Idols of the Odeons: Post-war British film stardom 9781526147042

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Idols of the Odeons

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Idols of the Odeons

Post-​war British film stardom

Andrew Roberts

Manchester University Press

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Copyright © Andrew Roberts 2020 The right of Andrew Roberts to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

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Published by Manchester University Press Altrincham Street, Manchester M1 7JA www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk British Library Cataloguing-​in-​Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 1 5261 4703 5 hardback First published 2020 The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for any external or third-​party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

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For Sharon

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Contents

List of figures

ix

Acknowledgements

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Introduction

1

Senior leads: Meet the chaps

11

Jack Hawkins: ‘Stand by, number one’

13

John Mills: ‘Do push off, there’s a good chap’

34

Kenneth More: Hawling like a brooligan

56

Younger leading men

75

Stanley Baker: The British Brando?

77

Laurence Harvey: The talented Mr Skikne

98

Leading ladies

119

Sylvia Syms: Never your typical ‘nice blonde’

121

The one and only Diana Dors: Britain’s ‘bad blonde’

140

The comics

161

Norman Wisdom: ‘Mr Grimsdale!’

163

Terry-​Thomas and Leslie Phillips: A tale of two cads

181

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viii     Contents Ladies and gentlemen of character

199

Sidney James: Jo’burg’s favourite cockney

201

James Robertson Justice: ‘What’s the bleeding time?’

218

Margaret Rutherford: Not to be crossed

236

Hattie Jacques: Matron and mistress of misrule

251

The art of screen acting

263

Peter Finch: The ‘actor’s actor?’

265

Peter Sellers: ‘There used to be a me but I had him surgically removed’

285

Conclusion

306

Filmography

308

Index

320

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Figures

1  2  3  4  5  6  7  8  9  10  11  12  13  14  15  16 

Jack Hawkins in The League of Gentlemen (1960) John Mills in Escapade (1955) Kenneth More in Sink the Bismarck! (1960) Stanley Baker in Hell Drivers (1957) Laurence Harvey in Romeo and Juliet (1954) Sylvia Syms in Victim (1961) Diana Dors in I Married a Woman (1958) Norman Wisdom in Follow a Star (1959) Terry-​Thomas in School for Scoundrels (1960) Leslie Phillips in Doctor in Clover (1966) Sidney James in Carry On Constable (1960) James Robertson Justice in Doctor in Clover (1966) Margaret Rutherford in Murder Most Foul (1964) Hattie Jacques in Our House (1960) Peter Finch in Judith (1966) Peter Sellers in Doctor Strangelove: Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964)

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13 34 57 78 99 122 141 164 182 183 202 219 237 252 266 286

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Acknowledgements

This book could neither have commenced nor been completed without the support of Matthew Frost, Sharon Auldyth Morris, Lars Mosesson and Julian Petley.

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Introduction

Haunting can be seen as intrinsically resistant to the contraction and homogenization of time and space. It happens when a place is stained by time, or when a particular place becomes the site for an encounter with broken time. (Fisher 2012: 19)

To commence on a reasonably self-​indulgent note, during the 1970s most provincial towns contained at least one tatty bingo hall that had once been the local ABC or Odeon picture house. As for the handful of cinemas that still existed in town centres, they were often in a profoundly sorry state of repair. For many of my background, a birthday visit to the pictures meant passing through peeling mock Ionic columns, buying strange brands of confectionery that any discerning child would otherwise avoid and settling into plush red seats that exuded clouds of dust. The bill of fare would usually commence with cigarette advertisements promising a jet-​set world that was entirely at odds with the surroundings both in and outside of the venue. The next part of the ritual was the promotions for local businesses,1 regularly enhanced by still photographs that appeared to be a decade out of date. You would not have to be supernaturally observant to appreciate, however dimly, that these venues were fast becoming ghosts, for all the billboards promising thrills, excitement and Dave Prowse sporting what appeared to be a coal scuttle on his head. When my own cinemagoing commenced, a visit to the Odeon on Above Bar Street was an occasional treat on par with a visit to the Little Chef,2 but even so, Southampton’s picture houses seemed just as much a relic of a recent but unattainable past. They seemed akin to the red and cream Corporation Guy

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All of which were advertised as being ‘just five minutes from the cinema’. Lower-​middle-​class life in the Solent region of the 1970s still had Tony Hancock and Sid James levels of enjoyment expectation.

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2     Introduction Arab double-​deckers or those ageing Teddy boys who frequented the Marlands bus station café. As for the stars who once provided the highlight of the week, along with the B-​feature and the newsreel, they could now be found as flickering images on a twenty-​inch TV screen, providing visions of the day just before yesterday. Some of the actors in this book have screen careers that commenced in the 1930s, a few were making films well into the twenty-​first century, but my focal period is their pictures of the 1950s. Their major productions of the 1940s, 1960s and 1970s will be included, but for each of the actors, it was this decade that arguably served as a fulcrum of their film work. During this period images of ‘Britishness’ –​including those actors born overseas  –​appeared to be serving as a virtual defence mechanism at a time of seismic change for the film industry. Regular picturegoing declined into an occasional treat akin to a visit to the theatre. In 1950 some 1,396  million people in the UK ‘visited 4,483 cinemas. By 1959 this had diminished to about 600m[illion] attendances and only 3,414 cinemas’ (Armes 1978: 239). The older members of the ‘family audience’ increasingly preferred television; John Sparos argued in his survey of the British film industry that one reason for the medium’s popularity was ‘that each visit to the cinema has a price whereas “switching on” is virtually costless’ (1962:  29). Another was that the surviving venues were increasingly ill-​maintained and as early as 1958 an editorial in Films and Filming complained, ‘Many of Britain’s remaining 4,100 cinemas are obsolete, poorly equipped and badly managed shells’ (In Camera 1958: 16). This was also the decade when the Rank Organisation and the Associated British Picture Corporation (ABPC) maintained a stable of artists. Such traits, according to Pinewood and Elstree studio public relations (PR), encompassed jollity and good manners and when Laurie Lee visited the 1957 Cannes Festival, he came across an array of poles that bore the images of the ‘cosy pantheon of Pinewood stars –​brother, sister, scout-​leader, and nurse’ (1957: 16). The studio’s twenty-​first-​anniversary brochure of the same year listed some thirty-​one artists under contract to the Rank Organisation, but within three years the future of the British cinema was one of independent actors and directors using the studio facilities. The ‘Britishness’ of such actors, including overseas-​born stars, was emphasised in newspaper advertisements and studio publicity at a time when US investment within the UK film industry was ever-​ increasing. The Eady Levy3 of 1950 included US-​backed productions (Stubbs 2009: 5) and between 1954 and 1956 the proportion of British films distributed by US firms doubled (Harper and Porter 2003: 30).

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A production fund derived from a cinema ticket levy –​50 per cent for the exhibitor and 50 per cent for British-​based film-​makers.

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Introduction     3 In 1962 Vincent Canby stated that, ‘American investment in British production has made it almost impossible to define a “British film” ’ (quoted in Balio 2010: 229). As Geoffrey Nowell-​Smith notes, ‘Involve an American major in the package and certain other consequences will also follow’ (2004: 53). One such was the use of a US lead, sometimes regardless of their relevance to the plot, from Shelley Winters in Alfie (Lewis Gilbert 1966) or William Holden’s Sefton in The Bridge on the River Kwai (David Lean 1957).4 By the mid-​1960s Michael Caine, Sean Connery and Julie Christie featured in pictures where Hollywood monies shaped the national identity but, as with any form of history, periodisation in cinema is seldom rigid. MGM funded several 1960s black-​and-​white horse-​brass strewn visions of ‘quaint’ English life; the UK was an important Hollywood sales territory and because of the Eady Levy’s rewards to commercially successful productions, ‘it was in the interest of Hollywood producers to make their British films as appealing as possible to British audiences’ (Stubbs 2009: 7). John Russell Taylor cited the paradox that in the 1930s it was Michael Balcon who ‘headed the most substantial attempt to bring American money into British films –​financing the images of the national identity via Hollywood funds (1974:  80). Thirty years later the United Artists-​funded 007 films featured a British Establishment ­figure –​‘when Connery says that drinking un-​chilled champagne is like listening to the Beatles without ear-​muffs, the entire swinging sixties collapse’ (Winder 2006: 201). A further element in shaping the image and the memory of a film star is, of course, critics and I have included a cross-​section from major newspapers to popular magazines to film journals from both the UK and the USA. One element that is highly notable across many titles is a palpable sense of disdain towards certain performers and another is a sense of ire at the very notion that cinema might be considered ‘art’. In 1947 C. A. Lejeune, the film critic of the Observer from 1928 to 1960, wrote: ‘If filmmakers would only stick to their province, which is to entertain, beguile and inform the largest possible number of people with the best mechanical means at their command, and leave all the pompous talk of art alone, how much happier they and we should be!’ (1947: 2). Anger at American cultural influences on cinematic depictions of British life was another popular topic for certain critics and Freda Bruce Lockhart ranted that: ‘The current arrangement by which a proportion of the profits from Hollywood films must be spent here seemed a fair enough makeshift. But it in turn is breeding at an alarming rate a more menacing monster

4

Harper and Porter point out that Board of Trade regulations regarding the ‘British’ nature of a picture allowed for an overseas producer, director and as many as two stars (2003: 114).

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4     Introduction than any [that] has yet threatened the cinema in these islands. I mean the Anglo-​American film’ (1950: 12). Fan magazines initially appear far removed from those critics who reviewed a picture in the manner of an irate housemaster –​‘Use of too many American phrases in the script. C-​minus; must try harder’ –​but they were equally instrumental in shaping an actor’s identity. Steve Chibnall points out of Britain’s major fan titles Picture Show (1919–​60) and Picturegoer (1921–​60): ‘The film press could not afford to antagonise Rank too severely because it relied, ultimately, on a steady and reliable stream of stories from the major domestic film producer’ (2016:  247). ABPC’s in-​house journal the ABC Film Review commenced in 1950 and continued in production as Film Review until as recently as 2008. To read the average film fan title of the 1950s is to vicariously experience an overtly jolly realm in the same manner of certain titles of the 1990s over-​ relying on the term ‘edgy’ to the extent that some of the actors referred to therein seem positively rhomboid. They were also a place where, in Richard Dyer’s words, ‘one can read tensions between the star-​as-​person and her/​his image’ (Dyer and McDonald 1998: 61) –​the ingénue with Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (RADA) training or the celluloid ‘war hero’ who preferred comedy roles. In 1955 Guy Marshall, a writer for Picturegoer, stated that a producer ‘would be crazy if you did not see to it that your stars did not parade the same personality over and over again’ (1955: 9). Within a few years, several of the younger stars in this book such as Stanley Baker, Laurence Harvey and Peter Sellers wished to exert more control over their destiny and avoid the scenario of the previous decade as described by Alexander Walker:  ‘The British actor had no high pay, no tax advantages and no power of any kind in the industry at all’ (1974: 93). That power included not being defined by studio PR. Towards the end of the 1950s cinema audiences ‘were in decline and an ever-​increasing proportion of them were under-​16s’ (Harper and Porter 2003: 231). As filmgoers were increasingly likely to opt for a picture featuring Tommy Steele, the latter days of Picturegoer saw it billed as Picturegoer with Disc DATE; and in 1959 Margaret Hinxman, the review editor of Picturegoer, wrote a spirited defence of the genre: ‘The dictionary defines a “fan” as an enthusiastic devotee and an ardent admirer. And if there were a few more such picturegoing “devotees” and “admirers”, the Rank Organisation wouldn’t be turning cinemas into bowling alleys and Laurence Olivier probably wouldn’t have to shelve Macbeth for lack of funding’ (quoted in Slide 2010: 183). But after April 1960, the magazine was billed as Disc DATE with Picturegoer. At the opposite end of the spectrum of film magazines, there was Sight & Sound, under the editorship of Gavin Lambert and Penelope Houston. In 1947, together with Karel Reisz, Peter Ericsson and Lindsay Anderson,

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Introduction     5 they formed Sequence and two years later Lambert was appointed editor of Sight & Sound, succeeded by Houston in 1955. Erik Hedling saw one of the major influences of Sequence as quickly writing off ‘most of the British cinema of the 1940s, particularly the influential documentary doctrines of John Grierson, and his belief in the utilitarian aspects of film, which had permeated much of British film criticism up to that date’ (2003:  26). The Autumn 1956 edition of Sight & Sound included Lindsay Anderson’s famous essay ‘Stand Up! Stand Up!’ that heaped an abundance of ire on the Lejeune approach to criticism: ‘To a remarkable extent, in fact, denigration of cinema, denial of its importance and significance has become common (Anderson 1956: 64). Houston’s belief, as expounded upon in her 1960 article ‘The Critical Question’ was that: ‘If cinema is the art we think it is, then it is entitled to the kind of critical analysis that has been traditionally devoted to the theatre and the novel; and the principles which seem to be most likely to be constructively useful remain liberal ones’ (1960:  165). A  further indispensable resource is Films and Filming, which commenced in 1954 and occupied the middle ground between glossy fan titles and the world of Monthly Film Bulletin and Sight & Sound. James Morgan of the latter title referred to the new publication’s ‘attempt at succinct popularisation’ (1955: 161). This approach also encompassed an appreciation of major actors and an indispensable legacy of Films and Filming is the tenure of Raymond Durgnat to whom virtually every scholar of British cinema owes a debt for his A Mirror for England: British Movies from Austerity to Affluence. In 1992 he argued that ‘the actor is the character’s auteur’ and how ‘the fine details of gestures, stances and intonations exposes individual attitude and their recombinations in specific situations, thus going deeper than mere typology’ (1992: 24). And so, the sixteen subjects of this book have been selected for their power to ‘summon up, evoke, a particular historical period through their personae; thus through their personae, stars come to stand as signifiers of the time in which they achieved their greatest popularity’ (Thumim 1992:  56).5 The screen career of Jack Hawkins illustrates the sense of ambiguity within the patriarchy of post-​war cinema. Kenneth More, at the height of his screen stardom, mirrored aspects of the social optimism of his 1950s audience; The Comedy Man (Alvin Rakoff 1964) illustrates the price of maintaining the ‘decent fellow’s’ public face. During the Second World War, the screen image of John Mills was that of a reliable working-​or lower-​middle-​class Englishman stoically coping with life’s vicissitudes. By the late 1950s, his ostensibly stable senior authority 5

One could have also included such luminaries as Kay Kendall, Anthony Steel, Robert Morley, Kathleen Harrison, Trevor Howard or Joan Greenwood; indeed, they merit a separate tome.

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6     Introduction figures often have a tolerance of subordinates and circumstance that is strained and glacial; Matthew Sweet contended that Mills’s forte was in portraying ‘the fatigued, the self-​disgusted, and the men who stayed behind or who ran away’ (2005: 244). Of the younger ‘leading men’ Stanley Baker became the first blue-​ collar leading man in British cinema, a decade before Michael Caine or Tom Courtenay achieved international fame. His first significant role of Lieutenant Bennett in The Cruel Sea (Charles Frend 1953) was a melange of swagger, deep insecurity and class envy and even in the stereotyped parts of his Rank Organisation career, Baker’s heavies had the quality of stillness. Virtually from the earliest days of cinema, there have been those leading players to whom their work on-​screen was less important than their publicity, and for much of the 1950s, this would seem to apply to Laurence Harvey before Room at the Top (Jack Clayton 1959). The role of Joe Lampton deployed his seldom exploited talent for ambitious outsiders while his performance singing and dancing spiv in Expresso Bongo (Val Guest 1959) is akin to one liberated from a filmic, and partially self-​created, straitjacket. In the ‘leading ladies’ section, Diana Dors was the ‘bad blonde’, with a screen image that was a fusion between the publicity department of the Rank Organisation, her then husband and the actress herself. Her world was one of gin and tonics in a roadhouse somewhere in the Home Counties, with a two-​ tone Ford Zephyr-​ Zodiac parked outside and Dennis Lotis singing from the jukebox –​affluent but certainly far from genteel. Sylvia Syms was, for many years, the ‘nice blonde’ of ABPC, whose genteel expression masked insight and festering anger. With the ‘comics’, Norman Wisdom’s characters are figures that hail from the traditions of Victorian live entertainment battling with the social hypocrisies of Macmillan-​era Britain. Charlie Chaplin regarded him as his ‘favourite clown’, A Stitch in Time (Robert Asher 1963) was so successful behind the Iron Curtain that it was screened in football stadia and in the early 1960s, the comic’s Rank films outsold James Bond pictures in world markets. As for Leslie Phillips and Terry-​Thomas, they were the perfect embodiment of the wartime ‘temporary officer’ attempting to adapt, with various degrees of success, to the 1950s and 1960s. Pauline Kael once argued that ‘movies dictate what the producers thought people would pay to see  –​which was not always the same as what they would pay to see’ (1996: 100), and this applies to the members of the Rank and ABPC studio rosters. A  select number of character actors became stars by public demand, such as Sidney James, one of the greatest support actors of British cinema, and James Robertson Justice, the finest embodiment of post-​war ‘soppy-​stern’ male authority. I  will refer to the personal background of each actor only in so far as it shaped their career, but those of Margaret Rutherford and Hattie Jacques are

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Introduction     7 especially crucial in the formation of images that, especially regarding the latter, became their prisons. Finally, I have devoted chapters to two actors whose fluidity of talent often defied conventional casting. The Australian-​raised Peter Finch was, quite simply, one of the finest exponents of British cinema in evoking the flaws, the human vanity and the fragility of an authority figure. His patriarchs and senior officers often conveyed a vulnerability in their fatherliness, a need to be loved more than a requirement that their rank and uniform be respected. Peter Sellers derived some of his fame from ‘internationally funded’ comedies such as A Shot in the Dark (Blake Edwards 1964), but the best use of his talents was in the exploration of the ambiguities of the British class structure. From his deluded trade union leader of I’m All Right Jack (John Boulting 1959) to the frustrated librarian of Only Two Can Play (Sidney Gilliat 1962), Sellers’s characters were often adrift in a world they did not fully comprehend. These actors simultaneously forged and deconstructed the fable of an almost mythical country where, as Gavin Stamp put it, ‘cars are always black, there are no plastic signs, and Georgian terraces are properly grimy with dark-​painted joinery’ (quoted in Lewis 1994: 385). Police cars were always black, actors’ hair was Brylcreemed, suits were sober and telephone boxes disgorged 4d on pressing button ‘B’. Roger Manvell wrote in The Film and the Public of how actors could reveal ‘on the international screen of the world’s cinemas the finer qualities of temperament and feeling and thought and spirit proper to the nations to which they belong’, and that within this ostensibly reliable and secure celluloid environment audiences were offered a presentation of the ‘national character’ by stars with the equal power to reassure and to challenge (1955: 85). Bibliography Anderson, Lindsay (1956), ‘Stand Up! Stand Up!’ Sight & Sound, Autumn, 63–​9. Armes, Roy (1978), A Critical History of British Cinema, London:  Secker & Warburg. Balio, Tino (2010), The Foreign Film Renaissance on American Screens 1946–​ 1973, Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Ballieu, Bill and Goodchild, John (2002), The British Film Business, Chichester, UK: John Wiley & Sons. Burn, Gordon (1991), Alma Cogan, London: Secker & Warburg. Cannadine, David (2000), Class in Britain, London: Penguin Books. Chibnall, Steve (2016), ‘Banging the Gong: The Promotional Strategies of Britain’s J. Arthur Rank Organisation in the 1950s’, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, 37(2), 242–​71. Davenport-​Hines, Richard (2013), An English Affair: Sex, Class and Power in the Age of Profumo, London: William Collins. Durgnat, Raymond (1962), ‘Editorial’, Motion 3, November, 4.

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8     Introduction Durgnat, Raymond (1970), A Mirror for England: British Movies from Austerity to Affluence, London: Faber & Faber. Durgnat, Raymond (1992), ‘Elegance Versus Vehemence’, Sight & Sound, January,  24–​6. Dyer, Richard and McDonald, Paul (1998), STARS, London: BFI. Farber, Manny (1971), Negative Space:  Manny Farber on the Movies, Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger. Fairlie, Henry (1963), ‘On the Comforts of Anger’, Encounter, July, 9–​13. Fisher, Mark (2012), ‘What Is Hauntology?’ Film Quarterly, 66(1), 16–​24. Frayn, Michael (1963), ‘Festival’, in Sissons, Michael and French, Philip (eds.) Age of Austerity, London: Hodder & Stoughton. Geraghty, Christine (2000), British Cinema in the Fifties: Gender, Genre and the ‘New Look’, London: Routledge. Hanson, Stuart (2007), From Silent Screen to Multi-​Screen: A History of Cinema Exhibition in Britain Since 1896, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Harper, Sue and Porter, Vincent (2003), British Cinema of the 1950s: The Decline of Deference, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hedling, Erik (2003), ‘Lindsay Anderson: “Sequence” and the Rise of Auteurism in 1950s Britain’, in MacKillop, Ian and Sinyard, Neil (eds.) British Cinema in the 1950s: A Celebration, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Houston, Penelope (1955), ‘The Undiscovered Country’, Sight & Sound, Summer,  10–​14. Houston, Penelope (1960), ‘The Critical Question’, Sight & Sound, Autumn, 160–​5. In Camera (1958), ‘What WE Think: Missing the Point of the “Crisis” ’, Films and Filming, May, 16. Inglis, Fred (2003), ‘National Snapshots:  Fixing the Past in English War Films’, in MacKillop, Ian and Sinyard, Neil (eds.) British Cinema in the 1950s:  A Celebration, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Kael, Pauline (1996), Raising Kane and Other Essays, London: Marion Boyars. Kelly, Terence, Norton, Graham and Perry, George (1966), A Competitive Cinema, London: Institute of Economic Affairs. Kerstin, J. M. (1981), ‘No Hollywood on the Thames’, Encounter, September,  45–​9. Kynaston, David (2013), Modernity Britain 1957–​1962: Opening the Box Book 1, London: Bloomsbury. Lee, Laurie (1957), ‘A Letter from Cannes’, Encounter, July, 15–​20. Lejeune, C. A. (1947), ‘At the Films:  Taking the Plunge’, The Observer, 14 September, 2. Lewis, Roger (1994), The Life & Death of Peter Sellers, London: Century. Lockhart, Freda Bruce (1950), ‘At the Pictures’, The Tatler, 20 September, 12. Macnab, Geoffrey (2000), Searching for Stars:  Stardom and Screen Acting in British Cinema, London: Continuum. Manvell, Roger (1955), The Film and The Public, London: Penguin Books. Marshall, Guy (1955), ‘Which Do You Take –​Guinness or Burton?’ Picturegoer, 24 September, 9. Marwick, Arthur (1998), The Sixties: Cultural Revolution in Britain, France, Italy, and the United States, c.1958–​c.1974, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Moran, Joe (2010), On Roads: A Hidden History, London: Profile Books.

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Introduction     9 Morgan, James (1955), ‘Books and Magazines’, Sight & Sound, January–​ March, 161. Murphy, Robert (2012), ‘Dark Shadows Around Ealing’, in Duguid, Mark, Freeman, Lee, Johnston, Keith M. and Williams, Melanie (eds.) Ealing Revisited, London: BFI/​Palgrave Macmillan. Nairn, Ian (1959), ‘The Antiseptic City’, Encounter, February, 54–​6. Nowell-​Smith, Geoffrey (2004), ‘Reflections on the European-​ness, or Otherwise, of British Cinema’, Journal of British Cinema and Television, 1(1), May, 51–​60. Perkins, Victor (1962), ‘The British Cinema’, Movie, 1, June, 3–​9. Plain, Gill (2006), John Mills and British Cinema:  Masculinity, Identity and Nation, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Sandbrook, Dominic (2005), Never Had It So Good:  A History of Britain from Suez to the Beatles, London: Abacus. Slide, Anthony (2010), Inside the Hollywood Fan Magazine:  A History of Star Makers, Fabricators and Gossip Mongers, Jackson:  University Press of Mississippi. Sparos, John (1962), The Decline of The Cinema: An Economist’s Report, London: Allen & Unwin. Stokes, Melvyn and Maltby, Richard (2007), Hollywood Abroad: Audiences and Cultural Exchange, London: BFI. Stubbs, Jonathan (2009), ‘The Eady Levy:  A Runaway Bribe? Hollywood Production and British Subsidy in the Early 1960s’, Journal of British Cinema and Television, 6(1), May, 1–​20. Sweet, Matthew (2005), Shepperton Babylon: The Lost Worlds of British Cinema, London: Faber & Faber. Taylor, John Russell (1974), ‘Tomorrow the World:  Some Reflections on the UnEnglishness of English Films’, Sight & Sound, Spring, 80–​3. Thumim, Janet (1992), Celluloid Sisters:  Women and Popular Cinema, London: Palgrave Macmillan. Walker, Alexander (1974), Hollywood England: The British Film Industry in the Sixties, London: Michael Joseph. Williams, Melanie (2011), ‘Entering the Paradise of Anomalies: Studying Female Character Acting in British Cinema’, Screen, 52(1), Spring, 97–​104. Williams-​Ellis, Clough (1996), England and the Octopus (2nd ed.), London: CPRE. Winder, Simon (2006), The Man Who Saved Britain: A Personal Journey into the Disturbing World of James Bond, London: Picador.

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Senior leads: Meet the chaps

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Jack Hawkins: ‘Stand by, number one’

Jack Hawkins was born on 14 September 1910 and trained at the Italia Conti Academy. Cinema was secondary to Hawkins’s stage work for many years, and he was 42 when he became a film star with Mandy (Alexander Mackendrick 1952). His subsequent image as the square-​jawed bastion of all that was decent and British belied a considerable acting range and a gift for dry comedy. Hawkins was awarded the CBE in 1958, and although

Figure 1  Jack Hawkins in The League of Gentlemen (1960)

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14     Senior  leads

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he lost his entire larynx to throat cancer in 1966, he refused to allow this to halt his career. He died on 18 July 1973. If one wishes for an apt encapsulation of the Jack Hawkins screen persona, let us turn to that thrilling publication, the house magazine of the Westminster Bank. David Kynaston quotes this august journal as stating, ‘there are many branches where the putting on of a soft collar rather than a stiff white one will mark a man down as unambitious and unworthy of the higher reaches of his profession’ (2009: 541). In a post-​war British film, one can imagine an official played by Cecil Parker, Raymond Huntley or Colin Gordon uttering such sanctimonious bilge –​but rarely Jack Hawkins. Hawkins’s cinematic fame as a senior officer was such that when the Archers were planning The Battle of the River Plate, the Admiralty hopefully enquired whether he would be in the cast (Powell 1993: 270). Dilys Powell referred to him as ‘one of the most likeable actors on the screen’ (1989:  106) and the ‘Personality of the Month Column’ of Films and Filming magazine saw Hawkins’s placing at the head of the 1954 Motion Picture Herald’s poll of money-​making stars as ‘a popular verdict in every sense of the word’ (1955:  3). The actor resembled an illustration on a forces’ recruitment pamphlet at a time when the former naval officer and ex-​prisoner of war (POW) Peter Butterworth was turned down for a role in The Wooden Horse (Jack Lee 1950)  on the grounds that he did not look the part (Bright and Ross 2000: 119). The short and faintly rotund Butterworth did not conform to the then-​prevalent image of a war hero, while Hawkins was tall and powerfully built. His characters conveyed a sense of warmth that was the antithesis to the British puritanism as identified by Roger Manvell –​‘advocating a cold rectitude of conduct which may at best have a stern kindliness about it but is seldom attractive or warm or vital’ (1955: 237). These were rarely the qualities of a Hawkins paterfamilias, who often bend or break the rules to help a member of their extended family. Roy Lewis and Angus Maude contended that the English middle classes provided ‘most of the nation’s brains, leadership and organising ability’ (1950:  337) and when out of uniform Hawkins frequently played professionals who guided post-​war society. On the surface, he represented stability during an era of anxiety that ‘worried away at the new social and sexual boundaries’ (Harper and Porter 2003:  272), but a sense of ire frequently jostled with the approachable qualities of his character. Kenneth Tynan once observed that Hawkins’s stage Iago had ‘a nicely brutal temper and a baleful braggadocio’ (1950: 90–​1) and these traits were often present in his most interesting screen roles. Jack Hawkins trained as a child actor in Italia Conti and in the 1930s he was a cinematic juvenile lead. His screen debut was in Birds of Prey (Basil Dean 1930), while a long willowy Hawkins clad in a tweed jacket

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Jack Hawkins     15 and lederhosen in the Ivor Novello vehicle Autumn Crocus (Dean 1934)  remains one of the more remarkable sights of any British film. After serving in the army during the Second World War  –​he was a colonel in charge of the Entertainments National Service Association (ENSA) in India  –​Hawkins in early middle age was a heavier, more aggressive-​looking figure. In 1946 he signed a three-​year film contract with Sir Alexander Korda (Hawkins 1973:  109) and Carol Reed effectively used him in The Fallen Idol (1948). If the adult world within the Embassy is one of ‘marital strife, adultery, obsession and hysteria’ (Evans 2005:  84), then the police are not the archetypal genial law guardians of post-​war British cinema but unapproachable oppressors. Detective Ames says little, but his glowering presence, looming down over the frightened eight-​year-​old Phillippe (Bobby Henrey) embodies the terror of the unknowable adult world. It was The Archers who gave Hawkins his first post-​war screen role of merit as the sardonic and manipulative government PR officer R. B. Waring in their adaption of Nigel Balchin’s The Small Back Room (1949). Michael Powell subsequently reflected that the actor was ‘a tall, handsome man, with shoulders so broad and chest so deep that they almost amounted to a deformity. He carried it off well. He gave the impression that he would force the pace a bit in a big role, but on the contrary, he was extremely subtle’ (2000: 48). John Ellis saw the role as ‘surprisingly effective and atypical’ (2005: 19), but because Hawkins cuts such a commanding figure, the casting is far more subversive than if Nigel Patrick or Dennis Price had portrayed the word-​spinner. In this black-​and-​white London of shadows and smog, Waring, with his ‘big booming gestures of his arms, the huge proprietary smiles’ (Dent 1949: 23), is an almost Machiavellian figure played as one who not only understands the bureaucratic procedure but revels in its manipulation. Hawkins was equally entertaining in State Secret (Sidney Gilliat 1950) as Colonel Galcon, head of security of the Iron Curtain state of ‘Vosnia’ with an ‘Oxford accent and a Nazi attitude’ (Crowther 1950: n.p.) and Bruce Babington saw the character as ‘ironic homo politicus incarnate’ (2002: 182). The actor’s insouciant performance made it difficult to wholly dislike a villain who before the end credits is contemplating a chair of political science position in an American university. At the end of the 1940s, there was even a final return to the pre-​ war juvenile with Fox’s fourteenth-​century set The Black Rose (Henry Hathaway 1950) opposite Tyrone Power’s swashbuckling hero. Hawkins saw the role of master archer Tristram Griffen as a form of proto Tony Curtis (1973: 114) and the director had originally intended to cast van Johnson (Pomainville 2016: 140). The spectacle of Tristram confronting Alfonso Bedoya’s Mongolian trader Lu Ching1 with ‘We’d do more for 1

Dubbed by an uncredited Peter Sellers.

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16     Senior  leads English blood any day than you would for an overgrown Sapphire’ was quite beguiling. The early years of the 1950s saw Hawkins gradually establish a cinematic identity as the embodiment of middle-​class professionalism, in No Highway in the Sky (Henry Koster 1951)2 as the level-​ headed English civil servant to James Stewart’s boffin and Home at Seven (Ralph Richardson 1952) as a GP. His screen association with the armed forces on-​screen commenced when ABPC offered him the role of Group Captain ‘Tiger’ Small in Angels One Five (George More O’Ferrall 1951). Freda Bruce Lockhart praised Hawkins for ‘another of his tremendously strong solid performances’ (1952: 32) in the first British picture focused on the Battle of Britain. On the surface, ‘the prevalent officer world is one of hard work, quiet confidence and stiff-​upper-​lip understatement, and the other ranks know their place and are jolly good chaps really’ (Armes 1978:  179), but the Group Captain is depicted as a middle-​rather than upper-​class professional. Andrew Spicer argues that the meritocratic professional officer, a type that had emerged in the Second World War, had become the dominant image of 1950s masculinity (2003: 33) and Small regards himself as the leader of a team. He warns Pilot Officer ‘Septic’ Baird (John Gregson) that, ‘We don’t take kindly to people who break the team’s rules’. If his dialogue has a wan, almost ritualistic quality, this could be because it is his sole method of retaining his sanity. The stiff upper lip is often to mask fear for although the Group Captain may have the skill and authority to imbue his junior officers with a sense of camaraderie and professionalism, he is powerless once they are in the air. Baird is gradually trained to be a good pilot, but this is not enough to prevent his death –​a scenario that the Group Captain will continue to confront. What Hawkins often excelled at was conveying an understated sense of pain, being obliged to nurture assimilation into a group, while constantly masking his doubts. With Mandy, the story examines the flaws of 1950s paternal figures, both in the form of Hawkins’s Dick Searle and within the wider family unit. The script by Nigel Balchin and Jack Whittingham describes how by the time Mandy Garland (Mandy Miller) is aged six her mother, Christine (Phyllis Calvert), takes her to Manchester to a school for the deaf where Searle sees Mandy’s potential and gives her private lessons every evening at Christine’s flat. Ackland (Edward Chapman), a solicitor on the school’s board of governors, wanting to discredit Searle attempts to gain compromising evidence. He falsely informs the child’s father Harry (Terence Morgan) that Mrs Garland is having an affair with the headmaster. Searle was the first of Hawkins’s civilian professionals for Ealing Studios and the teacher is pivotal in Mandy’s liberation. Early 2

Another British film with an incredible cast –​where else would you see James Stewart, Marlene Dietrich, Jack Hawkins, Kenneth More and Pete Murray in the same picture?

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Jack Hawkins     17 in the film we see her attack, in sheer frustration, an older child (Andrew Ray) at a park who tries to engage her in a ball game that she cannot understand. The reaction of his mother –​‘She’s insane –​she’s not fit to be with other children!’ –​is a diatribe delivered in shrill upper-​middle-​ class tones that shatters the unstated fears of her father Harry (Terence Morgan, in one of his best performances). When Christine argues with her husband about sending their daughter to a school for the deaf, accusing him that, ‘You’d rather she remained dumb!’ Harry slaps her; such is his anger at the idea of his child perceived as ‘the other’. The stiff upper lip may be as much the product of fear as stoicism. Mackendrick initially frames the school for the deaf to resemble even more of a prison than the Garland family home, with overtones of a Victorian workhouse, but it liberates Mandy, thanks to the dedication of Searle and his teaching staff. Macnab notes how in ‘sci-​fi, horror and even social-​problem films made after the war, it is striking how often film-​makers use the “expert” as a buffer’ (2000: 122), but Hawkins resisted the temptation to play Searle as a plaster saint. In one remarkable scene, the headmaster is simultaneously conducting an art lesson and verbally sparring with Chapman’s pompous solicitor. As the two adults snipe, a little boy tries to gain Ackland’s attention to look at his painting, but just as the child cannot make himself understood, Searle is almost wilfully obtuse when confronted by his arrogant but socially insecure governor. Phillip Kemp suggests that the headmaster is ‘a man who has shut off a whole area of himself –​incapable of sustaining an adult relationship, he deflects his emotional commitments onto the children in his care’ (1991: 80). The most positive figures in the film are Christine, who makes the crucial decision to send her daughter to the school against the wishes of Harry, Dorothy Allison’s teacher, who eventually turns screams of frustration into words, and Mandy herself. The terrain outside of the Garlands’ house awaits and in the words of Annette Kuhn: The mise en scène of the bombsite speaks a preoccupation that, unspoken yet insistent, pervades the entire film; the relationship between past and present. It suggests the future is rooted in the past, that the past will leave its marks on the future. The physical settings of the film’s story may appear ugly or scarred, and the older generation flawed in their inability to communicate; and yet the life, joy and energy of the new generation stand in contrast to such gloom. (2002: 44)

When Mandy takes those first tentative steps towards entering the wider community, it is a conclusion that avoids the standard Hollywood narrative of disability ‘first posed from outside as a form of stigma and then navigated from the inside as a mode of social redress’ (Mitchell and Snyder 2000:  34). Her condition will continue to be a challenge, her parents’ marital problems remain unresolved and the

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18     Senior  leads terrain beyond the garden walls of the Victorian villa will always bring problems and challenges –​but her move to the outside world is on her terms. Dick Searle exists between these two communities; his skills and dedication enable Mandy to develop her ability to communicate, but he has difficulty in functioning outside of the institution he regards as his fiefdom. Hawkins’s performance in Mandy resulted in his being invited to play the leading role in Ealing’s adaptation of Nicholas Monserrat’s The Cruel Sea (Hawkins 1973: 127). Penelope Houston opined in 1963 that ‘a few years ago if British cinema had an immediately identifiable image, it would have been a shot of Kenneth More, jaw boldly jutting on the bridge of a destroyer’ (1963: 119), but this image is more applicable to Hawkins. Nor is the film a triumphal celebration of wartime achievements; the atmosphere is grey, battered and relentless, with an emphasis on the sheer strain in maintaining discipline. Harold Laski warned in The Danger of Being a Gentleman and Other Essays that ‘there is no field of activity in which the amateur, however benevolent, can retain his function as leader without risking the survival of those who depend on him’ (1939: 22) and George Ericson (Hawkins), as with Group Captain Small, is very much a professional. In peacetime, he served with the merchant marine and as a lieutenant commander in the Royal Navy Reserve, he regards the newly recruited junior officers to the Compass Rose with a sense of weariness. Keith Lockhart (Donald Sinden) shows signs of promise, but his fellow sub-​lieutenant Gordon Ferraby (John Stratton) already appears vulnerable and Bennett (Stanley Baker) is a posturing oaf of a first lieutenant. Christine Geraghty has argued that British war films of this period allow ‘a safe space in which problems around masculinity can be resolved effectively’ (2000: 192) but The Cruel Sea, as with the best films within this cycle, contains no pat resolutions. Eric Ambler’s script illustrates the emotional and psychological damage of the war –​Lockhart must carry out first aid on dying survivors, the sister of Petty Officer Tallow (Bruce Seton) is killed in a German bombing raid and Ferraby suffers a nervous breakdown. Most famously Ericson is reduced to tears when he recalls how his decision to depth charge a U-​Boat results in the death of some British survivors  –​a moment prompted by the actor’s own emotions (Hawkins 1973:  136). Barr refers to ‘the sheer fuss it [The Cruel Sea] makes over even the unremarkable acts of professionalism of its Captain’ (1998: 204), but this essence of the picture is the human cost of remaining a solid authority figure. This mediation of the recent past is one of muted anguish and even a sense of resignation; the narrative concludes with Ericson reflecting to Lockhart on how they have successfully sunk only two enemy U-​Boats as they sail past the surrendered German fleet. Fred Inglis notes that:

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Jack Hawkins     19

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Much more, however, is made of saving lives and losing them than of cutting down or up the enemy. Compass Rose rescues sailors (including Scandinavian merchantmen), their lungs clotted with machine oil; in pursuit of a U-​boat which they fail to catch they run down their own shipwrecked comrades struggling in the water; when the second of the two ships in the story comes finally home in 1945 the last word of the film is the bare order ‘Shut down main engines’. (2003: 44)

Indeed, little of The Cruel Sea tallies with Lindsay Anderson’s diatribe concerning 1950s British war films  –​‘tapping our feet to the March of the Dam Busters, we can make believe that our issues are simple ones –​its Great Britain again!’ (1957: 16). In that same year, John Gillett contended:  ‘Anyone with service experience must have met someone who possessed some of the characteristics of the British cinema’s service model. What our film-​makers have too often ignored, though, is the human being behind the slang and the bonhomie’ (1957–​58:  126). But with The Cruel Sea, the middle-​class officer heroes are thrown into circumstances that test both their ability and morality. Ericson is the sole professional officer aboard Compass Rose  –​the other members of the wardroom are Volunteer Reserve  –​and the Commander now appears as one of the most plausible uniformed characters of post-​war British cinema. Manny Farber doubted ‘whether any other actor had equalled the realistic suffering, fatigue and nervous strain’ (Farber and Polito 2009:  447–​8) of Hawkins’s commanding officer, who is irascible and weary from the outset. Lindsay Anderson claimed that, ‘It is up there on the Bridge that the game is really played, as the officers raise binoculars repeatedly to their eyes, converse in clipped monosyllable (the British cinema has never recovered from Noel Coward as Captain “D”), and win the battles’ (1957: 16). With The Cruel Sea Ericson almost literally secures the bolts to his memory when aboard his second ship, trying to quell his nightmares. As the narrative progresses, he is promoted to commander, but he is on the verge of becoming a fanatic in his pursuit of a U-​boat. It is only the sight of the survivors who look so similar to British sailors that bring him to his senses, just as his growing reliance on Lockhart –​whom he guides towards the rank of lieutenant commander –​reminds him of his humanity. Sue Harper believed that 1950s British war films ‘might also be interpreted as fathers speaking to sons about themselves and their experiences’ (1997: 163) and it is so often because of this verisimilitude that war pictures of this era so often abide in the memory. The Cruel Sea gained Hawkins a contract with the Rank Organisation (1973:  170) and consolidated his stardom. British cinema in the 1950s offered a ‘conspicuously rich line in fathers’ (Durgnat 1970: 174) and the archetypal paternal figure is one of probity, professional skill or training, combined with the humility to admit his shortcomings. Hawkins also

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20     Senior  leads took part in various extramural activities; making a guest appearance as a guitar-​playing Teddy boy in Hancock’s Half Hour3 or featuring in various film magazines looking tweedily respectable. In 1953 Hawkins portrayed two further senior officers  –​Air Commodore Frank in Malta Story (Brian Desmond Hurst) and, more intriguingly, Colonel ‘Wolf ’ Merton in The Intruder (Guy Hamilton), based on Robin Maugham’s 1949 novel The Line on Ginger. The latter picture commences with Merton, now a peacetime stockbroker, discovering that a burglar in his house was ‘Ginger’ Edwards (Michael Medwin), one of his best troopers during the war. Edwards once saved the entire squadron during a battle, but his post-​war reception is that his girlfriend is now the partner of a wide boy (Harold Lang) and his home ruled by his sanctimonious bully of an uncle (Edward Chapman), who Ginger kills by accident. Eight years later he escapes from prison and breaks into Merton’s townhouse, unaware that it is the residence of his former commanding officer. A  cardinal sin of British cinematic patriarchs is a failure of duty affecting the family unit or the wider community and Hawkins plays Merton with a sense of anger that is partially self-​directed. The Colonel has failed to keep in contact with his men after the war. It is only when Merton offers to help Ginger to escape the country, thus behaving as a real father figure, that Edwards finally surrenders to the police. The Intruder shows how the Colonel’s peacetime refusal to abandon one of his chaps is contrasted sharply with Captain Pirry (Dennis Price), his former second in command whose ostensibly correct approach in contacting the police is seen to be morally wrong and the actions of one with no esprit de corps. ‘That day I  was hit in my tank, I could have cried with joy because I knew I was rid of the whole stupid lot of you!’ But we already know from flashbacks that Pirry is a snob and a coward. Murphy rather interestingly refers to him as ‘middle class’ (2000:  192) and in Price’s deliberately exaggerated vowels (combined with his slightly outré suits and persistent use of his title of ‘Captain’ in civilian life) there is the faint inference that he is a parvenu. In post-​war British films, genuine professionalism automatically commands respect as much as ersatz authority attracts derision, as Pirry narrowly evaded a court-​martial. Mid-​late 1950s stardom saw Hawkins in a variety of roles for both British and on loan to Hollywood cinema, the latter most notably in Land of the Pharaohs (Howard Hawks 1955)  –​yet another picture that haunted afternoon television during the 1970s. ‘Camp’ is rarely a phrase applied to the film work of Jack Hawkins but it is the mot juste 3

The Elocution Teacher, 25 November 1957. Curse the BBC for not telerecording this truly amazing sight.

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Jack Hawkins     21 when applied to the spectacle of his cross Pharaoh Khufu berating Joan Collins’s Princess Nellifer in the manner of a golf club secretary who had recently discovered a discrepancy in the bar accounts. Hawkins accurately described the entire enterprise as ‘perfectly ridiculous’ (1973: 148) and almost as bizarre was The Seekers (Ken Annakin 1954), a drama set in nineteenth-​century New Zealand.4 There was Touch and Go (Michael Truman 1955), an Ealing comedy that celebrated antiquity in glorious Eastmancolor. Industrial designer Jim Fletcher (Hawkins) is so enraged by his firm’s dismissal and rejection of his ideas for contemporary furniture that he decides to leave with his family to Australia. Naturally, this will not come to pass, as the ties of Fletcher’s local community are strong. He is a comparatively young man, but he ultimately chooses to forget his ambitions for a future of quiet stultification in a vibrantly shaded England in which virtually every male character says ‘gosh!’ Had William Rose’s screenplay conveyed the ambivalence towards the ‘tradition’ of Genevieve or The Maggie (Alexander Mackendrick 1954), the audiences might have seen Hawkins in more ‘light-​hearted comedy settings’ (Newnham 1955:  7). As it was, Touch and Go anticipates the studio’s late-​period comedies that celebrate such antique objects as the pier in Barnacle Bill (Charles Frend 1957) because of, not despite, their defects. These are venerations of an apparent lack of rational planning, but by 1957, tower blocks were already being created in Britain’s major cities (Kynaston 2009:  47). Jim is positioned uneasily between the old worlds –​the Fletchers’ neighbourhood has ‘no traffic coming through, and an onion seller plying his wares and crowds of stagey children’ (Barr 1998: 175) –​and his professional role in shaping the future. Hawkins’s performance in a role better suited to Robert Morley or James Robertson Justice was uncertain and heavy-​handed; Catherine de la Roche perceived Hawkins’s unease at playing a quasi-​Victorian paterfamilias (1955: 17). Hawkins’s last two films for Ealing also explore this theme, where the skills of his middle-​class professionals are once again placed at the service of the community but with a certain degree of ambivalence. The Long Arm (Charles Frend 1956) was the studio’s first police film since The Blue Lamp (Basil Dearden 1950) and unlike PC George Dixon (Jack Warner), Hawkins’s Superintendent Tom Halliday travels through London in his Wolseley 6/​89, rather than pounding the streets. Gordon Dines’s cinematography captures the gas-​lit narrow streets and the bombsites with ‘houses like giant teeth in which decay had been drilled out, leaving only the cavity’ (Spark 1963: 129). But among the battered pre-​war Morris 8s and the Victorian terraces are signs of the concrete and hire-​purchased future with television antennae on slate roofs and department stores 4

Which does at least feature the unforgettable scene of Kenneth Williams falling foul of Maori warriors.

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22     Senior  leads filled with consumer goods. Jerry White observes the government’s revocation of building licences in November 1954 ‘fired the starting pistol for the London landrush’ (2001: 48). This new London is under threat from the Gilsons (Richard Leech and Ursula Howells), a middle-​class couple whose scheming is far more of a threat to the community than the likes of ‘Slob’ (George Rose), the CID’s wide-​boy informer. Mid-​way through the picture, a young workman, Stanley James (Ian Bannen), departs from his council flat shortly before attempting to prevent a raid in a dockland’s office. The thieves use their Ford V8 Pilot as a murder weapon, a Cyclops-​like fog lamp gleaming as it speeds towards its prey. They are finally caught not after breaking into the premises of the spiv-​like merchant Stone (Sydney Tafler) but the Royal Festival Hall –​‘a place of space and light and simple gaiety totally unlike anything the capital had ever known before’ (Hopkins 1963: 271). Rodney Geisler saw The Long Arm in terms of ‘a game of chess with its characters as cold and motiveless as the pieces’ (1956: 23), but Halliday’s veneer of professionalism is not constant; he is visibly distressed after interviewing the dying witness James and feels guilt at neglecting his family. The detective is one who both compartmentalises his life to retain his sanity but who also enjoys his work away from his domestic life in leafy suburbia. Up until the final reel, The Long Arm eschews melodramatics, but in the final reel, the superintendent leaps on the bonnet of a Triumph Roadster getaway car to prevent Mrs Gilcrest’s escape. It is both a demonstration of how Hawkins’s patriarchs were more athletic than James Robertson Justice or Alastair Sim and, perhaps, how the superintendent feels the need to display his dynamism in an action that could have easily been accomplished by his junior officer Detective Sergeant Ward (John Stratton). If Tom Halliday is a more genial officer than his bitter and aggressive near-​contemporary of John Mills’s Detective Superintendent Halloran of Town on Trial (John Guillermin 1957), the final scene still implies a Scotland Yard officer wishing to at least temporarily escape from the constraints of his position. With Hawkins’s final Ealing production, The Man in the Sky (Charles Crichton 1957), his John Mitchell is a test pilot at Conway, an aeroplane manufacturer that is on the verge of bankruptcy. During a routine test of their latest prototype, an engine catches fire and Mitchell orders everyone to parachute to safety while he remains to save his company’s contract  –​and his professional future. The never easily satisfied Monthly Film Bulletin complained, ‘Hawkins’ mannerisms prevent him from giving any real depth to the character’ (Review 1957b: 16), but Mitchell, even more than Mandy or The Intruder, displays the actor as the insecure and truculent patriarch, with the aggressive traits noted by Kenneth Tynan barely in check. The focus is not on past conflicts but a conflicted middle-​aged man who justifies his behaviour by shouting at

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Jack Hawkins     23 his wife Mary (Elizabeth Sellers) that, ‘The man who said “better a live coward than a dead hero” was a live coward’. John Mitchell is emblematic of how in the late 1950s, British cinema’s paternal stalwarts so often displayed fundamental weaknesses that no amount of pipe-​smoking can hope to mask. His actions were not for queen and country and intermixed with his sense of loyalty to his firm, his mortgage and his marriage is his sense of bravado. Films and Filming perceived Mitchell to be a ‘cardboard hero of the Services Recruitment poster’ (Baker 1957: 24), but his actions are at least a partial form of escape from a parade of semi-​detached villas in a Wolverhampton suburb. The crisis is also an opportunity for excitement away from the mundanity of work, the shopping parade and the Billy Cotton Band Show on the BBC Light Programme every Sunday. Robert Murphy points out that the film has no ‘flashbacks to wartime experience, memories of domestic bliss, or explanations of what might have caused the fire’ (2012: 89). A lesser picture would have cut from shots of the stricken plane with flashbacks to Mitchell looking stoically heroic in the fashion of ‘Tiger’ Small, but with The Man in the Sky, the battle unfolds on a summer’s day in the West Midlands. The film entered production in a period when newsreels would proclaim how tradition and technology would combine to forge Britain’s future and when ‘fusillades of supersonic bangs saluted science’s new omnipotence and drove gardeners mad by shattering their greenhouse panes’ (Hopkins 1963: 386). But watching the events is a not so much grateful citizenry but a crowd of faintly vacant-​ looking thrill seekers who, in a faint echo of Ace in the Hole (Billy Wilder 1951), drift away once the main drama is over. There is now television and countless other distractions. By 1957 Hawkins had left his Rank contract, and he was awarded the CBE in 1958. His role of Major Warden in The Bridge on the River Kwai marked a point where his film career was moving into senior character roles. If Alec Guinness’s Colonel Nicholson may be regarded as ‘if not actually a Quisling, a Petain’ (Durgnat 1963: 44), Warden is an academic who embarks on a commando raid almost out of a need to fulfil an image of heroism. In 1959 Hawkins appeared as the Consul Quintus Arrius as in Ben Hur (William Wyler), thereby further illustrating the ‘aural paradigm’, which dictated that rulers should almost invariably be played by British actors in Hollywood’s depictions of ancient times (Richards 2008:  56). He also embarked on a major series for ITV, The Four Just Men, which he co-​produced. The Stage proclaimed that the programme ‘marked the first time that big international stars [Hawkins, Dan Dailey, Richard Conte and Vittorio De Sica] are taking part together in one TV series’ (Cowan 1959: 18), although the results often bore the hallmarks of a show made at breakneck speed.5 5

‘Overseas’ often meant driving on the wrong side of the road in Hertfordshire.

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24     Senior  leads By this point, both Rank and ABPC had reduced their production schedules, with Penelope Houston reporting ‘the Allied Film-​makers company headed by Jack Hawkins and Richard Attenborough, shows the independents on the move’ (Houston and Crow 1959–​60: 6).6 One of Allied’s first productions was The League of Gentlemen (Basil Dearden 1960)  and Raymond Durgnat links Bryan Forbes’s script with his directorial work in Séance on a Wet Afternoon (1964) and King Rat (1965) as a study of negative of paradoxical leadership (1976:  5). The driving force of Hawkins’s Lieutenant Colonel Norman Hyde is anger over his enforced redundancy after ‘twenty-​five years unblemished service’, with an England of decadent civilians with no apparent need for his services. He, therefore, rescues seven tarnished ex-​officers from their state of shabby gentility by dint of their return to structured teamwork, albeit for their own ends as opposed to that of the nation by robbing a bank. C. A.  Lejeune praised the gang’s manners  –​‘Not one of them lets any other down. Loyalty is complete. Nobody gets hurt’ (1960: 23) –​ but Hyde’s plan is predicated on mere civilians being unable to defeat eight professionally trained soldiers. Peter Baker fulminated about how censorship regulations of the day ensured that the ‘likeable rouges’ have to ‘land in the arms of the law and a pretty improbable tedious denouncement it is too’ (1960: 25). But while acting as a lookout, Porthill (Bryan Forbes) is on the verge of shooting an inquisitive police constable and Hawkins conveys Hyde’s similar threats to the bank staff at his most considerably menacing. The luncheon scene takes pains to display just how good each gang member is in their respective field, each having served their country. Their crimes mainly took place after the war and Hyde’s main ire at the initial meeting is towards Captain Weaver (Norman Bird), whose alcoholism caused the death of four of his men while on bomb-​disposal  duty. In place of the post-​war celebration of community in The Blue Lamp, the League pulls together as a team to regain their privileged status in society, their self-​respect and replenish their bank balances. At the end of the 1950s in the face of consumer affluence, ‘the high summer of a middle-​class cinema’ (Durgnat 1976:  1) was coming to an end as seen in the mainstream of British films. Hyde and Nigel Patrick’s Major Race (‘breeding will tell, you know’) appear to hail from the upper-​middle classes, but Lexy (Richard Attenborough) appears to be a representative of the wartime commissioned officer who has succeeded on merit but found no secure peacetime role (Turner and Rennell 1996: 182). The most naive and lost figure is ex-​Major Rupert Rutland-​Smith (Terence Alexander), who enjoyed a ‘good war’ and, by comparison with his comrades, his crimes (concerning mess bills) are light. He is eager, 6

Hawkins, Dan Dailey, Richard Conte and Vittoria de Sica.

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Jack Hawkins     25 contentious and loyal but these virtues, so essential in Reach for the Sky (Lewis Gilbert 1956) or The Dam Busters (Michael Anderson 1954), now cut little ice with his wife (Nannette Newman). Rupert’s glory days are now long past, his spouse reminding him that ‘the war’s been over for a long time … there’s plenty to go round’. The tone of The League of Gentlemen is often lightly comic, and the gang’s diligence and intelligence is a far cry from the shambolic nature of the peacetime army camp. The inefficient and disaffected officers and spit-​and-​polish non-​commissioned officers (NCOs) both fail to mask the grumbles of bored national servicemen or detect an arms heist occurring under their noses. But under the script’s many witty lines is a constant undermining of cinematic ideas of wartime courage. Hyde reprimands Race with the warning that although he ‘has nothing against heroes, they tend to ruin it for the rest of us’. Race resigned his commission in the face of charges for black-​market activities, but now his criminal tendencies are redirected for the betterment of stealing money from ‘defenceless civilians’. Their headquarters are Hyde’s pleasant country home, which is situated in a rural England that echoes Angus Calder’s description of the perfect village: It may be in Sussex or the Cotswolds, or in Jane Austen’s Hampshire –​ contains a pleasant Anglican vicar, an affable squire, assorted professionals, tradesmen and craftsmen, many whom will be ‘characters’, plus a complement of sturdy yeomen and agricultural workers learned in old country lore. It has a green, on which the village plays cricket, with squire as captain. (1991: 188)

But here the squire figure exhorts his loyal chaps with the observation, ‘Think of it as a full-​scale military operation. What chance has a bunch of ordinary civilians got against a trained, army-​disciplined, military unit?’ As the heist approaches, the gang has now regained the confidence they so clearly lacked in the opening scenes, but the bonds are still largely of financial opportunism. When Scotland Yard finally apprehends the League, their ‘betrayal’ was via a small but vital lapse in the Colonel’s professionalism  –​an error with a car number plate. On receiving the news, Hyde’s face displays both shame for a mistake caused by a seasoned professional such as himself and relief that none of his chaps had succumbed to their (well-​delineated) lack of scruples and betrayed him. Kynaston thought that the watchwords of the 1950s were ‘deference, respectability, conformity, restraint, trust’ (2009: 538), but in The League of Gentlemen, the inference is that Hyde’s less laudable qualities may have always been dormant and were catalysed by his premature retirement. ‘And here, I promise you, we shall enjoy our “Finest Hour”. What price glory? £100,000 each tax-​free. You won’t have to sign a form for it. You won’t even have to salute!’ Seven years earlier Roger Manvell claimed that British cinema’s finest war films were characterised by ‘the

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26     Senior  leads understatement of emotion –​resolved by eloquent silences or by giving a certain pathos to the clichés of accepted behaviour, or by sidetracking emotion to using laughter in its place –​[which] is [as] indigenous as our green, sweet and rain-​swept landscapes’ (1953:  222). In The League of Gentlemen, such understatement is in the service of a bank robbery. Jeffrey Richards notes how the role of Norman Hyde marked a notable change in Hawkins’s screen image:  ‘A renegade officer using professional skills for his criminal ends … or the general as shrewd and unscrupulous politico. The old-​value systems were being turned on their head’ (1997: 168). General Allenby of Lawrence of Arabia (David Lean 1962) was one such paternal figure to Peter O’Toole’s Lawrence, a performance that innately understood the military mindset. The predictably unpredictable Manny Farber described the character as ‘overweighed with British army beef ’ (Farber and Polito 2009: 543) and Hawkins was unhappy with the script’s historical accuracy (1973: 161), but the screen Allenby is a subtle figure. He is the senior guiding hand who also never lacks for political intelligence and is sometimes apprehensive of the younger officer’s impetuosity (Williams 2014: 161). Allenby was a role that would become typical of those offered to former British leading men of the 1950s  –​a senior character role, in support of a younger star in an ‘international production’. With Zulu (Cy Endfield 1963) Hawkins played the pacifist Lutheran priest Otto Witt, a role that was almost entirely at odds with his established screen image, although the actor was to subsequently state that the ‘the performance that appeared on screen bore no relationship whatever to the performance I  gave in front of the cameras’ (1973:  167). James Chapman has described the excised scene of how the now-​sober clergyman returns to the aftermath of the battle (2005: 220), one that would have lent the character a sense of dignity. Hawkins was more secure as the tired and phlegmatic Colonel Deal in Guns at Batasi (John Guillermin 1964), the commanding officer of a British Army regiment in a recently independent African state. In Batasi political turmoil means that the British Army barracks are under threat and Deal appreciates the realpolitik of the situation, for ultimately Whitehall recognises the new regime. As the old certainties were being eroded, the one figure who cannot adapt to a post-​imperial army is Regimental Sergeant Major Lauderdale (Richard Attenborough), now isolated not only from the younger staff sergeants but also from the military he has served in for over thirty years. The values he so proudly embodies have less and less meaning, and the continuing Commonwealth membership of Batasi (with its consequent British military presence) is partially dependent upon his deportation; a development that Deal wearily accepts. Lauderdale has devoted much of his life to the army, but his qualities do not prevent the Colonel from dispatching him back

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Jack Hawkins     27 to civilian life in a UK the Regimental Sergeant Major will barely now recognise. The actor alternated such telling performances with prominently billed supporting roles in semi-​forgotten pictures along the lines of Rampage (Phil Karlson 1963) or The Third Secret (Charles Crichton 1964), as health worries resulted in Hawkins increasing his cinematic output while he could. He had started to encounter problems with his voice in The League of Gentlemen, and Masquerade (Basil Dearden 1965) represented his last major appearance in a British film, playing the wartime hero Colonel Drexel. The Foreign Office employs him to rescue the teenaged ruler of Middle Eastern territory that is still loyal to the UK but, even more than Norman Hyde, Drexel is now completely disillusioned with the rewards of Establishment: ‘A pat on the back, a word of praise in a secret report, a dinner at the club. I want more than that –​materially I mean.’ The Monthly Film Bulletin objected that ‘Jack Hawkins hasn’t exactly the lightest of touches’ (Review 1965: 77–​8), but Drexel was an example of those senior professionals with brogues of clay and extensive overdrafts that are encountered in several mid-​1960s British films. ‘Authority  –​ however disinterested, well-​qualified and experienced –​was increasingly greeted with suspicion rather than trust’ (Davenport-​Hines 2013: 331). With Where the Spies Are (Val Guest 1966), David Niven, an actor whose facility at playing seemingly unflappable gentlemen with hidden weaknesses was often underused on both sides of the Atlantic, gives one of his best performances as Dr Jason Love, a wartime officer who is now a middle-​aged civilian hopelessly out of his depth. Philip French saw that with the decline of the British Second World War picture, the ‘direct expression of chauvinism’ (1966:  108) was to be found in spy films of the 1960s. In The Ipcress File (Sidney Furie 1965), the Establishment figures of Colonel Ross (Guy Doleman) and Major Dalby (Nigel Green) are both equally devious and disdainful of their subordinate sergeant, Harry Palmer (Michael Caine), achieving heights of caddishness that your average bounder could only have dreamed of after numerous cocktails. In civilian life, memories of the war and its service ethos were now fading; Jonathan Meades thought that the use of titles such as ‘Major’, once a proud token of service, now appeared ‘unconvincingly self-​ aggrandising’ (2014: 203). But Drexel has no intention of ending his days in a bungalow somewhere near Andover, and so he plans to use his old US Army comrade in arms, David Frazer (Cliff Robertson), as part of an illicit arms deal disguised as an official mission to the Middle East. Drexel amiably sacrifices all principles for easy money, and the conclusion has his British villainy officially rewarded whereas slightly naive American virtue receives the sum of £11 9s 2d after payment of back taxes (and ‘dinner at the club’) for his pains. The original casting choice of Fraser was Rex Harrison, but the use of Robertson brings an unconscious but pleasing

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28     Senior  leads sense of circularity to Hawkins’s career. In State Secret, Colonel Galcon’s game of cat and mouse with Dr John Marlowe (Douglas Fairbanks Jr) has the ‘undertext of the naïve American versus the more worldly and pragmatic Englishman’ (Babington 2002: 183). In Masquerade Frazer is reduced to a state of helpless confusion by the more worldly Colonel. In December of 1965, Hawkins was diagnosed with throat cancer, and in the following month, his entire larynx was removed. The actor’s memoirs describe, simply and without self-​ pity, his post-​ operation reactions  –​‘my thoughts frequently drifted back to when I  had been making Mandy’ (1973: 190) –​and for shorter roles, he was able to use his diaphragm and stomach muscles to create an esophageal voice.7 For longer parts, his voice was either dubbed by Robert Rietty or Charles Gray. The last eight years of his career combined supporting roles in prestigious productions –​ Young Winston (Richard Attenborough 1972), Oh, What a Lovely War! (Attenborough 1969), Nicholas and Alexandra (Franklin J. Schaffner 1971) –​and his still formidable presence allowed him to transcend strange miscasting.8 Hawkins’s final film role was in Tales That Witness Madness (Freddie Francis 1973); a portmanteau horror picture in which his Dr Nicholas has to investigate some bizarre cases, including Brian Thompson (Michael Jayston) who murdered his wife Bella (Joan Collins) and eloped with a tree trunk. Jack Hawkins died on 18 July 1973 after an operation to insert an artificial voice box resulted in haemorrhaging. Perhaps his performance as the Interrogator in The Prisoner (Peter Glenville 1955)  should be regarded as one of his finest. The screenplay was adapted from Bridget Boland’s 1954 play about a cardinal (Alec Guinness) falsely accused of treason in an East European state and while he and the Interrogator were once comrades in the Resistance during the Second World War, the latter now silkily requires his charge to ‘regard me as your doctor’. The story was inspired by the experiences of Josef Mindszenty, the post-​war Catholic Primate of Hungary but Hawkins’s character also functions as a virtual subversion of that paragon of post-​war British expertise –​the caring professional. ‘Who do you think you are dealing with  –​some mad sadist moron in the Gestapo, with power to play with flesh and blood to satisfy his own lust?’ The Integrator is proud to have been ‘a doctor before I was a lawyer’ and the attributes that Hawkins employed to train raw recruits in war narratives –​the commanding voice, the manner that is confidential yet formal –​are put to the service of repressive state machinery.

Hawkins being interviewed on a surviving edition of Simon Dee’s BBC chat show is a black-​and-​white archive moment that is near impossible not to be moved by. 8 Such as his Cypriot gangster in When Eight Bells Toll (Etienne Perier 1971), a film that attempted to create Anthony Hopkins as the Welsh equivalent of Sean Connery. 7

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Jack Hawkins     29 But the Interrogator suffers his own agonies of conscience and memory of the days when his skills and abilities were for the common good, not to reinforce his position within a nameless authoritarian state. The reviewer of the Spectator noted how ‘the Cardinal, under ceaseless questionings and solitary confinement, deteriorates, and as the pain of watching him do so becomes unbearable, one instinctively turns to Mr. Hawkins for help; thus do we identify our actors with former parts’ (Review 1955: 21). The same writer noted that the actor’s ‘appearance is ill-​suited to that of a subtle psychiatrist’, but this was a major strength of the casting. If the actor apparently belonged to the predictable and ordered English landscape so disdained by François Truffaut –​‘the subdued way of life, the stolid routine’ (1978: 140) –​his characters so often evinced fear, weariness and, on occasion, bitter resentment. Richard Dyer argued that star image may change, but within ‘the notion of consistency’ (Dyer and McDonald 1998: 98), and the commanding officer of HMS Compass Rose, Norman Hyde and the Interrogator who delights in acquiring the mind of his charges were diverse facets of Britain’s ultimate screen patriarch. Bibliography Aldgate, Anthony and Richards, Jeffrey (1999), Best of British:  Cinema and Society from 1930 to Present, London: I. B. Tauris. Anderson, Lindsay (1957), ‘Get Out and Push!’ Encounter, November, 14–​22. Armes, Roy (1978), A Critical History of British Cinema, London:  Secker & Warburg. Ashby, Justine and Higson, Andrew (eds.) (2000), British Cinema Past & Present, London: Routledge. Babington, Bruce (2002), Launder & Gilliat:  British Film Makers, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Baker, Peter (1957), ‘The Man in the Sky’, Films and Filming, February, 24. Baker, Peter (1960), ‘The League of Gentlemen’, Films and Filming, May, 25. Barr, Charles (ed.) (1986), All Our Yesterdays:  90 Years of British Cinema, London: BFI. Barr, Charles (1998), Ealing Studios (3rd ed.), London: Continuum. Bright, Morris and Ross, Robert (2000), Mr. Carry On: The Life and Work of Peter Rogers, London: BBC. Burton, Alan and O’Sullivan, Tim (eds.) (2009), The Cinema of Basil Dearden and Michael, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Burton, Alan, O’Sullivan, Tim and Wells, Paul (1997), Liberal Directions:  Basil Dearden and Post-​War British Film Culture, Trowbridge, UK: Flicks Books. Calder, Angus (1991), The Myth of the Blitz, London: Johnathan Cape. Calder, Angus (1992), The People’s War: Britain 1939–​1945 (2nd ed.), London: Pimlico. Chapman, James (1999), ‘British Cinema and “The People’s War” ’, in Hayes, Nick and Hill, Jeff (eds.) ‘Millions Like Us?’: British Culture in the Second World War, Liverpool: Liverpool University Press.

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30     Senior  leads Chapman, James (2000), ‘Film and the Second World War’, in Ashby, Justine and Higson, Andrew (eds.) British Cinema Past & Present, London: Routledge. Chapman, James (2005), Past & Present:  National Identity and the British Historical Film, London: I. B. Tauris. Chapman, James and Cull, Nicholas J. (2009), Projecting Empire: Imperialism and Popular Cinema, London: I. B. Tauris. Chibnall, Steve and Murphy, Robert (eds.) (1999), British Crime Cinema, London: Routledge. Christie, Ian and Moor, Andrew (eds.), Michael Powell: International Perspectives on an English Film-​Maker, London: BFI. Clay, Andrew (1999), ‘Men, Women and Money:  Masculinity in Crisis in the British Professional Crime Film 1946–​1965’, in Chibnall, Steve and Murphy, Robert (eds.) British Crime Cinema, London: Routledge. Cook, Pam (1986), ‘Mandy: Daughter of Transition’, in Barr, Charles (ed.) All Our Yesterdays: 90 Years of British Cinema, London: BFI. Cowan, Margaret (1959), ‘The Four Just Men’:  A TV Series Which Makes TV History’, The Stage, 19 February, 18. Crowther, Bosley (1950), ‘The Screen in Review: “State Secret”, Thrilling “Chase” Film with Douglas Fairbanks Jr., Bows at Victoria’, New York Times, 5 October. Crowther, Bosley (1955), ‘Screen: Alec Guinness in Grim Drama; Portrays “The Prisoner” in Revealing Film’, New York Times, 12 December. Davenport-​Hines, Richard (2013), An English Affair: Sex, Class and Power in the Age of Profumo, London: William Collins. de la Roche, Catherine (1955), ‘Touch and Go’, Films and Filming. November, 16–​17. Dent, Alan (1949), ‘The World of the Cinema: Good –​Serious and Good –​Silly’, Illustrated London News, 5 February, 23. Dixon, Wheeler Winston (ed.) (1994), Re-​ Viewing British Cinema 1900–​ 1992: Essays & Interviews, Albany: State University of New York Press. Duguid, Mark, Freeman, Lee, Johnston, Keith M. and Williams, Melanie (eds.) (2012), Ealing Revisited, London: BFI/​Palgrave Macmillan. Durgnat, Raymond (1963), ‘The Bridge on the River Kwai’, Films and Filming, February, 44. Durgnat, Raymond (1970), A Mirror for England: British Movies from Austerity to Affluence, London: Faber & Faber. Durgnat, Raymond (1976), ‘Britannia Waives the Rules:  Raymond Durgnat on the Angry Young Cinema’, Film Comment, July–​August. Dux, Sally (2012), ‘Allied Film Makers:  Crime, Comedy and Social Concern’, Journal of British Cinema and Television, 9(2), April, 198–​213. Dyer, Richard and McDonald, Paul (1998), STARS, London: BFI. Ellis, John (2005), ‘At the Edge of Our World’, in Christie, Ian and Moor, Andrew (eds.) Michael Powell:  International Perspectives on an English Film-​Maker, London: BFI. Evans, Martin and Lunn, Kenneth (eds.) (1997), War and Memory in the Twentieth Century, Oxford: Berg. Evans, William Peter (2005), Carol Reed:  British Film Makers, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Farber, Manny and Polito, Robert (eds.) (2009), Farber on Film:  The Complete Film Writings of Manny Farber, New York: Library of America.

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Jack Hawkins     31 French, Philip (1966), ‘The Alphaville of Admass: Or How We Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Boom’, Sight & Sound, Summer, 106–​11. Geisler, Rodney (1956), ‘The Long Arm’, Films and Filming, August, 23. Geraghty, Christine (2000), British Cinema in the Fifties: Gender, Genre and the ‘New Look’, London: Routledge. Gillett, John (1957–​58), ‘Westfront 1957’, Sight & Sound, Winter, 122–​7. Harper, Graham and Moor, Andrew (eds.) (2005), Signs of Life:  Medicine and Cinema, London: Wallflower Press. Harper, Sue (1997), ‘Popular Film, Popular Memory:  The Case of the Second World War’, in Evans, Martin and Lunn, Kenneth (eds.) War and Memory in the Twentieth Century. Oxford: Berg. Harper, Sue and Porter, Vincent (2003), British Cinema of the 1950s: The Decline of Deference, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hawkins, Jack (1973), Anything for a Quiet Life, London: Elm Tree Books. Hennessy, Peter (2006), Having It So Good:  Britain in the 1950s. London: Penguin Books. Hill, John (1986), Sex, Class & Realism: British Cinema 1956–​1963, London: BFI. Hopkins, Harry (1963), The New Look: A Social History of Britain in the Forties & Fifties, London: Secker & Warburg. Houston, Penelope (1963), The Contemporary Cinema 1945–​ 1963, London: Penguin Books. Houston, Penelope and Crow, Duncan (1959–​60), ‘Into the Sixties’, Sight & Sound, Winter, 4–​8. Inglis, Fred (2003), ‘National Snapshots:  Fixing the Past in English War Films’, in MacKillop, Ian and Sinyard, Neil (eds.) British Cinema in the 1950s:  A Celebration, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Johnston, Keith M. (2012), ‘A Riot of All the Colours in the Rainbow:  Ealing Studios in Colour’, in Duguid, Mark, Freeman, Lee, Johnston, Keith M. and Williams, Melanie (eds.) Ealing Revisited, London: BFI/​Palgrave Macmillan. Kemp, Philip (1991), Lethal Innocence: The Cinema of Alexander Mackendrick, London: Methuen. Kirstin, J. M. (1981), ‘No Hollywood on the Thames’, Encounter, September, 45–​9. Kuhn, Annette (2002), Family Secrets: Acts of Memory and Imagination (2nd ed.), London: Verso. Kynaston, David (2009), Family Britain 1951–​1957 (Tales of a New Jerusalem), London: Bloomsbury. Landy, Marcia (1991), British Genres: Cinema and Society 1930–​1960, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Laski, Harold J (1939), The Danger of Being a Gentleman and Other Essays, London: Allen & Unwin. Lejeune C. A. (1960), ‘At the Films: Wrath of Diana’, The Observer, 10 April, 23. Lewis, Roy and Maude, Angus (1950), The English Middle Classes, New  York: Alfred Knopf. Lockhart, Freda Bruce (1952), ‘At the Pictures’, The Tatler, 2 April, 32. MacKillop, Ian and Sinyard, Neil (eds.) (2003), British Cinema in the 1950s:  A Celebration, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Macnab, Geoffrey (2000), Searching for Stars:  Stardom and Screen Acting in British Cinema, London: Continuum.

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32     Senior  leads Manvell, Roger (1953), ‘Britain’s Portraiture in Feature Films’, Geographical Magazine, August, 222. Manvell, Roger (1955), The Film and the Public, London: Penguin Books. McBride, Joseph (2001), Searching for John Ford: A Life, London: Faber & Faber. Meades, Jonathan (2014), An Encyclopaedia of Myself, London: Fourth Estate. Mitchell, David T. and Snyder, Sharon L. (2000), Narrative Prosthesis: Disability and the Dependencies of Discourse, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Moor, Andrew (2005), ‘Past Imperfect, Future Tense:  The Health Services in British Cinema of the Mid-​Century’, in Harper, Graeme and Moor, Andrew (eds.) Signs of Life: Medicine and Cinema, London: Wallflower Press. Murphy, Robert (1992), Sixties British Cinema, London: BFI. Murphy, Robert (2000), British Cinema and the Second World War, London: Continuum. Murphy, Robert (2012), ‘Dark Shadows Around Ealing’, in Duguid, Mark, Freeman, Lee, Johnston, Keith M., and Williams, Melanie (eds.) Ealing Revisited, London: BFI/​Palgrave Macmillan. Newnham, John K. (1955), ‘Jolly Jack’, Picturegoer, 24 September, 7. Nowell-​Smith, Geoffrey (2004), ‘Reflections on the European-​ness, or Otherwise, of British Cinema’, Journal of British Cinema and Television, 1(1), May. 51–​60. O’Sullivan, Tim (2012), ‘That Ealing Feeling: “Ealing Comedies” and “Comedies Made at Ealing” ’, in Duguid, Mark, Freeman, Lee, Johnston, Keith M., and Williams, Melanie (eds.) Ealing Revisited, London: BFI/​Palgrave Macmillan. ‘Personality of the Month’ (1955), Films and Filming, March, 3. Pomainville, Harold. N. (2016), Henry Hathaway:  The Lives of a Hollywood Director, Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Powell, Dilys (1989), The Golden Screen: Fifty Years of Films, London: Headline Book Publishing. Powell, Michael (1993), Million Dollar Movie, London: Mandarin Paperbacks. Powell, Michael (2000), A Life in Movies, London: Faber & Faber. Rattigan, Neil (1994), ‘ “The Demi-​Paradise” and Images of Class in British Wartime Films’, in Dixon, Wheeler Winston (ed.) Re-​Viewing British Cinema 1900–​1992 Essays & Interviews, Albany: State University of New York Press. Rayner, Johnathan (2007), The Naval War Film:  Genre, History and National Cinema, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Review (1955), ‘The Prisoner’, The Spectator, 21 April, 21. Review (1956), ‘The Long Arm’ Monthly Film Bulletin, 23(270), July, 86. Review (1957a), ‘The Bridge on the River Kwai’, Monthly Film Bulletin, 24(286), November,  134–​5. Review (1957b), ‘The Man in the Sky’, Monthly Film Bulletin, 24(277), February, 16. Review (1965), ‘Masquerade’, Monthly Film Bulletin, 32(376), May, 77–​8. Richards, Jeffrey (1997), Films and British National Identity:  From Dickens to ‘Dad’s Army’, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Richards, Jeffrey (2008), Hollywood’s Ancient Worlds. London: Bloomsbury. Spark, Muriel (1963), Girls of Slender Means, London: Penguin Books. Spicer, Andrew (2003), Typical Men:  The Representation of Masculinity in Popular British Cinema, London: I. B. Tauris. Truffaut, François (1978), Hitchcock, St Albans, UK: Granada.

