Things I read off the screen in “They Drive By Night”

This is the 1938 British movie THEY DRIVE BY NIGHT, not the 1940 Raoul Walsh one with the same title. Walsh’s film is a searing drama about truck drivers. Woods’ film is a crime thriller that isn’t really about truck drivers at all, which is maybe part of the trouble with it.

Lots to read in this movie! Maybe that’s what they mean by British cinema being in thrall to the literary tradition. Nearly every plot point gets reported in the papers and then shown in print onscreen. Also, the busy studio-based world of the film, a very convincing and atmospheric creation, is alive with advertising, signage and print of all kinds. In one exciting scene the hero flees past a shop selling “everything”, plastered with product names and so busy that the human eye goes spastic trying to take it all in.

Newly released from prison, good-hearted crook Emlyn Williams goes to see a friend who runs a SNACK BAR.

Many are the ads for Player’s Cigarettes in this film! I won’t reproduce them all or you will be hypnotised into craving the Smooth Smoke Doctors Recommend, and I don’t want that on my conscience. The items offered by CHARLIE’S include TEAS, you will note. For a hard-boiled crime drama, this film shows quite a lot of tea being drunk. It’s an odd effect.

Graham Greene praised TDBN, saying it was “on a level with the French cinema” — Greene was a great fan of PEPE LE MOKO – which rather misses the point. What it’s blatantly trying to do is mimic American levels of pace, vigor and aggression. The dialogue is a weird mixture of British (girls = judies) and U.S. slang. The plot races along with casual abandon, driven by outrageous coincidence and a hunger for action, but moving in loosely structured fits and starts. Greene wouldn’t have minded the coincidence — check how, in Gun For Sale (filmed as THIS GUN FOR HIRE) the fugitive assassin hero happens to get on a train with the girlfriend of the detective leading the hunt! The man chiefly responsible for TDBN’s coincidences is film editor Derek Twist, who rescued Michael Powell’s THE EDGE OF THE WORLD in the cutting room, and adapted this script.

DIGRESSION — Powell & Pressburger gave Twist his directorial break on END OF THE RIVER, a jungle drama with Sabu. In his highly readable 2-volume autohagiography, Powell blames Twist for the uninspired result, “making the Amazon basin dull”. But my friend Lawrie Knight, who was manning the communications centre back at Rank’s Denham Studios, told me that in fact Twist got sick after a few days and it was Powell himself who took over direction of the film. “And he ruined it. It was supposed to be about the slow pace of life on the river contrasted with the speed of city life, and Mickey directed the whole thing like a train.” Cinematographer Christopher Challis observed in his witty autobio, Are They Really So Awful?, that you couldn’t see the rain forest except by flying over it, so it proved surprisingly unphotogenic.

TRY OUR HOT \__/  \__/ THEY’R GRAND. Hot pictographs! My, that DOES sound grand. Instants later, our hero has stumbled upon an old flame, lying strangled, and goes “on the lam.”

I like everything about the above image. The ad for Woodbines proves the makers’ aren’t totally in Player’s pocket. The tiny sign saying “BLACK CAT” makes it for me, and the nuns. Emlyn Williams is an unlikely hero — he’s Welsh, playing working class, unhandsome, vaguely effete, and cast as a tough hero called “Shorty”. But he’s rather good. He has the advantage of unexpectedness. But British cinema didn’t know what to do with him. Like Robert Newton, he was tried as a male lead and found wanting. Just as Hollywood found a role for Newton (saying “Arrr!” a lot), so it was a Hollywood filmmaker who first saw Williams’ true potential — Josef Von Sternberg cast him in his abortive epic I, CLAUDIUS, as Caligula, a man so decadent he was “maybe even a little sissy, but not too much.”

NEWS THEATRE. That is such an exciting concept – a tiny tiny cinema devoted to newsreels. Next door to a shop selling “TOBACCOS”, so you can go in and smoke and make the projector beam stand out nicely.

Hiding out, suspected of a crime he — for once – didn’t commit, jailbird Williams is upset to find the feature attraction is all about MURDERERS. Is the “No. 17″ a homage to the Hitchcock film of the same name? Williams, a talented writer, helped script the original THE MAN WHO KNEW TOO MUCH for Hitchcock. He’s also the author of a horrifying but moving and brilliant true crime book, Beyond Belief, dealing with the “moors murderers” Ian Brady and Myra Hindley. Follow the link to see the iconic mugshot of Myra, which caused John Waters to remark, “She’s going to do an extra twenty years just because she didn’t get her roots done that week.”

But Williams’ greatest contribution to cinema is his play, Night Must Fall, which has been filmed twice. Williams wrote the part of the psychopathic Danny for himself to play, and he seems perfect for it. In movies, the role provided great opportunities for both Robert Montgomery and Albert Finney, who gave contrasting performances of great detail and intensity. Well worth a look — but I wish there was a third version starring the creator of the role.

