Flying Britishers Go Dutch

“It was not a documentary; it was a detached narrative, told from the inside.” An interesting turn of phrase — Michael Powell, in A Life in Movies, describing the approach taken to ONE OF OUR AIRCRAFT IS MISSING.

Thanks to Tony Williams for reminding me that I ought to reread the section in Powell’s memoir about this film. Lots of amusing and interesting stuff, and Powell is one of the best memoirist-filmmakers, although his stories, particularly in the second volume, tend to take flight from reality until it can barely be perceived, a speck in the far blue distance. Everyone concerned kept quiet about this until after his death, and then a BBC arts programme had Kathleen Byron and Christopher Challis pointing out the tendency to confabulation. Future film scholars, approach with caution.

No information is given about how Robert Helpmann came to be able to speak Dutch, but we do learn that Lilli Palmer’s large family mastered the language “in about twenty-four hours”. None of them are credited. My late friend Lawrie reported meeting Palmer’s sister, and observed that she had all the recognisable features of the great beauty, but with the proportions slightly wrong, so that she wasn’t a beauty herself. He said the same thing about a male actor’s brother (I forget who), so he wasn’t being sexist, which was unlike him.

Powell says that one of his partner Pressburger’s best ideas was to keep the Germans in the distance, while hearing their voices as often as possible. Hiding the antagonists is quite a commonplace idea now, but it must have been fresh then. Even in Peter Ustinov’s church, where the Germans come closer, some marvelous indirection is used, as with the reflection in the pipe organ.

Ustinov (“The ugliest young man, but you couldn’t help but like him!” recalled Lawrie) reports, in a documentary about the Rank Organisation, that they had two Dutch priests as advisors on the set, but one of them insisted that a Dutch priest would always wear his crucifix and the other was adamant that he never would. They almost started another war.

The subterranean scene gives Ronald Neame a chance to get his chiaroscuro out. It moves the German characters slightly closer, but the gloom shrouds them. The look of the scene reminds one that operator Robert Krasker would go on to be D.O.P. on THE THIRD MAN. His old guvnor Neame had just fired him from GREAT EXPECTATIONS, and when they saw what he’d done with his liberty he and Lean wondered if perhaps they’d made a dreadful mistake. In fact, a huge amount of Carol Reed’s masterpiece was shot by two second units (or a second and a third), I think including the night scenes, the sewer chase, and the closing shot, so I always wondered if Krasker was perhaps given too much credit for that one.

Pressburger was a football fan, so he wrote a match into the plot, perhaps assuming that Powell might make a set-piece out of it. But, Powell notes, “I despise all games.” A man after my own heart.

As Powell notes, this is the obverse of 49TH PARALLEL, with a British crew rather than a German one descending from the sky rather than rising from the sea, and bonding as a unit rather than falling apart. It’s typical of the British propaganda films in the way it focuses on a team, rather than individual heroics, and doesn’t assume comradeship is built-in. It must be ACHIEVED. In this, it may have influenced Ustinov’s later script work on THE WAY AHEAD, which is entirely about that one idea.

Eric Portman returns — nice to hear him use his native Yorkshire accent for one of the few times (see also THE WHISPERERS) — Robert Helpmann and Pamela Brown debut, and Hay Petrie makes for a very Scottish burgomaster.

ONE OF OUR AIRMEN IS MISSING stars Professor Jordan; the Glue Man; Steerforth; Joe Gargery; Lord Tennyson; Frank Cheeryble; Catriona Potts; Jenny Jones – Mrs Waters; Helen Nosseross; The Child Catcher; Signora Doppo; The Lord Hastings; Lord Dashem; Dr. Ralph Halvorsen; Mark’s Father – A.N. Lewis; Boswell Marsh/F.X.Benedik; Ramsay – ‘The SBO’; MacDonald ‘Intelligence’; and Detective Frank Webber.

Byronic

JY wrote to request I say something about the late Kathleen Byron, born on this day 99 years ago (what are we all going to do for the Sister Ruth centenary?).

It’s taken for granted that Michael Powell was right when he told Byron that she’d never get another role as good as Sister Ruth — and of course he was. But we should stop to note that in A MATTER OF LIFE AND DEATH, a very nearly perfectly cast film, she’s a very striking presence, and THE SMALL BACK ROOM, which I adore, would not be the same without her.

Rank, of course, did not know what to do with her, and her later career becomes a game of spot-the-Byron, as she turns up for minute, often thankless and sometimes literally wordless roles in distinguished films like THE ELEPHANT MAN and SAVING PRIVATE RYAN, and altogether less celebrated works like CRAZE and NOTHING BUT THE NIGHT. It can look as if she was embracing obsolescence, accepting Powell’s prophecy, but I think it’s more likely she was still hoping to prove him wrong and knew she’d better keep her hand in if there was to be any chance of landing the great role when it came by.