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Turner, Barry and Rennell, Tony (1996), When Daddy Came Home: How Family Life Changed Forever in 1945, London: Pimlico. Tynan, Kenneth (1950), He That Plays the King, London: Longman, Green & Co. Walker, Alexander (1974), Hollywood England: The British Film Industry in the Sixties, London: Michael Joseph. White, Jerry (2001), London in the Twentieth Century:  A City and Its People, London: Viking Press. Williams, Melanie (2014), David Lean:  British Film Makers, Manchester: Manchester University Press.

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John Mills: ‘Do push off, there’s a good chap’

John Mills was born Lewis Ernest Watts Mills on 22 February 1908. His film career lasted from 1932 to 2004, just a year before his death on 23 April 2005. In Which We Serve (Noel Coward/​David Lean 1942) established his still-​abiding image as the brave English ‘Everyman’, his most interesting post-​war roles were as middle-​class professionals facing a crisis of identity. He received a knighthood in 1976. The ‘Candid Cameo’ page of the Sketch of 11 October 1950 commenced with the not altogether encouraging words:  ‘On the face of it, there

Figure 2  John Mills in Escapade (1955)

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John  Mills     35 seems to be no obvious reason for the popularity of John Mills with the film-​going public. He does not possess the long-​jawed, equine, relatively fragile features of a Leslie Howard or a Michael Wilding, which have become the recognisable facial equipment of British box-​office success’ (Urtica 1950: 16). However, the scribe went on to surmise his popularity was due to his personifying ‘the British love of understatement’. Mills was the good-​looking and well-​groomed personification of the chap next door, the friendly fellow who was the stalwart of the darts team. In times of war, he was utterly dependable, as a commissioned officer or as an NCO. If Mills’s reading of John Pudney’s poem ‘For Johnny’ in The Way to the Stars (Anthony Asquith 1945) was, to this observer at least, ineffably moving, it is because of the sheer anguish the actor conveys with such affectlessness beneath his matter-​of-​fact exterior. Kevin Gough-​Yates argued that ‘the creation of an epic hero involves the concept of an ideal, one that spoke in praise of a way of life’ (1965: 16) and Mills’s uniformed heroes appealed precisely because their appearance was the opposite of epic. In 1942 Mills was cast as able seaman ‘Shorty’ Blake of In Which We Serve, a role that the actor regarded as ‘kick-​starting’ his cinema career. ‘The air raid warden and the shop steward were men of destiny, for without their ungrudging support for the war it might be lost; morale might be in danger’ (Calder 1992: 18), and so Blake survives the shipwreck of HMS Torrin. Similarly, the actor’s Billy Mitchell was literally ‘the boy next door’ to the Gibbons family in Noel Coward’s tribute to lower-​middle-​class suburban virtue, This Happy Breed (David Lean 1944).1 George Orwell wrote of how ‘myths which are believed in tend to become true, because they set up a type or persona which the average person will do his best to resemble’ (1986: 204) –​such as the determined yet approachable heroes of John Mills. The critic Philip Hope-​Wallace stated that Mills was ‘an unsubtle actor at the best of times’ (1955: 198) and by 1955 Derek Hill referred to ‘what is rapidly becoming a hackneyed performance’ (1955: 18). More recently David Shipman thought that Mills was ‘was too self-​effacing; he was a nice leading man, but not a very forceful one’ (1989: 389). But the actor was at his most effective when such ‘niceness’ barely suppressed festering anger. In Scott of the Antarctic (Charles Frend 1948) Captain Scott writes in his diary that, ‘Amongst ourselves, we are unendingly cheerful, but what each man feels in his heart I can only guess.’ But in the main if a Mills character ever utters the phrase ‘mustn’t grumble’ in a British film it is more often between clenched teeth. The actor himself thought Scott of the Antarctic was ‘a good film, well-​made and well-​acted under appalling conditions. But I feel if we’d been allowed to delve more deeply into the characters of the men themselves it could have been a great one’ (Mills 1

Albeit one that in real life he fled as soon as he was able.

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36     Senior  leads 2001:  296). Ten years later Mills often stood for a crisis of masculine identity. In her definitive account of his film work, Gill Plain argues that in the 1950s ‘it was to Mills that British cinema turned for its portrayals of frustration, incompetence or impotence’ (2006:  5). As early as 1941 Anthony Asquith employed Mills’s genial voice and unthreatening physical presence as a Nazi agent in Cottage to Let (Anthony Asquith 1941), the fake Royal Air Force (RAF) hero trying ever so hard, and with increasing strain, to masquerade as a Spitfire pilot and a gentleman. His ‘stoic’ heroes can often barely restrain their anger or fear that their mask might crack altogether; the police superintendent of Tiger Bay (J. Lee Thompson 1959) confronted with a recalcitrant young witness, or Mr Polly at odds with his drably suburban surroundings. And, most notably, there is Lieutenant Colonel Basil Barrow of Tunes of Glory (Ronald Neame 1960) facing the collapse of his military dreams. Mills also specialised in expressing a peculiarly middle-​class sense of British bitterness, the short terrier-​ like figure of Town on Trial complaining that his social background meant he had to wait for ten years for promotion to chief inspector. In the flawed but interesting Tiara Tahiti (Ted Kotcheff 1962), Mills’s peacetime office wallah and ‘temporary gentleman’ Lieutenant Colonel Clifford Southey is forever being baited by James Mason’s caddish Captain Brett Aimsley, both during the war and afterwards –​‘For you, I will always be a little clerk’. If Mills was the post-​war Everyman, he was frequently one under enormous internal pressure to maintain the template of the ideal Englishman  –​‘clever though not intellectual, worldly but shy, moral but not judgemental and above all fair’ (Plain 2006: 23). And I would contend that if there was a defining performance for this actor, it was The October Man (Roy Ward Baker 1947) –​the post-​war Everyman as a vulnerable and damaged outsider. When the protagonist Jim Ackland barely represses his rising hysteria with the explanation, ‘I’m sorry. I try to be reasonable then I can’t hold on any more’, it is a line that encapsulates so many of Mills’s flawed protagonists. John Mills made his cinematic debut at the age of twenty-​four in The Midshipmaid (Albert de Courville 1924). Onstage, he frequently appeared as a light comedian, but his film roles of the 1930s varied from the musical comedy lead of Car of Dreams (Graham Cutts/​Austin Melford 1935)  to the East End gangster drama The Green Cockatoo (William Cameron Menzies 1937). Matthew Sweet rather rudely suggests that ‘watch his pre-​war films, and you’ll be struck by a salient aspect of his performances; he can’t act’ (2005: 243–​4), but this might also be a case, one far from unknown in British cinema, of often chronic miscasting. Furthermore, it would have been a challenge to have created a character of depths and pathos in The Lash (Henry Edwards 1934), an everyday story of how a millionaire gives his playboy son a horsewhipping because

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John  Mills     37 he was becoming ‘an absolute bounder’. His first major starring role in a main cinematic feature was as the hero of Brown on Resolution (Walter Forde/​Anthony Asquith 1935)  as the illegitimate son of a naval officer who dies as he attempts to sink a German cruiser during the First World War single-​handedly. Brown on Resolution also marked the beginning of Mills’s professional association with Anthony Asquith. Their collaboration We Dive at Dawn (1943) starred Mills as Lieutenant Taylor, the captain of a Royal Navy ­ gure  –​ submarine,2 a middle-​class but relatively egalitarian authority fi the rank structure is definitely in situ, but the narrative is ‘less concerned to rub the audience’s noses in it’ (Rattigan 2001: 106). Taylor appreciates the diverse skills of his team, including the intelligent and embittered leading seaman Hobson (Eric Portman), and although Mills was aged thirty-​five, he played the lieutenant with a congenial head prefect-​like air, underlined by an absolute focus on the job in hand. The director would cite Mills’s performance as a crucial ingredient in creating an air of authenticity (quoted in Ryall 2005: 81), and one of the main traits of Taylor is an almost terrier-​like hounding of his quarry. The fourth Asquith/​Mills picture, The Way to the Stars (1945), has Flying Officer Peter Penrose eventually becoming a highly respected squadron leader. Mills was also one of the comparatively few British male leads who could be regularly cast as either an officer or as an ‘other rank’ and in 1945 he played Corporal Jim Colter in Waterloo Road (Sidney Gilliat), an NCO who has gone absent without official leave (AWOL) to save his wife Tillie (Joy Shelton) from the clutches of super-​spiv Ted Purvis (Stewart Granger). As the end of the war approached, Jim’s actions in defeating flashy wide boys who hampered the post-​war reconstruction in peacetime would be but another form of protecting society. Here this sense of determination was seen to be for the national good, but such characteristics would be treated with greater ambivalence during the 1950s. The first post-​war film of Mills was as Pip in Great Expectations, but the role, described by David Lean as ‘a coat hanger for all the wonderful garments that will be hung on you’ (quoted in Williams 2014:  47), evoked a less interesting performance than in the film noir The October Man. Gill Plain notes that by the mid-​1940s the cinema audience would associate the Mills screen persona ‘with reliability and trustworthiness, even when he plays a character who patently does not behave in a reliable manner’ (2006: 85), and Eric Ambler’s screenplay subtly undermined this belief. The film opens with Jim Ackland taking the daughter (Juliet Mills) of a friend home when their bus crashes, killing the little girl. He suffers a nervous breakdown as a consequence and on his release from a year-​long stay in a mental hospital, he takes a new job in another part of 2

Mills was a subaltern during the Second World War but was invalided out in 1942.

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38     Senior  leads the country. At work, he is a white-​coated industrial chemist in a modern factory, one of the middle-​class experts rebuilding post-​war England, but his job still leaves too many empty hours of self-​torment. The October Man largely unfolds at night with the streets of grim suburbs barely illuminated by gas lamps and Ackland seeking refuge from the world in a shabby-​genteel guest house that seemingly belongs in a Patrick Hamilton novel. But once he is away from the faded wallpaper and the endless games of canasta, Jim must constantly fight against the urge to commit suicide by hurling himself off a railway bridge. Ackland’s war record is unstated, but he is as much a representative of a ‘crisis of masculinity’ as the former wing commander turned smuggler Bill Glennan (David Farrar) in Cage of Gold (Basil Dearden 1950) or Trevor Howard’s Clem Morgan in They Made Me a Fugitive (Alberto Cavalcanti 1947). Geoffrey Macnab claimed that, ‘Whether as leading man or character actor (and he often seemed the same as both), Mills was always the same principled altruist’ (2000: 102), which barely applies to the haunted figure who is so often seen in barely lit suburbia or seeking refuge in his hotel. Jim’s institutionalisation has been a long one, and he has exchanged one set of ritualised behaviour for another. Even the hotel’s lounge has the air of a faded officers’s mess. The murder of his fellow guest, the amiable good-​time girl Molly Newman (Kay Walsh), acts a catalyst for a mental maelstrom, for Jim has already falsely judged himself guilty of murder. Early in the picture his psychiatrist Dr Martin (Felix Aylmer) informs Ackland that the child’s parents do not blame him and asks if he plans to see them again, only to receive the overly casual reply, ‘I expect so’, delivered with forced nonchalance. But now, the images of what occurred during the crash becomes relentless –​‘A child without a head, and I’m the executioner’. The actor’s flat, despairing delivery of the line and the image it evokes possesses a horror beyond almost any Hammer or Amicus production. It is established almost from the outset that Jim is a potential suicide risk, and his psychiatrist hopes that the world will be ‘kind’ to him. Martin also advises Ackland that ‘people will upset you at first; try not to let them’, but, as Tony Williams contends, the film ‘views the nihilistically repressive post-​war British society as more threatening to Jim than his actual mental condition’ (2000: 115). His fellow guests and his co-​worker Harry Carden (Patrick Holt) almost all prejudge him, George Woodbridge’s insurance assessor complaining that his firm cannot pay Ackland’s health cover ‘indefinitely’ and Detective Inspector Godby (Frederick Piper) is vulpine and aggressive, convinced that the man who ‘used to be a mental case’ has to be the villain. To quote Freda Bruce Lockhart, ‘the Inspector’s impassive face made me feel that the imperturbably gentlemanly ways of our wonderful police might be just as sinister as those of any Gestapo or NKVD’ (1947: 8).

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John  Mills     39 Ironically, the murderer Peachey (Edward Chapman) is another guest in the hotel, one who is more of an outsider than Ackland. The light reflects off his spectacles in the manner of a cinematic Gestapo interrogator, and he takes a malicious pride in destroying the illusion of security within the hotel. ‘Middle-​class filth –​I could buy this place up ten times’, he gloats, in a faint north-​country accent that is at once triumphant and embittered. It is through defeating this figure of almost homicidal self-​ loathing that Ackland is no longer drawn to the bridge where he almost wills himself to suicide as ‘atonement’ for his guilt at the crash. Geoff Mayer points out that ‘the fact that the film ends on the railway bridge, and not in a more conventional manner with the capture of the killer, indicates that the most significant narrative strand is the internalised battle involving Jim’s psychological problem’ (2004: 102). At the conclusion, Ackland tells his girlfriend Jenny Carden (Joan Greenwood) that ‘I didn’t give in’; it is a hard-​won victory. Following The October Man, Mills played the title role in Scott of the Antarctic, but his next film was both his first venture into production and a bold attempt to escape stereotyping. By 1948 Mills, together with James Mason and Anna Neagle, were the only three British film stars who were more popular than Hollywood leading actors (Harper and Porter 2003: 250) and The History of Mr. Polly (Anthony Pelissier 1949) was a major departure from a popular screen image that was crystallised by Captain Scott. Andrew Spicer believes that the roots of the suburban paterfamilias harked back to the English yeoman, and it was wartime British cinema that helped to transform them into heroic figures (2003: 18). Mills had already starred in This Happy Breed and in the ten years following the Second World War, Here Come the Huggetts (Ken Annakin 1948) and The Happy Family (Muriel Box 1952) are tributes to the virtues of life in green tree-​lined respectable avenues. In these visions of suburban contentment, pipe-​smoking patriarchs (Jack Warner and Stanley Holloway) resolve matters of family and community. The mature Alfred Polly has the image of an upright shop-​owning citizen  –​the dutiful moustache, the stiff white collar and the mind of an anarchist. He anticipates subtle forms of subversion embodied by Henry Holland (Alec Guinness), the minor Bank of England official and criminal mastermind of The Lavender Hill Mob (Charles Crichton 1951), seething with frustration in the oppressive small-​town atmosphere of ‘Fishbourne’. The well-​observed period setting does not negate Polly’s anger  –​‘a silly, beastly wheeze of a hole’  –​and the slapstick sequence of his botched arson attempt does not entirely leaven an atmosphere of despair. The marriage to Miriam (Betty Ann Davies) has become a purgatory for them both, and as is so often the case in British cinema of the 1940s and 1950s, the countryside provides a balm and a sense of refuge, with Polly starting a new life with ‘the plump woman’ (Megs Jenkins).

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40     Senior  leads But what is important for Polly is that his sense of security can only be achieved once he has assured himself of Miriam’s future, for an austere form of happiness in suburbia is as real to her as Henry’s role as the landlord of the Potwell Inn. In This Happy Breed, Mills’s Petty Officer Billy Mitchell ‘travels to France, that bastion of British cinematic decadence, to ‘return “Wicked Lady” Queenie to her conservative family so she can bear children for the national good’ (Williams 2000:  28). The coda of Mr. Polly had his ‘widow’ now running a successful tearoom and tacitly accepting, in the briefest of wordless encounters, her former husband’s apology. The picture judges neither. The film was not a box office success; its star believed that its lack of appeal was because ‘the public were not ready for it, disliked me in the character and did not besiege cinemas to see it’ (Mills 2001:  299). Mr.  Polly and Scott of the Antarctic were two of the first films of the 1940s where Mills played roles close to his own age, as opposed to a young man, but whereas in the latter he was an officer and a gentleman, in the former he was a small and almost crumpled-​looking suburbanite. Lockhart of the Tatler wrote that ‘British films really should abjure the immediate past until they can approach that period without that fatal facetiousness which robs Mr. Polly of his vital spark of quixotic romance’ (1949: 6). But, by his presenting the Everyman as near suicidal dreamer, Mills created a truly unusual character in the context of 1940s British cinema. His second and final picture as a producer was a screen adaption of D.  H. Lawrence’s story The Rocking Horse Winner (Anthony Pelissier 1949). Paul Grahame (John Howard Davies) ‘uses his second sight to rescue his parents; the painful part is that he lacks first sight –​the judgment that would enable him to see that they are already destroyed’ (Kael 1984: 30). Philip Hope-​Wallace was not enamoured of Mills’s ‘Mummerset accent, old-​young rustic deference, even a limp!’ (1950: 31), but the handyman Bassett was perhaps the only true father figure in an England where the upper-​middle classes could perhaps be seen as exploiting children to sustain their pretensions. By contrast with the ‘little men’ of Bassett and Polly, the beginning of the 1950s saw Mills essay his first role as a senior officer in a contemporary setting. In Morning Departure (Roy Ward Baker 1950) Lieutenant Commander Peter Armstrong is the captain of a peacetime submarine that is a hit by a mine, resulting in its twelve-​strong crew becoming trapped with escape equipment for only eight. Armstrong is a congenial member of the wardroom who is notably more efficient in his demeanour than his shore-​ based colleagues and an approachable senior officer who is also never entirely unconscious of his rank. Manny Farber marvelled how ‘these British actors live inside their characters as though they owed a debt to real life; their fiddling with pen-​knife, dice or soiled cards amount to more than just a move against a static script’

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John  Mills     41 (Farber and Polito 2009:  345). Raymond Durgnat somewhat waspishly bracketed Mills’s officers with the other ‘grown-​up boys, trusting, vulnerable, decently worried and ready aye ready’ (1970: 142), but the strain in maintaining a sense of suppressed aggression is evident in several of his roles. If Richard Attenborough’s Stoker Snipe is prone to hysterics, the submarine captain cannot allow himself such a lapse in conduct. Middle-​class authority figures dominated Mills’s screen career during the 1950s, and his last major crime film was The Long Memory (Robert Hamer 1952). After being falsely accused of murder and serving a ten-​ year prison sentence, the embittered and vulnerable Phillip Davidson takes refuge in the north Kent marshes on the Thames Estuary. His former lover Fay (Elizabeth Sellars), concealed vital evidence and she subsequently married Bob Lowther (John McCallum), a policeman on the case who is now a detective superintendent. Raymond Durgnat rather glibly described it as an example of British cinema’s ‘running man’ sub-​genre where ‘insofar as the “running man” is violent, he’s a cad, insofar as he’s basically decent, he’s a cadet’ (1970:  144). But it is a picture of almost unremitting bleakness, where the few figures who are concerned for Davidson –​the journalist Craig (Geoffrey Keen) and, increasingly, the superintendent  –​are at times almost apprehensive of Davidson’s visceral anger. Few British films of the 1950s contain such an air of paranoia –​‘Mr. Mills is watching his victims, a couple of reporters are watching the detectives, a spiv with a gun is watching the watchers’ (Lejeune 1953: 11) –​all framed against a riverside of debris and rotting buildings. The Kentish landscape  –​‘a place where there always seems to be lowering skies every day of the week, and everything in nature seems to be muted and dismayed’ (Dent 1953: 33) –​reflects Davidson’s mood. Phillip Kemp believed that the role called ‘for a cold, harsh venom that isn’t within the actor’s compass’ (2003:  78), but throughout the film Mills very successfully sustains a consistent note of seething rage. The reporter genuinely fears Davidson after cornering him in his lair and when Mills quizzes the slow-​witted waitress Alice (Vida Hope) for crucial evidence the actor glares at her ‘as though he’d cheerfully strangle her with her own apron strings’ (Sweet 2005:  244). It is only in the surroundings of the barges and the marshland huts that he finds genuine kindness and rehabilitation from Ilse (Eva Bergh), a European refugee. The setting of rotting barges may look like a vision of devastation, but compared with the genteel chintzy villa of the superintendent or the London docklands populated by serpentine wide boys (Harold Lang) it is a place of refuge –​one where the ultimately exonerated Davidson just wants to be ‘left alone’. After The Long Memory Mills’s roles tended to be on the right side of the law and three strands of profession –​the school teacher, the services

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42     Senior  leads officer and the police officer –​dominated his most popular films of the 1950s. The actor’s work in the war, police and comedy genres of the 1950s often contain trenchant observations on the pressure required in maintaining the guise or mask of the fatherly stiff upper lip. The first, It’s Great to Be Young! (Cyril Frankel 1956), was one of Britain’s first teenage films where Cecil Parker’s Frome is the new headmaster of Angel Hill Grammar and a lonely and outwardly austere figure in opposition to Mills’s popular music teacher Mr Dingle. Frome deplores jazz –​‘it ruins character’  –​and Ted Willis’s screenplay explicitly approves of the Ted Heath-​style crooning of the well-​scrubbed Angel Hill scholars. The tone of this ABPC production is a strange, but not unappealing, combination of a Hollywood ‘college musical’ with overtones of Nigel Molesworth. Mills is meant to be the embodiment of firm but humane authority although he seems a decade too old to play Dingle, and his faintly selfish, happy-​ go-​ lucky attitudes are ultimately less sympathetic than the stern but sincere Frome. As Gill Plain argues, ‘the film has worked hard to emphasise that the headmaster is a fair man with right on his side’ (2006: 223). Dingle, with the best of motives, has taken an evening job playing a pub piano to guarantee a loan agreement for the orchestra’s new instruments. Dingle’s impetuous actions have left him vulnerable to Eddie Byrne’s faintly vulpine music dealer agent and severely compromised his professionalism in both acting as guarantor and taking a pub job to pay for the instruments. When fellow staff member Routledge (John Salew) visits the public bar and spies Dingle playing the piano, Frome summons his music teacher. There he also encounters Bryan Forbes as a spiv-​like instrument salesman, and so the headmaster has no option but to dismiss Dingle. This results in school riots but ultimately the film sees Frome as an ultimately misunderstood figure, one who plans to resign due to his failure to inspire his students. It’s Great to Be Young! concludes with both versions of paternal wisdom united –​the liberal teacher and the caring conservative headmaster. The picture was released in 1956, the year that Christopher Booker perceived as bringing ‘a new wind of youthful hostility to every kind of established convention and traditional authority’ (1969: 33). But at Angel Hill Grammar School both masters are applauded by the jolly, welfare state-​fed youth, even if Alan Dent was one critic who almost succumbed to apoplexy: I am nauseated by the scene in which the pupils go on strike because the jazz-​maniac master is dismissed from the school … I am revolted by the cunning but utterly unconvincing pretence that this master who teaches the love of Beethoven as well as the love of be-​bop (or whatever those odious and hideous rites call themselves at the moment). (1956: 42)

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John  Mills     43 Alas, for Dent, It’s Great to Be Young! was in the Motion Picture Herald’s list of top ten box office attractions in the UK for 1956, as skiffle and rock and roll waited in the wings. The second genre is that of the war film. Mills portrayed commissioned Second World War officers in four pictures of the 1950s, commencing with Major Pat Reid in The Colditz Story (Guy Hamilton 1955). The commercial success of so many films in this genre echoes Graham Dawson’s observation that, ‘If masculinity has had a role in imagining the nation, then so too has the nation played its part in constituting preferred forms of masculinity’ (1994: 1).3 The Colditz Story was based on Reid’s memoirs and although Films and Filming described the dialogue and acting as matching the tone of the author’s ‘stiff-​upper-​lip public school account’ (Minchinton 1955: 20),4 the picture does encompass the inmates’ sense of fear. Reid’s book claimed that admittance to Colditz was a ‘qualifying or passing out test was the performance of at least one escape from any of the many “Preparatory School” camps’ (1952: 9–​10). Group discipline is the one way in which the men may finally come to obtain their freedom and with enough flexibility, unlike the regime of their captors, for each Allied officer to retain a sense of individuality. Richard Gordon and Robin Cartwright (Richard Wattis and Ian Carmichael) act as a Greek chorus, while Jimmy Winslow (Bryan Forbes) is staving off a nervous breakdown. Reid and the senior British officer Richmond (Eric Portman), must remain stoic. Only a few years separate The Colditz Story from Dunkirk (Leslie Norman 1958) and Ice Cold in Alex (J. Lee Thompson 1958), but the first entered production at a time when many Britons still looked back with pride on the country’s wartime achievements (Sandbrook 2005: 65). The latter two were shot post-​Suez Crisis: in the words of the diplomat, Sir Christopher Mallaby, ‘World War II vindicated our way of doing things. There was great and genuine pride in contrast to France’s defeat and Germany’s sin. It was only when people sensed the decline after Suez that there came a sense of shame’ (interviewed in Hennessy 2006: 458). With Dunkirk Mills essayed his last working-​class Second World War hero for British cinema and if the mood was not of shame, nor was it triumphant. Here the ‘professional’ John Holden (Richard Attenborough) and Charles Foreman (Bernard Lee) are civilians and the most resourceful character is Corporal Binns (Mills). The story concludes with the narrator stating, Harper and Porter (2003: 249) list seven war films as the top box office attractions of the 1950s. 4 Andy Medhurst describes the film as essentially ‘a Billy Bunter story where Mr. Quelch is a Nazi’ (1984: 35), a scenario that would have made for an interesting BBC Children’s Hour programme. 3

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44     Senior  leads ‘No longer were there fighting men and civilians, there were only people. A nation had been made whole.’ The overall tone is grim, and there are expressions of discontent at disorganisation  –​‘What a shambles we’ve made of this whole rotten business’, says Foreman at one point. Charles Barr described the mood as ‘a recognition that Ealing cannot recreate that spirit (of the People’s War) and that united community any longer’ (1998:  179), while Mills’s next war film, Ice Cold in Alex, is yet more ambivalent. The main protagonist, Captain Anson (Mills), is alcoholic and shell-​shocked, and as such is carried by both Sergeant Major Pugh (Harry Andrews) and a German spy disguised as an Afrikaans South African officer ‘Captain van der Poel’ (Anthony Quayle). The focus of Christopher Landon’s original story was Pugh, but ABPC used Mills’s name to sell the film. One of Monthly Film Bulletin’s more misguided reviews dismissed the production thus: ‘John Mills has little to do except play frayed nerves; Anthony Quayle is an incredibly jovial spy; Harry Andrews stoically buckles down to the part of the shrewd and kindly British “Tommy” ’ (Review 1958: 99). Peter Baker in Films and Filming was at his most magisterial in his judgements –​‘quite an impressive performance’ (1958: 24) –​which would seem to overlook Mills’s achievements in creating this lost and desperate individual. Nor can battle-​fatigue-​ induced alcoholism wholly explain Anson’s problems  –​the opening scene already hints at a sense of moral cowardice and irrationality with the leaving behind of his colleague Captain Crosbie (Richard Leech) and his attempts to defy the order of a military police officer (David Lodge) at a bombsite. In Scott of the Antarctic Mills’s eponymous hero was diligent in an expedition where the code is, as Charles Barr notes, one in which there is a reluctance to bring personal feelings to the surface (1998:  79), but Anson faces dissent from the group members who are seen to be justified in their mistrust of his skills. If a 1950s British war film provides a ‘safe space’ for resolving problems of masculinity (Geraghty 2000: 192), the Captain is often the most disruptive element in the group. During the journey across the desert, Anson is frequently hysterical and prone to making fatally rash decisions  –​he attempts to outrun a phalanx of German tanks and they open fire on the ambulance, killing Sister Denise Norton (Diane Clare). As the Panzer commander explains, they would not have done so had Anson followed the advice of his sergeant major and the ‘South African’. At the journey’s conclusion, the Captain does gradually recover his sense of professionalism, but never quite dispelling the impression of a weak, aggressive man who needs constant support; ‘tremulous, sulky, simpering and vulnerable’ (MacKillop and Sinyard 2000: 3). Even the conclusion is ambivalent as the final scene in Alexandria cannot entirely negate how the ‘protective shell of duty and conformity has cracked, and the terrifying

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John  Mills     45 “other” of emotional excess is demanding expression’ (Plain 2006:  161). The ice-​cold lager may be a reward, but this triumphal ending also has Anson falling back into his addiction (Sweet 2005: 244). His future –​with or without Sister Murdoch’s support –​is not a predictable one. The third strand of Mills’s film work during the 1950s is that of the senior CID officer and by the latter half of the decade, British cinema’s detectives, inspectors and superintendents often combined professional status with the demeanour of the ‘tough guy’. In Town on Trial from Columbia Pictures, adapted from the Francis Durbridge Sunday newspaper series The Nylon Murders, Mills’s Detective Superintendent Mike Halloran is the expert as an outsider, descending upon the stockbroker belt community of Oakley Park. It was a role that marked a considerable change in the actor’s image; Plain argues that ‘Guillermin extracts from Mills a performance that disrupts the parameters of his customary Englishness’ (2006: 156), and Halloran also marked a shift in the depiction of the professional as hero. Aggressive loneliness and sheer persistence motivate the detective and if the late 1950s marked the increased marginalisation of the ‘professional-​class’ protagonist then the superintendent is a scourge rather than a reassuring presence. The opening scene has Halloran’s voice-​over noting a statement by a suspect, as the camera passes over a deserted high street in the early hours of the morning –​the familiar becoming alien. Charles Coburn as John Fenner, a faintly unlikely Canadian émigré GP, and Barbara Bates as his niece Barbara, were imported from Hollywood and such casting added to an air of perceived displaced Americanism permeating Home Counties suburbia. With Town on Trial, the residents of this respectable middle-​ class community are keen to embrace a degree of conspicuous consumption; British snobbery in an uneasy but wholly plausible marriage to quasi-​American consumerism. In a negative mirror image to the jazz-​obsessed but always well-​scrubbed youth of Angel Hill Grammar School, the teenagers of Oakley Park get drunk at dances and crash pre-​war Pontiacs and seedy ex-​officers ogle the doomed Marilyn Monroe/​Diana Dors lookalike Molly Peters (Magda Miller) at the local tennis club. Aldgate and Richards note that in the 1950s ‘police inspectors and superintendents were drawn from the ranks of actors previously associated with officers and gentlemen’ (1999: 136). But the strange south London/​mid-​Atlantic accent that Mills adopts for Halloran is in keeping with the senior police officer as a British interpretation of a Hollywood film noir-​style detective. The Guardian highlighted Halloran’s tendency to ‘ “grill” suspects in the manner of the late great Humphrey Bogart’ and ‘for once to find the hunter as interesting as the hunted makes a pleasant change’ (Manchester Cinemas: 1957: 5). There are no traces of Lieutenant Taylor or Mr Dingle, as the superintendent is an angry and deeply flawed individual, haunted by the memory of his

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46     Senior  leads family killed in the Blitz. Matthew Sweet contends that Mills’s forte was in portraying ‘the men who stayed behind or who ran away’ (2005: 244), and during the war Halloran was a police officer in London rather than in the forces. Although now of a senior rank, he clings, almost manically, to his roots, announcing his lack of an old school tie with defiance and regarding the ‘Oakley Park’ of chintzy villas and Establishment vowels with envy and disdain in equal measure. Alan Dent, who was probably now recoiling from the sounds of Bill Haley and the Comets, complained that Mills ‘is most persuasive when he is not bullying his suspects in a way that we don’t like to think of [as] English at all’ (1957: 32). But Halloran’s attitudes are very recognisable as they’re strongly redolent of lower-​middle-​class scholarship-​educated resentment. Shipman believed that Mills ‘never seemed at ease except (figuratively speaking) in the officers’ mess’ (1989: 388), but in Town on Trial, his superintendent seethes with envy of those who seem to ‘belong’. When Halloran first arrives in Oakley Park, the town’s Inspector Hughes (John Warwick) regards him with some awe, but in the final reel, the visiting superintendent is addressed, with mild contempt, by his surname. Gill Plain argues that the superintendent ‘becomes a conduit through which “true” values are preserved or restored after their abuse by the careless and irresponsible governing classes’ (2006: 169), but what is notable is the enjoyment Halloran derives from stirring up the community. Eleven years after the end of hostilities, Mike regards the town as one that needs ‘waking up’, delighting in allowing Barbara to sound the bell on his official Wolseley and in exposing the war record of Wing Commander Mark Roper (Derek Farr) as fraudulent. ‘The outside world, the dangerous world, is shut away:  its sounds are muffled’, wrote Lindsay Anderson of late 1950s English life, but here the menace is behind the ‘cretonne curtains’ (1957: 14). Halloran may almost bask in his self-​appointed role as the tormentor and judge of the pseudo-​respectable, but he is not a bastion of stability. The final reel arrest is undeniably dramatic, but the risk he takes in cornering the mentally disturbed suspect Peter Crowley (Alec McCowen) could easily have proved disastrous for both parties. The later 1950s saw Mills appear in a variety of pictures, from Disney’s The Swiss Family Robinson (Ken Annakin) to The Singer Not the Song (Roy Ward Baker 1960).5 It was a brace of domestic films released in the early 1960s that marked a virtual conclusion to the two major aspects of Mills’s image forged during the Second World War –​the contentious officer and the loyal rating. As we have seen, Mills’s screen persona of the 1950s, as 5

A picture that conclusively demonstrated that Mills should never be allowed to attempt an Irish accent. However, any Rank version of a Western co-​starring Dirk Bogarde clad (and acting) à la Patricia Laffan in Devil Girl from Mars (David MacDonald 1954) was unlikely to be a major critical and commercial success.

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John  Mills     47 established by Morning Departure, was often one of self-​contained professionalism, but as displayed in Ice Cold in Alex and Town on Trial the actor was equally adroit at ‘showing what happens when that self-​control is pushed to breaking point’ (Richards 1997:  132). This was displayed to stunning effect in Tunes of Glory, a screenplay by James Kennaway from his novel of the same name. The setting is an army barracks in 1948 where the up-​from-​the-​ranks Major Jock Sinclair (Alec Guinness) seeks to undermine the new English-​born commanding officer, Lieutenant Colonel Barrow (Mills), the product of Oxford and Sandhurst. The colour cinematography of Tunes of Glory only highlights the utter hell facing Barrow. The peacetime officers’s mess is a form of imprisonment. The regiment may indeed have a glorious past but now Sinclair and his supporters, especially Richard Leech’s rude and loutish Captain Rattray, behave as long-​term institutional inmates.6 A lack of flashbacks to the Second World War intensifies the claustrophobia of drill, mess and endless military ritual; Durgnat points out how Tunes of Glory ‘catches something of the old-​womanness of army life’ (1970: 113). Both men are the professional officers celebrated by 1950s British cinema but for all their heroism –​Sinclair at El Alamein and Barrow as a POW of the Japanese –​they each convey a ‘sense of arrested development. They are men who, at their core, have remained either “old boys” (a recurrent refrain) or “toy soldiers” ’ (Sinyard 2005:  120). Barrow’s mental equilibrium is so damaged by his wartime experiences when the Japanese tortured him that he is unable to exercise authority and Sinclair’s qualities that made him such a viable leader in times of war –​the rebel granted patriotic licence –​now make him a distinct liability. Our first sighting of Lieutenant Colonel Basil Barrow is of an immaculately presented figure who speaks in the clipped commanding tones of Major Pat Reid or Lieutenant Commander Peter Armstrong. Integral to Barrow’s realisation of his ideas is the shaping of the barrack’s standards in his own image. Neame continually highlights just how isolated the new colonel is from the regiment –​‘Barrow is repeatedly placed on the margins, framed in doorways, seated away from the crowd, or excluded from the group, Guinness is always centre stage’ (Plain 2006: 177). Sinclair is a former boy soldier who has been institutionalised since adolescence and is now a toxic blend of a playground bully and veiled insecurity, forever playing to the gallery. ‘From Oxford? Fancy that!’ he mocks of the new commanding officer. Mills won a Best Actor Award at the Venice 6

This in itself was often a theme with 1950s and early 1960s British cinema, in both service and civilian narratives –​the ex-​officers’s club in The Ship That Died of Shame (Basil Dearden 1955), the lorry drivers’ café in Hell Drivers (Cy Endfield 1957), the teachers’ staff rooms of Spare the Rod (Leslie Norman 1961) and Term of Trial (Peter Glenville 1962). The common image is one of stultifying inertia.

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48     Senior  leads Film Festival, and Richard Whitehall thought that he deserved such an accolade for his portrayal of

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a proper bastard but, ultimately, as layer and layer of his protective covering is peeled away we reach the terrible sickness and loneliness at the heart of a man who has been stunted by an embarrassment of clichés, words like ‘honour’ and ‘duty’ have been drummed into him since early youth and the result is a loveless martinet. (1960: 30)

From this perspective, Barrow is less a martinet and more a senior officer who, unlike Sinclair, will not court easy popularity. To establish his regime both within the barracks and the wider community he arranges a cocktail party for the local grandees, but Jock incites his cronies to ruin the event with calculatedly appalling behaviour. At the event Mills’s short stature and rigid body language creates a figure not so much in command but akin to a nervous department store floorwalker as he negotiates his guests. The result of Jock’s display is the Colonel’s public breakdown:  ‘The camera closes in on him as the noise swells, and his anger rises as if before them is his worst nightmare, hands clenched so tightly you feel they could break glass’ (Sinyard 2005: 115). Over the previous twenty years, Mills was a master at representing those middle-​class professionals who barely manage to restrain their feelings but now, even more than in Ice Cold in Alex, the dam has burst. After this utterly humiliating outburst in front of his men and the local grandees, he flees in a jeep, accompanied by his genuinely concerned adjutant Captain Cairns (Gordon Jackson). It is then that we learn how Barrow’s dream of finally taking command of the regiment helped to sustain him during his time as a POW at the hands of the Japanese. Terence Kelly thought the Colonel’s ‘loss of self-​confidence is never really built up’ (1960–​61: 37), but it is there from the outset, with Mills’s overly rigid body language and clipped diction as he introduces himself to the Mess. After the debacle in front of the local civilian community, Barrow tells Cairns  –​the only officer sympathetic to both the Colonel and Jock  –​ ‘When you’re dying, when you really believe you’re dying’. Mills so often excelled at those quiet moments when the mask of sangfroid shattered and when the adjutant reassures him, ‘You survived; you’re here to tell the tale’, Barrow replies, ‘Who said I  survived?’ No amount of drilling, the practice of reels and elaborate dinners can compensate for Barrow’s increasing despair as he attempts to preside over an officers’s mess dominated by Major Sinclair. The Guardian review saw Barrow as emotionally scarred by his wartime experiences and ‘altogether incapable of warmth of feeling’ (At the Cinemas 1961: 23), but part of his tragedy is that Jock further exploits the Colonel’s gestures of kindness. Sinclair hits Corporal Fraser (John Fraser), who is dating his daughter Morag (Susannah York), an offence

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John  Mills     49 that merits a court martial, but Barrow, for the sake of the regiment and out of a genuine sense of fair play, ultimately decides to deal with the matter internally. The result is that Sinclair informs his cronies of Barrow’s ‘weakness’, and Major Charlie Scott (Dennis Price at his most serpentine) conveys the news of this betrayal of trust. Earlier in the picture, the Colonel confided to his adjutant that ‘ridicule is always the finish’ and his suicide is as much the result of ostracism by his ‘family’ as his wartime experiences. Durgnat perceives Jock’s decision to award his former foe a ceremonial funeral as Sinclair finally assenting to ‘the aristocratic tradition’ (1970:  113) but the film concludes with the former band boy suffering a nervous breakdown. The officers and NCOs regard the plans with increasing unease and our final sighting of Jock is his being led away by Jimmy Cairns (Gordon Jackson is magnificent throughout the film) and the self-​possessed and self-​interested Scott. Neil Sinyard makes the fascinating argument that ‘Sinclair compels Barrow to fatally confront his own weaknesses’ (2005:  120), which is not a lack of moral or physical courage but a desperate human need to be liked and respected. But Jock is equally vulnerable, his craving of acceptance taking a diametrically opposite form of a self-​conscious use of vulgar language. Sinclair’s form of ‘self-​control’ was his flamboyant act to the gallery –​but now he has run out of lines. A year later, Flame in the Streets (Roy Ward Baker 1961) features Mills as the trade union leader ‘Jacko’ Palmer, dealing with a professional and home life where the standard conventions seem to be of increasingly less value. It would not be overly fanciful to suggest that Palmer might well be ‘Shorty’ Blake twenty years on, a shop steward urging the ‘troops’, except here the rallying to the cause fades in the face of a world that he no longer comprehends. Jacko urges his colleagues to accept the promotion of the West Indian Gabriel Gomez (Earl Cameron) to foreman. When his schoolteacher daughter Kathie starts a relationship with her Jamaican colleague Peter Lincoln (Johnny Sekka), it results in the collapse of his home life. The Monthly Film Bulletin was at its most curmudgeonly when it stated that Brenda de Banzie as Jacko’s wife Nell was a ‘self-​indulgent performance … (all tearful close-​ups and hysteria)’ (Review 1961: 91) –​ a remarkable misjudgement of a performance that is terrifying in its anger. Nell’s sheer vitriol has the sense of a dam bursting, attacking her daughter for her choice of boyfriend and then her husband for his alleged personal and sexual inadequacies. ‘John Mills and Brenda de Banzie especially are so good in their set pieces that here any lack of superficial verisimilitude is of little importance’, opined Durgnat (1961: 29). In The October Man, one of the dominant images is of the close-​ups of Mills’s anguished face, and here Baker focuses on Jacko’s uncomprehending despair amid his wife’s diatribe about his inadequacies as a husband and a

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50     Senior  leads man. John Hill refers to how post-​war British ‘social problem’ film would reintegrate the troubling elements into the community (1986: 124–​5) and indeed the final reel of the community reuniting to defeat a gang of Teddy boys7 is formulaic British cinema. But reconciliation is not complete for the Palmers (Mayer 2004: 10), for how could it be? The 1940s figure of the good working-​class/​lower-​middle-​class husband has now been deprived of the reassurance of his past illusions –​of the comradeship of those at work and, worse, of a happy marriage. After Tunes of Glory and Flame in the Streets, it was as though some of the angst in Mills had been dissipated into bemusement, stoicism or even fear. Gill Plain notes how ‘the belated ageing’ (2006: 21) of his face displaced him from leading-​man roles, but late middle age rather became the actor. As we have seen in Town on Trial and Tunes of Glory, Mills’s characters were so often alert of the possibility of social humiliation, and in Tiara Tahiti, his self-​made businessman continually labours under the weight of upper-​class disdain. Bosley Crowther groused that finding Mason and Mills in the picture was ‘like coming upon two college professors doing the hula at a campus wingding in grass skirts’ (1963: n.p.), but amidst the overseas locations and some very odd casting, there is an acute sense of social awareness. Clifford Southey has followed the path of many a dutiful scholarship boy; he has even ‘remade his voice, mugged up on wines and become a colonel in the army’ (Gilliatt 1962: 21). There is a beautifully timed early scene of Southey painfully holding forth to his junior officers as he audibly struggles to keep his suburban vowels in check. But for all his efforts to become a ‘gentleman’, Southey still finds himself despised by his public-​school rival Brett Aimsley (James Mason). Mills’s transformation to leading character actor was confirmed by his insecure north-​country head of the house Ezra Fitton in The Family Way (Roy Boulting 1966). He is in his fifties but likes to deport himself in the manner of an older Mr Polly. Mills gives Fitton a slightly hesitant quality, as though he is constantly playing the role of stern father for an audience of himself. He ostensibly believes in ‘traditional’ masculine virtues, but the reality is a fear of ageing and, worse, not being ‘normal’. Ezra sees that his position within the community is undermined by his son Arthur’s (Hywel Bennett) failure to consummate his marriage to Jenny (Hayley Mills). This stirs his deepest fears, ones he can barely articulate, for Fitton was so close to his childhood friend Billy that he even took him on honeymoon with him. Gill Plain argues that the Boultings had queered the English Everyman on his own territory (2006: 196) and Mills resists all temptations to indulge in cold J. B. Priestley mannerisms. Fitton is a supposedly bluff Northerner but as with Flame in the Streets, this is a film 7

That favourite folk devil of post-​war British cinema.

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John  Mills     51 concerned with the sheer pain of realising that the bedrocks of happy memory were probably illusions. Billy may well be Arthur’s true father, but Ezra is at least willing to accept a relationship with the real man –​not an idealised offspring. Mills directed Sky West and Crooked in 1965, an ambitious drama set in an idyllic Gloucester village rife with internal divisions. The sense of inchoate unease in an apparently secure community was emphasised by strong performances from Hayley Mills, Ian McShane and especially Annette Crosbie. ‘The film has its clichés and plays on emotional jolts … but it works’ was the not unfair assessment of Robin Bean (1966: 58). On-​screen, Mills’s Colonel in King Rat (Bryan Forbes 1965) was a senior officer prepared to tolerate the resident spiv Corporal King (George Segal) for the stability of the community. The role was a further illustration of Mills’s gift for understatement, as with his miserly farmer in Dulcima (Frank Nesbitt 1971), depicted as a West Country Albert Steptoe. Ironically, he won an Oscar for Best Supporting Actor in 1971, not for the underplaying that had become his forte but for his depiction of Michael the ‘village idiot’ in Ryan’s Daughter (David Lean 1970). Nigel Andrews regarded the performance as having ‘all the strength and pathos of a Dickens grotesque’ (1971: 13), but from a modern-​day perspective, it appears to be a case of overt ‘acting’ of a very predictable variety. It would not be unfair to suggest that Michael suffered for the same complaint that afflicted Mills’s earlier comedy performances in It’s Great to Be Young! and The Baby and the Battleship (Jay Lewis 1956); a tendency to forget that less is often more. Mills was knighted in 1976 and passed away in 2005, two years after his final major feature film Bright Young Things (Stephen Fry 2003). In his latter-​day career, the actor specialised in elder statesmen roles such as the Viceroy Baron Chelmsford in Gandhi (Richard Attenborough 1982), but on television his Professor Bernard Quatermass in The Quatermass Conclusion (Piers Haggard 1979) represented some of the actor’s most interesting later screen work. Nigel Kneale perceived Mills as lacking ‘the authority for Quatermass’ (quoted in Murray 2006: 139), but the sad, crumpled scientist facing the disintegration of social codes is a reminder of how the actor was at his best in minor key roles. This was also beautifully illustrated in what was arguably his last major film performance –​ When the Wind Blows (Jimmy T. Murakami 1986), a full-​length animated version of Raymond Briggs’s 1982 graphic novel. As the Third World War looms the elderly Jim and Hilda Bloggs (Mills and Peggy Ashcroft) read the official Protect and Survive booklets, build a shelter in their cottage and, after the bomb falls, hoping against hope that the modern-​day equivalent of the men in the ARP helmets will come to their rescue. Jim, elderly, frail and still believing in the government’s propaganda, could have been one of the dutiful householders in the Home Office’s

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52     Senior  leads UK Civil Defence (Nicholas Alwyn 1964)  series of short films. Any of the neatly dressed Britons awaiting the promised double-​decker buses that will take them to safety in the aftermath of the bomb could have been Jim or Ethel. The Bloggs’ home is one that is familiar to anyone who experienced rural English life during the 1980s –​a neatly kept bungalow furnished with carefully maintained goods from the 1950s and 1960s. Their life is ‘one of plates of sausages and chips, radio plays and proudly tended cabbage patches. Working class, gentle and devoted to each other, the retired couple also naively believe in the wisdom of the powers-​that-​ be’ (Mitchell 2018: n.p.). To quote Angus Calder once more, without the ungrudging support of the likes of the Bloggs, ‘morale might be in danger’ (1992: 18). Briggs’s work had been previously adapted as a Radio 4 play (John Tydeman 1983)  with Peter Sallis as Jim, but the cinema version creates an indelible memory of the voice of John Mills, cinema’s ‘Shorty’ Blake, now cajoling his wife that ‘ours is not to reason why’ in the face of a nuclear holocaust. In 1955 Roger Manvell asked, ‘Who could be more British than Mills?’ (1955: 84).8 The actor’s obituary in the Daily Telegraph cited him as ‘the epitome of the most admirable kind of Englishman –​restrained, determined, honourable, good-​humoured and capable of suffering on a heroic scale under fire’ (2005: n.p.). But to recall John Mills solely in terms of such character traits is to do a disservice to a thoughtful and often subtle portrayer of flawed and very human British masculinity. Bibliography Aldgate, Anthony (1995), Censorship and the Permissive Society: British Cinema & Theatre 1955–​1965, Oxford: Clarendon Press. Aldgate, Anthony and Richards, Jeffrey (1999), Best of British; Cinema and Society from 1930 to Present, London: I. B. Tauris. Anderson, Lindsay (1957), ‘Get Out and Push!’ Encounter, November, 14–​22. Andrews, Nigel (1971), ‘Ryan’s Daughter’, Monthly Film Bulletin, 38(444), January,  12–​13. At the Cinemas (1961), ‘Fine Acting Brings Distinction to “Tunes of Glory!”’ The Guardian, 26 January, 23. Baker, Peter (1958), ‘Ice Cold in Alex’, Films and Filming, August, 24. Barr, Charles (ed.) (1986), All Our Yesterdays:  90 Years of British Cinema, London: BFI. Barr, Charles (1998), Ealing Studios (3rd ed.), London: Continuum. Bean, Robin (1966), ‘Sky West and Crooked’, Films and Filming, March, 58. Booker, Christopher (1969), The Neophiliacs:  Revolution in English Life in the Fifties and Sixties. London: Collins.

8

Together with Laurence Olivier and Michael Redgrave.

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John  Mills     53 Calder, Angus (1992), The People’s War: Britain 1939–​1945 (2nd ed.), London: Pimlico. Crowther, Bosley (1963), ‘Screen:  “Tiara Tahiti”:  John Mills and James Mason Star in Farce’, New York Times, 6 November. Daily Telegraph (2005), ‘Obituary: John Mills’, 25 April. Dawson, Graham (1994), Soldier Heroes:  British Adventure, Empire and the Imagining of Masculinities, London: Routledge. Dent, Alan (1953), ‘The World of the Cinema: Manna in the Potteries’, Illustrated London News, 7 February, 33. Dent, Alan (1956), ‘The World of the Cinema; British Made’, Illustrated London News, 16 June, 42. Dent, Alan (1957), ‘The World of the Cinema:  Sound and Hollow’, Illustrated London News, 9 February, 32 Dixon, Wheeler Winston (ed.) (1994), Re-​ Viewing British Cinema 1900–​ 1992: Essays & Interviews, Albany: State University of New York Press. Durgnat, Raymond (1961), ‘Flame in the Streets’, Films and Filming, July, 29. Durgnat, Raymond (1970), A Mirror for England: British Movies from Austerity to Affluence, London: Faber & Faber. Farber, Manny and Polito, Robert (ed.) (2009), Farber on Film: The Complete Film Writings of Manny Farber, New York: Library of America. Geraghty, Christine (2000), British Cinema in the Fifties: Gender, Genre and the ‘New Look’, London: Routledge. Gilliatt, Penelope (1962), ‘Tiara Tahiti’, The Observer, 15 July, 21. Gilliatt, Penelope (1966), ‘The Family Way’, The Observer, 18 December, 20. Gough-​Yates, Kevin (1965), ‘The Hero’, Films and Filming, December, 11–​16. Harper, Sue and Porter, Vincent (2003), British Cinema of the 1950s: The Decline of Deference, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hennessy, Peter (2006), Having It So Good:  Britain in the 1950s, London: Penguin Books. Hill, Derek (1955), ‘Above Us the Waves’, Films and Filming, May, 18. Hill, John (1986), Sex, Class & Realism: British Cinema 1956–​1963, London: BFI. Hipkins, Danielle and Plain, Gill (eds.) (2007), War-​Torn Tales: Literature, Film and Gender in the Aftermath of World War II, Oxford: Peter Lang. Hope-​Wallace, Philip (1950), ‘Acting’, Sight & Sound, March, 30–​1. Hope-​Wallace, Philip (1955), ‘Hobson’s Choice’, Sight & Sound, Spring, 198. Hutchings, Peter (2001), ‘Beyond the New Wave:  Realism in British Cinema, 1959–​ 63’, in Murphy, Robert (ed.) The British Cinema Book (2nd ed.), London: BFI. Kael, Pauline (1984), ‘The Rocking Horse Winner’, New Yorker, 60(5), 30. Kemp, Phillip (2003), ‘The Long Shadow:  Robert Hamer After Ealing’, in MacKillop, Ian and Sinyard, Neil (eds.) British Cinema in the 1950s:  A Celebration, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Kelly, Terence (1960–​61) Review: “Tunes of Glory”, Sight & Sound, Winter, 37. Lejeune, C. A. (1953), ‘The Long Memory’, The Observer, 25 January, 11. Lockhart, Freda Bruce (1947), ‘At the Pictures: Autumn Renaissance’, The Tatler, 17 September, 8. Lockhart, Freda Bruce (1949), ‘At the Pictures: Respite from Crime’, The Tatler, 23 February, 6.

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54     Senior  leads MacKillop, Ian and Sinyard, Neil (eds.) (2003), British Cinema in the 1950s:  A Celebration. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Macnab, Geoffrey (2000), Searching for Stars:  Stardom and Screen Acting in British Cinema, London: Continuum. Manchester Cinemas (1957), ‘Britain Learns from Hollywood’, The Guardian, 5 February, 5. Manvell, Roger (1955), The Film and the Public, London: Penguin Books. Mayer, Geoff (2004), Roy Ward Baker:  British Film Makers, Manchester: Manchester University Press. McFarlane, Brian (1997), An Autobiography of British Cinema, London: Methuen. McFarlane, Brian (1998), ‘Losing the Peace’, in Barta, Tony (ed.) Screening the Past: Film and the Representation of History, Westport, CT: Praeger. McFarlane, Brian (ed.) (2005), The Cinema of Britain and Ireland, London: Wallflower Press. Medhurst, Andy (1984), ‘1950s War Films’ in Hurd Geoff (ed.) National Fictions: World War Two in British Films & Television, London: BFI. Mills, John (2001), Up in the Clouds, Gentleman Please, London:  Ticknor & Fields. Minchinton, John (1955), ‘The Colditz Story’, Films and Filming, March, 20. Mitchell, Neil (2018), ‘Why Apocalyptic Animation “When the Wind Blows” Is Still Devastating’, Sight & Sound, 23 January. Available at www.bfi.org.uk/​ news-​opinion/​news-​bfi/​features/​when-​wind-​blows-​raymond-​briggs-​jimmy-​ murakami (accessed 7 December 2018). Murphy, Robert (1992), Sixties British Cinema, London: BFI. Murphy, Robert (2000), British Cinema and the Second World War, London: Continuum. Murphy, Robert (ed.) (2001), The British Cinema Book (2nd ed.), London: BFI. Murphy, Robert (2005), ‘The Long Memory’, in McFarlane, Brian (ed.) The Cinema of Britain and Ireland, London: Wallflower Press. Murray, Andy (2006), Into the Unknown:  The Fantastic Life of Nigel Kneale, London: Headpress. Orwell, George and Davison, Peter (ed.) (1986), The Complete Works of George Orwell: Volume 16 –​I Have Tried To Tell the Truth 1943–​1944, London: Secker & Warburg. Plain, Gill (2006), John Mills and British Cinema:  Masculinity, Identity and Nation, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Quigly, Isabel (1961), ‘Flame in the Streets’, The Spectator, 30 June. Rattigan, Neil (1994), ‘ “The Demi-​Paradise” and Images of Class in British Wartime Films in Dixon, Wheeler Winston (ed.) Re-​Viewing British Cinema 1900–​1992 Essays & Interviews. Albany: State University of New York Press. Reid, P. R. (1952). The Colditz Story, London: Hodder & Stoughton. Review (1945), ‘The Way to the Stars’, Monthly Film Bulletin, 12(138), 30 June, 70. Review (1958), ‘Ice Cold in Alex’, Monthly Film Bulletin, 25(295), August, 99. Review (1961), ‘Flame in the Streets’, Monthly Film Bulletin, 28(330), July, 91. Richards, Jeffrey (1997), Films and British National Identity:  From Dickens to ‘Dad’s Army’, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Ryall, Tom (2005), Anthony Asquith: British Film Makers, Manchester: Manchester University Press.

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John  Mills     55 Sandbrook, Dominic (2005), Never Had It So Good:  A History of Britain from Suez to the Beatles, London: Abacus. Shipman, David (1989), The Great Movie Stars 2:  The International Years, London: Warner Books. Sinyard, Neil (2005), ‘Tunes of Glory’, in McFarlane Brian (ed.) The Cinema of Britain and Ireland. London: Wallflower Press. Spicer, Andrew (2003), Typical Men:  The Representation of Masculinity in Popular British Cinema, London: I. B. Tauris. Spicer, Andrew (2007), ‘Echoes of War:  Tunes of Glory and the Demise of the Officer Class in British Cinema’, in Hipkins, Danielle and Plain, Gill (eds.) War-​ Torn Tales:  Literature, Film and Gender in the Aftermath of World War II, Oxford: Peter Lang. Sweet, Matthew (2005), Shepperton Babylon: The Lost Worlds of British Cinema, London: Faber & Faber. ‘Urtica’ (1950), ‘Candid Cameo: John Mills’, The Sketch, 16. Weeks, Jeffrey (1981), Sex, Politics & Society: The Regulation of Sexuality Since 1800, Longman: London. Whitehall, Richard (1960), ‘Tunes of Glory’, Films and Filming, December, 30. Williams, Melanie (2014), David Lean, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Williams, Tony (2000), Structures of Desire:  British Cinema, 1939–​ 1955, New York: New York Press.

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Kenneth More: Hawling like a brooligan

An expert light comedian of considerable dramatic range, More was born in Buckinghamshire on 20 September 1914 and commenced his theatrical career in 1935. He served as a navy officer during the Second World War and at the age of thirty-​nine achieved cinematic stardom with Genevieve (Henry Cornelius 1953). More was awarded the CBE in 1970 and died from Parkinson’s disease on 12 July 1982. If Norman Wisdom was ‘the gump’, then Kenneth More was, on the surface at least, ‘the chap’. The critic Peter Brinson believed that ‘with his eccentricities, his multi-​coloured waistcoats, his irrepressible sense of humour, his honesty and sincerity he is almost a symbol of everything we like to think of as English’ (1955: 3). More’s popular image was the virtual cinematic incarnation of middle-​class decency –​the sort of fellow who proved pervasive throughout much of popular culture during the 1950s. In West End comedies, they would not actually enquire ‘anyone for tennis’, but they would say ‘gosh’ regularly, and the pages of John Bull or Picture Post would contain stylised drawings of blazered fellows advertising MG motor cars and insurance policies alike. More was not a conventional matinee idol, being fairly short of stature and stocky of build. He turned down the chance of starring in David Lean’s adaptation of The Wind Cannot Read because he was unsure if the public would accept him in as a romantic lead (More 1978: 223). By that time his image as a ‘chap among chaps’ was assured, a reliable sort with a more youthful persona than Jack Hawkins but more solid than the barely suppressed nerves of John Mills. Shortly after More’s death, the Guardian stated that he made ‘rather wooden but chirpily decent Englishmen into almost an art form’ (Barker 1982: 1). Clive James made the more scathing observation of More’s performing style, as having an apparently unshakeable conviction ‘that the expletive “Ha-​ha!” delivered straight to camera conveys mirth’ (2017: 60). The actor himself was aware that ‘the character 56

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Kenneth  More     57

Figure 3  Kenneth More in Sink the Bismarck! (1960)

with the woodpecker laugh comes very easily to him; and because he is a creative actor he does not want to keep playing it’ (Alison 1954: 5). Lewis Gilbert, who directed the actor in three pictures, said of More: ‘What he could do, he did very well. His strengths were his ability to portray charm; basically, he was the officer returning from the war, and he was superb in that kind of role. The minute that kind of role went out of existence, he began to go down as a box office star’ (quoted in McFarlane 1997: 222). If one thinks of British 1950s cinematic male leads as describing a spectrum, the saturnine Nigel Patrick or Dennis Price will occupy one end, revelling in their bow ties and their black-​market gin and tonics. Their diametric opposite is the upright Anthony Steel, while More ploughed a furrow in the centre; raffish yet dependable. But Margaret Hinxman of Picturegoer saw him as ‘one of those rare personalities, “an actor’s actor” ’ (1956: 15) and after seeing Terence Rattigan’s The Deep Blue Sea onstage, Kenneth Tynan declared that ‘Kenneth More is our best answer to Marlon Brando so far’ (Tynan and Tynan 1994: 67). Several years later, the actor was also offered –​but turned down –​the role of Claudius by Peter Hall (MacKillop and Sinyard 2003: 10). One of the keys to More’s success was an immaculate sense of comic timing. A Films and Filming review of Next to No Time (Henry Cornelius 1958)  thought that More gave ‘the untidy script such a tough and reassuring centre that without him I shudder to think what might have

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58     Senior  leads been left’ (Dyer 1958: 21). C. A. Lejeune went so far as to refer to the actor as ‘perhaps the best ambassador that England has had, since Chaplin, on the screen’ (1958: 14). When playing a commissioned officer, More had a genial and approachable manner, but his jovial expression could develop a flint-​like gaze if his authority were crossed while in civilian life, amiable hectoring could imperceptibly shade into bullying. More reflected in 1969 that he frequently played men with a ‘little-​boy’ quality and that ‘if you have that little twist of helplessness, vulnerability, those are the people I want to get to know, and that’s the quality I try to get into my work’ (quoted in De’Ath 1969: 21). That air of joie de vivre could descend into criminality, and at times there were moments when his characters seemed to be waiting for the moment when the curtain could at last fall on their carefully patented routine of joshing. The actor’s climb to cinematic success was a long one. He began his theatrical career at the age of twenty-​one initially as a stagehand at the Windmill Theatre and then as a bit actor onstage. He also appeared as a walk-​on in the Gracie Fields vehicle Look Up and Laugh (Basil Dean 1935), but war service interrupted More’s career until 1946. In that year, he made his West End stage debut, but his lack of career progression led him to seriously consider an offer to rejoin the navy at the elevated rank of lieutenant commander (More 1978: 45). Towards the end of the 1940s, his cinematic supporting roles began to improve, and he played Lieutenant ‘Teddy’ Evans in Scott of the Antarctic. Of somewhat greater interest is More’s blackmailer in the minor budget thriller Man on the Run (Lawrence Huntington 1949). The screen time of Corporal Newman is limited, but in those few minutes More could evoke a sense of cheap menace, softly suffixing his demands for funds from the hero (Derek Farr) with a mocking ‘old boy’. In 1950 More was cast by Bernard Miles for the juvenile lead role of Adam Watson in Chance of a Lifetime. In an agricultural factory somewhere in the Fens, relations between the owner Dickinson (Basil Radford) and the workforce is on the verge of complete deterioration. At one fraught meeting, the industrialist suggests that the shop-​floor workers take on his role for a period, an offer that the charge hands George Stevens (Miles) and Ted Morris (Julien Mitchell) take seriously. Inevitably the new management runs into difficulties, and when currency restrictions lead to the cancellation of a vital new order, Stevens and his team are obliged to call on Dickinson for his advice and experience. The film may conclude on a note of mutual respect, but there is no return for Bland (John Harvey), the expert works manager who is terrible at dealing with human beings. He soon departs the new regime, fulminating about ‘half-​baked bolshies’ and Bland is succeeded by the younger, more flexible and far less self-​consciously hierarchical Watson. The former keeps his distance –​a saloon bar Malvolio clad in a boldly

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Kenneth  More     59 striped suit  –​while the younger engineer is on first name terms with almost everyone. The conclusion has Dickinson invited to return to the plant only for him to promote Watson to managing director, the owner now content to take an advisory role, suggesting that ‘there was a class of eager young professionals ready to make their mark in British society’ (Stead: 2013: 161). Adam is demonstrably good at his job –​at one point, we see him explaining the intricacies of the new plough –​but he is also sympathetic towards the management’s problems; as with Dickinson he at least tries to understand the awkward and isolated Brand. It is this combination of integrity and professional talents that has earned him his new position, for Watson is more than willing to take advice from a paternal employer. Miles shot a Chance of a Lifetime on location in Cambridgeshire, and this lack of a studio-​bound narrative was matched by performances that Monthly Film Bulletin found were played ‘with a joyous lack of staginess’ (Review 1950: 43). Stead believes that More gave the picture’s most convincing performance (2013: 161), but Radford’s tired and emotional employer is a figure of some complexity. When Dickinson is haranguing the workforce he regards as idle and ungrateful there is a close-​up of a deep scar on his cheek, a possible legacy of the Great War. With Adam Watson, he has found a worthy professional heir who appreciates the necessity for duty. After Chance of a Lifetime, More’s cinematic supporting roles improved –​he was a genially menacing MI5 agent in The Clouded Yellow (Ralph Thomas 1950) and a pacifist in Appointment with Venus (Thomas 1951). In the very early 1950s, his theatrical career was of greater importance than his film work; in 1952 More was the original Freddie Page in Terence Rattigan’s The Deep Blue Sea. It was a role that he regarded as ‘the most certain, cast-​iron part I had ever been offered in my life’ (1959: 123). On-​screen, a second lead as the gentleman-​smuggler Tony Rackham in the Group 3 comedy Brandy for the Parson (John Eldridge 1952) was an early anticipation of his relaxed approach to comedy. More’s stage performance in The Deep Blue Sea was appreciated by Henry Cornelius (More: 1959: 128) who cast him as the second male lead in Genevieve, a comedy about two rival, veteran car owners staging an unofficial race on their return from the London–​Brighton rally. Michael Balcon had spurned the project, and although the Rank Organisation eventually agreed to back the project, significant budgetary considerations shaped the casting. ‘Kenneth More knew the producers had wanted Guy Middleton for his part, and John Gregson was fully aware that Dirk Bogarde had been first choice for his’ (Golden 2013: 59). In the event, the central quartet  –​Gregson and Dinah Sheridan as Alan and Wendy with More as his fellow motorist Ambrose Claverhouse

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60     Senior  leads and Kay Kendall as Rosalind, his latest girlfriend  –​was crucial to the picture’s success. The actor wrote in his first autobiography, ‘I feel I’ve got to be a chap who plays the game and has a basic honesty’ (1959: 185). But, as Penelope Houston praised in Sight & Sound, More’s ‘completely successful performance’ was in a film with ‘a hard urban flavour’ (1953:  30). Claverhouse may be reasonably described as a synthesis of the early twentieth-​century ‘masher’ and the Victorian advertising entrepreneur (Sandbrook 2015: 91) with post-​war aspirations. Harry Hopkins claimed that in the 1950s ‘affluence came hurrying on the heels of penury. Suddenly the shops were piled high with goods’ (1963: 309), and if that is not yet the case with Genevieve, Ambrose is primed to usher in the age of consumerism. Petrol rationing ceased in 1950, and the 1952 Hire Purchase Act repealed wartime credit restrictions. In the following year, the then Chancellor of the Exchequer R. A. Butler introduced a budget on 14 April designed to stimulate consumer spending. The filming took place almost entirely on location  –​an early scene features remarkable footage of the start of the 1952 London–​Brighton Rally –​and the protagonists live in a capital city that is still war damaged. But there are brand new Standard Vanguards among the pre-​war black-​ painted models and even the tramlines that trap Ambrose’s Spyker at the film’s conclusion were already obsolete. The Ambrose Claverhouses were ideally positioned to shape 1950s buying habits. In 1959, many Britons would be putting down a deposit on their first new car, with Ambrose’s finest sales copy inducing them to acquire a new Triumph Herald on ‘easy terms’. Kenneth More regarded Genevieve as the film that would establish his cinematic stardom (1959:  130), and his painstaking performance is of the post-​war professional as a minor cad. As the decade progressed, such figures were often portrayed by Terry-​Thomas, with every detail of his screen persona calculated to perfection, from the Jaguar bought ‘on approval’ to the carefully assembled wardrobe. But the self-​assured Claverhouse has no need of overreliance on such trappings and beneath the tweed suit and flat hat –​the outfit of the gentleman squire –​is often calculating his opportunities. Rosalind and Wendy have Ambrose’s measure, and it is the suspicious and moody Alan, who he finds the easiest to manipulate. More’s performance infers that if Ambrose feels under threat, the agreeable banter could descend into veiled threats. John Betjeman may have regarded trade as coming last ‘with wholesale and manufacturing slightly better class than retail’ in terms of British social hierarchy (1964: 90), but as an advertising agent, Claverhouse is now one of the new executives. Lewis and Maude believed that the post-​war middle classes were ‘beset with worries’ (1950:  334), but there is little evidence of serious financial straits for the McKims, Rosalind or Ambrose. Harry Hopkins wrote

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Kenneth  More     61 of how, in that decade, ‘American habits and vogues now crossed the Atlantic with a speed and certainty that suggested that Britain was merely one more offshore island’ (1963: 454). But none of the main protagonists is in any way depicted as attempting quasi-​Americana in either their speech or dress, for they are merely citizens who have realised that the Second World War is over. The belief that ‘to pinch and scrape suggested respectability’ and that ‘only spivs and car dealers fawned on the nouveau riche’ (Davenport-​Hines 2013: 149), was already on the verge of passing and in Genevieve old motor vehicles are a hobby as opposed to financial necessity. Henry Cornelius once stated: ‘To me, it seems the post-​war mood in this country is merely symptomatic of the general apathy and staleness’ (1950:  115), and in Genevieve, the modern Ford Consuls and Austin A40 Somersets are not so much threats but merely occupying different aspects of everyday existence. Raymond Durgnat accused the film of ‘museamaphilia … Freedom is concerned in Betjeman terms of leaving the dear old past alone’ (1964: 10). But Genevieve affords the old car of neither party the form of veneration given to the branch line of Ealing’s The Titfield Thunderbolt (Charles Crichton 1953) or the bird sanctuary of Group 3’s A Conflict of Wings (John Eldridge 1954). In William Rose’s screenplay, heritage may be enjoyed but not at the expense of sacrificing comfort. If some modern vehicles, such as the Allard driven by J.  C. Callahan (Reginald Beckwith), are flamboyantly louche, both the antique Darracq and the Spyker are prone to frequent engineering maladies. They are also the catalyst for some exceedingly immature male behaviour.1 As befitting his key performance in one of the finest comedies in the history of cinema,2 More was nominated for a British Academy of Film and Television Arts (BAFTA) Award for Best Actor and his next picture, Doctor in the House (Ralph Thomas 1954), consolidated his stardom. It was another role that was borne partially of economic circumstance on the part of the film-​makers as Rank allotted the project a limited budget and when More signed for the picture Genevieve had not been released; his fee was just £3,500 (More 1978:  160).3 In Richard Gordon’s 1952 roman-​à-​clef, Gaston Grimsdyke  –​a bright but idle medical student cushioned from financial woe by his legacy –​was just one of many agreeable bounders. Nicholas Phipps’s screenplay combined these characters as ‘Richard Grimsdyke’, an amiably decadent figure who is happy for Dirk Bogarde’s hero Simon Sparrow to become a doctor for the benefit of the Namely, hawling like brooligans. I am openly biased. 3 The senior executive Earl St John told Betty Box that ‘they [Rank’s management] don’t like hospital films and they don’t like titles with “Doctor” in them’ (quoted in Macnab 1993: 223). 1 2

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62     Senior  leads community. More’s raffish and (very) mature student is one who is happy to drift –​or rather breeze –​through life, piloting his vintage Bentley with insouciant ease. Lewis and Maude considered that the middle classes contained ‘the conscience of the nation’ (1950:  337) and halfway through Doctor in the House, Sparrow helps to deliver a baby. More’s shining moment is the viva voce, where Grimsdyke sports a waistcoat of such flamboyance that it momentarily silences even Sir Lancelot (James Robertson Justice). The male protagonists of British films of this era were often concerned with the ‘assimilation into the proper family and class position’ (Landy 1991: 40). With Doctor in the House, the message is clear –​the trainee medical professionals respected the past as much as they enjoy the present. If wartime and post-​war Ealing celebrations of the ‘people as hero’ were defined ‘regarding opposition to Hollywood spectacle in favour of an austere realism’ (Cook 1995: 63), then the vibrant colour of Doctor in the House inferred a bright future for the dedicated professional. While Bogarde’s hero demonstrates that only the dedicated belong in the new world of the welfare-​state professional, Grimsdyke accepts his limitations with grace. The film ends with a newly qualified Dr Sparrow about to go on duty and Grimsdyke preparing to resit his finals again. On its release in 1954 Doctor in the House became the most popular film at the British box office with More winning the BAFTA Award for Best British Actor. Dilys Powell believed that the picture would not have been as funny without More –​‘as a character in the line of descent from Sawyer, late Nockemorf ’ (1989: 121) and the actor’s screen image as the archetypal ‘chap’ was now complete. Ambrose and even, in his unique fashion, Grimsdyke, may have adapted to post-​war civilian life while in Raising a Riot (Wendy Toye 1955). More’s Peter Kent is a navy commander who is forced to look after his three children during his wife’s illness and eventually learns that his upper-​deck manner does not work in family life. British cinema of the 1950s also featured several one-​time devil-​may-​ care junior officers who were unwilling or unable to make a transition to a peacetime role. These are not so much the commissioned ‘rotters’ of David Farrar’s ex-​Wing Commander Bill Glennan in Cage of Gold or the psychotic Miles ‘Rave’ Ravenscourt (Laurence Harvey) of The Good Die Young (Lewis Gilbert 1954), but characters that evince a sense of loss. In The Ship That Died of Shame (Basil Dearden 1955), wardroom reunions are staged in faded commercial hotels while Nigel Patrick’s Tony Garthwaite, a former Battle of Britain ace, in The Sound Barrier (David Lean 1952) is hopelessly out of kilter in a new world of jet aircraft. He is undeniably brave and determined, but the future now belongs to the more cautious and analytical Philip Peel (John Justin). Above all, there is Freddie Page in the screen adaption of The Deep Blue Sea (Anatole

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Kenneth  More     63 Litvak 1955), hiding in the Spitfire Club from his responsibilities and civilian life. When Alexander Korda produced the film version of Rattigan’s play, More was the sole leading member of the original theatre cast to appear on-​screen opposite Vivien Leigh as Page’s lover Hestor in a performance suffused with mental anguish beneath an overly brittle exterior: ‘Her eyes often tend to abstract wandering. Her mind seems perpetually involved. And now and again, her physical movements have a peculiarly volcanic force’ (Crowther 1955). More held that one of his strengths as an actor was to make women wish to mother him (quoted in De’Ath 1969: 21), but in The Deep Blue Sea the ‘homme fatale’ is an overgrown petulant schoolboy who lashes out at Hestor whom he treats as much as a surrogate parent as he does a partner. Freddie seeks refuge in drink and slang that by 1955 was already dated enough to appear embarrassing but not sufficiently archaic to now seem endearing. The producer Daniel Angel believed that More was not ‘physically a very attractive man. He couldn’t play love scenes’ (quoted in McFarlane 1997: 22), but with The Deep Blue Sea, Hestor’s attraction to Page is as convincing as her fear of his feckless immaturity. More was awarded Best Actor at the Venice Film Festival, and there have been few more incisive and devastating looks at ‘the chap’. More’s next film was Reach for the Sky, and the biopic of Douglas Bader was the most popular film in the British box office in 1956. The production also provoked Lindsay Anderson to paroxysms of free-​cinematic rage: ‘Back there, chasing the Graf Spee again in the Battle of the River Plate, tapping our feet to the March of the Dam Busters, we can make believe that our issues are simple ones –​it’s Great Britain again’ (1957: 14). The original casting choice was Richard Burton before More gained the role he perceived as ‘the embodiment of my own beliefs’ (1978: 67). S. P. MacKenzie argues that Reach for the Sky differed from Angels One Five in that the latter wholly emphasised teamwork, whereas Bader is depicted as an individual (2007: 66). In British war films, it is often the case that those who do not accept paternal discipline are expelled from the group, such as the arrogant  –​and worse, incompetent  –​Lieutenant Bennett (Stanley Baker) in The Cruel Sea. Bader serves as a former rebel whose behaviour is sanctioned by the necessities of war and his achieving the rank of wing commander. The finished picture, as noted by Monthly Film Bulletin, was that ‘the central figure of Bader himself  –​apparently an indomitable, often irascible, personality  –​has been conventionalised into a slangy, headstrong British air ace’ (Review 1956: 87–​8).4

4

Gilbert was partially constrained by the presence of the real Bader on-​set –​‘When he read the script he said I had made a terrible hash of it because I’d cut out a lot of his friends’ (quoted in McFarlane 1997: 221–​2).