“You come out of the movies and the world’s changed,” complains Steve Martin in PENNIES FROM HEAVEN. Emlyn finds this especially true: not only is it raining (a proper British downpour which will last for the next two reels) but he’s now officially wanted for murder. Bummer.

Grabbing a bus out of London — the conductor is “Billy Hartnell”, future film star (BRIGHTON ROCK) and TV’s first Dr. Who — our Emlyn winds up at the first of the film’s several Transport Cafes, where CAMP COFFEE is on offer but the long distance drivers inexplicably prefer tea. It was at “greasy spoons” like this that Anthony “Puffin” Asquith, top film director and son of the prime minister, would moonlight, helping out in the kitchen in order to pick up truckers. Emlyn is himself picked up by a trucker, and after numerous adventures, ends up — at another cafe.

Along the way there’s an altercation with what should be some “Truck Stop Dames”, but since this is England, we have to call them “Lorry Girls”, which doesn’t sound right, somehow.

The big attraction at WALLY’S CAFE is the TEAS again:

British tea-drinkers are strongly advised not only to DRINK, but also to ENJOY their MAZAWATTEE TEAS. You have to remind them or they’ll forget, you know. The film now gets on with the lorry-based action, fifteen minutes of it, after which it moves on, having justified its title to its own satisfaction. Winning over a dubious trucker, bumping into an old friend who’s a dance-hall hostess and friend of the murder victim, and escaping from police, Emlyn makes the headlines again — stick with me, this is ABOUT TO GET WEIRD.

I question the “glamour girl” part slightly, but not as much as I question the other “top stories” — MERMAID WEEPS and DON’T SUCK YOUR PEN! Remember, this is 1938. Europe is poised on the brink of war. And the paper devotes its front page to a penny-ante murder story, a sobbing water nymph, and advice on what to not suck. BIZARRE. Oh wait, it’s the Daily Mirror, that explains it.

These aren’t quite as good, but HANDBOOK TO GUIDE VOLUNTEERS and RADIO JERKS FINANCE HITCH are still pretty interesting. This is a completely unnecessary newspaper montage anyway, recapping the action we’ve just seen, and introducing headlines we’ll get to see later.

Now the plot swerves into PIEGES / LURED territory, with Emlyn’s lady friend attempting to ID the real killer from among the clients at the PALAIS DE DANSE where she works. It suddenly becomes clear that the movie could have usefully omitted Emlyn altogether and made her the hero. The pretentious French of PALAIS DE DANSE was a British tradition — nearly all dance halls were known as “the palais“, it seems.

In an American movie the professional dance partners would be prostitutes, disguised for the sake of the Production Code. And I guess they are here, too. Some of them sound pretty POSH though. Now the film tips its hand, revealing the TRUE KILLER — Ernest Thesiger. Yes, red-blooded, testosterone-fuelled Ernest Thesiger is strangling dance hall girls with silk stockings and then going home, slipping into his housecoat and leering at hardcore pornography:

PARIS NIGHTS. Disgusting! The film devotes the rest of its running time, apart from the matter of rounding off the plot, to Ernest’s reading material. Apart from the odd house number (Ernest resides at No. 3), we only get to read what Ernest has read. His literary sloppy seconds, as it were.

MODERN DANCE AND THE DANCER, and THE STOCKING PARADE. It’s beyond depravity! Ernest plays Walter Hoover, a retired schoolmaster and pub bore who lectures the local drunks on the niceties of psychopathology, explaining how the killer derives a thrill from wielding power over life and death. “You do give things a queer twist!” remarks a regular. Maybe because the psychobabble is, for once, coming not from a pipe-smoking Lew Ayres type prof, but from an actual murderer, it’s surprisingly reasonable.

Thrillingly, the flick affords us not one but TWO glimpses of Ernest’s library, where he keeps his many leather-bound volumes. The room no doubt smells of rich mahogany. And semen.

SEX IN RELATION TO SOCIETY sounds hilariously dry and vague, but SOCIAL CONTROL OF SEX EXPRESSION is the real winner. Havelock Ellis was a real author, wasn’t he? (He was — I just read up on him, and he’s bloody fascinating. Click on his name.) So these aren’t mock-ups, but perhaps items from the Sinister Library of Derek Twist. “You do give things a queer Twist!” But there’s more to come:

CROOKED PERSONALITIES IN CHILD HOOD AND AFTER — well, that “AFTER” certainly covers everything. TWENTY HUMAN MONSTERS sounds like a damn fine read, likewise THE THRILL OF EVIL, but it’s SEX IN PRISON that makes me choke on my Mazawattee Tea. That’s so frank I can’t believe they even included it. Is it the novelisation of William Dieterle’s SEX IN CHAINS, I wonder?

