directed, frequently produced and often supervised the editing. But the amazing thing about his whole career was the wide range of themes and styles: he switched from broad comedy to situation comedy to crime and detective thrillers, from studio-bound productions to location dramas, from period musicals to science- fiction tales (of which the Quatermass films and The Day the Earth Caught Fire are among his best known work), from pop musicals to soft porn, from cinema to television series. It is impossible to think of another British film creator who can approach his record.

Valmont Maurice Guest was born in 1911 in Maida Vale, London. Some show-business blood must have come from his mother, who was a principal girl in pantomime, but his father, who had a jute business, divorced her early in the boy's life. At school at Seaford College, Sussex, young Val would sneak into the masters' common room where he used an old typewriter to compose short stories. He began writing professionally in his teens, turning out film news and gossip pages for classy weeklies like Illustrated London News and fan publications such as Film Weekly.

Val Guest's acting career began on the stage with several touring plays. He met the young but rapidly rising Ida Lupino, who introduced him to his uncle, the comedian Lupino Lane. Lane had been awarded a directing contract with British International Pictures, then one of the UK's biggest production companies, with studios at Elstree. He was about to direct a film version of Maid of the Mountains (1932) a hugely popular theatre hit. He sub-contracted Guest to write the script, privately paying him £50 and keeping the deal a secret so that Guest did not get a screen credit. Guest did, however, play a small part in the film.

This led to a number of "bit" roles for the company, from a gangster in Innocents of Chicago (1932) to small roles in Leslie Fuller comedies. "I was in good company," Guest remembered. "Other extras and stand-ins included Patric Knowles, Michael Rennie and Michael Wilding." In 1934 Guest was back writing about films for the newly issued London edition of Hollywood Reporter, a job which took him to the United States for the first time. In his weekly column "Rambling Around", he interviewed the French director Marcel Varnel and was very critical of his latest film. "If I couldn't write a better screenplay. . . ," he wrote. Varnel, incensed, complained to the editor, taking up the challenge, and Guest was given the chance of working on the screenplay of Varnel's next film. No Monkey Business (1935) was an independent production starring Gene Gerrard, a popular film comedian of the period, and the ex-Hollywood glamour girl June Clyde. Guest co-wrote the script which was from a German screen original by Joe May. It led to a very comfortable film career for Guest as a gag-man and screenwriter, and he even tried his hand as director of the second unit. "Varnel was an excitable little Frenchman," said Guest. "An absolute professional. I learned my entire trade from him."

The success of the film led to a contract for Guest with Gainsborough as a staff writer at the Poole Street studios. He worked alongside Frank Launder, Sidney Gilliat and especially the former stage comedian George Marriott Edgar. From Windbag the Sailor (1936) to Where's That Fire (1939), the team of Edgar and Guest wrote eight excellent Will Hay comedies, placing the bumbling know-nothing in roles from sea captain, schoolmaster, and station-master of Buggleskelly, Ireland's most bashed-up station, to policeman and fireman. For Hay's Oh, Mr Porter! (1937), Guest wrote a classic, much quoted, line for Moore Marriott, who opens the railway station's ticket hatch to announce, "The next train's gone!" He described Hay as "a brilliant comedian . . . but notoriously mean". Guest was also responsible for the discovery and casting of Graham Moffatt, Hay's insolent "fat boy" stooge whom he found delivering bacon sandwiches as a Gainsborough office boy. In between Will Hay pictures Guest and Edgar worked on the series of four Crazy Gang comedies from Okay for Sound (1937) to Gasbags (1940), with its brilliant sequence of a dozen or more Adolf Hitlers.

When I made a comedy documentary called The Crazy Gang: a celebration (1983), I interviewed Guest about his work. That extraordinary team of three disparate double-acts (Flanagan and Allen, Nervo and Knox, Naughton and Gold) were great fun to work with, recalled Guest, but hopeless as film crafters. When Edward Black, Head of Production at Gainsborough, suggested a get-together discussion at the start of Okay For Sound (1937), "They were useless," Guest said. "Why don't we do this? Why don't we do that? One hundred per cent undisciplined. We never called a cast conference again." The radio triumph of Band Waggon, starring "Big Hearted" Arthur Askey and Dickie "Stinker" Murdoch, led to a film based on the show and a string of Askey/Murdoch vehicles. There was the variation on an old stage favourite Charley's Big-Hearted Aunt (1940), a remake of the Jack Hulbert film The Ghost Train (1941) and eventually the first feature film written and directed by Guest, Miss London Ltd (1943). Although he made seven films starring Askey for Gainsborough, Guest was not very keen on the half-pint comedian. "They called him Big-Hearted Arthur," he mused. "Big-headed Arthur, more like! In fact, he was a cross that I bore."