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64     Senior  leads But the screen Bader was a myth and as Angus Calder argued, these ‘must be consensual, they contain truths, they do not deny, are selective, and become facts from the past’ (1991: 46). More’s considerable achievement was to create a wholly believable airman within the limitations of the narrative. The director stated that, ‘We did not want the false sentiment of the American pictures neither did we want the hysteria of Latin pictures’ (Gilbert 1956:  9), and long after the release of the picture Douglas Bader observed how many people thought what a ‘dashing chap Kenneth More was’ (MacKenzie 2008:  168). Had the airman been portrayed by John Mills, the film might have contained more scenes of overt emotionalism, but More’s characters frequently express their anguish in the shadows, away from public scrutiny. One of the strongest moments in the film comes not at the RAF bases, where the other ranks are present and correct5 to serve drinks, polish shoes and take orders with a smart salute, but when Bader is learning to walk on his artificial legs. More recalled of his own wartime experience that, ‘I know the only reason I didn’t let myself go with fear is that I was frightened of what the others would say’ (quoted in De’Ath 1969: 21). Throughout the scene, the breeziness in his exchanges with the physiotherapist (Sydney Tafler) seems purposely exaggerated, as though both parties fear the consequences of the young man’s stoic mask finally shattering. More followed Reach for the Sky with a Columbia Pictures screen adaptation of The Admirable Crichton (Lewis Gilbert 1957). ‘If British cinema must turn to démodé playwrights then why J. M. Barrie?’ moaned Peter John Dyer (1957: 23), but his eponymous butler takes command of a shipwrecked aristocratic family with a natural command that would have been grating with a lesser actor. In the words of David Shipman: It was not just that he had superb comic timing: one could see absolutely why the family trusted their fates to him. No other British actor had come so close to that dependable, reliable quality of the great Hollywood stars –​you would trust him through thick and thin. And he was more humorous than, say, Gary Cooper, more down-​to-​earth than, say, Cary Grant. (1989: 415)

Although during the 1950s Kenneth More has been associated with Pinewood Studios, he was not one of Rank’s artists until 1957, when he signed a seven-​picture/​five-​year agreement. When Roy Ward Baker was planning the casting of A Night to Remember (1958), adapted from Walter Lord’s account of the Titanic, it was decided that Second Officer Herbert Lightoller would be the central if not star part (Richards 2002: 35). To the role, More  –​a former lieutenant in the Royal Navy  –​brought his

5

Inevitably including Sam Kydd.

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Kenneth  More     65 professional background –​if a not entirely accurate accent6 –​and a sense of growing bewilderment that the system he has so proudly served is failing the community he is charged with protecting. The rally rousing of Chance of a Lifetime and the heroism of Reach for the Sky are both notable traits of the cinematic Lightoller –​except that here More’s screen persona must come to terms with the system’s essential failure. Before the end of the film, the Captain (Laurence Naismith) has committed suicide, going down with his ship; the architect Thomas Andrews (one of the most exceptional performances from the great character actor Michael Goodliffe) has retreated into despair. Lightoller had performed his duty, maintained an emotional sangfroid at a time when middle-​class cinema audiences often equated respectability with ‘moderation’ –​‘It was not respectable to be voluble, passionate or outspoken; it was certainly not respectable to “make a scene” ’ (Sandbrook 2005: 57). He has witnessed children being separated from their parents and the understatement of More’s playing of the scene with Jack Merivale and Honor Blackman belies any trace of the rigid upper lip of popular mythology. The release of A Night to Remember came two years after the Suez Crisis, the aftermath of which had accelerated a decline of deference (Hall 2016:  393) and, as Andrew Spicer notes, the debacle had ‘undermined the credibility of national greatness which the officer hero incarnated’ (2003:  43). The effect of More’s merchant mariner surrounded by the dying and quietly stating, ‘I don’t think I’ll ever feel sure again. About anything’, is truly devastating. After A Night to Remember More starred in Rank films that were aimed at the ‘international market’ and distributed in the USA by 20th Century Fox. The Sheriff of Fractured Jaw (Raoul Walsh 1958)  was a comic ‘Western’ shot in Spain that had the surprising but very charming teaming of More with Jayne Mansfield, and North West Frontier (J. Lee Thompson 1959) teamed him with Lauren Bacall. The latter has More’s Captain Scott projecting a six-​year-​old Hindi prince in 1905 India only for his charge to thank the officer at the film’s conclusion but also observe that one day he may have to fight the British to make them leave his country. James Chapman argued that, ‘The historical film is not merely offering a representation of the past; in most instances it is offering a representation of a specifically national past’ (2005: 6), and here Scott’s amiable sangfroid belonged to another era. The same applies to The 39 Steps (Ralph Thomas 1959), which, if it were not for the Jaguar Mk VIIMs and Wolseley 1500s, could have been set in the 6

Lightoller spoke with a West Country rather than a received pronunciation (RP) accent (Richards 2002: 36). However, More was not famed for his mastery of dialect and given the actor’s spectacularly dire attempt at an Irish sailor in the comedy Our Girl Friday (Noel Langley 1953), this was probably for the best.

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66     Senior  leads 1920s. The production further suffered from being helped by a director who was now chafing about the projects allotted him by Rank’s management –​ ‘on the whole I regretted it [the film]’ (quoted in Dixon 1994: 112). The result was a picture that offered More few chances to display his talents as a light comedian, nor did the asides from a telling vignette with Sidney James as a worldly wise lorry driver provide any real sense of tension.7 Unlike Robert Donat’s resourceful young hero in the 1935 adaptation (Alfred Hitchcock), the script by Frank Harvey too often relies on More’s Richard Hannay uttering the phrase ‘arf’ as he encounters various self-​consciously eccentric characters. The film’s problem was ‘even when filmed largely for comedy, it cannot but look like a period piece’ (Houston 1959: 50), with More as an anachronistic figure in a landscape that could have been shot for a tourist board advertising feature. By this time More was, at last, starting to look middle-​aged and in Sink the Bismarck! (Gilbert 1960), his first war film since Reach for the Sky, he cuts a weary figure as Captain Jonathan Shepard, the Admiralty’s chief of operations. It was not a film likely to find favour with the stout-​hearted critics of Films and Filming –​‘I may be proved wrong, but I would not have thought that this picture was the kind of yarn today’s cinemagoer’s want’ (Baker 1960: 23) –​but it was the seventh most popular film released in the UK in 1960. A key element is More’s subtle and understated portrayal of a disciplinarian who is not quite the figure described by Christine Geraghty  –​‘unable to admit to feelings, the heroes of war films can scarcely articulate emotion, let alone act on it’ (1984: 66). But it is not the place for a commanding officer bearing four gold rings on his uniform to give vent to their feelings when on duty. When Shepard discovers that his son, a ‘Swordfish’ pilot whom he had feared was missing in action, is alive, he withdraws to his quarters to weep. Murphy refers to characters in Second World War narratives who are ‘adept at a language which uses small gestures and veiled words to convey a passion without exposing it to the public gaze’ (2000: 235) –​and this encapsulates the strengths of More’s performance in Bismarck! However, by 1959, ‘the chap’ appeared to be out of kilter with the Italian suited and pointed-​shoed young men that were starting to dominate the sales campaigns of Harold Macmillan’s soap-​flake Arcadia. More’s last film to showcase him thus in a leading role was Man in the Moon (Basil Dearden 1960).8 The mise en scène is a strange fusion of the contemporary –​More’s middle-​class Everyman William Blood drives a Messerschmitt bubble car  –​and a sense of retreat into rural whimsy. Especially not in the car chase in which a Ford Zephyr transforms into a Consul from shot to shot. 8 As a sign of a changing cinema world, it was an early production from Allied Film Makers. 7

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Kenneth  More     67 Man in the Moon was not a commercial success, and it is easy to agree with Alexander Walker that there was ‘too much [of ] a reversion to the good-​humoured idolatry of warm-​hearted incompetence to catch a public mood’ (1974: 104–​5). The tone of the picture was almost self-​ consciously genial but it did highlight how the actor was able to anchor a poorly constructed narrative, acquitting himself elegantly ‘in awkward circumstances’ (Guardian 1960: 5). Man in the Moon also emphasised the fact that More was now in his mid-​forties and had reached the outer limit of being cast as a carefree young fellow. At the beginning of the 1950s, Lewis and Maude claimed that the middle classes were ‘the main vehicle for the transmission of the essential national culture’ (1950: vii), but by 1960 Stanley Baker was now a major box office attraction. More had established his stardom at an earlier time when, to quote David Cannadine, ‘Churchill was back in 10 Downing Street; Britain had once more asserted her place as a great power; there was a new Elizabethan age around the corner. All this was not only implicit but was self-​consciously articulated at the time of the coronation’ (2012:  154). With Reach for the Sky, we have a narrative predicated on Establishment certainties, but within just a few years the outwardly straightforward hero was being swept to the margins. The opportunity to play a mature –​and ambiguous –​romantic lead in The Greengage Summer (Lewis Gilbert 1961) represented a change of image that More relished. The narrative of sixteen-​year-​old Joss Grey (Susannah York) who oversees her three younger siblings while on holiday in France where she falls for Eliot, a charming but enigmatic Englishman, is predictable, but More’s performance marked a significant change in the Kenneth More film image. One early casting choice was Cary Grant, although had The Greengage Summer been a Hollywood-​backed production, Eliot, a genial but shadowy figure of regrets, would have been ideal for David Niven.9 But it was Kenneth More’s interpretation of one whose long-​practised deceptions fade when confronted by someone who truly believes in him that allowed him an escape from his stereotypical image. One Guardian critic thought that More’s demeanour suggested he had just returned from a brisk round of golf at the Surbiton links’ (1961: 19), but here his wit and self-​assurance have over-​readiness of the remittance man. Dilys Powell saw the performance as combining the actor’s ‘normal good-​scout manner’, a ‘flavour of recklessness and instability which awakens one’s pity’ (1989: 174), but these traits were equally present with Douglas Bader, Freddie Page and even Richard Grimsdyke and Ambrose Claverhouse. But the passing of the years imbued such aspects of the More image with undertones of pathos and regret. When Joss tells Eliot, ‘I loved you so’, a 9

Conversely, just imagine how More could have played the Major in Separate Tables.

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68     Senior  leads fleeting look of utter anguish passes over his face. He can cope with the police and various professional setbacks  –​but his self-​loathing is ever present. The commercial success of the film seemed to anticipate an escape from ‘either the stiff-​upper-​lip war hero or the hearty, back-​slapping, beer drinking idiot’ (More quoted in the Guardian 1982:  9). The Greengage Summer inferred how the actor could have smoothly progressed towards more ambivalent authority, and surely the older More  –​gentle-​voiced and faintly bewildered at changing circumstances –​would have been the perfect casting for Colonel Redfern in Look Back in Anger. The beginning of the 1960s also marked a chance for More to bid for Hollywood fame; he had previously starred in several US-​funded productions but had not been billed above the title in an American film. When he was presented with the opportunity to star as the explosives expert Sergeant Miller in The Guns of Navarone (J. Lee Thompson 1960), Rank agreed to loan More to Columbia Pictures. John Davis subsequently rescinded this permission on the grounds that Danny Angel  –​a producer who More was also contracted to –​had ‘violated the film producers’ code (Chibnall 2000:  258). The actor drunkenly heckled the studio chief at a formal dinner (More 1978: 182–​3) and after that never worked for Rank again.10 More’s theatrical and television work continued,11 but when he took the role of Smith, a churchwarden who oversees a gang of Teddy boys in Some People (Clive Donner 1962), it was because there was no other film offers (More 1978:  150). As with Greengage Summer, the young cast highlighted that the Battle of Britain was a long time ago, but Durgnat regarded Some People as one of the few ‘consistently interesting’ (1970: 139–​40) British films about juvenile delinquency. It was shot on location in Bristol with profits going to the Duke of Edinburgh Award scheme, and the plot focuses on a trio of Teddy boys, Johnnie (Ray Brooks), Bill (David Andrews) and Bert (David Hemmings), who receive a driving ban after a motorcycle accident. They are also expelled from a local dance hall when Johnnie plays rock and roll on the piano.12 The gang’s fortunes change when Smith allows them to use the church hall for band practice. Unlike the other authority figures who are desperate to maintain the status quo, Kenneth More’s middle-​class professional is also a single parent who trusts Johnnie as the group’s unofficial leader in a performance with ‘never a sanctimonious note’ (Gow 1962: 32). The part went to David Niven. More played the lead role of the TV journalist David Mann in the Terence Rattigan play Heart to Heart (BBC December 1962). It was praised by Dennis Potter, then the television critic of the Daily Herald, as being ‘well-​produced and compellingly acted’ (quoted in Wansell 1995: 208). 12 Prompting the glorious line, ‘I won’t have Teddy boys contaminating my boys and girls!’ 10 11

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Kenneth  More     69 The final major starring role for Kenneth More in a British picture was also one of his finest opportunities for British cinema. Peter Yeldham’s screenplay for The Comedy Man, adapted from Douglas Hayes’s novel, concerned life at the lower end of the Equity spectrum. The protagonist was one Charles ‘Chick’ Byrd, an ageing juvenile lead who, after being fired from a north-​country provincial repertory theatre due to his sleeping with the producer’s wife, decides to make one last attempt at West End success. Eventually, he does find stardom in TV commercials for breath mints, a role he acquired only after the suicide of his fellow actor Jack Lavery (Alan Dobie). The agent Mim Scala believed the part was ideally suited to a star who was ‘lovely but a bit stuck in the Fifties; he desperately needed a film’ (2009: 69), and More responded to the script’s ‘relevance to my own life, and to the lives of so many actors I had known’ (1978: 222). If younger stars such as Stanley Baker marked a shift from apparently unambiguous screen heroism towards more ambivalent protagonists, then figures of seemingly middle-​aged probity were now seen as tired and fallible. Chick Byrd is as much a deconstruction of a familiar screen persona as John Mills in Tunes of Glory or Jack Hawkins in The League of Gentlemen, all three-​giving vent to darker undercurrents. With Lieutenant Colonel Barrow Mills’s often suppressed tension –​‘now buzz off old chap before I really lose my temper’ –​is a key to so many of his performances and is humiliatingly given voice in front of his junior officers. Hawkins’s Lieutenant Colonel Hyde allows the ire and the opportunism that uniformed service in the name of monarch and empire disguised for so many years to finally to flourish. And then there is Chick, a middle-​aged man desperately trying to maintain his dignity while eking out an existence in the bedsit land of a grey London. Many of More’s earlier films often had his characters joshing with the female leads as a cover for his insecurity and here even these defences break down. Judy (Billie Whitelaw) grows weary of his bantering routines, and Fay (Angela Douglas) makes him realise the passage of time. Alan Dent complained that ‘we can hardly wait for him [More] to return to his usual breeziness and jollity’ (1964: 40) without apparently realising how the actor was examining the elements sustaining this desperately theatrical mask. Fourteen years earlier in Chance of a Lifetime Adam Watson is a decent chap who possesses skills that benefit the community and is respected as such while More dedicated his autobiography to ‘the public, god bless ‘em!’ but The Comedy Man illustrates the high price of the ‘decent chap’s’ facade. In these memoirs, the actor informs the readers that he refused to play a character who ‘shoots someone from behind’ (1959: 185) and when Chick jovially tells his audience the reasons for his dismissal, well a chap is permitted a licensed roguishness now and then. But More fully

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70     Senior  leads comprehends the slow corrosion of hope and idealism behind the mask of an ageing one-​time juvenile lead. ‘I’m sorry’, he whispers on the set of a television advert as he completes a scene that would have gone to Lavey –​an apology as much to himself, for destroying his integrity, as to his late friend. Kenneth Tynan thought that ‘the script, adapted from a minor novel by Douglas Hayes, bulges with moribund backstage clichés  –​ e.g. the assumption that there is something intrinsically noble about an unemployed actor that puts him a moral cut about an unemployed ditch digger’ (1964: 25). But More’s performance is one of an intensity and poignancy that is the equal of Laurence Olivier in The Entertainer (Tony Richardson 1960)  or Peter Finch in No Love for Johnnie (Ralph Thomas 1961). The shooting of The Comedy Man took place in 1963, the year when Nicholas Tomalin was describing the new middle-​class suburban ‘Scampi Belt’ in Town magazine, ‘all Beatles records, Goon voices and Mini cars’ (cited by Campbell 2009:  116). Byrd lives in a drabber Macmillan-​era twilight, for he could have been any number of the ageing juveniles to be found in the Spotlight Casting Directory, with their professionally jaunty headshots at least five years out of date. Their billing matter may contain the claims ‘have just returned from a successful tour of Rhodesia’ or ‘specialise in military roles’ and each betrays the desperation that a casting director will contact a Putney or Flaxman telephone number for a role in a second feature. Hope must be maintained, even when you have run out of shillings for the gas meter but throughout the story, every detail of the strain of maintaining the mask of sangfroid is visible on the actor’s face. The release of The Comedy Man was delayed until late 1964, and it did not result in a revival of More’s cinematic fortunes; the breakup of his marriage and his relationship with Angela Douglas further damaging his career. The chance of a key role as GP, the artistic mentor to Miranda (Samantha Eagar) in The Collector (William Wyler 1965), ended on the cutting-​room floor when the director decided that his scenes ‘diminished the sense of claustrophobia and slowed the narrative’ (Sinyard 2014: 207). The leading role of Jolyon in the BBC adaptation of The Forsyth Saga (John Giles and David Cellan Jones 1967)  marked his return to mass popularity, and his final cinematic role was as an amiably befuddled grey-​haired monarch in The Spaceman and King Arthur (Russ Mayberry 1979). The nominal leading man was Dennis Dugan with More as King Arthur and John Le Mesurier as an equally venerable Sir Gawain, who committed grand larceny of every scene. When Kenneth Tynan reviewed The Deep Blue Sea and compared More with Brando he added ‘the same doubting proviso: can he do anything else?’ (1961: 48). To which an answer might be, although Kenneth More lacked the protean abilities of a Peter Sellers, he possessed a

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first-​rate skill to finely shade a character that might have descended into caricature in the hands of a lesser player. After More died of Parkinson’s disease, Michael Billington wrote of his theatrical achievements that he brought to the works of Terence Rattigan, Freddie Lonsdale and William Douglas-​Home ‘a love of language, comic precision and the rare capacity to make decency interesting’ (1982:  9). The same could be said of his legacy to British cinema. Bibliography Alison, Dorothy (1954), ‘More Again Please’, Picturegoer, 24 April, 7. Anderson, Lindsay (1957), ‘Get Out and Push!’, Encounter, November, 14–​22. At the Cinema (1961), ‘Determinedly British’, The Guardian, 29 May. 19. Baker, Peter (1960), ‘Sink the Bismarck!’ Films and Filming, 23. Barker, Dennis (1982), ‘Kenneth More:  The Essentially English Actor’, The Guardian, 14 July, 1. Betjeman, John (1964), ‘Unwritten Hierarchy’, Encounter, March, 90–​1. Billington, Michael (1982), ‘Kenneth More: An Appreciation’, The Guardian, 14 July, 9. Box, Betty (2000), Lifting the Lid: The Autobiography of Film Producer, Betty Box, OBE, Hove, UK: Book Guild. Brinson, Peter (1955), ‘Editorial’, Films and Filming, April, 3. Calder, Angus (1991), The Myth of the Blitz, London: Johnathan Cape. Campbell, Christy (2009), Mini: An Intimate Biography, London: Virgin Books. Cannadine, David (2012), ‘The Context, Performance and Meaning of Ritual: The British Monarchy and the “Invention of Tradition”, c.1820 to 1977’, in Hobsbawm, Eric and Ranger, Terence (eds.) The Invention of Tradition (20th ed.), Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Chapman, James (2005), Past & Present:  National Identity and the British Historical Film, London: I. B. Tauris. Chibnall, Steve (2000), J. Lee Thompson:  British Film Makers, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Cook, Pam (1995), ‘National Identity in Gainsborough Costume Drama’, in Higson Andrew (ed.) Dissolving Views:  Key Writings on British Cinema, London: Cassell. Cornelius, Henry (1950), ‘Round Table On British Films’, Sight & Sound, May, 114–​22. Crowther, Bosley (1955), ‘Screen:  Woman’s Choice; Vivien Leigh Exquisite in “The Deep Blue Sea” ’, New York Times, 13 October. Davenport-​Hines, Richard (2013), An English Affair: Sex, Class and Power in the Age of Profumo, London: William Collins. De’Ath, Wilfred (1969), ‘Kenneth More Talks to Wilfred De’Ath’, Illustrated London News, 19 April, 21. Dent, Alan (1964), ‘The World of the Cinema: The Bad New and the Good Old’, Illustrated London News, 5 December, 40. Dixon, Wheeler Winston (ed.) (1994), Re-​ Viewing British Cinema 1900–​ 1992: Essays & Interviews, Albany: State University of New York Press.

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72     Senior  leads Durgnat, Raymond (1964), ‘Vote for Britain! A  Cinemagoers’ Guide to the General Election’, Films and Filming, April, 9–​14. Durgnat, Raymond (1970), A Mirror for England: British Movies from Austerity to Affluence, London: Faber & Faber. Dyer, Peter John (1957), ‘The Admirable Crichton’, Films and Filming, July, 23. Dyer, Peter John (1958), ‘Next to No Time’, Films and Filming, September, 21. Dyer, Peter John (1959), ‘The 39 Steps’, Films and Filming, April, 22–​5. Geraghty, Christine (1984), ‘Masculinity’, in Hurd Geoff (ed.) National Fictions: World War Two in British Films & Television, London: BFI. Geraghty, Christine (2000), British Cinema in the Fifties: Gender, Genre and the ‘New Look’, London: Routledge. Gilbert, Lewis (1956), ‘Drama from The Lives of Men Around Us’, Films and Filming, September. Golden, Eve (2013), The Brief, Madcap Life of Kay Kendall, Lexington: University Press of Kentucky. Gow, Gordon (1962), ‘Some People’, Films and Filming, September, 32. The Guardian (1960), ‘Man in the Moon’, 5 November, 5. The Guardian (1961), ‘The Greengage Summer’, 29 May, 19. Hall, Simon (2016), 1956: The World in Revolt, London: Faber & Faber. Harrison, Rebecca (2018), From Steam to Screen:  Cinema, the Railways and Modernity, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Harper, Sue and Porter, Vincent (2003), British Cinema of the 1950s: The Decline of Deference, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hinxman, Margaret (1956), ‘A Star: By Public Demand’, Picturegoer, 28 January, 14–​15. Hopkins, Harry (1963), The New Look: A Social History of Britain in the Forties and Fifties, London: Secker & Warburg. Houston, Penelope (1953), ‘Genevieve’, Sight & Sound, July–​September, 30. Houston, Penelope (1955), ‘The Undiscovered Country’, Sight & Sound, Summer,  10–​14. Houston, Penelope (1959), ‘The 39 Steps’, Sight & Sound, Spring, 50. Houston, Penelope (1963), The Contemporary Cinema 1945–​ 1963, London: Penguin Books. James, Clive (2017), Clive James on Television, London: Picador. Johnston, Keith M.(2012), ‘A Riot of All the Colours in the Rainbow:  Ealing Studios in Colour’, in Duguid, Mark, Freeman, Lee, Johnston, Keith M. and Williams, Melanie (eds.) Ealing Revisited, London: BFI/​Palgrave Macmillan. Landy, Marcia (1991), British Genres: Cinema and Society 1930–​1960, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Lejeune, C. A. (1958), ‘Films: A British Comedy’, The Observer, 7 September, 14. Lewis, Roy and Maude, Angus (1950), The English Middle Classes, New  York: Alfred Knopf. MacKenzie, S. P. (2007), The Battle of Britain on Screen: ‘The Few’ in British Film and Television Drama, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. MacKenzie, S. P. (2008), Bader’s War:  ‘Have a Go at Everything’, Staplehurst, UK: Spellmount. MacKillop, Ian and Sinyard, Neil (eds.) (2003), British Cinema in the 1950s:  A Celebration, Manchester: Manchester University Press.

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Kenneth  More     73 Macnab, Geoffrey (1993), J. Arthur Rank and the British Film Industry (Cinema and Society), London: Routledge. Macnab, Geoffrey (2000), Searching for Stars:  Stardom and Screen Acting in British Cinema, London: Continuum. Manvell, Roger (1955), The Film and the Public, London: Penguin Books. Marwick, Arthur (1982), British Society Since 1945, London: Pelican Books. Mayer, Geoff (2004), Roy Ward Baker: British Film Makers, Manchester: Manchester University Press. McFarlane, Brian (1997), An Autobiography of British Cinema, London: Methuen. More, Kenneth (1959), Happy Go Lucky, London: Robert Hale. More, Kenneth (1978), More or Less:  An Autobiography, London:  Hodder & Stoughton. Murphy, Robert (1992), Sixties British Cinema, London: BFI. Murphy, Robert (2000), British Cinema and the Second World War, London: Continuum. Powell, Dilys (1989), The Golden Screen: Fifty Years of Films, London: Headline Book Publishing. Ramsden, John (2003), The Dam Busters:  A British Film Guide, London:  I. B. Tauris. Review (1950), ‘Chance of a Lifetime’, Monthly Film Bulletin, 17(195), March–​April,  43. Review (1954), ‘Doctor in the House’, Monthly Film Bulletin, 21(244), May, 73. Review (1956), ‘Reach for the Sky’, Monthly Film Bulletin, 23(270), July, 87–​8. Richards, Jeffery (2002), A Night to Remember:  The Definitive Titanic Film:  A British Film Guide, London: I. B. Tauris. Sandbrook, Dominic (2005), Never Had It So Good:  A History of Britain from Suez to the Beatles, London: Abacus. Sandbrook, Dominic (2015), The Great British Dream Factory:  The Strange History of Our National Imagination, London: Allen Lane. Scala, Mim (2009), Diary of a Teddy Boy:  A Memoir of the Long Sixties, London: The Goblin Press. Sight & Sound (1950), ‘Round Table on British Films’, May, 114–​22. Sinyard, Neil (2014), A Wonderful Heart: The Films of William Wyler, London: McFarland & Company. Shipman, David (1989), The Great Movie Stars 2:  The International Years, London: Warner Books. Spicer, Andrew (2003), ‘Kenneth More’, BFI Screenonline. Available at www. screenonline.org.uk/​people/​id/​558568/​index.html (accessed 7 December 2018). Stead, Peter (2013), Film and the Working Class: The Feature Film in British and American Society. London: Routledge. Tynan, Kenneth (1961), Curtains:  Selections from the Drama Criticism and Related Writings, London: Longmans. Tynan, Kenneth (1964), ‘Films: The Director Cult’, The Observer, 22 November, 25. Tynan, Kenneth and Tynan Kathleen (eds.) (1994), Kenneth Tynan Letters, London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson. Vinen, Richard (2014), National Service:  Conscription in Britain 1945–​1963, London: Allen Lane.

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Walker, Alexander (1974), Hollywood England: The British Film Industry in the Sixties, London: Michael Joseph. Wansell, Geoffrey (1995), Terence Rattigan, London: Oberon Books. Weight, Richard (2002), Patriots:  National Identity in Britain 1940–​ 2000, London: Pan Books.

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Younger leading men

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Stanley Baker: The British Brando?

Born on 28 February 1928, Baker first achieved stardom as Lieutenant Bennett in The Cruel Sea. Typecasting as a villain then ensued but by the late 1950s, his work with Cy Endfield, Joseph Losey and Val Guest had established him as British cinema’s first working-​class leading man. In the 1960s he alternated production work –​most famously with Zulu –​ with some of his most complex roles for Losey. He died from cancer on 28 June 1976, shortly after he was nominated for a knighthood. The archives of Pathe Newsreels contain footage of a beauty contest named ‘Easy to Love’, staged at a windblown Prestatyn holiday camp in 1954. The judges’ task is to select ‘Britain’s Esther Williams’ and among their number is a notably unglamorous young man. His five o’clock shadow is visible and his hair lacks the soigné ultra-​Brylcreemed look favoured by 1950s matinee idols, for he is a film star who appears to be entirely human rather than descended from Pinewood’s answer to the Olympian heights. In the words of Peter Stead, ‘Quite obviously British cinema was waiting for its own Brando, for an actor who could embody social anger and yet combine it with some indication of his own confidence and vitality’ (2013: 190). And there, facing the audience of respectable holidaymakers in their open-​necked shirts and sensible frocks, was Stanley Baker, the first real blue-​collar leading man of British cinema. Zulu is one of Baker’s most famous pictures, but after innumerable airings on television, it now appears more notable for the performance of Nigel Green and Baker’s achievements as a producer rather than for his portrayal of Lieutenant John Chard. In the aftermath of Rank and ABPC shedding their contract artists, some actors did indeed establish themselves as independent film-​makers, but Baker’s development of such an epic six years after playing a stock heavy in Campbell’s Kingdom (Ralph Thomas 1957) is little short of miraculous. And while it may initially seem quixotic to concentrate on the actor’s British-​based pictures as opposed 77

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78     Younger leading  men

Figure 4  Stanley Baker in Hell Drivers (1957)

to his major international epic or indeed his starring in the Hollywood-​ backed The Guns of Navarone or The Angry Hills (Robert Aldrich 1959), what, one could reasonably ask, is there to say about the likes of Jet Storm (Cy Endfield 1959), in which Baker’s BOAC pilot manages to remain stoic even when confronted with an over-​acting Richard Attenborough as a mad bomber? But, aside from the quite incredible cast1 and a narrative that positively revels in its clichés, the film is significant for the casting of Baker as the captain of a jetliner. He was neither a Dirk Bogarde-​style romantic lead or a Jack Hawkins-​style father figure, but a ‘tough guy’ who might typically use methods reserved for the villain but put them to a just cause unlike the decent chaps of Pinewood and Elstree. Dilys Powell wrote of Baker’s ‘mesmerising compound of arrogance and defenceless bewilderment’ in Accident (Joseph Losey 1967) (1989: 225), and in the 1950s he anticipated the more aggressive and more insecure middle-​class males of 1960s British cinema: Richard Johnson, Ian Hendry, Edward Judd or even the young Oliver Reed. Marcia Landy observed that films of this era ‘even when they attempt to resolve social unrest, cannot conceal the underlying tensions centring around the precariousness of authority’ 1

On board are Dame Sybil Thorndike, Harry Secombe, Barbara Kelly, Bernard Braden, George Rose, Virginia Maskell, Paul Eddington and Marty Wilde.

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Stanley  Baker     79 (1991: 48), and Baker’s army officers and detective inspectors can often barely contain their rage. If the ‘tough guy’ often expresses himself and finds fulfilment via conflict and testing (Glover 1986:  73–​7), this rarely applied to Baker’s combination of aggression, regret and insecurity. Losey, who arrived in the UK in exile from HUAC in 1953, regarded him as an actor gifted with a ‘very special violence which permeates or engulfs the characters and precedes any action … it is violence in act (en acte), before coming into action’ (quoted in Gardner 2004: 5). Such aggression often focused inwards and a further, crucial, element to distinguish Baker from other cinematic villains of post-​war British cinema was his voice. This was a period in which criminals often favoured snappy headgear and spoke in the brusque North-​American tones of an imported US star  –​Brian Donlevy in The Quatermass X-​Periment (Val Guest 1955)  –​or in a London whine  –​Sydney Talfer2 in what seemed to be every other B-​ feature. Lindsay Anderson declared that ‘a young actor with a regional or a cockney accent had better lose it quick: for with it he will never be able to wear gold braid round his sleeve –​and then where are his chances of stardom’ (1957: 16). But regardless of rank, Baker’s accent remained soft, Glamorgan-​inflected and often inferring of future retribution of any subordinate or villain who dared to cross his path. David Thomson saw Baker as ‘the only male lead in the British cinema who managed to suggest contempt, aggression and the working class’ (2002: 45) before the 1960s. Certainly, he was not the first leading man of proletarian origin, but Richard Burton, as well as making comparatively few films in the UK, had acquired a fine polish from his time at Oxford and the Royal Shakespeare Company. The major stardom of Michael Caine and Sean Connery did not commence until the 1960s, as did that of Tom Courtney. In a comic vein, Ronald Shiner and Norman Wisdom were both of humble origins but neither suggested an ‘uninhibited display of masculine energy, preferably from an actor untouched and unprocessed by traditional Home-​County and film studio blandness’ (Stead 2013: 190). Jack Warner was an undoubted star of post-​war British cinema and Durgnat praised his acting as ‘simple and subtle’ (1967: 44). But he never essayed any form of romantic lead, and he often played characters who patiently negotiated the no man’s land between the respectable working class and lower-​middle-​class aspiration. Warner’s screen persona was one of solid and secure avuncularity,3 with a capacity for shrewd and even psychotic villains largely underused

2 3

A brilliant actor too often sorely misused by British cinema. Harper and Porter refer to the ‘comfortable bodies’ of PC Dixon and his wife (Gladys Henson) in The Blue Lamp as symbolising social cohesion (2003: 60).

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80     Younger leading  men by British cinema, aside from the remarkable My Brother’s Keeper (Alfred Roome 1948). His senior police officers were sometimes wearied by the communities they served, as with Inspector Fellows of Jigsaw (Val Guest 1962), but secure in their duty. But even when Baker was playing professional characters, there was always a sense of unease. He was a Rank contract artist from 1956 to 1959, but the studio did not see him ‘as leading man material’ (Shail 2008: 43) and the actor might well have remained trapped as a ‘heavy’, eventually joining the ranks of Michael Coles and those other criminal sorts who frequently graced the works of Merton Park Studios. It was Hell Drivers (Cy Endfield 1957) that gave Baker his first starring role as an ambivalently heroic lead, anticipating his work for Joseph Losey and Val Guest. Peter John Dyer cited both as directors who turned their backs on contemporary British life while appearing to ‘scratch the surface’ (1960–​61:  33) in comparison with Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (Karel Reisz 1960). However, the former’s deliberate use of histrionics and the latter’s journalistic approach now appear to heighten Baker’s ability to depict conflicted authority figures. Blind Date (Losey 1959), Yesterday’s Enemy (Guest 1959) and Hell Is a City (Guest 1960)  established him as the master of portraying men who were in a state of confusion or frustration about their social and professional roles. Stanley Baker was born and raised in Ferndale where his schoolteacher Glynn Morse encouraged an interest in amateur dramatics, which resulted in Baker’s screen debut at the age of fourteen in the Balkan-​set but Wales-​filmed Ealing drama Undercover (Sergei Nolbandov 1943). The role of Petar provides a fascinating anticipation of the actor’s future screen persona; with John Clements bravely attempting to play a Chetnik partisan, Baker wisely underplays. After National Service, he joined a theatre repertory company in Middlesex and began to receive small parts in B-​features. A supporting role as the Bosun in the Warner Brothers UK production of Captain Horatio Hornblower (Raoul Walsh 1951) provided a welcome escape from such undemanding roles as Willie, the dim-​witted but honest stable lad in Home to Danger (Terence Fisher 1951). His breakthrough was Ealing’s production of The Cruel Sea. After reading Nicholas Monsarrat’s novel, the actor was determined to portray James Bennett, the parvenu First Lieutenant of HMS Compass Rose. The role had already been cast, but Baker was given the job of feeding lines to Donald Sinden during the latter’s screen test. The result was that the role was recast and Bennett dominated his comparatively few scenes. We first see him stalking the ship with his cap at a rakish angle in an apparent attempt to resemble an animated recruitment poster, and the First Lieutenant has none of the suburban gentility of the ship’s sub-​lieutenants. Robert Shail argues that despite being a thug and a fraud, ‘Bennett still seems fresh and dynamic’ (2008: 26) in comparison with the other young chaps in the wardroom and the well-​bred

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Stanley  Baker     81 junior officers engineer his departure –​Lockhart (Sinden) was a peacetime journalist, Ferraby (John Stratton) was a bank clerk and the Old Wykehamist Morell (Denholm Elliott) was a barrister. Bennett is indeed an outsider but not just because he was a used car salesman in peacetime –​or even that his wardroom manners are horrendous4 –​for he is also terrible at his job. Baker saw the role of Bennett as ‘the best part, the flashiest part’ (quoted in Shail 2008:  24) and it also encapsulates many of his subsequent attributes; the air of physical intimidation and the underlying insecurity. Lieutenant Commander Ericson (Jack Hawkins) does not need to raise his voice, but from the outset, the First Lieutenant seeks to impose himself. An air of middle-​class professionalism permeates the wardroom (Murphy 2000: 221), but Bennett’s drive is for self-​aggrandisement. The Cruel Sea is not a film that slavishly worships the idea of the stiff upper lip, and it is far from emotionless, but although Bennett’s self-​ confidence and brashness could turn to the good of the group his métier is self-​presentation and bullying. He must be expelled and planting the suggestion of faking a duodenal ulcer seems to be the obvious solution. The impact of The Cruel Sea was further casting as villains –​Baker observed that six more such roles arrived ‘in quick succession’ (quoted in Tarratt and Gough-​Yates 1970: 33) –​albeit with star-​billing. In 1953 the actor had signed a contract with Alexander Korda and his cinematic roles further improved –​Attalus in Alexander the Great (Robert Rossen 1956), Sir Mordred in Knights of the Round Table (Richard Thorpe 1953) and Henry, Earl of Richmond in Richard III (Laurence Olivier 1955). Possibly the most bizarre picture of his career was Beautiful Stranger aka Twist of Fate (David Miller 1954); the sight of a twenty-​seven-​year-​old Baker with grey streaks in his hair playing the criminal partner of Ginger Rogers is a memorably surreal one. In 1956 he appeared as Rochester in a BBC Television adaptation of Jane Eyre. Baker was now known to over-​exuberant film scribes as the actor with the ‘smouldering eyes, hatchet jaw and the look of a dozen demons hopping inside him’ (quoted in Spicer 2003:  72) and the film noir The Good Die Young marked a change in his screen persona. The ex-​GI Joe Halsey (Richard Basehart), cuckolded US Air Force Sergeant Eddie Blaine (John Ireland) and crippled ex-​boxer Mike Morgan (Baker) fall under the influence of the decadent playboy Miles ‘Rave’ Ravenscourt (Laurence Harvey) and carry out a post-​office van robbery. We can understand why Mike initially believes the flashy Rave just as Baker’s deception of Morgan’s physical agony and sense of sheer entrapment  –​he has lost a hand and his wife has loaned his £1,000 life savings to his confidence 4

‘Snorkers! Good-​oh!’

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82     Younger leading  men trickster brother-​in-​law (James Kenney) –​is achieved with the minimum of extraneous emoting. The conclusion has the narrator giving a bleak coda with all four gang members dead and the stolen money hidden in a graveyard, with a sense of genuine regret at how the gentle and sincere Morgan ever became involved in this idiosyncratically British vision of an urban hell. Two years later, the Eros production Child in the House marked the first time the actor had worked with Cy Endfield. Elizabeth Lorimer (Mandy Miller) stays with her wealthy relatives Henry and Evelyn Acheson (Eric Portman and Phyllis Calvert) while her mother recovers from an operation. She also contacts her father Stephen (Baker), an ex-​ solicitor who is now on the run from the police who wish to question him on charges of fraud. The first impression of the picture is how truly strange mainstream British cinema can appear, in the almost inert world of townhouses, chauffeured Humber Imperials and cocktail parties. Endfield’s casting of Stanley Baker is offbeat, as the role is, on the surface, one that would have been better suited to Terence Morgan, but the director came to regard his performance as ‘one of his best, and most sensitive’ (quoted in Neve 2015: 121). Adam’s art direction creates a vision of the Acheson’s villa as a gracious home that appears as immaculate and inert as a picture in Queen magazine, a realm in which Evelyn is prone to either hysteria every five minutes or shrieking at Elizabeth. With Baker’s sensitive underplaying, the audience can immediately appreciate why she prefers her charismatic father, and the meetings between Mandy and her father take place, by necessity, in bedsits or on grey pavements that are still preferable to the sterile environment of the Achesons. Following the death of Alexander Korda, the Rank Organisation acquired Baker’s contract and his first role for Pinewood was as the main villain in Checkpoint (1956), directed by Ralph Thomas and produced by Betty Box. The thrilling plot has O’Donovan hired by the racing magnate Warren Ingram (James Robertson Justice) to recruit the designer of the rival Volta D’Italia team. Instead, he attempts to steal the blueprints, resulting in a factory fire and the death of several Volta employees and Ingram arranges for O’Dovovan to be smuggled out of Italy in the car of Bill Fraser (Anthony Steel); a gentleman, racing driver and all-​round decent chap. So far, so archetypal 1950s Rank melodrama, and for all of Checkpoint’s shortcomings as a drama, it does contain authentic colour footage of the 1956 Mille Miglia, some of the most splendid cars of the decade and expert stunt work. If there was a gulf between the thespian styles of Baker and his contemporaries in The Cruel Sea this was even more marked in Checkpoint. Steel was a former guards officer who, after the Second World War, joined the studio’s Company of Youth  –​better known to the press as the Charm School. The fifty-​plus Steel was adept at portraying a tired,

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Stanley  Baker     83 wounded sense of dignity, but at the pinnacle of his Rank success, he was a star born to don a safari jacket and sing, with manly gusto (and the backing of the Radio Revellers), the hit song ‘West of Zanzibar’. He was a straightforward and agreeable leading man, but with Checkpoint Fraser’s main attributes seem to consist of driving a Lagonda V12 with verve and aplomb, pipe-​smoking and uttering such aphorisms as ‘women are as tricky as the devil and best driven fast’. Somewhat inevitably, he is also prone to exclaiming ‘gosh!’ at times of extreme stress. The picture is stolen by James Robertson Justice’s ambitious but guilt-​ ridden motor magnate and Baker’s O’Donovan –​permanently on edge yet not without a sense of conscience. Amid an epic dismissed by Monthly Film Bulletin as ‘stirring shots of fast cars roaring through the Italian countryside’ (Review 1956: 167), was a demonstration of how Baker’s air of psychological and physical danger that was lacking in many of Rank’s other leading men. Roy Ward Baker wanted to cast the actor as Jack Havoc in his adaptation of Tiger in the Smoke (1956) and compared Baker with Jack Hawkins as ‘someone you could be really frightened of ’ (quoted in McFarlane 1997: 50). The saturnine David Farrar was another such actor, but his manners were of the officers’s mess while Stanley Baker’s appeal remained blue-​collar. Even when he portrayed professionals, there was always the sense that his characters had risen through the ranks. In the following year, Baker appeared as another villain for Box and Thomas in Campbell’s Kingdom, a picture that was typical of Rank’s ‘international’ ambitions. By 1956 around half the studio’s revenue derived from overseas and it had interests in five hundred foreign cinema outlets (Chibnall 2016:  176), and so Campbell’s Kingdom had location filming with the Italian Dolomites standing in for the Rockies. Dirk Bogarde’s hero Bruce Campbell attempted to look gloomily consumptive while various well-​known British actors essay Canadian accents of varying degrees of awfulness. The role of Owen Morgan requires Baker to wear a black hat(!) and glower a good deal, and there is little sense of dramatic tension, merely Rank contract artists clad in a fetching array of plaid shirts all filmed in vibrant Eastmancolor.5 Escape from such casting was at hand with Hell Drivers, based on the short story written by John Kruse in a 1955 edition of Argosy magazine, inspired by the writer’s experiences. The screenplay, by Cy Endfield and Kruse, focused on a repentant ex-​con, Tom Yately, who takes a driving job with a seedy haulier. His main goal is to raise money for his younger brother, who is now disabled after being injured in a car accident during a botched robbery. The piece rate seems generous, but each driver must haul a minimum of twelve loads of gravel per day, leading to marauding 5

A. H. Weiler thought that the film was ‘tinted in colors that occasionally tend toward the garish’ (1960: n.p.).

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84     Younger leading  men fleets of tippers careering through rural England. The Guardian saw Hell Drivers as ‘a brisk step in the right direction  –​away from the phoney conventions of the standard British comedy and the devoutly sentimental war story, and towards the facts of modern life in Britain’ (1957: 3). Seven years earlier the critic Frank Enley complained of The Blue Lamp and other ‘people-​as-​hero’ films of appealing ‘to a vanity in the national temperament’ with the chief emotional overtone of complacency (1950: 78). With Hell Drivers, there is no camaraderie, merely senseless and almost incessant banter that never quite masked the threat of physical violence. Monthly Film Bulletin complained that ‘even the most gullible’ (Review 1957b: 102) could not accept the picture as representative of either the road haulage industry or masculine behaviour, but one of the key details of Hell Drivers is how it is the antithesis of a jovial barrack-​ room atmosphere. The drivers’ working life unfolds within ‘a landscape of comprehensive dispossession and vacancy’ (Hutchings 2004: 29), one of seedy haulage yards and boarding houses in a landscape dotted with industrial detritus. The existence of Yately and the other drivers is largely predicated by their need to earn a generous basic rate of £21 per week in a firm that is not overly concerned if they hold a valid licence. Their social life focuses on the local transport café where the highlight of the week was a dance in the local village hall to the happening sounds of the local amateur combo. Baker was hired to play Tom against some considerable odds; Andrew Spicer cites this as evidence of how the actor’s transformation from ‘heavy’ to star was ‘not made by unimaginative Rank executives’ (1999: 7) but by such maverick directors as Endfield. By 1957 Rank’s promotion for Hell Drivers proclaimed Baker as ‘a fine actor for whom great things are predicted’ in a film they described as ‘enormously accomplished’ (Guardian 1957:  3). The other stand-​out performance is from William Hartnell as the manager Cartley. Hartnell was often the embodiment of NCO virtue, but he was also expert in embodying seedy criminality, and here he is no figure of paternal wisdom but a harsh, brutal character in league with Red to use drifters and no-​hopers and skim their wages, yet he derives no joy from it. His car is a ‘sit-​up-​and-​beg’ 103E Series Ford Popular, his wardrobe seemingly consists of a solitary demob suit and his kingdom is a run-​down haulage yard. Cartley is as much in a hell as the drivers who career through Buckinghamshire in almost suicidally dangerous trips to deliver ballast to a site where no building ever seems to be completed. Richard Roud identified the ‘ “Huggetry”  –​the naive mixture of coyness, patronage and sentimentality that runs through many British working-​class films’ (1956–​57:  120), but these traits are wholly absent from Hell Drivers. Baker’s Everyman represents a Sisyphus of post-​war England with no detective inspector played by John Horsley or Russell

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Stanley  Baker     85 Napier to sweep up in a Wolseley to bring about a moral resolution. The role of Yately was symptomatic of how in the late 1950s British audiences were being encouraged to shift their identification from the centre to the margins’ (Plain 2006: 168), and this became more apparent in the films of this period in which Baker played military officers or police detectives. According to the sociologist Geoffrey Gorer, ‘the amount and extent of an enthusiastic appreciation of the police is peculiarly English and a most important component of the contemporary English character. To a great extent, the police represent an ideal model of behaviour’ (1955:  213). Violent Playground (Basil Dearden 1958) marked the first time that Baker had played a police officer, a development that Aldgate and Richards regarded as encapsulating an increasing move towards depicting senior officers in terms of the ‘tough guy’ (1999: 138). The script, co-​written by Dearden with James Kennaway, has Detective Sergeant Truman (Baker) reluctantly transferred from crime to the Juvenile Liaison division6 and trying to understand David McCallum’s Teddy boy gang leader, Johnnie Murphy. However, despite Truman being a younger and more dynamic figure than PC George Dixon, the arguments are still with the Establishment. His vocabulary and style of speech infer his working-​class background, the gulf between the police officer and the Ted still seems to be insurmountable. ‘You are whatever you want to be’, Truman informs Johnnie. But, as John Hill notes, this is not the case, even on the film’s terms: ‘Johnnie, for example, attempts to enter the Grand Hotel (with its Rolls-​Royce clientele) but is, of course, disadvantaged by virtue of age and class’ (1986: 82) and nor is the Teds’ culture seen to have any worth or validity. Derek Hill berated Dearden and Kennaway for finding ‘the familiar material for melodrama’ (1958: 203), although in one truly astounding sequence, an ill-​choreographed Johnnie and his gang engage in a bout of utterly ghastly dancing, as witnessed by an appalled Truman. Violent Playground shows that caring but firm authority succeeds where the well-​meaning liberalism of the local headmaster fails. ‘Haven’t we had enough of these crazy mixed-​up kids who go around bullying and ganging up on people, beating up old ladies?’ moans Truman’s chief inspector (George A. Cooper). The Sergeant is barely thirty years old, but the rock and roll scene clearly display the gulf between the detective and the Teddy boys. The camera cuts to Johnnie’s younger brother and sister cowering in the corner of the living room, both traumatised by the horrendous music and abysmal dancing –​but Truman is equally appalled. Violent Playground may not quite accord with Victor Perkins’s lambasting of Basil Dearden’s work –​‘the traditional good director in the appalling 6

Formed in 1949 by the chief constable of Liverpool Police to prevent vulnerable juveniles from drifting into crime.

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86     Younger leading  men performances he draws from good actors; and in his total lack of feeling for cinema’ (1962: 5) –​but Baker is palpably working against the script’s limitations. It is a picture that both attempts to appeal to the youth audience –​the dire theme song Play Rough by Johnny Luck –​and illustrates how ‘the collective adult mind had become neurotically imprinted with the idea of teenage delinquency’ (Laurie 1965: 123). Dearden evidently regarded jazz in I Believe in You (1952) as wicked enough, but rock and roll further encapsulated the fears of transatlantic influence on teenagers. Of greater interest is the maverick but isolated Detective Inspector Morgan of Blind Date, the work of a director who was a ‘dramatist of deception and double-​dealing, an architect of environments that entrap and extinguish their inhabitants’ (Sanjek 2002). A London-​based Dutch art student, Jan Van Rooyer (Hardy Kruger), is accused of murdering his lover Jacqueline (Micheline Presle) by Morgan, who initially does not conform to the suspect’s image of the London police being ‘famous for being polite, decent people’. According to Losey, ‘Rank, who were distributing it, basically in England, didn’t like the treatment of the police … But fortunately, the writers and Hardy Kruger and I all stood strongly together and (John) Davis was not able to change anything at all’ (quoted in Climent 1985:  170). It transpires that Jacqueline was also the mistress of a major diplomat, while Morgan is increasingly discouraged by his patrician colleague, Inspector Westover (John van Eyssen), and the Commissioner, Sir Brian Lewis (Robert Flemyng). If Jack Hawkins’s Tom Halliday in The Long Arm was decidedly world-​ weary and John Mills’s Mike Halloran in Town on Trial was embittered and aggressive, Morgan seems openly scarred. ‘You get to know the givers and the takers. You can smell them out. It’s a question of background’, he muses at one point. The Guardian critic disdainfully wrote that the Assistant Commissioner’s attitude ‘is the sort of silly implausibility which comes of an American (or Americanised) view of Britain’ (Review 1959a: 3). But there is little sense of authoritarian stoicism typical of many British A-​and B-​film detectives with Morgan. Isabel Quigly praised how ‘Stanley Baker’s social scratchiness really gives one a feeling of his daily struggle, and daily failure, to feel at ease’ (1959:  14). The Inspector is a florid, aggressive and even sentimental figure with a (too-​ carefully maintained?) Valleys accent and a flamboyant check suit. In 1959, Stanley Baker left the Rank Organisation, buying himself out of his contract for £12,000 (Shail 2008: 57) and two of his first post-​ Pinewood films were for Hammer. Yesterday’s Enemy (Val Guest 1959), adapted from the television play by Peter Newford, was set in Burma in 1942 with a British platoon led by Captain Langford (Baker) cut off from its main division and with a badly wounded Brigadier (Russell Walters). They discover a small force of Japanese holed up in a remote village and a top-​secret map on the body of a slain Japanese commander. The Captain

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Stanley  Baker     87 suspects that one of the villagers secretly knows about this document, and so he orders the execution of two local civilians to force information from a collaborator. If Langford is the British army officer ‘tough guy’, he is not a brute but a professional man forced into making decisions ‘which should not be inflicted on any man’ (Review 1959b: 121) –​‘You don’t mind when a bomber pilot pushes a button and kills a few hundred civilians. You don’t mind murder from a distance’, he berates the padre (Guy Rolfe) and Max, a war correspondent (Leo McKern). Yesterday’s Enemy has no triumphal score, which only intensifies a sense of military discipline being used for appalling ends. Here the fatherly NCO figure Sergeant McKenzie (Gordon Jackson) is ordered by Langford to escort an elderly Burmese civilian to the firing squad and when the Japanese capture the platoon, Major Yamazuki (Phillip Ahn) regards the Captain with some respect as an officer with the same sense of purpose and tenacity. Baker collaborated once more with Guest on Hell Is a City (1960), based on the novel written by the ex-​police officer Maurice Proctor. Inspector Harry Martineau is a young up-​and-​coming police officer obsessed with a childhood foe, against a grim Lancashire background. Although Baker’s north-​country accent is variable, Martineau is an English detective at one with his city. Guest’s direction combines the narrative strengths of the Hollywood crime thriller with a sharp evocation of the north-​country landscape  –​‘I wanted to give it a newsreel quality. I  tried desperately to get the quality of realism about the streets, houses and crowds’ (Guest quoted in McFarlane 1997:  259). The story unfolds not against the background of Soho dives, but rather in a Manchester captured by Arthur Grant’s black-​and-​white cinematography as a city still scarred by the Blitz.7 Christine Geraghty described Guest’s 1958–​ 64 output as looking back ‘to the ethos and assumptions of the 1950s with a sensibility that is starting to feel like that of the 1960s’ (2005: 135). Our first sighting of the Inspector is an imposing figure framed against the remaining Victorian buildings of night-​time Manchester circa late 1959, a character at one with his surroundings. Martineau comments on the empathy that he has with the film’s villain, a former childhood cohort –​‘from the same streets’, as he describes it –​and he spends as little time as possible in his comfortably furnished suburban villa. The Inspector only seems happy on the streets of Manchester, but Guest also shows the 1960s looming on the horizon; former bombsites now boast new buildings, nearly every

7

The reviewer of the Monthly Film Bulletin wrote: ‘This film may not re-​create the atmosphere of Manchester any more effectively than Violent Playground did that of Liverpool’ (Review 1960: 64), which makes one wonder just what he/​she was viewing.

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88     Younger leading  men taxi is a brand-​new Austin A55 Cambridge Mk II and department-​store windows tempt the unwary with offers of easy credit. British films of the 1950s frequently used the rural landscape as a place of refuge from urban chaos, where the protagonists may rediscover their true values. But outside of Manchester is a bleak wilderness in which crime can flourish almost unfettered, from illegal games of pitch and toss to the dumping of corpses. The closing scenes feature Martineau, newly promoted to detective chief inspector, quarrelling with his wife Julia (Maxine Audley) and storming out of his suburban villa to the open spaces of Manchester where he feels that he belongs. The film’s PR material billed Martineau as an ‘almost Bogart-​style he-​man [who] provides a refreshing change from the rather neurotic, mixed-​up heroes who have been in fashion for a while now’ (quoted in Shail 2008: 60) –​ but Baker’s angry, emotional and troubled detective is both. Hell Is a City ends with Harry wandering through a new city of neon-​lit streets, office blocks and shopping developments. Martineau is both young enough to take part in this future but still emotionally tied to a world that is on the verge of disappearing. Shortly after completing Guest’s film, Baker was involved in planning a screen adaptation of The Criminal, a short story by the Hammer writer Jimmy Sangster about Johnny Bannion, a major figure in the underworld. The actor recommended Alun Owen as scriptwriter (Shail 2008:  83), and the result was a Jacobean revenge cycle directed by Losey at Merton Park. There is more than a sense of irony that a studio so associated with Anglo-​Amalgamated’s B-​film celebrations of law and order, usually with narration from the ever-​lugubrious Edgar Lustgarten, would play host to such a demolition of Establishment values. In prison, in which Bannion is incarcerated for a three-​year stretch, authority is represented by the ineffectual governor (Noel Willman) and the genially sadistic chief warder Barrows (Patrick Magee) who revels in the inmates’ fights. Richard Roud perceived the officers rulling over the prisoners ‘only by accepting their code, their morality and their way of life’ (1960: 196) and Barrow relishes the power he possesses in his role as the conduit between the governor and the inmates. However, Bannion does not, or cannot, play such political games inside prison and within London’s underworld. He is planning a post-​ release £40,000 racetrack heist, but affluence brings an alternative form of imprisonment. The director subsequently observed that, ‘I have to bring the violence out in the actors. And in Robert Shaw and Stanley Baker, there is immense violence in them as people’ (quoted in Climent 1985:  196). But while a post-​ incarceration Johnny  –​a figure Baker modelled on the Soho mobster Albert Dimes  –​may revel in the outward symbols of success, he is now out of time and superfluous to the underworld’s requirements. In The Criminal, violence breeds violence

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Stanley  Baker     89 in many guises, including neo-​corporatism; Bannion’s American confederate Mike Carter (Sam Wanamaker) tells him that crime is now ‘a business. But your sort doesn’t fit into an organisation’. Nor is there a benevolent trench-​coated CID officer preventing Bannion from meeting his terrible end –​dying in a snowdrift in the middle of farmland as his former confederates ‘dart about like a pair of scurrying mice, digging desperately for the stolen money in a frozen field’ (Gardner 2004: 82). Stanley Baker’s final black-​and-​white crime drama was made during the five-​year gestation period for Zulu. With A Prize of Arms (Cliff Owen 1962), Turpin (Baker) plans to disguise himself and his gang of Fenner (Tom Bell) and Swavek (Helmut Schmid) as part of a military convoy to gain access to an army base. As the barracks are preparing for a massive troop movement, three unfamiliar faces are hardly likely to be noticed –​ the perfect cover for the robbery of the military payroll. As a cashiered wartime officer turned gang boss, Turpin is highly intelligent and disciplined. His plan almost succeeds due to the laxity encountered at nearly all levels of military life, and the fact that most of the camp is engaged in performing their duties with the maximum swinging of lead. The film functions almost as a blue-​collar version of The League of Gentlemen and, as with the earlier picture, the demands of censorship ensured that that criminal did not profit from their cunning scheme. Indeed, while Turpin was cashiered for black-​market activities in post-​war Hamburg, senior officers who were engaged in the same enterprise evaded the law. A Prize of Arms was released at a time when national service was on the verge of disappearing –​the final conscript was demobbed in 1963, and here, even more than the barracks sequence encountered by Jack Hawkins and company, the overall impression is one of disorganised chaos. The Monthly Film Bulletin praised how the ‘natural locations have been used throughout, with excellent camera work and lighting. The technical details of camp life are obviously authentic and always fascinating’ (Review 1962:  173), one example of the latter being that the NCOs are more concerned with protocol than actual security. Turpin’s background remains ambiguous –​was his promotion to captain a field commission? And throughout the screenplay, by Kevin Kavanagh and Nicolas Roeg, there is the sense of ability misplaced. Baker essayed one of his most remarkable screen performances in 1962 in Eva (Eve in the UK), based on the novel by James Hadley Chase. The film was directed by Joseph Losey in an extremely troubled production in which the financiers, the Hakim brothers, cut an hour from the overall running time.8 But, as David Thomson contended: ‘Eve is an 8

‘The result is almost certainly not quite the film Joseph Losey intended, which clearly had far more pretentions (whether justified or not it is difficult to guess) to intellectual and psychological profundity’ (Taylor 1963: 197).

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90     Younger leading  men extraordinary film, absolutely novel in its view of male humiliation and of this monstrous queen-​bee figure who rules her world. [Jeanne] Moreau never did anything stronger and more dangerous. Baker is brilliant and tortured. And this was before Losey did The Servant’ (2010: 268). Baker’s acting range often encompassed emotional neediness: Lieutenant Bennett craves the respect of Commander Ericson and the junior officers; Harry Martineau is desperate for intimacy; and Tom Yately sought redemption for his background as a criminal. In Eva Tyvian Jones, an ex-​miner turned successful novelist thanks to his stealing his brother’s work, is virtually masochistic. He is invited to the Venice Film Festival to see the screen version of ‘his’ work Strangers in Hell and Jones’s subsequent obsession with Eva, a courtesan, displays his craving for abasement for betraying his background. Losey’s cinematographer Gianni Di Venanzo frames Venice in shades of grey, where the various tourist diversions and exotic motor cars do not alleviate the overreaching mood of depression –​they are but further elements of this ennui. Tyvian’s fiancée Francesca (Virna Lisi) perceives him to be a working-​class intellectual, and now he has the trappings of success, including the Alfa Romeo Spider. But after merely a short while in his company, Jones appears to be little more than an anagram of second-​ hand aphorisms and props: ‘the book made me famous, the film made me rich’. Durgnat saw the picture as ‘as an obstinately puritanical film, an American counterpart of Ingmar Bergman’s struggles with the soul’ (1985: 1010), and so if Eva needs to control, Tyvian craves abasement. He positions himself as one of macho puritan virtue in a decadent city where film receptions are stages in an atmosphere of Baroque grandeur –​even the photograph on the novel’s dust jacket is a portrait of the poseur as an angry young man. It is to Eva, not his wife, that Jones confesses his deception in a vain attempt to be absolved of responsibility. At the film’s epicentre is Baker’s deconstruction of masculinity in a performance that deserves to be ranked alongside Yvonne Mitchell in Woman in a Dressing Gown (J. Lee Thompson 1957) or Peter Finch in No Love for Johnnie, for its haunting and embarrassingly raw depiction of emotion. Julian Petley argued that, ‘Whereas native English cinema tends to tone down emotional excess and to regard melodrama as a pejorative term, Losey tends to play up the passion and play down the touches of realistic detail so beloved by critical consensus’ (1986: 112). It was a directorial approach that was virtually guaranteed to incur the wrath of certain critics. Bosley Crowther saw Jones as ‘the kind of nut who pops his eyeballs, flares his nostrils and starts breathing hard when he first catches sight of this French siren sneaking a bath in the king-​sized tub in his rented Venetian home’ (1965: n.p.). He concluded his review with the observation that ‘Mr. Losey said the producer ruined it by cutting. The rejoinder is: He didn’t cut it enough’ (1965: n.p.). On the other side of

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Stanley  Baker     91 the Atlantic, Elspeth Grant complained of the ‘glumly erratic goings on’ (1963: 40), while the Monthly Film Bulletin compared Eva to ‘an uneasy bloated parody’ of La Dolce Vita style films (Review 1963: 128). Tyvian sobs, pleads, wheedles, attempts emotional manipulation, lashes out like an angry thirteen-​year-​old and, in the final reel, is even whipped by Eva. Gardner notes how ‘unlike in Proust, where time regained produces an eventual overcoming of memory and loss through art and indifference’ (2004: 102), Baker’s anti-​hero is trapped within the cycle of destructive self-​delusion; an inverse image to that of the suave pseudo-​writer. He is now a pathetic ‘character’ of Harry’s Bar, holding court to an ever-​ diminishing band of followers. The mid-​1960s saw Baker appear in the African-​set Dingaka (Jamie Uys 1964) and Sands of the Kalahari (1965), the latter both marking a final collaboration with Endfield and being the sort of film that used to haunt the TV schedules during bank holidays.9 The actor’s final collaboration with Losey was in 1966 in Accident, based on Nicholas Mosley’s novel about two Oxford academics, Stephen (Dirk Bogarde) and Charley (Baker), who both crave Anna (Jacqueline Sassard). The casting was controversial, and Baker believed that ‘with a director like Losey, he doesn’t rely on type or performances you’ve done before. He sees you as an actor and if you are an actor you can approach anything’ (quoted in Tarratt and Gough-​Yates 1970: 1). Bogarde thought the result was ‘a marvellous matching of contrasted flavours, a real strong country Cheddar and a more delicate, insidious Demi-​sel’ (quoted in Taylor 1966: 182).10 The results are indeed fascinating to behold, with Stephen trying ever so politely to vie with the more physically oppressive Charley. Losey and Harold Pinter’s screenplay creates a veneer of good manners with footage of university life that almost parodies a Rank Look at Life travelogue of the period, all masking a world of ambition and venality. The lives of the academics unfold against a succession of games in an existence that looks as though it derives from the world of the colour supplements. One of Charley’s roles is that of a media don, with recurring horn-​rims, a hairstyle slightly too young for him and an assertive and charming manner that is perfect for issuing wise edicts on Late Night Line-​Up. But as Penelope Houston noted, ‘Stanley Baker’s performance layers of protective covering are ripped away, as painfully as sticking-​plaster, from the image of the television don, everyman’s pundit, the unlovable man with the instinct for betrayal’ (1967: 14). From The Cruel Sea onwards, Baker had played an array of bullies, but Charley was possibly the most dangerous, his veneer of intellectualism ‘Everyone mouths lines about the universal significance of it all, while the baboons look on in amazement’ (Review 1965–​66: 52). 10 No glittering prizes for guessing which fromage Bogarde was comparing himself to. 9



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92     Younger leading  men slipping to reveal a degenerate like Stephen, who forced himself upon Anna after she is injured in the car crash that has killed her fiancée William (Michael York). Losey’s approach did not gain the approval of all British film critics of that time,11 but ‘if the world of Accident is alluring and romantic in a decadent, excessive fashion, something like a fantasy of Lautreamont or Rimbaud, it is also a domain of endless circular pain’ (Dixon 1998:  59). Anna finally leaves to return to Austria, but while the young and vulnerable William ‘escapes’ only via a motor accident, the older protagonists will seemingly remain. The film concludes with the opening car crash, while Charley and his ilk will remain entrapped in a ceaseless, remorseless round of epigrams and games beneath the glittering surface. ‘Losey has made a film in which nothing is signalled, nothing given away … You have to do your share of the work, watching patiently and absorbedly as the characters live their lives, cook their omelettes, exchange their trivial chat, and [are] rewarded almost constantly by the moments of glittering illumination’ (Milne 1967: 59). Or, it may even be perceived as a mad hatter’s tea party set in 1960s academe, a comfortable sun-​drenched world of an endless summer that is both the protagonists’ supposed reward and their private hell –​and some of the most telling moments in the film are when Charley is seen to realise this. When Accident was released in 1967, Baker had formed the production company Oakhurst, with Bob Porter and the film-​maker Michael Deeley. Their first collaboration was Robbery (Peter Yates 1967), a fictional version of the Great Train Robbery two years earlier, and shooting commenced during a watershed period for the British crime film. The year 1967 marked the last of Merton Park’s B-​film series, the Scales of Justice episode ‘Payment in Kind’ (Peter Duffel 1966) and the final mainstream black-​ and-​ white British main crime features were shot two years earlier. David Thomson was somewhat wide of the mark when he wrote that what Peter Yates had achieved was little more ‘profound than send[ing] hubcaps careering round corners, but nobody did that better’ (2014: 1140), for the opening reel car chase establishes that Clifton’s gang is well-​disciplined and ruthless. Throughout the film, Clifton is seen to run his gang in the manner of a far-​sighted managing director and preparation for the train heist is strictly a business matter. Paul is quite content to delegate where necessary –​the gem heist of the opening reel is the province of a select group of his better-​trained confederates  –​but he always pays attention to the fine detail. There was ‘a slight but unmistakable feeling of a grand-​ scale sporting contest, in fact, about the whole thing’ (1967b: 170), but 11

‘It seems incredible to me that there are still some directors around who think a meaningless shot is worth having. Surely, if the nouvelle vague and all its vagaries have taught us anything, it is that if the shot is useless it must be cut’ (Sarne 1967: 5).

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Stanley  Baker     93 Clifton is as much, if not more, of a contemporary professional than Inspector George Langdon (James Booth). Both men are dark, imposing and quietly spoken professionals but the CID officer works in the archaic surroundings of the Yard. Briefings from the Commander (Glyn Edwards) take place in a drab Woodbine-​smogged briefing room with bakelite telephones –​while Clifton’s gang own boutiques and frequent nightclubs. Robbery has no suggestion of police corruption, but there are questions as to how the escape of the currency expert Robinson (Frank Finlay) from prison was so easily effected. Paul Clifton is far more intelligent than either the gang bosses or their dated renegade hitman Chas (James Fox) in Performance (Donald Cammell and Nicolas Roeg 1970). Nor does he engage in any of the wasteful emotions of Richard Burton’s Vic Dakin in Villain (Michael Tuchner 1971) or Michael Caine’s vengeful and over-​confident thug in Get Carter (Mike Hodges 1971). To Frank Finlay’s currency expert Robinson, involvement with the gang marks a final loss of dreams of home and family but to Paul Clifton, ‘home is a Swiss bank account’. Virtually all the trappings of a successful businessman circa 1967 –​the Bentley S3, the villa and even his wife can all be dispensed with if necessary. Unfortunately, Baker’s production career did not end well, and Shail’s biography contains paragraph after depressing paragraph of how an attempt to branch into pop promotion and acquire British Lion resulted in the actor’s near bankruptcy. To fund the company’s payroll, he had to make forays into the dank and dismal world of the Euro-​drama, that strange and dispiriting sub-​genre of cinema in which a familiar and indeed respected face, looked older, tired and often with unflattering close-​ups. Baker starring in Popsy Pop12 (Jean Herman 1971)  or the British-​set Giallo A Lizard in a Woman’s Skin aka Unalucertola con la pelle di donna (Lucio Fulci 1971) is on a par with seeing Flora Robson in The Beast in the Cellar (James Kelley 1970). Two exceptions to this dismal litany were Perfect Friday (Peter Hall 1970), in which Baker’s assistant bank manager ‘Mr Graham’ is the epitome of ambition not entirely thwarted by years in suburbia,13 viewing the world of glass and concrete office blocks with a wry sense of jaundice. The Games (Michael Winner 1970)  was centred around the Olympics and although the Monthly Film Bulletin derided Winner’s ‘flashy shooting … all staccato cutting and ugly zooms’ (1970: 166–​7), Baker gave an intense, almost overbearing, performance as Bill Oliver, a disabled trainer who lives vicariously through his protégé Harry Hayes (Michael Crawford). 12 13

It was also distributed under the title of The Butterfly Affair. ‘Nice performances all round too, with stern Stanley Baker, seductive Ursula Andress and languidly eccentric David Warner asked to no more than what comes naturally’ (Milne 1971: 26).

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94     Younger leading  men The actor’s final British ‘tough guy’ role for the cinema is as the ageing, embittered secret agent John Craig in Innocent Bystanders (Peter Collinson 1972)  and Shail argues that Baker’s almost monolithic protagonist is in the Clint Eastwood/​Charles Bronson style of stone-​faced killers of the era (2008: 117). During the last decade of Baker’s life, television offered him far greater opportunities than cinema, with BBC adaptions of Robinson Crusoe (James MacTaggart 1974) and How Green Was My Valley (Ronald Wilson 1975). Stanley Baker died of cancer on 28 June 1976, shortly before he was to be knighted for his services to the cinema. To refer to his filmic legacy as being ‘the British Brando’ is to essentially undervalue it, for Baker was an individualistic performer who needed no forms of comparison with a Hollywood contemporary. To cite Raymond Durgnat, a film has the capacity to communicate a character’s experience, ‘whether intellectual, emotional, physical or a blend of all three’ (1967: 39) –​ and that is what Stanley Baker achieved without apparent effort. Bibliography Aldgate, Anthony and Richards, Jeffrey (1999), Best of British; Cinema and Society from 1930 to Present, London: I. B. Tauris. Anderson, Lindsay (1957), ‘Get Out and Push!’ Encounter, November, 14–​22. Barr, Charles (ed.) (1986), All Our Yesterdays:  90 Years of British Cinema, London: BFI. Barr, Charles (1998), Ealing Studios (3rd ed.), London: Continuum. Barta, Tony (ed.) (1988), Screening the Past:  Film and the Representation of History, Westport, CT: Praeger. Billington, Michael (1996), The Life and Work of Harold Pinter, London: Faber & Faber. Borden, Iain (2013), Drive:  Journeys Through Film, Cities and Landscapes, London: Reaktion Books. Burton, Alan and O’Sullivan, Tim (eds.) (2009), The Cinema of Basil Dearden and Michael Relph, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Caute, David (1993), Joseph Losey: A Revenge on Life, London: Faber & Faber. Chapman, James (2005), Past & Present:  National Identity and the British Historical Film, London: I. B. Tauris. Chibnall, Steve (2016), ‘ “Above and Beyond Everyday Life”:  The Rise and Fall of Rank’s Contract Artists During the 1950s’, in Hunter, I. Q., Porter, Laraine and Smith, Justine (eds.) The Routledge Companion to British Cinema History, London: Routledge. Chibnall, Steve and Murphy, Robert (eds.) (1999), British Crime Cinema, London: Routledge. Climent, Michel (1985), Conversations with Losey, London: Methuen. Crowther, Bosley (1965), ‘The Screen: Jeanne Moreau as Eva: Romantic Drama Opens at Little Carnegie’, New York Times, 5 June. Dixon, Wheeler Winston (1998), The Transparency of Spectacle: Meditations on the Moving Image, New York: State University of New York Press.

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Stanley  Baker     95 Duguid, Mark, Freeman, Lee, Johnston, Keith M. and Williams, Melanie (eds.) (2012), Ealing Revisited, London: BFI/​Palgrave Macmillan. Durgnat, Raymond (1967), Films and Feelings, London: Faber & Faber. Durgnat, Raymond (1970), A Mirror for England: British Movies from Austerity to Affluence, London: Faber & Faber. Durgnat, Raymond (1985), ‘Eva’, in Magill, Frank N. (ed.) Magill's Survey of Cinema: Foreign Language Films, Hackensack, NJ: Salem Press. Dyer, Peter John (1960–​61), ‘Saturday Night and Sunday Morning’, Sight & Sound, Winter, 33. Enley, Frank (1950), ‘The Blue Lamp’, Sight & Sound, April, 76–​8. Gardner, Colin (2004), Joseph Losey, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Geraghty, Christine (2005), ‘80,000 Suspects’, in McFarlane, Brian (ed.) The Cinema of Britain and Ireland, London: Wallflower Press. Glover, David (1986), ‘The Stuff That Dreams Are Made of:  Masculinity, Femininity and the Thriller’, in Longhurst, D. (ed.) Gender, Genre and Narrative Pleasure, London: Unwin Hyman. Gorer, Geoffrey (1955), Exploring English Character, London: Crescent Press. Grant, Elspeth (1963), ‘Films: Far Cry from the Bethel’, The Tatler, 31 July, 40. The Guardian (1957), ‘Advert: “Hell Drivers”’, 31 July, 3. Harper, Sue and Porter, Vincent (2003), British Cinema of the 1950s: The Decline of Deference, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Higson, Andrew (1984), ‘Space, Place, Spectacle’, Screen, 5(4–​5), 1 July, 2–​21. Hill, Derek (1958), ‘Violent Playground’, Sight & Sound, Spring, 203. Hill, John (1986), Sex, Class & Realism: British Cinema 1956–​1963, London: BFI. Houston, Penelope (1967), ‘Cinema: Pinter’s Hand in Losey’s Glove’, The Spectator, 17 February, 14. Hunter, I. Q., Porter, Laraine and Smith, Justine (eds.) (2016), The Routledge Companion to British Cinema History, London: Routledge. Hutchings, Peter (2004), ‘Uncanny Landscapes in British Film and Television’, Visual Culture in Britain 5(2), 27–​40. Landy, Marcia (1991), British Genres: Cinema and Society 1930–​1960, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Laurie, Peter (1965), The Teenage Revolution, London: Anthony Blond. Longhurst, D. (ed.) (1989), Gender, Genre and Narrative Pleasure, London: Unwin Hyman. MacKillop, Ian and Sinyard, Neil (eds.) (2003), British Cinema in the 1950s:  A Celebration, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Macnab, Geoffrey (1993), J. Arthur Rank and the British Film Industry (Cinema and Society), London: Routledge. Macnab, Geoffrey (2000), Searching for Stars:  Stardom and Screen Acting in British Cinema, London: Continuum. Macnab, Geoffrey (ed.) (2009), Screen Epiphanies: Film-​Makers on the Films That Inspired Them, London: BFI. Magill, Frank (ed.) (1985), Magill’s Survey of Cinema:  Foreign Language Films, Ipswich, MA: Salem Press. McFarlane, Brian (1997), An Autobiography of British Cinema, London: Methuen. McFarlane, Brian (1998), ‘Losing the Peace’, in Barta, Tony (ed.) Screening the Past: Film and the Representation of History, Westport, CT: Praeger.