And this is from Ernest’s scrapbook of murder, hidden behind the porn. BEDROOM MYSTERY is a fine, fine headline. Unfortunately, since Ernest has clipped out and saved all the bits relating to his crimes, he’s failed to preserve the advice DON’T SUCK YOUR PEN! Perhaps this will be his downfall.

Now the film continues to become derailed and unstuck, as the climax hinges on whether Emlyn can lick Ernest in a fight. IN A FIGHT — get your minds out of the gutter. Since we’ve already seen Em knock Er for six with a single mighty chop, there’s not much suspense in this. Ernest is a fey cat-loving schoolteacher(”Come here, my subtle one,” he coos at a kitty) while Emlyn may be a shorty but he’s a hardened crim. “Ernest Thesiger could be overpowered by his own kittens,” remarks Fiona. Emlyn beats them to it, and the film’s glossolalia serves up one final message: 

The Farmer Takes a Knife

THE COTTAGE is a new British horror film from writer-director Paul Andrew Williams, who had a critical and commercial hit in 2006 with LONDON TO BRIGHTON.

Backstory: after trying for three years to get THE COTTAGE made, PAW approached producer Rachel Robey and offered her the script of LTB, provided she got the budget (£65,000) very swiftly — he was sick of waiting.

They shot the thing with private investments, then got completion money from The Film Council’s Paul Trijbits (Richard Stanley’s bête noir) and had a festival hit on their hands.

I haven’t seen the result, but Fiona has and was very complimentary — she expected to hate it, as it’s that kind of low-budget “gritty realism” much in fashion in the UK and especially Scotland, seemingly because nobody has any idea what else cinema can be. But it also has a gripping narrative hook, and is a thriller and sort-of road movie. Fiona saw the thing at the Edinburgh Film Fest in 2006, where she attended one of the big parties and saw Rachel R being spanked by Brian DePalma (he tried to get her to sit on his lap, she refused, and received swift bottom-related justice from de palm of DePalma). Fiona relayed this gossip to me that night, and I was glibly recounting it to a friend the next day when I realised to my embarrassment that the subject of the story was sitting behind me. But Rachel is a very good sport.

After scoring with his feature debut, PAW suddenly had no trouble finding support for THE COTTAGE —  The Isle of Man paid him to come to their benighted land mass to shoot it, and The Film Council stumped up a considerably greater sum. Yet Williams has sounded rather muted when “promoting” his resulting dream project in interviews.

The film is a mess. Two incompetent kidnappers (Andy “my precious” Serkis and Reece Shearsmith of TV comedy troupe The League of Gentlemen) come to the titular cottage with sweary hostage Jennifer Ellison. It’s immediately clear that the film is madly off-target. Jokey credits that fly in from all directions for no damn reason (and without any of the wit of Leone’s ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE WEST titling) and 10th generation Danny Elfman rip-off music (LOUD! HEAD-ACHY!) give way to mismatched performances from the annoying and unsympathetic characters. Serkis and Ellison are relatively naturalistic, but Shearsmith is shrill and “comedic”, which might be more appropriate to the kind of film this is, but stands out as unconnected to the other players, and is rather tiring on the ears and nerves. Inexplicably, the two kidnappers are brothers, sharing a house since childhood, but Serkis is cockney and Shearsmith clearly from Hull. Similarly, Ellison is Scouse but her step-brother, who’s in on the caper, is a soft southern bastard and amusingly middle-class to boot. Played by Steve O’Donnell, he’s the only funny one, with his constant mild air of failure although he’s party to all the “these characters are unbelievably stupid” stuff, which is a major part of the film’s massive irritation factor.

Plot holes… so many, and so glaring. Starting with the title — it’s called THE COTTAGE, and there is a cottage fairly prominent in it, but the centre of terror proves to be a farmhouse. Ellison’s gangster dad is forever on his way to wreak mayhem, but never turns up — a stab at Waiting For Godot? (Fiona’s diligant research turns up the fact that Stephen Berkoff cameos in this role after the end credits — somebody was optimisitc enough to hope the audience would stick around). The farmhouse’s occupants have some kind of backstory that’s hinted at in diaries, photos and news clippings, but it never makes sense or adds up to anything evocative. A bog-standard TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE set-up is all we really get. The role of farmer’s wife wastes the excellent Scottish actress Katy Murphy, so maybe there was more material originally. Another lacuna involves the brothers and an incident in a greenhouse from their past — referred to several times, never elucidated, and never acquiring any resonance from being kept mysterious. One character has a moth-phobia. Of course he’s confronted by masses of moths at one point, but the effect is a big “so what”? He isn’t destroyed by his fear, he doesn’t triumph over it, he just leaves the room.