Now contracted as a writer/director, Guest was at last launched on his main cinema career. He began in an area strangely neglected by British films, the musical. With a co-writer, Manning Sherwin, Guest had been composing songs in his spare time for the Windmill Theatre, and now the pair began composing for films. Give Us The Moon (1944) was overlong and thoroughly disappointing. It was adapted from a pre-war novel by Caryl Brahms and S.J. Simon, but Guest moved it forward in time to an England after the war. It frankly failed to work, and within months it was utterly out of date. I'll Be Your Sweetheart (1945) followed, shot during the height of Hitler's flying bomb attacks. A good story of the old music-hall days, it was again overlong and lacked the 20th Century-Fox touch Guest was trying to emulate. It did, however, make a star of his former colleague from BIP film-extra days, Michael Rennie. When Sidney Box took over the production at Gainsborough in 1946, Guest followed the other creative people and left the company. He spent a year in Hollywood, returning to act as gag-writer to Sid Field in the technicolored musical London Town (1946).One line he was proud to recall followed Field's long speech which left him sagging to the ground - "I must remember to breathe when I speak!"

Guest finally made it back into the director's chair with two features based on Richmal Crompton's enormously popular children's books, Just William's Luck (1947) and William Comes to Town (1948). Both starred the youngster William Graham as the famous naughty boy, but he was too skinny for the part and no more "Williams" were made. During shooting, Guest discovered that he did not need to shoot with sound all the time, especially in a low budget film. He saved time and money by shooting long silent sequences and adding a music track later. This economic method became a Guest trademark for a while. He had always enjoyed working among the half-dressed chorus girls at the Windmill, and now came up with a B-feature based on the "Revuedeville" theatre, Murder at the Windmill (1949). Shot in 17 days, the film is interesting in that the foundations of the Val Guest "Repertory Company" could be seen. Garry Marsh, Jon Pertwee and Peter Butterworth were present, later to be joined by Reginald Beckwith, A.E. Matthews ("Always bemused but fabulous") and others whose cameos delighted cinema audiences.

Meanwhile, Guest had fallen in love with the American star Yolande Donlan. They promptly set up house together, marrying in 1955; and when, six months ago, Guest was asked the secret of his longevity, he replied, "Marry someone like Yolande." Guest immediately began creating films for her, and in 1950 made Miss Pilgrim's Progress and The Body Said No. Later came Mr Drake's Duck (1951) based on a radio sketch, "The Atomic Egg", by Ian Messiter. Opposite Donlan Guest cast Douglas Fairbanks Jnr, who would only agree if Guest switched the title: it had originally been called "Mrs Drake's Duck". Penny Princess (1952) was the first true Val Guest Production and his first film in technicolor. It was made for Rank and he was forced to accept Dirk Bogarde as the leading man, although he had hoped for Robert Cummings. Donlan played the "princess" - it would be her last leading role, although Guest would pop her into his later pictures now and then. Guest who had scripted the Bebe Daniels and Ben Lyon comedy Hi Gang (1941), now made two films with the American stars and their children, Barbara and Richard. Based on their tremendously successful radio sitcom, Life with the Lyons (1953) and The Lyons in Paris (1955) were popular but no great shakes as films beyond the lively performances of the experienced stars. The films were made for Hammer, not yet the world's champion horror purveyors, and in all Guest would direct 14 films for the company.

Guest made The Runaway Bus (1954) for Eros, the first film to star the radio comedian Frankie Howerd. He continued to browse around popular genres. Men of Sherwood Forest (1954) was a burlesque of the Robin Hood formula with the American Don Taylor as Hood. Dance Little Lady (1954) featured young Mandy Miller as a child ballerina. They Can't Hang Me (1955) was a crime drama teaming Donlan with Terence Morgan. Break in the Circle (1955) was a return to Hammer and marked Guest's first location film, being shot in Hamburg. Guest's next film became a milestone in both his career and Hammer's. The Quatermass Xperiment (1955) was adapted from BBC TV's first huge success, an original science-fiction serial by Nigel Kneale. Guest had not seen any of the six episodes, and commented "I'm not mad about science fiction", a statement that may still surprise cinema sci-fi buffs. An enormous box- office hit, the film set Hammer on their new trend. It starring Brian Donlevy, by this time not the force he had been in the Forties, and suffered from the usual Hammer low budget, and Guest's main worry was that Donlevy had to face the wind "or his toupée blew off". The sequel - Quatermass II followed in 1957.

For some while, Guest continued to vary his film types. It's a Wonderful World (1956) was a musical starring Terence Morgan and George Cole as songwriters. Carry On Admiral (1957) was from Ian Hay's play Off the Record and, according to Guest, gave a rival producer the whole idea of the "Carry On" series. Returning to Hammer horror, Guest made another film from a Nigel Kneale serial, The Abominable Snowman (1957). Rather slow to climax, the film starred Peter Cushing, who proved to be hugely entertaining to the crew. Given a scene in which he examined a Yeti's tooth, Peter unexpectedly produced a huge magnifying glass, a tape measure to measure it, and a nail file to scratch it. We were all in hysterics.