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96     Younger leading  men McFarlane, Brian (ed.) (2005), The Cinema of Britain and Ireland, London: Wallflower Press. Milne, Tom (1967), ‘Two Films: “Accident” ’, Sight & Sound, Spring, 57–​62. Milne, Tom (1968), Losey on Losey. New York: Doubleday. Milne, Tom (1971), ‘Films’, The Observer, 3 January, 26. Murphy, Robert (1992), Sixties British Cinema, London: BFI. Murphy, Robert (2000), British Cinema and the Second World War, London: Continuum. Murphy, Robert (ed.) (2001), The British Cinema Book (2nd ed.), London: BFI. Neve, Brian (2015), The Many Lives of Cy Endfield: Film Noir, the Blacklist, and ‘Zulu’, Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Perkins, Victor (1962), ‘The British Cinema’, Movie, 1, June, 3–​9. Petley, Julian (1986), ‘The Lost Continent’, in Barr, Charles (ed.) All Our Yesterdays: 90 Years of British Cinema, London: BFI. Plain, Gill (2006), John Mills and British Cinema:  Masculinity, Identity and Nation, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Powell, Dilys (1989), The Golden Screen: Fifty Years of Films, London: Headline Book Publishing. Quigly, Isabel (1959), ‘Cinema: Police Methods’, The Spectator, 28 August, 14. Review (1956), ‘Checkpoint’, Monthly Film Bulletin, 23(264), January, 167. Review (1957a), ‘Hell Drivers’, The Guardian, 27 August, 3. Review (1957b), ‘Hell Drivers’, Monthly Film Bulletin, 24(187), August, 102. Review (1959a), ‘Blind Date’, The Guardian, 22 August, 3. Review (1959b), ‘Yesterday’s Enemy’, Monthly Film Bulletin, 26(308), 121. Review (1960), ‘Hell Is A City’, Monthly Film Bulletin, 27(316), May, 64. Review (1962), ‘A Prize of Arms’, Monthly Film Bulletin, 29(347), December, 173. Review (1963), ‘Eva’, Monthly Film Bulletin, 356(30), September, 128. Review (1965–​66), ‘The Sands of The Kalahari’, Sight & Sound, Winter, 52. Review (1967a), ‘Accident’, Monthly Film Bulletin, 34(398), March, 39–​40. Review (1967b), ‘Robbery’, Monthly Film Bulletin, 406(34), November, 170. Review (1970), ‘The Games’, Monthly Film Bulletin, August, 166–​7. Roud, Richard (1956–​57), ‘Britain in America’, Sight & Sound, Winter, 119–​23. Roud, Richard (1960), ‘The Criminal’, Sight & Sound, Autumn, 196. Sanjek, David (2002), ‘Cold, Cold Heart: Joseph Losey’s “The Damned” and the Compensations of Genre’, Senses of Cinema, July. Sarne, Mike (1967), ‘ “Accident”: Mike Sarne Examines the Losey Myth …’, Films and Filming, April, 4–​5. Sarris, Andrew (1970), Confessions of a Cultist, New York: Simon & Schuster. Shail, Robert (2008), Stanley Baker:  A Life in Film, Cardiff:  University of Wales Press. Spicer, Andrew (1999), ‘The Emergence of the British Tough Guy; Stanley Baker, Masculinity and the Crime Thriller’, in Chibnall, Steve and Murphy, Robert (eds.) British Crime Cinema, London: Routledge. Spicer, Andrew (2003), Typical Men:  The Representation of Masculinity in Popular British Cinema, London: I. B. Tauris. Stead, Peter (2013), Film and the Working Class: The Feature Film in British and American Society, London: Routledge.

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Stanley  Baker     97 Tarratt, Margaret and Gough-​Yates, Kevin (1970), ‘Playing the Game’, Films and Filming, August, 30–​4. Taylor, John Russell (1963), ‘Eva’, Sight & Sound, September, 197. Taylor, John Russell (1966), ‘Accident’, Sight & Sound, Autumn, 179–​84. Thomson, David (2002), The New Biographical Dictionary of Film, London: Little Brown Books. Thomson, David (2010), ‘Have You Seen … ?’ A  Personal Introduction to 1,000 Films Including … , London: Penguin Books. Thomson, David (2014), The New Biographical Dictionary of Film (6th ed.), London: Little Brown Books. Weiler, A. H. (1960), ‘Review: “Campbell’s Kingdom”’, New York Times, 11 January.

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Laurence Harvey: The talented Mr Skikne1

Laurence Harvey was born Zvi Mosheh Skikne in Joniskis, Lithuania, on 1 October 1928. After a childhood and war service in South Africa, he studied at RADA and gained the stage name ‘Laurence Harvey’ at the start of his film career, which spanned from 1948 until shortly before his death on 25 November 1973. His theatre work encompassed the 1955 season at Stratford upon Avon, the title role in Henry V at the Old Vic Company in 1959, the lead in the West End version of Camelot in 1964 and The Winter’s Tale at the 1966 Edinburgh Festival. If you were an enthusiastic reader of gossip columns during the 1950s, you could not have failed to have noticed the name of Laurence Harvey along with those of Gilbert Harding, Lady Norah Docker2 and Fanny Craddock. In his survey of up-​and-​coming young British leading men, the writer Rod Hume claimed that the actor ‘had so far only achieved a personality off the screen’ (1957: 12). As with Diana Dors, Harvey seemed to revel in shocking respectable Britons, and he often appeared in the guise of one expelled from the upper sixth for habitual caddishness. He also delighted in baroque hairstyles and a wardrobe that was almost avant-​garde for the period –​Harvey once remarked that a reporter once ‘wanted me to admit that I was King of the Teddy boys –​because of the clothes I wear’ (quoted in Hutchinson 1956: 6). In 1955 Roger Manvell maintained that: The screen players of today do not even try to be the legendary figures of which great stars are made: their aim is to be representative of their audiences rather than to seem exceptional and remote. They become This chapter was partially inspired by the Sight & Sound feature ‘Laurence Harvey:  A Dandy in Aspic’ (Roberts 2006), ‘The Film That Changed British Cinema’ (Roberts 2009) and the essay from the BFI Flipside release of Expresso Bongo (Roberts 2016). 2 The wife of the chairman of Birmingham Small Arms (BSA), Sir Bernard Docker. A photo in the Daily Mirror dated 14 December 1954 was memorably captioned ‘Lady Docker Crawls Through Jimmy Edwards’s Legs’. 1

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Laurence  Harvey     99

Figure 5  Laurence Harvey in Romeo and Juliet (1954)

as a result familiar and favourite actors instead of irresistible objects of audience fascination, except perhaps for the more impressionable adolescent. (1955: 231)

It was a viewpoint that would probably not have found favour with Laurence Harvey, who devoted much effort into becoming a ‘star’; he once noted, ‘I’m not one of your “man next door” type of actors’ (quoted in Hinxman 1955: 7). He rose to fame at a time when many Pinewood and Elstree denizens gave the impression of descending from a somewhat lower tier of Olympus than their Hollywood counterpart –​an issue the actor was evidently keen to rectify. Alan Wynne of Picturegoer rhetorically asked, ‘Who else relishes the position of a movie star quite so openly? “I love every minute of it,” he says. “And I don’t care who knows it” ’ (1960:  82). This was not the ‘done thing old chap’ when a British film star was still meant to wear a sports jacket, affect an expression of

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100     Younger leading  men suitable modesty and preferably smoke a pipe as opposed to Harvey’s ultra-​theatrical cigarette holder. Richard Dyer contended that ‘stardom is an image of the way stars live’ (Dyer and McDonald 1998:  35), and Harvey, as with Diana Dors, revelled in images wholly devoid of reticence. These included a succession of cars that he could initially barely afford –​post-​R ADA transport was a sober Morris 10, but Harvey soon graduated to a flamboyant and faintly nouveau-​riche Jaguar Mk VII. He would subsequently rhapsodise how he loved ‘having a Rolls worth many thousands’ (quoted in Hutchinson 1956: 6). The following decade saw a brace of the even more imposing Jaguar Mk X, a Fiat ‘Jolly’ beach car, various Rolls-​Royces and a coach-​ built Mini Cooper with ‘LH’ crests embossed on the doors. Such fine vehicles frequently graced the actor’s PR shots as if to titillate and enrage a reader who believed that two custard creams at a Lyons’ corner house were the height of decadence. ‘Let me tell you about the social round first. It was much the more exhausting’, he graciously informed readers of Picturegoer on his return from a sojourn in Hollywood (Harvey 1954: 8). Not entirely surprisingly, the actor attracted a considerable amount of critical opprobrium both during and after his lifetime. David Shipman unbottled the vitriol to write that Harvey’s career was proof that ‘it is possible to succeed without managing to evoke the least audience interest or sympathy’ (1989: 246). A performance of Sir Walter de Frece in the biopic of Vesta Tilley After the Ball (Compton Bennett 1957) received a truly memorable review from Elspeth Grant: Under that jutting penthouse of hair3 to which he is so unaccountably attached, he is one mass of affectations, mannerisms, false smiles and meaningless gestures. Mr. Compton Bennett, a director whom I admire, is possibly too gentle a man to cope with the obstreperous Mr. Harvey  –​who should have been thrown over a bony knee and severely spanked very early in the proceedings. (1957: 27)

In 1963 Robert Lennard, the casting director for the ABPC wryly stated, ‘No matter what you think of his acting, Harvey is a star’ (quoted in Grant 1955: 34). The major irony of Laurence Harvey’s career is that while he devoted such effort to cultivating an image of West End urbanity, it was a role as a north-​country accountant that allowed him to achieve the apotheosis of the personality he was acting, when ‘an actor is able to fall right into his role, having to only concentrate on the expressive requirements of the film’s fictional situation. When a role achieves this ideally, so there is no feeling of characterisation whatsoever and the actor is at his expressive 3

The Harvey quiff greatly troubled Miss Grant; in her review of Storm Over the Nile, she referred to ‘that jutting promontory of forelock’ (1955: 34).

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Laurence  Harvey     101 best, then it is his archetypal role’ (Shaffer 1973: 105). What is remarkable about Harvey’s career is that he managed similar triumphs with Expresso Bongo, The Manchurian Candidate (John Frankenheimer 1962)  and Life at the Top (Ted Kotcheff 1965). Stanley Kauffmann contended that prior to Room at the Top Harvey was merely ‘an attractive young man with a pleasant if unutilised voice and remarkably well-​combed hair’ (1966: 191). But even his earlier roles in I Believe in You and The Good Die Young illustrate a skill at illustrating sociopathic cunning and vulnerable anger that made him one of the most interesting leading men of post-​ war British cinema. After Harvey’s death from cancer, Nicholas de Jongh wrote: ‘There is no player of his age who survives with his particular gifts’ (1973: 7). It is also difficult to dislike the kind of actor whom, when invited to a ‘come as your favourite person’ fancy-​dress party, arrived as himself. That ‘self ’ was, as with many film stars, a matter of some conjecture for one of his longest-​running and most successful performances was that of an English gentleman actor. ‘Laurence Harvey’ was the creation of a deracinated actor, one who had been performing for most of his adult life and who understood how a theatrical image needed to be crafted to survive in an alien land. Zvi Mosheh Skikne had hailed from Lithuania before his family relocated to South Africa in 1933 when Skikne was aged five. In the Second World War, he lied about his age to join a South African army entertainment troop under the command of Sergeant Sidney James, performing a jitter-​bugging act, and after demobilisation he was awarded an ex-​serviceman’s grant to study at RADA. To match his career in a new country was a stage name that was inspired by a combination of Laurence Olivier and the Harvey Nichols department store. Throughout the 1950s, Harvey’s social profile rose thanks to a series of relationships with Hermione Baddeley, Margaret Leighton, to whom Harvey was married between 1957 and 1961, and James Woolf, who was one of his chief influences in matters of deportment as well as acting. Harvey appears to have acquired his cut-​glass accent with the same ease and fluency that Sidney James developed his cockney patois, but these cultivated tones were not those of ‘the chap, the young middle-​class professionals’ who were ‘a part of a coherent interventionism in social life’ (Weeks 1981: 233). The tone was set by his feature film debut in the B-​ picture House of Darkness (Oswald Mitchell 1948) where the young actor depicted a piano-​playing bounder and general rotter Francis Merryman in a performance of uninhibited Grand Guignol. His unabashed melodramatic turn was sufficiently eye-​catching to gain him a two-​year contract with the ABPC.4 4

It was also praised as ‘outstanding’ by Monthly Film Bulletin (Review 1948: 73).

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102     Younger leading  men The most prominent film that Harvey made for the studio was Cairo Road (David MacDonald 1950)  in which he was second billed as the dashing narcotics agent Lieutenant Mourad. The casting was quite surreal –​C. A. Lejeune remarked, ‘I could not get into the habit of regarding Eric Portman as a man called Youssef Bey, nor of Laurence Harvey as a man called Mourad’ (1950:  6)  –​but the latter’s sense of apparent self-​ assurance remains in situ. In the hands of any other young British actor, the part might have proved a standard issue juvenile lead, but throughout Cairo Road Harvey’s diction is impeccable, his hair immaculate and his understanding of whom the camera should be focusing upon –​i.e. himself –​utterly infallible. After the ABPC contract ended in 1950, following one of their regular cutbacks, there were more roles in the netherworld of the British second feature, but small budgets did little to hamper the young actor’s ambition. In A Killer Walks (Ronald Drake 1952), Harvey was not natural casting for a farmhand named Ned, but he did not allow this to deter him from hurling himself around the set in a manner that would have met with approval from Tod Slaughter. Indeed, there was often a sense with Harvey’s performances in his early British films that he was not so much playing a role as telegraphing them. In Scarlet Thread (Lewis Gilbert 1951), Sydney Tafler’s gang boss reacts to impending doom with understated sangfroid while Harvey signals panic with an array of expressions that would have done credit to a pantomime villain. However, a supporting role as nightclub crooner Jerry Nolan in the 1952 epic Women of Twilight (Gordon Parry) so impressed the producer James Woolf that it earned Harvey a contract with the independent film-​maker Romulus. An early trip to Hollywood resulted in the third lead as Sir Kenneth of Huntington in King Richard and the Crusaders (David Butler 1954), but a maladroit script5 hampered both this effort at a costume drama and the chance of a contract with Warner Brothers. Alan Stanbrook describes the aftermath of this non-​epic as returning to the UK ‘if not in disgrace, at least in disappointment, to continue as simply one of a dozen romantic leads’ (1964:  42). Romeo and Juliet (Renato Castellani 1954)  did bring Harvey some critical attention  –​‘handsome, nimble, hot-​headed and eventually rent in mad despair’ (Crowther 1954: n.p.). On the other side of the Atlantic, Edward Thorpe perceived Harvey’s Romeo as ‘wooden and stereotyped’, but also considered him to have ‘the personality of a thinking actor; nervous, sharp-​edged, electric’ (1955: 8). Thorpe’s review further highlighted how Laurence Harvey was unsuited to the straightforward juvenile leads or conventional romantic roles that dominated post-​war British cinema. In 1955 Harvey portrayed 5

Sample dialogue:  ‘War, war! That’s all you ever think about, Dick Plantagenet! You burner, you pillager!’

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Laurence  Harvey     103 John Durrance in Storm Over the Nile (Zoltan Korda/​Terence Young 1955)  the remake of The Four Feathers (Zoltan Korda 1939), which, if nothing else, is a testament to the staying powers of Brylcreem even after hours under the African sun.6 Three Men in a Boat (Ken Annakin 1956) was a box office triumph but is now challenging to endure as it is a monument to 1950s uber-​chappishness and David Robinson referred to Harvey’s performance in I Am a Camera (Henry Cornelius 1955) as ‘meaningless’ (1955–​56: 150). Alan Stanbrook perceptively discerned that, ‘When he responds to a part … he is outstanding; but when he finds it uncongenial, he retreats into the externalised, mechanical, gesture’ (1964:  43). Harvey was at his most compelling in roles that emphasised a sense of displacement and not entirely belonging to the British ‘family’ rather than his off-​ screen antics as a Mayfair gadabout. The calculating hotel employee of Innocents in Paris (Gordon Parry 1953) displayed his talent for comedy –​ ‘Laurence Harvey makes something precious of the banal character of the waiter whose room service cheers the waiting hours of the frightful gum-​chewing eternal girlfriend Gloria’ (Lockhart 1953: 28). In the previous year, a supporting role in the Ealing drama, I Believe in You (Basil Dearden and Michael Relph 1952) gave an early indication of Harvey’s capacity for flamboyant and dangerously immature screen villainy. The screenplay focused on Cecil Parker’s retired colonial officer and ‘man of leisure’ Henry Phipps’s induction into the probation service. The film details how he and his female colleague ‘Matty’ Matheson (Celia Johnson) attempt to guide Harry Fowler’s Charlie Hooker and Joan Collins’s Norma away from the malign influence of Harvey’s louche Jordie Bennett. Raymond Durgnat describes I Believe in You as ‘English do-​gooders come movingly alive on the screen’ (1970:  138), but Jordie has isolated himself from all forms of benign official assistance. Harvey had played spivs and cockneys earlier in his career in Scarlet Thread, and There Is Another Sun (Lewis Gilbert 1951), but I Believe in You allows him the chance to create a figure of real menace. Andrew Spicer describes the young criminal as ‘stylish, cool, calculating, sexually predatory’ (2003: 133) and from the outset Jordie is established as a danger to the community. We first see him fleeing from a stolen Jowett Javelin and then smirking, as only Laurence Harvey could, on receiving a six-​month prison sentence. On his release, Jordie’s criminal behaviour escalates to the point of using a firearm, but Harvey imbues the young wide boy with a peacock-​ like charisma, strutting through a London landscape of weed-​ filled gardens and bombsites. His spiv is a louche habitué of a subterranean 6

‘It is in the playing that Storm Over the Nile shows itself decidedly inferior to the 1939 version’ (Review 1955: 177).

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104     Younger leading  men world of jazz dens, a drape-​jacketed illustration of how Basil Dearden often depicted popular music as ‘a snare, a fatal incitement to surrender to descent’ (Hill 1986: 76). The poster artwork has a young Joan Collins mesmerised by Harvey’s pompadour of evil, with Jordie’s clothes and hairstyle marking the cusp between the spiv and the Teddy boy. Jordie’s serpentine manner is redolent of languorous sexuality that no amount of youth club ping-​pong tournaments and national service would be able to quell. Harvey’s leading role in The Good Die Young gave him an early opportunity to create a leading performance of note, that of a cad. These decadent sorts were typically a younger son remitted by his long-​suffering family to remote parts of the empire –​on the condition that he never returned to Blighty –​and who seduced wealthy widows as a matter of course. With The Good Die Young, a fatalistic and uncredited narrator introduces the four main protagonists as a Jaguar Mk VII cruises through a nocturnal Chelsea towards a planned mail-​van raid that ultimately becomes a rendezvous with death. Eddie (John Ireland), a US Air Force sergeant, Joe (Richard Basehart) an ex-​GI and Mike (Stanley Baker), a crippled boxer, have been inveigled by Harvey’s, Miles ‘Rave’ Ravenscourt to rob a mail van. We next see Rave (undoubtedly one of the best names in the history of British cinema) in a penthouse apartment decorated with as a shrine to his ego. As with all proper cinematic cads, Rave is fond of spending the money of his wife Eve (Margaret Leighton), but she now refuses to support him any longer and issues an ultimatum that they must start a new life in Africa to save their marriage. To raise further funds, Rave then attempts a little light blackmail of his father (Robert Morley), and in the confines of a gentleman’s club, Sir Francis confronts his on-​screen son with a mixture of revulsion and shame. In return, Rave attacks his screen pater with a blend of suave menace and adolescent petulance, revelling in both his parasitic nature and his fake war record. Monthly Film Bulletin complained that ‘the inadequacy of Laurence Harvey’s performance as the heartless and menacing Rave makes his domination over three allegedly honest men appear the more improbable’ (Review 1954: 52), but The Good Die Young now seems a fascinating example of the British film noir. C.  A. Lejeune praised Harvey’s ‘smooth, smiling, unguent study of an incompletely written character’ (1954: 11), the actor’s immaculately modulated tones hinting at evenings in Mayfair’s finest niteries, departing in a polished Jaguar Mk VII, with possibly a crate of black-​market gin in the boot. It was a world that the young Withnail (Richard E. Grant) must have aspired to, and Harvey was also a role model to the manager of the Rolling Stones, Andrew Loog Oldham, ‘Britain’s first pop star’ (Oldham 2011: 420). The role of Lieutenant Commander ‘Buster’ Crabbe in The Silent Enemy (William Fairchild 1958)  further illustrated Harvey’s ability at

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Laurence  Harvey     105 playing those who were distanced from mainstream social hierarchies and in that same year he commenced work on the film that was to establish him with British cinemagoers. Alan Stanbrook saw Harvey as an actor who underwent ‘four discoveries’ (1964:  43), commencing with the contract with ABPC, the second male lead in Cairo Road, starring in Romeo and Juliet and culminating with Room at the Top. Anthony Carthew of the Daily Herald wrote, ‘For years, Laurence Harvey has been telling everyone what a good actor he is and then promptly disproving his statement by appearing in a film or play. This week, his talent finally catches with his opinion of it’ (1959: 8). John Braine’s novel Room at the Top was published in 1957, and Romulus Films recognised the commercial potential of a screen adaptation –​John Woolf heard of the book via BBC TV’s Panorama (Sinai 2003:  232). The initial casting choice for Joe Lampton was Stewart Granger, but after this idea was (mercifully) discounted, the Woolfs chose Harvey. Jack Clayton, who had co-​produced four of the actor’s Romulus films, believed that he was ideal to play the ex-​R AF sergeant POW Joe Lampton,7 who Braine saw as representing the idea that ‘most ambitious working-​class boys want to get the hell out of the working class. That was a simple truth that had never been stated before’ (quoted in Murphy 1992: 13). In the director’s view, ‘Who better to play someone talented, aggressive, ambitious, arrogant, with a huge chip on his shoulder but also bags of charm and self-​confidence’ (quoted in Sinyard 2000:  40) than an actor who once bitterly noted that in West End theatrical circles he was seen as little more than a ‘cocky intruder’ (quoted in Sinai 2003: 81). Harvey once stated, in a line that could have been uttered by Joe Lampton, ‘failure never entered my plans. From the start I envisaged only success for myself ’ (quoted in Stanbrook 1964:  43). Both star and character represented a social stratum that was described with mild contempt by Frank Inlton in Encounter magazine as ‘the underdogs’: They are ambitious, intelligent, and they come from nowhere. They have no inhibitions. They have nothing to lose that they have not already automatically lost by the simple fact of their intelligence and their education. They have a suddenly acquired taste for life. In some ways everything and anything is possible. But they don’t know where to start. They have no background that could have nursed their talents and trained them how to use them. They have only their intelligence, their energy, and too much choice. So they have no confidence and approach everything with suspicion. (1958: 60)

7

Certainly, Harvey was more of an outsider than new-​wave stars such as Albert Finney, the son of an affluent Manchester bookmaker.

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106     Younger leading  men Escape is one of the narrative’s motifs, and the cinematic Joe Lampton is constantly on the move, with even his new shoes in the opening credits symbolising progression from ‘underdog’ status. He spurned the chance to break out from his POW camp to plan a form of freedom via studying for his accountancy examinations –​‘What did I have to escape for?’ Early in the narrative, he may cry out during an amateur dramatic performance that he is ‘working class and proud of it!’ but Lampton has spurned a post-​war existence in his home town for a better life in the more affluent community of Warley: ‘When I was a POW there was … a limit to the time served, but Dufton –​that seemed like a lifetime sentence.’ When Joe briefly visits the bomb site that was once his family home in the town of Dufton, Harvey’s softly inflected sad remark to a little girl playing there that ‘it used to be mine too’ infers that there was never any real prospect of his returning. Joe now finds himself on the path to middle-​class respectability as a local government accountant  –​yet he finds civilian life equally stifling, as emphasised by the dull lighting (Francis 2013:  88). The town clerk Hoylake (Raymond Huntley) has clearly settled for his well-​defined role in local society a long time ago, but Joe is not prepared to enter the new decade of the 1950s and face a nation, as described by Richard Davenport-​Hines, ‘where the gravy served at main meals made everything taste alike’ (2013: 33). That was not the civilian life Joe dreamed of in the POW camp, and he now feels primed to depart for a level of society typified by sunshine and gin and limes. A sense of ambition was far from a new trait in a post-​war British film, but Lampton is open in his goals. For Ealing Studios, Henry Holland of The Lavender Hill Mob used the mask of the dutiful state employee and Louis Mazzini uttered his bons mots with ironic detachment. As with Kind Hearts and Coronets (Robert Hamer 1949), Room at the Top is a ‘period film’  –​it is set in the late 1940s  –​but Harvey’s protagonist cuts a far more contemporary figure. Nor would he contemplate achieving material success in the manner of the salesmen described by Richard Hoggart  –​‘neat, ready-​made clothing, shiny though cheap shoes, well-​creamed hair and ready smiles’ (1957:  107); Harvey’s wary and calculating demeanour is the opposite of such spivery. Lampton’s arrival at the town hall has the office girls appraising him in the same manner that he covets a parked Lagonda a moment earlier, for Joe sees his destiny as a provincial form of La Dolce Vita. His will not be a world of second-​hand Austin 10s and semi-​detached villas, but of hand-​ built motor cars and ‘Robbins the chemist with the bottles of Lentheric aftershave lotion and the beaver shaving brushes’ (Braine 1957:  196). However, while Joe may have moved to a new community, Warley is still a north-​country industrial town in the provinces where

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you are never able to forget your poverty (that is, absence of wealth) and your inferiority, and if you are especially sensitive to such things, at last you are forced to do something about it. To forget your poverty (that is, absence of wealth) and your inferiority, and if you are especially sensitive to such things, at last you are forced to do something about it. (Inlton 1958: 63)

The ‘top’ is a world that is initially closed to Lampton, and he faces ‘a conservative and conformist working class, in the form of his surviving family members and a self-​made middle class who wish to guard the status quo (Richards 1997: 150). His relationship with Susan Brown (Heather Sears) results in a confrontation with her father, the self-​made business magnate Abe Brown (Donald Wolfit), but is more of a generational collision. It is Susan’s mother, played with icy disdain by Ambrosine Phillpotts, and the ex-​R AF officer Jack Wales (John Westbrook) who show the upper classes in a harsh light. As Neil Sinyard argues, ‘When Lampton retaliates against Wales’ sneering address of him as “Sergeant” he is signalling a new direction not only for himself but for British film. He refuses to accept deference based on tradition rather than talent, to genuflect instinctively to the officer class’ (2000: 47). For Joe, the one redeeming member of the community is Alice Aisgill (Simone Signoret), the thirty-​five-​year-​old wife of a prominent local solicitor and Lampton’s only love. In the book, the character is English, but the casting of Signoret makes Alice almost as much of an outsider as Joe, her accent concealing her social origins from British ears. Clayton was less interested in the film’s social arguments than the human story –​ ‘It was infinitely more truthful about relationships between people than films in that genre that had preceded it’ (quoted in Walker 1974: 53). The scene where Allan Cuthbertson’s George Aisgill mercilessly threatens Lampton with a succession of legal challenges to his relationship with Alice leads not to an angry reprisal but rather a mute defeat and Joe’s tearful crumpling. Peter John Dyer questioned whether the character had ‘any feeling beyond sex and ambition? What is the real Joe that Alice alone discerns when she sleeps with him? We never really know’ (1959: 21). But it is Alice who sees through Joe’s mask of surliness, and Harvey subtly displays how Lampton gradually thaws under her influence and his pleasure in bringing her happiness. Penelope Houston mused as to whether Lampton was the victim of his own character or the social structure and suggested that Harvey’s performance left these as open questions (1959:  57). But the actor understood the immature, self-​seeking vulnerable young man in a hurry. As Stanley Kauffmann observed, the role of Joe Lampton allowed Harvey to ‘crack out of a plaster mold, to breath, to strike and suffer, to be’ (1966: 191, original emphasis).

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108     Younger leading  men The result of Joe conducting simultaneous affairs is a virtual shotgun wedding to Susan, and Alice is killed in a drink-​related car crash after she hears the news. Early in the film, she tells Joe, ‘ “I’m not fragile” … “I won’t break”, but she is:  she will’ (Sinyard 2000:  60). Amid office celebrations for the engagement, we hear Huntley’s voice announcing that Alice was ‘scalped’ in the collision, his hushed tones permeating through the bonhomie and the cheap champagne. The conclusion has Lampton riding towards ‘the top’ in a Bentley, in a state of total despair, the memory of Hoylake’s description of Alice’s death still revolving in his mind. The final reel illustrates Joe’s feeling of self-​inflicted loss. Elspeth Grant reflected that ‘one can’t help feeling that once he had got his hands on his father-​in-​law’s brass, he’ll be able to forget  all about Alice (1959: 12). He won’t, ever. Harvey capitalised on his Oscar-​nominated success with Expresso Bongo as Johnny Jackson, big-​band drummer and general Soho fixture. Wolf Mankowitz created the original 1958 stage musical as a satire of the rise to fame of Tommy Steele, the UK’s first rock and roll singer-​ songwriter. In both the play and the film, the central character was Johnny Jackson, whose template was Larry Parnes, the Willesden-​born dressmaker turned ‘star maker’. British Lion commissioned a screen version that entered production in September 1959, directed by Val Guest, who collaborated with Mankowitz on the screenplay. The film retained only two of the original numbers, and there was a new sequence that spoofed television documentaries on youth culture. Paul Scofield initially portrayed Jackson and Peter Sellers was considered for the film version before Guest cast Harvey. David Thomson once described the actor’s persona as ‘never quite likeable, and never too much in love with himself ’ (2010: 736), and Harvey brought a genuine sense of understanding to his interpretation of Johnny. His manager is prone to wearing a trilby at a dramatic angle as he spins his cheap dreams at approximately 200 mph in an attempt to escape his seedy flat with its combined kitchen/​bathroom/​lavatory. He delivers all the script’s finest bons mots (‘Get back to your washboard, scrubber!’) with relish, in a cockney accent based on Mankowitz’s voice but with distinct undertones of a Lithuanian-​inflected South African. The plot quickly establishes that Johnny can barely raise the credit for a salt-​beef sandwich, but his goal is to become a name throughout Tin Pan Alley, but his tame song-​writer Beast Bailey is unlikely to challenge Lionel Bart with numbers such as When I  Beat My Chick with a Solid Rock. Nor does Jackson’s route to success lie with promoting his stripper girlfriend Maise (Sylvia Syms), a would-​be chanteuse whose singing ability is nil. But one evening he encounters an amateur bongo player named Bert Rudge (Cliff Richard); finally, Jackson now has an ‘artiste’ who will pack the expresso bars ‘from Croydon to Willesden!’ and the

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Laurence  Harvey     109 fact that his protégé is under twenty-​one and thus signed to an illegal contract does not overly concern him. One devoted fan of this performance was the future manager of the Rolling Stones, Andrew Loog Oldham: ‘No one could have pleased me more as manager Johnny Jackson than my own Larry Harvey’ (2011: 35). Indeed, Johnny Jackson is one of the cinema’s most endearing spivs, a figure to be ranked alongside Sydney Tafler in Wide Boy (Ken Hughes 1952). When catching sight of an ITV talent show, it is impossible not to think of Expresso Bongo’s standout number of Nausea with Meier Tzelniker and Harvey jiving around Soho as they question the very nature of pop. ‘When I see this little bleeder and compare him to Aida –​ nausea!’ bewails Tzelniker’s record producer Gus Meyer as the Harvey terpsichorean skills provide an echo of the teenaged army entertainer Larry Skikne. At this point, Harvey decided to revive a Hollywood career that had been essentially dormant since 1955.8 Between 1960 and 1964 he made pictures across the globe, although some now take the form of a vaguely troubling nightmare. Two Loves (Charles Walters 1961) featured Shirley MacLaine as a spinster schoolmistress in rural New Zealand torn between Jack Hawkins’s headmaster and a motorcycling Laurence  –​‘excruciatingly bad as a sex-​starved neurotic’ (Grant 1961: 40). Meanwhile, Bosley Crowther thought Laurence Harvey ‘barely one-​ dimensional as the dim-​witted Texas tramp’ (1962: n.p.) in Walk on the Wild Side (Edward Dmytryk 1962). Such epics, most of which are forever doomed to roam the schedules of late-​night television, also appeared to be designed to indulge the actor in his worst mannerisms. The actor’s British productions during this period include the Second World War drama The Long and the Short and the Tall (Leslie Norman 1960) –​ Monthly Film Bulletin very accurately described Harvey’s interpretation of Private Bamford as veering between ‘gifted professional mimicry and forceful personality-​selling, nowhere touching the true cockney accent or manner’ (Review 1961: 44). Of Human Bondage (Ken Hughes 1964), with Kim Novak as Mildred and a club-​footed Laurence as Phillip Carey, was greeted with a similar lack of acclaim: ‘Mr. Harvey’s portrayal is, at best, a succession of basically vacuous, woebegone attitudes’, wrote an underwhelmed A. H. Weiler (1964: n.p.). During this period, Harvey also starred in and directed the Tangiers-​shot prison drama The Ceremony (1963), which was neither a commercial nor a critical success –​‘ruined by Laurence Harvey’s I Am Orson Welles direction’, grumbled Sight & Sound (Review 1963: 104). 8

This lost Harvey the chance to star in Peeping Tom; Michael Powell believed he would have ‘had the allure of one of the readers of Films and Filming or other magazines of that style, neglected, half-​dead from hunger, passionate’ (quoted in Tavernier 1968: 2–​13).

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110     Younger leading  men Fortunately, The Running Man (1963) represented an enjoyable return to British caddish villainy. The project must have seemed like a highly promising proposition with direction from Carol Reed and a screenplay by John Mortimer, but the overall results were not universally well-​ received, described by John Cutts as ‘technically perfect but artistically dead’ (1963: 23). The same critic also considered Harvey to be ‘charmless’ in the leading role, but no one could accuse Laurence of underplaying. His robust performance, augmented by an immaculate white Lincoln Continental plus a blonde quiff-​and-​moustache combination that made him resemble a deranged Leslie Phillips, was a bounder in overdrive. Alan Bates’s sensible, Austin Cambridge-​driving insurance investigator looked like the Strand cigarette man on an off day by comparison. The high point of Harvey’s film work during the 1960s was The Manchurian Candidate, where, as Greil Marcus notes, ‘We’re seeing the director John Frankenheimer; the screenwriter George Axelrod; plus Frank Sinatra, Laurence Harvey, Henry Silva, Khigh Dheigh, Angela Lansbury … and more  –​all of them working over their heads, diving into the material they’ve chosen, or been given, in every case outstripping the material and themselves’ (2002: 196). The irony of Harvey’s one great performance in an American film is that it is as moving a depiction of the pain of maintaining a stiff upper lip as Trevor Howard in Heart of the Matter (George More O’Ferrall 1953) and Michael Redgrave in The Browning Version (Anthony Asquith 1951). The Manchurian Candidate showcases Harvey as the white Anglo-​Saxon Protestant (WASP) prig Raymond Shaw and Harvey’s acting electrifies in the fashion of British actors when they are conveying the precise moment when restraint and emotion overlap. Even when Shaw is at his most disdainful, Harvey manages to convey with his eyes a plea for understanding that makes his despairing admission that ‘I am not loveable’ as moving as the breakdown of Redgrave’s Andrew Crocker-​ Harris. The lonely, desiccated, schoolmaster is reminded by a small parting gift from one of his students that his life does have a purpose, while Raymond is a figure whose cold manner is no longer a mask but his prison. Post-​Manchurian Candidate, it was British cinema that gave Harvey his final three significant roles, with Darling (John Schlesinger 1965), Life at the Top and A Dandy in Aspic (Anthony Mann 1967). Darling is one of the most dated relics of the swinging London era, partially not least because of its plot that resembles a Rank ‘let’s punish Diana Dors because she is young, intelligent and attractive’ melodrama circa 1955. The protagonist Diane Scott is a model who sleeps her way to the top of society, and beneath the witty aphorisms of Frederick Raphael’s screenplay, Darling is essentially a morality tale with a suffocating sense of pseudo-​ virtue. As a 1965 interpretation of the ‘bad blonde’, albeit one of an upper-​middle-​class background, Diane is condemned for her behaviour

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Laurence  Harvey     111 while Dirk Bogarde’s Robert Gold, a writer and TV journalist with his duffle coat, humble Morris 1100 and liberal pretensions, is treated with great respect, despite the fact that he leaves his wife and family for a younger model. It is Harvey’s vampiric advertising agent Miles Brand who is paradoxically the least obnoxious of the two male leads, if only because he does not bother to mask his nature as the poseur’s poseur. Alexander Walker remarked that the three men that the protagonist becomes associated with –​Robert, Miles and the photographer Malcolm (Roland Curram) –​ are all image makers, with Harvey’s character ‘manipulating the values of consumer society by presenting an infinitely more attractive version of reality’ (1974: 282). Every aspect of Miles is calculated to present an infallibly soigné image from his lightly oiled quiff to his Mercedes-​Benz 230SL and carefully polished quips; one priceless moment has Brand happy and secure in his conceit, gliding through a ballroom to the accompaniment of the Breakaways’ ‘Someone to Love’. Had Rave of The Good Die Young decided to turn a (reasonably) honest penny, PR would have provided the ideal venue for his narcissism. Kenneth Tynan believed Raphael was ‘sniggering at the characters he created’ (1965: 24), but what pleases Miles is his talent for manipulating those below and above him on the social scale; the voyeur who regards others as his puppets. Brand’s origins are ambiguous, with his diction and tone almost too actorly to mark him as one of the gentry; even his name sounds as though it was as carefully crafted as any washing powder sales campaign. We have already seen with the likes of Genevieve how the wartime officer could adapt to the demands of the nascent consumerist society, but Miles is now the cad as 1960s image maker. Penelope Houston regarded Brand as ‘a monstrous poseur who takes Diana to Dolce Vita orgies in a Paris brothel, but won’t open the office safe at her bidding to let her see the firm’s papers’ (1965: 46). But Miles knows the power in holding the keys to the secrets of others. His time on-​screen may be comparatively limited, but Harvey still creates the last notable villain of his career. Harvey’s next British film, Life at the Top, suffers from some very confused chronology,9 but it does capture an aspect of 1960s Britain rarely seen in cinema –​a north country of tailored suits, expense-​account scampi and steak au poivre. Joe Lampton is now the chief accountant of Abe Brown’s textile mill, with tailored suits, gin and tonics and a new Jaguar S-​Type company car. If Kotcheff ’s direction lacks, Clayton’s bravura flourishes from the first film, the screenplay of Mordecai Richler –​ who had made uncredited contributions to the earlier film –​is of a high 9

The first film was set in the late 1940s and although Life is meant to take place a decade later, it clearly unfolds in 1965.

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112     Younger leading  men standard, expertly capturing the boredom of provincial life where the local Establishment still despise Lampton for being a parvenu. A business trip to London makes the capital initially appear equally unappealing; an expense-​ account-​ funded evening includes a nightmarish strip club straight from The Small World of Sammy Lee (Ken Hughes 1963). After life and marriage in the North appear untenable, Joe uses an affair with Honor Blackman’s visiting TV journalist Norah and the vague possibility of a directorship at a rival firm offered by Nigel Davenport’s Mottram as a chance to flee provincial torpor. Philip French saw 1963 as the year in which British ‘kitchen-​sink’ cinema made ‘a social as well as geographical about-​face’ (1966: 107), drawing attention to the conclusion to Billy Liar! (John Schlesinger 1963). ‘The camera may have followed Billy on his lonely, elegiac return to the family semi-​detached, but spiritually the film-​makers had a one-​way ticket to ride south with Miss Christie’ (1966:  107). But Joe’s southward journey to London is not framed as a triumphal escape along a new motorway but an ignominious fleeing from his family responsibilities in a borrowed Morris Mini-​Traveller. As Robert Murphy observed, ‘the idea that most films between 1965 and 1970 promoted a mindlessly optimistic view of the world is more of a myth than the myth the films are assumed to convey’ (1992: 4). Joe finds not so much a capital of limitless opportunity but rather derision from Norah’s literati friends. Kenneth Tynan compared Lampton with Richard Burton in The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (Martin Ritt 1965), believing that ‘Joe is a product of the compromised society that Alec Leamas is paid to protect. Their contaminated values stem from the same source’ (1966: 25). The Le Carré protagonist works for mean, chipped and cardigan-​wearing officials who make decisions that can literally mean life or death and exists in a city of 1930s tenement blocks and gimcrack grocer’s shops in an all-​pervasive atmosphere of a never-​ending winter. Lampton faces derision from the literati of ‘media London’ for being a businessman from the provinces. His Bradford tones clash with their polished vowels –​‘Full of love and Oxfam they are, full of humanity, but introduce a stranger, a non-​club member into their midst and they will insult him just for the hell of it’  –​is his not inaccurate assessment. The key scene is the directorship interview, set up for Lampton by Mottram, and while Joe believes that the capital will be less class bound than the world of the provinces, he is quickly disabused of that notion. His CV  –​modest compared with the academic achievements of other applicants but an immense success given his deprived background –​is politely and ruthlessly dissected and in Life at the Top London appears less the city of limitless opportunity and more of another closed fortress to a scholarship boy. Throughout this whole scene, Harvey effortlessly

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Laurence  Harvey     113 and subtly conveys Lampson’s shame and destruction of self-​esteem, as throughout the interview Joe has his carefully arranged defences ruthlessly and courteously stripped away. In Room at the Top he was told by Alice, ‘You don’t ever have to pretend. You just have to be yourself ’, but the irony is that by doing just that in front of the board of directors that Lampton wishes to impress, the result is his near mental collapse. It is an extraordinarily painful sequence to witness, on a par with Viaggio in Italia (Roberto Rossellini 1954), where George Sanders’s cynical English businessman Alex Joyce is slowly stripped of his verbal protection to reveal a remarkable sense of depressive loneliness. And Harvey’s Joe Lampton facing a nervous breakdown reflects the same isolation once experienced by a nineteen-​year-​old Lithuanian in London with the ever-​present nightmare of being deported back to a country that he no longer remembered. The conclusion sees Joe running his father-​ in-​law’s business, driving a Maserati Quattroporte  –​a car even more magnificent than the Lagonda he first saw on arrival in Room at the Top. Lampton has returned to Yorkshire both for his family and enhanced career prospects at the cost of further entrapment. The final shot of the factory gates shutting in front of his new car symbolises his status as a privileged prisoner, a conclusion almost as bleak as in the first film. False identity was the theme of Harvey’s last important screen role, in A Dandy in Aspic, directed by the star himself after Mann’s demise halfway through shooting. The plot was tailor-​made for Harvey as the main protagonist –​Alexander Eberlin is a Russian spy who has adopted an English identity to function as an undercover agent within British intelligence. The New  York Times complained that Harvey’s role was a ‘prop’ and that ‘normally, in the James Bond sort of movie where all the characters are stock, the gadgetry at least is animate’ (Alder and Canby 1968:  n.p.). But this is to misjudge Harvey’s depiction of a conflicted middle-​aged spy. Eberlin’s dour nature is partially masked by a form of ‘Englishness’ that takes the external form of dandyism to an almost parodic extent. His dual identity has become both an overwhelming experience and a burden. After the death of his mentor James Woolf in 1966, Harvey’s image seemed trapped in the parody of the post-​war Mayfair dandy. Harvey’s post-​1967 screen career descended to an absolute nadir, with pictures such as Rebus (Nino Zanchin 1969) that were aimed at that mid-​Atlantic market but almost inevitably disappeared at some point off St Helena. One role where Harvey’s dangerous soigné charms would not have seemed anachronistic was that of 007. David Cannadine describes the James Bond of Ian Fleming’s novels as ‘a quintessential clubland hero, flourishing in the very era when they were deemed to be doomed’ (2002:  293), and Ian Fleming could almost have written Commander Bond’s brand snobbery with Harvey in mind, as could his brief physical

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114     Younger leading  men description of 007.10 In 1971 Harvey was diagnosed with stomach cancer and his last British picture, Night Watch (Brian G.  Hutton 1973), was the work of a visibly ill man. Sixteen months before his death, a profile by Donald Zec captured the faintest air of Expresso Bongo –​ ‘Laurence Harvey was in so jubilant a mood he kissed Lionel Blair [and] embraced writer Wolf Mankowitz’ (1972: 11). In 1967 Harvey reflected that ‘too much parading up and down with the dolly birds and jolly old Britain will still stop wishing you well. I should know; I had my first Roller in ’54. Couldn’t afford it but that’s half the pleasure’ (quoted in Oldham 2011: 42). Alexander Walker believed that he ‘always saw himself as a romantic lead; he was never prepared to settle for being a leading character actor’ (1988: 216), and in the latter capacity Joe Lampton was the cinematic embodiment of male post-​war frustration. Perhaps tellingly, the actor’s favourite role was not in one of his Hollywood epics but as the kinetic and driven Johnny Jackson, a figure at the heart of an urban vista of Gaggia coffee machines and singers who desire to become ‘all-​round entertainers’. If one moment of Harvey’s screen career should be preserved for posterity it is of the actor singing ‘I’ve Never Had It So Good Before’ as his caffeine-​crazed wide boy strolls through a night-​time West End contemplating a golden future in which his clients will ‘open shoe shops for cash!’ Bibliography Alder, Renata and Canby, Vincent (1968), ‘Screen:  Harvey Plays a Deadpan “Dandy in Aspic”: Tale of Double Agent Opens at Cinema 1’, New York Times, 3 April. Braine, John (1957), Room at the Top, London: Eyre & Spottiswoode. Cannadine, David (2002), In Churchill’s Shadow: Confronting the Past in Modern Britain, London: Penguin Books. Carthew, Anthony (1959), ‘The New Films:  Now Britain Joins the Bedroom Brigade … and Adds a Slice of Yorkshire Pudding’, Daily Herald, 23 January, 8. Chandler, Charlotte (2001), ‘It’s Only A  Move’:  Alfred Hitchcock  –​A  Personal Biography, New York: Simon & Schuster. Crowther, Bosley (1954), ‘Anglo-​Italian “Romeo and Juliet” Arrives’, New  York Times, 22 December. Crowther, Bosley (1962), ‘Laurence Harvey and Capucine Head Cast:  “Satan Never Sleeps”’, New York Times, 22 February. Cutts, John (1963), ‘The Running Man’, Films and Filming, September, 23. Daily Mirror (1954), ‘An Amazing Picture Says Lady Docker’, 14 December. Davenport-​Hines, Richard (2013), An English Affair: Sex, Class and Power in the Age of Profumo, London: William Collins. 10

‘Bond knew there was something alien and un-​English about himself. He knew that he was a difficult man to cover up. Especially in England’ (Fleming 1955: 44).

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Laurence  Harvey     115 de Jongh, Nicholas (1973), ‘Obituary’, The Guardian, 27 November, 7. Durgnat, Raymond (1970), A Mirror for England: British Movies from Austerity to Affluence, London: Faber & Faber. Dyer, Peter John (1959), ‘Room at the Top’, Films and Filming, February, 21. Dyer, Richard and McDonald, Paul (1998), STARS: New Edition, London: BFI. Fleming, Ian (1955), Moonraker, London: Jonathan Cape. Francis, Freddie (2013), Freddie Francis:  The Straight Story from Moby Dick to Glory, a Memoir, Plymouth, UK: Scarecrow Press. Fraser, John (2004), Close-​Up: An Actor Telling Tales, London: Oberon Books. French, Philip (1966), ‘The Alphaville of Admass: Or How We Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Boom’, Sight & Sound, Summer, 106–​11. Goodwin, Cliff (2011), Sid James: A Biography, London: Virgin Books. Grant, Elspeth (1955), ‘At the Pictures:  Skirmish with the Dervish’, The Tatler, 23 November, 34. Grant, Elspeth (1957), ‘At the Pictures:  Bludgeoning of Fate’, The Tatler, 21 August, 27. Grant, Elspeth (1959), ‘Cinema:  Mr. Skikne Arrives at the Top’, The Tatler, 4 February,  11–​12 Grant, Elspeth (1961), ‘Elspeth Grant On Films’, The Tatler, 13 September, 40. Grant, Elspeth (1963). ‘In Search of a Star’, The Tatler, 13 March. 34. Harvey, Laurence (1954), ‘Going Hollywood on my Party Line’, Picturegoer, 3 April,  8–​9. Hennessy, Peter (2007), Having It So Good:  Britain in the Fifties, London: Penguin Books. Hill, John (1986), Sex, Class & Realism: British Cinema 1956–​1963, London: BFI. Hinxman, Margaret (1955), ‘The Perils of Being Harvey’, Picturegoer, 13 August. Hoggart, Richard (1957), The Uses of Literacy; Aspects of Working-​Class  Life, London: Chatto & Windus. Houston, Penelope (1959), ‘Room at the Top?’, Sight & Sound, Spring, 56–​9. Houston, Penelope (1965), ‘Darling’, Sight & Sound, Autumn, 46. Hume, Rod (1957), ‘Gentlemen of England:  The Boys of British Cinema Are on the Verge of Top International Stardom’, Films and Filming, September, 12–​13. Hutchinson, Tom (1956), ‘Harvey Keeps the Film World Guessing’, Picturegoer, 15 December, 5–​6. Inlton, Frank (1958), ‘Britain’s New Class’, Encounter, February, 59–​64. Kauffmann, Stanley (1966), A World on Film, New York: Harper & Row. Landy, Marcia (1991), British Genres: Cinema and Society 1930–​1960, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Lejeune, C. A. (1950), ‘At the Films: Bob’s Your Uncle’, The Observer, 25 June, 6. Lejeune, C. A. (1954), ‘At the Films: Tale of Woe’, The Observer, 7 March, 11. Lockhart, Freda Bruce (1953), ‘At The Pictures: The Whole Treatment’, The Tatler, 22 July, 28. Macnab, Geoffrey (2000), Searching for Stars:  Stardom and Screen Acting in British Cinema, London: Continuum. Mann, William J. (2005), Edge of Midnight: The Life of John Schlesinger, London: Arrow. Manvell, Roger (1955), The Film and the Public, London: Penguin Books.

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116     Younger leading  men Marcus, Greil (1996), The Dustbin of History, Cambridge, MA:  Harvard University Press. Marcus, Greil (2002), The Manchurian Candidate, London: BFI. McFarlane, Brian (1992), Sixty Voices: Celebrities Recall the Golden Age of British Cinema, London: BFI. McFarlane, Brian (1997), An Autobiography of British Cinema, London: Methuen. Murphy, Robert (1992), Sixties British Cinema, London: BFI. New York Times (1973), ‘Obituary: Laurence Harvey’, 27 November, 47. Oldham, Andrew Loog (2011), Rolling Stoned, Kennet Square, PA: Gegensatz  Press. Passingham, Kenneth (1983), Sean Connery: A Biography, London: Sidgwick & Jackson. Pettigrew, Terence (1982), British Film Character Actors, Newton Abbott, UK: David & Charles. Review (1948), ‘House of Darkness’, Monthly Film Bulletin, 15(174), 30 June, 73. Review (1954), ‘The Good Die Young’, Monthly Film Bulletin, 21(243), April, 52. Review (1955), ‘Storm Over the Nile’, Monthly Film Bulletin, 22(263), December, 177. Review (1961), ‘The Long and the Short and the Tall’, Monthly Film Bulletin, 28(327), April, 44. Review (1963), ‘The Ceremony’, Sight & Sound, Spring, 104. Review (1968), ‘A Dandy in Aspic’, Monthly Film Bulletin, 35(412), May, 71–​2. Richards, Jeffrey (1997), Films and British National Identity:  From Dickens to ‘Dad’s Army’, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Roberts, Andrew (2006), ‘Laurence Harvey: A Dandy in Aspic’, Sight & Sound, April. Roberts, Andrew (2009), ‘The Film That Changed British Cinema’, The Observer, 20th June. Roberts, Andrew (2016), ‘Expresso Bongo’, BFI Flipside DVD essay, 2016. Robinson, David (1955–​56), ‘I Am a Camera’, Sight & Sound, Winter, 150. Rosenbaum, Jonathan (2007), Discovering Orson Welles, Berkeley: University of California Press. Schickel, Richard (1965), ‘Darling’, Life, 27 August, 10. Shaffer, Lawrence (1973), ‘Some Notes on Film Acting’, Sight & Sound, Spring,  103–​6. Shipman, David (1989), The Great Movie Stars 2:  The International Years, London: Warner Books. Sinai, Anne (2003), Reach for the Top:  The Turbulent Life of Laurence Harvey, Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press. Sinyard, Neil (2000), Jack Clayton: British Film Makers, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Spicer, Andrew (2003), Typical Men:  The Representation of Masculinity in Popular British Cinema, London: I. B. Tauris. Stanbrook, Alan (1964), ‘Laurence Harvey’, Films and Filming, May, 42–​6. Street, Sarah (1997), British National Cinema, London: Routledge. Tavernier, Bertrand [1968] (2003), ‘Midi-​Minute Fantastique’, in Lazar David (ed.) Michael Powell: Interviews, Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. Thomson, David (2010), ‘Have You Seen?’: A Personal Introduction to 1,000 Films, London: Penguin Books.

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Laurence  Harvey     117 Thorpe, Edward (1955), ‘Shooting Star?’, Films and Filming, July, 8. Tynan, Kenneth (1965), ‘Films’, The Observer, 19 September, 24. Tynan, Kenneth (1966), ‘Films’, The Observer, 16 January, 25. Tynan, Kenneth and Lahr, John (ed.) (2001), The Diaries of Kenneth Tynan, London: Bloomsbury. Walker, Alexander (1974), Hollywood England: The British Film Industry in the Sixties, London: Michael Joseph. Walker, Alexander (1988), ‘It’s Only A Movie, Ingrid’: Encounters On and Off the Screen, London: Headline Publishing. Weeks, Jeffrey (1981), Sex, Politics & Society: The Regulation of Sexuality Since 1800, London: Longman. Weiler, A. H. (1964), ‘Of Human Bondage’, New York Times, 24 September. White, Jerry (2001), London in the 20th Century:  A City and Its People, London: Viking. Wynne, Alan (1960), ‘Harvey Gets to the Top’, in Attaway, Robert (ed.) Picturegoer Film Annual 1960–​1961, London: Longman. Zec, Donald (1964), ‘The Ego & I: Donald Zec Talks to Laurence Harvey’, Daily Mirror, 16 October, 9. Zec, Donald (1972), ‘As Happy as Larry!’ Daily Mirror, 4 July, 11.

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Leading ladies

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Sylvia Syms: Never your typical ‘nice blonde’

Born in London on 6 January 1934 and educated at RADA, Sylvia Syms’s film career commenced in 1956, when she gained a seven-​year contract with the ABPC. Her co-​stars included Orson Welles, Tony Hancock, John Mills and Sidney James. In her later career she combined film and television work with family commitments, being awarded the OBE for charitable works in 2007. To look at almost any faded news film of a PR stunt is to look at the lost world of the comparatively recent past. At a 1961 vintage Battersea funfair, one might witness a young Morecambe and Wise, sharp and poised in their sky-​blue suits, playing expertly for the camera, while Harry Secombe clowns with the fixed genial expression of one who has spent many years acting as a buffer between Spike Milligan and Peter Sellers. There might also be Hughie Green, leering with the air of a minor Hammer vampire, a profoundly uneasy-​looking Benny Hill visibly wishing the day would end plus, inevitably, any number of vaguely recognisable young actresses. Just as any self-​respecting newsreel of this period has a ‘gosh-​golly’ announcer and incidental music that practically defines the term ‘jaunty’, there might be shots of June Thorburn, Imogen Hassall, Eunice Gayson or Jacqueline Ellis. In the archives of British Pathé or Movietone newsreels, one can indeed see young British actresses attending film galas in Moscow or premieres in Leicester Square. In the early 1960s, ABPC would also employ its remaining contract artists to perform the opening ceremonies of their new bowling alleys (Hanson 2007: 118), but such PR events were at least partial compensation for those actresses who fell into the dispiriting category of ‘very nearly famous’. However, this world was one that was escaped by Sylvia Syms, despite Elstree’s best efforts to mould her as the archetypal ‘nice blonde’. Syms’s original period of stardom in British cinema ran from 1957 to 1965, and much of her film career contradicted Raymond Durgnat’s 121

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122     Leading  ladies

Figure 6  Sylvia Syms in Victim (1961)

despairing contention that 1950s British films had ‘extraordinary difficulty, not in finding, but in developing, starlets, female assorted innumerable’ (1970: 218). He went on to cite Joan Collins, Belinda Lee and Audrey Hepburn as examples of actresses who were given opportunities in Hollywood and European films that had been denied them in the UK. One could add the names of Jean Simmons, Barbara Steele, Ann Lynn and Barbara Ferris to this list, but Syms’s finest work was in British films. Sue Harper and Vincent Porter saw the 1950s as a decade in which, from 1954 onwards, there were two symbolic worlds in British cinema –​the first being ‘regular, dry, tidy, and empty’ while the second was ‘asymmetrical, wet, viscous, disorderly, and full-​ to-​ bursting’ (2003:  271). For much of her career in mainstream cinema, Syms looked as though she was a product of the former, but her ethos was very much that of the latter. In 1957 Sylvia Syms accepted a contract with the ABPC ‘that a charming man called Robert Lennard, who discovered lots of people, offered me’ (quoted in McFarlane 1992: 205). Her subsequent film work for ABPC ran until the mid-​1960s, and during this period she enjoyed as varied a career as any other actor discussed in this book. The scale of this

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Sylvia  Syms     123 achievement is even more remarkable when some very talented actresses were rarely given the opportunities to display their abilities. This was an era, as several writers have observed, in which while the chaps were regularly celebrated for their manly (and often tweedy) Britishness, leading ladies were so often compared with their US or Continental counterparts. If Diana Dors was to be branded ‘the British Marilyn Monroe’, then Sylvia Syms was referred to by Donovan Pedelty of Picturegoer as ‘a sort of English Grace Kelly’ (1957: 8). As Sue Harper notes, ‘in the 1950s, female stereotypes and acting roles were determined by the producers, distributors and scriptwriters’ (2000:  123)  –​a phenomenon that continued well beyond that decade. Occasionally a part might allow them more scope to display the acting range of many an ingénue. Twice Round the Daffodils (Gerald Thomas 1962) and Only Two Can Play are the rare exceptions to the morass of roles offered to Juliet Mills and Virginia Maskell. Hassall’s witty turn in Carry On Loving (Thomas 1970),1 or Joan Collins’s desperately vulnerable juvenile delinquent in I Believe in You –​but in the main, a starlet’s lot appeared to revolve around swimwear and the fluttering of eyelashes. But throughout all the ABC publicity stunts, Syms was simultaneously a leading lady and a character actress. She was a performer destined to be remembered even when the banality of the script was forgotten and always far more than just an attractive presence on the red carpet or indeed a studio creation. In the August 1957 edition of ABC Film Review, a profile by Roy C. Bramwell pointed out that Syms was ‘an intelligent actress who is becoming known to the press as “the girl without a gimmick” ’ (1957:  15). Nor was her image as an actress ‘ “created” in the sense that people nursed my career or guided me nicely’ (quoted in Mcfarlane 1992: 205) and her range was wide. In 1959 Isabel Quigly cited her as without a doubt the most interesting of our young film actresses, with the fairly rare capacity to vary not just her part (in the sense of character), but her temperament and presence  –​the degree of, say, warmth or coldness she seems to have in her, the degree of goodness or passion, even the degree of beauty; she, can make herself more or less interesting, underplay herself for a slight role, rise to a better one. (1959: 12)

Syms’s femme fatales could out-​ vamp Fenella Fielding, her blonde girlfriends are humanly real, and her sense of comedy timing was immaculate, as seen to glorious effect in The Big Job (Gerald Thomas 1965). Syms’s characters, despite the very worst of the screenwriter’s art, were always real, with a sense of genuine anger and thwarted intelligence 1

Thomas directed all the Carry On films.

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124     Leading  ladies beneath a mask of what society deemed to be a ‘sweet girl’. The actress once reflected how she was ‘always in conflict’, struggling to reconcile her ‘duty to be a gifted housewife’ with her aspirations to be ‘a gifted actress’ (quoted in McFarlane 1997: 549). Furthermore, Syms’s main period of British cinema stardom occurred in a period when self-​determination and intelligence in a leading film actress were not always welcomed,2 but she was a performer whose creations were increasingly not going to endure the status quo as described by Rachel Cooke in Her Brilliant Career:  Ten Extraordinary Women of the Fifties: Women could not take out mortgages in their own name, even if they had a job, and if they wanted to be fitted with a diaphragm, one of the few forms of contraception then available, they had first to produce a marriage certificate. Abortion was illegal. But we need to be clear: the end of the war did not send every female hurrying back into the kitchen, just as the feminism of the Sixties did not spring from the minds of women who had spent the last decade in an apron and rubber gloves. (2013: xiv)

Sylvia Syms was born in 1934 and after graduating from RADA, and while in repertory theatre, Herbert Wilcox co-​starred her with his wife, Anna Neagle, in My Teenage Daughter (Wilcox 1956). The editor of the Daily Mirror, Hugh Cudlipp, suggested to Neagle that she make a ‘contemporary film’ (Neagle 1974: 174) and the result was that the playwright Felicity Douglas was commissioned to write a screenplay about the generation gap. The searing drama told of how seventeen-​year-​old Janet Carr (Syms) leaves ‘business college’ to spend all her time with Tony Ward Black (Kenneth Haigh), a homicidal deb’s delight. Naturally, this brings shame to Janet’s widowed mother Valerie (Neagle), but far worse than the alcohol and the (not very) wild parties is the jazz club full of jiving, which was considered to be destroying the moral compass of the young. Fortunately, Janet eventually learns that a life of crime, attempting to outrun police Wolseley 6/​80s, consorting with cads who favour suede footwear and dancing to Humphrey Littleton’s music does not pay. Felicity Douglas’s screenplay has the gall to present Mark (Michael Meacham), a young farmer whose idea of romance is to describe his cattle stock, as Janet’s ideal partner and the fade-​out has our reformed teenager contemplating marriage and life among the milk-​churns. C. A. Lejeune, sounding eerily like a magistrate in the film, opined that Sylvia Syms ‘has some freakishly effective moments, but to learn a little of Miss Neagle’s screen discipline will do her no harm’ (1956: 9); in other 2

In 1963 Liz Fraser was fired by Peter Rogers for daring to suggest methods of how to better market the Carry On films (Bright and Ross 2000: 125).

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words, ‘ingénues know your limits!’ The script contains such verbal gems as ‘crazy mixed-​up teenager’ and the idea that drinking coffees sans milk (gasp!) in clubs frequented by bearded (shock!) ‘Bohemians’ (faint!) is the zenith of teenage rebellion, yet Syms manages to create a believable character of Janet. The fate of Tony Ward Black is never openly stated,3 but at least the conclusion has Janet safely engaged to Mark, the blame for her temporary lapse partially falling on Valerie, for as Gill Plain perceptively observed: The 1950s are packed with films which blame women for the ills of both men and of society as a whole. The working woman, the ‘bad’ woman, the sexual woman, even the domestic woman was a convenient scapegoat for the problems of post-​war readjustment and the recognition that Britain remained at heart a class-​bound and conservative culture. (2012: 193–​4)

And so, the penultimate reel of this fascinatingly dreadful film4 has a magistrate (Ballard Berkeley) castigating Valerie for her lack of maternal guidance. If she were not obliged to go out to work as a journalist to maintain a Hampstead Garden Suburb villa in a state of abject luxury, then possibly Janet would not have fallen prey to the ‘wild world’ of coffee bars. Her future appears to be one of the ideal 1950s marriage where ‘the wife and mother must also be sexual and smart, attentive to her husband as well as to her children’ (Geraghty 2000: 158). But even as the final credits roll, you can imagine Janet sneaking off from cattle feed stock taking to join Kay Kendall in illicit jazz trumpet playing à la Genevieve. Syms’s role attracted the attention of the casting department of the ABPC, and she joined the studio at a critical time in its history, as by that time ABPC was in a parlous financial state. Its roster of stars was smaller than those of Rank, and a further challenge was ABPC’s poor track record in finding suitable roles. Audrey Hepburn was briefly signed to a contract and, after an array of standard ingénue roles, was loaned to Hollywood to shoot Roman Holiday (William Wyler 1953).5 Except for Two for the Road (Stanley Donen 1967), she was mostly lost to the UK film industry after the 1950s. Carole Lesley, née Maureen Rippondale, was marketed as ABPC’s answer to Diana Dors and she did essay a few good supporting roles in their prestige films –​Woman in a Dressing and No Trees in the Street (J. Lee Thompson 1959). In the main, Lesley’s film

My guess is a five-​year sentence at the ‘Terry-​Thomas Institute for Rotter Reformation’. Although it was the last commercially successful Wilcox–​Neagle picture (Harper and Porter 2003: 158). 5 At one point, ABPC’s management suggested that she star in a biopic of Gracie Fields (Harper 2000: 81), but, amazingly, Ms Hepburn spurned this golden opportunity. 3 4

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126     Leading  ladies roles were on a par with her Charlotte Pinner in the unspeakably bad What a Whopper (Gilbert Gunn 1961).6 The ABPC contract theoretically offered Syms the opportunity of US exposure –​in 1948 Warner Brothers, who distributed ABPC films in the USA, bought a controlling interest in the company. In reality, her ‘international’ roles during that period were typified by a loan to Paramount for a support role in The World of Suzie Wong (Richard Quine 1960) and to 20th Century Fox to play the female lead in the critically disastrous Ferry to Hong Kong (Lewis Gilbert 1959).7 It is her wholly domestic films that are of far greater interest, although her image in her first ABPC films was solidly and unambiguously one of haute suburbia. Photographs in the ABC Review showcase Syms as the epitome of the healthy middle-​ class girl next door –​the PR shots of Diana Dors so often presented ‘the good-​time  girl’. Pam Cook makes the argument that with the growth of consumerism during the 1950s, ‘the British obsession with “quality” and distrust of the excesses of trashy popular culture associated with “Americanisation” came to the fore’ (2001: 168). If the image of Diana Dors belonged to a country of Ford Zodiacs with white-​wall tyres and other 1950s British interpretations of US design tropes, Sylvia Syms both looked exceedingly demure and spoke in the crisp tones of a BBC children’s TV presenter. ‘Bad blondes’ welcomed the threat of US ‘admass’ as warned by Francis Williams in his survey The American Invasion, as one that would ‘turn ideas into no more than handmaidens of commerce’ (1962: 39). But the ‘nice blonde’, a category that also included Virginia McKenna and, in the early 1960s, Juliet Mills, generally embodied the qualities of John Betjeman’s Miss Joan Hunter Dunn –​‘With the tilt of her nose and the chime of her voice’. And while Dors cavorted in a ‘mink’ bikini, Syms appeared on the front cover of Home Chat magazine on 20 October 1956 to illustrate the star knitting pattern for her ‘two-​way pinafore frock’. Thus, Sylvia Syms appeared perfect casting for several mainstream conventional leading-​lady roles –​her first major parts included a stoic wife in British Lion’s The Birthday Present (Pat Jackson 1957) and a nurse in a children’s hospital in No Time for Tears (Cyril Frankel 1957).8 She was also on loan to the Rank Organisation, as Ann Wainwright, the girlfriend of Hardy Kruger’s German student in Bachelor of Hearts (Wolf Rilla Ten years after her ABPC contract ended in 1964 Lesley committed suicide. ‘Maureen had taken so literally at face value, and celebrated with such innocent charm, had been so manifestly a trick of the light, flickering on a screen, in the dark’ (Orr 2012: n.p.). 7 ‘The Rank Organisation’s first Cinemascope “blockbuster” is nothing short of a fiasco’ (Review 1959: 106). 8 ‘Sylvia Syms, as a student nurse who hasn’t learnt yet to control her silly heart, handles the children nicely and is a pretty thing to have about a hospital’ (Lejuene 1957: 28). 6

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1958). One type of role she managed to evade was in the comedy films adapted from popular West End successes such as Father’s Doing Fine (Henry Cass 1952)  or Please Turn Over (Gerald Thomas 1959). These were pictures that reflected the theatrical genre described by Kenneth Tynan as ‘Loamshire’: The inhabitants belong to a social class derived partly from romantic novels and partly from the playwright’s vision of the leisured life he will lead after the play is a success –​this being the only effort of imagination he is called on to make. Joys and sorrows are giggles and whimpers: the crash of denunciation dwindles into ‘Oh, stuff, Mummy!’ and ‘Oh, really, Daddy!’ (Tynan quoted in Shellard 2003: 96)

Even in Bachelor of Hearts (which was admittedly not adapted from a theatrical production), a comedy suffused with chaps prone to saying ‘gosh’ at regular intervals, ‘Ann Wainwright’ never resorts to starlet-​like simpering. My Teenage Daughter also displayed how Syms was highly adept at hinting at a sense of genuine passion, qualities that were displayed to the fore in her ABPC films with J.  Lee Thompson  –​Woman in a Dressing Gown, Ice Cold in Alex and No Trees in the Streets. Woman in a Dressing Gown was based on a play by Ted Willis, a long-​time collaborator with Thompson, and the plot has Jim Preston (Anthony Quayle) on the verge of leaving his wife Amy (Yvonne Mitchell) for his younger colleague Georgie (Syms). Jim’s position as a senior clerk allows his family a degree of material comfort but at the cost of ignoring Amy’s encroaching depression. John Hill rather scathingly described the screenplay as ‘a dour little morality play, counselling compromise and acceptance, and beset by a condescension so characteristic of writers who self-​consciously attempt to write about “ordinary people” ’ (1986: 98). But there appears little that is ‘dour’ in a picture that deals with the utter, grey, hell of depression. For Amy Preston, the world outside of the shambolic flat that reflects her encroaching mental collapse is one of penny-​pinching terror, where even her attempts to represent herself as the standard-​issue 1950s ‘good wife’ is beset by seemingly minor humiliation. In the vivid description of Melanie Williams: ‘In a mise en scène dominated by her fellow shoppers’ umbrellas (everyone seems to have one except her), Amy runs to catch a bus but is refused admittance. When she tries to resume her place in the queue, she is harshly told to get to the back by an older woman (who is carrying an umbrella)’ (2013: 716). And to Amy, this ‘other woman’ is the virtual personification of this uncaring realm beyond her front door. Jean-​Luc Godard bemoaned Thompson’s ‘incredible debauch of camera movements as complex as they are silly and meaningless’ (quoted in Milne 1972: 86), but they reflect Amy’s increasingly frenetic state of mind.

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128     Leading  ladies Durgnat saw how Thompson employed melodrama ‘not gratuitously, but in determination to ram right into the complacent spectator the full pain and terror of the emotional extremes’ (1970: 243–​4). Georgie, initially at least, embodies if not complacency then enviable self-​determination, one might have strayed from a copy of Good Housekeeping9 or any other publication depicting an existence that Amy can only dream about. Virginia Nicholson saw Good Housekeeping as a realm ‘people[ed] by women with radiant smiles, clean pinafores and clean coiffeurs’ (2015:  207) and Georgie seems cut from the same cloth. She goes to work, she lives in a neatly furnished flat and she would certainly have no problems in charming shelter from a passer-​by. Her manner appears brisk and almost condescending –​in Amy’s words, ‘You look at me, and you feel so efficient’. But Syms makes her wholly believable and sympathetic –​a young lady who is both bright and naive; John Cutts credited her ‘teenage butterfly caught fast in an emotional spider’s web’ as ‘the best performance in the film’ (1957: 24). The actress herself thought that ‘Georgie is only in love with Jim, the most boring man in the world because her horizons are so limited. He’s her boss; he’s the only man she knows’ (quoted in Cooke 2013: 17). Amy asks her, ‘Couldn’t you … somehow have found the strength to leave him alone?’ and Syms’s performance infers an insecurity that would suggest the answer was ‘no’. John Gillett thought Syms gave ‘her best performance to date’ (1957: 92) and Woman in a Dressing Gown illustrates how her most interesting work was not opposite conventional juvenile leads but older actors such Quayle or John Mills, or leading men in challenging roles such as Dirk Bogarde in Victim (Basil Dearden 1961). In Ice Cold in Alex the main protagonist, Captain Anson (Mills), is an alcoholic and shell-​shocked Royal Army Service Corps officer in charge of an ambulance fleeing the Nazi invasion of Tobruk to the haven of Alexandria. Throughout the narrative Anson is carried by Sergeant Major Pugh (Harry Andrews), a German spy disguised as a South African officer “Captain van der Poel” (Anthony Quayle) and Syms’s Sister Diana Murdoch. Thompson wrote, ‘I feel that it’s very dramatic, to put people in confined spaces and have their characters examined in what I call “confinement” ’ (quoted in Chibnall 2000: 185) and throughout the journey in the Austin K2 Sister Murdoch is never an acquiescent presence. From the outset, her clipped tones and professionalism are unlike the immature nurse Denise –​who is prone to hysteria –​and her skills are to be respected. ‘There’s nothing anyone can do. I know’, she tells the Sergeant Major of Denise’s condition after the ambulance is shot at by German troops. She is also the dominant partner in her relationship with Anson, 9

Which commenced publication in 1957.

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Sylvia  Syms     129 and although Mills is the focal point of the narrative, the inference is that Murdoch would be a more effective commander of the mission than the unstable captain or the self-​aggrandising van der Poel. If the closing theme music is triumphant, the scene of the celebratory drink is ambivalent. All four protagonists have inevitably been affected by their trials; Sister Murdoch uses a lipstick before remembering she previously used it to mark the grave of her colleague, whose death was partially due to the Captain’s panicking. Diana genuinely loves the Captain –​the actress saw Anson as ‘the type who’ll never speak unless I make him’ (quoted in Pedelty 1957: 8). But his focus is now once more on alcohol, and the brave, resourceful and intelligent Sister Murdoch faces life with an insecure and demanding man. The second Thompson–Willis collaboration, No Trees in the Street, centres on Elstree’s idea of a 1938 East End slum. The story commences in 1958 with a flick-​knife wielding proto-​Ted (David Hemmings)10 being lectured on the bad old days by Frank (Ronald Howard), a detective sergeant. Two decades earlier Tommy (Melvyn Hayes) is a teenager employed by the crooked local bookmaker Wilkie (Herbert Lom), who is attracted to Tommy’s sister Hetty (Syms). Chibnall remarks how Hetty is ‘both drawn to, and repelled by, the godfather of Kennedy Street. She is attracted to his strength, authority, and confidence, but deplores his cynical exploitation of others’ (2000: 165). The film benefits from the naturalistic performances of Syms and Lom, who makes Wilkie more than a ruthless local godfather. He is an ambitious, even dynamic, immigrant who, when he was aged fourteen, ‘made a list of things I was going to get, see? Well, I ticked them off one by one. Everything I wanted I got. You are on the list now. The last item’, he informs Hetty, who represents status to the local crime lord. The character is altered from Willis’s original 1948 stage play –​in the theatrical production he rapes Hetty with the collusion of her mother, but in the film, he seduces her but does not take advantage of her drunken state. Isabel Quigly of the Spectator praised the love scenes of Wilkie and Hetty, saying how they ‘showed the actors appearing like people, like themselves, behaving in love as you can believe they would behave’ (1959: 12). After Tommy is killed, Hetty’s anger turns on Wilkie –​‘You’re greedy and wicked, you’re a devil, you’re a devil to boys like Tommy! Your smart suits, your sweet talk and your easy money!’ But Syms’s rage could equally be directed towards the bright and ambitious young woman who is trapped within Kennedy Street.11 10 11

Of course. Syms’s performance also has the very considerable merit of not employing a proto-​Dick Van Dyke accent, which cannot be said of all British actors called upon to play East End residents in 1950s films.

