If you watch British films made between 1920 and 1959, it is almost certain that you have seen the work of Jack Cox. From Hitchcock thrillers like Blackmail (1929), via wartime factory workers in Millions Like Us (1943), Margaret Lockwood and James Mason raising temperatures in The Wicked Lady (1946), to laughs with Norman Wisdom and Honor Blackman in The Square Peg (1959), Cox photographed many major movies. My particular research interest is in the work of Maurice Elvey, and in the 1920s Cox advertised himself as ‘Maurice Elvey’s cameraman’. While many of their films are now lost, their partnership survives in the Sherlock Holmes mystery The Sign of Four (1923) and the magnificent Hindle Wakes (1926).
