Fled Hitler, loved Lenin, shot Michael Caine. The ordinary life of Wolfgang Suschitzky

Instead, he remains the Austrian Jew who left Vienna in 1934, fleeing the rise of fascism in his home city which would ultimately destroy friends and family. His origins are obviously apparent in the heavy mittel-European

inflections and the old-world courtesies that pepper his speech. He admits that in some ways he feels like an exile, but then again, there is no burning ambition to return to the old country.

''Vienna would be a great city if it wasn't for the Viennese,'' he says of the natural conservatism that periodically solidifies into outright reactionary attitudes in the city of his birth. It's a rare moment of waspishness from an octogenarian who is not usually the kind to push his opinions on others.

But then reticence is part of the man's make-up. He is congenitally modest, to the point of invisibility, and it is that, as much as the diffuse nature of his work, that has left him a little- known name outside industry circles. When I ask him why, when he fled a Europe falling under Hitler's shadow, he opted to come to Britain rather than America he says tellingly, ''I always felt I didn't have enough elbows for America. You need to be pushy for America.''

Pushy is the last thing you could call Suschitzky. We have met to talk about the upcoming exhibition of his photographs in Edinburgh. The exhibition's curator, Duncan Forbes, believes it will prove Suschitzky is ''one of the great classic documentary photographers''. Ask Suschitzky about his pictures, though, and he will talk about his ''tiny talent''. You get the same self-effacing response when you ask him about the monumental events that shaped his early life. He has to be prompted to talk you through the story and even then he's not one for hyping up his past or over-emoting about its horrors.

This August, Suschitzky turns 90, although only the greyness of his beard and the odd liver spot betray his age. He bustles around the top-floor flat, overlooking Regent's Canal, his home for the past 35 years, with some gusto, fussing around Heather, his partner, as she makes lunch, while urging me to eat more of mine. When the interview ends he is out the door before I am, rushing to make it to a Bafta screening of Charlotte Gray. He has retired from the film business, but not from living.

Suschitzky's CV is certainly a full one. In his time he has made 100 films and produced three children. He has been married three times and is proud of his nine grandchildren, the youngest of whom is just 18 months old.

In his professional life, Suschitzky was one of the mainstays of the pre- and post-war British film industry. He earned his living as a cinematographer, starting in the now-almost-

forgotten British documentary movement of the 1930s. In the 1950s he transferred to feature films where he ran the gamut of projects from the sublime (filming Caine against a down-at-heel Tyneside backdrop in Mike Hodges's Jacobean thriller Get Carter; ''your eyes are like pissholes in the snow'' and all that) to the amusingly absurd (Vincent Price's Shakespearian-

themed horror movie Theatre of Death). He was such a regular visitor north of the border,

making documentary films for the coal board or shooting Scottish-based feature films such as Ring of Bright Water, he was once given the nickname McSuschitzky.

He trained as a stills photographer and continued to take pictures alongside his film work, often on the same sets and at the same locations. He also explored his own fascinations. His love of animals prompted his work with the progressive zoologist Julien Huxley in the thirties, while his political beliefs saw him chart the rise of CND in the 1950s.

''I've been a socialist all my life and I'm not ashamed of it,'' he tells me, sounding uncommonly assertive. ''I was against the nuclear bomb and I was against wars like the Gulf War and I'm still against the war in Afghanistan.'' He was, he admits, enthralled by the Soviet

experiment.

''Unfortunately politicians get hold of something and then convert it into something to their advantage. When the Russian Revolution happened we thought it was a wonderful thing and we thought it would change the whole world and we were very enthusiastic in supporting them, but the very good idea of socialism was somehow converted into dictatorship. It took a long time until we realised it.''

Suschitzky, of course, would only have been five years old when the Bolsheviks stormed the Winter Palace in St Petersburg, but he was suckled on left-wing politics. His father, a social democrat in Vienna, followed his political beliefs by opening a bookshop, along with his brother, in one of the city's working-class

districts in 1901, though Suschitzky Snr had

to go to parliament to gain the concession.

