Final Cut
I belatedly thought of checking Matthew Sweet’s Shepperton Babylon for any interesting insights into Hitchcock’s silent period, and was very glad I did. When I first read the book, I didn’t know who Lillian Hall-Davis was, but I was moved by her story. Now I’ve seen her in THE RING and THE FARMER’S WIFE, and her story breaks my heart.
LHD was born, without her hyphen, in Mile End, a working class area of London. As a silent movie star, she was able to affect a more high-class persona, but when sound came in, her accent gave her away. Work dried up. In 1933, she turned on the gas taps and cut her throat.
Quite apart from the tragedy and horror of this tale, there’s a point to made about Britain and its cinema. In both Hitchcock films, Lillian played working-class characters. But it was not acceptable for her to SOUND like one. This may be a small part of why Britain struggled while Hollywood thrived. Authentic working-class accents were scarcely heard in British films, except in regional comedies, and even then, they were often music-hall concoctions. Leading men and leading ladies always sounded like upper-middle-class tennis-playing toffs. The stage informed British acting, whereas in America, a purely cinematic approach seemed to evolve naturally. As we approach the period of Hitchcock’s early talkies, this subject may come up again…
shadowplay 
February 11, 2009 at 2:27 pm
Thus the “Angry Young Men” had something of genuine cause to be angry about. Except — weren’t they middle class?
IOW, Forget Look Back in Anger. The REAL breathrough was Sparrows Can’t Sing.
As usual the great heroine of British Culture is the only Windsor I care about — Barbara.
February 11, 2009 at 2:33 pm
That is what I love in the work of Humphrey Jennings. In Fires Were Started he does justice to everyone, including their accents. He was one of the great directors.
February 11, 2009 at 2:37 pm
“Look Back in Anger” is highly overrated, never knew what the big deal was with that malarkey. And as John Osbourne’s migration to the right proved eventually, we should have all known from the start.
Hitchcock’s legendary “actors are cattle” bit by the way was initially a put-down to snooty stage actors who thought cinema was second class slumming and Hitchcock disliked such snobbism as did Powell. Any time someone badmouthed the cinema near Powell, he’d be very cross with that guy.
The odd thing is how things have changed. Once Ms. Davis’ accent finished her career because of the RP statute in place. Today to be popular in British cinema or get roles in Hollywood you have to do either a fake Cockney accent or an exaggerated Oxford patois.
British cinema certainly suffered from that class attitude. Little surprise that most of it’s pioneers were emigres and working-class boys of Covent Garden grocers like Hitchcock or someone who grew up in a farm at Canterbury like Powell. The only high class major player was Reed I suppose and of course Anthony Asquith. Lean came from Quaker stock as well. In America, Hollywood was made by the Irish-Americans and of course, Jewish immigrants(as we are ceaselessly reminded) and other exiles and society rejects.
February 11, 2009 at 2:40 pm
Well Jennings was a documentary maker(though I WAS A FIREMAN is actually a reconstruction with the actual participants after the fact) so he didn’t have to play by the usual rules of the game. For the documentaries with narration like A DIARY FOR TIMOTHY he got Michael Redgrave with the standard Recieved Pronounciation accent but since Redgrave is so great, it’s alright.
February 11, 2009 at 2:45 pm
Well known Cockney actors include Alfie Bass, Michael Caine, Charlie Chaplin, Terence Stamp and Ray Winstone.
February 11, 2009 at 2:51 pm
Of course Hitchcock’s Irish-Catholic roots certainly influenced his work.
February 11, 2009 at 3:06 pm
Yes but is RP or Cockney the only two accents in Britain. What about that wonderful accent of Lawrence’s Nottingham, I haven’t seen Russell’s film adaptations so do they reproduce that. Atom Egoyan’s ”Felicia’s Journey” was a rare film that actually recorded the native Brumie accent of Birmingham.
Hitchcock’s Irish-Catholic roots only figure on two occassions. His adaptation of JUNO AND THE PAYCOCK, a play he loved a lot and UNDER CAPRICORN which deals with the Irish diaspora in Australia, a period in history that’s quite under-represented(wonder if Philip Noyce has plans for a “Gangs of New South Wales”). However Tag Gallagher has argued that Hitchcock’s public persona on his TV shows is an Irishman’s parody of English people as sinister hatchet-men.
Hitchcock himself didn’t seem interested in the class conflict but his sympathies seem to be on display in REBECCA where the novel is from Du Maurier’s slightly aristocractic point of view of an end of a certain class of society. For Hitchcock, this is a prison that can’t end soon enough like the way Manderlay is a graveyard and tomb.