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130     Leading  ladies Of Syms’s three films with Thompson, Ice Cold in Alex, in particular, was a major commercial and critical success, but it commenced production at a time of significant change for the ABPC. Ironically, it was during the latter part of her contract –​at a time when ABC picture houses were being turned into other forms of entertainment venues –​that she enjoyed some of her most interesting roles. In the 1950s Syms’s image in her first ABPC films was solidly middle class, but in 1959, she was employed by British Lion to play Maisie –​a stripper and would-​be singer –​in Expresso Bongo. Val Guest had to fight to use her in the picture, but Sylvia Syms created a character that was simultaneously naive, thoughtful, dim and shrewd. As a would-​be vocalist, she is appalling; her boyfriend Johnny (Laurence Harvey) may be a wide boy, but he is also an experienced jazz drummer and music arranger, often wincing at her performances. She is the one person who Johnny cares about aside from himself and his bank balance, and she is often and justifiably exasperated by her flashy and untrustworthy partner. Diana Dors, Liz Fraser or even the young Barbara Windsor (whose talents were seldom recognised by British cinema) could have also essayed a memorable figure, but Syms’s Maisie is beautifully underplayed. She is maternal towards the naive ‘Bongo’ Herbert (Cliff Richard), disdainful of Johnny’s resident songwriter ‘Beast’ Bailey (Barry Lowe) and stronger than her perpetually gyrating spiv of a boyfriend  –​an early scene contains Syms’s priceless reaction to Harvey’s attempt at jitterbugging. Pauline Kael wrote, ‘This very funny, very distinctive musical satire accepts its targets with good-​natured incredulity’ (1982: 56), and none less so than Sylvia Syms’s contribution. Expresso Bongo further marked a rare occasion in her main period of stardom where she was partnered with a leading man near her own age –​Harvey was born in 1928 –​and an even rarer opportunity for her to play a completely believable and genuinely erotic character.12 The early 1960s marked three roles that showcased Syms’s considerable range. At the beginning of the decade, she was loaned to the Rank Organisation to appear in Flame in the Streets based on the television play Hot Summer Night by Ted Willis. Jacko Palmer (John Mills), a trade union shop steward of avowedly liberal views is challenged by his members’ opposition to the promotion of the West Indian Gabriel Gomez (Earl Cameron) to factory foreman and his daughter Kathie, a trainee teacher, becoming engaged to the Jamaican Peter Lincoln (Johnny Sekka). Jacko 12

In 1956 Dirk Bogarde, slightly ungallantly, complained to Sarah Stoddard of Picturegoer how certain British female starlets would try to copy continental sex symbols only for the result to be farcical: ‘ “Brussels sprouts and porridge!” he snorted. “When they try to copy the foreign girls they’re just clowns. With their dyed hair, false bosoms and phoney allure they’re affected, frankly comical” ’ (quoted in Stoddard 1956: 10).

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Sylvia  Syms     131 is uneasy about the relationship, but his wife Nell (Brenda de Banzie) responds with a stream of toxic racial abuse. The conclusion has the local community joining forces on bonfire night to defeat an invading gang of Teddy boys but despite this, and Jacko persuading Nell to accept the relationship between Peter and their daughter, there are bleak undercurrents that remain unresolved. Durgnat observes how elements of doubt, disgust and despair ‘quietly infiltrate’ (1970:  287) Baker’s films and while Syms’s Kathie reflects the positive traits of her parents  –​her father’s determination and her mother’s vibrancy –​her education and relationship with Peter are escape routes from a domestic hell. The scene in which Nell screams at her husband that he made love to her as though he was taking a quick drink is one of the cruellest in British cinema, but Kathie is very unlikely to settle for a future of such despair. Her family home –​Jacko was born there –​is framed as a trap, with Nell often being framed by Baker sat in a darkened room and her father’s almost endless union activities represent a form of escape. If Peter is a very determined individual –​he responds to Jacko’s claims that he is prejudiced with ‘yes, we had good teachers’ –​then Kathie is equally so. The Monthly Film Bulletin review made a passing reference to Syms –​‘sympathetic acting in the smaller parts by players who seem willing to give the subject a certain dignity’ (Review: 1961a: 91) –​ but Kathie is far from an acquiescent figure. She knows full well that her future with Peter will be challenging, but it will very probably be more fulfilling than her parents’ marriage. Flame in the Streets was made shortly before Victim, in which Syms was cast as Laura, the wife of Dirk Bogarde’s Melville Farr, a role turned down by several other actresses. On its release, Terence Kelly had ‘reservations about Sylvia Syms’ portrayal of a judge’s daughter’ (1961:  199) and the critic of the Guardian thought the script gave the actress ‘the almost impossible task of representing outraged convention, loyal wife and stark, culpable stupidity –​all in a single person’ (1961: 5). More recently, Sue Harper argued that the screenplay, Syms’s acting style and Laura’s demure wardrobe all infer a woman ‘who has never caught fire’ (2000: 109). But this is a misinterpretation of a subtly nuanced performance. Laura is a good deal younger than her middle-​aged husband, the daughter of a judge who, as Paul Mandrake (Peter Copley) hints, Mel married at least in part for social advancement. For most of Victim Farr is visibly barely keeping his emotions in check, but in the scene partially written by Bogarde, which is arguably the heart of the film, Laura finally confronts her husband. Melville tells her that he stopped seeing Barratt because ‘I wanted him!’ Andy Medhurst saw this scene as ‘the moment when irresistible desire, literally, finds its voice’ (1984: 31–​2), but Syms’s reaction is pitch perfect –​despair, recognition and a sense of loss. Her demeanour and age may infer a limited experience of the wider world,

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132     Leading  ladies but Laura is highly perceptive, bitterly accusing her husband that ‘you looked at him as though he was a girl’, with the inference that he has never regarded her in the same manner. Victor Perkins famously castigated Dearden and Relph’s ‘social problem’ films in his 1962 essay ‘The British Cinema’ for their devising ‘a number of stereotypes to fit every matter at hand’ (1962: 5), but this is far from evident with Victim. The performance of Syms illustrates a further issue: if Farr is eventually prepared to make a personal and professional sacrifice when he tells Inspector Harris (John Barrie) that he intends to highlight the legal oppression surrounding male homosexuality, why should his wife settle for second best? ‘Marriage is a sexual and emotional obligation’ (Durgnat 1997: 82) and so why should Laura not feel a sense of betrayal? Early in the film, Barratt’s friend Frank (Alan Howard) informs his wife Sylvie (Dawn Brevet), ‘He hasn’t got what you and I have got’, but she is painted as cheap, ignorant and brash, with the mannerisms of a bored coffee-​bar waitress. Laura has the demure appearance of one expected to appear at an Inns of Court social function, combined with a growing sense of anger and self-​determination. Perhaps Syms’s finest work in the picture comes in the scene after she and her brother Scott (Alan MacNaughton) discover a vandalised garage door emblazoned with ‘Farr is queer’. Her sibling is himself a senior barrister –​‘I’ve defended this sort of case and prosecuted it; either way, it wreaks havoc’ –​and advises Laura to leave Farr. Her eventual decision to support her husband is one of integrity and sacrifice, one arrived at after enduring a feeling of anguish almost as immense as that of Melville himself. Laura is a striking and angry figure in a London pervaded by fear. She is far from the ‘mouthpiece’ as cited by Perkins in his diatribe against the British ‘good film’, quietly explaining to Scott, ‘I love him still’. Laura is ultimately not to have her sense of autonomy swayed by either her brother or her husband. An equally insightful view of a relationship could be found in The Punch and Judy Man (Jeremy Summers 1962), in which Syms appeared opposite Tony Hancock13 as the unhappily married Delia and Wally Pinner. She makes a very credible partner for Hancock, her Delia being both shrewish and very vulnerable. The Pinners reside in a seaside town –​ a traditional community whose raison d’être is slowly passing (Walton 2000: 10). While her husband can at least find a form of escape, drifting with his equally shiftless friends from arcade to cafes, Delia is trapped behind the counter of their shop, selling souvenirs to rain-​sodden tourists in possibly the world’s dullest seaside resort. Wally spends his off-​duty 13

The film was made for ABPC by the comic’s own production company.

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Sylvia  Syms     133 hours wandering the town with his friends, where even the pseudo-​ American ice-​cream parlour can become a hostile space,14 with a sense of the beach linked to a freedom (for men at least) that is not possible elsewhere (Allen 2008). But Delia has no such sense of liberation, being tied to the shop that presumably is responsible for generating most of the couple’s income. Gilbert Taylor’s cinematography captures a Bognor of grey boredom and as Walton observes, ‘the film conveys the sense that this kind of resort is at a crossroads, with shabby-​genteel visitors’ (2000:  10). It is entirely understandable that Delia, who looks considerably younger than her husband, seeks refuge in fantasies about joining a social elite. The arrival of the socialite Lady Caterham (Barbara Murray) to turn on the town’s illuminations is akin to an ABPC starlet cutting the ribbon on a new bowling alley, but Syms’s eager, almost desperate, anticipation of the visit is an honest and insightful glimpse into a sad, lonely existence.15 The Punch and Judy Man both demonstrated Tony Hancock’s sadly never realised potential as a character actor and, in his scenes with Syms, one of the most convincing marriages of any British comedy film of this era outside of Only Two Can Play. One of Syms’s finest performances came in 1963 with The World Ten Times Over (Wolf Rilla 1963). Two women, Ginnie (June Ritchie) and Billa (Syms) share a flat and work as hostesses in the same nightclub, Ginnie agrees to go away with Bob (Edward Judd), a wealthy young man who is infatuated with her and prepared to leave his wife (Sarah Lawson) for her. Billa is visited by her father (William Hartnell), who is not prepared to accept the truth about the way she lives. After a disastrous night at the club, which is visited by both men, followed by Ginnie’s attempt at suicide, each recognises her dependence on the other in a London framed in the cold light of Larry Pizer’s black-​and-​white camerawork. Billa has fled to this grey capital from lower-​middle-​class ‘respectability’ as the daughter of a rural teacher and she dresses in the manner of a respectable young PR lady –​still the ‘nice blonde’ of ABPC’s press material. But the determined passion that made Janet Carr plausible amid a morass of clichés now corrodes into anger. Compared with some of the vacuous mini-​skirted female roles that were to bedevil late 1960s British cinema, Billa is a very formidable character. Melanie Bell-​Williams notes that ‘the figure of the female prostitute is a mainstay of cultural representation and in the post-​war period alone she appears in films as diverse as The

Two scoops of luscious vanilla, two scoops of flaky chocolate, succulent sliced bananas, juicy peach fingers swimming in pure cane sugar. 15 Monthly Film Bulletin praised the film’s ‘quiet, understressed’ atmosphere (Review 1963: 61). 14

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134     Leading  ladies Fallen Idol (1948), social dramas such as I Believe in You (1952) and, at the other end of the decade, The L-​Shaped Room (1962)’ (2006: 270). By the early 1960s, London had the reputation of being ‘the worst city in Europe’ (Hopkins 1963: 207) regarding the commercialisation of sex, but unlike the more overtly ‘tarty’ street walkers of Dora Bryan or Diana Dors, Syms’s protagonist cuts a coolly possessed and well-​spoken lady. There are no overt signs of the ‘whorish hussies’ referred to by Sue Harper (2000: 98), for Billa is the ‘nice blonde’ as a young urban professional. The woman’s place in post-​war England as described by Rachel Cooke (2013) is emphatically not for Billa, but the film conveys the distinct impression that she can no longer balance her outward appearance with her job in a nocturnal Soho. The seedily jovial capital of Expresso Bongo is wholly absent in a tinsel-​shrouded realm of vice presided over by former wide boys turned vice racketeers and certain senior CID officers. Syms displays how Billa is focused on remaining sane in this profoundly seedy world, sardonically winking at voyeuristic middle-​aged men. Robert Murphy makes the fascinating argument that although her father and Bob are basically good men, ‘their fantasies are dangerous for the women they profess to love’ (1992: 83). Billa’s parent wants to believe that his daughter is a young, straight professional, a mask that she is desperate to lose. ‘Public relations!’ she cries, in utter derision.16 In a London of ‘hostile blandness, of egg-​box office blocks, conversations in which no-​one communicates’ (Durgnat 1970: 247), Billa can only trust Ginnie. Richard Roud of the Guardian grumbled, ‘I imagine this kind of film is supposed to be proof that British cinema is coming of age. I  think it’s just silly’ (1963: 11). Shortly afterwards he continued to moan how ‘the problems of unhappy nightclub hostesses were resolved in lesbianism’ as an example of how ‘it is no good any more just presenting standard working-​class stories’ (1964: 9). It is a prime example of the critical misjudgement of a British film in which Billa is playing a role for a patriarchal society. The actress commented: As far as I was concerned my character was in love with June Ritchie and I  wanted to play it that way, but in those days one could only suggest lesbianism. One could not be too explicit. To suggest the character’s lesbianism I wore a leather coat to help to make her look tough, but I also felt that it was important for her to be feminine. If this film had been made in a freer atmosphere, perhaps the relationship between the two women would have been developed. (Quoted in Bourne 2016: 181)

16

The World Ten Times Over is not the first British film with an openly lesbian character  –​it is predated by Mavis (Cicely Courtneidge) in The L-​Shaped Room (Bryan Forbes 1962) –​but it is arguably the first to focus on a lesbian couple.

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Sylvia  Syms     135 If British cinema up until the mid-​1960s quite often resembled a family tea party ghost-​scripted by Harold Pinter in which nothing and yet everything was said by implication, Billa no longer has any desire to maintain her ‘respectable’ facade. She is emphatically not a victim and nor is she wholly likeable; her treatment of her father borders on cruel and what seems to drive her is fermenting rage. But she is very much alive in a film that wants ‘Out! Out!’ Sue Harper thought that if a 1950s British leading lady had ‘open features, shallow set eyes and short curls like Susan Stephen, Peggy Cummins or June Thorburn you stood little chance of being anything other than an MOI reprise; the virtuous homemaker’ (2000: 98). In the early 1960s, this could also mean a circumscribed existence of Wincarnis, drudgery and loneliness as her husband drove the company Vauxhall Victor to his next appointment.17 But this is a game Billa no longer wished to play. The fact that Syms could star in The World Ten Times Over and essay a parody of a brainless moll in 1965’s The Big Job18 is evidence of her considerable range. From the mid-​1960s onwards, Sylvia Syms concentrated on her family, which did shape her cinema career –​‘You can’t have both. It’s a myth to say you can have both. You’ve got to give up something’ (quoted in Barkham 2012: n.p.). Two of Syms’s more challenging roles of the late 1960s demonstrated her talent for conveying brittle vulnerability, the first being Danger Route (Seth Holt 1967), an ambitious spy thriller from Amicus19 where her outwardly disdainful Barbara Canning perfectly matches Richard Johnson’s aggressively professional hero. In 1969 she starred in Run Wild, Run Free (Richard C. Sarafin) as ‘Mrs Ransome’, the mother of a ten-​year-​old boy, Phillip (Mark Lester), who has been mute since the age of three. Roger Ebert, in an example of the great critic completely missing the point, complained: Instead, filled with the fire of a dedicated actress, she rings in all sorts of quirks and nervousness. These are apparently supposed to indicate her own psychological hang-​ups, and to suggest some of the reasons for the boy’s problems. But nothing is made clear, and so the mother simply appears neurotic. More warmth and tenderness in the character of the mother would have been welcomed by the younger children in the audience. (1969: n.p.) Two vignettes of suburban despair  –​Yootha Joyce’s patron in the hair salon in The Pumpkin Eater (1964) and Justine Lord in the remarkably bleak Scales of Justice second feature Payment in Kind (1967). 18 The last black-​and-​white comedy from the Peter Rogers/​Gerald Thomas stable and a strange yet quite beguiling ménage of 1965 tropes –​the Ford Cortina De Luxe –​and venerable music hall; Syms’s character’s name is ‘Myrtle’. 19 Robert Murphy thought that ‘the odd little interlude between Johnson’s class-​conscious hatchet man and the upper-​class wife’ (1992: 229) looked like fragments from a subplot that may have been lost in the editing. 17

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136     Leading  ladies But Syms is absolutely credible throughout the picture; her Mrs Ransome is not a monster but a woman desperately trying to simultaneously protect her son from the outside world and cope with his condition that she barely understands. Monthly Film Bulletin, in a dismissive review, questioned how ‘Phillip has seemingly dodged the clutches of health and education services’ (Review 1969: 149) –​to which the answer is far more easily that was generally believed. The domestic scenes at the Ransome home have none of the phenomena referred to by Stuart Murray in Representing Autism:  Culture, Narrative, Fascination  –​‘a spectrum of wonder or nervousness –​the allure of potentially unquantifiable human difference, and the nightmare of not somehow being fully “human” ’ (2008: 5). A lesser actress would have given the line ‘I want to love him, but I can’t’ the sort of melodramatic overtones familiar to any American made-​for-​television ‘disease of the week’ film, but Syms’s voice-​over is of flat, matter-​of-​fact despair. Phillip’s father (Gordon Jackson, in equally good form) wants to send his son away and can take refuge in his newspaper, but the burden of care lies with his mother. Phillip’s behaviour now looks to have the classic traits of one on the autistic spectrum, and he is unlike the ‘archetypes, symbols, ideas, props’ seldom seen as ‘fully human beings’ (Osteen 2007:  30) who are often found in more recent films about autism. The narrative emphasis is on Lester –​Run Wild was made shortly after Oliver! (Carol Reed 1968) –​but Syms illustrates, through body language and a present look of apprehension, the sheer strain of her coping with a child whose challenges would seldom be fully understood today, let alone in the late 1960s. In a lighter vein, Syms’s lead in The Fiction-​Makers (Roy Ward Baker 1968), two episodes of The Saint re-​edited for a cinematic release, displays how the carefully crafted Roger Moore image worked best when teamed with an actress who understood the art of light comedy. Five years later, she co-​starred with another former ABPC contract artist, Richard Todd, in Asylum (Roy Ward Baker) as a wife murdered by her vengeful husband –​a bad move for any villain in an Amicus production who utters the immortal line ‘rest in pieces’. The story would have been stronger had it been Todd’s body hidden in the freezer; Syms could have claimed justifiable homicide on the strength of his choice of cravats alone. A major supporting role in The Tamarind Seed (Blake Edwards 1974) resulted in a nomination for a BAFTA Award, and in more recent years Sylvia Syms has played high-​profile character roles such as the Queen Mother in The Queen (Stephen Frears 2006). But even if Syms had never made another film after the mid-​1960s her work would still be remembered. She was never a ‘starlet’, one of several Marilyn Monroe clones obliged by the studio to twitter in comedy films. She may have been underpaid for most of her contract and rarely billed above a male

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Sylvia  Syms     137 lead. But nor was she ever a full-​time resident of Loamshire or destined to co-​star with Adam Faith and a not terribly convincing model of the Loch Ness monster. Sylvia Syms was, in the best sense of the term, a fully fledged star.

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Bibliography Allen, Steve (2008), ‘British Cinema at the Seaside:  The Limits of Liminality’, Journal of British Cinema and Television, 5(1), 53–​71. Barkham, Patrick (2012), ‘Sylvia Syms: I’d Like a Really Evil Part’, The Guardian, 19 July. Bell, Melanie (2009), British Women’s Cinema, London: Routledge. Bell-​Williams, Melanie (2006), ‘ “Shop-​Soiled” Women: Female Sexuality and the Figure of the Prostitute in 1950s British Cinema’, Journal of British Cinema and Television, 3(2), November. 266–​83. Bourne, Stephen (2016), Brief Encounters: Lesbians and Gays in British Cinema 1930–​1971, London: Bloomsbury. Bramwell, Roy C. (1957), ‘Success and Miss Syms’, ABC Film Review, 15. Bright, Morris and Ross, Robert (2000), Mr. Carry On: The Life and Work of Peter Rogers, London: BBC. Chibnall, Steve (2000), J. Lee Thompson:  British Film Makers, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Cook, Pam (2001), ‘The Trouble with Sex: Diana Dors and the Blonde Bombshell Phenomenon’, in Babington Bruce (ed.) British Stars and Stardom: From Alma Taylor to Sean Connery, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Cooke, Rachel (2013), Her Brilliant Career:  Ten Extraordinary Women of the Fifties, London: Virago. Cutts, John (1957), ‘Woman in a Dressing Gown’, Films and Filming, October, 24. Durgnat, Raymond (1970), A Mirror for England: British Movies from Austerity to Affluence, London: Faber & Faber. Durgnat, Raymond (1997), ‘Two “Social Problem” Films: Sapphire & Victim’, in  Burton Alan, O’Sullivan Tim and Wells Paul (eds.) Liberal Directions: Basil Dearden and Post-​War British Film Culture, Trowbridge, UK: Flicks Books. Ebert, Roger (1969), ‘Run Wild, Run Free’, Chicago Sun-​Times, 3 December. Geraghty, Christine (2000), British Cinema in the Fifties: Gender, Genre and the ‘New Look’, London: Routledge. Gillett, John (1957), ‘Woman in a Dressing Gown’, Sight & Sound, Autumn, 92. The Guardian (1961), ‘At the Cinema:  A Mixture of Sermon and Mystery’, 2 September, 5. Hanson, Stuart (2007), From Silent Screen to Multi-​Screen: A History of Cinema Exhibition in Britain since 1896, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Harper, Sue (2000), Women in British Cinema:  Mad, Bad and Dangerous to Know, London: Continuum. Harper, Sue and Porter, Vincent (2003), British Cinema of the 1950s: The Decline of Deference, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hill, John (1986), Sex, Class & Realism: British Cinema 1956–​1963, London: BFI.

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138     Leading  ladies Holmes, Su (2005), British TV and Film in the 1950s: Coming to a TV Near You, Bristol: Intellect Books. Hopkins, Harry (1963), The New Look: A Social History of Britain in the Forties & Fifties, London: Secker & Warburg. Kael, Pauline (1982), 5001 Nights at the Movies, New York: Henry Holt. Kelly, Terence (1961), ‘Victim’, Sight & Sound, Autumn, 198–​9. Lejeune, C. A. (1956), ‘At the Films: Practised Hands’, The Guardian, 24 June, 9. Lejeune, C. A. (1957), ‘Cinema:  Million Dollar Question’, The Sketch, 28 August, 28. McFarlane, Brian (1992), Sixty Voices: Celebrities recall the Golden Age of British cinema, London: BFI. McFarlane, Brian (1997), An Autobiography of British Cinema, London: Methuen. Medhurst, Andy (1984), ‘  “Victim”:  Text as Context’, Screen, 25(4–​5), July–​October,  22–​35. Milne, Tom (trans.) and Godard, Jean-​Luc (1972), Godard on Godard, London: Secker & Warburg. Murphy, Robert (1992), Sixties British Cinema, London: BFI. Murphy, Robert (2000), British Cinema and the Second World War, London: Continuum. Murray, Stuart (2008), Representing Autism:  Culture, Narrative, Fascination, Liverpool: Liverpool University Press. Neagle, Anna (1974), Anna Neagle: An Autobiography, London: W. H. Allen. Nicholson, Virginia (2015), Perfect Wives in Ideal Homes; The Story of Women in the 1950s, London: Penguin Books. Oakley, C. A. (2014), Where We Came In:  Seventy Years of the British Film Industry, London: Routledge. Orr, Deborah (2012), ‘Who’d Be a Movie Star? They Are Little More Than Pampered, Tethered Goats’, The Guardian, 20 January. Osteen, Mark (ed.) (2007), Autism & Representation, London: Taylor & Francis. Pedelty, Donovan (1957), ‘Another Big Break for Sylvia’, Picturegoer, 21 September,  16–​17. Perkins, Victor (1962), ‘The British Cinema’, Movie, 1, June, 3–​9. Plain, Gill (2006), John Mills and British Cinema:  Masculinity, Identity and Nation, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Plain, Gil (2012), ‘From Shorty Blake to Tubby Binns:  Dunkirk and the Representation of Working-​ Class  Masculinity in Postwar British Cinema’, Journal of British Cinema and Television, 9(2), 177–​97. Porter, Vincent (2000), ‘Outsiders in England: The Films of the Associated British Picture Corporation, 1949–​1958’, in Ashby, Justine and Porter, Vincent (eds.) British Cinema Past & Present, London: Routledge. Quigly, Isabel (1959), ‘Cinema: Coals in the Bath’, The Spectator, 13 March, 12. Review (1959), ‘Ferry to Hong Kong’, Monthly Film Bulletin, 26(307), August, 106. Review (1961a), ‘Flame in the Streets’, Monthly Film Bulletin, 28(330), July, 91. Review (1961b), ‘Victim’, Monthly Film Bulletin, 28(332), September, 126. Review (1963), ‘The Punch and Judy Man’, Monthly Film Bulletin, 30(352), 61. Review (1969), ‘Run Wild, Run Free’, Monthly Film Bulletin, July, 149. Rolls, John (1957), ‘Life in The Mirror’, Daily Mirror, 23 October, 2. Roud, Richard (1963), ‘New Films in London’, The Guardian, 1 November, 11.

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Sylvia  Syms     139 Roud, Richard (1964), ‘New Films in London’, The Guardian, 24 January, 9. Shellard, Dominic (2003), Kenneth Tynan:  A Life, New Haven, CT:  Yale University Press. Stoddard, Sarah (1956), ‘She’s the Minx with a Jinx Says Dirk Bogarde’, Picturegoer, 10 November, 10. Street, Sarah (1997), British National Cinema, London: Routledge. Walton, John K. (2000), The British Seaside: Holidays and Resorts in the Twentieth Century, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Williams, Francis (1962), The American Invasion, New York: Crown. Williams, Melanie (2013), ‘Remembering “the Poor Soul Walking in the Rain”: Audience Responses to a Thwarted Makeover in “Woman in a Dressing Gown”, Journal of British Cinema and Television, 10(4), October, 709–​26.

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The one and only Diana Dors: Britain’s ‘bad blonde’

Born Diana Fluck on 23 October 1931 in the unglamorous town of Swindon, Dors trained at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art (LAMDA) and gained a contract with the Rank Organisation in 1947. Despite the worst efforts of various partners, the film industry and her taste for publicity, she was a character actress and light comedienne par excellence. She died of cancer on 4 May 1984. If your year of birth coincided with the moon landing, the Beatles’ Abbey Road LP and the debut of the Austin Maxi, you were most likely to encounter Diana Dors in her incarnation as small-​screen dragon –​the very embodiment of a ferocious pub landlady or boarding house owner. There were also cabaret appearances in working men’s clubs in between such best-​forgotten epics as The Amorous Milkman (Derren Nesbitt 1975). ‘The diamante-​encrusted, pink-​frocked Diana Dors enveloped the stage at the Country Cousin on her return engagement last week and was quite charming. She even told the audience repeatedly how wonderful they were and seemed to mean it’ (Comerford 1978: 5). Even in the mid-​1950s, the infamous ‘mink’ bikini was rabbit fur, and in the 1970s the ‘limousine’ was often not entirely in the first flush of youth. But even when hosting the Open Dors chat show for Southern Television or promoting diet schemes (for £600 cash per appearance) on the early days of breakfast TV, she always retained an idiosyncratically British stellar quality. Andrew Walton of Picturegoer wrote with admiration how ‘this promoting of Dors by Dors is phenomenal indeed, make no mistake about that. Through her own exuberant drive, publicity-​mindedness and quick wits and instinctive know-​how, Diana has made a latter-​day myth out of Dors’ (1954: 25). In the 1960s Dors was wont to claim, ‘I was the first sex symbol this country ever had’, which is patently untrue, but it would be fair to claim that she created a distinctive niche. Laurie Lee argued that in the 1950s 140

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Diana  Dors     141

Figure 7  Diana Dors in I Married a Woman (1958)

mainstream British films relied on the ‘shutter-​lipped hero and the family joke –​with the girls, at most, their stooges and waiting wives’ (1957: 19), but Dors was never going to be relegated to such roles. For more than three decades, her screen persona was derived from the 1940s ‘good-​time girl’ –​the queen of the Palais de Danse, who was frequently ‘condemned for excessive pleasure-​seeking’ (Abra 2017: 228). Their dreams were of ‘American cocktail bars’, nylons, imported Cadillacs and crooners with mid-​Atlantic accents –​in fact, any form of US-​imported popular culture that was the antithesis of ration books and gravy browning, As noted in the previous chapter on Sylvia Syms, Harper and Porter suggest that British films of the late 1950s tended to occupy two worlds –​ the ‘regular, dry, tidy, and empty’ or the ‘asymmetrical, wet, viscous, disorderly, and full-​to-​bursting’ (2003: 27), but Dors’s characters often managed to seek and find pleasure in a regulated and moralistic landscape. If two moments on film encapsulate her image, the first is of Carole in Dance Hall (Charles Crichton 1950), defying the ‘no jiving’ rule at the Hammersmith Palais. The second is a guest role in As Long as They’re Happy (J. Lee Thompson 1955), her artist’s model Pearl Delaney

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142     Leading  ladies revelling in how a once standard-​issue family home is now filled with ‘bohemians’.1 If there was one actress of 1950s British cinema born to encourage formerly respectable types to do the Hokey Pokey Polka, it was Diana Dors. The first phase of Dors’s screen career ran from 1946 to 1954 when her on-​and off-​screen mode of dress and craving for quasi-​American affluence was an affront in the twilight of rationing. Post-​war Britain was also an era when a surfeit of Nice biscuits was widely considered to be evidence of wild living. A 1955 profile by Margaret Hinxman excitedly detailed the Maidenhead house with ‘a private cinema and three bedrooms –​one with a sunken bathroom’ and the ‘luxury model French car … Original cost; £7,000’ (1955: 15).2 Of course, Rank and ABPC male contract artists were regularly seen deporting themselves in the manner of a country squire with no financial concerns, whereas Dors’s home and motor fleet allowed the great British public to fulminate about ‘hussies’. These highly publicised material possessions were the fulfilment of her long-​held childhood dream to be a star with ‘a big house, a cream telephone and a swimming pool’ (Bret 2014: 7). A further element of Dors’s image is her distinctive voice  –​warm of tone, with drama school elocuted vowels. Brian McFarlane regarded her as ‘seeming obdurately working class in a cinema whose narratives reflected middle class values’ (1997: 182), but her identity was arguably a reaction to a background that was of the privately educated and drably respectable lower middle classes. Those faintly mid-​Atlantic vowels that became so much a part of her stardom were a further mark of how she had escaped from Swindon’s answer to East Cheam. Raymond Durgnat thought that she personified the ‘proletarian dream of belonging to the outwardly Americanised middle-​classes’ (1970:  66), but such dreams also apply to those trapped within the suburbs and the provinces. In 1956 an editorial in the Spectator complained that the only form of wealth in post-​war life that incurred ‘no popular disapproval are riches obtained by good fortune and chance’. The diatribe continued, ‘Messrs. David Whitfield and Dickie Valentine, Mesdames Sabrina and Diana Dors grow richer all the time; and they enjoy the widest popularity’ (Editorial 1956: 10). The idea that an actor or an entertainer might possess talents and a work ethic evidently by-​ passed the writer. For much of the 1950s Dors’s publicity was often out of all proportion to her cinematic career, with –​but of course –​questions asked in A further reason for viewing is a supporting role from Charles Hawtrey as the world’s least menacing Teddy boy. 2 Not to mention that in August 1953, ‘The Swindon Town Hockey Club does not re-​elect her as vice-​president’ (Hinxman 1955: 15). 1

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Diana  Dors     143 the House of Commons.3 It was a decade when British female on-​screen sexuality saw the ‘paradoxical coexistence of a desirable and glamorous physical appearance with vulnerable innocence’ (Thumim 1992:  54) to which Dors added a measure of sheer joie de vivre and largely neglected talent as a character comedienne. In Lady Godiva Rides Again (Frank Launder 1951) her experienced ‘beauty queen’ Dolores August regards the various PR agents and the entire charade with amused disdain. Even within the limitations of the studio system, industry, societal sexism and her often disastrous taste for publicity, she was indeed a star –​as early as 1951 Sight & Sound was referring to ‘the inimitable Diana Dors’ (1951: 8). Some writers made comparisons between Dors and Marilyn Monroe but the Hollywood template that best fitted Swindon’s brightest star was a beguiling local combination of Mae West and Eve Arden. In 1957 the Pendennis column in the Observer declared that ‘underneath Miss Dors’s fantastic get-​up of Perspex and diamonds, there seems to thrum a very efficient self-​publicising dynamo, but with it an engagingly down-​to-​ earth-​outlook and manner’ (Pendennis 1957: 6). She was born Diana Mary Fluck in 1931, and at the age of fourteen, she was offered a place at LAMDA. During her time there she made her screen debut in The Shop at Sly Corner (George King 1947) as Mildred, the girlfriend of the villainous Archie Fellowes (Kenneth Griffiths). We first see her leaning on a BMW roadster in a West End showroom, demanding new earrings in a South London whine. She subsequently pouts and attempts to sashay in a manner that Mildred has clearly witnessed in innumerable Hollywood B-​pictures at the local Gaumont. It is such a well-​judged naturalistic performance that it is nearly impossible to believe that Dors was aged just fifteen. Her next two films crystallised her screen image for the next few years. Her characters, even though they often faced ostracism for their pains, often did their level best to ignore such norms –​Diana Hopkins in Here Come the Huggetts causes a stir in respectable suburbia simply by her very presence. Joe and Ethel Huggett (Jack Warner and Kathleen Harrison) are visibly quailing that the lower-​middle-​class status they have worked so hard to attain is under threat from an early incarnation of their teenager. If you wish for an early example of how Dors often exemplified the ‘aspirations and anxieties of a society in transition’ (Cook 2001: 168), the moment when Joe moans about the ‘painted hussy’ in his midst is perfect. The family’s semi-​detached villa in the suburbs looks immaculate with a neatly manicured lawn and into this haven straight from John Bull magazine arrives Diana –​in the words of Derek Hill, ‘some welcome disruptions 3

In 1954 Henry Price, the MP for Lewisham West, raised the issue of ‘Miss Diana Dors who was drawing £60 a week, £50 of which was tax free’. (MacKenzie 1954: 18). It must have been a very slow day in Westminster.

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144     Leading  ladies in sham suburbia’ (1955b: 11). Here Come the Huggetts also confirmed her skill as a comedy actress, especially in the scenes with Warner serving as her flummoxed straight man. Di might have emerged from a milk bar of low repute. Such film performances caused the Rank Organisation to offer Dors a contract to join the Rank Organisation’s Company of Youth in 1947, at a fee of £10 per week (Bret 2014: 19). The ‘Charm School’, as the press insisted on referring to the enterprise, was based in a church hall in Highbury next to the studio’s centre of B-​film operations. One oft-​voiced complaint was that there were too many female leads and not enough roles for them, resulting in more fete openings than screen time. Eunice Gayson was loaned to advertising firms and endorsed ‘everything from hairgrips to car seat covers. Ronson lighters, ironing boards, coffee, furniture ranges and even toothbrushes!’ (Gayson 2012: 73–​4). But even if arriving at the Streatham Odeon in a Humber Super Snipe or opening a shoe shop somewhere in Doncaster was not exactly California, it was still a form of fame. Plus, it was still probably more exciting than life in Swindon. One major element that often distinguished the films of Diana Dors from those of her contemporaries was her air of amused disdain for the various male characters. She was never to follow in the path of ‘those English rosebuds who rarely flowered and mostly faded away still smiling at where the camera had been’ (Hopcraft 1962: 7). On-​screen ‘she did a neat parody of the man-​mad teenager, the nubile cousin who ogles the best man at the wedding breakfast … She was the best thing about most of her early films’ (Shipman 1989: 147). In It’s Not Cricket (Alfred Roome and Roy Rich 1949) her applicant of a secretarial post at the Bright and Early Detective Agency positively traumatises Basil Radford and Naunton Wayne. ‘How am I doing boys?’ she mockingly asks, responding to Bright’s (Radford) enquiry, ‘What else can you do?’ with a ‘You’d be surprised, handsome’, in a manner that would have done Mae West proud. The perturbed reactions of the two stalwart chaps do not look entirely contrived, and so they ultimately employ Susan Shaw, a fellow Charm School graduate and ‘nice blonde’, as befitting a character name of Primrose Brown. If the role of Charlotte in Oliver Twist (David Lean 1948) represented a high point of Dors’s Rank career –​an acutely realised cameo of a slattern who rules the scullery as her queendom –​a low point was playing a hard-​ edged belle in the South African-​set Diamond City (David MacDonald 1949). The Charm School did not appreciate her talents as their raison d’être was to produce film stars that were easily recognisable commodities. Dors had been awarded the Alexander Korda medal on graduating from LAMDA, Pete Murray had previously studied at RADA, but several others were hired because of their similarity to Hollywood stars.4 Thus, 4

Constance Smith had been raised in poverty in Ireland and in 1945, she entered a ‘film-​ star doubles’ contest in the Screen magazine where her resemblance to Hedy Lamarr resulted in a Rank contract.

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Diana  Dors     145 a young character comedienne with overtones of a self-​parodic suburban vamp was not, to Rank’s management at least, a strongly definable element in their retinue. However, towards the end of Dors’s Rank contract, a loan to Ealing to appear in Dance Hall marked both a crystallisation of her screen image and an opportunity for her comic timing. The poster featured her ‘flashing her stocking tops’, and the film’s press book trumpeting its casting of a starlet who is ‘the most truly representative of the full-​of-​life, swing-​keen youngster. She is as full of vitality as a dynamo; her exuberance positively leaps out from the screen!’ (Duguid et al. 2012: 10). For Carole, the venue is more than a venue in which she might find a husband; it is a few hours of relief from the bomb sites and ration coupons. It may be a den of spivery5 –​but its entertainments are a freedom from the communal jollity as celebrated in A Boy, a Girl and a Bike (Ralph Smart 1949). As the 1950s progressed, Richard Hoggart would rail about the blank-​faced ‘juke-​box boys’ in The Uses of Literacy (1957), but Stephen Berkoff referred to the dance halls of his youth as a free space where you could temporarily adopt an image of choice. ‘For a short spell you could be who you wished to be –​warrior, lover, Jimmy Cagney, Tony Curtis, villain, spiv, leader, loner, heavy, Beau Brummell’ (1996: 34). This is why Carole is so at home in the Palais and if, as Christine Geraghty argues, Dors was ‘obviously not an Ealing type actress’ (2016: 30), the fault, as with Joan Collins, was of the studio.6 Even the stern scribe of Monthly Film Bulletin, despite complaining that ‘there is little opportunity for real characterisation (the social placing of the four girls is extremely vague)’, thought ‘Diana Dors has obvious talents’ (Review 1950: 99). The ‘Charm School’ closed in 1950 following the financial setbacks of the Rank Organisation and the first half of the decade was marked by a variety of pictures for minor outlets  –​and a marked increase in publicity, much of it devised by her manager and then-​husband Dennis Hamilton. Dors was more than capable of generating press outside of a studio publicity machine. Diana Dors in 3D, a book of ‘racy’ photographs taken by Horace Roye was available at all good –​and quite a few bad –​ news stands in late 1954, and the ensuing publicity was worth far more than Dors’s original fee. Consumer goods were a further form of PR, and in an interview with Films and Filming, Dors spoke proudly of her latest ‘coach-​built car’ (Hill 1955b: 11). She was far from alone in being pictured with her status symbols in film magazines of this period; one publicity shot of Jack Hawkins features him arriving at the gates of Ealing

5 6

As its manager is played by Sydney Tafler, this is somewhat inevitable. The same studio that turned down the opportunity to put Audrey Hepburn under contract after her cameo in The Lavender Hill Mob.

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146     Leading  ladies Studios in his Jaguar Mk VII. However, he was a tweed-​suited leading man whereas Diana Dors was a very British form of vamp. By now Dors’s hairstyle was even more markedly dyed from fair to platinum, and the topic of ‘the blonde and post-​war British Cinema’ would merit a book in its own right. The ‘nice blondes’ of Sylvia Syms in the early part of her ABPC career, Virginia McKenna, Shirley Eaton in the first Carry On films or Juliet Mills might be found at the local tennis club. They may evince a display of a certain degree of flirtatiousness but never descending to the image as vividly described by Marcia Landy: ‘Peroxide blond hair usually long low and loose, large breasts, a swinging-​hips walk, tight-​fitting clothing with low backs and necklines that call attention to the body, an availability for play or pleasure, a love of dancing and a disregard for the opinion of others’ (2001:  155). The ‘bad blonde’ could be upper class with ice in their veins and the contempt of their servants, as with Moira Lister in Grand National Night (Bob McNaught 1953)  or Sandra Dorne, the definitive British second-​ feature femme fatale of Marilyn (Wolf Rilla 1953). Vera Day variously fell prey to the sub-​par patter of Sydney Tafler’s wide-​boy chauffeur in The Crowded Day (John Guillermin 1954), alien invaders at a works’ dance (Quatermass 2, Val Guest 1957) or irate tree trunks (The Woman Eater, Charles Saunders 1958). A further category was an array of highly adroit comediennes; Shani Wallis with her parody of a crooner obsessed uber-​fan in The Extra Day (William Fairchild 1956) or Belinda Lee’s performance in The Runaway Bus (Val Guest 1954). Barbara Windsor, the wonderful character actress from Sparrows Can’t Sing (Joan Littlewood 1963), was subsequently, and ineptly, used by Gerald Thomas as the Carry On series answer to Jayne Mansfield, while Liz Fraser’s wit and deadpan timing were worthy of better films.7 There was also a myriad of minor figures such as Sheree Winton, Sheena Marshe or the model Sabrina, whose standard cinematic task was to act as a stooge to the comic leading man. And in Cover Girl Killer (Terry Bishop 1959) blonde models are strangled by Harry H. Corbett’s toupee-​wearing maniac.8 The hairstyle complemented Dors’s image as the leading light of a Home Counties interpretation of a Hollywood ‘rat pack’ –​trips to a chic roadhouse off the A3 for gin and tonics in the company of the ‘Diana Dors Set’ of B-​film leading men and various hangers-​on. As the 1950s progressed, Harry Hopkins argued that ‘one result of this “democratic” diversity and continuous consumption was that true conspicuous consumption in the Edwardian manner became not only technically difficult of effective Fraser’s beauty queen turned trophy wife in Live Now, Pay Later (Jay Lewis 1962) was Oscar worthy, while her comic timing is at its best in the ‘frothy coffee’ scene of The Rebel (Robert Day 1961). 8 Dors would have probably swatted him aside like a fly. 7

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Diana  Dors     147 achievement but also “undemocratic” or “in bad taste” ’ (1963: 353). He went on to mention Lady Norah Docker as a key example of the latter.9 As Norah’s husband Sir Bernard was the chairman of the Birmingham Small Arms Company (BSA), the parent company of Daimler, this allowed her to present successively more elaborate vehicles –​each of which teetered on the cusp of flamboyance and uber-​naffness –​at the Earls Court Motor Show. Dors also revelled in her automotive fleet  –​at one stage they included a Delahaye and the Cadillac –​plus the mink coat. The publicity often masked debts and spousal abuse10 and a run of sub-​par films: ‘The discerning will not have forgotten her Charlotte in Lean’s Oliver Twist or her sly professional beauty queen in Lady Godiva Rides Again. Generally she has been so unfortunate with scripts that it comes as a surprise to learn that Value for Money, the comedy which she is completing, will be her twentieth film’ (Hill 1955b: 11). But even low-​budget films could showcase her talents. The Last Page (Terence Fisher 1952)  was re-​titled Man Bait for the USA, with Dors resplendent in a pink brassiere on the poster. Her shop assistant Ruby Bruce is so brazen that she not only attempts to blackmail her employer John Harman (George Brent) but dares to tangle with the floorwalker Clive Oliver (Raymond Huntley at his most imperious). When Ruby becomes involved with spiv Peter Reynolds, we know that his world of nightclubs and being able to order mixed grills for two without a qualm will turn her head. The role could have been as a squawking cockney caricature, but Dors plays the villainess as a young suburbanite who is only dimly aware that she is truly out of her depth. Hutchings observes how Fisher’s work often contains the theme of the danger of succumbing to desire (2001b: 60), and this applies as much to Ruby as it does to Harman. Such minor pictures frequently showcased her subtle and well-​timed comic talents. During the 1970s and 1980s, the schedules of BBC television were often happy hunting grounds for the likes of Is Your Honeymoon Really Necessary? (Maurice Elvey 1953), which she made for Adelphi Films. As the plotline involved a US Air Force commander discovering Laurie Vining arriving at Heathrow with his new spouse, only to discover he is still technically married to his American-​born first wife, there will inevitably be an appearance from Bonar Colleano.11 Equally inevitably Sidney James would unleash his patent Johannesburg-​cockney-​New York accent on the part of Hank while a surprisingly whimsical Monthly Film Sue Harper described Dors as a ‘sort of Lady Docker of the screen’ (2000: 98). Hurricane in Mink by David Bret (2014) is probably the best book about the life and works of Diana Dors and an infinitely depressing account of her being physically attacked by Hamilton, who stole her earnings and whose business partners included Peter Rachman. 11 A US-​born actor who was ubiquitous in post-​war British cinema as either a GI or a displaced American hood. 9



10

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148     Leading  ladies Bulletin described Dors’s performance as ‘responding to the essence of the piece beautifully by exuding 100 per cent sex’ (Review 1953: 150). Another film of limited financial backing also featured the most off-​beat of all Dors’s leading men when in 1953 she co-​starred with Frank Randle in It’s a Grand Life (John E.  Blakeley 1953). Dors was billed as ‘Britain’s most beautiful and glamourous’. Randle portrayed ‘Private Randle’ a soldier with a theoretical grasp of his lines. Dors recalled the comic as ‘mad  –​and usually drunk into the bargain’ (1981:  133) and during the surprisingly long 102 minutes running time she appears to be acting in a totally different film. It’s a Grand Life would occasionally surface on BBC2’s early evening schedules, leaving viewers with the faintly disquieting impression that they were viewing an expressionistic nightmare rather than the final picture to be produced by Mancunian Films.12 The year 1955 saw a marked improvement in Dors’s professional fortunes with a leading role in A Kid for Two Farthings (Carol Reed 1955). Wolf Mankowitz created an urban fantasy that unfolded in a fantastical colour version of Bethnal Green where the tailor Mr Kandinsky (David Kossoff ) aspires to own a steam press, while his employee Sam (Joe Robinson) becomes a wrestler so that he may purchase an engagement ring from ‘Ice’ Berg (Sidney James) and eventually marry his fiancée Sonia (Dors). On its US release, Bosley Crowther uncorked the vitriol –​ ‘Diana Dors, who plays soulful Sonia, is about as sensitive as Marilyn Monroe, whom she terrifyingly resembles’ (1956:  n.p.)13  –​which from a twenty-​first-​century perspective, is not only a complete misreading of Monroe’s talents but also of Dors’s performance. Sonia has the appearance of a slightly tarnished-​looking but genuine princess in a fantasy East End and her performance of an ambitious young seamstress is well judged. The cockney accent is low key, with no overtones of Dick van Dyke and if Sonia wishes to escape via marriage from this apparently enchanted corner of London, it is not entirely incomprehensible. Phillip Gillett points out that marriage could mean escape from an overcrowded home ‘where there was parental discord and little privacy’ (2003: 12). The theme of remaining loyal to one’s family and to the wider community was a common one of 1950s British cinema, and David Kynaston points out that this was a period when the desire not to be moved from a familiar community even to improved housing was widespread (2009: 228). But Lars von Trier once claimed, ‘I am a man of very many anxieties but doing strange things with the camera is not one of them’ (quoted in Macnab 2006:  n.p.), but even he might have found Frank Randle sharing the same screen with Diana Dors overly bizarre. 13 Crowther was rather more on target with his view that Joe Robinson ‘looks and acts as though he’d be happier on a police horse than riding the poignant myth of a unicorn’ (1956: n.p.). 12

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Diana  Dors     149 to Sonia –​bright, ambitious and determinedly blonde –​a home with a bathroom like a Lyons Corner House is the goal. Dors’s performance in A Kid for Two Farthings resulted in an offer to return to the Rank Organisation with a five-​year contract at £7,000 per annum (Bret 2014: 69). In 1955 Dors appeared in An Alligator Named Daisy (J. Lee Thompson 1955), and in this alleged comedy, a songwriter named Peter Weston (Donald Sinden14) has to guard said alligator for no clear purpose. The one bright moment in the picture is the casting of Dors as the daughter of James Robertson Justice, the characters of the ‘good-​time girl’ as a sardonic debutante and the curmudgeon providing a charming balance. Her accent has a crisp public-​school sense of dismissiveness without lapsing into caricature;15 ‘She transforms the material by suggesting, through the ironic bravura of her performance, that desire and status are random’ (Harper and Porter 2003: 52). It was a loan to ABPC that presented Dors with one of her most notable cinematic opportunities. In 1953 she had played the brash inmate Betty in the prison drama The Weak and The Wicked (J. Lee Thompson) with a scenario based on the roman-​à-​clef Who Lie in Gaol (1951) by Thompson’s wife, Joan Henry. A second prison-​based novel Yield to the Night followed in 1954, and the initial idea of the Rank Organisation casting for Mary Hilton, a convicted murderess in the death cell, was Margaret Leighton (Bret 2014: 77). The picture commences with Mary Hilton (Dors) as the apparent personification of the ‘bad blonde’ striding through London on a pair of determined stilettos. Her victim, Lucy Porter (Mercia Shaw), is overdressed in mink, retrieving parcels from a flamboyantly expensive-​looking Ford Thunderbird –​an appropriately American motor car for what first appears to be the opening of a typical British crime feature. But by initially presenting Mary as the archetypal hard-​faced bad blonde, Thompson adroitly uses Yield to the Night to indict the punitive streak within British society –​‘You must take somebody who deserves to die, and then feel sorry for them and say this is wrong’ (quoted in Williams 2003:  131). To cast Leighton would arguably have presented the audience with a sympathetic –​and overtly middle-​class –​figure, as opposed to an actress who seemingly revelled in tabloid headlines and who openly stated, ‘I might as well cash in on my sex now while I’ve got it. It can’t last forever, can it?’ (Time 1955: 116). Alan Dent of the Illustrated London News observed the infinitesimal pause before Mary fires for the sixth time and writes, ‘Nothing that Miss Dors can do after this can make Acting with all the verve of a man whose screen career has been described as an arc from The Cruel Sea to a reptile farce. 15 It was when An Alligator Named Daisy was being promoted at the 1955 Venice Film Festival that Dors wore the rabbit bikini. 14

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150     Leading  ladies me feel sorry for Mary Hilton. The more she does, the more I feel like echoing Dr. Johnson; “The woman’s a slut, and there’s an end on’t.” But Miss Dors does much to oblige us all to think differently’ (1956: 37). Yield to the Night was, in many respects, the culmination of an arc in Dors’s on-​screen career. Eight years earlier, Dors had appeared in the framing sequences of Good Time Girl (David MacDonald 1948)  as Lyla, a runaway fifteen-​year-​old who is ‘refusing to return home’. A  middle-​aged paternal-​looking sergeant asks a magistrate (Flora Robson) to ‘have a word with her’ and so we learn how Jean Kent’s eponymous protagonist Gwen Rawlings did indeed leave home only to find himself in a post-​ war urban hell of nightclubs run by Herbert Lom,16 spivs with tramline-​ striped suits and GI deserters. Rawlings eventually receives a sentence of fifteen years for her part in a botched car robbery, and this tale so shocks Lynda that following advice from a senior representative of the state she happily returns home to endure further domestic misery with an alcoholic father. This theme of escape is a common trope of many of Dors’s most interesting performances. Gwen wishes to flee a domestic hell only to be informed by a supposedly benevolent Establishment that she should be grateful that her circumstances are not even worse. Carol becomes, for a few fleeting hours, the queen of the Hammersmith Palais de Danse and Sonia envisages a married future in a semi-​detached villa with a refrigerator and a television set. With Yield to the Night, Mary sees Jim Lancaster (Michael Craig) –​witty, educated and wholly unreliable –​as a form of escape from a mundane existence and marriage to the much older Fred (Harry Locke). There is a scene of Mary avidly listening to Lancaster recount his early life and Dors’s face is almost childlike in her enthusiasm, but Jim is possibly the ultimate of the vacillating men encountered by one of her characters. Craig was given too few opportunities to display his talents for weak charmers during his years with Rank, and Lancaster craves a mother figure as much as he does a lover. He eventually kills himself, and Lucy’s cold reaction is the catalyst for the murder in a picture where state functionaries ‘give care and companionship in a death cell ensemble that constantly mocks the family group’ (Chibnall 2000: 83). Monthly Film Bulletin wrote that, ‘As a plea against capital punishment, however, the producers’ conception of their drama seems to lack passion’ (Review 1956: 101–​2), but that is arguably the raison d’être of Yield to the Night, where the authorities diligently carry out their assigned duties. Hilton’s mother (Dandy Nichols) can barely articulate her grief and a brief visit from estranged husband Fred only intensifies Mary’s pain. Mr Hilton is much older than Mary and cares for her deeply, but now it is 16

Of course.

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Diana  Dors     151 the female prison officers who form a surrogate family around Mary. The supporting cast illustrates Richard Dyer’s theory that bit players could develop an individual character that was ‘familiar and also both broader and more individuated than a pure stereotype, drawing on a connotative range beyond the film in question’ (2002: 78). Liam Redmond utters platitudes in a Dublin brogue, urging Mary Hilton to ‘conform to the routine, however hard and futile it may seem’, and the chaplain is played by the equally familiar Geffrey Keen. Surrounding Mary at all times are the constantly bantering uniformed prison staff, working to ensure that a state-​sanctioned death is carried out as smoothly as is possible. One officer is reduced to tears at the news there is to be no reprieve, and the governess (Maire Ney) advises that ‘by remaining calm you’ll make it less difficult for them and better for yourself ’. The law, as celebrated in so many British crime films of this era, will inexorably take its course. The last visit from Fred is framed within the context of an expressionistic nightmare, with his last desperate words of comfort barely heard, as Mary is now readying herself for what lies behind the door at that end of her cell. Yield to the Night remains one of the perfect fusions of actress and character in post-​war British cinema although, somewhat predictably, it received a certain degree of patronage that such a ‘glamour’ figure possessed any thespian skills at all. Barry King wrote how ‘in the studio system, impersonatory skills were assigned a lower value compared to the cultivation of a persona’ (1991:  181)  –​although Dors’s image was largely self-​created –​ and Picturegoer headlined its review of 30 June 1956 with ‘YES  –​Dors CAN Act Without Her Mink’. With several reviews, there was a sense of prurient moral judgement in the deglamorisation of Hilton/​Dors. Isabel Quigly wrote in the Spectator: ‘She has no basic beauty once the warpaint is off, and the rather rhomboid face, washed clean with tears, puffy with sleeplessness, crowned by a straggle of mouse-​ coloured hair darkening somehow shockingly at the roots, looks nakedly rubbery and plain’ (1956: 18). The fate of Mary Hilton is the bleakest of any ‘bad blonde’ of British cinema as played by a star who courted the dangers of flamboyance and dalliance with US-​style affluence. Marcia Landy saw the film as ‘an allegory of society’s retaliation against female desire through all its institutional channels’ (1991: 458). Throughout the narrative, the question remains as to whether the authorities wishing to help Mary to accept her fate is for her benefit, themselves or even the film magazine-​reading audience occupying the 2/​9d seats. The publicity from Yield to the Night resulted in a three-​picture contract with RKO (aka Radio-​Keith-​Orpheum) Pictures but did not produce any film of note and a further problem, aside from Hamilton physically attacking members of the press, was Dors’s image. As Richard Roud reflected, ‘Imitators never really do well on a free market … the American

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152     Leading  ladies exhibitor presented with a choice between Marilyn Monroe and Diana Dors will always take Monroe’ (1956–​57:  119–​23). Diana Dors was too individualistic a performer to be an ersatz Monroe, but to many US cinemagoers, she was the filmic equivalent of a Ford Zephyr Zodiac or an early London-​based rock and roll singer –​a slightly muted British interpretation of US popular culture. Her eventual return to the UK was marked by The Long Haul (Ken Hughes 1957), as Zephyr-Zodiac Lynn, a nightclub hostess who falls for Liverpool-​based ex-​GI lorry driver Harry Miller (Victor Mature). This epic was produced by Warwick Films who were contracted to supply Columbia Pictures (Harper and Porter 2003:  129) and The Long Haul is often quite endearing in its attempts to emulate a Hollywood film noir. Patrick Allen’s villain has the US Army surplus name Joe Easy and a Canadian accent, Irish-​American drunks17 frequent night spots and the fact that the Austin FX3 taxis and police Wolseley 6/​80s are driving on the left is a mere detail. Monthly Film Bulletin complained of Hughes’s script exploiting ‘every known melodramatic cliché’ (Review 1957: 128), but the film conveys a faintly self-​parodic air. Its finest moment occurs when Harry is obliged to change the wheel of his Leyland Octopus in the middle of a loch. Meanwhile, Lynn fetchingly pouts. The final major British picture of Dors’s 1950s career was Tread Softly Stranger (Gordon Parry 1958), which was set in the Yorkshire town of Rawborough and presented her with a rare opportunity to appear opposite a strong leading man near her own age. George Baker had previously essayed straightforward leads for ABPC, but Johnny Mansell was a more demanding character role; a tall and well-​built individual slightly too ready of smile and with a glibness of manner. Calico (Dors) has seen most forms of male behaviour as a club hostess, but at least he offers a sense of change. Johnny may be a spiv, he may be on the run from London hoods, but he once tried to escape from his hometown. Much of the picture was shot on location in Rotherham, and it is not entirely implausible that a north-​country town would have an approximation of a London niterie for the entertainment of provincial magnates and would-​be dignitaries. At least Calico has escaped working in one of the local factories. After two more attempts at ‘international’18 pictures, Dors’s UK career now descended to Passport to Shame (Alvin Rakoff 1958), which may be fairly regarded as her first exploitation film.19 It was made partially Alfred Burke! I Married A Woman (Hal Katner 1958) starred the comedian George Gobel but The Love Specialist aka La Ragazza Del Palio (Luigi Zampa 1958) did at least allow Dors to appear opposite a Lancia Aurelia Spider-​driving Vittorio Gassman. 19 On his website (www.alvinrakoff.com) Rakoff recalls that ‘television directors, no matter how successful, were kept from making films. That is why my first film Passport to Shame … was a low-​budget exploitation film. It was all I  could get’ (accessed 18 November 2018). 17 18

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Diana  Dors     153 to capitalise on the change in the law regarding prostitution following the 1957 Wolfenden Report and was introduced à la Edgar Lustgarten in Anglo-​Amalgamated’s Scotland Yard B-​film series by ex-​superintendent Robert Fabian. In such a picture, there is a certain inevitability that Herbert Lom will play the chief vice racketeer, and similarly, the moralistic narrative will take every opportunity to display Dors’s character Vicki in her underwear. In 1958 Dors separated from Dennis Hamilton, and her discovery of the extent of his financial mismanagement resulted in the sale of her memoirs to the News of The World,20 a twelve-​week serial commencing on 17 January 1960. The serial permitted readers to moralise over tales of orgies in darkest Surrey, but it did not revive her British screen career. The beginning of the decade saw another sojourn to Hollywood, following her marriage to the comedian Richard Dawson; photographs of this period display him posing as a sun-​shaded junior Rat Pack member who was quite keen to leave his Gosport past behind. From 1960 to 1966 Dors divided her time between the USA and the UK, but the female lead in the Danny Kaye vehicle On the Double (Melville Shavelson 1961)  failed to establish a Hollywood career, and her British roles were now descending towards ‘star cameos’. She turned down the role of Brenda in Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (Karel Reisz 1960) (Bret 2014) and her outgoing yet lonely Georgie in in West 11 (Michael Winner 1963) is poignant evidence of that missing opportunity. The director’s zealous  –​one might say manic  –​efforts at self-​ publicity in the 1980s and 1990s frequently overshadowed his earlier achievements. Framed in Otto Heller’s cold-​looking black-​and-​white photography, Georgie is a formidable queen bee of Notting Hill but a ‘good-​time girl’ from the already remote past of jitterbugging and dance bands. Penelope Gilliatt referred to Judy Holliday and Marilyn Monroe as ‘breakable-​looking waifs, struggling to stay hidden inside their confidently rubbery bodies’ (1990: 63) and Georgie is equally vulnerable, with her resigned air of one who had been hurt many times over the years. Bill Harding thought that the main characters were ‘people who exist rather than live’ (1978: 23) and Dors portrays one who is only too aware of her bleak existence. The part also encapsulated the sexism of a film industry in which Dirk Bogarde could play Simon Sparrow at the age of forty-​two, while Dors was perceived as ‘middle-​aged’ at thirty-​one. By the mid-​1960s Dors’s film career had largely descended to horror films of the calibre of Berserk! (Jim O’Connolly 1967). The Unusual Miss Mulberry, a series created by Associated-​Rediffusion as a rival to ABC TV’s The Avengers and starring Dors in the title role was cancelled,21 This prompted the quite fantastic response from the Archbishop of Canterbury that Dors was a ‘wayward hussy’ (quoted in Waymark 2001: 92). 21 No tape appears to have survived. 20

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154     Leading  ladies and there were decreasingly prestigious tours of the cabaret circuit. She maintained her profile by guest appearances on Juke Box Jury or The Eamonn Andrews Show,22 but her image now seemed as rooted in the 1950s as those ageing provincial Teds who fulminated against the Rolling Stones. However, the Beatles featured her image on the cover of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Heart Club Band and 1967 also saw Amicus provide a showcase for her talents as a character player. In the downbeat spy thriller Danger Route, her brassily unhappy Rhoda Gooderich is exploited by the self-​loathing MI5 agent Jonas Wilde (Richard Johnson). It is a spy picture that unfolds in ‘a world devoid of moral absolutes where institutions, whatever their ideological bias, are corrupt (Mayer 2003:  93). Rhoda’s loneliness makes her prey for a man who seduces her out of professional expediency. When Wilde takes his leave, the professional layer of brassiness fleetingly dissolves to reveal Rhoda’s genuine pain at her being, once again, used by a man. Between the end of the 1960s and the early 1980s, Dors entered the most dispiriting phase of her career, with a few gems to compensate for a CV featuring some prime cinematic drek. The title of What the Swedish Butler Saw (Vernon P. Becker 1975)  initially reads like a spoof created by Peter Richardson but it really exists. For those with a yen to view a film in which a Victorian aristocrat converts a former asylum into a ‘love nest’ only to discover that Jack the Ripper is an unwanted lodger, it is an unmissable experience. There were also horror pictures such as Craze (Freddie Francis 1974)  in which Jack Palance sacrifices various Equity Card holders to Chuku, the African idol he keeps in his basement, in between driving a Vauxhall Victor FC estate around the Home Counties. Diana Dors was far from alone in being a star of 1950s British cinema who was now in straitened circumstances; Craze guest-​starred a glum-​ looking Trevor Howard as Superintendent Bellamy and Richard Todd was second-​billed in Number 1 of the Secret Service (Lindsay Shonteff 1977), which had the production values of an amateur film shot in the fog. His fellow ABPC artist George Baker starred in Intimate Games (Tudor Gates 1976) and other well-​known names would grace sex comedies with all the charm of being buried alive in a pile of Mayfair back issues. Dors’s third marriage to the character actor Alan Lake saw the couple as a 1970s British tabloid answer to Burton and Taylor, especially after his eighteen-​ month prison sentence following a pub brawl, and there were the cabaret shows, complete with a self-​provided bouquet. Twenty-​five years earlier Dors often toyed with the various weak-​ willed sport-​ jacketed males  –​in Value for Money (Ken Annakin 22

David Lusted remarked on how Dors would often use male guests as stooges –​‘caustic putdowns on personalities around her whose bonhomie grew excessive (“Calm down, there’s a good boy”)’ (1991: 256).

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Diana  Dors     155 1955)  her nightclub chanteuse Ruthine West beguiles and terrifies in equal measure John Gregson’s north-​country textiles magnate. As David Lusted observes, ‘Always self-​conscious of the type, she wasted few chances to expose  –​through exaggerated gestures of female sexuality and a sneering disdain for on-​screen predatory males (no-​one curled a lip like Dors)’ (1991:  259). Pam Cook argued that the post-​war British female sex symbol ‘is a transgressive figure who is driven by sexual desire and materialism to challenge traditional social boundaries and is often demonised or criminalised as an instrument of consumerism’ (2001: 169). If this was a subtext of Yield to the Night, British cinema’s further punishment for Dors took the form of revenge via having her play characters that too often served to be mocked. The ill-​lit realm of the exploitation picture had succeeded the dreams of the Hollywood villa with the cream telephone. As Jeff Nuttall put it, ‘Besides kindness, however, community breeds taboo and aggression. It is forbidden to seek ostentatious individuality’ (1978: 82). During this period, it was television that offered Dors a greater range of dramatic opportunities –​she was the definitive Mrs Bott in London Weekend Television’s (LWT) 1977 adaptation of Just William (Adrian Dannatt) and a truly terrifying Grand Guignol villainess in the Nurse Will Make It Better episode of Associated Television’s (ATV) Thriller (Brian Clemens 1975). The fourth season The Sweeney story ‘Messenger of the Gods’ (Terry Green 1978)  presented her as an extremely funny criminal matriarch –​a combination of Violet Kray and Peggy Mount –​and three cinema outings of the 1970s show the range of her talents. Deep End (Jerzy Skolimowski 1970) is an outsider’s view of a London of torn posters advertising Embassy cigarettes and rusting Austin A40s. Andrew Sarris compared it with ‘the best of Godard, Truffaut, and Polanski and then some’, while remarking that Dors was ‘a frightening reminder of what Marilyn Monroe might look like if she were alive today’ (1971: 322). Michael Billington, with a greater degree of grace, referred to ‘the incomparable Diana Dors’ (1971: 24), whose unnamed bathhouse patron is a terrifying apparition to the fifteen-​year-​old school leaver Mike (John Moulder-​Brown). ‘Why can’t you look into my eyes boy’, she breathily orders him before clutching him to her bosom, screaming, ‘Tackle, dribble, dribble, score!’23 as she fantasies about George Best. Her final command to Mike –​‘Get out … I don’t need you any more’ –​could even be seen as a tacit comment to all of the useless males who had previously bedevilled her films. Second, there was Mrs Wickens in The Amazing Mr. Blunden (1972), which was directed and scripted by Lionel Jeffries from The Ghosts by 23

Dors performing the Molly Bloom soliloquy in Ulysses  –​another cinematic lost opportunity.

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156     Leading  ladies Antonia Barber. Jeffries had previously received considerable critical and commercial success with his adaption of The Railway Children (1970) and although Mr. Blunden similarly has a period setting  –​1918  –​it is certainly not an overly prettified vision of a safe past. The remarkable climax has the ghost of Blunden (Laurence Naismith), a solicitor purging himself through fire to atone for neglecting the children under his care as a trustee, and Dors’s housekeeper is a shrew, controlling her punch-​ drunk husband (David Lodge on equally good form). She is one of the film’s many adults who exploit the young in a picture created by a film-​ maker who endured a tragic childhood.24 If The Railway Children was a paean to the upbringing Jeffries never experienced, The Amazing Mr. Blunden served as a warning. Mrs Wickens may initially appear as a form of pantomime villainess, but the damage she creates is real. Finally, the Act of Kindness story of the horror portmanteau From Beyond the Grave (Kevin Connor 1974)  presents a vision of a lower-​ middle-​class Hades. Amicus films were often notable for their ‘attention to, and familiarity with the minutiae of British life’ (Hutchings 2001a: 142) and David Pirie lauded the ‘superbly Pinteresque’ qualities of the episode An Act of Kindness (1974: 72). The opening scene has Mabel (Dors) and Christopher Lowe (Ian Bannen) as a nightmare version of Meg and Petey Boles; the latter berated for being ‘a jumped-​up clerk. That’s all an office manager really is’. The paterfamilias wears a demob suit and a moustache on the verge of surrender, while his spouse still dresses like the queen of the Mecca ballroom in Streatham circa 1953. Did Mabel encounter her future husband when she was running a Navy, Army and Air Force Institute (NAAFI) or managing a club somewhere in Nairobi or Malta –​the queen of the Mecca ballrooms now working in the colonies and, beguiled by Lowes’s sergeant’s stripes and his promise of a comfortable post-​service future? The irony that her husband attempts to reaffirm his masculinity by stealing a military medal from Peter Cushing’s junk shop only serves to confirm his snivelling nature, while the Lowes’s villa is suffused with the shabby gentility that the actress had worked so hard to escape. As for the four pictures that Dors made during the late 1970s  –​ Adventures of a Taxi Driver (Stanley Long 1976), Keep It Up Downstairs (Robert Young 1976), Adventures of a Private Eye (Long 1977)  and Confessions from the David Galaxy Affair (Willy Roe 1979)  –​each conveyed the essential glamour and eroticism of a £3.65 budgeted industrial training film about forklift truck maintenance, although the last-​ named did boast a lead performance from Alan Lake of quite mesmerising awfulness. Diana Dors’s screen career did at least end on a high note with 24

‘The beatings from his father, as well as the mental abuse, haunted him all his life’ (Ty Jeffries quoted in Paton 2012: n.p.).

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Diana  Dors     157 Steaming (1985), the final work from Joseph Losey. Violet, the defiantly blonde matriarch of an East End Turkish bath, was a further indication of a talent undimmed by the worst that Wardour Street had to offer. Had she enjoyed a longer life, a damehood would not have been implausible.25 But it was not so much the screen adaptation of Nell Dunn’s play that served as the finest moment of the twilight of her career but her fairy godmother in the video for Adam and the Ants’s ‘Prince Charming’. There are far worse epitaphs than a 1950s icon appearing with a punk/​new-​wave star (and one who owed a considerable stylistic debt to Johnny Kidd and the Pirates), providing him with a new wardrobe and a Mercedes-​Benz 300SL Roadster –​and it further encapsulated her idiosyncratic appeal. She was not the British Marilyn Monroe  –​she was the one and only Diana Dors. Bibliography Abra, Allison (2017), Dancing in the English Style: Consumption, Americanisation and National Identity in Britain 1918–​ 1950, Manchester:  Manchester University Press. Berkoff, Steven (1996), Free Association:  An Autobiography, London: Faber & Faber. Billington, Michael (1971), ‘Cinema’, Illustrated London News, 3 April, 24. Bret, David (2014), Diana Dors: Hurricane in Mink, London: J. R. Books. Brunsdon, Charlotte (2007), London in Cinema: The Cinematic City Since 1945, London: BFI. Chibnall, Steve (2000), J. Lee Thompson:  British Film Makers, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Comerford, Catherine (1978), ‘Country Cousin’, The Stage, 16 November, 5. Cook, Pam (2001), ‘The Trouble with Sex: Diana Dors and the Blonde Bombshell Phenomenon’, in Babington, Bruce (ed.) British Stars and Stardom: From Alma Taylor to Sean Connery, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Crowther, Bosley (1956), ‘Screen:  Whimsical Tale; “Kid for Two Farthings” Arrives at Plaza’, New York Times, 18 April. Dent, Alan (1956), ‘The World of the Cinema:  Degrees of Badness’, Illustrated London News, 30 June, 37. Dors, Diana (1981), Dors by Diana, London: MacDonald Futura. Duguid, Mark, Freeman, Lee, Johnston, Keith M. and Williams, Melanie (eds.) (2012), Ealing Revisited, London: BFI/​Palgrave Macmillan. Durgnat, Raymond (1970), A Mirror for England: British Movies from Austerity to Affluence, London: Faber & Faber.

25

At the time of her passing there were also plans for a West End production of Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? with Dors as Jane opposite the Blanche of Noele Gordon, who had recently been fired from Crossroads. It was a casting combination that could well have made London theatrical history.

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158     Leading  ladies Dyer, Richard (2002), The Matter of Images: Essays on Representations (2nd ed.), London: Routledge. Editorial (1956), ‘The Idle Rich’, The Spectator, 6 April, 10. Gayson, Eunice (2012), The First Lady of Bond, Cambridge, UK: Signum Books. Geraghty, Christine (2016), ‘Post-​War Choices and Feminine Possibilities’, in Sieglohr, Ulrike (ed.) Heroines Without Heroes:  Reconstructing Female and National Identities in European Cinema 1945–​1951, London: Bloomsbury. Gillett, Phillip (2003), The British Working Class in Post-​War Film, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Gilliatt, Penelope (1990), To Wit: Skin and Bones of Comedy, New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons. Harding, Bill (1978), The Films of Michael Winner, London: Frederick Muller. Harper, Sue (2000), Women in British Cinema:  Mad, Bad and Dangerous to Know, London: Continuum. Harper, Sue and Porter, Vincent (2003), British Cinema of the 1950s: The Decline of Deference, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hill, Derek (1955a), ‘A Kid for Two Farthings’, Films and Filming, September, 16. Hill, Derek (1955b), ‘A Window on Dors’, Films and Filming, April, 11. Hinxman, Margaret (1955), ‘The Remarkable Diary of Diana Dors’, Picturegoer, 7 May, 15–​16. Hopcraft, Arthur (1962), ‘The Opening Game’, The Guardian, 13 February, 7. Hopkins, Harry (1963), The New Look: A Social History of Britain in the Forties and Fifties, London: Secker & Warburg. Hutchings, Peter (2001a), ‘The Amicus House of Horror’, in Chibnall, Steve and Petley, Julian (eds.) British Horror Cinema, London: Routledge. Hutchings, Peter (2001b), Terence Fisher:  British Film Makers, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Jones, Matthew (2017), Science Fiction Cinema and 1950s Britain: Recontextuali­ zing Cultural Anxiety, London: Bloomsbury. King, Barry (1991), ‘Articulating Stardom’, in Butler, Jeremy G.  (ed.) Star Texts: Image and Performance in Film and Television, Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press. Kynaston, David (2009), Family Britain 1951–​1957 (Tales of a New Jerusalem), London: Bloomsbury. Landy, Marcia (1991), British Genres: Cinema and Society 1930–​1960, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Landy, Marcia (2001), ‘ “You Remember Diana Dors Don’t You?’ ”:  History Femininity, and the Law in 1950s and 1980s British Cinema’, in Landy, Marcia (ed.) The Historical Film: History and Memory in Media, London: Athalone Press. Lee, Laurie (1957), ‘A Letter from Cannes’, Encounter, July, 15–​20. Levin, Bernard (1960), ‘A Spectator’s Notebook: It Always Dors on Sunday’, The Spectator, 19 February, 6. Lusted, David (1991), ‘The Glut of Personality’, in Gledhill, Christine (ed.) Stardom: Industry of Desire, London: Routledge. Macnab, Geoffrey (2006), ‘I’m a Control Freak: But I Was Not in Control’, The Guardian, 22 September. Mackenzie, Compton (1954), ‘Iaauni’, The Spectator, 12 November, 18. Mayer, Geoff (2003), Guide to British Cinema, London: Greenwood Press.