''The local politicians said we didn't need a bookshop in a working-class district, although there were 100,000 inhabitants there and not a single bookshop,'' Suschitzky says of the family business.

The shop was initially a success, selling

progressive literature - books on sexual education and women's rights - but the subject matter incurred the wrath of the local authorities. The situation worsened considerably with the rise of fascism in the thirties. ''We had a kind of civil war in Austria in 1934,'' he says. ''The army shot into working-class flats with artillery. My father's position became very difficult, not only as a socialist, but as a Jew. The shop didn't pay its way any more, and soon after I left, he

committed suicide. He had been suffering from depression.''

Suschitzky's uncle fled with his wife to France but their escape was to be short lived. When France fell to the Nazis in 1940 they were arrested by the French police and subsequently disappeared. The shadow of the concentration camps looms over the event.

Suschitzky himself left Vienna in 1934. ''I came away with a Dutch girl who I met in

the photographic school.'' They first came to

England where his sister, the photographer Edith Tudor Hart, was already living. But since they couldn't get residency the couple, now married, decided to settle in Holland.

''After a year my Dutch wife left me, which was very lucky for me because had I stayed there, I wouldn't be alive any more. I came back to England as a student and was able to photograph children and animals and make a little bit of income because I didn't take anybody else's work,'' he says.

Suschitzky's selling point was to bring a unique spontaneity to such subjects. ''He was the first photographer in Britain to bring a new informality to animal photography,'' says

Duncan Forbes, ''and he introduced a much more informal way of seeing children which broke with the format of the rather staid

Victorian portrait.''

Suschitzky puts it more simply. ''I thought mine were a little bit different because I didn't mind if a child had a dribble on its lip which normal portrait photographers tried to avoid by all means.''

That willingness to photograph people and places as he found them is as close to a style as Suschitzky is willing to admit to. ''Very few

photographers have a style. There are some, like Bill Brandt or Cartier Bresson. You certainly need a sense of proportion and how to organise a rectangle or a square. I myself am not what might be called a creative photographer. I never called myself an artist. I'm quite content to be a craftsman. I observe things and if I think it would make a good picture I take a picture, rather than arrange things.''

There are dangers in his observational approach. His portraits of the great and the good in the fifties, taken while working on the NBC series Wisdom, are as stuffy and formal as the men in the frame. But give him a street scene and he responds to its clutter and vitality. At street level his pictures carry the perfume of other lives, none more so than his Charing Cross sequence of the late thirties. Initially inspired by his discovery of a street full of bookshops - a Utopian vision so far removed from his

father's tragic experience - Suschitzky's images vividly conjure up the pre-war big city in all its smoky splendour. Thirty years later, that eye for urban life was employed again. Searching for someone who could match his own vision, Mike Hodges, the director of Get Carter, says he recalls seeing a little-known Anthony Newley movie The Small World of Sammy Lee, which Suschitzky had photographed. ''It had the gritty realism that I wanted,'' recalls Hodges.

It is difficult to imagine that the quiet family man who sits beside me could be the same man whose unblinking gaze so powerfully captured the violence and amorality of Hodges's thriller. This is a man who describes women as ladies and who happily describes his relationship with his current partner as a romantic story.

''She was the wife of my best friend, Zoltan Wegner, who was also a photographer. He died a few weeks before my third wife died. So we were both alone and we thought we should

be alone together. We've been together for 12 years.''

After finishing his career working in television - working on the children's favourite Worzel Gummidge and an adaptation of Paul Scott's novel of India after the Raj, Staying On, among others - Suschitzky officially retired at the age of 80.

These days he concentrates on selling prints of his old negatives, though on holidays, his camera still makes an appearance. But he says he just takes snapshots now. Anyway, he can always claim he has passed the torch on. Both his son Peter and grandson Adam have become cinematographers.

The afternoon has drifted away and outside the light is fading over Regent's Canal. Given the span and substance of his life, I wonder, isn't it time for his autobiography? ''I'm no good at writing or talking,'' he says with a smile. But seeing, well, that's another matter. n

An Exile's Eye: The Photography of Wolfgang Suschitzky, National Portrait Gallery, Edinburgh, from February 22.