February 11, 2009 at 3:13 pm
Hitchcock often takes the piss out of upper class characters. I would agree with Tag Gallagher’s argument.
I enjoyed “Felicia’s Journey”
February 11, 2009 at 3:50 pm
My favorite cockney is of course Harold Pinter — the man who understood that Pronunciation is Power.
Hitchcock’s Frenzy is in many ways a revisitng not only of Great Britain as a setting but that country’s class/accent issues, and how they have and haven’t changed since Hitch emigrated.
February 11, 2009 at 4:05 pm
David, I agree with you about Pinter’s exposure of pronunciation and power, and also your point about Frenzy.
February 11, 2009 at 4:14 pm
Another great “regional accent” film, and one of my favourites, is Ken Loach’s Raining Stones.
February 11, 2009 at 7:17 pm
Wow – I have never heard of Hitch being claimed for the Irish, and we’re a notorious crowd of talent-claimers (cf Felicia’s Journey, which, for all its Brummieness, was written by an Irishman, and the leading actress in the film is also Irish – the luminous Elaine Cassidy).
February 11, 2009 at 7:31 pm
Slightly off-topic: Is Scotland about to outlaw oral sex?
February 11, 2009 at 7:42 pm
Hitchcock was born and raised in Covent Garden to a family of 2nd or 3rd generation Irish immigrants. No colour photographs exist but he’s believed to have had red hair as a young man(though that’s not native to Ireland either). He identified himself as an Englishman but some suggest that his family was marginalized for their Irish background as well as for being Catholic, which was a minority religion in it’s time. Essentially it meant that the only way Hitchcock could get out of going into grocery like his dad and his brothers was through engineering but luckily cinema called and he got into designing titles and then film-making.
The Irish in the early 20s although lacking a cinema of their own were intrepid pioneers. Rex Ingram who mentored Powell and made films in Nice was Irish as well(though Protestant, eventually converting to Islam). In America, you had Ford, Keaton, Walsh and McCarey. Irish Literature of course was in it’s golden period in this same time and James Joyce funded the first cinema in Dublin and was a big film buff before he started having eye problems.
FELICIA’S JOURNEY let’s not forget is a film by an Armenian-Canadian.
February 11, 2009 at 7:45 pm
I don’t see how in the world that’s off-topic.
February 11, 2009 at 8:32 pm
I’m amazed we haven’t banned it for kids already. Criminalizing it is a weird one, though, because how do you work out who’s the victim? The one performing it, the one instigating it, the older one, the male one? What a stupid thing to worry about.
Now, where were we? Oh yes, Hitchcock! Lower middle-class, since his parents owned their shop, and aspirant, since they sent him to a private school. Although Catholicism was a minority faith, there were plenty of classy public schools (oddly, in the UK “public” means the same as “private” as far as schools goes) of a Catholic bent. And Southern England by then was probably less sectarian and prejudiced than Scotland.
I love the idea of Hitchcock parodying the English — he’s certainly playing a part. But “Hitchcock” is surely an English name, or am I wrong?
What wowed me about Felicia’s Journey was its dramatic use of the landscape of motorways and industrial estates and metal buildings. No film by a Brit has made a cinematic use of that part of the UK. Bob Hoskin’s version of a brummie accent is, I’m told, very extreme but just about credible.
Frenzy is really a recreation of Hitchcock’s childhood environment. When people told him that speech or manners had changed and that the film was out of date, he didn’t care.
February 11, 2009 at 8:59 pm
It has some Irish roots, it’s certainly Celtic rather than Saxon and the Irish have always identified the English as being Saxons rather than Celts. It’s hard to really seperate names as specifically Irish anyway. Like there are English Joyces, Becketts, Swifts(Jonathan was Irish) and then you have Prime Minister Gladstone.
Most biographies I’ve read characterize his upbringing as working-class rather than lower-middle class and going to a Catholic school is kind of natural in that world. Not that his childhood was in any way comparable to Chaplin’s, obviously he didn’t have to struggle like he did growing up in the East End. McGilligan noted that Hitchcock’s trajectory was more Capraesque then Dickensian, in that he worked hard and through diligent enterprise made his mark in society.
Egoyan has a great eye for landscape and detail. He also loves British cinema a lot, his favourites include Powell, Hitchcock and also SEANCE ON A WET AFTERNOON which was an influence on his film.