Maybe people were a little scared of her — not just because she’s so intimidating in BLACK NARCISSUS, but she seems to have been a formidable person in real life. Powell’s unexplained reference to her threatening him with a revolver while naked in Vol II of his autobiography appears to be a complete wish-fulfillment confabulation on his part, but they were intimate, and she wasn’t afraid to stand up to him.

My late friend Lawrie Knight, a third assistant on BN, confirmed Byron’s account of her refusing to take Powell’s direction when Sister Ruth visits Mr. Dean’s hut. She’d decided for herself that Sister Ruth was PERFECTLY SANE and she was damn well going to play it that way. Of course, most viewers still perceive Ruth as mad — her actions are a bit extreme, but unrequited love, frustration and jealousy aren’t mental illnesses, though they may have many of the same characteristics. Whatever was behind Byron’s choices, the effect on screen is incredibly powerful and convincing. Powell went off in a huff, Byron worked out the scene with David Farrar, then they showed it to their director.

“Well, it’s not what I wanted but I suppose it’s all right,” he harumphed.

To his credit, he let her do it, he cast her once more, and he gave her some of the greatest close-ups in British cinema.

(What ARE the greatest close-up in British cinema? When Deborah Kerr looks up from the pencil in her hand and sees Ruth staring at her, that’s one. Christopher Lee coming downstairs and saying hello, that’s two. Yootha Joyce in the hairdressers in THE PUMPKIN EATER, that’s three. Hmm, they’re all quite scary. I’ll need to think of some romantic ones — I think COLONEL BLIMP offers several…)

Reincarnate

In Peter Sasdy’s NOTHING BUT THE NIGHT, Christopher Lee is stuffy, Peter Cushing is snippy, Diana Dors is stroppy and Georgia Brown is chippy, lippy and slutty. And little Gwyneth Strong is absolutely brilliant. Everyone is intense, fervid, all the time, like they were all fathered by Charles McGraw when no one was looking, which seems to be a Sasdy characteristic (see also The Stone Tape).

It’s Christopher Lee’s only film as producer, adapted from a novel by John Blackburn, a quite interesting genre writer though a very reactionary one. Reaching the screen, some of these attitudes are softened or switched, but some remain, so you don’t quite know what to think.

The plot centres on an orphan (Strong), seemingly traumatized in a bus crash, but there’s something sinister afoot with the foundation caring for her (Kathleen Byron is involved so it can’t be a purely charitable institution, can it?). Dors is a red herring in a red shiny coat, seen trudging through the Scottish heather for reels on end, the least inconspicuous person ever. She’s a fortune teller with a black cat decal on her Hillman Imp and she’s trying to get her daughter back. Tabloid hack Brown tells her, “You must admit she’d be better of with them than here,” which seems a bit unsympathetic. There’s nothing wrong with Dors’ clairvoyance pad: she has a phrenology head and an Emmanuelle chair, what more could any child ask?

Apart from class horror at Dors’ raging slattern, the film seems to share Lee and Cushing’s distaste for the pushy journo, yet she’s the one who sets them on the right trail. The great duo are at everyone’s throats all the way through, with Cushing in particular JUST VERY CROSS in every scene. It’s the Hammer films trope of the authority figures being righteous, correct, our only hope, yet deeply dislikeable. Only with the pitch turned up and a bit of a headache.

Gwyneth Strong can dislocate her jaw in order to swallow whole goats.

We enjoyed the Scottish locations — Edinburgh airport looks unchanged to me — the evil scheme is an intriguing one and the climax gets some real moral horror going, aided by Lee waking up and doing some proper acting as he faces a kind of payback for his role in THE WICKER MAN. He could really rise to the occasion, that man, and at six foot ninety he had a head start.

It all falls apart in the closing shots, where the script can’t come up with a good finish, calls for some effects that don’t quite make it, and the staging falls apart accompanied by mismatched dusk/dawn-for-night and night-for-night shots (NOTHING LIKE THE NIGHT, you could call it), and it looks as though Sasdy just ran out of time on top of everything else.

Night shoots are a bitch.

The music — a lush rephrasing of Nine Green Bottles — is extremely poor. A death-by-hatpin recalls Sasdy’s HANDS OF THE RIPPER. Strong’s performance is one for the ages — authentically terrifying.

NOTHING BUT THE NIGHT stars the Grand Moff Tarkin; Mycroft Holmes; Frau Poppendick; Frau Freud; Nigel Barton; Mackay; Albus Dumbledore; Aunt Beru; Victor Carroon; and Sister Ruth.