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Diana  Dors     159 McFarlane, Brian (1997), An Autobiography of British Cinema, London: Methuen. Medhurst, Andy (1986), ‘Dirk Bogarde’, in Barr, Charles (ed.) All Our Yesterdays: 90 Years of British Cinema, London: BFI. Nuttall, Jeff (1978), King Twist: A Portrait of Frank Randle, London: Routledge. Paton, Maureen (2012), ‘Dad Was Too Much to Compete with’, The Guardian, 28 January. Pendennis (1957), ‘Table Talk’, The Observer, 10 February, 6. Pirie, David (1974), ‘From Beyond the Grave’, Monthly Film Bulletin, 41(483), April, 72. Quigly, Isabel (1956), ‘Anguish Keeps the Gate’, The Spectator, 22 June, 18. Review (1950), ‘Dance Hall’, in Monthly Film Bulletin, 17(198) July, 99. Review (1953), ‘Is Your Honeymoon Really Necessary?’ Monthly Film Bulletin, 20(237), 150. Review (1956), ‘Yield to the Night’, Monthly Film Bulletin, 23(271), 101–​2. Review (1957), ‘The Long Haul’, Monthly Film Bulletin, 24(285), October, 128. Roud, Richard (1956–​57), ‘Britain in America’, Sight & Sound, Winter, 119–​23. Sarris, Andrew (1971), ‘Deep End’, Village Voice, 19 August, 322. Shipman, David (1989), The Great Movie Stars 2:  The International Years, London: Warner Books. Sight & Sound (1951), ‘London’, August–​September, 8. Sweet, Matthew (2005), ‘X Appeal: Britain’s Oldest Living Sexploitation Star Tells All’, Independent, 29 January. Thompson, Howard (1968), ‘Berserk!’ New York Times, 11 January. Thumim, Janet (1992), Celluloid Sisters: Women and Popular Cinema, London: Palgrave Macmillan. Time (1955), ‘Visible Export’, 10 October, 116. Walton, Andrew (1954), ‘Dors Deglamorized’, Picturegoer, 6 February, 25. Waymark, Peter (2001), ‘Diana Dors’, in Billington, Michael (ed.) Stage and Screen Lives, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Williams, Melanie (2003), ‘Yield to the Night’, in MacKillop, Ian and Sinyard, Neil (eds.) British Cinema of the 1950s:  A Celebration, Manchester:  Manchester University Press.

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The comics

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Norman Wisdom: ‘Mr Grimsdale!’

Born in London on 4 February 1915 Norman Wisdom joined the army as a band boy to escape from a background of poverty. His first significant film Trouble in Store (John Paddy Carstairs 1953) resulted in thirteen years of star vehicles and international fame, especially in Albania. Wisdom was knighted ten years before his death on 4 October 2010, but his contribution to British cinema has too often been taken for granted. During the 1970s the misadventures of Norman Pitkin/​Puckle/​Stone (the surname changed, but the forename remained the same) were screened and re-​screened in the TV slot that occupied the void between the news and The High Chaparral. To an older generation, the latest Norman Wisdom film at your local Odeon was as much a part of the Christmas festivities as the Queen’s Speech. Beyond the UK his pictures were also enormous successes at the box offices in the Commonwealth, the Middle East and South America and behind the Iron Curtain.1 ‘Any visitor with a less secure sense of national identity than the British might have it shaken by the incredulity with which the Hungarians greet an Englishman professing a lack of interest in Norman Wisdom’s films’ (Fairhall 1965: 16). One market where Wisdom did enjoy limited critical and commercial success was the USA, where Bosley Crowther of the New York Times received Trouble in Store thus: ‘The forte of this sawed-​off cockney, who is almost as thick as he is tall, seems to be an incredible ability to act like an absolute dunce’ (1956: n.p.). Crowther subsequently wrote of Follow a Star (Robert Asher 1959) that, ‘It has been five years since Mr. Wisdom 1

Wisdom’s most famous overseas market was Albania where he was a ‘cult hero whose death on Monday made the news on all Tirana’s leading television channels. In Communist times, Norman Wisdom comedies were the only Western film[s]‌allowed into Albania, and the self-​effacing star was one of the few Westerners permitted to visit the country’ (Wagstyl 2010: n.p.).

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164     The  comics

Figure 8  Norman Wisdom in Follow a Star (1959)

was last seen here in “Trouble in Store”. If fortune smiles upon us, it will be at least five years before we see him again’ (1961:  n.p.). Across the Atlantic, the comic’s first major screen performance was greeted with acclaim by many British critics. The Guardian thought Wisdom reminiscent not of ‘Dickens, Ealing or the village green’ but of ‘early Chaplin and perhaps of the Marx Brothers’ (Review 1954: 3), echoing Peter Forster’s belief that ‘Norman Wisdom has a quality of his own which owes nothing to anybody’s influence’ (1954:  29). David Robinson of Sight & Sound believed he had ‘the makings of a great clown’ (1954: 213). However, as the 1950s progressed there was increasing disdain for the comic’s works and by 1957 Rodney Geisler wrote of his performance in Up in the World (John Paddy Carstairs 1956)  that ‘there are touches of Chaplinesque pathos, ugliness, and helplessness inspiring pity interspersed with comedy and tragedy; but these are not enough to make up a complete character philosophy’ (1957:  26). Alan Dent referred to how ‘Norman

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Norman  Wisdom     165 Wisdom laughs, and the great big un-​critical world laughs with him’ (1960: 37). Penelope Gilliatt would opt for a more wrathful approach –​ ‘Norman Wisdom specialises in bashfulness that verges on mental deficiency’ (1973: 165). More recently, Matthew Sweet expressed amazement that ‘somewhat improbably, one of his formulaic little comedies pitched Dr. No from the top position at the box office’ (2005: 222) –​although there is a certain irony in dismissing Wisdom’s work as ‘formulaic’ in comparison with a 1960s Bond picture. Dr. No. (Terence Young 1962) now appears to be as faded as a copy of yesterday’s Tatler, with Commander Bond acting as a form of a colonial policeman who maintains law and order in the twilight of the empire. Meanwhile, the best of Wisdom’s comedy is a combination of incredible slapstick and clowning that derived from real adversity. C. A. Lejeune objected that with Man of the Moment the comic had not ‘studied the habits, speech and behaviour of filing clerks in Whitehall. In fact you feel pretty sure that a clerk like Norman wouldn’t have been there at all’ (1955: 40). But this was to ignore the fact that the ‘gump’ was simultaneously the joke and the hero, regardless of scenario. Norman Wisdom was born in London, and his childhood was one of genuine poverty. In 1930, as an escape from homelessness he joined the Tenth Royal Hussars as a band boy, where he gained proficiency in several musical instruments. After a brief period in civilian life, Wisdom rejoined the forces at the outset of the Second World War where he helped to organise camp entertainments in the Royal Signals. Wisdom embarked on a show business career at the end of the war and throughout the late 1940s toured the variety circuit. In 1949, when he was acting the stooge for the magician David Nixon, he devised his ‘gump’ costume; a thirty-​shilling undersized check suit. At the beginning of the 1950s his stage work was attracting the attention of London critics2 and by 1951 Wisdom had become a star of BBC television. In the following year, he signed a contract with the Rank Organisation, but the studio initially had no real idea as to how to use Wisdom; an early screen test had him as a light leading man informing Petula Clark that she had ‘eyes like gossamer’ (Wisdom and Hall 2003:  185). It was possible to imagine Dirk Bogarde at least attempting to utter such a line with conviction, but the comic was entirely ill-​matched for overcoming such typically banal juvenile lead material. Eventually, Jill Craigie devised Trouble in Store as a vehicle for Wisdom, who plays a stockroom boy with a longing for self-​improvement to become a window dresser. In the process, he defeats the velvet-​voiced cad Gerald (Derek Bond) and his

2

‘Mr. Norman Wisdom is an appealing clown with an embryonic style which decent material may one day develop astonishingly’ (Cookman 1950: 16).

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166     The  comics gang of crooks and wins the heart of Sally (Lana Morris) who works in the record department. To provide a form of insurance for a comic who had never sustained an acting role in a feature film, the eventual screenplay by John Paddy Carstairs, Maurice Cowan and Ted Willis included a subplot of Margaret Rutherford’s aristocratic shoplifter and a strong supporting cast including Joan Sims, Michael Brennan and Moira Lister. Wisdom’s stage and writing partner Eddie Leslie appeared as a thug and in response to the studio wishing to cast a widely known actor, Jerry Desmonde appeared as the store owner August Freeman (Dacre 2012: 41). Jerry Desmonde had previously worked with Sid Field and would appear onstage with Wisdom. At the time filming commenced in 1952, Desmonde was thought to be one of the finest straight men in British comedy.3 Charles Drazin cites the Norman Wisdom comedies as examples of how Rank films in the John Davis era were formulaic and cheap to make –​‘fine for business, but a pity for those who hoped that British films could continue to be inspiring’ (2007: 53), but the sheer craftsmanship and talent in front and behind the camera should not be undervalued. Burridges’ department store was a well-​observed blend of street footage of Oxford Street with the realistic yet witty shop interiors (Harper and Porter 2003: 202). One of the best sequences in any Rank comedy film of this period is of the grand department store besieged by hundreds of wild-​eyed female bargain hunters, all seemingly clad in equally deranged-​ looking headgear, as they frantically search for now de-​rationed luxuries.4 Trouble in Store resulted in Wisdom receiving the BAFTA Award for the Most Promising Newcomer to Film in 1954. The contract with Rank was extended until 1959, with the comic making pictures for Rank on a film-​ by-​film basis until 1966 (Dacre 1991: 46). John Paddy Carstairs directed One Good Turn (1955), Up in the World (1956), Just My Luck (1957) and The Square Peg (1959). Wisdom’s other principal director was Robert Asher, who helmed Follow a Star (1959), The Bulldog Breed (1960), On the Beat (1962), A Stitch in Time (1963), The Early Bird (1965) and Press for Time (1966).

‘This actor, called a stooge or feed in the profession, is the greatest ambassador a comic ever enjoyed. He is suave, handsome, and utterly at home. A prank may shake him, but we are confident that he can never really be out of countenance. Some men are designed by nature to have well-​creased trousers and to underline with one raised eyebrow the absurdities of lesser beings. Without his aid Mr Wisdom would be as indifferent as his detractors find him; with it he can make superior criticism fatuous, because Mr Desmonde with infinite grace has implied it already’ (Carter 1955: 19). 4 John Grierson, in a letter to Kinematography Weekly, noted how the film’s vitality derived from both its slapstick and capturing the public interest in shopping and consumerism (1954: 6). 3

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Norman  Wisdom     167 One standard complaint from the critics was the ossification of the formula. Peter John Dyer wrote snidely, ‘Our Norman (or, possibly, your Norman as I hesitate to lay any claim to him)’ in The Square Peg needed a ‘Burroughs Adding Machine to count the whiskers on the chestnuts’ (1959: 25). In reality, Wisdom’s films are not entirely homogenous –​the setting might be institutional (the navy of The Bulldog Breed, the police of On the Beat or the business world of The Early Bird. The gump’s persona and look also change over the years; he does not burst into song after Follow a Star. During the 1960s he adopted a somewhat neater hairstyle and more conventional suit while his manner is slightly more assertive. However, crucial elements of Wisdom’s films  –​pathos, slapstick and a need for recognition combined with unconscious defiance of the social order –​would intensify over thirteen years. As the comic would play an increasing role in the writing process of his films, pathos would increasingly dominate Wisdom’s Rank output. As early as 1954 Margaret Hinxman of Picturegoer asked the comic, ‘Don’t you think you overworked that just a bit in Trouble in Store?’ to which the response was, ‘If anything, I  think it was underworked. I’d like to get more in’ (1954: 9). Richard Dacre argues that, ‘It is only with the Asher films that Wisdom is successful in pulling off that difficult blend of pathos and comedy’ (1991: 51), although Robert Murphy believed that he was ‘more susceptible than the worldly, hard-​boiled Carstairs’ (1992:  247). It could be equally the case that films made by either director rarely balanced these elements with elan, especially is if the scenario was too deliberately contrived. A case in point is One Good Turn in which Wisdom plays is an orphanage handyman who, despite being nearly forty years of age has ‘never seen the sea’ –​a scenario that afforded him too many opportunities to openly plea for the audience’s affections. Perhaps the most acute assessment was from Richard Davis who declared, ‘In most Norman Wisdom comedies isolated patches of brilliance –​in some cases very isolated in some cases –​are always balanced on the debit side of the ledger by mawkishness and banality’ (1967: 35). Trouble in Store, arguably the most accomplished of Wisdom’s Rank comedies, displayed how pathos could easily and naturally arise; in the Want to Put on Record musical number there is the charming moment when the gump reacts in amazement to the crowd’s positive reaction to his singing. Harper and Porter make the interesting point that Wisdom’s box office receipts declined after his first Rank picture and it was not until The Square Peg that his fortunes revived (2003: 51). It was Wisdom’s first service comedy and combined a marked decrease of overt pathos with the gump placed in a scenario of real danger. It also provided him with the opportunity to play Private Pikin’s doppelgänger General Schreiber as a straight role. Yet, extensive use of pity did not harm the prospects of

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On the Beat at the box office or that of his next vehicle A Stitch in Time.5 Possibly the most perceptive assessment of Wisdom’s persona is from Roger Lewis who wrote: The point is that while Wisdom found fame in the British cinema of the Fifties and Sixties, he was already an anachronism. He could have belonged to the gas lit Victorian music hall, as depicted by Sickert or Toulouse-​Lautrec  –​a place of acrobats in leotards, of tear-​jerking ballads and crude, broad emotions. Wisdom’s childhood certainly fitted this melodramatic bill. (2010: n.p.)

Indeed, when re-​watching Wisdom’s Rank output, it appears that the gump’s relationship with the late twentieth century was progressively ambiguous. Andrew Spicer regarded the Wisdom’s films as working hard ‘to offer a contemporary Everyman’ (2003: 104), but Penelope Gilliatt saw Press for Time as harking back to the 1930s: ‘A lot of the elements in his style and look are pure period; the underfed physique, the Brylcreem, the clothes that sadly try to ape a fashion patented by a remote boss class’ (1973: 166). Such a sense of ambivalence or even dissonance as to time and place were not unique factors in Wisdom’s films  –​just note the unease of the late-​period Carry Ons with a contemporary setting –​ or with many aspects of British humour. Seaside postcards of the 1970s would frequently contain a surreal juxtaposition of Donald McGill-​style caricatures sporting Patrick Mower hairstyles and flared trousers. When watching Benny Hill’s last ITV series, one double-​takes at seeing 1989-​ registered cars in the background while the realm of Dennis the Menace and the misadventures of The Bash Street Kids will forever unfold in a version of Dundee circa 1957. The viewpoints of Lewis and Gilliatt both seem to reflect Wisdom’s troubled background; he was indeed an errand boy in the late 1920s and experienced the ethos of the Raj during his service as a band boy in India. Benny Green believed that, ‘The collapsing Empires of the theatre circuits and the collapsing empires of the British in the post-​war period became one’ (1986: 293), but the gump has escaped from the twilight of the music hall into a post-​war Britain. Wisdom’s screen image was a conflation of the sentimental Victorian clown, now confronting menacing Teds in coffee bars, and the performer’s background. In his more upbeat moments, ‘Norman’ is still the ambitious errand boy, dodging among Morris-​Commercial delivery vans as he dreams of being promoted to shop assistant or the private soldier, appealing to a paternal commanding officer over the heads of recalcitrant corporals and sergeants who do not 5

This was despite Penelope Gilliatt fulminating that ‘Wisdom’s films usually contain a character who is planted to tell us how loveable he is but I’ve never known the line to be advertised quite so hard before’ (1973: 163). Nor did such pathos stop A Stitch in Time from being more popular than From Russia With Love (Terence Young 1963).

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Norman  Wisdom     169 appreciate his talents. Furthermore, as John Fisher notes of Wisdom’s stage appearances: ‘After his signature closing with Don’t Laugh at Me Cos I’m a Fool he would walk to the wings with his head down, then shoot a glance straight at the audience, break into hysterics and say “You ought to see your faces!” ’ (2013: 333). Such a device, known as a ‘treacle-​cutter’ in the acting profession, was sadly rarely used in Wisdom’s films. The court-​ martial scene in The Bulldog Breed is an unusual and delightful moment of self-​parody with all the assembled officers and NCOs bursting into tears at Norman’s defence of sheer woe. Alas, such a moment was not repeated in Wisdom’s pictures where, as Dacre remarks, the on-​screen pathos was left ‘unapologetically unalloyed’ (2012: 133). Fisher suggests Rank as the ‘guilty party’ (2013: 333) although Wisdom took a progressively more prominent writing role and openly stated, ‘Honestly, I’d like to play the Hunchback of Notre Dame; Just think of it; that pathos. That mime!’ (quoted in Hinxman 1954: 9). The result seemed to reduce Elspeth Grant to a state of apoplexy, especially the songs –​‘these little numbers are as nauseating to me as a mixture of lard and molasses’ (1955: 24). Such an outburst now reads almost irresistibly like one of Jerry Desmonde’s diatribes after Pitkin has wrecked his office and Geoffrey Macnab argues, if confronted with ‘Jacques Tati, Chaplin or Keaton these critics would doubtless have been in raptures’ (2000: 97). One Good Turn has Wisdom attempting to retrieve a number scribbled on the wall of a telephone box while arguing with Richard Caldicott’s arrogant queue jumper ends with the booth wrecked and the dial jammed into the latter’s mouth. The slapstick routines became progressively more elaborate, and in 1963 a considered review by David Rider of Films and Filming praised the inventiveness of On the Beat, such as the ‘glorious well-​ observed send-​up’ of a bold CID superintendent in the opening scene, and highlighted the climactic chase between Pitkin and fifty uniformed policemen who ‘pursue him through a dozen back gardens, filmed like the Grand National with low level shots, and trap Norman on a patch of wasteland, a capture cleverly shot at high level’ (1963: 40). The chase in On the Beat is a highlight of the comic’s work for Rank together with two brilliant set pieces in A Stitch in Time. The first is the beautifully timed and executed stretcher routine in which Pitkin’s attempts at aiding an ambulance man (Glyn Houston) results in two further patients. The second is of a wheelchair-​bound Norman crashing through a brick wall on to the roof of a moving ambulance. Harper and Porter observe that ‘once he breaks away from the gump, Wisdom’s performance acquires a quality of confidence that makes him far more attractive’ (2003:  51), but a sense of self-​belief, however misguided, is a constant aspect of his heroes. The comic was often at his most effective when playing characters attempting to join an adult world governed by rules they barely comprehend, standing up for their rights in

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170     The  comics the fashion of a determined child. In Trouble in Store, Norman is utterly convinced of his window-​dressing skills, and at the conclusion of Follow a Star, the Metropolitan Theatre is reduced to chaos because of his determination that his singing abilities should not be ignored. An attempt to perform a citizen’s arrest on a ‘thief ’ in On the Beat results in Norman trapped outside a moving Tube train and when operating a hand-​drawn milk cart in The Early Bird Norman looks only mildly bemused at how his ingenious plans have wrecked Dandy Nichols’s front parlour. Such felicitous moments serve as reminders of Wisdom’s status within post-​war British cinema. Of his contemporaries, the few film appearances of Benny Hill displayed a formidable acting talent but little of Wisdom’s physical grace. Frankie Howerd would not find an effective leading comedy role until The House in Nightmare Park (Peter Sykes 1973), and the tall, brash Max Bygraves was better employed in straight roles –​especially in Spare the Rod (Leslie Norman 1961). In 1960 ABPC signed the brilliant, mercurial Tony Hancock, who had no tolerance of blatant pathos, and Charlie Drake. The latter was a faintly menacing cherub with a sardonic mock-​genteel accent; in his four ABPC pictures, one always had the impression that he was on the verge of biting the supporting cast’s ankles. Spike Milligan was briefly under contract to MGM British, but his star vehicle Postman’s Knock (Robert Lynn 1962) showcased a comedian who was palpably not at ease as a screen actor. In ninety minutes, he smugly telegraphed a sense of second-​hand pathos as his rural postman defeats a criminal gang who resembled a second-​tier version of Professor Marcus and co. in The Ladykillers (Alexander Mackendrick 1955). In the 1950s the vehicles for Ronald Shiner showcased ‘a modern version of Mr. Punch, an aggressive trickster who always refuses to accept authority’ (Spicer 2003: 114) –​but it is his frequent co-​star Brian Rix who provides an interesting contrast to Norman Wisdom. As with Wisdom, he brought an already established stage persona to his film, one that often makes the gump seem like a member of MENSA, but his image was that of a gormless north countryman rather than Wisdom’s fusion of sentimentality and aggressive self-​assertion. Rix was also not short of stature, hailed from a very comfortable middle-​class background and was an actor/​theatrical producer as opposed to a comedian. That said, The Night We Got the Bird (Darcy Conyers 1961), is an almost absurdist vision of post-​war England6 that is far beyond the constraints of Wisdom’s Rank pictures. What Rix’s characters lacked, in addition to Wisdom’s near-​balletic sense of grace, is the gump’s hunger for recognition from his elders 6

Even Ken Russell could not have devised a film centred on a spiv (Ronald Shiner) who is reincarnated as a parrot.

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Norman  Wisdom     171 and betters; he ‘always tries to be right but never succeeds –​unless, of course, by a happy last minute fluke’ (Robinson 1954: 213). In Wisdom’s first major film, the gump himself looks almost Dickensian in his desperate attempts at respectable neatness, the better to impress Burridge’s managing director, played by one of Wisdom’s finest screen partners. Theatre World stated Jerry Desmonde’s ‘reputation as a stooge is second to none on the English-​speaking stage’ and that he had ‘perfected the art of playing a straight man opposite a comic’ (1955: 24). However, the comic, while acknowledging that Desmonde was essential to Trouble in Store, considered that he might not need a foil in a different scenario and that ‘I certainly don’t want to team up with anyone’ (quoted in Hinxman 1954: 9). As it was, Desmonde appeared in five more of Wisdom’s films –​ always billed below the title and usually indispensable. He is at his considerable best in Trouble in Store and A Stitch in Time whereas his pompous self-​regarding figures also have a genuine sense of ambition and their antipathy towards Wisdom is often justified. Augustus Freeman is hard working and possesses a sense of vision for his store, while Sir Hector wishes to raise money for a children’s home, but both these endeavours are in severe danger from a short twit. Desmonde was one member of a regular team of expert foils who graced the cast of Wisdom’s films. Eddie Leslie often appears as an apoplectic hood or villain’s henchman, and Michael Ward’s response to the gump’s assertion that he is the new window dresser in Trouble in Store –​ ‘how utterly grotesque’  –​rivals his line in Carry On Cabby (1963) for sheer timing expertise.7 David Lodge proved to be an equally indispensable straight man; his newspaper editor in Press for Time, Chief Petty Officer Knowles in The Bulldog Breed and, in particular, Superintendent Hobson in On the Beat. Raymond Durgnat considered that Wisdom’s oscillations between eager cooperativeness, accident proneness and petulant retaliation, catch something of the ambivalence of the apparent reconciliation between the classes (1970: 207); indeed, the gump genuinely wants to engage with a first-​class train compartment of stone-​faced commuters in One Good Turn. Wisdom’s lack of overt respect can only cause wrath in any respectable and rule-​abiding white-​collar worker, from Lionel Jeffries’s enquiries agent to Brian Oulton’s cinema manager and, most notably, Edward Chapman’s ‘Mr Grimsdale’ in The Square Peg, A Stitch in Time and The Early Bird. Matthew Sweet expressed his sympathy with the ‘diplomats and dowagers and managing directors whom he molested with ladders and hosepipes and vulgar nudges. His little man, crammed into that porridge-​tweed suit and cloth cap, seemed less a good hearted incompetent and more a Rumpelstiltskin-​like imp who 7

‘What? With tweeds?’ (Michael Ward, Carry On Cabby).

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172     The  comics indulged in fits of destructive passion’ (2005:  223). But if Wisdom is a lord of misrule, his chaos is a result of the gump’s eagerness to please combined with his childlike ignorance of social hierarchy. In that respect, he is a more subversive figure than the juvenile leads prone to saying ‘gosh’ in other British comedies of this era as Wisdom’s hero ‘always fails to recognise the signifiers of class’ (Dacre 2012: 132). Pitkin et al. are always keen to embrace the modern world, but their pursuit of success must take place within the context of a social hierarchy. Trouble in Store mostly takes place in a towering Victorian edifice where Jerry Desmonde’s would-​be paterfamilias could plausibly don a frock coat and side whiskers; much of the landscape of Wisdom’s first starring vehicle would have been familiar to a nineteenth-​century Briton. Nine years later the constables of On the Beat carry whistles and use police telephone boxes while the squad cars that Norman is ordered to clean and polish are black Wolseley 6/​90s and 6/​99s with clanging gongs. The chase through Windsor is against a background of corner shops and iron gasometers, but tower blocks increasingly dominated the London skyline, and the era of family firms was passing. Harold Perkin notes how by 1963 ‘less than a third (29 per cent) of the largest 116 companies were controlled by traditional tycoons or family businessmen’ (2002: 441–​2). Once the authority figures whose templates were variously James Robertson Justice, Raymond Huntley or Richard Wattis were on the wane, Wisdom’s characters would increasingly seem adrift. In 1965 Alan Dent argued that a key to Wisdom’s popularity was ‘his lack of subtlety. He never hesitates to repeat his effects’ (1965: 29), but the comic was well aware of the dangers of being trapped in a formulaic straitjacket. As early as 1954 he was saying that he wanted to ‘develop his film character through a more mature role’ (quoted in Marks 1954: 10). After the Rank contract came to an end Wisdom made two pictures for the independent Knightsbridge Films, There Was a Crooked Man (Stuart Burge) and The Girl on the Boat (Henry Kaplan 1962) where the Gump was conspicuous by his absence. Wisdom was somewhat miscast as a Wodehousian comedy hero in the latter, but in the former in which his ex-​commando turned safe-​blower defeats crooked property speculators was rightly described by Richard Dacre as ‘amongst his finest’ (2013: 135). The screenplay by Reuben Ship was based on James Birdie’s play The Odd Legend of Schultz and for the first time Wisdom looks middle-​aged on-​ screen. His Cooper is a believable character; naive but quiet, dignified and self-​confident about his professional abilities. In a typical Rank film, the knowledge that a wartime comrade (Timothy Bateson) is now ‘Flash Dan’, a self-​serving wide boy, would have provoked an explosion of gump-​ like yelps, but here Davy reacts merely with a sad smile. The picture further benefits from a wittily drawn criminal gang led by a saturnine Alfred Marks and the setting in a north-​country town places

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Norman  Wisdom     173 Wisdom away from the familiar London and Home Counties location. For the first time even the statutory romance –​between Cooper and the much younger Ellen (Susannah York) –​is not beyond the outer realms of possibility, as Wisdom eschews bashfulness and pleading. Harper and Porter saw the gump as ‘not a man to admire. Rather, he is someone who evokes either sympathy or pity’ (2003:  51), but Davy is a dynamic and resourceful figure. Monthly Film Bulletin praised There Was A Crooked Man for ‘Norman Wisdom at last achieving a personally sharp and distinctive comic identity’ (1960:  144), but, unfortunately, filmgoers only seemed to want the gump.8 The magnificently executed opening of The Early Bird can also be seen as a virtual riposte to Pinewood’s management and his audiences –​if stairs they want, stairs they shall have. As late as 1966 Wisdom was the country’s fifth most popular box office attraction but in his three last Rank films evidence of a less whimsical nation start to appear, like signs of a thaw. A Stitch in Time has an extended routine based around a very 1963-​looking new Hillman Imp, and in The Early Bird the train that destroys Norman Pitkin’s milk cart is electric not steam while in among the clanging bells of the fire engines in the final reel is the unmistakable sound of a klaxon horn. The ‘sprawling, asymmetrical, unplanned’ pattern of everyday life, as celebrated by Ian Nairn in his essay The Antiseptic City (1959:  56), is being superseded by the planned and the rational. Life in the later 1960s was, in the view of Bernard Levin, ‘becoming standardised, made to fit specifications that allowed less and less for individual tolerances and eccentricities’ (1970:  191). Meanwhile, Hollywood-​ backed productions increasingly dominated British cinema and the typical ‘international comedy’ film usually boasted some familiar character actors who were doing their very best to steal the scene from the American leads. Pictures such as Those Magnificent Men in their Flying Machines; Or, How I Flew from London to Paris in 25 Hours 11 Minutes (Ken Annakin 1965) could also be very long. When watching Flying Machines, it makes one further appreciate the pace of Wisdom’s films as the running time appears to be approximately five days. That same year also marked his first major colour film, The Early Bird, and it is a picture that exemplifies the complaints of Raymond Durgnat that the comedian did not have ‘a Preston Sturges to invent a style and a world for him’ (1970: 207). Allen Eyles, in a not at all positive assessment of A Stitch in Time, thought Pitkin lacked ‘any genuine sense of innocence, 8

There Was a Crooked Man was even greeted by Films and Filming with faint praise; albeit prefaced with the observation that the reviewer had never seen one of the comic’s pictures before and it came as ‘a pleasant surprise’. One reason was that his trousers stayed ‘thankfully in place’ and another was that ‘neither does he sing, this news should no doubt be welcomed by admirers and detractors alike’ (Cutts 1960: 32).

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174     The  comics being far too cocky and thrusting, and his destructiveness outweighs the good he is represented as doing’. Furthermore, he declares that the hero was ‘inexplicably unaware of the damage he has done’ (1964: 31). It was precisely this trait of lacking any perception of a capacity to wreak havoc that could have been harnessed by a director of the calibre of Alexander Mackendrick, with the gump as a blithely destructive force reigned against the increasingly perturbed forces of modernity. But in The Early Bird, such possibilities are only hinted by Richard Vernon’s dairy magnate begging Pitkin to ‘leave us alone’ in the final reel. Wisdom’s last major film released under the auspices of the Rank Organisation, Press for Time, is one that conveys a sense of retreat. Thirteen years earlier the gump was at the heart of the nascent consumerist zeitgeist in a West End department store but the opening shot of his riding on a transporter filled with brick-​shaped Ford Zephyr Mk IVs straight from a J. G. Ballardian dystopian vision merely emphasised his anachronistic incongruity. After the first reel, the screenplay  –​by Wisdom and Eddie Leslie –​sends ‘Norman Shield’ to the Devonshire coast as an inept newspaper reporter. Press for Time does contain two standout routines –​ Norman precipitating a bus chase through Teignmouth and an attempt to secure his bicycle that results in him and his machine being suspended from a light fitting. Unfortunately, Wisdom’s performance is, for once, lacklustre and only Mike Vickers’s wonderfully plangent score tantalisingly hints at the film that might have been, a bittersweet melancholy comedy unfolding in an overly jolly holiday setting.9 There is a moment when we see Wisdom’s profile as he walks alone but resolute along the coast at sunset, a further demonstration of the sheer eloquence of his body language. But these remain isolated incidents in a picture of flat direction, which is at its worst in Shield’s wrecking of a housing estate, a sequence lacking in internal logic as to the destruction. There is little cohesion in the performances of the supporting cast, which ranges from nicely underplayed  –​David Lodge and Angela Browne  –​to a pantomime turn  –​Stanley Unwin. The excellent colour cinematography also highlights Wisdom’s age; his relationship with the mayor’s daughter Liz Corcoran (Francis White) is extraordinarily implausible. There seldom appeared to be any real chemistry between Wisdom and the various Rank ingénues who played the ‘heroine who will see through her beau’s clumsiness and regard him with loyal, loving admiration’ (Review 1966: 6). Wisdom’s films, with so many British comedies of the late 1950s and 1960s, also frequently contain a moment in which a young lady loses her dress; the reaction of Pitkin et al. is often akin to a Carry On-​style 9

Imagine Tony Hancock or Peter Sellers in the lead.

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Norman  Wisdom     175 satire with even less courage of his dubious convictions.10 He was better deployed opposite strong character actresses such as Joan Sims, Angela Browne or with Honor Blackman’s leading lady in The Square Peg, who regards Norman with affection or pity but, crucially, no hint of an implausible romance. But in the final reel of Press for Time, there is the beauty contest, a scene as unpleasant as any humiliation of Hattie Jacques in a Carry On film or of Anna Karen in Holiday on the Buses (Bryan Izzard 1973). The shots of a vulnerable woman onstage being bayed at by drunk males go beyond some of the previous misjudgements in Wisdom films. Despite the standard happy ending, Press for Time embodies just how often the comic lacked –​or refused –​strong direction. After the summer of 1966 Wisdom made no further pictures for Rank and in an attempt to escape his British stereotyping made his Broadway debut that September in Walking Happy, a musical version of Hobson’s Choice that gained him a New  York Critics Award. In the following year, he portrayed Chick Williams, an English comic working on the Burlesque circuit in The Night They Raided Minsky’s (William Friedkin 1968). Wisdom’s first –​and as it transpired, last –​American picture gave him opportunities so long denied him at Pinewood, with Chick being a wholly believable middle-​aged professional comic; his song and dance routines with his partner Raymond Paine (Jason Robards Jr) alone are worth the price of the DVD. The critical raves balanced the previous carping of certain British reviewers who evidently thought that Odeon patrons should be enjoying a jolly evening with Lindsay Anderson or Ingmar Bergman. Roger Ebert reflected that, ‘Norman Wisdom, the great British comedian and music-​hall veteran, is very good as the tender hearted comic; Jason Robards isn’t quite so good as the straight man and big operator’ (1968:  n.p.). The New  York Times compared him to ‘the ancestor of Chaplin and Marcel Marceau’s Bip’ (Adler 1968:  n.p.) and Variety opined that, ‘So easily does Norman Wisdom dominate the many scenes he’s in, that the other cast members suffer by comparison’ (Review 1967: n.p.). Wisdom returned permanently from the USA in 1968 to gain custody of his children after the breakup of his marriage. His next venture took the form of What’s Good for the Goose (Menahem Golan 1969), a ‘sex comedy’ with all the allure of a public information short on how to safely reverse a Vauxhall Viva. In somewhat of a casting departure. Wisdom, instead of facing the wrath of an assistant bank manager was now playing one and ‘Timothy Bartlett’ was the first time the comic portrayed 10

‘In their presence he is a pygmy. His view of them is very like the outmatched awe depicted on pre-​ war seaside postcards, where starveling young men with nervous shoulder blades crept around confident feminine rumps on the beach’ (Gilliatt 1973: 166).

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176     The  comics someone near to his true age. The script, co-​written by Wisdom, had Bartlett travelling to a conference and giving a lift to a pair of hitchhikers, Meg (Sarah Atkinson) and Nikki (Sally Geeson). He and Nikki form a brief relationship, but Bartlett ultimately returns to his wife. It was a narrative that had the potential to provide Wisdom with a straight role as affecting as Kenneth More’s ageing actor in The Comedy Man and the scenario had echoes of the contemporary drama Three Into Two Won’t Go (Peter Hall 1969). Admittedly Norman Wisdom is seldom compared with Rod Steiger, but both films have a middle-​aged Ford-​ driving protagonist who acquires a younger female hitchhiker –​although the American method actor did not have to endure an apparent budget of 3/​6d11 and Tigon Productions using a ‘hired Southport hotel’ (Halligan 2003:  203). Middle-​aged film-​makers of the late 1960s and early 1970s often had a fascinatingly dreadful idea of what constituted a ‘happening’, and here we have Norman cavorting with ‘far-​out’ mini-​skirted extras to the sounds of the Pretty Things at the ‘Screaming Apple’. Under the influence of his new friend, Bartlett acquires a new wardrobe of paisley shirts, satin trousers and kaftans; the result may not be as ghastly as the ‘hippie’ disguises of Bernard Bresslaw and Sidney James in Carry On Camping (1969), but it is not far removed. Goose also featured both nude and bed scenes  –​a new, if not universally welcome, development for a Wisdom picture for if broadsheet critics disapproved of pathos, they were highly unlikely to approve of his take on the free-​love generation.12 Monthly Film Bulletin bluntly referred to What’s Good for the Goose as ‘a strong candidate for the worst British comedy for some considerable time’ (Review 1969:  109). It was to be Wisdom’s final cinematic star vehicle, with many of its elements anticipating the familiar tropes of low-​budget farces made during the following decade. There were the respected character actors –​David Lodge, Derek Francis and Terence Alexander  –​looking glum as they consider their mortgage payments, the vacuous lines given to the female leads, the prurient nude scenes and the air of all-​pervasive seediness with the surface polish of his Rank films now replaced by muddy cinematography. It is a moot point to consider what British cinema might have offered Wisdom during the following decade. On the evidence of What’s Good for the Goose, it might well have been guest starring in a Hades of bored peroxide actresses attempting to feign desire for side-​burned lotharios in Hillman Avengers. Plus, Steiger drove a more exalted variety of Ford –​a Zodiac Mk IV instead of a Zephyr 6 Mk III. 12 ‘It is in every way the most horrific and painful film I have seen in many a long year’ (Mortimer 1969:  28). Monthly Film Bulletin’s review concluded with the word ‘Ugh’ (Review 1969: 109). 11

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Norman  Wisdom     177 During the 1970s, Wisdom’s professional life was dominated almost entirely by stage work with his latest straight man, Tony Fayne, and a run of sitcoms for ATV. He also spurned the chance to take the role of Frank Spencer in Some Mother’s Do ’Ave ’Em, although the fact that he was now aged fifty-​eight was a probable factor. Wisdom gave his final great screen performance in Thomas Ellice’s adaptation of Robert Downs’s novel Going Gently, which centred on two male patients in a cancer ward, directed by Stephen Frears and transmitted on BBC television on 5 June 1981. Greil Marcus wrote of the ‘curving time made by the way actors carry roles with them through the careers, each role, if the actors can burn at the core, bleeding into every other’ (2014: 53). Wisdom, in terms of British cinema at least, was almost always ‘Norman’ and although the role of the retired salesman was not written for him, Bernard Flood has the demeanour of the gump but now frail and grey-​haired. Nancy Banks-​ Smith referred to Wisdom’s ‘small talkative body’ (1981:  11), but now the short figure who once cajoled recalcitrant authority in a corner of Pinewood faced a wholly intransigent enemy. As a fusion of talent and screen image, Going Gently was almost unbearably moving, and every other minor guest appearance Wisdom would subsequently make  –​Bergerac, Last of the Summer Wine, Casualty –​would be of little consequence in comparison. As the comic gradually retreated into old age, there was one final picture in the form of Double X:  The Name of the Game (Shani Grewal 1992), a film that occasionally surfaces on certain satellite channels. Here Wisdom plays one Arthur Clutten, an elderly safe-​cracker, Bernard Hill is the mob enforcer ‘Iggy’ and as if to reinforce the impression that you are viewing a bizarrely updated 1962 B-​feature, Derren Nesbitt appears as ‘the Minister’. Norman Wisdom was knighted in 2000 and formally retired from acting at the age of ninety. His final picture was the silent short Expresso (Kevin Powis 2007), a fitting bookend to his thirteen-​second shadow-​ boxing film debut in Date with a Dream (Dicky Leeman 1948). His death in 2010 was national news both in the UK and, of course, in Albania. As with Tony Hancock or Morecambe and Wise, Wisdom was never to achieve the trans-​Atlantic fame of Benny Hill, but the Southampton-​ born comic lacked the sheer athletic grace of Norman Pitkin fleeing an enraged assistant manager. Early in his career, Wisdom stated, ‘I want to be the first Norman Wisdom, not the second Chaplin’ (quoted in Marks 1954: 10), and even the least accomplished of thirteen Rank films contain moments that could be the work of no other performer. They are pictures that belong to a lost England of Teddy boys, shops displaying adverts for Woodbines and the Daily Herald with a hero who echoed a nineteenth-​century London. But at his finest, it is comedy that is universal.

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Bibliography Adler, Renata (1968), ‘The Night They Raided Minsky’s’, New  York Times, 23 December. Banks-​Smith, Nancy (1981), ‘Last Stages’, The Guardian, 6 June, 11. Carter, Youngman (1955), ‘London Limelight: A Prize for Everybody’, The Tatler, 31 August, 19. Cookman, Anthony (1950), ‘At the Theatre: Sauce Piquant’, The Tatler, 10 May, 16. Crowther, Bosley (1956), ‘Screen:  British Comic  –​Norman Wisdom Stars in “Trouble in Store” ’, New York Times, 14 January. Crowther, Bosley (1961), ‘Screen:  British Slapstick:  Norman Wisdom Seen in “Follow a Star”’, New York Times, 26 April. Cutts, John (1960), ‘There Was a Crooked Man’, Films and Filming, November, 32. Dacre, Richard (1991), Norman Wisdom:  A Career in Comedy, London: Farries. Dacre, Richard (2012), ‘Norman Wisdom: Rank Studios and the Rise of the Super Chump’, in Hunter, I. Q. and Porter, Laraine (eds.) British Comedy Cinema, Oxford: Routledge. Dacre, Richard (2013), ‘Norman Wisdom’, in McFarlane, Brian and Slide, Anthony (eds.) The Encyclopedia of British Film (4th ed.), Manchester:  Manchester University Press. Davis, Richard (1967), ‘Press for Time’, Films and Filming, February, 35. Dent, Alan (1960), ‘The World of the Cinema: Where Praise Is Due’, Illustrated London News, 15 October, 37. Dent, Alan (1965), ‘The World of the Cinema: Critics May Groan –​the World Guffaws’, Illustrated London News, 11 December, 29. Drazin, Charles (2007), The Finest Years: British Cinema of the 1940s, London: I. B. Tauris. Durgnat, Raymond (1970), A Mirror for England: British Movies from Austerity to Affluence, London: Faber & Faber. Dyer, Peter John (1959), ‘The Square Peg’, Films and Filming, February, 25. Ebert, Roger (1968), ‘The Night They Raided Minsky’s’, Chicago Tribune, 23 December. Eyles, Allen (1964), ‘A Stitch in Time’, Films and Filming, January, 31. Fairhall, John (1965), ‘Britons in Budapest’, The Guardian, 20 April, 16. Fisher, John (2013), Funny Way to Be a Hero, London: Random House. Forster, Peter (1954), ‘The World of the Cinema: Cheerfulness Tries to Break in’, Illustrated London News, 9 January, 29. Geisler, Rodney (1957), ‘Up in the World’, Films and Filming, January, 26. Gilliatt, Penelope (1973), Unholy Fools; Wits, Comics, Disturbers of the Peace: Film & Theatre, London: Secker & Warburg. Gorer, Geoffrey (1955), Exploring English Character, London: Crescent Press. Grant, Elspeth (1955), ‘At the Pictures: Salute to Miss Lockwood’, The Tatler, 2 September, 24. Green, Benny (1986), The Last Empires:  A Music Hall Companion, London: Pavilion/​Michael Joseph. Grierson, John (1954), ‘ “Physical Wallop” Can Lift Box Office to New Heights’, Kinematography Weekly, 14 January, 6.

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Norman  Wisdom     179 Halligan, Benjamin (2003), Michael Reeves:  British Film Makers, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Harper, Sue and Porter, Vincent (2003), British Cinema of the 1950s: The Decline of Deference, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hinxman, Margaret (1954), ‘Where Does Wisdom Go from Here?’ Picturegoer, 6 February, 8–​9. Hunt, Leon (1998), British Low Culture:  From Safari Suits to Sexploitation, London: Routledge. Hunter, I. Q. and Porter, Laraine (eds.) (2012), British Comedy Cinema, London: Routledge. Lejeune, C. A. (1955), ‘Cinema: The Key to Comedy Is Observation’, The Sketch, 21 September, 40. Levin, Bernard (1970), The Pendulum Years:  Britain in the Sixties. London: Jonathan Cape. Lewis, Roger (2010), ‘Norman Wisdom: A Fond Farewell to the Fall Guy’, Daily Telegraph, 6 October. MacDonald, Dwight (1957), ‘Reflections’, Encounter, May, 68–​71. Macnab, Geoffrey (2000), Searching for Stars:  Stardom and Screen Acting in British Cinema, London: Continuum. Macnab, Geoffrey (2016), Delivering Dreams:  A Century of British Film Distribution, London: I. B. Tauris. Marcus, Greil (2014), The History of Rock ’n’ Roll in Ten Songs, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Marks, Louis (1954), ‘Top Billing’, Films and Filming, December, 10. McFarlane, Brian and Slide, Anthony (eds.) (2013), The Encyclopedia of British Film (4th ed.), Manchester: Manchester University Press. Moore-​Gilbert, Bart and Seed, John (eds.) (2013), Cultural Revolution? The Challenge of the Arts in the 1960s, London: Routledge. Mortimer, Penelope (1969), ‘Films:  What’s Good for the Goose’, The Observer, 23 March, 28. Murphy, Robert (1992), Sixties British Cinema, London: BFI. Nairn, Ian (1959), ‘The Antiseptic City’, Encounter, February, 54–​6. Perkin, Harold (2002), The Third Revolution:  Professional Elites in the Modern World, London: Taylor & Francis. Porter, Vincent (2012), ‘Making and Meaning: The Role of the Producer in British Films’, Journal of British Cinema and Television, 9(1), January, 7–​25. Review (1954), ‘At the Pictures: Trouble in Store’, The Guardian, 5 January, 3. Review (1955), ‘One Good Turn’, Monthly Film Bulletin, 22(253), February, 26. Review (1959), ‘The Square Peg’, Monthly Film Bulletin, 26(300), January, 9. Review (1960), ‘There Was a Crooked Man’, Monthly Film Bulletin, 27(321), October, 144. Review (1966), ‘The Early Bird’, Monthly Film Bulletin, 33(384), January, 6. Review (1967), ‘The Night They Raided Minsky’s’, Variety, 31 December. Review (1969), ‘What’s Good for the Goose’, Monthly Film Bulletin, May, 108–​9. Richards, Jeffrey (2003), ‘New Waves and Old Myths:  British Cinema in the 1960s’, in Moore-​Gilbert, Bart and Seed, John (eds.) Cultural Revolution? The Challenge of the Arts in the 1960s, London: Routledge. Rider, David (1963), ‘On the Beat’, Films and Filming, February, 40.

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180     The  comics Robinson, David (1954), ‘A New Clown’, Sight & Sound, April–​June, 213. Spicer, Andrew (2003), Typical Men:  The Representation of Masculinity in Popular British Cinema, London: I. B. Tauris. Sweet, Matthew (2005), Shepperton Babylon: The Lost Worlds of British Cinema, London: Faber & Faber. Theatre World (1955), ‘Jerry Desmonde’, 51, 24. Wagstyl, Stefan (2010), ‘Norman Wisdom:  Big in Albania’, Financial Times, 5 October. Wisdom, Norman with Hall, William (2003), My Turn:  An Autobiography, London: Arrow Books.

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Terry-​Thomas and Leslie Phillips: A tale of two cads

Terry-​Thomas was born Thomas Terry Hoar Stevens on 10 July 1911 and died of Parkinson’s disease on 8 January 1990. After many years as a leading television and variety comedian, Private’s Progress (John Boulting 1956)  established him as British cinema’s cad du jour, culminating in School for Scoundrels (Robert Hamer/​Cyril Frankel 1960). Leslie Phillips was born in London on 20 April 1924 and trained at the Italia Conti Academy. His roles as a would-​be seducer in Carry On Nurse (1959) –​catchphrase ‘ding dong!’ –​and Doctor in Love (Ralph Thomas 1960) fixed his film image for nearly twenty years. He was awarded the CBE in 2008. It is entirely possible –​indeed plausible –​to imagine many of the screen creations of Leslie Phillips and Terry-​Thomas as occupying a place in an officers’s mess during the Second World War. The former would have been the self-​appointed life and soul of the party while the latter –​probably a pip or two higher in rank –​was most likely to be found selling gin to the locals or running a black-​market petrol racket. A comic cinematic hero often combines vices that are lovable, or at least excusable, with those that are not and if Phillips often played those on the right side of the pale, Thomas would teeter on its margins. And so a typical Leslie Phillips character was a suburban gadabout whose employment was sometimes on the outer reaches of respectability –​a used car salesman in The Fast Lady (Ken Annakin 1962) or an estate agent in Father Came Too! (Peter Graham Scott 1964). He was less Bertie Wooster and more Lupin Pooter, a role he would play in a 1954 stage adaptation of Diary of a Nobody and one that would arguably set the tone for his future screen roles. Several of Phillips’s comedy films inferred that social service to the community –​in the form of a doctor, a vet or a school inspector –​need not lack for a certain amount of joie de vivre. They might 181

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182     The  comics

Figure 9  Terry-​Thomas in School for Scoundrels (1960)

be shrewd and calculating such as his unorthodox charity fundraiser in The Man Who Liked Funerals (David Eady 1959) or, as on BBC Radio’s The Navy Lark (1959–​77), so dim-​witted as to be a positive menace.1 Rarely would such types evince a sense of danger or regret; the destructively self-​loathing Vivian Kenway (Rex Harrison) of The Rake Progress (Sidney Gilliat 1945) is almost entirely unlike a Phillips salesman or junior doctor whose mindset is dominated by Men Only magazine and his tailor’s bills. These were optimistic chaps who veered towards the raffish rather than cad-​like –​and were unlikely to use a former military rank in civilian life. They were also often at ease with tropes of trans-​Atlantic affluence –​they might be seen in a Ford Thunderbird or a Lincoln Continental Mk III –​but they were always precise of diction and seeking approval of senior professionals. Meanwhile, the immaculately clad Thomas would have thus far managed to avoid any formal charges being pressed –​and so was still able 1

‘Left-​hand down a bit!’

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Terry-Thomas and Leslie Phillips     183

Figure 10  Leslie Phillips in Doctor in Clover (1966)

to refer to himself as ‘Major’ or ‘Captain’ at the nineteenth hole. Of his near contemporaries, the screen characters essayed by George Sanders or Dennis Price were probably disowned by their respective families, while it is highly likely that Thomas dispensed with his domestic ties on gaining a temporary commission. Such ‘wartime gentlemen’ might in peacetime achieve the social heights of the Willesden-​born Gerald Nabarro, the MP for South Worcestershire who became the moustachioed embodiment of every back-​bench Tory who wanted much of the populace deported and/​or flogged. And if a chap had to live on his wits, at least it avoided the fate of the former officers as described by Jonathan Meades as eking out an existence in a crumbling Salisbury bungalow of ‘dark wood tables clambering over crazed leather armchairs’ (2014: 172). The ex-​wartime officer living on his wits in post-​war England was the semi-​respectable face of the spiv, who David Hughes regarded as ‘not merely the harbingers and outward sign of a crime wave, which the law would stamp out in due time, but a much more disturbing indication that times in England had finally changed’ (1963: 99). Certainly, Thomas’s recourses as a dramatic actor were largely under-​employed, but although his various bounders would have let it be known that they were of the same calibre as David Niven’s gentlemen, they knew full well that they were parvenus. The entrance of Thomas in The Green Man (Robert Day 1956)  is a virtual encapsulation of the post-​war remittance man par

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184     The  comics excellence, fulminating about ‘the mem-​sahib’ and flaunting a Jaguar XK140 that was probably borrowed for the occasion. Penelope Gilliatt remarked on ‘the appalling cheerfulness’ (1973: 172) of a Terry-​Thomas screen character and they were often the comic version of the displaced wartime officer from Nigel Patrick’s deserter in Silent Dust (Lance Comfort 1949) to the desperate Freddie Page in The Deep Blue Sea. The immaculate exterior almost always remained the same,2 but Thomas could depict an entire patina of ‘rotters’ and ex-​ military dreamers.3 His roles encompassed the ex-​major turned thief for charity in Make Mine Mink (Robert Asher 1960) who spiritedly defends his wartime role in running a mobile bath unit –​‘We kept the army clean!’ –​ and the gleefully bounderish businessman of Too Many Crooks (Mario Zampi 1959). Bosley Crowther noted of the latter ‘how magnificently and completely a mad-​cap comedian can blow his top. His eyes flash, his lips curl, his sibilants whistle and he glares like a maniac’ (1959: n.p.). Thomas once reflected how he differentiated his screen roles,4 despite their superficially similar appearances, remarking of his Lieutenant Wigg in Operation Snatch (Robert Day 1962):  ‘I saw the character I  play as socially insecure, and the thing he wants more than anything else is the three pips so that he can call himself Captain. And I think in what I saw his insecurity has come out against say the swagger of the man in School for Scoundrels, who was one-​up on his colleagues’ (1961: 11). Robert Murphy contrasted both actors, together with Lionel Jeffries as creators of ‘comic types’ (1992: 245) and indeed Thomas had created an off-​screen persona for himself literally since adolescence (McCann 2008: 13). His social background was one of commerce –​his father ran a firm of meat importers at Smithfield Market –​and after Ardingly College and avoiding a career in the family business he developed a career as a cabaret entertainer, augmented by bit roles in films. By 1948 Thomas starred in the B-​feature revue Date with a Dream (Dicky Leeman) and in the following year had his first television vehicle How Do You View? but it would not be until Private’s Progress (John Boulting 1956) that he achieved cinematic fame. The Tottenham-​born Leslie Phillips was several ranks lower down the class structure than Thomas, but the Italia Conti Academy and a wartime army commission transformed his accent.5 In Thomas sued Private Eye in 1965 for a cartoon that inferred that he might look less than immaculate off-​stage (McCann 2008: 132). 3 Or ‘Major Pollock’ in Separate Tables. 4 ‘Permanent air of caddish disdain … bounder … aristocratic rogue … upper-​class English twit … genuine English eccentric … one of the last real gentlemen … wet, genteel Englishman … high-​bred idiot … cheeky blighter … camel-​haired cad … amiable buffoon … pompous Englishman … twentieth-​century dandy … stinker … king of the cads … All those descriptions added up to my image as Terry-​Thomas’ (Thomas and Daum 1990: 1). 5 The original tones of Phillips can still be heard as a railway fireman in Train of Events (Sidney Cole, Charles Crichton and Basil Dearden 1949) and as a merchant sailor in Pool of London (Dearden 1951). 2

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Terry-Thomas and Leslie Phillips     185 the early to mid-​1950s, Phillips could be seen as a police sergeant in Time Bomb (Ted Tetzlaff 1953) or more devious figures such as the solicitor of The Smallest Show on Earth (Basil Dearden 1957). In that same year, a profile in the Sketch described him as ‘a poised polished light comedian’ who could ‘tackle a dramatic role to equal effect’ (Richards 1957: 28). A blazed silly ass was just one aspect of his screen image until his appearance as the would-​be lecher Jack Bell in Carry On Nurse. Of the two actors, it was Terry-​Thomas who first achieved cinematic stardom. Private’s Progress entered production the year Ealing Studios was sold to the BBC and in his essay ‘Ealing’s Way of Life’, Kenneth Tynan complained that in their comedies ‘the law-​courts, the police force, the armed services, the Houses of Parliament and the government offices are all as sacrosanct as the crown’ (1955: 10). It could be equally argued that the observations of Alexander Mackendrick or Robert Hamer were no less bitter or acute for being framed in apparent whimsy (The Ladykillers) or taking place in a beautifully framed vision of the past (Smallest Show, Hamer 1949). But Tynan quoted Michael Balcon as stating, ‘If someone sent me a script criticising the army … something would stop me from making it. You can call me middle class if you like, but a script like that would  –​well, it would stick in my throat’. For the Boulting brothers –​‘No comic absurdities could be too far-​fetched for the individual who had served in a unit in a nation at arms’. (Balcon quoted in Tynan 1955: 10)

S. P. MacKenzie perceived the army of Private’s Progress as ‘a hypocritical institution governed by petty regulation and officious-​ness, where those who prospered were those who knew how to play the system rather than the brave’ (2001:  133). Such attitude resulted in a complete withdrawal of War Office support for the film; the Boultings billed the picture as ‘the film THEY didn’t want made’ and acknowledged ‘the official co-​operation of absolutely nobody’6 in the opening credits. When production commenced in 1955, the Second World War had been over for a decade, and the Boultings thought that conscription was viewed in the UK ‘as a regrettable necessity’ (Conrad 1959:  7). The 1953 War Office publication A Guide for the National Service Man stated that ‘in this country, it [conscription] is still regarded as an innovation and interruption the normal course of life’ (quoted in Weight 2002: 108). There were also various accounts of bureaucratic disasters concerning the process of the call-​up, such as blind men passed as fit for the service.7 A further reason was probably that as the 1950s progressed this made ‘recruitment into the regular forces a difficult task for the War Office –​there were too many attractive positions available in civilian life’ (Vinen 2014: 101). 7 ‘Terence Morris was discharged from the Ordnance Corps in 1953. He was partially sighted, carried a blind person’s free transport pass; the medical board had passed him as Grade II’ (Vinen 2014: 46). 6

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186     The  comics If Ealing comedies such as The Lavender Hill Mob were mostly concerned with acting as a safety valve for repressed urges, then the brothers were more concerned with exposing a social complacency. Private’s Progress was not the only post-​war British comedy with a service background, but there was little that fundamentally criticised the military mindset in Worm’s Eye View (Jack Raymond 1951), or Orders Are Orders (David Paltenghi 1955). With the Boultings’ production, the sheer inertia and incompetence present an inverted portrait of the nation characterised by much of Ealing’s wartime output. San Demetrio London (Charles Frend 1943) has the crew of a bombed merchant vessel uniting to guide her home but in Private’s Progress most of the platoon escaping from their duties into a cinema, where they loll at their ease while watching a stirringly patriotic newsreel. The presence of their commanding officer Major Hitchcock (Thomas) in a 1/​9d seat illustrates that Private’s Progress is emphatically not a film where people bond in the face of common adversity. John Gillett argued that, ‘Anyone with service experience must have met someone who possessed some of the characteristics of the British cinema’s service model’ (1957–​58:  126)  –​unfortunately, said model might well have been the Major. In a post-​war Ealing film, problems often occur when ‘the individual is detached from his service role and from the all-​male group. One solution is to out the group together again’ (Barr 1998: 77). In Private’s Progress, it is the group ethos that is fundamentally flawed, with Hitchcock setting the tone. Thomas was surprised to be cast as an officer, believing he was more suited to a sergeant major (McCann 2008: 74) and on the surface, his role followed in the tradition of previous cinematic cads. In the 1930s and 1940s, Guy Middleton had essayed an array of moustachioed rotters, most notably as Victor ‘Wizzo’ Hyde-​Brown, sports master and all-​round bounder in The Happiest Days of Your Life (Frank Launder 1950). But the Major is a far more isolated figure who blatantly loathes the military, his posting and himself –​the scene when he is drunkenly raving at his second in command Captain Henry Bootle (Thorley Walters) is played straight. Thomas’s performance infers that Hitchcock is well aware of his inadequacies; the ‘shower’, as he admits, equally refers to himself and there is little sign of the caricatured cad of the following decade. As McCann rather aptly put it, there was ‘a depth of suggestion within the melancholic major’ (2008: 75) and laziness combined with a fundamental decency –​his sympathy with a hungover Private Windrush (Ian Carmichael) and the recalcitrant Private Blake (Victor Maddern) is palpable –​prevents Hitchcock from becoming actively aggressive in his demeanour. A sense of resignation can often transmogrify into bitterness, and Thomas might equally have been cast in place of Roland Culver as the serpentine Major Fordyce turned smuggler in The Ship That Died

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Terry-Thomas and Leslie Phillips     187 of Shame. The tones that uttered the famous phrase, ‘You’re an absolute shower!’ could have equally plausibly uttered the line, ‘Didn’t fancy working for the plebs after fighting for them’. Private’s Progress resulted in a five-​film contract from the Boultings, although their adaptation of Lucky Jim (John Boulting 1957) was a picture where traditional comic tropes sit very uneasily with social satire. Ian Carmichael’s Jim Dixon is a standard comic juvenile and there is no sense of a believable Redbrick university campus. It was now ‘a British comedy picture’ and as Monthly Film Bulletin complained, ‘Lucky Jim has become broader, milder and softer; from the screen version, with its thoroughly traditional humours, one would never suspect that the novel had become the symbol of a new movement in English fiction’ (Review 1957b: 135). It is Thomas’s Bertrand Welch who is the closest to the comic monster of the Amis novel, the mannerisms of the saloon bar bore easily translating into the pseudo-​intellectual figure. It was, as the Guardian pointed out, a performance that gave ‘some flavour of the book and suggests possibilities for more serious roles’ (Review 1957a: 5). The Boultings further used Thomas as a wide boy in Brothers in Law (Roy Boulting 1957), and a police officer in Happy Is the Bride (Roy Boulting 1958), allowing him to further demonstrate his talents as a character actor. The bankrupt Captain Romney Carlton-​Ricketts of Blue Murder at St Trinian’s (Frank Launder 1957) was closer to his popular stage and television image and Thomas’s first appearance is a master class in evoking an air of insouciance in the most unlikely circumstances. The immaculately dressed proprietor of the Dreadnaught Motor Traction Company (i.e. two semi-​derelict Bedford coaches) lives in an abandoned double-​decker festooned with images of pre-​war Brooklands that look as though they have were acquired from a junk stall. Such bounders existed beyond the studio gates, and the Captain is the humorous version of the desperate ex-​service reunions of The Ship That Died of Shame; he might also have been a candidate for The League of Gentlemen. The Sight & Sound review singled out a ‘nicely absurd brief encounter between Joyce Grenfell and Terry-​Thomas’ (Review 1957–​58:  58), and as a seasoned bounder, Carlton-​Ricketts knows that his routines are awful. But with Ruby Gates (Joyce Grenfell) he might just have found a potential partner who is naive enough to fall for his very second-​hand patter. A year later Films and Filming praised Carlton-Browne of the F.O. (John Boulting 1959) as being ‘their best comedy’ and how the Boulting brothers ‘have also done the seemingly impossible –​turned Terry-​Thomas into an actor and not just a funny personality from TV’ (Baker 1959:  22). The eponymous diplomat is less the poseur and more the dim-​witted scion of an aristocratic family who regards his position as head of the Department of Miscellaneous Territories as a sinecure. Thomas saw Carlton-​Browne as ‘a low-​brow, unimaginative, wouldn’t read any other newspaper but

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188     The  comics The Times, wouldn’t be seen dead in London without a bowler hat and an umbrella’ (1961: 11). Inevitably, the diplomat is no match for the serpentine prime minister of the disputed colony of Galladia (Peter Sellers), and the island’s King Lovis further emphasises his sheer ineptitude. Ian Bannen plays the young monarch in a dry and acerbic manner, undermining Carlton-​Browne’s bluster and although the film concludes with his being decorated by both governments there remains the inference that any British diplomatic achievement is a miracle. The final picture of Thomas’s contract with the Boulting brothers was I’m All Right Jack, which, despite the slightly confusing timeline,8 was a sequel to Private’s Progress. Hitchcock is now the personnel manager of a missile factory, still ‘confusing national and personal interests’ (Vincent 1959: 27); to the Major (naturally he retains his title) the latter is always predominating. Hitchcock knows only too well that his state of agreeable idleness is dependent on the maintenance of a status quo, however shambolic. His wrath at Stanley Windrush’s innocent enthusiasm (‘You’re an absolute shower!’) is exacerbated by the fear that his carefully crafted routines might be disrupted. Hitchcock is an ex-​officer in a post-​Suez Crisis Britain where he knows full well that the culture of deference is dissipating. His supine grovelling towards his employer is matched only by his contempt for the workforce –​‘muck sweat at standing still’ –​but his encounter with the trade-​union leader Fred Kite (Peter Sellers) is a curiously touching moment. In the aftermath of a national strike, the shop steward has been deserted by his family, and although Hitchcock has been ordered to Kite’s home to negotiate a release from the deadlock, he can see that his erstwhile opponent is now quite lost. The tragedy of the Major is that he is capable of more than his self-​created image, immediately responding to Kite’s solution and using his military training not just to darn a sock but to act as a good officer. Unlike Carlton-​Ricketts, who has the appearance of having gained his commission at a time of national desperation, the Major does have the air of having once been a committed soldier, but now it is masked by outmoded slang and a desperate raffishness. Thomas’s final British comedy of the 1950s both anticipated the more cartoon figures of his 1960s Hollywood work and created possibly the ultimate cinematic comic bounder. School for Scoundrels (Robert Hamer/​ Cyril Frankel 1960)  suffered from a troubled production,9 but with Raymond Delauney, he was the quintessential Macmillan-​era bounder; the sort one would seek to avoid at Goodwood or Henley Regatta. Raymond Durgnat saw the film as establishing ‘that exacerbated dread of The first film is set during the Second World War and the latter was shot in a very 1958 Home Counties, but Stanley Windrush is still only aged twenty-​six. 9 Hamer was replaced by Frankel during shooting. 8

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Terry-Thomas and Leslie Phillips     189 hostile judgment, that terrorised and often unjustified certainty of every betrayal of non-​stock emotion being silently noted, possibly to be non-​ committally held against one’ (1970: 196). Thus, our hero Henry Palfrey (Ian Carmichael) is seen to suffer the burdens of a conventional life and thus lives in fear of his managing clerk (Edward Chapman), snide head waiters (John Le Mesurier) and any other form of petty authority that seemingly has the power to judge him. But Delauney is a fellow who is beyond such strictures. Not only does he enjoy a lifestyle to which Major Hitchcock could only dream –​and with no apparent worry about bounced cheques –​he is free from the permanent worries of the social climber. Nancy Mitford wrote that ‘silence is the only possible U-​response to many embarrassing modern situations’ (1955: 6), but Delauney maintains a constant stream of aggrandising patter, referring to wine in which ‘the grapes have had too much of the Dordogne wind –​in which they have a tendency to sulk’. If even Raymond’s surname is probably as fake as the badging on his ‘Bellini’ sports car,10 this matters not to a bounder so secure in his polished routines. The film critic of the Guardian noted of Thomas’s diplomat in Carlton-​Browne of the F.O. that his demeanour was of ‘someone a good deal less elevated on the social scale’ (Review 1959: 3), but in School for Scoundrels the image and the self-​confidence is all. Monthly Film Bulletin complained of ‘the limitations of the script, which makes nothing of the underlying savageries of the Lifemanship game of humiliation and inspired bad manners’ (Review 1960: 66).11 But the performance of Thomas infers that it is not enough to defeat one’s opponent, it must be done so to humiliate him beneath a thin veil of jocularity. By this time, Leslie Phillips was establishing his image as the screen chap who was the life and soul of the party  –​regardless of whether the other chaps wished for such a celebration. In 1958 he essayed the supporting role of Jack Bell, the would-​be lecher in Carry On Nurse. As we have already seen with Sidney James and Hattie Jacques, the series did not achieve its familiar form until as late as 1967 with Carry On Doctor. With Nurse the series has not attained its folkloric state, the point when, as Marcus puts it, the borders between the movie and nation cease to exist. The movie becomes a fable; then it becomes a metaphor. Then it becomes a catchphrase, a joke, a shortcut. It becomes a way not to think, and all the details in people’s minds, that brought it to life not just on the screen but in the imagination of people at large, no matter how few or many those details might be, dissolve. (2002: 14) 10 11

A disguised 1954 Aston Martin DB3S. Monthly Film Bulletin did not even mention Thomas’ performance, which proves that the reviewer was an ‘absolute shower’.

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190     The  comics With the very early black-​and-​white Norman Hudis-​scripted entries, there is a sense that the fable is not in an immediately recognisable embryonic form. There are some familiar faces, and Charles Hawtrey’s persona is already established, but others are younger, lower-​billed and more actor-​like such as Kenneth Williams. Nurse did create two stars –​Jacques as Matron and Phillips as Jack Bell. He establishes within one minute that his patient is probably ex-​services, amiable (he waves his shoe at the other inmates on entering the ward) and an overgrown schoolboy. British cinema of the 1950s had an ignoble tradition of oily creeps who were strangely irresistible to the female leads despite having the charisma of a Standard Eight, but Jack Bell is so blatant in his aims –​‘as long as I get in my snogging’ –​he is almost endearing. Phillips remained with the Peter Rogers/​Gerald Thomas team for a further six films, displaying a talent to transcend cliché in resolutely unpromising surroundings. Andy Medhurst brackets him with the ‘second-​rung’ Carry On performers  –​‘Most of these had one act which they stuck to, or had stuck to them, throughout the length of their sentence –​never straying far from the droll chunk of personality’ (2007: 133). But Leslie Phillips could create a believable figure within the limits of a script, as demonstrated by 1959’s Please Turn Over. It is a quite extraordinary picture, one populated by caricatures who behave as though they have escaped from a 1934 edition of Punch and set in a sun-​drenched suburbia of Ford Zephyrs and television sets. An angry young playwright (Tim Seely) is revealed to be a simpering juvenile lead at heart, women apparently cannot drive and in the lead was the radio and variety comic Ted Ray, who bellowed his lines with a patent uneasiness. Somewhat predictably, Films and Filming did not like Please Turn Over at all  –​‘the same old material salvaged from obsolete radio or stage shows … when the cinema industry has to rely on these films to keep going, then it may just as well pack up and join forces with television’ (Bean 1960:  24). But Phillips’s quiet, dignified GP Dr Manners is a believable figure, just as in No Kidding (Thomas 1960)  where his founder of a home for disturbed children of the wealthy has moments of genuine anger. By 1961 the actor ‘had no intention of getting locked into an interminable series with a risk of getting totally typecast across the world’ (Phillips 2006) and he had already found a haven with the Doctor series, serving as a virtual heir to Kenneth More’s Grimsdyke in Doctor in Love. With Doctor in the House (1954) More is insouciant, regarding Sir Lancelot (James Robertson Justice) with respect but not awe, while Phillips’s Doctor Hare is louche and incompetent in equal measure. He craves the life of a well-​heeled cad  –​the tailored wardrobe, the Aston Martin DB4, the beehive-​haired secretaries –​but all the while anticipates the wrath of James Robertson Justice.

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Terry-Thomas and Leslie Phillips     191 The well-​meaning and almost entirely inept Flying Officer Cooper of Very Important Person (Ken Annakin 1961)  crystallised Phillips’s stardom, Peter Baker citing him among ‘a team of comedy actors in which Britain has no equal. Consider the skill behind the studied comedy idiocy of Leslie Phillips’ (1961: 23). Such skill may be taken for granted until one experiences him acting opposite an ill-​cast co-​star. A Weekend with Lulu (John Paddy Carstairs 1961) has Phillips as an advertising executive in an ice-​cream firm who joins forces with his delivery-​van driver friend Fred Scutton (Bob Monkhouse) for a caravan holiday in France.12 The former delivers his lines with a sense of obvious ease while the latter tries (too) hard, coping with both a peculiar cockney accent and the palpable desire to make the audience like him. To quote Penelope Gilliatt, ‘The funniest men always seem independent of your opinion. You take them or leave them’ (1973: 172), which is immediately evident with Crooks Anonymous (1962). It was the second in the series of three films directed by Annakin to co-​star Phillips with James Robertson Justice and Stanley Baxter, and Phillips, in a deceptively unassuming manner, dominates the screen as ‘Dandy’ Forsdyke, a pseudo-​public-​school safe-​breaker who attempts to reform so he can marry his girlfriend. Phillips’s comic timing and look of hurt pride are the equal of Jack Lemmon or Tony Randall, while the casting of Julie Christie as the female lead also denotes how this black-​and-​white fantastical London of sharp-​suited wide boys and irate, bearded department-​ store owners is now on borrowed time. The film was released under the auspices of the Rank Organisation, and Melanie Bell remarks on how ‘the studio’s inability to use Christie effectively is an index of how far removed the organisation was from the cultural landscape’ (2016:  17). Crooks Anonymous entered production only a few months before Billy Liar! but the gulf between ‘Babette’ the stripper and Liz, strolling through Bradford to the accompaniment of Richard Rodney Bennett’s jazz score, is virtually insurmountable. Christie and Phillips went on to appear in The Fast Lady and to read an account of the car rally that publicised the film13 is to vicariously experience a world that would barely survive past the middle of the decade (Report 1963: 33). Such a cinematic formula may now have some modern overtones –​generic pop music transistor radios, perhaps a modest twist might be performed on the lawn  –​but it was less concerned with the contemporary than with perfecting its own mythology. Rather predictably, Monthly Film Bulletin did not enjoy this exceptionally jolly comedy, 12 13

With hilarious consequences. To be fair, who would not rather have a two-​hour road safety rally with a stellar array of cars and drivers to a succession of boring non-​entities mouthing inane PR speak on a red carpet?

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192     The  comics but their description of an ‘attempt to please the affluent society through a brash portrayal of its fads and fancies’ (1963: 21) does make one realise how The Fast Lady could only have been shot in 1962.14 Phillips’s performance as the blatantly devious car salesman was utterly treasurable, but he ran the risk of becoming trapped within the boundaries of this cinematic realm. Doctor in Clover (Ralph Thomas 1966) was both his last successful British light comedy film vehicle and notable for a brief clash of cultures. Dr Gaston Grimsdyke’s brief foray to Carnaby Street to acquire some ‘fab gear’ is inevitably doomed to failure and the vignette of Phillips in a fashion store remains a telling moment. The young manager (Nicky Henson) courteously receives Grimsdyke but the doctor is isolated from this new London via both his age and his ethos. Philip French wrote sardonically of how by 1966  ‘the film industry’s be-​jewelled crown’ was in reality ‘the cap and bells of a jester’s motley, worn over a Beatle wig’ (1966: 111) –​but it is still a world beyond Grimsdyke. Better to retreat to a reassuring institutional landscape of predictable stereotypes and archetypes,15 plus various high jinks with fire extinguishers16 and Sir Lancelot’s Rolls-​Royce. Leslie Phillips remained a figure of British cinema asides from Les Girls (George Cukor 1957), where his ‘droll’ supporting role of Sir Gerald Wren was praised by Bosley Crowther of the New  York Times (1957). Had the actor been twenty years older it is wholly plausible to envisage him in roles once essayed by David Niven or even George Sanders; the idea of the Phillips tones as applied to Jack Faversham in Rebecca (Alfred Hitchcock 1940) remains an intriguing one. But in the late 1950s, Hollywood’s ‘British colony’ had already dissipated and in the 1960s it was Terry-​Thomas, a more identifiable ‘type’, who filmed on both sides of the Atlantic. ‘Once I had cornered the market, in the Sixties, as Hollywood’s favourite silly ass Englishman, the work piled up. It didn’t bother me that I had been typecast. Perhaps it should have concerned me more’ (Thomas and Daum 1990: 1). Some of Thomas’s work in the USA did showcase his talents; Raymond Durgnat thought How to Murder Your Wife (Richard Quine 1965) ‘reveals T-​T’s real forte as sophisticated comedy (rather than farce17)’ (1965: 25) –​ but It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World (Stanley Kramer 1963) had Thomas Another giveaway –​the trad jazz style theme tune. Richard Roud of the Guardian was not an enthusiast, as he considered the Doctor series provided ‘people of an arrested mental or sexual development the chance of indulging themselves with a relatively clean conscience’ (1966: 11). Nor was Monthly Film Bulletin: ‘This depressing comedy relies almost exclusively on well-​tried slapstick routines … James Robertson Justice, Leslie Phillips and Joan Sims work hard without a funny line to share between them’ (Review 1966: 59). 16 That reliable standby of many a Pinewood comedy. 17 Thomas was not a fan of the latter genre (Thomas 1961: 11). 14 15

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Terry-Thomas and Leslie Phillips     193 as but one element of a stellar cast. The British-​based and Hollywood-​ funded Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines was a further example of comedy as spectacle, with black-​and-​white filmed intimacy now succeeded by Todd-​AO widescreen cinematography. Fortunately, Thomas could elevate his roles beyond the merely clichéd; Kenneth Tynan praised Sir Percy Ware-​Armitage’s ‘sincerely evil leers’ (1965: 24). Who could remember that Stuart Whitman’s Orvil Newton and James Fox’s Richard Mays actually won the race when in the company of Tony Hancock’s deluded aeronaut who flew backwards to Scotland and Thomas berating his valet Courtney (Eric Sykes)? Thomas and Sykes repeated their on-​screen partnership18 with Monte Carlo or Bust! (Annakin 1969), where Thomas, as Verrina Glaessner observed, resembled ‘a Searle drawing come to life –​a thin, scuttling figure of evil intent’ (1969: 40). Add Peter Cook and Dudley Moore’s finest film appearance since Bedazzled (Stanley Donen 1967) and comparatively few cinemagoers would overly care about the Chester Schofield of Tony Curtis. In the latter half of the 1960s, Thomas increasingly worked in mainland Europe with some of his films proving a vast commercial success –​ La Grande Vadrouille (Gérard Oury 1966) was the most popular French film for more than four decades. With other pictures, the actor’s work was ‘done so quickly, I never knew the title of the films or met the stars’ (quoted in McCann 2008: 175). Thomas was now increasingly required to do a turn rather than create a character, although his Mini Moke-​ driving scoutmaster confronted with the poker-​faced traffic police constable of Ian Hendry was a highpoint of the fascinatingly uneven The Sandwich Man (Robert Hartford-Davis 1966). It is a matter of regret that the narrative of Michael Bentine’s eponymous hero wandering through London as a genial lord of misrule was not directed by Jacques Tati, just as it is highly tempting to think of Thomas as Major Dalby in The Ipcress File  –​the mask of banter now frozen into an expression of enduring bitterness. It is equally plausible to envisage Phillips instead of Denholm Elliott as the remittance man Charlie Prince in Nothing But the Best (Clive Donner 1964), assisting Jimmy Brewster (Alan Bates) in his quest to transcend his suburban roots and ‘to become the only figure amongst cyphers’. By 1966 the actor co-​produced the thriller Maroc 7 (Gerry O’Hara), which also marked an attempt at a change of screen image as a jewel smuggler, but the result bore an unfortunate resemblance to an extended ITC drama, complete with an imported US B-​film leading man. Phillips concentrated on stage work for the remainder of the 1960s, for by 1970 British cinema was enduring another of its ongoing crises  –​‘According to Today’s 18

Their first film together was an undemanding MGM-​British farce Kill or Cure (George Pollock 1962).

