Bulldog Biggles

We know that Hitchcock’s THE MAN WHO KNEW TOO MUCH started off as a Bulldog Drummond movie. There was a problem with the rights or else they decided it worked better as a standalone, and rewrote it. I wonder if 1939’s Q PLANES (aka CLOUDS OVER EUROPE) has a similar backstory, since Ralph Richardson plays a government intelligence man (triple contradiction in terms?) called Hammond — and Richardson had been in two Drummond movies, once playing the man of mystery himself, once a strangely-costumed master criminal.

Fortunately, the role in QP is much more suited to Richardson’s flamboyant eccentricity — Hammond is a bit of a maniac. And the film again pairs RR with Laurence Olivier, who plays a flier at a plant whose planes keep going missing — so it’s like Bulldog Drummond meets Biggles, with the resulting mix at times resembling a James Bond film.

It’s very jolly — Valerie Hobson adds to the fun, and the feeling is closer to Powell & Pressburger’s CONTRABAND than to Hitchcock, though his big successes no doubt inform the airy mixture of comedy and thrills. The plot turns out to depend on an enemy ray — Vincent Korda’s white moderne designs make this seem a cross between Kenneth Strickfaden’s FRANKENSTEIN lab equipment, FLASH GORDON, and a Jessie Matthews musical. The big battle at the end, with Olivier joining forces with previously downed and captured airmen, put me strongly in mind of THE SPY WHO LOVED ME.

Given a straight hero role with few opportunities for grandstanding, Olivier proves more than capable of reining it in, though one assumes he shot envious eyes at Richardson, who has, and is, a real character. Almost a dry run for Doctor Who — the eccentric, brilliant, energetic type. When he breaks the fourth wall in the last shot, it feels wholly appropriate for such an uncontainable live wire.

This kind of fantasy — enemy rays and so on — disappears from British propaganda films as the war progresses. This one is all about the rearmament phase, pre-war, though luckily the film would still have seemed relevant at the start of hostilities. It’s an ill wind (of war)… American B-thrillers like the Nick Carter movies would mine this kind of semi-SF material into the 40s, but Britain felt compelled to take things more seriously. As John Laurie snaps at Hobson, “Less enthusiasm! This is Britain.”

Q PLANES stars Zeus; The Supreme Being; Blanche Fury; Sexton Blake; Ned Horton; Commercial Traveller; Anthony Babbage; Ruby Lane; Uncle Pumblechook; Inspector Claud Teal; Detective Frank Webber; Eldridge Harper; Orac; Sammy Rice; Nurse Freddi Linley; Private Frazer; and Canon Chasuble.

Butter Armageddon

I was moved to write a complaint to Film4 the other day. yes, I’m becoming one of those people. My previous complaint was to the BBC, and was at least about something serious, a piece by their science editor that began by questioning the seriousness of the Coronavirus threat (this was before 50,000 Brits had died, so I feel history has borne me out here) and ended by suggesting we’d soon have to make some tough decisions balancing the health of the populace with the health of the economy — calculating, as Harry Lime would put it, how many of those little dots we could afford to spare.

Well, the BBC has been guilty of crimes against humanity, perhaps, but The Telegraph has our mass graves already dug.

So maybe it’s a relief to get on to something trivial. My complaint to Film4 mainly spoke about the way the film was screened in the wrong aspect ratio, so that everyone was very long and thin — OK, Conrad Veidt and Valerie Hobson are long and thin normally, but that doesn’t explain why the moon was an oblong. Everybody knows movie moons are always full, unless they’re crescent.

This might well have been my cable provider’s fault, but have you ever tried explaining an aspect ratio problem to somebody in a call centre? If you’re very lucky they’ll understand you well enough to suggest adjusting the settings on your TV.

But the transmission in question had another problem, one that was certainly not Virgin Media’s fault. Somebody had stuck English subtitles on the first exchanges, in German, between Veidt and Hobson.

This might seem like a natural thing to do. There are several lines, and it starts to get a bit frustrating that we (the presumed non-German-speaking viewers) can’t understand the dialogue. But this is absolutely deliberate, part of the Powell-Pressburger plan. As the scene progresses, our incomprehension increases the tension, which is finally broken by a joke, and even Hobson looks relieved.

Crass as the subtitler’s unwelcome intervention was, it made me realise something about the scene. At the end of the exchange, Veidt suddenly gets a rapt look in his eye and advances upon Hobson in a Stroheimesque manner… then picks up the true object of his desire, a dish of butter, which he smells deeply, before declaring, “Butter!”

“You had me worried there for a moment,” smiles Hobson.

True, Powell hasn’t quite worked out a way of tricking the eyelines so we BELIEVE that Connie’s gaze is fixed on Val, but you can’t have everything.

The gag is part of a quaint idea that the Germans would be suffering more from food shortages than the island-bound Brits in 1917, which I’m not sure is accurate. But maybe. It’s quite late in the war.

Anyway, what I realised was that P&P were pulling the same stunt performed more showily by John McTiernan and screenwriters Larry Ferguson, Donald E. Stewart and David Shaber in THE HUNT FOR RED OCTOBER: making a transition from a foreign language, then one which the characters would in reality be speaking (Hobson in fact spoke German fluently), to English, for the benefit of the audience, the switch being performed by use of a single word which is the same in each language. “Butter” is “butter” in German and English, and “Armageddon” is “Armageddon” in Russian and English.

McTiernan’s version works with subtitles. The Archers’ version is clearly better without.

Also, Veidt’s German is better than Sean Connery’s Russian.

THE SPY IN BLACK stars Cesare the Somnambulist; Edith D’Ascoyne; Anakin Skywalker; Conductor 71; Julia Trimble-Pomfret; Uncle Pumblechook; Halima; Sokurah the Magician; Finn – the Mute; Dr. Petrie; Joe Gargery; and Professor Auguste Balls.

THE HUNT FOR RED OCTOBER stars James Bond; Donald Trump; Alan Shephard; Damien Thorn; Darth Vader; De Nomolos; Duncan Idaho; Joseph Andrews; Dr. Frank-N-Furter – A Scientist; Ron Carver; Moominpapa; Ed Rooney; and Dr. Beverly Crusher.

 

 

Tea-time

Researches for a current project led me to look for all the images I could get from Universal’s horror cycle of the thirties. And one thing I found was… lots of tea breaks.

Director James Whale was English, and insisted on proper tea breaks: elevenses, and high tea (I’m Scottish, so I don’t know what those are, but they’re some kind of tea-break). The Americans weren’t invited, noted Gloria Stuart.

  

Are Colin Clive and Valerie Hobson in character, pretending to have tea, or out of character, actually having tea?

Pretty sure THIS isn’t a scene from either FRANKENSTEIN or BRIDE.

No tea actually visible in this one, but I infer its presence close by. Una O’Connor needs her pick-me-up.

 

Yes! Ernest Thesiger was a keen painter as well as a needlepoint enthusiast.

This is the famous one —