Camp On Blood Island (1958) was a return to realism based on an ex-POW's wartime-diary scribbled on lavatory paper. For the first time, Guest had two of his films playing against each other in the West End, Blood Island at the Pavilion and Up the Creek (1958) at the Warner. Utterly different in style and story, the latter was the first starring role for the comedian Peter Sellers. By the time he directed the sequel, Further Up the Creek (1958) Sellers was too expensive and Guest had to make do with his old friend Frankie Howerd. Guest's comedy cavalcade continued with a revival of the Crazy Gang after a 30-year hiatus. Life Is a Circus (1959), filmed in cinemascope, was notable mainly for its reunion of Bud Flanagan with his long-retired partner Chesney Allen. In a moving sequence, the two meet and sing their old favourite "Underneath the Arches" once again.

Yesterday's Enemy (1959), taken from a TV play, marked a return to war, this time 1943 Burma. Guest shot the film entirely at Hammer's studio in Bray, so realistically that Earl Mountbatten of Burma at the premiere was certain he recognised many of the trees. Expresso Bongo (1959) starred Laurence Harvey in a Wolf Mankowitz scripted musical. Harvey asked Guest how he should play his character. "Base it on Wolf," said Guest, "only don't tell him!". Set in a saucy Soho club, this was the first film to be shot in two versions, one somewhat spicier, for Continental consumption. "For British release, the nude ladies wore tassels on their tits," Guest said. In 1960

Guest moved into gritty location reality with Hell Is a City. Writing the film from a Maurice Procter novel, Guest and company moved into Manchester with Stanley Baker playing the tough Inspector and the local police providing full co-operation. After scripting Dentist in the Chair for Bob Monkhouse, Guest made perhaps the one film that younger film buffs will always cherish, The Day the Earth Caught Fire (1961). This fantasy of the end of the world, shot mainly in Fleet Street, has one, perhaps two bad mistakes: the casting of the non-actor Arthur Christiansen, editor of the Daily Express, as himself, and the cut-price special effects which made the atomic fog travelling down the Thames look like a cardboard cut-out. Guest won his first and only award: Bafta gave him the best screenplay of the year.

Guest was now on a run, making location-based thrillers that remain the best films he ever directed. Jigsaw (1962), a crime drama from a book by Hilary Waugh, was originally set in Canada. Guest's script moved it to Brighton. Jack Warner was again excellent as the plodding detective, and there was a first character role for Donlan. 80,000 Suspects (1963), the story of a city besieged by smallpox, was filmed in Bath, where Guest, having a drink one day, thought the balding barman looked familiar. It was Will Hay's former fat boy Graham Moffatt. Guest immediately gave his old friend a bit role in the film: Moffatt is the man who receives an injection and promptly faints.

The Beauty Jungle (1964) was overlong and not quite tough enough in its attempted exposé of Miss World-type contests. Where the Spies Are (1964), from a James Leasor novel, switched its locale from Tehran to Beirut and its title from Passport to Oblivion. "Audiences will think you mean Laurence O'Blivion," the head of MGM objected. The odd-man-out James Bond film Casino Royale (1965) was a colourful mess. Guest was given the job of "supervising director" (there were six in all) and "linking writer" (there were five others at least). The producer was Charles K. Feldman, who wanted 18 different actors to play Bond. One was Peter Sellers, who was sacked before the finale was filmed. Orson Welles refused to act in the same set-piece with him, calling him "that effing amateur!"

Assignment K (1967), a Stephen Boyd thriller, was somewhat better. When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth (1970) was Guest's one fantasy set in prehistoric times. Shot in the Canary Islands, it starred Veronica Vestri, a Playboy centrefold, and featured a made-up language. Tomorrow (1970), a futuristic musical starring Olivia Newton-John ("cute as a button") had little more than two days in the West End after a lawsuit between Guest and its producer Harry Saltzman, but was later released on the Odeon circuit.

Guest's rapid descent into soft porn, perhaps hinted at by the nude bath scene with Claire Bloom in 80,000 Suspects, began with Au Pair Girls (1972). Among its stars was Me Me Lay. Then came Confessions of a Window Cleaner (1974) which made so much money that Columbia had to pay corporation tax for the first time. It led off a series which Guest did not direct. Diamond Mercenaries (1975) was Guest's first and only American film, shot in the African desert, and he now plunged into television.

He directed a number of episodes of The Persuaders (1971), "quite a lot" of episodes of Space 1999 (1976) for Gerry Anderson, and numerous chapters of The Adventurer (1973). Guest's last television series was Hammer House of Mystery and Suspense (1983). One more film remained. This was The Boys in Blue (1982) starring the TV comics Tommy Cannon and Bobby Ball. Guest rewrote his old Will Hay script of Ask a Policeman and came up with the impossible: a comedy without a single laugh from the audience. Guest shrugged off the sad end to an outstanding career: "They weren't my cup of tea!"

In the later years of his life, Guest went to live in the United States but, still sprightly, was in London in December to attend a screening at the National Film Theatre of his gritty thriller Hell is a City, and to field questions from an appreciative audience. Denis Gifford

[Note: Some corrections have been made to this obituary]