February 11, 2009 at 9:45 pm
Seance on a Wet Afternoon is a very good film (I like Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s typically elliptical response to it, too) and Bryan Forbes deserves a bit more appreciation in general. He has his bad films like anybody, but King Rat, Seance, The Whisperers and Whistle Down the Wind are enough for him to deserve a special place in British cinema histories.
The class thing is strangely precise-yet-not. Like, being a grocer is working class, but owning a shop is potentially middle-class. Interesting that Hitch never tried to present himsekf as posh, which many British filmmakers (James Whale in particular) were anxious to do.
February 11, 2009 at 10:05 pm
Hitchcock privately had his affectations in that he was obsessed with travel and food and in fact James Stewart when asked what made Hitchcock different said that he was the only director who during film production talked about everything except the film, that is he’d talk about restaurants and fashions and other stuff but not about the film, the character and the like.
And he disliked actors who lacked sophistication. Like Paul Newman rubbed him the wrong way when during dinner he said he wanted a beer and himself went to the fridge and removed a cold one for a drink. This was enough for a bad mark against ol’Blue Eyes. I’d say it’s more of a privately created taste rather than an attempt to be sterotypically cultured. Hitchcock was never that, which is why he moved to America even if he knew that he’d lose his well-built home reputation in Britain for crossing the pond.
People have noted that Hitchcock’s voice is a strange mixture of refined posh butler and cockney bartender. Not unlike Cary Grant who came from very humble beginnings and who was a cockney(as heard in ‘Sylvia Scarlett’) but whose accent became a kind of odd continental refinement in American cinema.
February 11, 2009 at 10:17 pm
Cary Grant was born in Bristol, wasn’t he? But I don’t know where he grew up. His accent is a curious thing: “Nobody tawks loik that!” as Jack Lemmon protests in Some Like It Hot. I’d bet he wasn’t a cockney because his version of the accent isn’t too accurate.
When Look Back in Anger was a hit, all the actors who had lost their regional accents at RADA had to get them back again. In that sense, although it’s a rather ugly, uninteresting play and film, it had a tremendous impact.
February 11, 2009 at 11:55 pm
Here’s my piece on the British in Los Angeles, subtitled “How To Be Cary Grant.”
Los Angeles is a VERY British town in that all the really important people who “made it” (Aldous Huxley, Christopher Isherwood, Gavin Lambert David Hockney, Barbara Steele, Jackie Bissett, Michael York, Wash Westmoreland) came from Old Blighty.
My favorite L.A. novel ius Huxley’s After Many a Summer Dies the Swan, which Orson Welles planned to adapt as his first movie. Then he met Herman J. Mankiewicz who had another Hearst story — and the rest is history.
February 12, 2009 at 12:27 am
I love that piece.
Hitch’s sense of propriety was quite unyielding — Evan Hunter was quite surprised to find that Hitchcock expected him to wear a suit for script conferences on The Birds. But we will allow the great ones their quirks.
I haven’t read AMASDTS, but I did enjoy Crome Yellow.
February 12, 2009 at 5:26 am
David E., funny you should mention the Huxley book — was just re-reading one of Anita Loos’s memoirs where she discusses her friendship with Huxley. She claims he was smitten (non-sexually) with Paulette Goddard and that the heroine of After Many a Summer Dies the Swan was a dead ringer for Paulette. You agree? I should read that book.
I had honestly never thought about the absence of lower-class accents in early British talkies but it’s extremely interesting. David C., when would you say the working-class accents began to appear for leads? they’re certainly around in some David Leans of the 1940s.
In America, I would argue that it has gone the other way. Hollywood movies of the 1930s-50s are peppered with all kinds of wonderful regional accents, especially many variants on New Yorkese, but also Midwestern, Western, Southern. Now there are scarcely any regular actors with a strong regional tinge to their voices, they all sound like newscasters. For a while at the beginning of sound though, the romantic leads did sound like they took elocution from that lady in Singin’ in the Rain. “Round tones … I cahn’t stahnd him.”
February 12, 2009 at 5:56 am
My favourite LA films are Altman’s Short Cuts and Lynch’s Mulholland Dr.
February 12, 2009 at 8:33 am
Altman is a key chronicler of LA – THE LONG GOODBYE is also a terrific masterpiece as is 3 WOMEN that takes place in LA’s Desert Community. He was also one of the few American film-makers before his death who was interested in regionalism. COOKIE’S FORTUNE is a portrait of the South, DR T. is about Dallas. Recently Hollywood seems not to be interested in making…American films. That is films set in a time and place that is American. Scorsese is another one with THE DEPARTED being one of the few films about the Southie, even if most of it was shot in New York, Mean Streets style(a film that was indeed shot in LA).