Subjecting the characters to their worst nightmares is what the film is all about, I suppose. But it’s all so unimaginative — they get bones broken, bits lopped off, other bits impaled, they eventually die. It’s like a literal execution of brain-dead “script guru” Dov SS Simmons’ dictum, “send seven characters into a house and chop them up.” Not very enlightening. The complete lack of character sympathy negates suspense and helps kill laughter too. PAW tries to find some compassion for the central duo about ten minutes from the end, by which time it’s an exercise in pointlessness on a par with the rest of the film. Everybody in the story is a stereotype and they behave accordingly, with only the tiniest amount of development permitted, and no surprises anywhere. Inexplicably, the kidnap victim is portrayed as the most unpleasant of them all, in keeping with a pervasive tone of misogyny that’s completely unexamined by the script and direction.

A proper film.

It’s not FROM DUSK TILL DAWN — the music and overacting tip us off to the intended genre shift before the story’s even started. It’s not EVIL DEAD II — the violence is graphic and unpleasant, rather than cartoony and funny. It’s actually worse than CREEP, which was also full of plot holes and lacked any kind of explanation, but took itself seriously, which at least allowed for a small amount of dramatic tension.

What we have is a combination of the two genres beloved of The Film Council, genres it has consistently failed to master — the gorefest and the mockney gangster romp. Everybody got sick of the latter about eight years ago, with only SEXY BEAST winning any friends since, through its sheer demented originality. Suturing a brainless crime comedy onto a mindless splatter film does NOT make anything new or different or interesting.

I can’t work out what’s gone wrong with PAW — my best guess is that, having made LONDON TO BRIGHTON he actually found a style and tone that suited him better than his intended “crowd-pleaser”. Given the opportunity to make the film he’d hoped for, he found suddenly that it held no interest for him, was shallow and devoid of humanity compared to what he’d found himself capable of. He couldn’t bring the depth and passion of LONDON TO BRIGHTON to it because the whole idea lacked any weight or relevance to the real world (the inbred serial killers inhabit a yokel village an hour outside of modern London), was just a compendium of horror clichés put together with no love for the genre or affection for the characters. It would be torture porn only it lacks any actual sadistic relish, which in the context of this deadening mishmash would actually constitute a redeeming feature. And it’s flatly made in a joyless televisual style that confirms again the serious lack of visual literacy in the UK film industry.

I don’t LIKE using Shadowplay to be mean about films. I want British genre films to be made with love and to deliver pleasure to people who care about cinema. I can even just about tolerate something that’s mean-spirited and nasty if it shows a love of CINEMA.

Michael Powell had an expression he’d use when he saw a disappointing film, and it’s apposite here: “He didn’t teach me anything.”

The Chills #1: “You’re out of your senses!”

 

When a film hits you with such an overdose of poetry that it bends the needle on your Aesthetometer, and the part of your brain known as Fassbinder’s Eggcup starts to overflow with meaningful beauty, causing a pint of freezing cold serotonin to squirt down the back of your neck, the whole thing “kind of monkeys around with the body’s periodontal atrium,” bringing on what we at Shadowplay call THE CHILLS.

You get goosebumps, shivers, all that. You feel in danger of falling into the sky.

In celebration of this neural havoc, we present the first in an occasional series devoted to isolating those dangerous moments of sublime transcendence. Send in your nominations.

Fiona says:

As part of David’s new ‘Chills’ thread I would like to offer up a few thoughts on a specific sequence from ‘Black Narcissus’, but I would also like to talk about the outrageously neglected actress involved, Kathleen Byron. No one in the British film industry (apart from Powell) knew what to do with her gimlet-eyed, somewhat disturbing presence, and after a brief flourish, she all but disappeared from our screens. Fortunately she’s left us with some peerless screen moments, and as she’s still “very much alive” I’d like to personally congratulate her on contributing to that subtle frisson that ‘Chills’ is all about. We’re not talking about fear here. It’s all about that delicious shiver up the back of the neck that happens when you’re particularly moved by something. And this one never fails to get me, even after years of repeat viewing.

The sequence involves the now fully bonkers Sister Ruth stalking ‘our Debs’ (She was a Scot you know) through the mountaintop ex-harem, in a fabulously choreographed sequence, culminating in a murder attempt in the dawn mist. At precisely the moment Kathleen swings open the outer door and we have that astonishing CU on her face, the chills overtake me, the hairs stand up on the back of my neck and I proclaim “F***ing Hell. That’s Genius!” (It’s true. Ask David)

Of course the build up to this moment is crucial — the whole thing was actually shot with Brian Easdale’s pre-recorded score played on the set to provide it with drive and rhythm. But the clincher comes when Kathleen charges through that door in her Kabuki makeup. It’s an extraordinarily stylised, overwrought moment, so unBritish in every way, and I love it for that.