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194     The  comics Cinema their finance of British films has fallen from £31 million in 1968 to only £13 million in 1970’ (Davenport 1971: 24). Thus, the new decade saw Phillips’s cinema career embrace a group of titles that bore a distinct air of resigned smuttiness –​Doctor in Trouble (Ralph Thomas 1970), Not Now, Darling (Ray Cooney/​ David Croft 1972) and Not Now, Comrade (Cooney 1976). The latter two were adapted from West End stage farces where longer hair and a disastrous taste in flared trousers could not disguise an overwhelming sense of fatigue. The BBC situation comedy The Good Life (1975–​78) illustrated how the cad figure could adapt to the 1970s, with Paul Eddington’s Jerry Ledbetter being both charmingly offhand and extremely perceptive. Phillips’s sitcom of this period was Casanova ’73 (Harold Snoad 1973), and even the opening credits are sufficient to lower the viewer’s spirits. The title, as with the posters for the actor’s films, promised an air of licensed naughtiness –​the reality was tired routines performed in the manner of a one-​ time roué who would now really prefer a nice cup of tea. The 1970s saw Thomas’s work increasingly curtailed by the effects of Parkinson’s disease (McCann 2008:  175), but his obsessive-​compulsive Arthur Critchit in Vault of Horror (Roy Ward Baker 1973) was a reminder of talents so often misused by British cinema. Tom Milne thought that ‘a little of (Alejandro) Jodorowsky’s visual extravagance’ would have benefited the film (1973:  36), but this is to misunderstand the appeal of an Amicus production. Unlike Hammer Horrors that often use a vaguely defined ‘gothic’ past, the portmanteau stories of its rival need to flourish in a Home Counties of Berni Inns and suburban villas with really unfortunate decors.19 But it is worth enduring the low-​rent vampires and badly staged car crashes for Thomas’s performance of depressed, quiet dignity as an ageing business magnate whose only fault is his obsessive neatness. Peter Hutchings perceived the Amicus portmanteau films as offering a ‘different view  –​cynical, sardonic, cruel, modern’ (2002:  142) in comparison with Hammer, but in The Neat Job story, there is no real sense of horror, more of the sadness of an ill-​matched marriage within the confines of a Habitat-​furnished bungalow. Vault of Horror was to be Thomas’s final noteworthy film performance, for the late 1970s encompassed titles that people would change continents to avoid  –​The Last Remake of Beau Jeste (Marty Feldman 1977), The Hound of the Baskervilles (Paul Morrissey 1978)  and The Bawdy Adventures of Tom Jones (Cliff Owen 1976).20 Side by Side (Bruce A further part of the Amicus ritual is that someone will break the fourth wall, to announce the plight of his fellow cast members. Here the honour falls to Curt Jurgens, whose traumatised expression infers the real nightmare is being trapped in Twickenham Studios for what feels like all eternity. 20 As described by Graham McCann as being ‘to the classic Enlightenment novel by Henry Fielding what a packet of pork scratchings was to haute cuisine’ (2008: 163). 19

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Terry-Thomas and Leslie Phillips     195 Beresford 1975) co-​starred Thomas with Barry Humphries as Max and Rodney Nugget, the co-​proprietors of the Golden Nugget Variety club while their ‘happening’ next-​door rival Sound City favours an array of glam rock acts. If such a description was not sufficient to induce fear beyond any Peter Cushing/​ Christopher Lee vehicle, there is music that would be utterly passé only a few months after the film’s release. Plus, sundry mockney accents and a visibly ailing Thomas –​John Pym remarked on the lead actors’ ‘evident lack of enthusiasm for the marshmallow plot’ (1976: 63). Then there was Spanish Fly (Bob Kellett 1975) in which he co-​starred with Phillips as two lecherous bounders in a Menorca where the local wine is treated with an aphrodisiac. It was a scenario that promised all the hilarity of an Ibsen play,21 although David McGillivray did offer the faint praise of ‘the moderate amusement to be had from Terry-​Thomas being Terry-​Thomas’ (1976: 34). By 1981 Phillips made the conscious decision to leave behind ‘lecherous twits with suave chat-​up lines and dysfunctional trouser braces’ (2006: 333). When he appeared in the exceptionally ill-​conceived Carry On Columbus (1992), it was with the assurance of one who had played Gaev in Lindsay Anderson’s production of The Cherry Orchard and Lord Astor in Scandal (Michael Caton-​Jones 1989). As with his fellow cast member, the Oscar-​nominated and Tony Award-​winning Jim Dale, Phillips had redefined his image to such an extent that he could afford a brief return to old grounds via nostalgia rather than necessity. For Terry-​Thomas, there came the offer from Derek Jarman to appear as Old Prospero in his adaptation of The Tempest (1979), only for the part to be recast due to the actor’s health. It remains one of the most tantalising what-​ifs of British cinema and to hear Thomas utter, ‘We are such stuff as dreams are made on; and our little life is rounded with a sleep’, would have been a fitting farewell to both his screen career and his persona. The loss of the role devastated the actor (McCann 2008: 176). Thomas appeared on the BBC documentary series The Human Brain (1983) talking about his condition, but after that, he faded from the contemporary gaze, the familiar tones and gap-​toothed smile now appearing on countless TV re-​runs. In the age before the Internet, there was the general assumption that he was living a comfortable retirement in a Mediterranean villa until a 1988 newspaper report revealed he was enduring a poverty-​stricken existence in a three-​room London flat. The 21

Far more entertaining than the film  –​although this was not an especially notable achievement per se –​was the review of Michael Davie in the Observer. The critic visited the ABC cinema in Golders Green to experience a double bill of Man About the House (John Robins 1974) with Spanish Fly –​‘The audience of 30 had dwindled to 15 by the intermission’. Meanwhile the gimmicks to sell the latter production included a ‘Spanish string bag’ containing ‘a record by Geraldine singing Fly Me’ and ‘in a discrete plain envelope, a pair of frilly green knickers’ (1976: 32).

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196     The  comics response was a charity gala that at least allowed Thomas to end his days in a nursing home. More than Phillips, who had a low-​key but extensive pre-​Carry On cinematic hinterland, ‘Terry-​Thomas’ the screen cad seemed indivisible from Terry-​Thomas the chap  –​never quite trustworthy but never cowed. It would not be too pretentious to suggest that the shocked reaction to the press coverage of his illness was due to both genuine concern and a reminder of the viewers’ own mortality. Perhaps the one dramatic role that would have been equally suited to either actor would have been Donald Crowhurst –​two failed commissions in the army and the RAF before his desperate entry in the 1968 Sunday Times Golden Globe Race. It was an event for which he and his vessel were almost wholly unsuited, yet the facade had to be maintained –​the jovial fellow in a community of mortgaged villas, Jaguars and gin and tonics. Thomas or Phillips could have depicted the strain of issuing a stream of quips that never quite masked the fear of losing status in the eyes of the neighbours and the gamble of arriving in Chichester harbour as the plucky loser, bantering with the gentlemen of TV news. As it is, their legacy to British cinema is typified, somewhat paradoxically, by their respective contributions to minor comedies. A Matter of WHO (Don Chaffey 1961) is a true oddity, a comic thriller with Thomas as a World Health Organisation official attempting to source a deadly virus. There is the almost-​regulation imported American second lead (Alex Nicol), a name (‘Archibald Banister’) suited to a dealer of second-​hand Sunbeam-​Talbots and even the standby of a British comedy, a ‘comic’ motor car.22 But amid such unpromising surroundings, Terry-​Thomas, in a role originally intended for Noel Coward, created a wholly plausible investigator –​‘Thomas goes at the part squarely and scores a decided triumph over the ambivalent script’ (Cutts 1961: 28). That same year saw Phillips starring in the vet farce In the Doghouse (Darcy Conyers 1961), a British comedy so quintessentially early 1960s that it boasts (a) a trad jazz theme tune, (b) various comic animals and (c) an irate professor in a tweed suit (Colin Gordon on this occasion). ‘A kindly but limp comedy, sadly lacking in invention and wit, about a vet. It has the excellent Leslie Phillips [in] a sequence with an escaped lion in a church hall, and a performing chimp called the Hairy Houdini. You know the sort of thing’, mused the Guardian (At the Cinemas 1962: 4). However, Phillips’s scenes with Esma Cannon as an elderly woman facing the death of her pet allowed the actor’s skill at elevating a clichéd scenario into the pain of high comedy. Just as Terry-​Thomas had the gift of implying an inner life behind the cigarette holder, be it a sense of incisive wit or deep regret, Leslie Phillips was always more than a pencil moustache and ‘ding dong!’ They were rare comedy actors with the gift of being 22

In this case, an Austin Seven.

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Terry-Thomas and Leslie Phillips     197 able to transcend their material with apparent ease, creating a character that was both essential to the plot and capable of examination outside of it. And to anyone who disagrees –​hard cheese, old boy.

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Bibliography At the Cinemas (1962), ‘In the Doghouse’, The Guardian, 1 January, 4. Babington, Bruce (ed.) (2001), British Stars and Stardom: From Alma Taylor to Sean Connery, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Babington, Bruce (2002), Launder and Gilliat: British Film Makers, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Baker, Peter (1959), ‘Carlton-​Browne of the F.O.’, Films and Filming, April, 21–​2. Baker, Peter (1961), ‘Very Important Person’, Films and Filming, June, 23. Baker, Roy (2000), The Director’s Cut: A Memoir of 60 Years in Film and Television, London: Reynolds & Hearn. Barr, Charles (1998), Ealing Studios (3rd ed.), London: Continuum. Bean, Robin (1960), ‘Please Turn Over’, Films and Filming, February, 24. Bell, Melanie (2016), Julie Christie, London: BFI/​Palgrave Macmillan. Burton, Alan, O’Sullivan, Tim and Wells, Paul (eds.) (2000), The Family Way: The Boulting Brothers and British Film Culture, Trowbridge, UK: Flicks Books. Chibnall, Steve and Petley, Julian (eds.) (2002), British Horror Cinema, London: Routledge. Conrad, Derek (1959), ‘What Makes the British Laugh?’ Films and Filming, February, 7. Crowther, Bosley (1957), ‘The Screen: “Les Girls” ’, New York Times, 4 October. Crowther, Bosley (1959), ‘The Screen:  British Comedy; Terry-​Thomas Stars in “Too Many Crooks” ’, New York Times, 25 April. Cutts, John (1961), ‘A Matter of WHO’, Films and Filming, September, 28. Davenport, Nicholas (1971), ‘Money:  The Film Crisis’, The Spectator, 18 September, 24. Davie, Michael (1976), ‘The Decline and Fall of the Funny Film’, The Observer, 8 February, 32. Durgnat, Raymond (1965), ‘How to Murder Your Wife’, Films and Filming, October, 25. Durgnat, Raymond (1970), A Mirror for England: British Movies from Austerity to Affluence, London: Faber & Faber. French, Philip (1966), ‘The Alphaville of Admass: Or How We Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Boom’, Sight & Sound, Summer, 106–​11. Gillett, John (1957–​58), ‘Westfront 1957’, Sight & Sound, Winter, 122–​7. Gilliatt, Penelope (1973), Unholy Fools; Wits, Comics, Disturbers of the Peace: Film & Theatre, London: Secker & Warburg. Glaessner, Verrina (1969), ‘Monte Carlo or Bust!’, Films and Filming, October, 40. Glynn, Stephen (2013), The British Pop Music Film:  The Beatles and Beyond, London: Palgrave Macmillan. Hall, Simon (2016), 1956: The World in Revolt, London: Faber & Faber. Hughes, David (1963), ‘The Spivs’, in Sissons , Michael and French, Philip (eds.) Age of Austerity, London: Hodder & Stoughton.

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198     The  comics Hutchings, Peter (2002), ‘The Amicus House of Horror’, in Chibnall, Steve and Petley, Julian (eds.) British Horror Cinema, London: Routledge. Marcus, Greil (2002), BFI Film Classics: The Manchurian Candidate, London: BFI. MacKenzie, S. P. (2001), British War Films 1939–​45. London and New  York: Hambledon and London. Malcolm, Derek (1969), ‘Monte Carlo or Bust!’ The Guardian, 18 July, 8. McCann, Graham (2008), Bounder! The Story of Terry-​Thomas, London: Aurum. McGillivray, David (1976), ‘Spanish Fly’, Monthly Film Bulletin, 43(505), 34. Meades, Jonathan (2014), An Encyclopaedia of Myself, London: Fourth Estate. Medhurst, Andy (2007), A National Joke: Popular Comedy and English Cultural Identities, London: Routledge. Milne, Tom (1973), ‘Vault of Horror’, The Observer, 28 October, 36. Mitford, Nancy (1955), The English Aristocracy’, Encounter, September, 5–​11. Murphy, Robert (1992), Sixties British Cinema, London: BFI. Petrie, Duncan (2018), ‘A Changing Visual Landscape: British Cinematography in the 1960s’, Journal of British Cinema and Television, 15(2), April, 204–​27. Phillips, Leslie (2006), Hello! The Autobiography, London: Orion. Pym, John (1976), ‘Side by Side’, Monthly Film Bulletin, 23(506), March, 63. Rees, Goronwy (1963), ‘Amateurs and Gentlemen or the Cult of Incompetence’, Encounter, July, 20–​9. Report (1963), ‘Cars of the Stars’, Motor Sport, March, 33. Review (1957a), ‘Lucky Jim’, The Guardian, 20 August, 5. Review (1957b), ‘Lucky Jim’, Monthly Film Bulletin, 24(286), November, 135. Review (1957–​58), ‘Blue Murder at St. Trinian’s’, Sight & Sound, Winter, 58. Review (1959), ‘Carlton-​Browne of the F.O.’, The Guardian, 7 March, 3. Review (1960), ‘School for Scoundrels’, Monthly Film Bulletin, 27(316), May 66. Review (1963), ‘The Fast Lady’, Monthly Film Bulletin, 30(349), February, 21. Review (1966), ‘Doctor in Clover’, Monthly Film Bulletin, 33(387), April, 59. Richards, Dick (1957), ‘Players in Profile: The Debonair Comedian’, The Sketch, 6 November, 28. Roud, Richard (1966), ‘Doctor in Clover’, The Guardian, 4 March, 11. Spicer, Andrew (2003), Typical Men:  The Representation of Masculinity in Popular British Cinema, London: I. B. Tauris. Thomas, Terry (1961), ‘Interview’, Films and Filming, December 11. Thomas, Terry and Daum, Terry (1990), Terry-​ Thomas Tells Tales:  An Autobiography, London: Robson Books. Turner, Adrian (1990), ‘Obituary Terry-​Thomas’, The Guardian, 9 January, 39. Tynan, Kenneth (1955), ‘Ealing’s Way of Life’, Films and Filming, December, 10. Tynan, Kenneth (1965), ‘Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines’, The Observer, 6 June, 24. Vincent, John (1959), ‘I’m All Right Jack’, Films and Filming. September, 27. Vinen, Richard (2014), National Service:  Conscription in Britain 1945–​1963, London: Allen Lane. Weight, Richard (2002), Patriots:  National Identity in Britain 1940–​ 2000, London: Pan Books.

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Ladies and gentlemen of character

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Sidney James: Jo’burg’s favourite cockney

Born Solomon Joel Cohen on 8 May 1913 and raised in Johannesburg, after stage and radio experience with the South African Broadcasting Corporation, Sidney James (as he was known professionally) enlisted in the army and served in an entertainment unit. One of his recruits was Larry Skikne, later to be famous as Laurence Harvey. James left South Africa for the UK in 1946 and gained stardom in Hancock’s Half Hour and the Carry On films. He died on 26 April 1976. If you had to describe Sidney James to one unfamiliar with post-​war British cinema, this approach is as good as any: Fade-​up Pathé News styled theme tune and patronising off-​screen announcer. ‘Sidney James  –​your all-​purpose British character actor! He can play hard-​bitten reporters!’ Cue Sid being shot by enemy alien forces in Quatermass 2. ‘Italian!’ Cue footage of Sid sporting a very dubious false accent in The Venetian Bird (Ralph Thomas 1952). ‘American!’ Cue footage of Sid in the company of Bonar Colleano in Is Your Honeymoon Really Necessary? ‘Australian!’ Cue Sid saying ‘fair dinkum’ in The Green Helmet (Michael Forlong 1961). ‘Spanish!’ Cue a moustachioed Sid dancing  –​and reciting lyrics in a ‘Spanish’ accent best described as ‘Tokyo-​ Johannesburg’  –​in Tommy the Toreador (John Paddy Carstairs 1959). ‘Or London’s sharpest wide boy!’

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202     Ladies and gentlemen of character

Figure 11  Sidney James in Carry On Constable (1960) Cue B-​film footage of Sid running across a bombsite, hotly pursued by a bell-​clanging police Wolseley 6/​80. ‘Yes, Sidney James –​your all-​purpose man of character!’ Fade-​ out on a shot of our hero looking furtive while smoking a Woodbine and cue the next item about the latest colonial disaster.

Melanie Williams has noted that as compared with Hollywood cinema, ‘the categories of star and character actor seem rather more permeable (2011: 97) in British films, and when Sidney James died in 1976, he was a near-​ubiquitous presence. He now seemed less of an actor and more of a ‘type’ –​‘Sid’, the amiable and safely lecherous London Everyman. Any TV viewer seeking refuge from Grandstand was equally aware that an ‘also Starring Sidney James’ credit was as much a guarantee of cinematic satisfaction as ‘with David Lodge’ or ‘and Richard Wattis’. The heyday of James’s film career was in that realm where Marianne Stone and Sam Kydd preside over an array of day-​old rock cakes and curling ham sandwiches in a seedy café somewhere in the East End of London. Outside, the gas street lights barely cut through the pea-​souper, while inside the atmosphere is one of cheap dreams and Woodbine fumes. Larry Martyn’s gang of Teddy boys plan their next escapade and Harry Fowler and Alfie Bass huddle over a chipped Formica table. Harold Lang overhears their furtive plans to dispose of several hundredweight of kippers that had recently, and miraculously, descended from the back

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Sidney  James     203 of a lorry. He sneaks off to the nearest telephone box, dials an advance exchange number and, after pressing button ‘A’, tips off Sergeant Jack Watson of skulduggery in the region of St Katharine’s Docks. Within a few minutes, Detective Inspector John Horsley arrives on the scene in the Wolseley of Justice. And, of course, there would also be a key role –​ on either side of the law –​for Sidney James. Such pictures so often displayed an actor far removed from the figure with the distinctive laugh for there in black and white or vibrant Eastmancolor, was a far less predictable actor on display. Sidney James is a key example of a supporting player who became a star in middle age by public demand and one with, initially, at least, had no fixed screen persona. Melanie Williams refers to how the ‘brilliant miniaturists’ of character acting allowed the viewer to ‘trace a hidden history of British cinema’ (2011: 103–​4) and in the late 1940s, 1950s –​and even with the early Carry On films –​James was an exemplar of the form of ‘termite art’ acting that Manny Farber famously defined as ‘a kind of squandering-​ beaverish endeavour that isn’t anywhere or for anything. A peculiar fact about termite-​tapeworm-​fungus-​moss art is that it always goes forward eating its own boundaries, and, likely as not, leaves nothing in its path other than the signs of eager, industrious, unkempt activity’ (1962–​ 63: 9–​13). Farber cited the example of John Wayne in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (John Ford 1962) as the epitome of such performances –​ ‘focusing only on a tiny present area, nibbling at it with engaging professionalism’ (Farber and Walsh 1998: 136). He could equally have been talking about James as the coffee stall owner in The Rainbow Jacket (Basil Dearden 1954), his desperate alcoholic journalist in Paper Orchid (Roy Ward Baker 1949) or his first major picture The Small Back Room (Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger 1948). Dilys Powell cited his performance as the pub landlord ‘Knucksie’ as an example of the excellence of the film’s supporting performances (1989: 81); a kindly but firm figure with an air of controlled power –​‘You go home’, he orders David Farrar’s hero with understated and very real menace. The Small Back Room was an early indication of one of James’s main strengths as a screen actor; a sense of quiet, still, authority with the potential for genuine anger if stirred. In 1956 the director Ralph Thomas once went as far as to claim, ‘It wouldn’t be a British picture if it didn’t have Sidney James in it’ (quoted in Goodwin 2011: 110). Robin Bean bracketed him alongside James Robertson Justice and Daniel Massey as an actor that Pinewood could not do without (1959: 24). The actor’s voice, with that distinctive and much-​parodied laugh, is possibly his best-​remembered aspect, but it is his pale eyes suffused with barely suppressed anger that dominates this cameo. His characters could behave with ‘the breeziest good-​humour and naturalism’ (Dent 1958: 35) just as they could bluster, wail and attempt to palm off stolen goods or command respect in a

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204     Ladies and gentlemen of character single reaction shot. One reason for James’s success was that rarely, if ever, would you catch him ‘acting’ and he once remarked to a friend that, ‘People are clamouring for me to do their films because I know how to underplay a part. We are surrounded by people who overplay. But me, with my pock-​marks and strange diction and funny smile, all I have to do is underplay a part, and the directors love it’ (quoted in Goodwin 2011: 98). With seemingly little effort, Sidney James could dominate any scene he appeared in, always with a total sense of control. He was born Solomon ‘Solly’ Joel Cohen, becoming known as ‘Sidney James’ while still at school, and his acting career commenced in 1937 when he joined the Johannesburg Repertory Company. At the outbreak of the Second World War, James was regularly broadcasting on the South African Broadcasting Corporation (SABC), and during the hostilities, he was in charge of an army entertainment troup, where one of the youngest members was a Lithuanian-​born dancer named ‘Larry Skikne’. After the war, James toured with the Gwen Ffrangcon-​Davies/​ Marda Vanne Shakespeare Company, regarded as the ‘foremost English-​ speaking theatre troupe in South Africa’ (Goodwin 2011: 58) and in 1946 he departed on an ex-​serviceman’s grant for a new career in the UK. Just as Zvi Skikne became known as ‘Laurence Harvey’, the Mayfair lounge lizard, James was eventually transformed into the cockney ‘Sid’. The Carry On film series increasingly dominated the last sixteen years of James’s life, and although these rarely showcased his abilities as an actor, they did reflect his success in marketing himself as a home-​grown comedy staple. James’s original accent was often quite evident whenever his characters were under stress –​he berates Jim Dale in Carry On Cabby for being ‘a tweet!’ –​but this vocal element was not so marked as to categorise James as a foreigner. South Africa was a dominion within the Commonwealth until 1961  –​another reason casting directors did not regard James as an ‘outsider’ to the same extent as his near contemporaries, the Czech-​born Herbert Lom or the Austrian Eric Pohlmann. By 1953 the presence of James in the near-​phantasmagorical rural arcadia of The Titfield Thunderbolt was wholly unexpected, and two years later Elspeth Grant wrote of John and Julie (William Fairchild 1954)  that ‘there is always Mr. Sidney James, who barges through the piece grumbling splendidly as only an Englishman can’ (1955: 22).1 He was occasionally called upon to essay Jewish characters, such as the wonderfully named ‘Ice’ Berg, a fast-​talking diamond merchant in A Kid for Two Farthings, but he avoided many of the stereotyped roles offered to Alfie Bass and Sydney Tafler. In the 1950s James was offered the greatest 1

The press often mentioned the fact that Sidney James was born and raised abroad during his lifetime; a hilariously excruciating Scottish Television interview from 1963 has the presenter remarking, ‘You’re a cockney  –​yet you’re from South Africa!’ to which the great man responds with a scowl that does not appear entirely contrived.

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Sidney  James     205 variety of roles of any subject of this book, apart from Peter Sellers; few actors could have played a villainous cowboy in the Arthur Askey comedy Ramsbottom Rides Again (John Baxter 1956) and a Spanish con man in Tommy the Toreador with such elan. James’s film career in the UK commenced almost literally weeks after his arrival from South Africa on Christmas Day 1946 with a small part in the film noir Black Memory (Oswald Mitchell 1947). Crime drama was one of several genres that James specialised in during the late 1940s and early 1950s, and for a time, it was as though James was vying with Tafler for the title of ‘King of the Wide Boys’. The actor’s entry in the 1955 Spotlight Casting Directory showcases him in the pose of a gang boss resignedly issuing orders to his incompetent subordinates. James’s spivs and confidence tricksters often wore an amiable smile that never quite masked their mercenary nature, and he was equally adept at portraying the exploiter and the exploited within the criminal milieu. Rowton, the cynical speedway troupe owner in Once a Jolly Swagman (Jack Lee 1949), is a wholly believable figure, especially when contrasted with Dirk Bogarde’s stagey efforts at a ‘cockney’ accent. Three years later, his crooked boxing promoter Danny Marks in Emergency Call (Lewis Gilbert 1952)  pattered away with brash desperation as the forces of criminal retribution arrived. If Soho habitué was one facet of James’s range as a character actor, another, less well remembered, aspect to his talents was that of portraying members of the Establishment. His understated air of intensity served well as Henry Hodgson, an upper-​middle-​class yoga expert in The Man in Black (Francis Searle 1949) –​and until 1960 James’s film roles often encompassed several authority figures. These often had an appealing world-​weary quality, from his Superintendent Williams in Park Plaza 605 (Bernard Knowles 1953)  to the desk sergeant in I Believe in You. John Fisher thought that in Hancock’s Half Hour (BBC 1954–​60) the actor was ‘as adaptable as a Swiss army knife, capable of instigating the plot or dissolving unselfishly into the background as the scripts dictated’ (2008: 268) and this equally applies to James’s best work in British cinema. He might be phlegmatic, such as his nightwatchman in The Crowded Day (John Guillermin 1954), or as brashly aggressive as his corrupt pub landlord in Time Gentlemen, Please! (Lewis Gilbert 1952). One popular form of 1950s British film that James rarely appeared in was the Second World War epic, although his Chief Petty Officer Thorpe in The Silent Enemy (William Fairchild 1958) is a wholly convincing performance of a stoic but weary NCO. The film career of Sidney James was almost entirely British based, but although he never worked in Hollywood, he did feature in a handful of ‘international films’ shot in the UK or Europe, such as Trapeze (Carol Reed 1956) and Seagulls Over Sorrento (John Boulting 1954).2 The Iron 2

It is hard not to double take at Sidney James in a scene with Burt Lancaster or Gene Kelly.

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206     Ladies and gentlemen of character Petticoat (Ralph Thomas 1956) had James, clad in a truly bizarre toupee that resembled a Brillo pad, appearing opposite Bob Hope and Katherine Hepburn and A King in New York (Charlie Chaplin 1957) featured James as an advertising agent tempting Chaplin’s exiled monarch. He also essayed hard-​bitten American newspaper men in The Story of Esther Costello (David Miller 1957), opposite Joan Crawford, and Another Time, Another Place (Lewis Allen 1958), one of the few films with a cast list including James, Lana Turner and Sean Connery. The nearest James ever came to appear in a Hollywood thriller, a milieu that James’s air of professional cynicism was well suited to, was a supporting role in The Man Inside (John Gilling 1958), made by Warwick productions, the company responsible for the British output of Columbia Pictures during the 1950s. He joined an eclectic roster of actors –​Jack Palance, Anita Ekberg, Nigel Patrick, the near-​inevitable Bonar Colleano, plus Anthony Newley as a Spanish (!) taxi driver –​as Franklin, a private detective who hires Milos March (Palance with a Texan accent) to find a jewel thief. Some of The Man Inside seems to be shot in the UK, with various American cars dotted around the streets in an attempt to hide the Home Counties locations, but James’s scenes with Palance do make one wonder if he could have enjoyed the sort of roles played by Ernest Borgnine. It is wholly plausible to see him as the genially sinister Sergeant Judson in From Here to Eternity (Fred Zinnemann 1953)  or as Coley Trimble, battling Spencer Tracy in Bad Day at Black Rock (John Sturges 1955). It is also eminently possible to envisage James as Marty (Delbert Mann 1955); few of his British film or TV roles, aside from Carry On Cabby exploited his gift for understated pathos. The actor once remarked, ‘I didn’t want to go to the States because I think there are too many blokes like me, in the States’ (quoted in Ross 2011: 67). In the event, American was one of the arrays of accents James was required to assume for post-​war British films. In 1948 he was one of the heavies in No Orchids for Miss Blandish (St John L. Clowes) and in the 1950s the actor would appear in comedies and drama opposite Colleano. Two of James’s US roles for Ken Hughes represent some of the most ambitious of his film career. The House Across the Lake (1954) was a US-​style film noir transposed to a Home Counties setting and adapted from Hughes’s novel, High Wray. James’s incisive performance of quiet self-​loathing as the American expatriate businessman Beverly Forrest is a far cry from his future Carry On film image. The House Across the Lake represents the opportunities the actor was sometimes presented by low-​budget second features, just as Joe MacBeth (1955) displays the frequently surreal heights attained by post-​war British cinema. On a not limitless budget, Hughes creates a dystopian vision of New  York, as recreated in Shepperton Studios, the backdrop to a reworking of Shakespearian tragedy as a gangland drama. Monthly Film Bulletin

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Sidney  James     207 moaned about the picture existing in ‘the most artificial of vacuums’ (Review 1955:  175), but the studio-​bound mise en scène highlights the intense central performances of Paul Douglas, Ruth Roman and James as ‘Banky’, the less than imaginatively renamed Banquo figure. The ‘Ghost at the Feast’ scene, featuring an aggrieved looking demob-​suit-​clad James materialising to the general consternation of Mr Macbeth will forcibly imprint itself upon all who see it. Until the mid-​1950s James was equally likely to be cast in such dramatic role as he was in comic parts and one of the most prominent early examples of the latter was The Lavender Hill Mob. For many years, Alec Guinness’s middle-​aged Bank of England security clerk Henry Holland has planned to rob the Bank of England and to do so he needs to engage two career thieves, one of whom is James’s ‘Lackery Wood, the Wandsworth Boy’. It was the first of several roles for the studio, and his performance was critically acclaimed on both sides of the Atlantic. Bosley Crowther declared that ‘Guinness and Mr. Holloway are deliciously adroit in their roles’ and ‘Sidney James and Alfie Bass support them with comparable slyness as a pair of hen-​pecked crooks’ (1951: n.p.), while Monthly Film Bulletin opined that ‘Sidney James and Alfie Bass as the professional thieves are particularly good’ (Review 1951: 292). C. A. Lejeune praised how the picture made ‘full use of the London scene, the London habit, and the people and institutions of London’ (1951: 6), of which James now seemed an integral part. It was also much appreciated by the young comedy scriptwriters Ray Galton and Alan Simpson. Wood was the character who came to mind when they were looking for an actor to fill the role of a crooked straight man in the new radio situation comedy Hancock’s Half Hour. The star and his writers decided to eschew music hall foils and employ ‘legitimate actors’ for his new situation comedy. When the show began on radio in 1954 James was but one of the principal supporting cast members, but when he recorded his final appearances in the television series in 1960, the public viewed the two as a double act, with laconic wide boy ‘Sid’ as the equal partner to Tony Hancock’s peevish suburbanite. The two never appeared together in a film, asides from the dire service comedy Orders Are Orders, produced before Hancock’s Half Hour commenced broadcasting. However, at the end of the 1950s, James’s screen image was now primarily ‘Sid the Spiv’ of Railway Cuttings, and in this guise, he narrated a Rank Look at Life travelogue about London’s markets (1959) and a cinema featurette about British film comedy. Pictures of James featured in Radio Fun comic strips about Tony Hancock, and he was even a nemesis in the Hancock’s Half Hour Chad Valley board game. The ‘Sid’ character from Hancock’s Half Hour did feature in films opposite other comics, such as Arthur Askey in Make Mine a Million

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208     Ladies and gentlemen of character (Lance Comfort 1959)  and comedy now began to dominate James’s cinema roles even if with some of his pictures you wondered why he bothered leaving the house. He certainly deserved some form of award for bravery in the face of deadly scripts for What a Whopper.3 Rather more rewarding was Desert Mice (Michael Relph 1959), where James’s bravado is brilliantly deployed as Bert, the lead comedian of the world’s worst ENSA troupe, and Hell Drivers where James’s seemingly amiable persona, with his ever-​present air of bonhomie, was subverted. The ready grin of Dusty masks a bored venial individual who provokes fights and workplace divisions to stave off the misery of working as a lorry driver in the middy of a rural wasteland. The other key development in James’s transformation to a screen comedy star came in 1960 when he took a leading role in Carry On Constable.4 Stardom was status the actor was wary of, and throughout most of his early film career James believed that it was more lucrative to be a frequently employed supporting actor; he made ten films in 1954 alone. ‘I don’t like this star business. I think, taking a long-​term view, I am only a character actor, and I think once you start this star business you have got to wait for star parts to come along … and I don’t consider myself a star’ (quoted in Goodwin 2011:  70). One of his last supporting roles, Perce the lorry driver in The 39 Steps (Ralph Thomas 1959), demonstrated how James belonged to the First XI of British Cinema Character Actors, nonchalantly asking Kenneth More’s Richard Hannay, ‘Have you ever been inside?’ as he sizes up to a possibly dangerous opponent. Such small but utterly telling parts were to vanish from James’s CV a few years after the release of Carry On Constable when he first starred in one of the UK’s cinematic staples. Jeffrey Richards went so far as to claim that the series ‘allegedly included twenty-​nine films but were in fact the same film made twenty-​nine times’ (1997: 165), but the first six entries do not adhere to this stereotype. Norman Hudis often devised clever vignettes about integrity versus self-​obsessed vanity, and so Eric Barker gives a brilliantly convincing portrayal of a pompous and irascible inspector in Constable. James himself is the unselfish straight man, rather than the Railway Cuttings wide boy, and his first three Carry On films highlighted his strengths as the pivot around which the narrative revolves. ‘Comedy is hard work and I am not really a comedian … I need funny people around me to get the best out of myself ’ (James quoted The only picture to combine the talents of James, Adam Faith and a thirty-​eight-​year-​old Terence Longdon playing a ‘young’ scientist (by dint of combing his hair forwards), plus a model of the Loch Ness monster that looks as though it inflated the budget by 2/​9d. 4 James was not actually first choice for Sergeant Frank Wilkins –​Peter Rogers considered casting the Edinburgh comic Chic Murray as an attempt to broaden the appeal of Carry Ons in Scotland (Bright and Ross 2000: 93). 3

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Sidney  James     209 in Goodwin 2011:  vii). Indeed, James’s barely restrained alarm at the entrance of Charles Hawtrey to the police station in Constable is one of the finest single scenes of twentieth-​century British cinema. The Hudis-​ penned stories often carried a degree of acute social observation –​Wellington Crowther (James) in Cruising is all too aware that the shipping company directors object to an up-​from-​the-​ranks ‘H-​dropper’ being a cruise liner captain –​and this continued with Cabby, the first to be written by Talbot Rothwell. The first three Carry On films opted for an institutional setting, one with its own set of rules and social mores. Even in the earliest pictures, placing the cast in a recognisable and mundane world ran the very real risk of highlighting their anachronistic appearance. Peter Mills complained of the ‘long outdated parade to the day’s beat’ (1960: 24), while the rainswept Ealing locations circa autumn 1959 appear bleaker than any north-​country ‘kitchen sink’ film. However, Cabby perfectly captures the zeitgeist of early 1960s consumerism with its glossy ranks of Ford Consul-​Cortina minicabs –​and is a prime example of how a Carry On film was well worth the 1/​9d ticket. For many families, to see James and the rest of the team, followed by steak and chips at the local Golden Egg was often the high point of the week –​accompanied by the latest Edgar Wallace B-​film and a Kia-​Ora in the interval. Nor is it quite the Carry On of popular myth, the films with an ‘obsession with bodily functions, the caterwauling and absurdity’ (Lewis 2001: 3–​4) and James’s performances opposite an equally strong character actor were frequently a series high-​point. In Constable, the Monthly Film Bulletin singled out ‘Eric Barker’s disorganised Inspector and Sidney James’ infinitely weary Sergeant’ as coming ‘nearest to real humour’ (Review 1960: 51). Peter Mills cited James and Hattie Jacques as the only two cast members who seemed ‘to know what filming is all about’ (1960: 24) and Elspeth Grant singled out ‘Mr. Sidney James and Miss Hattie Jacques’ as ‘both admirably human’ (1960: 45). The delightful performances of this same duo in Cabby create the only believable marriage in the entire series  –​Peggy Hawkins simultaneously shrewd, knowing and vulnerable, and Charlie, determined, hard-​working and, in the nicest manner, misguided. The first half of the 1960s saw James alternate comedies for Rogers and Thomas with his final dramatic role, that of an ‘Australian’ racing engineer in The Green Helmet and the well-​crafted horror comedy What a Carve Up (Pat Jackson 1961). Raymond Durgnat noted of the latter that one of the best scenes is one in which James and Kenneth Connor dine on fish and chips in their gloomy lodging house, a scene of ‘comic melancholy missing from even the best of the Carry On series’ (1970: 208). The Beauty Jungle (Val Guest 1964) has James appearing as a guest star –​a further indication of celluloid celebrity –​as ‘himself ’, a judge at a Butlin’s beauty contest. Robert Shail observes how Guest could ‘bring out the tensions

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210     Ladies and gentlemen of character just under the mundane surface of everyday British life’ (2007: 87), and the footage of Weston-​super-​Mare during 1963 perfectly captures a time when would-​be hipsters chain-​smoked while doing the twist. The contest that James is attending is one in a long succession of tacky events5 that the heroine Shirley (Janette Scott) had won. Interspersed with shots of a cold, wet holiday camp are close-​ups of ‘Sid James’ donning a comic expression for the punters and otherwise grimly chain-​smoking through an afternoon of provincial tat. In 1964 James played his first and only significant role for his home country’s cinema, Tokoloshe: The Evil Spirit (Peter Prowse 1964) as Harry Parsons, a retired sailor facing blindness. The film received a British release in 1971 and aside from a guest cameo in the farce Stop Exchange (Howard Rennie 1970), James was never to make another South African film. In 1963 James took out British nationality, and his billing marked his starring role in the BBC comedy/​drama Taxi! as ‘Sid’, and a guest starring role in Three Hats for Lisa (Sidney Hayers 1965) denotes how the character actor ‘Sidney James’ now appeared to belong to a past epoch. Three Hats for Lisa is a swinging pop musical in which James plays Sid Marks, a chirpy Austin FX4 driver hired to transport Joe Brown and his chums around a colourful and litter-​free London. The film received a surprisingly positive review from the Guardian, commenting that it ‘deserves a sympathetic reception’ and with a mention of ‘that happy cabby Sid James’ (Wright 1965: 13). Three Hats for Lisa further serves as a vivid reminder of the sometimes-​ phantasmagorical nature of British commercial cinema –​a musical with Brown, Una Stubbs, an almost unrecognisably fresh-​faced Peter Bowles and a cameo from Jeremy Lloyd. The plot combines uber-​1960s scenes of the as yet unopened Post Office Tower with a ‘Continental’ leading lady (Sophie Hardy) –​who was very much in the 1950s Mylène Demongeot tradition –​and a solo number from James. When François Truffaut infamously claimed that there was ‘a certain contradiction between the terms “cinema” and “Britain” ’ (1968: 100), he had clearly never witnessed James dancing on the banks of the Thames while performing ‘Bermondsey’.6 Back at Pinewood, Carry On Cleo (1964) marked a change in his film persona from straight man to (raddled) Lothario. Three years earlier with Regardless (1961) his employment exchange manager is mistaken for a doctor, and, was often the case in an early 1960s British comedy, called upon to react to the sight of comely nurses but this was mild compared Namely ‘Miss Devonshire Cream’, ‘Cheltenham’s Miss Banana Yoghurt’ and ‘Pontypool’s Crumpet Queen’. 6 Remaining with a nouvelle vague theme, how about a British Bande à part starring James, Jacques and Hawtrey? Or Jim Dale in a Pinewood remake of A Bout de Souffle (Jean-​Luc Godard 1960), crashing his stolen Morris Minor convertible into Kenneth Williams’s Humber Super Snipe? 5

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Sidney  James     211 with Mark Anthony uttering ‘Puer! Oh, Puer!’ at the prospect of seducing Cleo (Amanda Barrie, on top form). Sid the Spiv was now Sid the Roué and Cleo also hailed the series’ wholesale embracing of parody costume drama:  Ian Wright accurately describes the film as ‘intimate pantomime’ (1964:  11) and John Fisher contended that Carry On films sans Sidney James are ‘like apple pie without the cloves, roast beef without the horseradish’ (2008: 291). This is the case when the picture in question was truly excellent, such as Screaming (1966) which starred Harry H. Corbett, or the badly balanced Follow That Camel (1967), which used Phil Silvers as a replacement for James.7 The American comic’s performance only reminded audiences of James’s art in concealing his art, and this was also the case for those Carry Ons that were so bad that they rarely surface on daytime television. In Regardless James was once again the unselfish straight man linking a succession of badly edited vignettes. In the better entries in the series, he presided over a comedy with an appeal best evoked by Gilbert Adair, whose 1985 spoof Roland Barthes’ article ‘The Nautilus and the Nursery’ is still a perfect encapsulation of the period-​set Carry On: It does not matter that Carry On Cowboy was all too visibly shot somewhere in the south of England, since it is the very falseness of the landscape which clinches, as it were, the synecdoche nature of the whole enterprise:  the producers had only to crown the green and gently undulating English countryside with a sheriff ’s office, a saloon bar and a livery stable, like a schoolboy wearing a Stetson hat, and the trick was done. The game being played, it hardly needs to be added, is Cowboys and Indians (for some reason, no doubt because of its association with just such children’s games, the word ‘cowboy’ has seldom figured in the title of any Western with pretensions to seriousness); and one can see  –​better, probably, in this film than in any of the others  –​with what ease the more or less permanent repertory troupe invites comparison with a gang of children (or, at least, its comic-​strip caricature). (1985: 131)

The James figure of Cowboy and especially his Sir Sidney Ruff-​Diamond of Up the Khyber (1968) may have been a lothario but an utterly safe one. This state of affairs collapsed with Camping (1969) as the seventeenth Carry On, which marked a return to a contemporary setting (Doctor (1967) had a safely institutional setting). It commences with Sid Boggle (James of course) and Bernie Lugg (Bernard Bresslaw) taking their girlfriends (Joan Sims and Dilys Laye) to their local ABC picture house where the star attraction is Nudist Paradise (Charles Saunders 1958). Derek Malcolm remarked that, ‘Middle-​aged types naturally predominate since the series 7

The filming schedules clashed with the recording of his ITV sitcom George and the Dragon.

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212     Ladies and gentlemen of character has been going for so long and they are drawn as shrewdly and spitefully as in any other comedy outside “Ayckbourn” ’ (1978: 11). And as a precis of the sort of cinema patron who paid 2/​6d to view an ageing post-​war naturist film, the first reel of Camping is quite perfect. The previous holiday-​related Carry On film, Cruising, revels in an air of luxury with well-​groomed passengers and a ship’s buffet ‘laden with colourful jellies, cakes and blancmange, resplendent in piped cream and glacé cherries, in an over-​decorative style reminiscent of Fanny Craddock’ (Kerry 2011: 12). Furthermore, Cabby showcases the fleet of Glamcabs as an exciting new presence in Windsor, but towards the end of the decade, the attitudes of Sid and company towards the young are fearful, prurient and insular. Michael Billington made the acute observation that ‘the Carry On team are at their best when parodying a particular genre –​the Western, the spy film, the Indian army film –​rather than then when providing basic British comedy’ (1969: 25). Films such as Camping relied even more heavily on the skills of James and his fellow team members to provide a basic framework, and the actor’s comedy timing remained immaculate even when Rothwell’s scripts appeared to be a compendium of rejected Max Miller one-​liners. James was one of the sole redeeming elements of Up the Jungle (1970), a film primarily notable for its Woolworth’s surplus palm trees and Bernard Bresslaw’s depiction of an African servant. In a Carry On with a contemporary setting, Thomas’s direction usually failed to exploit the opportunities presented to him, which has little to do with the restricted budget. The locations of Slough, Windsor and Maidenhead captured the 1960s and 1970s version of John Betjeman’s Metroland but rarely did a Carry On, except for Cabby, exploit the Home Counties’ landscape. Abroad (1972) commences with promise, the opening scene unfolding in Sid’s pub. It was a scenario that would have exploited James’s mastery of the comedy of despair as shown in Desert Mice and The Square Ring (Basil Dearden 1953), where his boxing stadium manager brandishes a cigar he could barely afford to smoke, and in the saloon bar the decor is utterly and fantastically 1972, from the Watney’s Red Barrel to the greying pork pies in a Formica display cabinet. It was the type of licensed venue that Knucksie might have retired to in late middle age. Alas, the narrative soon moves to Pinewood’s less than convincing interpretation of ‘Spain’. On occasion, a Rogers/​Thomas film might contain an entertaining vignette of utter seediness –​in Raising the Wind (1961) James is a composer of advertising jingles, genially pounding away at a piano and oblivious to the fact that his composition and singing alike both have the power to induce extreme suffering. With Matron (1972), James’s last really good Carry On, Sid and his gang of would-​be master criminals spend much of the plot either lurking in a hospital car park in their second-​hand Ford Zodiac Mk. III getaway car or merely squabbling in

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Sidney  James     213 their flat about bus routes as they plan another inept heist. But such observational gems were now very much the exception to the rule, with the film’s physical appearance betraying the gimcrack parsimony of its budget. In 1960 the critic Peter Baker considered James to be an ‘an artist I would like to see taken more seriously’ (1960: 24), but in the early 1970s he was heading the bill of pictures that were not wry observations of seediness –​they truly were seedy. It was as if any vestige of style seemed to vanish while ‘the ebbing of the films’ vitality is most evident on those faces (of the actors’ (Medhurst 2007: 133). The scripts became increasingly mean-​spirited –​ Loving (1970) had a vague Swinging London setting (several years too late), an ineptly-​timed pie-​fight finale8 and more cruel mockery of Hattie Jacques. James, together with the juvenile leads Jackie Piper and Richard O’Callaghan, manages to save the film just as his works foreman in the unions of At Your Convenience (1971) is a welcome distraction from the screenplay’s views on trade unions. Possibly not coincidentally this was the first Carry On to lose money at the box office initially and to rewatch At Your Convenience is sometimes to experience a filmic version of a J. G. Ballard novel as directed by Ken Loach; a West London of rusting Ford Prefects, bare light bulbs and kitchens caked with congealed fat.9 However, if audiences required more proof of James’s talents, they are ever present in his scenes opposite Hattie Jacques, squabbling about their budgerigar and delighting how his race winnings gain him a new Morris Marina.10 Such moments also serve as a reminder of how seldom the series used James’s gift for portraying brash desperation. Andy Medhurst referred to the ‘warm, boozy, communal embrace’ of the Carry On films (1992:  20), but this jovial ethos could only be sustained by the film maintaining at least a surface gloss. By the mid-​1970s the pictures came to resemble the grimmest of home movies. The Carry Ons of the previous decade, such as Cowboy with its charming ballad from Angela Douglas or the well-​dressed extras in Cruising, now seemed like distant dreams. In 1969, David Rider praised Up the Khyber (1968) for its performances –​‘Sid James, in fact, has refined his performance to such an extent he needs to do very little to raise laughs’ –​and its polish –​‘There’s nothing worse than a tatty comedy but this film is far from that –​it looks good, it sounds good and by golly it’ll make a pile. I hope the cast are on percentages’ (1969:  38).11 By 1974 much of the eighteenth-​century-​set A further demonstration that Gerald Thomas was not a great director of slapstick. Derek Malcolm rather brilliantly referred to it as ‘a particularly ghastly flash in the pan’ (1971: 10). 10 A 1.8 Super Coupe to be precise. 11 They famously were not. 8 9



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214     Ladies and gentlemen of character Dick resembled a car park, and it is the one film where the actor’s trademark laugh sounds utterly forced. ‘Sid James, as ever, croaks out those subtleties familiar to bar-​flies and admirers of Archie Rice pier shows’, stated Nigel Gearing (1974: 170–​1), with no small measure of perception. It was, fortunately, the actor’s last Carry On,12 as he was already enjoying immense success in the ITV sitcom Bless This House (1971–​76) as a harassed suburban paterfamilias. He repeated this role in the film version (Gerald Thomas 1972), and his scenes opposite his screen son Robin Askwith were delightful, but his early death at the age of sixty-​ two in 1976 robbed filmgoers and TV viewers alike of further opportunities to appreciate his range. The younger James would have been perfect as Harry Fabian, the brash opportunistic outsider of Night and the City (Jules Dassin 1950), just as he may have created the definitive cinematic Alfie Elkins. The older James might have been, as John Fisher suggests, an intriguing alternative to George Cole as Arthur Daley in Minder (2008: 291) and one can only speculate about how he would have played Max in Harold Pinter’s The Homecoming –​a part he was asked to play in the 1960s (Reina James quoted in Jacobs 2009: n.p.). James was also Lionel Bart’s first choice to portray Fagin onstage (Moody 2013: 51) and in the late 1950s he turned down the role of Archie Rice in a South African theatre version of The Entertainer. ‘Although I  have lived it, I couldn’t hope to come anywhere near Olivier’s performance’ (quoted in Goodwin 2011: 140). At his considerable best, Sidney James always showed the audience a fully realised three-​dimensional character right in the truth of the moment. They were at their most engaging when they variously served to mock, support and cajole a gamut of Quixotic heroes, from the genteel bank robber of Alec Guinness to the ‘baroque paranoid grandeur’ of Tony Hancock (Richardson 1960: 26). In 1973 the BBC produced a version of The Adventures of Don Quixote (Alvin Rakoff ), with Rex Harrison as the eponymous knight and Frank Finlay as his squire. In a parallel universe, it would have been made in 1958 and starred the two inmates of Railway Cuttings. And one can just envisage the question ‘what giants?’ being asked in that gentle South African-​accented voice as Hancock attempts to tilt at yet more windmills.

12

James was prevented from starring in Behind (1975) due to theatre commitments in Australia. That Carry On at least benefited from Elke Sommer’s droll leading lady whereas England (1976) is unwatchable and Emmannuelle is vile, showing contempt in equal measure for the audience and the cast. Just look at the despair in Joan Sims’s eyes, the self-​loathing in every line delivered by Kenneth Williams and the muddy cinematography that makes the film resemble a faded copy of Penthouse magazine.

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Bibliography Adair, Gilbert (1985), ‘The Nautilus and the Nursery’, Sight & Sound, Spring,  130–​2. Baker, Peter (1960), ‘Desert Mice’, Films and Filming, January, 24. Barr, Charles (1998), Ealing Studios (3rd ed.), London: Continuum. Bean, Robin (1959), ‘Upstairs and Downstairs’, Films and Filming, October, 24. Billington, Michael (1969), ‘Cinema:  The Vitality of Vice’, Illustrated London News, 12 July, 25. Bold, Alan (ed.) (1976), Cambridge Book of English Verse, 1939–​1975. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Bright, Morris and Ross, Robert (2000), Mr. Carry On: The Life and Work of Peter Rogers, London: BBC. Chapman, James (2012), ‘A Short History of the “Carry On” films’, in Hunter I. Q. and Porter, Laraine (eds.) British Comedy Cinema, London: Routledge. Crowther, Bosley (1951), ‘The Screen in Review: “The Lavender Hill Mob”, with Alec Guinness, First Offering at New Fine Arts Theatre’, New York Times, 16 October. Dent, Alan (1958), ‘The World of the Cinema:  Dances of Death’, Illustrated London News, 22 March, 35. Durgnat, Raymond (1962), ‘Editorial’, Motion 3, November, 4. Durgnat, Raymond (1970), A Mirror for England: British Movies from Austerity to Affluence, London: Faber & Faber. Farber, Manny (1962–​ 63), ‘Elephant Art vs Termite Art’, Film Culture 27, Winter,  9–​13. Farber, Manny and Walsh, Robert (1998), Negative Space: Manny Farber on the Movies, Cambridge, MA: Da Capo Press. Fisher, John (2008), Tony Hancock:  The Definitive Biography, London:  Harper Collins. Gale, Steven H. (ed.) (2001), The Films of Harold Pinter, New York: State University of New York Press. Gearing, Nigel (1974), ‘Carry On Dick’, Monthly Film Bulletin, 41(487), August, 170–​1. Geraghty, Christine (2000), British Cinema in the Fifties: Gender, Genre and the ‘New Look’, London: Routledge. Goodwin, Cliff (2011), Sid James: A Biography, London: Virgin Books. Grant, Elspeth (1955), ‘At the Pictures: Dog-​Watch Surgery’, The Tatler, 27 July, 22. Grant, Elspeth (1960), ‘Cinema: A Flashback to Real Fun’, The Tatler, 9 March, 45. Grant, Linda (2007), ‘Deathly Prose’, The Guardian, 28 June. Harper, Sue and Porter, Vincent (2003), British Cinema of the 1950s: The Decline of Deference, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hudis, Norman (2008), No Laughing Matter: How I Carried On, Clacton-​on-​Sea, UK: Apex. Hunt, Leon (1998), British Low Culture:  From Safari Suits to Sexploitation, London: Routledge. Jacobs, Gerald (2009), ‘Joyous, Exciting and Rarely There:  My Dad Sid James’, Jewish Chronicle, 1 May. Kerry, Matthew (2011), The Holiday & British Film, London: Palgrave.

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216     Ladies and gentlemen of character Lejeune, C. A. (1951), ‘At the Films: Ealing for England’, The Observer, 6 July, 6. Lewis, Roger (1994), The Life & Death of Peter Sellers, London: Century. Lewis, Roger (2001), Charles Hawtrey, 1914–​1988: The Man Who Was Private Widdle, London: Faber & Faber. MacCabe, Colin (1999), ‘Why “Carry On Cleo” and “Carry On Up the Khyber” Are Two of the Best Films Ever’, The Guardian, 29 January. Malcolm, Derek (1970), ‘Filleted Hamlet’, The Guardian, 9 April, 10. Malcolm, Derek (1971), ‘Out of Bondage’, The Guardian, 16 December, 10. Malcolm, Derek (1978), ‘The Moving Seaside Postcard Show’, The Guardian, 22 April, 11. Mayer, Geoff (2003), Guide to British Cinema, Westport, CT:  Greenwood Press. McFarlane, Brian (1997), An Autobiography of British Cinema, London: Methuen. Medhurst, Andy (1986), ‘Music Hall and British Cinema’, in Barr, Charles (ed.) All Our Yesterdays: 90 Years of British Cinema, London: BFI. Medhurst, Andy (1992), ‘Carry On Camp’, Sight & Sound, August, 16–​20. Medhurst, Andy (2007), A National Joke: Popular Comedy and English Cultural Identities, London: Routledge. Mills, Peter (1960), ‘Carry On Constable’, Films and Filming, April, 24. Moody, Ron (2013), A Still Untitled (Not Quite) Autobiography, London: Robson Press. Murphy, Robert (1992), Sixties British Cinema, London: BFI. Orwell, George (1998), The Complete Works of George Orwell, Vol. 13, London: Secker & Warburg. Powell, Dilys (1989), The Golden Screen: Fifty Years of Films, London: Headline Book Publishing. Review (1951), ‘The Lavender Hill Mob’, Monthly Film Bulletin, 18(210), July, 292. Review (1955), ‘Joe Macbeth’, Monthly Film Bulletin, 22(263), December, 175. Review (1960), ‘Carry On Constable’, Monthly Film Bulletin, 27(315), April, 51. Richards, Jeffrey (1997), Films and British National Identity:  From Dickens to ‘Dad’s Army’, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Richardson, Maurice (1960), ‘Subjects for the Needle’, The Observer, 4 December, 26. Roberts, Andrew (2015), ‘Warren Mitchell Obituary’, Sight & Sound, 1 December. Rolinson, Dave (2000), ‘ “If They Want Culture, They Pay”:  Consumerism and Alienation in 1950s Comedies’, in MacKillop, Ian and Sinyard, Neil (eds.) British Cinema of the 1950s: A Celebration, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Ross, Robert (2011), Smasher! The Life of Sid James, London: J. R. Books. Shail, Robert (2007), British Film Directors:  A Critical Guide, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Spicer, Andrew (2007), European Film Noir, Manchester:  Manchester University Press. Stevens, Christopher (2011), Born Brilliant:  The Life of Kenneth Williams, London: John Murray. Truffaut, François (1968), Hitchcock, London: Secker & Warburg. Webber, Richard (2011), Fifty Years of the Carry On, London: Arrow.

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Williams, Melanie (2011), ‘Entering the Paradise of Anomalies: Studying Female Character Acting in British Cinema’, Screen, 52(1), Spring, 97–​104. Wright, Ian (1964), ‘This Week’s Films in London’, The Guardian, 11 December, 11. Wright, Ian (1965), ‘This Week’s Films in London’, The Guardian, 28 May, 13.

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James Robertson Justice: ‘What’s the bleeding time?’

James Robertson Justice was born James Norval Harold Justice in Lee, London on 15 June 1907 and died on 2 July 1975 in Romsey, Hampshire. He was a larger-​than-​life character actor who entered films in 1944 and achieved stardom with his portrayal of the surgeon Sir Lancelot Spratt in Doctor in the House. This role dominated the remainder of his screen career, often in pictures opposite Dirk Bogarde or Leslie Phillips. When reviewing The Fast Lady, the critic Tony Mallerman appeared to be channelling the spirit of Raymond Huntley when he opined that ‘the performances, too, are such as we have been fleeing from in British comedies for years’. He goes on to suggest that ‘someone should advise James Robertson Justice, for instance, to go away and prepare for the next Captain Bligh’ (1963: 39). The actor himself claimed that his thespian ability was ‘terrible’ and that what he most liked about the profession was ‘the pay packet at the end of the week (quoted in Armstrong 1957: 7). The film career of James Robertson Justice began when he was in early middle age, and more than possibly any actor in this book, his off-​screen and on-​screen persona appeared inextricably linked. David Rider reviewed Father Came Too! with the description of Justice’s role as bearing ‘a remarkably strong resemblance to James Robertson Justice playing practically every other part that you can think of ’ (1964: 26). He was also once described by an editor of Sight & Sound as ‘a Woolworth’s actor’ –​i.e. one prone to giving one performance on a regular basis.1 British films of the 1950s certainly did not lack for comic ogres and paterfamilias. Robert Morley’s characters could be self-​satisfied and self-​ conscious in their eccentric mannerisms, such as Lord Lorgan in Ealing’s The Rainbow Jacket (Basil Dearden 1954)  and Alastair Sim’s screen manner had an ‘underlying jolly eccentric, not-​so-​jolly, verging on the 1

Author personal communication, 2010.

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James Robertson Justice     219

Figure 12  James Robertson Justice in Doctor in Clover (1966)

sinister, ambivalence’ (Babington 2002: 157). The sublimely brilliant Cecil Parker was variously weak and vacillating as in The Man in the White Suit (Alexander Mackendrick 1951), blustering and corrupt in The Ladykillers or well meaning as in I Believe in You. And, at the height of his powers, James Robertson Justice created believable and sometimes nuanced figures from his celluloid ogres. The public responded to his ‘personality acting’ as an upper-​class curmudgeon for more than a decade, and Lawrence Shaffer wrote of how the best of such performances was not the absence of acting, as with Fabian, Elvis Presley, and hundreds of grade B movie actors. Rather, it is acting that can concentrate almost exclusively on expressive behaviour because the role strikes such a chord in the actor’s psyche that he doesn’t have to worry about defining traits and mannerisms. When the role stimulates and provides for the personality actor to put his very best behavioural leg forward, then it is an archetypal role for that actor. (1973: 104–​5)

Shaffer used Gene Hackman’s performance in The French Connection (William Friedkin 1971)  as an example of this form of acting, but he could have equally cited Justice’s defining role as Sir Lancelot Spratt in Doctor in the House. By 1962 Alan Dent referred to the actor’s ‘one short fleeting appearance of utter majesty’ (1962:  38) in Crooks Anonymous, which encapsulates Justice’s appeal –​he commanded the screen.

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220     Ladies and gentlemen of character Geoffrey Macnab refers to the divide between the ‘unassuming behaviour of the character actor and self-​promoting antics of the star’ (2000: 101), and Justice’s many off-​screen accomplishments2 reinforced the idea that he was a multi-​talented gentleman. However, his persona had been developed long before his screen career and it was as carefully constructed as that of many a Hollywood leading man. Justice liked to claim that he was born underneath a whisky distillery on the Isle of Skye and this ‘Scottish’ heritage would come to be deployed in all media, from Rank Organisation PR shots to guest starring as a villainous laird in The Last of the McHancocks, a 1958 edition of Hancock’s Half Hour. In fact, the actor was born in South London and raised in Bromley –​even the name of ‘Justice’ name was bestowed upon himself. After leaving Marlborough –​ he would claim to hold a PhD from Bonn University –​and in the 1920s and 1930s Justice was variously a schoolmaster in Canada, the secretary of the British Ice Hockey Association and employed at the Brooklands racing circuit. Then, in the mildly incredulous words of Roger Lewis: Justice spent an afternoon –​possibly as much as a few days –​‘getting a taste of action’ with the International Brigade during the Spanish Civil War. ‘Look! Greylag geese!’ he is remembered as booming. He joined the Royal Navy Volunteer Reserve in time for his ship to be ‘bombed by German aircraft while at anchor at Port Tewfik’. He was discharged in 1943, claiming to have been ‘the last man alive to have been shot at in anger by bow and arrow’. (2008: n.p.)

To add to the skills, Justice was fluent in several languages and a falconer.3 He was also an amateur stage performer and, after being invalided out of the navy, he took an uncredited role as operations room officer in For Those in Peril (Charles Crichton 1944)  and the Ealing director Harry Watt saw Justice appearing as a chairman at the Players Theatre. This resulted in his being cast as a centurion in Fiddlers Three (Harry Watt 1944). After the end of the war, Justice continued acting, together with other off-​screen roles:  he worked as a location manager on the Isle of Skye for The Brothers (David MacDonald 1947) (Hodgson 2013: 105). For Ealing, he essayed benevolent authority figures such as Dr Maclaren in Whisky Galore! (Alexander Mackendrick 1948) or an engine room officer in Pool of London (Basil Dearden 1951). His Petty Officer ‘Taff ’ Evans in Scott of the Antarctic is a rare example of Justice cast as an NCO, for his standard screen image was a member of the Establishment, both as an upstanding member of the community or as a comic ogre. Such as regularly appearing in photographs with the Duke of Edinburgh and twice being elected Rector of Edinburgh University. 3 One of Dennis Potter’s first roles at the BBC was to supervise Justice on Panorama defending game hunting (Gilbert 2002: 56). 2

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James Robertson Justice     221 The film that established what was to become Justice’s popular screen persona was Dr Grimstone in Peter Ustinov’s 1948 version of Vice Versa. His performance was critically acclaimed  –​‘a lovely combination’ of Dickens’s Dr Blimber and Dr Strong’ (Dent 1948: 24) and ‘in his first major role he outshines everybody’ (Mannock 1948: 2). It must be said that Justice’s delivery of such lines as ‘the dastardly circumstances provoked by this heinous boy’, ‘kindly do not provoke me by gulping in class’ and ‘a companion of the inferior sex’ would have been worth the price of a 1/​9d cinema ticket. In the early 1950s, Justice’s profile was such that he was referred to by the Daily Herald as belonging ‘to a dying race, the breed of British eccentrics’ (Holt 1953: 4). During this period he essayed major supporting roles in three Disney costume adventures –​The Story of Robin Hood and His Merrie Men (Ken Annakin 1952), The Sword and the Rose (Annakin 1953)  and, somewhat inevitably, Rob Roy, the Highland Rogue (Harold French 1953). Terence Pettigrew makes the tart observation that ‘Justice, never a pretty sight in drag, looks more ill-​at-​ease than a country curate caught in a vice raid’ (1982: 176) and the actor was not at his most effective in a costume drama. Somewhat more rewarding parts came with Miss Robin Hood (John Guillermin 1952), as a comically corrupt distiller named ‘the Macallister’ and The Voice of Merrill (John Gilling 1952) as the bombastic author Jonathan Roche. There were also rare forays into Hollywood film-​making with Justice as Abishai in David and Bathsheba (Henry King 1951), an example of the sort of endless film that always seemed to be aired on a Sunday afternoon on BBC1 during the 1970s. In the seven years after the Second World War, Justice had made over twenty screen appearances, and his breakthrough as a star occurred when Betty Box was planning a screen version of Richard Gordon’s comic novel Doctor in the House, in the face of considerable opposition from the Rank Organisation. The studio’s management allotted a restricted budget, which meant that James Robertson Justice, rather than Robert Morley, played the senior surgeon, Sir Lancelot Spratt. The screenplay, by Nicholas Phipps, has Dirk Bogarde’s Simon Sparrow and his three close friends attempting to become fully fledged doctors and, in doing so, coming to recognise and appreciate the old traditions. The 1950s did see in terms of specific occupational trends, two rapidly growing sectors within the middle class; first, in the science/​technology/​engineering fields, in part driven by the increasing number of non-​arts university students (doubling between the 1930s and late 1940s) and second, in the public sector especially social services and the nationalised industries. (Kynaston 2009: 144)

Sir Lancelot and his senior staff must ‘support the new students and Sparrow, in particular, as they learn not only to be doctors but also to

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222     Ladies and gentlemen of character understand the institution’ (Geraghty 2000:  67). Thus, in Doctor in the House Sparrow and company need to understand the necessity of being berated by a large bearded individual for not knowing ‘the bleeding time’. Peter Hutchings referred to Spratt as ‘one of the major castrating fathers of British cinema’ (1993:  45), but the surgeon is an ogre of a slightly different genre than Justice’s egocentric author of The Voice of Merrill or village squire in the remarkably twee Stop Press Girl (Michael Barry 1949). Sir Lancelot is a figure of purpose  –​as Ralph Thomas pointed out of the ‘bleeding time’ scene, ‘the humour there was centred on the students and their reactions to the lecturer who was, in fact, giving a perfectly plausible and accurate talk’ (1956:  5). The bombastic manner never quite masked his reassurance to the eager young, aspirational professionals. That such a paterfamilias duly recognised their diligence exemplified the ‘new Elizabethan age’ where progress and tradition coexist in harmony. Despite an election slogan of ‘Set the People Free’, Winston Churchill made ‘little effort to roll back the welfare state or even to return nationalised industries to private hands’ (Sandbrook 2005:  59). Sir Lancelot stood for patriarchal guidence as a surgeon who treated National Health Service (NHS) and private patients with the same degree of skill. A further key to the success of Doctor in the House was Justice’s comic timing, especially in his scenes opposite Kenneth More’s insouciant Grimsdyke, and to his presenting the human face of authority in a picture where the joie de vivre is palpable.4 As a screen father figure, Justice looks at least a decade older than Jack Hawkins –​in reality, they were only three years apart –​and somewhat less irascible. With Doctor in the House, the surgeon displays a professional self-​confidence that never descended into smugness and in his more amiable moments is often willing to bend or break the law to help a member of his extended family. The film’s success resulted in Justice signing a contract with the Rank Organisation, for he was now a star as decreed by the public and he certainly provided a contrast to their roster of dashing young chaps who regularly appeared in Pinewood’s PR materials. An actor who was known to drive a Mercedes-​Benz 300SL ‘Gullwing’ to Winchester market with a pig sat on the passenger seat, was guaranteed to appear larger than life. It made commercial sense for the studio to cast Justice in similar roles to Spratt, but few of them offered the same scope as Doctor in the House. The sequel, Doctor at Sea (Thomas 1955), offered one of the most fantastical casting juxtapositions of cinema history, with Justice and Brigitte Bardot aboard a freighter crewed by Maurice Denham and Michael Medwin. The Canadian-​set Campbell’s Kingdom had Justice guest starring with 4

One supporter of the film was François Truffaut –​‘All lovers of English humour have to see this movie. It has lots of spirit’ (quoted in MacKillop and Sinyard 2003: 9).

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Athene Seyler, with Peter Baker expressing his fear that ‘for one terrifying moment I expected them to appear, singing The Campbells Are Coming in duet’ (1957: 25).5 As the 1950s progressed, the actor often found himself mired in the sort of pictures described by Isabel Quigly: Altogether, a complete facade of film-​ Britishness (something like stage-​Irishness) perpetuated the idea of ourselves as we half-​mockingly liked to see ourselves, but that even we were growing a little tired of. The effect was rather like watching people talking noisily in a train, conscious that the silent rest of the compartment is listening, and somehow acting up to what is expected, caricaturing some preconceived notion of themselves. (1959: 7)

One such picture was An Alligator Named Daisy, which Justice made in 1955. Here, Donald Sinden (looking decidedly woebegone) is straight man to an aquatic co-​star, Jeanne Carson dances on dustbins while a grumpy (and bearded) press magnate commissions an ‘alligator rally’ for no good reason, complete with guest appearances from Gilbert Harding, Jimmy Edwards and Frankie Howerd. The idea of Diana Dors as Justice’s daughter is a rather beguiling one, but such films, even ones boasting a sequence of reptiles taking part in garden parties, are Eastmancolor and Technicolor celebrations of inherited income. Despite some contemporary sights such as television sets and Vauxhall E-​Series Veloxes in the background shots, the setting appears curiously time-​locked into the 1930s.6 The actor was also loaned to the Warner Brothers’ production Land of the Pharaohs to play Vashtar the master architect, a not overly plausible Kushite slave; the actor played the role as Sir Lancelot clad in a somewhat unflattering costume. As befitting one who was apparently born middle-​ aged, the forty-​ eight-​ year-​ old Justice played the venerable General Burroughs in Storm Over the Nile, a remake of The Four Feathers in which C. Aubrey Smith originally played the role of the patriarch. Marcia Landy observed that ‘the film continues to affirm traditional values of honour, tradition, duty, the fulfilment of paternal expectations and the cohesiveness of the male community (1991: 173). Here Justice presided over a ‘nice group of young English actors [who] wear their uniforms and heroism well. But they scarcely recommend this picture, which is definitely autres temps, autres moeurs’ (Crowther 1956: n.p.). Such unquestioning support for imperial values and status quo would be far less common in the wake of the Suez Crisis but until the mid-​1950s

5 6

To be fair, that might have improved the film no end. The Monthly Film Bulletin wrote: ‘Aimless direction produces flat performances from the principals and gives small scope to the remarkable collection of small-​part talent’ (Review 1956: 6).

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224     Ladies and gentlemen of character such a period drama or even a comedy featuring a reptile seem to reflect the mindset of many traditional middle-​class  Conservative voters. In 1954 a Tory Central Office report to Sir Anthony Eden felt as though ‘they have not had a square deal and are looking for somewhere else to go’ (quoted in Cannadine 2000: 152). Justice’s characters were usually ones of probity and security within this changing world, but overt forms of screen villainy and various forms of weakness were certainly within his range. Isabel Quigly referred to ‘the stylistically elegant though very limited James Robertson Justice’ (1961: 26), but early in his screen career, he essayed a poetry-​quoting self-​deluding commercial traveller in My Brother Jonathan (Harold French 1948). Rank seemed to require little more of their resident ogre than for him to either glower or boom, for this was his box office image, but his range encompassed more flawed and vulnerable patriarchal figures. His dramatic potential was hinted at with a low-​key performance as a corrupt yet regretful motor magnate in Checkpoint and, more prominently, as the ‘Commander’, a trainer of Gene Summers (Paul Massie) a US Air Force captain turned government assassin Gene Summers in Orders to Kill (Anthony Asquith 1958). Monthly Film Bulletin found his naval officer to be ‘most subtly observed’ (Review 1958: 58) and the critic of the Guardian cited Justice as an example of the film’s superb acting but suggested Orders to Kill ‘does cheat in its choice of assassin –​this young man was obviously too nice-​minded for the job’ (1958: 3). But the casting of the innocuous-​looking Massie is as much a key element to the narrative as that of Justice; the ostensibly clean-​ cut juvenile lead and his trusted mentor as seen in a typical Box/​Thomas comedy feature.7 But during Summers’s training, Major MacMahon (Eddie Albert) believes the young officer is ‘play acting and he’s loving it’. The Commander responds, ‘I’ve got to stop civilised men from thinking about the reality of killing a fellow human being with their bare hands. Because if they thought about it, they might never do it. But they’ve got to do it.’ In the Doctor films Justice mentors fresh-​faced students and his junior staff members to serve the community, but here he must ‘turn the act of killing into a cross between a game and a drill … I don’t mind if he’s sick afterwards. My only concern is that he isn’t sick before’. The Commander is ostensibly the British upper-​class eccentric and appears as jovial as Léonie (Irene Worth), Summers’s Resistance contact in France, is austere, but they are both elements of the same system. An innocent 7

The narrative might have been stronger still had Summers been an RAF flight lieutenant played by Michael Craig or an older and more careworn senior officer portrayed by John Mills.

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James Robertson Justice     225 man, Marcel Lafitte (Leslie French), is dead, and all the Commander’s tutoring will never vanquish his last words to Summers –​ why? Peter John Dyer considered Orders to Kill ‘an artistic achievement of the highest order’ (1958: 23), and it presented Justice with the opportunity to express a sense of commitment and even angst. Alas, although one major comedic role lay in the immediate future, the domestic Pinewood comedy Upstairs and Downstairs (Ralph Thomas 1959) encapsulates the sense of inertia of Justice’s time with Rank, with the recently married Richard and Kate Barry (Michael Craig and Anne Heywood) facing great difficulty in finding the right domestic servants. Naturally, Justice plays a bombastic older statesman, and the sole point of interest is that the crush of the young maid Ingrid (Mylène Demongeot) on her tweed-​jacketed employer is played straight and with genuine feeling on the part of the actress. It is a rare human moment in a film that looks immaculate but feels like a museum piece. Craig was just one contract player who came to bridle at the limitations of Rank’s casting policies devised to keep a chap in his place. ‘I did five films at Pinewood … the same writers, same directors, producers, camera team, actors’ (Craig quoted in McFarlane 1997: 144). He appeared with Justice in Doctor in Love (Thomas 1960), a film notable for Sir Lancelot’s scenes opposite Leslie Phillips’s Dr Burke, which at least captured some of the wit of the More/​Spratt exchanges six years earlier. Phillips would become Justice’s most frequent and popular co-​star, the comic timing of both actors perfectly in tune. The film critic of the Guardian bemoaned that although the three most commercially successful pictures of 1960 were all British, ‘only one, Sink the Bismarck!, was a film to be proud of. Doctor in Love belongs to the genial but insignificant series’ (1960:  6).8 But such box office success at a time when Woodfall was shooting Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (Karel Reisz 1960) is a further illustration of Dominic Sandbrook’s valid point that ‘there is no such thing as a single national experience. People rarely remember that the soundtracks of The Sound of Music and South Pacific comfortably outsold any of the Beatles’ albums of the decade’ (2005: xxiii–​xxiv). And the performance of Justice could never be referred to as ‘insignificant’. As the roster of Rank contract artists diminished, there was little variety in the roles offered to Justice. By 1959, the Organisation did not employ any permanent production staff, and during the 1960s it would be freelance film-​makers who mainly used the UK’s major studios. In the first half of the 1960s Justice often played much the same roles as he had

8

The other was Carry On Constable.