February 12, 2009 at 9:39 am
Yeah, when Hollywood ventures to Boston or even Chicago it always feels slightly exotic, and anything in the south might as well be a foreign country, going by the way the camera swoons over the regional variations.
I *think* the heroine in Blackmail actually has a weird mixed-class accent, a bit like Hitch, but that’s unusual. Normal practice was for a cockney like Jessie Matthews to learn a cut-glass BBC speaking voice, while her well-connected husband trained himself to play comedy cockneys. Nobody was actually FOOLED by either of them, apparently, but the effort counted.
Irene Handl, famous for her comic maids etc, was quite posh, but had a great ear for dialect and picked up the speech patterns from her family’s servants.
Hobson’s Choice is a fairly rare example of regional accents in a British 40s film. Again, a comedy.
You want a creepy one? Oliver Twist is full of different London sounds, including a rare attempt at Jewish cocknet from Guinness (especially coming so soon after the Holocaust, the film was understandably attacked for anti-semitism). But Oliver himself, despite being raised in a workhouse in Northampton, is upper-middle-class. Presumably because he comes from a wealthy family originally. Breeding, you know.
I think the Polanski film (somewhat underrated and overlooked) is the first movie where Ollie has a plausible accent.
Cockney was common, mostly because British film has always been London-centric the way US film is now LA-NYC-centric. This Happy Breed is the only other Lean I can think of with actual working class leads, but then it’s an ensemble piece. The ensemble of In Which We Serve includes majot below-decks characters, and has the impossibly regal Noel Coward — in reality a working-class lad from Liverpool — as captain.
Another perversity is that when an actor put on a working class voice, it was a sign of their versaitility. But they mustn’t HAVE a working-class voice of their own — that was verboten until the late 50s. One thing that’s fascinating to me in 60s films is apparently posh actors dusting off their origins and speaking the language of the streets: Eric Portman, the plummy squire from A Canterbury Tale, suddenly goes underclass in The Whisperers, and is so utterly convincing I think he must have been raised that way.
February 12, 2009 at 9:52 am
For me, one of the very best chronicles of “ordinary” modern lives, warts and all, is Michael Apted’s great and poignant UP series of documentaries.
February 12, 2009 at 11:41 am
Yeah but Oliver can’t possibly have a posh accent inherited hereditarily that goes against accepted science. It has to surround him or be taught or be acquired like with Dennis Price’s character in KIND HEARTS AND CORONETS, Robert Hamer’s salute to social-climbing.
Hamer, a director who I am very interested in, made films with Googie Withers – PINK STRING AND SEALING WAX and IT ALWAYS RAINS ON SUNDAY and there’s again an attention to ways of speech across class barriers. The latter film depicts how the neighbourhood gangster(who’s Jewish) has a distinct accent as well. Hamer’s films have been seen as anticipating 60s realism but he’s actually a throwback to the 30s French films. Withers seems to have been an actress specializing in lower class characters.
Still all the same I rather like RP accents of the 40s. Like Roger Livesey in and as COLONEL BLIMP.
The reason it feels exotic is that American cinema nowadays rarely makes films about landscapes or cities. Clint Eastwood is another exception, Boston in ‘Mystic River’ and recently Detroit in ”Gran Torino”(a terrific film). There’s a great no-no towards how people live outside of the NY-LA-WASHINGTON axis, save as a selection to set films there in order to get a tax write-of.
Scorsese wanted to shoot ‘The Departed’ in Boston but the producers said no, because if they shot in NY they could get a write-of. Then many American films are shot in Canada or around the world, part of the whole outsourcing craze in America and one of the reasons why the economy is so fucked up.
February 12, 2009 at 2:18 pm
Oliver’s accent is straight out of Dickens, though — the lad has perfect grammar, right down to the distinction between shall and will. So Lean is following the source in that case.
What about Hobson’s Choice? All those northern accents sound pretty down-market to me, John Mills especially, though I suppose Hobson is more middle class. But, as you say, Mills didn’t have that accent naturally, I suppose.
Arthur S. is right about the lack of movies made in “flyover country,” although independents venture there much more often than big-budget movies. But the lack is particularly acute on television. I tell you, I am a bone-deep New Yorker but even I am getting tired of us. We need another WKRP in Cincinnati or something.