Kathleen should have been a star, with that long, haughty nose, febrile intensity and unconventional beauty, but it wasn’t to be. Outside of Powell’s patronage, she failed to flourish, and that’s a damn shame. For the most part our films just weren’t daring or interesting enough to contain her. However, even her relationship with Powell wasn’t a smooth one. She was one of the few people happy to stand up to him, Powell even suggests in his autobiography the she attempted to shoot him in the nude (her not him). Kathleen refutes it. “Why would I bother to get undressed?” she asks, not unreasonably. Powell had a reputation for being ruthless. Or as our friend, his assistant Lawrie, once simply put it, “A bastard!” Lots of people might have wanted to kill him. One can imagine a whole line of naked assassins waiting to take a pop at him. (Go on, have a go. You can cast it according to your personal preferences and sexual orientation)

Anyway, I digress. Take a look at these screen grabs. They represent the many faces of Kathleen Byron:

SULTRY

DEMONIC

MENTAL

and HOMICIDAL

AND THAT’S JUST IN THE ONE FILM!

David here: legendary nonagenarian camera wizard Jack Cardiff reports that he treated the church with red light and green shadows in order to create a psychological disturbance, “as in certain of the paintings of Van Gogh.” He fought with Technicolor to use a diffusion filters for the foggy dawn scene, and Lawrie reported rising very early and going to film a real sunrise. Everybody oohed and aahed at the rushes, but Powell declared the material NG. “It’s too pretty — nobody’ll believe it. We’ll have to do it in the studio!”

Euphoria #34: IKWIG!

 

Apologies to a couple of people who’ve suggested clips for our ongoing Cinema Euphoria project but haven’t had them show up yet, but — have you noticed? — we have a bit of a theme going on this week.

Yes, it has turned into a week of Scottish Euphoria (two words that seldom go together). Starting with THE WICKER MAN and carrying on through GREGORY’S GIRL and A MATTER OF LIFE AND DEATH — not itself a Scottish film in any way, but an excuse for some anecdotes from assistant director Lawrie Knight, who was born and died here in Edinburgh. I’m not sure how I can shoehorn THE FEARLESS VAMPIRE KILLERS into this theme, but with enough ingenuity anything should be possible.

So today we continue in a similar vein with a prize extract from I KNOW WHERE I’M GOING!, another film from the Powell-Pressburger team.

IKWIG, as we shall henceforth be calling it, takes place largely on a fictional version of the island of Mull, and still attracts tourists to that part of the world. Perhaps not quite as many as LOCAL HERO, but a few. (Curiously, both movies feature iconic public telephone boxes.) Here we find Wendy Hiller on her way to marry Consolidated Chemical Industries, before fate intervenes, proving that while we may THINK we know where we’re going, the forces of the universe are always capable of radically altering our plans.

The folk song that gives IKWIG its title, and which plays in this scene, may be strangely familiar even to non-aficionados of traditional song, especially if they are fans of Nicholas Ray. Ray’s debut feature, THEY LIVE BY NIGHT, uses the same theme in its opening titles, testament to the folk-music advice of Ray’s friend Woody Guthrie, who assisted, uncredited, with the selection of music.

Oh yes! The clip was suggested by filmmaker and writer Mary Gordon, who wrote:

I also love the bonkers dream scene from I know where i’m going when the train seems to travel amongst tartan-covered breasts - or am i just making that up? And just generally in that film having a female character who is frankly unlikeable and not scared to be unlikeable…

We then debated whether the tartan breasts were in fact breasts or just Lollobrigidian hills, and I put it to all of you that one of them has a tunnel in it, ergo it’s a HILL.

Agree about the heroine, she’s tough and cold and very very stubborn BUT there’s still something positive there. I think Powell and Pressburger were very skilled and imaginative about finding sympathy for even quite monstrous characters: I adore Wendy in this film, as I adore Lermontov and Sister Ruth and Mark Lewis in Powell’s PEEPING TOM. Maybe Wendy Hiller is appealing here because she breaks all the rules about how women are supposed to behave in romantic movies, and that makes her refreshing company. Screenwriters take note: movie characters are different from real people in that what they mainly should be is surprising and stimulating. I don’t generally choose real-life friends for their ability to give me conniptions, but I certainly don’t want to spend my movie-viewing time with a lot of placid, lovely people. I need brazen nutters!

IKWIG was our friend Lawrie’s favourite Powell and Pressburger film, even though he didn’t work on it. I think he liked its relative modesty, compared to the overheated, un-British intensity of BLACK NARCISSUS and THE RED SHOES. I think, also, that he managed to convince himself that those classics he worked on were really not so very great — and he maintained this illusion until any time he caught a glimpse of one, and then he would be blown away all over again by how undeniably staggeringly gorgeous they are.

Euphoria #33: Lip-flap a-go-go

High-powered producer/assistant director David Brown (pictured) is the most well-placed film industry bod I can claim as friend. Even I’m impressed I know him!

 

Here, David cameos in his first ever film (as unit runner), GREGORY’S GIRL. More on this little beauty in Euphoria #32.

