The Screengrab

Cinematographer David Watkin has died of cancer at the age of 82, at his home in Brighton, England. Watkin developed his skills after joining the Southern Railway Film Unit as an assistant in 1948. He branched into work on TV commercials in the early 1960s, where he met the director Richard Lester. Lester hired him to shoot his 1965 film The Knack and subsequently worked with him on Help!, How I Won the War, The Bed Sitting Room and Cuba. In those movies Watkins demonstrated a mastery of a wide range of styles, ranging from the cinema-verite vaudeville of Lester's Beatles films to the Godardisms of How I Won the War, but their best work together may well have been in The Three Musketeers (1973) and its companion piece The Four Musketeers (shot at the same time as the first film but released separately a year later) and the 1976 Robin and Marian, with Sean Connery and Audrey Hepburn as the middle-aged Robin Hood and Maid Marian. In those movies, Watkin, famous for his mastery of soft light, somehow achieved a romantic period look while incorporating his director's love of slapstick and visual clutter.

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In Slate, Brett Sokol explains how a recently remade Western added a word to the Cuban lexicon. "Take a walk down any of Havana's main thoroughfares," he writes, "and you'll hear American visitors hailed as yumas, while the United States itself is affectionately dubbed La Yuma." This is a spin on the term "La Yunay", which was, back in the bad old Batista days was inspired by the omnipresent United Fruit Company but was the closest most Cubans could come to saying "United." Cuban audiences were nuts about American Westerns, though, and when the original 3:10 to Yuma played Havana, Cubans looking for a catchy slang terms for Americans were quick to trade up to "Yumas," which was similar to "Yunays" but more lovable in its associations. Castro's government eventually mostly banned American Westerns from Cuban screens in favor of ideologically pure entertainment from the Soviet bloc. But by the late 1970s even Fidel must have been getting sick of movies starring tractors, because the freeze on American pop culture thawed a bit, and both 3:10 to Yuma and the slang word it had inspired made a comeback.

For Elmore Leonard, on whose novel of the same name the film was based, this is all just a reminder of how fluky pop culture can be: he simply picked the name "Yuma" because that's where the prison was. Of course, that was in another lifetime, before he figured out that the big money for him was never going to be in writing Westerns; back in 1957, he scored $4,000 for the screen rights, with a clause assuring him another $2,000 if the story was filmed again. His feelings about the remake? "My agent is working on getting me that two grand." — Phil Nugent