February 12, 2009 at 2:56 pm
Actually Lean was following a play adapted from the book. Lean had no familiarity with Dickens until he saw a production of ”Great Expectations” which he admired and decided to adapt that work. He was a most non-literary and not a very cultured man(though apparently he was a jazz buff according to his widow).
But yeah that’s there in Dickens and Dickens’ style allows you to buy that. But it’ll open a whole new can of worms regarding the use of accents in 19th Century English Literature and Dickens is himself a major contradiction in that he had to spend his entire adult life denying and hiding his difficult upbringing even if said upbringing was the key influence on his art. His GREAT EXPECTATIONS was an earnest successful self-critique through the main character. Boz had the fear of losing rank and position that is common to many people who rise above their social stature.
What is needed is really good producers. What we have in Hollywood are bankers and peddlers or shareholders, not people with any sense on producing films unlike the 70s where as cranky and obnoxious as they were, the likes of Robert Evans and the Phillips’ had some idea of producing films. The old studio system is pretty much a dead era so at least look back at the recent past.
February 12, 2009 at 5:07 pm
Hobson’s Choice is part of a tradition of regional comedy in the theatre — Hitchcock’s The Farmer’s Wife is another example. Such successes were occasionally filmed. At least Charles Laughton was real Yorkshireman (and another Catholic schoolboy, like Hitch) so he knew that accent and world.
Ealing Studios were probably the most progressive (outside of people like Jennings) in terms of trying to portray Britain as a whole, city and countryside, and even making it up to Scotland a couple of times (Whisky Galore is fairly well-known, but I recommend The Maggie to anyone who hasn’t seen it). Robert Hamer certainly had a keen interest in class, but Basil Dearden was another one who actually moved from Ealing dramas like The Blue Lamp (crime in London) to sixties social realism with A Place to Go (crime in London), starring Rita Tushingham and Mike “Myra Breckinridge” Sarne, thus forming a direct link between Ealing and the British new wave. I’ve been catching up on Dearden for a Britmovie article.
February 12, 2009 at 5:16 pm
Adventurous producers could certainly give US cinema a kick in the pants by pushing writers and directors to go further rather than holding them back. I’m not particularly a fan of realism for its own sake, but it seems like a fresh flavour which could enliven US film if injected into the right places, and part of what would come from that would be a rounder portrait of different areas of the country.
February 12, 2009 at 9:35 pm
Let us not forget Bill Douglas and My Ain Folk.
February 12, 2009 at 9:42 pm
What enlivens Douglas is his poetry. Realism is a dominant mode in modern British filmmaking (along with half-arsed genre noodling). We have too much realism, the US has not enough.
February 12, 2009 at 9:48 pm
Should we call Cassavetes a hyper-realist.
February 12, 2009 at 10:04 pm
Or just hyper?
February 12, 2009 at 10:16 pm
Cassavetes is an “angry realist”, yes. There’s a great deal of stylization in his films(which weren’t as improvised as legend has it). I see his films as being very poetic mood pieces which tries to give a strong sense of heightened powerful emotions to his audience. Unlike the conventional idea of realism which is to show life as it is, in other words dull and boring. Cassavetes on the other hand celebrates vitality one breath at a time.
Let’s never forget his two favourite film-makers were Carl Theodor Dreyer and Frank Capra.
February 12, 2009 at 11:03 pm
Life isn’t boring, but it’s somewhat unstructured.
February 13, 2009 at 6:57 am
I can see the influence of Dreyer and Capra in Cassavetes’ films in that blend of presence and volatility.
Favourite JC films are Woman Under The Influence and Husbands. I can see the greatness of Love Streams but I haven’t really come to grips with it yet.
February 13, 2009 at 12:16 pm
I’ve just foolishly undertaken to write something on Dreyer’s Master of the House. Fortunately I have a copy of it so I can remind myself what the hell it is.
February 13, 2009 at 12:57 pm
Oh I’ve never seen that. Do write about it.
February 13, 2009 at 1:06 pm
I promised I would, for Senses of Cinema. I’m used to them saying “No” so it was something of a surprise to get accepted. What happens is they send you a list of films they need covered, and you volunteer to write about something you actually understand, then you think you’d better put a second and third choice so as not to seem arrogant, and then you end up writing about one of those. But I’m determined to do a spectacular job, if possible.
February 13, 2009 at 8:24 pm
Clint’s very underrated rendition Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil is another triumph of the regional. He absolutely uxuriates in Savannah and its citizens, including The Lady Chablis as herself. Most wittily he casts Jude Law as the most spectacular piece of “rough trade” yet seen on screen.
And Ken Spacey as The Beaver.