At our recent outing to SWEENEY TODD, I twisted David’s arm and got him to think of some favourite film moments for this spot: scenes that create the kind of rosy glow and feeling of well-being that can be detected on Geiger counters.

To his great credit, the first title past David’s lips was Powell & Pressburger’s 1946 A MATTER OF LIFE AND DEATH (or STAIRWAY TO HEAVEN, for those of you afflicted with an oceanic handicap). He subsequently volunteered several OTHER great suggestions, but we’re keeping them for later. We veered back and forth between the rose and the table tennis scene, but I finally put my foot down and insisted on the rose, since I have more to say about it.

At this point I must hand over to my deceased friend Lawrie – a fellow assistant director of David’s, though of an earlier generation, present on the set as these sequences were shot.

‘David Niven, you know had odd hands, like a labourer, so whenever there was a close-up of hands to be done, they would say, “Get Lawrie.”‘

(So that’s Lawrie’s hands we see holding the flask.)

‘The line was written as, “One is so starved of colour up there,” but we’d done several takes, and Marius Goring, who was one of the cleverest actors I ever knew, was bored, so he said, “One is so starved of Technicolor up there,” and we all fell about laughing. He was just having fun, but Mickey [Powell] must have liked it.’

Sharp-eyed Shadowplayers will have spotted the fairly heavy lip-flap on that line: Goring’s mouth movement’s don’t quite synch with what he’s saying. My theory is that Powell must have decided he liked that improv later, but didn’t have a good take of it, so he used a “straight” take and dubbed the sound in from Goring’s ad-lib, or else got Goring in to post-synch the line.

Powell said that when he heard the audience laugh at that line, he knew there was no such thing as realism in the cinema. It’s true, too. All films bear a purely allegorical relation to reality — it may suit their purposes sometimes to strive for an illusion of “naturalism”, but it may not. British cinema seems to have arrived at something close to a “house style” which is either faux-naturalism (Loach) or FAILED faux-naturalism (almost everyone else) and which excludes nearly everything that can be enchanting or exciting about film art. One could pretty easily draw up a Dogme 95 list of commandments for British film and see that nearly all of them tow the line. (Note to self: try this and see if you’re talking crap.)

What else to say? Well, I purposely kept this clip long, because I just couldn’t stop it. It’s the same when I watch the film or show the opening to students. It takes a rare force of willpower to hit the STOP button. That’s cinema.

But the moment that primarily concerns us is the transition from b&w to colour on the rose, and the line afterwards. When Pressburger first suggested mixing media in this way, Powell assumed that the earthly scenes would be monochromatic, with fantasy otherworld in colour, as in THE WIZARD OF OZ. Pressburger set him straight: “Look around you: the world is in colour, therefore it’s Heaven that must be in black and white.”

Uncle Silas

Adapted from the novel by J. Sheridan LeFanu (CARMILLA), this maybe misses real greatness but has some great stuff in it. Produced by Two Cities, who also made Olivier’s Shakespeare films, Carol Reed’s ODD MAN OUT, and David Lean’s first Noel Coward films (before Lean branched out with cinematographer/producer Ronald Neame to make BRIEF ENCOUNTER), this emerges from the immediate post-war period when british cinema was enjoying a boost in confidence and ambition. Overall, UNC SILAS has elements of Lean’s evocatively textured Dickens films, and a little of Michael Powell’s hallucinatory surrealism.

Genre-wise, it’s straightahead gothic melodrama. Jean Simmons, a rising young star at the time, plays an innocent young thing foisted upon her sinister relative who lives at Scary Hall (not its real name). He plots to Do Her Into get her inheritance. There’s a simple Locked-Room Mystery thrown in for good measure (which is probably the best thing to do with L-RMs, since if made the basis for an entire story they tend to reduce the narrative to puzzle-solving). As stories go, it’s all pretty generic and linear.

Director Charles Frank (a Belgian with a fragmentary and puzzling non-career) compensates for a rather basic story by throwing style at the film. He’s like a matador decorating a cake. Even the heroine’s French lessons get treated to an expressionist dream sequence — and a damn good one.

 

The credits suggest the involvement of a storyboard artist (”Script Illustrator”), and the mise en scene slots together with pre-planned precision and nicely designed angles. Cinematographer Robert Krasker (THE THIRD MAN) lights the doomy sets beautifully, and has a particularly nice approach to fireplaces, blasting light through them from behind to make flickering shapes on the floor.

Based on his work here, it’s criminal that Frank didn’t make more films in Britain. I’ve never seen his scanty Belgian oevre, and it’s uncertain I’ll ever get to, but this movie has moments of incredible brio and gets so many things dead right that with slightly more complex material I can’t help but feel that Frank could have made a truly Great Film.

The cast is marvellous, with Simmons breathing vivacity into the dull protag, Derrick DeMarney crepuscular and oleaginous as the eponymous Unc, and John Laurie as a hilariously odd, lopsided butler, materialising in rooms without warning, like Mrs Danvers, or Jeeves. My friend Lawrie Knight’s abiding memory of his quasi-namesake and fellow Scot was J. Laurie’s tendency to start every acquaintanceship with an account of his success in the lead role of Hamlet. If you watch RETURN TO THE EDGE OF THE WORLD, you can see John Laurie actually do this.

A fellow called Manning Whiley does good work as Silas’ awful, horny son, making great use of a powerful voice, and the great Esmond Knight brings his customary strength to the role of Simmons’ sympathetic family doctor. All the more impressive when we recall that Knight was blinded in the war. He continued playing sighted parts in films like THE RED SHOES and BLACK NARCISSUS, using sheer dramatic skill and self-confidence to make the audience believe he can see. In the latter film, he had to ride a donkey through a forest. “Don’t you want a stand-in?” “No, no, the animal doesn’t want to bump into a tree any more than I do.”

(Casting a blind man as a film director seems a fairly sick joke, but it shouldn’t surprise us that this is just what happens in PEEPING TOM. Knight’s character, Arthur Baden, a frenzied bully, is a parodic self-portrait by director Michael Powell [the character name derives by way of Robert Baden-Powell, founder of the scout movement. Furthermore, studio boss Don Jarvis is a "spoonerism" of real Rank Studios president John Davis, who is viciously and accurately parodied throughout, and the name of Mark Lewis, the film's titular voyeur, is a reversal of screenwriter Leo Marks' name.])

The only film where I’ve ever seen Knight play a blind man (in Olivier’s T.V. King Lear he plays the old man who actually LEADS the blinded Gloucester) is Richard Lester’s witty and touching ROBIN AND MARIAN, where Knight actually popped his glass eye out in order to be even more convincingly disabled. But to return to UNCLE SILAS –

– Best of all, Katina Paxinou is the scary French mistress, Madame de la Rougierre. Alternately shrieking and muttering, she is terrifying in her malice, offensive familarity and sheer stupidity — you may not think of stupidity as naturally frightening, but it can be, just look at our world leaders. 

K.P. submits to being made truly grotesque by Frank and Krasker’s leering use of wide-angle lenses: she lurches into close-up and makes things happen with her corpse’s teeth, or else she stands swaying on the spot and lets the camera rocket drunkenly in on her. Either way, she was born to alarm.

The film’s only trouble is its inability to accomplish anything beyond suspense and slick visuals. It has a compelling baddie in the hypocrite and schemer Silas, but his bad qualities never amount to a coherent whole. The leading lady is trusting, then figures things out, then gets rescued, which robs her of the opportunity to fend for herself and grow as a character. It’s one of those films that can quickly fade to black after the villains are vanquished, because there’s nothing else to sort out.

One possible half-solution to this poverty of theme is to throw in some spuriously ambiguous final moment, tenuously connected to any old motif established earlier, and leave the audience with a faux-poetic puzzle. This is known (by me) as the Coen Coda, but I guess nobody was buying that one back in the ’40s.

I don’t mean to be down on this film AT ALL, because it’s a great directorial box of tricks — students of cinema (which I hope includes all of us) could probably learn more technique from this than from an acknowledged masterpiece like Lean’s OLIVER TWIST. But O.T. is the better film for narrative and thematic reasons, which lend it greater impact and make it satisfying in a way that UNCLE S. cannot aspire to be, for all its visual and aural dexterity.

Let the Shadows Play

Maurice Binder’s titles for Ken Russell’s THE BILLION DOLLAR BRAIN (the second sequel to THE IPCRESS FILE with Michael Caine).

Saul Bass gets a very good press, and rightly so, but maybe we should also talk more about Maurice Binder? While Bass is more consistently elegant and tasteful, Binder could be guilty of breathtaking kitsch (those later Bond titles!), as well as more classical work.

ARABESQUE is a film made by Stanley Donen, who told his cinematographer, the great Christopher Challis (TALES OF HOFFMAN) that the script was so bad their only hope was to try every crazy photographic trick in the book. It works! The presence of Sophia Loren and Alan Badel also help compensate for the fey script and the usual Gregory Peck drag-factor.

A similar contempt for the story enlivens THE IPCRESS FILE, where director Sid Furie started the shoot by tearing up and stamping on his script in front of the whole crew. “THAT’S what I think of THAT!”

Michael Caine supposes he must have had to borrow somebody else’s copy for the rest of the film.

Anyhow, Binder certainly gets these films off to a groovy start. I once asked production designer Ken Adam about Binder. The two had worked on many of the same James Bond films. I made the mistake of pronouncing the name “Morris Bynd-er”. But Binder was a German like Adam himself:

“Maw-reece Bin-der,” he enunciated, “was a lovely man, who liked, very much, to photograph silhouetted naked ladies.”

Well, yes.

Binder himself told the story of his struggle with a model’s pubic hair, which stuck out in a censorable mohawk formation, visible as she turned in silhouette. ‘She wouldn’t shave, so I thought I’d smooth it down with vaseline. I was just patting it down when [producer] Cubby Broccoli walked in. He just looked at me, then said, “Maurice, I think maybe I am paying you too much.”‘

Maybe sometime I’ll post the titles of Billy Wilder’s THE PRIVATE LIFE OF SHERLOCK HOLMES, a favourite film of mine. Elegant and witty credits by Binder, with Miklos Rosza’s finest and most melancholy score. ‘Why is it so SAD?’ asks Fiona. The violin theme started life as a concerto by Rosza, and Wilder listened to it while writing the script. The sadness seeped into the comedy, making for Wilder’s most deeply-felt work since maybe THE APARTMENT. It’s also Wilder’s SCOTTISH FILM and makes better use of Robert Stephens’ unique gifts than any other movie — although working with Wilder was so stressful for Stephens, he attempted suicide partway through the shoot.

(While Mitchell Leisen would annoy Wilder by cutting his scripts to make things more comfortable for the actors, Wilder, it seems, never did ANYTHING for the comfort of his actors…)

My friend Roland suggests that you tend to find the best title sequences attached to the worst films, and there are certainly cases of that, but as long as there are films like TPLOSH around, I can’t subscribe to that as a guiding principle.

Not Of This Earth

 

So, my late friend Lawrie Knight was an A.D. on Powell and Pressburger’s THE RED SHOES. He had an odd set of duties, sometimes assisting Reggie Mills in the cutting room, (”I was the worst editing assistant –all my splices fell apart!”) sometimes helping co-ordinate crowd scenes. When the studio had a Royal Visitor, Lawrie was landed with the job of escorting the Princess around. “Why me?” he protested. “Because you’re the only GENTLEMAN in the unit,” he was told.

 An empty stage had been set aside for the dancers to practice on. As Lawrie showed the Princess in, a tiny figure started to pirouette towards them from the extreme distance. Robert Helpmann.

They watched as, like Omar Sharif in LAWRENCE OF ARABIA, which had not yet been made, the minute figure slowly grew, until Helpmann spun to a halt right before them.

“What’s your date of  birth?” demanded the dancer.

“Umm, September 22nd,” stammered Lawrie.

“Oh, another lovely virgin for me!” exclaimed R.H., dancing off.

Lawrie also set up the camera for the official cast and crew photo, setting the timer and running to the back of the group to appear in it himself.

But my favourite story concerns Anton Walbrook. The day after filming the big argument scene where he smashes the mirror, Walbrook asked if he could be shown the rushes. Lawrie took him to the screening room and asked for the relevant takes to be shown.

The film came on, but there was no sound. Lawrie made to go and find out what the problem was, but Walbrook indicated that it didn’t matter. So they sat and watched the footage with only a faint whirrr from the projector.

And, in the dark, Lawrie could gradually hear a whisper. “Marvellous. Wonderful. Oh, I’m fantastic.”

Which he was.

This fits nicely with Moira Shearer’s recollections of Walbrook as an elegant, slightly distant figure, wafting about in sunglasses. Once, as she sat dining in the hotel restaurant in the South of France location, Walbrook strolled by. “Ah, it’s beautiful, but it’s not our world, is it?” he sighed, and wafted on.

Well, Walbrook was a refugee, after all. Even after his death, in Germany in 1967, he had no last resting place: for thirty years his ashes were kept in a jar, before finally being interred in the graveyard of St. Johns Church, Hampstead, as he had requested in his will.

*

In his not-always-factual autobiographies, A Life in Pictures and Million Dollar Movie, Powell claims credit for casting Walbrook in a series of films. His colleague, Emeric Pressburger “didn’t like homosexuals,” — and yet Pressburger wrote some vividly autobiographical material for Walbrook: Pressburger’s experiences as an exile surely informed Walbrook’s unbearably moving speech in the immigration office in THE LIFE AND DEATH OF COLONEL BLIMP. Powell obviously responded to Walbrook’s intensity and flexibility: who else could achieve the bitter melancholy of that monologue, the sly wit of his characterisation in OH…ROSALINDA!  and the strangulated angst of his last speech in THE RED SHOES?

“Actors are a third sex,” ~ Orson Welles. Certainly some of the most amazing actors have an ALIEN quality. The Shock of Recognition is a powerful thing, that kind of dramatic deja vu, but jamais vu is pretty amazing too — the Shock of Seeing Something You Never Saw In Your LIFE. Walbrook combines the two.

Maybe Walbrook’s most apt role isn’t in a P&P film at all — his otherworldly grace is perfectly suited to the “Ringmaster” character in Ophuls’ LA RONDE.