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undertaken for Rank and Geoffrey Macnab regards this period as one of the most paradoxical in British film history: On the one hand this was an era in which British film-​ makers foregrounded local identity, and even stars started talking about a new style of ‘folk acting’, earthy, demotic and in stark contrast to the blandishments of the West End and Pinewood Studios. On the other hand, there was an emphasis on internationalism as Britain paid host to ‘runaway’ American productions and to a variety of big name continental directors and actors. (2000: 206)

And, as Penelope Houston noted, the Saturday Night and Sunday Morning public was also the Carry On public (1963: 119) –​and that of Justice too. His comedies could be divided between those narratives that were firmly in Loamshire and other mainstream comedies with comic characters readily adapting to an England of consumerism. The first category includes the range of medium-​budget MGM-​British black-​ and-​white comedy films with ‘a presumption that everyone lives in nice converted Tudor cottages or the inevitable Stately Home’ (Riley 1961: 29). It was the twilight of pictures in which young ladies still simper, chaps are still crisp of hacking jacket and the lower orders still know their places. Meanwhile, male authority often favour (a) beards and (b) bellowing ‘you miserable worm!’ on a regular basis. Thus, Justice appeared in Raising the Wind (Gerald Thomas 1961) –​ the Doctor formula applied to a musical college  –​and as a teacher in the comedy A French Mistress (Roy Boulting 1960). Dai Vaughan praised his performance in the latter as ‘a credible sketch of personalities obesely inflated by development exclusively within a children’s world’ (1960: 29). Meanwhile, Monthly Film Bulletin cited the ‘relaxed and confident playing of Justice and Cecil Parker as making the most of ‘the few effective moments of dry humour’, but suggested that the entire film was a cue to ‘pension off, even in farce, these phoney English public schools, fire-​eating colonels, bird-​watching vicars, sporty cane brandishers and all those dearly loved images of “the English as they see themselves” ’ (Review 1960: 142). Thus, when MGM-​British was casting Murder She Said (George Pollock 1961) there was a certain inevitability that Justice would portray a bed-​ridden squire; few actors could thunder futile orders at Margaret Rutherford with such elan. Fortunately, the first of a trio of films written by Jack Davies and directed by Ken Annakin for Independent Artists give Justice more scope than attempting to bring life to a familiar scenario with ‘a line here, a facial expression or a situation there’ (Crowther 1960:  n.p.). The three pictures co-​starred Justice with Leslie Phillips and Stanley Baxter, and the first, Very Important Person (1961), combined a very well-​realised POW background with thriller elements in addition to allowing the actor’s persona to be used to dramatic purpose rather than the resident comic ogre.

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James Robertson Justice     227 It was also a leading role for Justice, rather than supporting Dirk Bogarde or Michael Craig, and the scientist Sir Ernest Pease KBE FRS offered the actor his best opportunity since Doctor in the House. The critic of the Guardian thought that Justice was presented with a chance to dominate an entire film, as opposed to individual scenes, one he took with ‘the imperturbable lordliness of a dreadnaught’ (1961: 5). The screenplay establishes that Pease’s claims to be a genius are wholly correct combined with a genuine sense of danger. The actor’s image is of one who booms his way through a film but for all the lines such as, ‘Cooking requires no intelligence. Were it otherwise women would be no good at it’, his understated performance conveys a watchful quality. As with Spratt in his original incarnation, Pease is dynamic and possess an intellect that is both genuine and deployed in the service of others. The second entry was Crooks Anonymous; a witty crime caper focused on the talents of Leslie Phillips. The last of this cycle, The Fast Lady (1962), was the only film in the trilogy to be shot in colour and at first sight, the essence of its charm is the studio set in Beaconsfield, which replicates with almost dreamlike accuracy the same world as in the Ladybird books. You half expect Peter and Jane to make a guest appearance on the high street and Elspeth Grant thought The Fast Lady was ‘a jolly little comedy, as English as they come’ (1963:  45), but as the mid-​1960s approached the protagonists of such pictures would increasingly have to negotiate ‘tradition’ and ‘modernity’. Justice’s work for Annakin was arguably a high point in his later career, but even then, he was seen either in a period setting (the Second World War), an institution (department store) or within a carefully constructed fantasy Home Counties England. Justice’s next picture with Phillips and Baxter, Father Came Too!, cast him as an overbearing father-​in-​law who is also a somewhat hammy actor, booming his disdain at Juke Box Jury and other signs of modern decadence. There was also a further entry in the Doctor series and Distress (1963) provides considerable evidence of how Box and Thomas had become increasingly frustrated with the mechanics of their comedy series. Thomas subsequently explained that, ‘We’d make a deal (with Rank); one Doctor film for something we really wanted to do’ (quoted in Dixon 2001: 110) –​ and Distress has the hallmarks of a picture that the team really did not ‘want to do’. Ten years after Doctor in the House, Dr Sparrow is now a middle-​aged figure of some seniority, for all his taste for dashing sports jackets and brand-​new Morris Mini Supers. He now commands a team of (notably insipid) juveniles, and the dynamic between Sparrow and Spratt has now irrevocably altered, much to the detriment of the picture. Leslie Phillips’s characters tend to regard Justice as a tweed-​suited ogre who needs to be regularly pacified, but Bogarde now observes Sir Lancelot with sardonic amusement. But despite the uneven screenplay, Justice displays his gift

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228     Ladies and gentlemen of character for physical comedy –​the railway carriage scene with Fenella Fielding is worth the price of the DVD –​and ‘bellows and suffers with more finesse and vigour than ever’ (Durgnat 1963: 31). Doctor in Distress also allowed Justice moments of subtle underplaying, inferring just how lonely Spratt is when away from his hospital.9 The actor was then aged only fifty-​five, but his surgeon is now a virtually Edwardian figure, with seemingly little connection with the 1960s; even the Rolls-​Royces that he favours are venerable models. To quote George Orwell, ‘Everything is safe, solid and unquestionable. Everything will be the same for ever and ever’ (1957: 190). But outside of St Swithin’s hospital, the world is less predictable. When Doctor in the House entered production, the capital was one of bomb sites, but by 1954 there was a relaxation of building regulations, and this ‘ignited a London property boom which thundered on until 1964’ (Davenport-​Hines 2013:  15). In his famous essay ‘Festival’, Michael Frayn saw the Festival of Britain in 1951 as the product of ‘the Britain of the radical middle classes  –​the do-​gooders; the readers of the News Chronicle, the Guardian and the Observer’ (1963: 319–​20). Twelve years later, ‘where the Festival had once stood there grew one of the largest and ugliest commercial office blocks in Western Europe. And a car park for 700 cars’ (Frayn 1963: 338). This is no longer the London of Sir Lancelot, for the capital city now belongs to the ‘salesman or a financial speculator. His office skyscrapers shoot up overnight where familiar old buildings have been (and he hires public relations men to tell us how much more beautiful they are than the old buildings and makes us ashamed of ourselves for thinking otherwise’ (Wharton 1962: 14). Furthermore, 1963 saw a well-​publicised event where ‘the spheres of politics, medicine, law, journalism, smart society, new money and espionage all converged’ (Davenport-​Hines 2013: 5) –​the so-​called ‘Profumo Affair’.10 It unfolded at a time when Britain’s relative economic decline was the subject of concern by several commentators. Goronwy Rees claimed that ‘the great majority of those who form the country’s grand committee of management do not have the knowledge or the understanding to apply them’ (1963: 23) and Anthony Sampson argued in his Anatomy of Britain that the nation’s problems stemmed from ‘the old fabric of the British governing classes, while keeping its social and political hold, has failed to accommodate the vast forces of science, education or social change which (whether they like it or not) are changing the face of the country’ (1962: 638). 9



10

Penelope Gilliatt noted some ‘very elegant acting and some very coarse jokes’ (1963: 19). At a party at Cliveden House in 1961 John Profumo, the Secretary of State for War, met Christine Keeler, a showgirl, who also claimed to have had an affair with the Soviet Naval Attaché Eugene Ivanov. Profumo and Keeler embarked on an illicit relationship, which eventually resulted in his resignation.

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James Robertson Justice     229 The world of bellowing patriarchs as played by Justice was now on the wane. 1965 saw the production of Doctor in Clover, which did tentatively look at ‘swinging London’. Leslie Phillips’s Dr Grimsdyke, to the accompaniment by Kiki Dee singing ‘Take a Look at Me’, ventures to Carnaby Street only to be treated with pity by Nicky Henson’s boutique manager. He is evidently as trapped in the previous decade as his strait-​laced cousin Miles (John Fraser), and so finds sanctuary in being regularly described as a ‘nincompoop’ by Sir Lancelot who remains safely ensconced in the institution. In Doctor in the House, he was presented as a dynamic figure, scattering acolytes in his wake. Twelve years on Sir Lancelot stands for the England who regarded supermarkets with mistrust and who echoed the opinion of The Times that rock and roll was ‘an abomination –​a perversion’ (quoted in Beckett and Russell 201:  293). Furthermore, in the years immediately after the Profumo Affair, it was as if the capital outside the hospital; no longer accepting officialdom at face value: In fact, the trauma had been too horrendous for the status quo to be restored. Traditional notions of deference had been weakening for years, but after June 1963 they became mortally sick. Authority  –​ however disinterested, well-​qualified and experienced –​was increasingly greeted with suspicion rather than trust. Respect and deference, even when merited, were increasingly seen as a species of snobbery. (Davenport-​Hines 2013: 331)

Andrew Spicer contends that, ‘The perfect gentleman, the male ideal of the British ruling classes, was the product of a nineteenth-​century synthesis of aristocratic style and bourgeois values’ (2003: 8). Sir Lancelot was a gentleman, albeit an irascible one, and part of his attraction was how his professional abilities served the wider community. When British cinema was increasingly questioning the idea of a benevolent Establishment, Justice could have found a niche, depicting self-​absorbed and even malign eccentrics. His casting as Bernard the misguided scientist in The Damned (Joseph Losey 1963)  would have fundamentally subverted the Spratt image, just as one can envisage Justice as Tony’s father in The Servant (Losey 1963) or one of the sinister grotesques in Bunny Lake Is Missing (Otto Preminger 1965). Television might also have provided a haven for Justice’s talents –​he was surely tailor-​made to play a megalomaniac in The Avengers –​and one could also envisage him finding refuge as M in the Bond films. Simon Winder sees the 007 films as appealing to an audience who were ‘stranded, like the government, on a planet that didn’t have much to say about them’ (2006: 201). By 1965, the Bond films provided a reassuring fantasy away from doubt, for all of 007’s battles with fiendish super villains uttering threats in the dubbed tones of Robert Rietty. Outside of the world of accessorised Aston Martin DB5s or indeed the gates of St Swithin’s, young doctors and other professionals now find that social conventions

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230     Ladies and gentlemen of character cannot be automatically trusted and that their skills no longer received the deference of the community In the late 1960s Justice was starting to appear in cheaper features. The Face of Fu Manchu (Don Sharp 1965), may have been a production of the exploitation film specialist Harry Alan Towers, but it was not a film to regret; the Monthly Film Bulletin opined that, ‘Don Sharp … has been on the verge of making a really good film for some time now, and this is it’ (Review 1965: 163). Somewhat less felicitous was the Anglo-​ German Edgar Wallace adaptation The Trygon Factor (Cyril Frankel 1966), a confused production presided over by a bored-​looking Stewart Granger. Justice’s final leading role in a major picture was as Lord Scrumptious in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang (Ken Hughes 1968). It is worth enduring its many longueurs for Robert Helpmann’s child catcher, the performance of Benny Hill in a rare straight role as a German toymaker and for Justice informing Dick van Dyke, ‘You had your chance, and you muffed it!’ Shortly after Chitty Chitty Bang Bang finished production, Justice suffered a major stroke at the end of 1967. He partially recovered, but ‘his short-​term memory was shot’ (Hogg et al. 2008: 186) and his poor health is sadly evident in Zeta One (Michael Cort 1969). Illness had reduced Justice to a Tigon production concerning the eponymous alien leader (Dawn Addams, looking as though she’d wished that she had invaded somewhere else) from the planet Angvia and her army of underclad bacchante to take over the Home Counties. Adding to a scenario that could have been devised by a bored fourteen-​year-​old as a distraction from his geometry homework was a budget of £60,00011 and locations centred on a converted warehouse in North London. Justice was the villainous Major Bourdon and an even wanner looking than usual Charles Hawtrey was his sidekick Swyne. The sense of despondence at watching respected performers reduced to a British exploitation picture of the late 1960s or 1970s cannot be overstated, with Justice’s line delivery a deadly combination of illness and disinterest.12 David McGillivray mused on how it was ‘difficult to understand how James Robertson Justice and Dawn Addams came to be involved with the project, unless they were unaware of the banal treatment in store for the script’ (1971: 62), but it is hard to envisage either actor having any

11 12

But looking all of £45 6s 1d. Justice was far from alone in his career problems. When Zeta One entered production a tired and ill George Sanders was starring in The Body Stealers (Gerry Levy 1969), a tale of how crash-​helmet-​wearing female aliens kidnapped bored stuntmen in mid-​ air featuring the spaceship left over from Daleks’ Invasion Earth 2150AD (Gordon Flemyng 1966).

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James Robertson Justice     231 illusions from the outset. The ‘torture’ scene makes not just a low point for Justice and Hawtrey but for British cinema. Justice’s last significant film role also marked the final time he worked with Betty Box and Ralph Thomas. In the 1970 finale to the film series, Doctor in Trouble, the vaguely ‘groovy’ credits alert the audience to expect the worse  –​and they certainly will not be disappointed. Ralph Thomas stated in an interview that ‘the title says it all; but it still, fortunately, continued collecting money, but I  couldn’t bear making any more films in the series’ (quoted in Dixon 2001:  113). House used London’s landscapes to their fullest advantage, but Trouble employed the familiar Pinewood cruise liner set finally left over from Carry On Cruising (1962), photographed in muddy colour. Despite some ostensibly ‘swinging’ trappings in the form of Simon Dee’s romantic juvenile and Graham Chapman’s camp fashion photographer, the scenario obstinately remained populated with Salad Days refugees –​albeit here clad in Carnaby Street threads. Doctor in Trouble is, if anything, even more depressing than Zeta One as it is suffused with shadows of happier times. The gulf between the final picture in the series and House is so vast as to be almost insurmountable –​the former used an Eastmancolor vision of London with extensive footage, but the latter was the familiar shipboard set. Penelope Mortimer cited the screenplay by Jack Davies as the culprit for the picture’s failure: ‘a dreadful story, a terrible script, inadequately seasoned with worn-​out laughs’ (1970: 28). Phillips, Freddie Jones (acting à la Lionel Jeffries) as the Master-​at-​Arms and Harry Secombe as a pool-​winning vulgarian all perform sterling work, but the tone of this grim production is set by the cameo from a sadly diminished Justice, shot in profile and reading his lines from cue cards. Ill health made him uninsurable post Doctor in Trouble (Hogg et al. 2008: 190); one role he was considered for was Mycroft in The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes (Billy Wilder 1970). His final screen appearances were in two nature documentaries, The Falcon Gentle and The Chalk Stream Trout made for ITV in 1974. He died in the following year. The primary period of Justice’s stardom commenced with Doctor in the House and ended with Doctor in Clover, and for those twelve years, there was arguably no better embodiment of the ‘soppy-​stern’ patriarch in post-​war British cinema. He also possessed an ‘easy and effortless grandeur with the effect that ‘everyone around him appears to be striving and working very hard’ (Dent 1961: 43). Justice’s body of work is regarded by many with considerable affection, a term that seldom seems to find favour in certain academic circles or with the stern denizens of Sight & Sound. But for a generation of filmgoers, a major pleasure was the work of a large, bearded gentleman fond of calling Leslie Phillips a ‘miserable worm!’ And who is not pleased to be answered, ‘Ten past ten sir!’

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Bibliography Armstrong, Roberts (1957), ‘A Typical Scot’, The Stage, 29 August, 7. Babington, Bruce (2002), Launder and Gilliat: British Film Makers, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Baker, Peter (1957), ‘Campbell’s Kingdom’, Films and Filming, November, 25. Beckett, Francis and Russell, Tony (2015), 1956: The Year That Changed Britain, London: Biteback. Box, Betty (2000), Lifting the Lid: The Autobiography of Film Producer, Betty Box, OBE, Hove, UK: Book Guild. Burton, Alan (2012), ‘ “From Adolescence into Maturity”: The Film Comedy of the Boulting Brothers’, in Hunter, I. Q. and Porter, Laraine (eds.) British Comedy Cinema, London: Routledge. Cannadine, David (2002), In Churchill’s Shadow: Confronting the Past in Modern Britain, London: Penguin Books. Caunce, Stephen, Mazierska, Ewa, Sydney-​Smith, Susan and Walton, John K. (eds.) (2004), Relocating Britishness, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Chibnall, Steve (2000), J. Lee Thompson:  British Film Makers, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Chibnall, Steve (2016), ‘ “Above and Beyond Everyday Life”:  The Rise and Fall of Rank’s Contract Artists of the 1950s’, in Hunter, Ian, Smith, Laraine and Porter, Justin (eds.) The Routledge Companion to British Cinema History. London: Routledge. Cook, Pam (1995), ‘National Identity in Gainsborough Costume Drama’, in Higson, Andrew (ed.) Dissolving Views:  Key Writings on British Cinema, London: Cassell. Cooke, Rachel (2013), Her Brilliant Career:  Ten Extraordinary Women of the Fifties, London: Virago. Craig, Michael (2005), The Smallest Giant:  An Actor’s Life, London:  Allen & Unwin. Crowther, Bosley (1956), ‘Screen: Desert Heroics: “Storm Over Nile” Is a Remake of Old Film’, New York Times, 9 June. Crowther, Bolsey (1960), ‘Screen: British Comedy: “A French Mistress” in Debut at the Guild’, New York Times, 19 December. Davenport, Nicholas (1958), ‘The Rank Story’, The Spectator, 25 September, 29. Davenport-​Hines, Richard (2013), An English Affair: Sex, Class and Power in the Age of Profumo, London: William Collins. Dent, Alan (1948), ‘The World of the Cinema: Credits and Discredits’, Illustrated London News, 14 February 1948, 24. Dent, Alan (1961), ‘The World of the Cinema: C’est Magnifique … Mais C’est Le Guerre!’, Illustrated London News, 13 May, 43. Dent, Alan (1962), ‘The World of the Cinema: All at Sea’, Illustrated London News, 8 December, 38. Dixon, Wheeler Winston (2001), Collected Voices: Voices from Twentieth-​Century Cinema, Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. Drazin, Charles (2007), The Finest Years: British Cinema of the 1940s, London: I. B. Tauris.

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James Robertson Justice     233 Durgnat, Raymond (1963), ‘Doctor in Distress’, Films and Filming, September, 31. Durgnat, Raymond (1970), A Mirror for England: British Movies from Austerity to Affluence, London: Faber & Faber. Dyer, Peter John (1958), ‘Orders to Kill’, Films and Filming, May, 23. Frayn, Michael (1963), ‘Festival’, in Sissons, Michael and French, Philip (eds.) Age of Austerity, London: Hodder & Stoughton. Geraghty, Christine (2000), British Cinema in the Fifties: Gender, Genre and the ‘New Look’, London: Routledge. Gilbert, W. Stephen (2002), The Life and Work of Dennis Potter, New  York: Overlook Press. Gillett, John (1957–​58), ‘Westfront 1957’, Sight & Sound, Winter, 122–​7. Gilliatt, Penelope (1963), ‘Films’, The Observer, 28 July, 19. Gledhill, Christine (ed.) (1991), Stardom: Industry of Desire, London: Routledge. Grant, Elspeth (1963), ‘Films: Gruesome & idyllic’, The Tatler, 20 February, 45. The Guardian (1958), ‘By Our London Film Critic:  Problem of a Sensitive Assassin’, 29 March. 3. The Guardian (1960), ‘Cinema By Our Film Critic’, 22 December, 6. The Guardian (1961), ‘Justice Is Served … in Full Measure’, 22 April, 5. Hamilton, John (2005), Beasts in the Cellar: The Exploitation Film Career of Tony Tenser, Godalming, UK: FAB Press. Harper, Sue and Porter, Vincent (2003), British Cinema of the 1950s: The Decline of Deference, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Higson, Andrew (ed.) (1995), Dissolving Views: Key Writings on British Cinema, London: Cassell. Hodgson, Michael (2013), Patricia Roc:  Goddess of the Odeons (2nd ed.). Bloomington, IN: AuthorHouse. Hogg, James, Sellers, Robert and Watson, Howard (2008), James Robertson Justice: What’s the Bleeding Time? A Biography, Sheffield: Tomahawk. Holt, Paul (1953), ‘He’s Radio’s New Teller of Tales’, Daily Herald, 11 August, 4. Houston, Penelope (1963), The Contemporary Cinema 1945–​ 1963, London: Penguin Books. Hunter, I. Q. and Porter, Laraine (eds.) (2012), British Comedy Cinema, London: Routledge. Hunter, I. Q., Porter, Laraine and Smith, Justin (eds.) (2016), The Routledge Companion to British Cinema History, London: Routledge. Hutchings, Peter (1993), Hammer and Beyond:  The British Horror Film, Manchester: Manchester University Press. King, Barry (1991), ‘Articulating Stardom’, in Gledhill, Christine (ed.) Stardom: Industry of Desire. London: Routledge. Kramer, Peter and Lovell, Alan (1999), Screen Acting, London: Routledge. Kynaston, David (2009), Family Britain 1951–​1957 (Tales of a New Jerusalem), London: Bloomsbury. Landy, Marcia (1991), British Genres: Cinema and Society 1930–​1960, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Lewis, Roger (2008), ‘Gruff Justice’, The Spectator, 26 November. Lewis, Roger (2011), What Am I  Still Doing Here? My Life as Me, London: Coronet.

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234     Ladies and gentlemen of character Lewis, Roy and Maude, Angus (1950), The English Middle Classes, New  York: Alfred Knopf. MacKillop, Ian and Sinyard, Neil (eds.) (2003), British Cinema in the 1950s:  A Celebration, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Macnab, Geoffrey (1993), J. Arthur Rank and the British Film Industry (Cinema and Society), London: Routledge. Macnab, Geoffrey (2000), Searching for Stars:  Stardom and Screen Acting in British Cinema, London: Continuum. Mallerman, Tony (1963), ‘The Fast Lady’, Films and Filming, 39. Mannock, P. L. (1948), ‘Films: Fantasy in Whiskers’, Daily Herald, 30 January, 2. McFarlane, Brian (1997), An Autobiography of British Cinema, London: Methuen. McGillivray, David (1971), ‘Zeta One’, Monthly Film Bulletin, 38(448), March. 62. Mortimer, Penelope (1970), ‘Films: Celestial Mortality’, The Observer, 21 June, 28. Murphy, Robert (1992), Sixties British Cinema, London: BFI. Orwell, George (1957), ‘Boys Weeklies’, in Orwell, George, Inside the Whale and Other Essays, London: Penguin Books. Pettigrew, Terence (1982), British Film Character Actors, Newton Abbott, UK: David & Charles. Quigly, Isabel (1959), ‘Films: Out of the Bag’, The Spectator, 26 June, 7. Quigly, Isabel (1961), ‘Cinema: Horror Comics’, The Spectator, 28 April, 26. Rees, Goronwy (1963), ‘Amateurs and Gentlemen or the Cult of Incompetence’, Encounter, July, 20–​9. Review (1954), ‘Doctor in the House’, Monthly Film Bulletin, 21(244), May, 73. Review (1956), ‘An Alligator Named Daisy’, Monthly Film Bulletin, 23(264), January, 6. Review (1958), ‘Orders to Kill’, Monthly Film Bulletin, 25(292), 86. Review (1960), ‘A French Mistress’, Monthly Film Bulletin, 1(327) October, 142. Review (1965), ‘The Face of Fu Manchu’, Monthly Film Bulletin, 32(382), November, 163. Rider, David (1964), ‘Father Came Too!’, Films and Filming, March, 26. Riley, Phillip (1961), ‘Murder She Said’, Films and Filming, October, 29. Sampson, Anthony (1962), Anatomy of Britain, London: Harper & Rowe. Sandbrook, Dominic (2005), Never Had It So Good:  A History of Britain from Suez to the Beatles, London: Abacus. Shaffer, Lawrence (1973), ‘Some Notes on Film Acting’, Sight & Sound, Spring,  103–​6. Sissons, Michael and French, Philip (eds.) (1963), Age of Austerity, London: Hodder & Stoughton. Spicer, Andrew (2003), Typical Men:  The Representation of Masculinity in Popular British Cinema, London: I. B. Tauris. Spicer, Andrew (2004), ‘The “Other War”:  Subversive Images of the Second World War in Service Comedies’, in Caunce, Stephen, Mazierska, Ewa, Sydney-​ Smith, Susan and Walton, John K. (eds.) Relocating Britishness, Manchester: Manchester University Press.

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Thomas, Ralph (1956), ‘My Way with Screen Humour’, Films and Filming, February, 5. Vaughan, Dai (1960), ‘A French Mistress’, Films and Filming, October, 29. Wharton, Michael (1962), ‘Beyond a Joke’, Twentieth Century, July, 10–​15. Winder, Simon (2006), The Man Who Saved Britain; A Personal Journey into the Disturbing World of James Bond, London: Picador.

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Margaret Rutherford: Not to be crossed

Margaret Rutherford was born on 11 May 1892 and embarked on a theatrical career at the age of thirty-​three after spending many years as an elocution teacher. She achieved cinematic fame in Blithe Spirit (David Lean 1945) and screen immortality in The Happiest Days of Your Life. Rutherford was awarded an Oscar for Best Supporting Actress for The V.I.Ps. (Anthony Asquith 1963) and the DBE in 1967. Her later screen career was dominated by the Miss Marple series for MGM-​British. She died on 22 May 1972. Margaret Rutherford was initially a prime example of the British character performer as a star and even in her early films her mannerisms, physical appearance and, above all, her sense of inner life so often contrasted with the demeanour of those billed above her. Lawrence Shaffer argued that, ‘In character acting at its most obvious, the actor works behind, or through, a plethora of traits associated with a “role”. He is clearly role-​ playing’ (1973:  103), but Rutherford’s performances rarely descended into cliché. Nor could she easily be categorised via ‘her jutting chin, and flowing capes, her tendency to stalwart retaliation and perfectly timed tartness in the face of opposition or cheek’ (Riley 1961: 29). J. C.  Trewin had the sense that ‘beneath her the slithy toves are gimbling’ (1954:  35), but Rutherford’s performances were the work of one who knew, at a terrible cost, the gulf between unorthodox behaviour on-​screen and struggling to endure an everyday existence. For many years she had suffered from mental illness that resulted in hospitalisation and electroconvulsive therapy;1 in many of her films, the rituals that are meaningless to outsiders are the work of an actress who refused to play anyone she thought were of unsound mind (Merriman 2009: 5–​6). 1

In his biography of Stephen Tennant, Phillip Hoare recounts the desperately sad story of how the socialite proposed to Rutherford but he ‘then refused her admittance into his country house, Wilsford Manor’. His butler subsequently took pity on her and granted her entrance. He later found the actress ‘in the coal cellar, eating coal’ (1990: 308).

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Margaret Rutherford     237

Figure 13  Margaret Rutherford in Murder Most Foul (1964)

One major challenge of the British character performers elevated to stardom was that of becoming one of the ‘corrupt’ actors as referred to by Stanley Kaufmann. He cited Robert Morley as a case study of one who performed his routines with ‘impeccable timing and poise, and occasionally he comes close to moving us but it is too late for him to bother about acting’ (1966: 195–​6).2 But Rutherford’s air of ‘non-​patronising warmth’ (Shipman 1989: 513) and her comic timing remained undaunted by the most cliché-​minded of film-​makers. Of all the actors in this book, it is Rutherford who exemplifies the sometimes-​precarious balance between whimsy and that much tabloid-​praised virtue of ‘common sense’: The English penchant for the dream and the vision may in turn be part of a general escape from the conventions and practicality and common sense which make up so much of the native psyche. The tradition of empiricism or pragmatism is not in contradiction to the equally large inheritance of ghosts, dreams and visions; they are opposite sides of the same coin of the realm. (Ackroyd 2002: 270)

Margaret Rutherford began her acting career at the age of thirty-​three, after working as a teacher of piano and elocution, and made her film 2

This was not always the case.

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238     Ladies and gentlemen of character debut in 1936 with Dusty Ermine (Bernard Vorhaus). By 1939 she was an established theatrical name following the success of John Gielgud’s production of The Importance of Being Earnest (Merriman 2009:  53), and on-​screen, it was The Demi-​Paradise (Anthony Asquith 1943) that crystallised her screen persona. The visiting Soviet engineer Ivan (Laurence Olivier) views Rowena Ventnor, a lady seemingly impervious to bombs and doubt, as a figure of wonder as she organises the annual village pageant. In the following year, she was invited to recreate her stage role of the medium Madam Arcati in the screen adaption of Blithe Spirit (David Lean 1945). It was this picture that made Rutherford a star, as ‘a holy innocent, eccentric in appearance but definitely her own woman’ (Williams 2014: 36). The actress did not see the play as a comedy (Hoare 1995: 320–​ 1); her Arcati exists in a realm that is entirely real to her, with demeanour and conduct that is entirely beyond the comprehension of the feline Charles Condomine (Rex Harrison). That she unwittingly materialises the ghost of his first wife Elvira (Kay Hammond) is an issue he responds to with epigrammatic wit, for Condomine is far more perturbed by the enigmatic middle-​aged medium. Rutherford’s Arcati may resemble a cross between prep-​school headmistress and the White Queen from Alice in Wonderland, but she has the unwitting power to move between the rational and the supernatural. Blithe Spirit earned Rutherford critical plaudits from both sides of the Atlantic3 and established her stellar status as a cinematic eccentric. However, Raymond Durgnat was apparently in an acutely curmudgeonly state of mind when he wrote in A Mirror for England that if a veneration for such characters was a safety valve, the eccentrics glorified usually turn out to be either Margaret Rutherford or Alastair Sim (the twin souls of The Happiest Days of Your Life). At any rate, they are usually upper-​class in origins and ether of independent means or firmly ensconced in authority … They’re usually variations on old-​fashioned father and aunt figures and the eccentricity isn’t eccentricity at all, but the old upper-​class way of speaking out boldly and rudely. (1970: 195)

Post-​war British cinema was indeed suffused with upper-​class figures portrayed by such actors as Robert Morley, Wilfrid Hyde-​White, Miles Malleson, Martita Hunt and Ambrosine Phillpotts, but they were at their 3

The Monthly Film Bulletin commented that, ‘Margaret Rutherford gives Madame Arcati tremendous gusto and, with generous help from the property department in massing occultist paraphernalia, gives us some of the most bizarre pictures the screen has presented’ (Review 1945: 45). The New York Times was more succinct but no less applauding –​‘The old gal, played with robust good nature by Margaret Rutherford, certainly sets things going haywire in the cosmic beyond’ (The Screen, 1945: n.p.).

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Margaret Rutherford     239 most interesting when representing noblesse oblige without the nobility.4 Penelope Houston thought that in Britain ‘rebellion traditionally stops short at eccentricity’ (1955:  11), but with certain actors, there was the sense of the door being slammed in the face of social climbers in the manner of a Bateman cartoon.5 At other times, they merely basked in the manner of a somnolent pike; to quote Nancy Mitford, ‘the English lord is a wily old bird who seldom overdoes anything. It is his enormous strength’ (1955: 11). Lower down the class structure were those desperately clinging to their status and adopting eccentricity as a protective mask  –​Vincent Perrin (Marius Goring) barely tolerated by his headmaster (Raymond Huntley) in Mr. Perrin and Mr. Traill (Lawrence Huntington 1948). Such a measure runs the risk of the mask ossifying over the years; Andrew Crocker-​Harris (Michael Redgrave) of The Browning Version reflected how, ‘I’d realised too that the boys, for many long years now, had ceased to laugh at me’. While the characters portrayed by Rutherford rarely engaged in malice or self-​loathing, she was at her least effective when the likes of An Alligator Named Daisy or Just My Luck (John Paddy Carstairs 1957) required her to play a stock aristocratic eccentric. As C. A. Lejeune observed in her review of Castle in the Air (Henry Cass 1952): A British film comedy has but to introduce a few established jesters such as Miss Margaret Rutherford. Mr. A.  E. Matthews and Mr. Michael Trubshawe; substitute tomfoolery for wit; indulge in some stale and obvious antics; add a dozen topical jokes, a mild drunk scene, a pseudo-​Viennese theme song, and a funny hat; and it [is] sure to achieve popularity and make money (1952: 6).

Films and Filming also complained, ‘When will Pinewood realise she [Rutherford] is a fine artist capable of playing more than cranky old ladies?’ (Review 1957a: 25). The actress was far more effective in depicting those were often truly ignorant of the ways of the world. Shaffer divided character actors into those who attempted a variety of roles and those ‘through the inflexibility of their own mannerisms … or the readiness to be typecast’ (1973: 104). Rutherford would often be found in a third category of performers who attempted to transcend what might be a stereotypical role if depicted by a lesser actress. Some of her most interesting performances were as late middle-​aged or elderly spinsters who were negotiating a world that now seemed strange, where ‘England was essentially torn between pre-​war traditions which had been fought for, and Hyde-​White as the confidence trickster Soapy Stevens in Two-​Way Stretch (Robert Day 1960)  or Morley coldly staring at his degenerate son (Laurence Harvey) in The Good Die Young. 5 Phillpotts ruminated about Joe Lampton’s surname in Room at the Top –​‘What peculiar names these people have’. 4

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240     Ladies and gentlemen of character what may be understood as the imperatives of later modernity, informed by American cultural influences’ (Burton et al. 1997: 45). During the 1945–​59 period, Rutherford’s characters were finely shaded, from the fey to the indomitable and even sly. The first encompasses Aunt Clara (Anthony Kimmins 1954), where Rutherford’s mortally ill gentlewoman is tasked with executing the will of her reprobate uncle, accepting the foibles of others and her mortality with grace. There was also the 1952 screen version of The Importance of Being Earnest (Anthony Asquith) –​ ‘one cannot hope for a better Chasuble and Prism than Miles Malleson and Margaret Rutherford (Review 1952: 90) –​and the nurse in Miranda (Ken Annakin 1948), unphased by professional duties that include attending to a mermaid (Glynis Johns). With Curtain Up (Ralph Smart 1952), a provincial repertory company is obligated to put on an exceedingly bad play that was written by Catherine Beckworth (Rutherford), the theatre owner’s aunt. If it is unabashedly escapist entertainment, it is an excellent showcase for the leading lady’s comic timing, for Rutherford so often displayed how ‘immersion in a small area without point or aim’ (Farber and Walsh 1998:  144). The film also illustrates how her screen presence benefitted from being teamed with a strong comic leading man –​her scenes opposite Robert Morley’s producer Harry Blacker alone were worth 1/​9d of anyone’s cinema ticket money. Rutherford was rarely, if even, seen in any form of on-​screen relationship, her male screen partners tending towards the equally unorthodox –​Morley, Alastair Sim in The Happiest Days of Your Life or Richard Hearne in Miss Robin Hood. Her real-​life husband Stringer Davis frequently had small roles in her pictures, most notably as Arbuthnot, the expatriate Englishman obsessed with painting the Mona Lisa in Innocents in Paris (Gordon Parry 1953). The scene in the Louvre is a high point of the picture, with Rutherford’s Gladys Inglott instinctively understanding the impetus that keeps the artist in France, year after year. The second category encompasses Passport to Pimlico (Henry Cornelius 1949), which Charles Barr brackets with Hue & Cry (Charles Crichton 1947)  in that both adventures are ‘released’ by eccentrics (2003:  95). In the former, the catalyst is Alastair Sim and in the latter Margaret Rutherford as the Professor who inadvertently causes the seeming liberation of Pimlico.6 Both actors specialised in ‘authority figures with a funny-​peculiar as well as funny ha inflexion’ (Babington 2002: 156), as displayed most felicitously in Launder and Gilliat’s adaptation of the West End farce The Happiest Days of Your Life. Sim’s Dr Wetherby Pond, preening and ambitious for a promotion to the headmastership of a more elevated public school, presides over the 6

The role was originally destined for Sim.

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Margaret Rutherford     241 not quite first-​rate Nutbourne College. The Ministry of Education mistakenly billets St Swithin’s School for Girls at his institution and Pond is faced with Miss Muriel Whitchurch (Rutherford), the headmistress of a school that specialises in educating ‘girls whose parents are from the colonies’. A  sense of retaining one’s status on limited means pervades the instituon –​‘The school goes back to the Tudors, and if Pond doesn’t keep up the payments it goes back to the bank’, muses Nutbourne’s maths teacher Arnold Billings (Richard Wattis). It is also a clever comedy of gender reversal, for as Babington notes: Happiest Days thrives on the paradox that its most absolute representatives of ‘masculinity’ and ‘femininity’ are in the ordinary sense completely sexless, and further, that from conventional viewpoints, Whitchurch is far more ‘masculine’  –​brisk, bluff, organising  –​than the ‘feminine’ Pond –​vain, histrionic, preening, growingly hysterical. (2002: 169)

Muriel easily fends off the caddish Victor Hyde-​Brown (Guy Middleton), who has designs on her sixth form, commandeers Pond’s quarters and devises a plan to keep the visiting board of governors from Harlingham away from her group of St Swithin’s parents. The scheme inevitably fails, but while Sim admits defeat, Muriel Whitchurch would never surrender to self-​doubt. Alan Dent thought that Launder and Gilliat were ‘very wise to insist on retaining Miss Margaret Rutherford as the quartered schoolmistress. This is a striding Penthesilea, a snorting figurehead, majestic in authority, superb in reproach’ (1950: n.p.). Nor is her teacher prone to any form of whimsy, for that is the province of the gym mistress Miss Gossage whom, with the beautiful performance of Joyce Grenfell, displays every sign of one who never actually left school. The Happiest Days of Your Life ends with the ministry causing further chaos by billeting a third school at the premises, with Pond and Whitchurch deciding to flee to start a new establishment in Tanganyika. Neither teacher wishes to engage with an educational future typified by the arrival of ‘free-​expression’ students with their quasi-​Bohemian masters. The critic J.  C. Trewin once referred to how Rutherford’s ‘penetrating eyes, that quick, spring-​heeled voice, remain in mind. She is, in the best sense of the word, an attacking comedienne, one with a flash bulb effect’ (quoted in Merriman 2009: 5). These attributes were occasionally employed in those of less than laudable intent. She was second-​ billed as box office assurance for Norman Wisdom in Trouble in Store as the genteel shoplifter Miss Bacon whose eccentricity –​at one point she asks the assistant Edna (Joan Sims) for a ‘more seductive’ hat  –​is seen to be bombastic and entirely contrived. It is a performance with Rutherford easily and courteously manipulating the male staff members of Burridge Stores, from the managing director (Jerry Desmonde) to the store detective (Michael Brennan).

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242     Ladies and gentlemen of character Her next picture, The Runaway Bus (Val Guest 1954), was a further subversion of a screen image that was ‘wholly characterised by single-​ minded straightforwardness, with not a breath of deviancy or role-​ playing’ (Babington 2002: 157). As with Trouble in Store, Rutherford was supporting a male comedian making his star debut, but while she shared comparatively few scenes with Wisdom Runaway Bus had her at constant loggerheads with Frankie Howerd’s bus driver Percy Lamb. Much of the picture takes place in a BOAC coach stranded in the fog, the weather conditions acting as a ‘cloak for crime’ (Corton 2015: 294), just as the mannerisms of the ‘positive thought’ lecturer Cynthia Beeston are the mask for a bullion thief and the terror of Holloway. As the 1950s progressed, Rutherford’s screen roles reflected a sense of the contemporary world being kept at bay with effort, for during this decade British cinema often celebrated the defence of English artefacts via nostalgia for a mythical past, where the aesthetics are the raison d’être rather than community values. A  common theme in these films is how anyone from the outside world is perceived as a threat to this construct –​Christine Geraghty notes that these often take the form of either ‘the bureaucrat, representing the modern state, and the industrialist, representing modern industry’ (2000: 41). William Rose’s script for British Lion’s The Smallest Show on Earth has Matt and Jean Spenser (Bill Travers and Virginia McKenna) who inherit ‘the fleapit’ cinema. The question, for the staff of the picture house –​Old Tom the commissionaire (Bernard Miles), the cashier Mrs Fazackalee (Rutherford) and Mr Quill (Peter Sellers), the projectionist –​is whether the young couple will prove as much a threat as the nearby establishment or whether they will adapt to the older ways. As it transpires, any disruptive element that enters the realm of these elderly retainers does so entirely at their own risk. A gang of Teddy boys stands no chance against the wrath of Miss Fazakalee clad in the truly amazing guise of an usherette ‘disdainfully brandishing an ice cream tray’ (Houston 1957: 13). But while the Spensers have freedom of movement, the older staff view their kingdom as a place of retreat from an outside world that increasingly confounds them. Henry Fairlie argued that ‘modernisation’ could be used ‘to justify, in the alleged interests of society, the deliberate and callous neglect of the interests of any minority: especially, so it seems, the weak and the aged’ (1963: 10). This is not quite the late Ealing or Group 3 celebration of eccentricity that Penelope Houston referred to as ‘exasperatingly quaint as a thatched cottage in a London street’ (1955: 10) and in The Smallest Show on Earth there is a sublime moment when the Bijou’s employees treat themselves to long-​forgotten silent films after hours. As Monthly Film Bulletin praised: Peter Sellers’ little dance of joy and his drunken subsidence in the projection booth, Margaret Rutherford’s mastery of the Bijou’s accounting

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system and her devotion to the late proprietor, Bernard Miles’s startling displays of idiot shyness, are all in an excellent and robust tradition; and it is remarkable that such different and eccentric performers should have formed a team so homogeneous. They each have the gift of making absurdity and pathos momentarily indistinguishable, and the success of such a scene as the one in which they sweetly grieve together at a private projection of Coming Through the Rye is due entirely to them and not at all to the script. (Review 1957b: 56–​7)

Margaret Rutherford’s final film of the 1950s was the Boulting brothers’ I’m All Right Jack, the sequel to Private’s Progress where Stanley Windrush (Ian Carmichael) graduates from Oxford and seeks work in the manufacturing industry. The late 1950s was a period in which newsreels and, from 1959 onwards, Rank’s Look at Life travelogue series informed cinema audiences of a brave new age of scientific marvels, but Stanley’s trials commence with a mock-​newsreel commentary over vistas of obsolete Victorianism, where factories are poorly run and staffed by disinterested, unmotivated and notably unhygienic workers. After a succession of disastrous interviews for an executive position, Windrush seeks refuge in the home of his great aunt, Dolly (Rutherford). Her screen time may be limited, but she is pivotal to the narrative, the embodiment of values that can be manipulated by modern barbarism. Arthur Marwick saw the pre-​credit sequence, set on VE Day, as sketching ‘the history of the decline of the old upper class since 1945, when it had been securely based in the world of finance, to the present, when its representatives are, somewhat shoddily, involved in industry’ (1998: 119). Even before the rock and roll style theme tune, the elderly club habitué Sir John Kennaway (Peter Sellers) is already ‘on his way out’ in the pre-​credits scene, while Dolly’s brother-​in-​law (Miles Malleson) as Windrush senior has sought refuge in a nudist colony. Dolly is initially seen in the surroundings of her genteel villa as very much Orwell’s vision of England as a family –​‘in which the young are generally thwarted and most of the power is in the hands of irresponsible uncles and bedridden aunts. Still, it is a family’ (1968: 68) –​writ large. She disapproves of Stanley embarking on any career that does not reflect his status as ‘a gentleman’ and when he is apparently on the verge of betraying his class by joining the strike organised by the shop steward Fred Kite (Sellers), she makes a foray into the Britain of 1959 to remind her nephew of his duties. In this Dolly receives the support of Mrs Kite (Irene Handl) who, possibly as a reaction to her husband’s views, is an innate Conservative. The press extensively covers Stanley’s return to work, with headlines that hail him as the ‘hero of the hour’  –​‘What a race we British are when we are stirred’, Dolly proclaims. But the story is manipulated by the factory owners, for as with many of the Boultings’ pictures, the Establishment betrays the innocent and the vulnerable. In the opening

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244     Ladies and gentlemen of character reel, we see Stanley briskly marching towards a factory building as an off-​ screen announcer stirringly proclaims that British industry ‘was working at high pressure to supply the vital needs for which the family had hungered for so long’. In reality, these powerhouses produce ‘Num-​ Yum bars, Detto powder (“The New Black Whitener”) and weapons of mass-​destruction’ (Petley 2000: 28), while Aunt Dolly learns of how her son Bertram (Dennis Price) betrayed the values of his upbringing via an ITV current affairs show. When Stanley finally denounces his uncle and all that he stands for, we cut to a shot of Aunt Dolly reacting in shock. Her maid (Esma Cannon) and chauffeur (Enyon Evans) exchange sad glances of recognition as they witness Stanley’s speech of ‘dawning affronted realisation’ (Fairclough 2011:  78). Ten years earlier, Muriel Whitchurch fulminated, ‘We are moving in a descending spiral of iniquity’, but her offspring is an old-​ fashioned cad who has made an easy transition to the Macmillan era.7 In I’m All Right Jack, the traditional squirearchy that populated post-​ war British society was becoming marginalised to either nudist colonies or living in their villas, with their old values underpinned by dubious new money. Lindsay Anderson wrote how ‘the aristocracy is generally represented by Mr. A. E. Matthews, and is treated, though respectfully, as a fine old figure of fun’ (1957: 15), but Aunt Dolly conveys the film’s sense of sadness and betrayal that lay beneath the slapstick of the badly run sweet plant and the determined nudists. Orwell remarked how the English family had ‘its private language and its common memories, and at the approach of an enemy it closes its ranks’ (1968: 68), but here the enemy is within the family circle and the wrong members really are in control. At the beginning of the 1960s Rutherford made her sole Hollywood outing in the Danny Kaye vehicle On the Double (Melville Shavelson 1961), but this had less impact on her career than a contract with MGM and five pictures –​four adaptations of Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple, all directed by George Pollock, and The V.I.P.S. (Anthony Asquith 1963). All were made in the UK, and the Miss Marple series was in part the result of the studio rethinking the strategy of its British subsidiary after the box office failure of The Barretts of Wimpole Street (Sydney Franklin 1957). The company’s output now ‘veered from expensively mounted costume films and turned towards more modest fare’ (Chapman 2005:  179). Rutherford’s contract with what was then the largest and most influential of the American major studios in the UK (Murphy 1992: 265) resulted in further international fame in a series of Miss Marple films in which, as

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Could it be that Bertram’s exceedingly shady dealings and consorting with spivs such as Sidney Cox (Richard Attenborough) helps to maintain his mother’s home?

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Margaret Rutherford     245 with many of the Carry On series, the settings are a bizarre anagram of the ancient and the contemporary. British films of the previous decade had seen the rise of the middle-​class senior police detective of Jack Hawkins and John Mills and the decline of the traditional gentleman detective; in Rank’s adaptation of Margery Allingham’s Tiger in the Smoke (Roy Baker 1956), Albert Campion is dispensed with altogether. In 1961, Murder She Said commenced with Ron Grainer’s irrepressibly upbeat theme tune and while Inspector Craddock (Charles Tingwell) may be the model of professionalism8 he is no match for Rutherford’s Jane Marple. Her world may pay lip service to the early 1960s  –​in Murder at the Gallop (1963) our heroine even dances the twist  –​but it is always a world of teacups, cads played by James Villiers9 and grumpy squires who are, somewhat inevitably, played by James Robertson Justice and Robert Morley. Murder She Said and Gallop both have the benefit of the strong and genuinely menacing villains of Arthur Kennedy and Flora Robson, but the latter two entries in the series had an overly comic tone, summarised by Terry Scott’s music hall-​style police constable in Murder Most Foul (1964). In the novel A Murder Is Announced Jane Marple sadly observes to the Inspector that, ‘Fifteen years ago one knew who everybody was … But it’s not like that anymore. Every village and small country town is full of people who’ve just come and settled there without any ties to bring them’ (Christie 1950: 91–​2). But in the MGM-​British films, a feudal squirarchy is very much in place. Away from the Christie murder mysteries, Rutherford played variations of the Miss Marple persona in Mouse on the Moon (Richard Lester 1963), which was awash in a sea of self-​conscious ‘eccentric’ performances. Her contract with MGM ended in 1965, the same year in which she made her final appearance as Miss Marple with a guest cameo in The Alphabet Murders (Frank Tashlin 1965). This was her also last British-​shot black-​and-​white picture for, as Robert Murphy put it, ‘in the second half of the ’60s stage farces, service comedies, rural whimsy and old crock films seemed in danger of extinction’ (1992: 238). An England of concrete overpasses and tower blocks awaited, and it was The V.I.P.s that movingly illustrated just how the Rutherford persona was at odds with this world. The screenplay, by Terence Rattigan, for what Monthly Film Bulletin accurately described as a ‘pretty little cinematic souffle that melts in the mind, but its flavour is spicy and sweet’ (1963: 143), was a late-​Macmillan era interpretation of the Grand Hotel (Edmund Goulding 1932) formula. Various travellers are stranded at a 8 9

Naturally he arrives in a black Wolseley. An actor who always looked as though he had strayed from the pages of a Wodehouse novel.

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246     Ladies and gentlemen of character fog-​bound Heathrow –​including Rutherford’s Duchess of Bedford, who has taken a position as a hostess in a casino to save her family home. The picture is an early example of the strange world of the British-​based ‘international film’ where Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor appeared in the same scenarios as Richard Wattis, Peter Sallis, Michael Hordern, Dennis Price and other familiar support actors. Bosley Crowther wrote of Rutherford and her fellow supporting cast members that, ‘Under Anthony Asquith’s brisk direction, they back the film with humor and zest. And that it can take’ (1963: n.p.), as both Burton and Taylor indulge in their worst mannerisms. The Metrocolor and Panavision cinematography is also a reminder of how rarely we see Margaret Rutherford in the full spectrum, for she is so often associated with the black-​and-​white late Victorian landscape that still existed well into the 1950s. David Cannadine argued how the post-​ war conservative ideal view of England was one ‘composed of individuals who knew their place and of a fundamental unity of society’ (2000: 157), just as the ‘international film’ shot in the UK was ‘a cinema of uncertain critical identity’ (Ryall 2005:  141). Rutherford’s Duchess of Brighton is totally ill at ease and bewildered in a glass and concrete landscape. Even the opening credits are a tribute to a colour-​supplement vision of 1963 vintage high living, with the senior cast members represented by a Rolls-​ Royce10 in the opening credits. The film concludes with the Duchess’s home saved by a generous payment from the producer Max Buda (Orson Welles), who wishes to use it as the location for his latest picture. Paul Andros (Burton) proposes a toast to ‘to 1973 when top people will be up there not because they are born there but because they deserve to be’. The line applies to Mead and Magrum but also to the Duchess  –​born into the aristocracy but with a nobility of character that deserves to be supported by international monies. Andros himself is seemingly British but is now rooted wherever his finances demand, whereas the Duchess remains a figure within her own landscape. Rutherford was awarded an Oscar for Best Supporting Actress for The V.I.P.s and it is her performance, together with those of Maggie Smith as Miss Mead and Rod Taylor as her Australian tractor magnate employer Les Mangrum, who provide a welcome relief from the ‘subservient camera’ (Ryall 2005:  152), constantly focusing on the symbols of early 1960s elitism. The cinematic screen epitaph of Margaret Rutherford should not be her voicing the Rank-​Bass cartoon The Wacky World of Mother Goose (Jules Bass 1967) or a guest appearance in A Countess from Hong Kong (Charles Chaplin 1967), but Chimes at Midnight (Orson Welles 1965). In the Welles production, Rutherford had definitively escaped from the 10

David Frost, who played a newspaper reporter, is represented by an Austin Mini.

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Margaret Rutherford     247 shadow of Madam Arcati. Kenneth Tynan saw Rutherford as possessing a ‘monstrous vitality: the soul of Cleopatra has somehow got trapped in the corporate shape of an entire lacrosse team’ (Tynan and Lahr 2001: 12), but here she is a bawd in the guise of an English gentlewoman. There are rare and cherishable occasions in the cinema when an established actor, especially a senior figure previously known for their predictable ‘eccentric’ mannerisms, slip their moorings of typecasting. It happened with Robert Morley’s paternal barrister in The Boys (Sidney J.  Furie 1962), his brittle, vulnerable Oscar Wilde (Gregory Ratoff 1960)  and A. E. Matthews in They Came to a City (Basil Dearden 1944) with his Sir George Gedney bleakly confessing, ‘I can’t stand people’. With Chimes at Midnight Rutherford is a symbol of Welles’s lament for a lost Eden: Merrie England as a conception, a myth which has been very real to the English-​speaking world and is to some extent expressed in other countries of the Medieval epoch: the age of chivalry, of simplicity, of Maytime and all that. It is more than Falstaff who is dying. It’s the old England dying and betrayed. (Welles and Gellert Lyons 1988: 262)

And part of that dying world is the Boar’s Head Tavern, presided over by Mistress Quickly. Simon Callow beautifully described Rutherford’s performance as ‘unlikely a whore-​mistress as could be found on the face of the planet, and one, moreover, endowed with an inexplicable and freely roaming Irish accent, but one who is somehow perfectly and properly at home in Welles’s Merrie England’ (2015:  385). She is no longer the embodiment of Victorianism transposed to a fantasy vision of a 1960s Home Counties as a dependable totem of eccentricity. Like Sir John Falstaff, she is close to midnight but still completely alive. At her finest, Margaret Rutherford embodied far more than a tweedy academic or a vision of post-​war eccentricity and one cannot help but wonder as to how Rutherford might have played Miss Havisham.11 But such a character would have embodied all Rutherford’s fears of mental illness and its consequences –​the constant fear and the desperate maintenance of a semblance of dignity while being reliant on the kindness of strangers. As it was, the actress who Shipman described most accurately as ‘a lady who will never be replaced’ (1989: 515), created Madam Arcati, Muriel Whitchurch and Mistress Quickly. And each of these formidable ladies embody Floriane Reivorn-​Pegay’s view of the national character: ‘In order to grasp the complexity of Englishness, it is necessary to allow for perpetual oscillation in the mind between centre and periphery or margin, transience and timelessness, rurality and urbanity, practicality, common-​sense and dream or vision’ (2009: 10). 11

The twenty-first-​century equivalent of Miss Havisham is Miss Shepherd (Maggie Smith) of The Lady in the Van (Nicholas Hytner 2015).

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Bibliography Ackroyd, Peter (2002), Albion: The Origins of the English Imagination, London: Chatto & Windus. Anderson, Lindsay (1957), ‘Get Out and Push!’ Encounter, November, 14–​22. Babington, Bruce (ed.) (2001), British Stars and Stardom: From Alma Taylor to Sean Connery, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Babington, Bruce (2002), Launder & Gilliat:  British Film Makers, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Baker, Peter (1959), ‘I’m All Right Jack’, Films and Filming, September, 22. Barr, Charles (1998), Ealing Studios (3rd ed.), London: Continuum. Bergson, Henri (2008), Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic, Rockville, MD: Arc Manor. Burton, Alan, O’Sullivan, Tim and Wells, Paul (1997), Liberal Directions:  Basil Dearden and Post-​War British Film Culture, Trowbridge, UK: Flicks Books. Callow, Simon (2015), Orson Welles:  Volume 3  –​One-​Man Band, London: Jonathan Cape. Cannadine, David (2000), Class in Britain, London: Penguin Books. Chapman, James (2005), Past & Present:  National Identity and the British Historical Film, London: I. B. Tauris. Christie, Agatha (1950), A Murder Is Announced, London: Collins Crime Club. Corton, Christine L. (2015), London Fog: The Biography, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Crowther, Bosley (1963), ‘Screen: “The V.I.P.s” at Music Hall: Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton Star the Cast’, New York Times, 20 September. Dent, Alan (1950), ‘The World of the Cinema: That English Channel’, Illustrated London News, 1 April. Durgnat, Raymond (1970), A Mirror for England: British Movies from Austerity to Affluence, London: Faber & Faber. Fairclough, Robert (2011), This Charming Man:  The Life of Ian Carmichael, London: Aurum. Fairlie, Henry (1963), ‘On the Comforts of Anger’, Encounter, July, 9–​13. Farber, Manny and Walsh, Robert (1998), Negative Space: Manny Farber on the Movies, Cambridge, MA: Da Capo Press. Geraghty, Christine (2000), British Cinema in the Fifties: Gender, Genre and the ‘New Look’, London: Routledge. Gilliatt, Penelope (1973), Unholy Fools; Wits, Comics, Disturbers of the Peace: Film & Theatre, London: Secker & Warburg. Harper, Sue (2000), Women in British Cinema:  Mad, Bad and Dangerous to Know, London: Continuum. Hoare, Phillip (1990), Serious Pleasures:  The Life of Stephen Tennant, London: Hamish Hamilton. Hoare, Phillip (1995), Noel Coward:  A Biography of Noel Coward, London: Sinclair-​Stevenson. Houston, Penelope (1955), ‘The Undiscovered Country’, Sight & Sound, Summer,  10–​14. Houston, Penelope (1957), ‘At the Films:  The Stuffed Gorilla’, The Observer, 14 April, 13.

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Margaret Rutherford     249 Hunter, I. Q. and Porter, Laraine (eds.) (2012), British Comedy Cinema, London: Routledge. Kauffman, Stanley (1966), A World on Film, New York: Harper & Row. King, Barry (1985), ‘Articulating Stardom’, Screen, 26(5), September–​October, 27–51. Lejeune, C. A. (1952), ‘At the Films: Old Faithfuls’, The Observer, 13 July, 6. Marwick, Arthur (1982), British Society Since 1945, London: Pelican Books. Marwick, Arthur (1998), The Sixties: Cultural Revolution in Britain, France, Italy, and the United States, c.1958–​c.1974, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Medhurst, Andy (2007), A National Joke: Popular Comedy and English Cultural Identities, London: Routledge. Merriman, Andy (2009), Margaret Rutherford: Dreadnought with Good Manners, London: Aurum Press. Mitford, Nancy (1955), ‘The English Aristocracy’, Encounter, September. 5–​11. Murphy, Robert (1992), Sixties British Cinema, London: BFI. Orwell, George (1968), ‘The Lion and the Unicorn:  Socialism and the English Genius’, in Orwell, George, The Collected Essays, Journalism, and Letters of George Orwell: My Country Right or Left, 1940–​1943, San Diego, CA: Harcourt, Brace & World. Petley, Julian (2000), ‘The Pilgrim’s Regression:  The Politics of the Boultings’ Films’, in Burton, Alan, O’Sullivan, Tim and Wells, Paul (eds.) The Family Way: The Boulting Brothers and British Film Culture, Trowbridge, UK: Flicks Books. Porter, Laraine (1998), ‘Tarts, Tampons and Tyrants: Women and Representation in British Comedy’, in Wagg, Stephen (ed.) Because I Tell a Joke or Two: Comedy, Politics and Social Difference, London: Routledge. Reivorn-​Pegay, Floriane (2009), ‘The Dilemma of Englishness’, in Reivorn-​Pegay, Floriane (ed.) Englishness Revisited, Newcastle upon Tyne, UK:  Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Review (1945), ‘Blithe Spirit’, Monthly Film Bulletin, 12(136), April, 45. Review (1952), ‘The Importance of Being Earnest’, Monthly Film Bulletin, 19(222), July, 90. Review (1957a), ‘Just My Luck’, Films and Filming, December, 24–​5. Review (1957b), ‘The Smallest Show on Earth’, Monthly Film Bulletin, 24, May,  56–​7. Review (1963), ‘The V.I.P.S!’ Monthly Film Bulletin, 30(357), October, 143. Richards, Jeffrey (1997), Films and British National Identity:  From Dickens to ‘Dad’s Army’, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Riley, Phillip (1961), ‘Murder She Said’, Films and Filming, October, 29. Ryall, Tom (2005), Anthony Asquith: British Film Makers, Manchester: Manchester University Press. The Screen (1945), ‘Ectoplasmic High Jinks of Noel Coward Tale: “Blithe Spirit”, Marks Return of the Winter Garden to the Cinema Fold’, New York Times, 4 October. Shaffer, Lawrence (1973), ‘Some Notes on Film Acting’, Sight & Sound, Spring,  103–​6. Shipman, David (1989), The Great Movie Stars 2:  The International Years, London: Warner Books.

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250     Ladies and gentlemen of character Street, Sarah (2012), ‘Margaret Rutherford and Comic Performance’, in Hunter, I. Q. and Porter, Laraine (eds.) British Comedy Cinema, London: Routledge. Trewin, J. C. (1954), ‘The World of the Theatre:  Hands Across the Channel’, Illustrated London News, 35. Tyan, Kenneth and Lahr, John (ed.) (2001), The Diaries of Kenneth Tynan, London: Bloomsbury. Welles, Orson and Lyons, Bridget Gellert (eds.) (1988), Chimes at Midnight, New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. Williams, Melanie (2011), ‘Entering the Paradise of Anomalies: Studying Female Character Acting in British Cinema’, Screen, 52(1), Spring. Williams, Melanie (2014), David Lean (British Film Makers), Oxford:  Oxford University Press.

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Hattie Jacques: Matron and mistress of misrule

Josephine Edwina ‘Hattie’ Jacques was born on 7 February 1922 and began her acting career at London’s Player’s Theatre in 1944. By the 1950s she had become well known for her work in radio comedy, especially opposite Tony Hancock. In films, her role as Matron in Carry On Nurse (1959) anticipated her later stereotyping but Carry On Cabby (1963), and The Pleasure Garden (James Broughton 1953) are testaments to her range and talents. She died on 6 October 1980. In his memoirs Paperboy (2009), Christopher Fowler gave a potted impressionistic guide to the character actors who respected the seemingly fixed points to aid the navigation of a typical 1950s and 1960s British film. He mentioned such familiar names as ‘Irene Handl (charlady) Anna Quayle (posh woman) Lance Percival (dim nerd) Sid James and Sydney Tafler (spivs) to Arthur Mullard (common stupid bloke running tea stall) and Liz Frazer (indignant girl in tight sweater)’ (Fowler 2009: 166).1 As for Hattie Jacques, she was bracketed with Avis Bunnage as ‘Matron’. Sue Harper makes the point that in 1950s British cinema, character actresses had more scope for creating interesting roles than ‘sexpots’ whose narrative function remained fixed (2000:  98). Regardless of a leading man who might or might not resemble well-​polished teak in a Burton’s suit and a screenplay predicated around the word ‘crikey!’ it was the support players who could elevate the most anodyne of pictures. They were so often the sole worthwhile element of the cinematic equivalent of suet pudding but, as Melanie Williams observes, ‘bathos or poignancy are often the keynotes, with intelligent and skilful performers continually shunted to the sidelines’ (2011: 103). In terms of actresses, the list is indeed a lengthy one:  Dora Bryan, except A Taste of Honey (Tony Richardson 1

Joan Sims is ‘jolly den mother’ and June Whitfield is ‘shocked genteel lady’.

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Figure 14  Hattie Jacques in Our House (1960)

1961); Beryl Reid, aside from The Killing of Sister George (Robert Aldrich 1968); Esma Cannon; and Peggy Mount, to name but a few. The performances of Yootha Joyce in Catch Us If You Can (John Boorman 1965), and especially The Pumpkin Eater (Jack Clayton 1964)  stand for more lost opportunities for British films, which also neglected the talents of June Whitfield and Fenella Fielding. Cinema also seldom made effective use of Jacques before 1958, when she featured –​ for a not especially munificent fee2 –​as Matron in Carry On Nurse, a role that both defined her film career and created a post-​war icon.3 The sight of Jacques positively gliding along the corridors in Nurse is one of the most indelible images of British cinema, while one of her most distinctive aspects was her vocal range; when Matron issues her orders, it is in her ‘bell-​tone voice with its cut-​crystal diction’ (Cecil 2007: n.p.). There were 2 3

Jacques was paid £250 for her role. ‘The Royal College of Nursing (RCN) has employed an award-​winning documentary cameraman to produce a film, being released this week, which it hopes will alter the public perception of nursing. The college believes nurses are still seen as either the stern matron figure portrayed by Hattie Jacques in the Carry On films or, at the other extreme, the sex-​mad characters played by Barbara Windsor in the same series of movies’ (Brooks, 2005: n.p.).

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Hattie Jacques     253 also the ‘dark expressive eyes and the effective trick of passing from the demure into sudden, formidable truculence’ (Cookman 1952: 16). But Jacques’s physical appearance was used as the butt of a succession of jokes almost from the outset of her acting career –​even concerning wireless stardom. In 1947 she joined the cast of BBC radio’s It’s That Man Again as Sophie Tuckshop, an overweight sixth former –​‘A large body with a very little voice seemed to hit the spot, so “Sophie Tuckshop” was born –​the terrible child who never stopped eating, with sickening results’ (quoted in Kavanagh 1974: n.p.). Jacques’s physique was the constant subject of critical comment, for if the ‘bad blondes’ of 1950s British cinema were condemned for their outré dress sense, the judgement on character players could often descend into near vitriol. In 1952 a theatre critic referred to Jacques as ‘mountainous’ (Cookman 1952:  16) and twenty-​six years later a TV critic wrote, ‘What appears to be a beached whale turns out to be Hattie Jacques’ (Shelley 1978b: 9). On-​screen Jacques was a natural for the world of Charles Dickens, playing a singer in Oliver Twist (David Lean 1948), Mrs Fezziwig in Scrooge (Brian Desmond Hurst 1951) and Mrs Nupkins in The Pickwick Papers (Noel Langley 1952). Her ability to move easily between middle-​ class and blue-​collar roles allowed her to be cast in such roles as a welder in Chance of a Lifetime. There was also the music hall surrealism of Mother Riley Meet the Vampire (John Gilling 1952), with Jacques joining with Arthur Lucan and Dandy Nichols on a rousing interpretation of I Hold Up My Finger, and I Say Tweet.4 When Jacques was cast as the Medical Corps Captain Clark in Carry On Sergeant (1958), her fame had derived less from cinema and more from the theatre and from playing Tony Hancock’s secretary in radio’s Hancock’s Half Hour. In the latter capacity, she excelled in thwarting the inept attempts of any male resident of 23 Railway Cuttings to undermine her status or, as an army doctor, over-​age recruits of the calibre of Horace Strong (Kenneth Connor). It was in the next film in the series that Jacques played the role that she would become associated with well into the twenty-​first century although Nurse was in many respects far removed from the popular Carry On image. The embryonic team is not just fresh of face, with the exception of Charles Hawtrey,5 their acting is more nuanced, while Norman Hudis, who wrote the first six entries, was less concerned with flying bras and more interested in expressing a slightly jaundiced view of authority: When men enlist or are drafted to serve their countries and cause, I  cannot see the need to treat them as recalcitrant halfwits. Equally, young rigorously trained women, frequently called up to take drastic

4 5

Once witnessed, never to be forgotten. A human cartoon that seemed to have strayed from the pages of the Beano.

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action before a doctor can arrive to tackle a ward emergency should not be harassed and confined under a series of archaic, hierarchic, meaningless restrictions. (2008: 35)

In Nurse, much of the work is seen to be carries out by Staff Nurse Dorothy Denton (Shirley Eaton) and the tired Sister (Joan Hickson), with Matron’s occasional inspections the cause for much scurrying. Jacques’s performance creates an authority figure that is not just far more formidable than the male house surgeons; she is a fascinating anagram of a battle axe of the Mary Brough/​Peggy Mount school combined with Sir Lancelot Spratt’s indomitable faith in his professional abilities. Peter Mills in Films and Filming thought that ‘most of the cast tries its best with the hackneyed script. The others seem to have given up on the first “take” ’ (1959: 22), but Hudis’s screenplay never infers that Matron is ever less than competent. Her arrival in the ward is the cause of as much male alarm as Muriel Whitchurch descending upon Nutbourne College. In Carry On Sergeant the commanding officer was the short and ineffectual Captain Potts (Eric Barker), but in Nurse, the Matron makes an entrance ‘like the Day of Judgement; underlings flatten themselves against the wall as she storms past, her fingers snaking out to check for dust, her eyes swivelling to spot a poorly made bed’ (Gray 2004:  79). Jacques reflected that much of her work was as a feed to comedians –​‘I have to know humour and its timing exactly’ (quoted in Haysom 1978:  21)  –​but Matron is more than a stooge. Her energies are too often directed at maintaining the status quo, and the sole patient who is openly unimpressed with her rigid adherence to protocol is the austere nuclear physicist Oliver Reckitt (Kenneth Williams): ‘If a Doctor asks me to hang by one arm from the ceiling wearing an aqualung with my birthday tattooed on my left buttock in shorthand, I’ll do it. He aims to cure me. Your rule has nothing to do with my cure; therefore, it has no meaning in here.’ It is an intriguing scene for several reasons. The film’s straight man and audience proxy is Ted York (Terence Longdon), a reporter using his stay as an opportunity to write an account of life in a hospital. However, it is not York or one of the male doctors who confronts Matron whose ‘power lies not in scientific expertise but in a form of superdomesticity articulated through carbolic soap, starched uniforms and scrubbed hands’ (Tincknell 2015: 10), but the young scientist. Reckitt is not the pseudo-​intellectual of Williams’ 1960s and 1970s Carry Ons, nor an Establishment patriarch, but a defender of individuality. Gray argues that Matron regards ‘all male patients as potential exploiters of her overworked nurses’ (2004: 79), but Reckitt’s diatribe is delivered straight, and with anger, the inference being that devotion to rules has overbalanced Matron’s sense of professional judgement.6 6

Editing lost the end of the sequence in which Reckitt explains to his fellow patients just why disobeying petty and meaningless rules is so important.

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Hattie Jacques     255 Jacques went on to more prominent billing in Teacher and Constable, her maths teacher Grace Short and her Sergeant Moon acting as efficient but approachable authority figures, but the Carry Ons did not yet define Jacques’s film career. Between 1958 and 1963, she played upper-​class ladies of the ‘hunting shooting fishing’ school of behaviour –​Nannette Parry in Make Mine Mink (Robert Asher 1960)  or blithely eccentric professionals. Jacques’s amiably conceding reporter Miss Richards in She’ll Have to Go (Robert Asher 1962) transcends the very worst of the direction. Such roles also illustrated Laraine Porter’s argument that with regard to women in British entertainment, ‘fatness precludes desirability and connotes the absence of sexuality’ (1998: 79). Until the early 1960s –​and as with Margaret Rutherford –​Jacques was seldom cast as anyone in a relationship. In Hancock’s Half Hour, Miss Pugh was the girlfriend of Sidney James, but the co-​scriptwriter Alan Simpson stated that ‘you didn’t write for her thinking she’s a woman, so we’ve got to write the feminine point of view. That made it easier for us’ (quoted in Webber 2004: 112), and this approach was duplicated in several of her film roles. In the Doghouse (Darcy Conyers 1961)  saw Jacques as a desexualised Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (RSPCA) officer, and the singing instructress of Follow a Star (Robert Asher 1959) was a similar ‘heroes’ best friend’ role. In 1955 her fellow Carry On cast member Joan Sims complained how British cinema made her look like ‘the battered back of a tram’, unlike Judy Holliday in the USA –​‘and they always give her a boyfriend’ (quoted in Ottaway 1955: 12). But the character actresses and comediennes of Pinewood, Shepperton and Elstree had, as if by ancient writ, to be either safely asexual or ‘comically’ voracious in their pursuit of men –​all of which makes Carry On Cabby (1963) rather remarkable. Being a Carry On, the slapstick has the timing of an industrial training film about the art of warehouse management, and there will, naturally, be a scene in which a middle-​aged male has to don a female disguise that is less convincing than a provincial pantomime dame. But the marriage of Peggy and Charlie Hawkins (Jacques and Sidney James) is utterly plausible –​one of love and mutual respect but where professional insecurity causes the husband to overwork. It is an unusual moment in the history of the Carry On films, as Andy Medhurst noted, ‘With very rare exceptions (Hattie Jacques in Cabby is probably the most impressive), the performers were never asked to characterise, in the sense of putting together credibly three dimensional comedic individuals but to inhabit, in the sense of slotting into an already established template in the English imagination’ (2007:  134). Monthly Film Bulletin praised a plot that was ‘more solidly constructed than usual’ (Review 1963: 145) and Peggy’s success in running her minicab firm is believable. In the early scenes, you sense her sheer frustration at her drive and intelligence being overlooked. If there

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256     Ladies and gentlemen of character is one moment of the entire series that should be preserved, above even Matron in Nurse encountering the Colonel (Wilfrid Hyde-​White) with a daffodil inserted into his anatomy, it is the introduction of the Glamcabs. Peggy walks proudly along the ranks of brand-​new Ford Consul Cortinas,7 a determined and farsighted businesswoman who, very unusually for the Carry Ons, is wholly at ease with the contemporary world. It is her husband who belongs more to Orwell’s ‘solid breakfasts and gloomy Sundays, smoky towns and winding roads, green fields and red pillar boxes’ (1968: 57) while Peggy embraces chrome-​plated modernity in a role that for once allowed Jacques to escape her screen persona. Between 1963 and 1967, Jacques mainly concentrated on the small screen, co-​starring in the BBC’s Sykes and in 1964 appearing as Madam Arcati in an ITV adaptation of Blithe Spirit (Joan Kemp-​Welch), which received possibly the ultimate accolade –​‘finally someone had delivered a performance that wasn’t overshadowed by Margaret Rutherford’ (quoted in Merriman 2008: 135). In 1964 Jacques starred in the ABC TV comedy thriller series Miss Adventure, which suffered from the flat lighting and cheap sets that were typical of television drama of that era, but her scenes opposite Maurice Kauffman’s ‘Greek’ lothario have a charming bantering quality that was far removed from her typical film comedies. A cinematic supporting role as the Spanish housekeeper Trinity Martinez in the 1966 Peter Sellers film The Bobo (Robert Parrish) showed a very different Jacques –​slimmer, elegant and with dark, suspicious eyes surveying any male who dared to approach her charge Olympia Segura (Britt Ekland). In 1967 she once more played Matron in Carry On Doctor, for the series had reverted to an institutional setting and with an odd ménage of styles: ‘No-​one working on the films seems to have decided whether they are with-​it or not. This makes them strangely timeless, like the language of Wodehouse; they incorporate without difficulty a lot of the flavour of pre-​war beach-​postcard humour but they are also full of the 1960s’ (Gilliatt 1973: 236). There are indeed nods to modernity  –​Jim Dale’s ITC-​leading man hairstyle and the klaxon horns on the Bedford ambulance –​blended with Talbot Rothwell’s screenplay that was apparently compiled from rejected variety show scripts. It was Doctor that crystallised many of the tropes that would come to be associated with the Carry On brand, not least Barbara Windsor cavorting through the car park of Maidenhead Town Hall in an implausibly short nurse’s uniform, naturally accompanied by Eric Rogers’s jaunty score and various leers from male bit-​part actors. In Nurse and Sergeant Jacques’s medical professionals were the models of asexual uniformed efficiency but in Doctor, Matron Lavina is depicted 7

Sourced via Peacocks, a Ford dealer in Balham.

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Hattie Jacques     257 as lovelorn and ridiculous in her pursuit of Kenneth Williams’s Dr Tinkle. Christopher Pullen contends that Jacques’s Matron was constructed as ‘an older [woman] or spinster’ in opposition to Williams’s ‘seemingly real character’ (2016: 72). The former argument is certainly plausible, but in 1967 there is no trace of the actor’s acerbic but approachable intellectual of the early Carry Ons, for Kenneth Williams was now approaching his roles as a caricature. Frances Gray saw their screen partnership as one that ‘brought a rare dignity to the seaside postcard image they were required to present’ (2004:  104), but while Dale and Anita Harris give extremely assured performances as the romantic juvenile leads, the Matron is viewed as a grotesque:  ‘While younger nurses demonstrate hearty sexual appetites and cheeky intelligence, for older females, no longer sex objects, sexual desire is depicted as laughable and grotesque’ (Hallam 2000: 57). The Matron of Carry On Nurse sailed into the ward as stately as a galleon, but by 1967 Jacques was suffering from a major eating disorder,8 her size contrasted for cruel laughs against the thin and reedy looking Williams. Camping (1969) repeated the dispiriting formula of Doctor but it was also the Carry On film that finally encountered the 1960s,9 to the wrath of Dr Soaper (Williams) and Miss Haggard, the Matron of Chayste Place finishing school. The hippies have only one Mini-​Moke, with the Sisyphean task of perpetually driving around the same muddy field while Rogers and Thomas considered approximately twenty-​five extras indulging in some tame, albeit appalling, dancing to what sounds like a ’62 Shadows B-​side10 in the November cold to be the epitome of the menace of youth culture. The picture ends with the sixth formers escaping on a hippy convoy and the film would have been infinitely improved had Miss Haggerd left with them, rather than embark on yet another pursuit of Kenneth Williams. Andy Medhurst commented that ‘everyone comes in for some stick’ in a Carry On and praised the series as ‘freewheeling anarchy’ (1992: 18). But Camping is a film populated by middle-​aged grumps who are blatantly resentful of anyone who is not downtrodden and suburban. While the attempts by Sid Boggle (Sidney James) and Bernie Lugg (Bernard Bresslaw), two gentlemen of distinctly non-​matinee idol appearance, to find physical passion are shown to be not just funny but faintly laudable, Matron’s desires are there to be mocked. Andy Merriman’s superb biography of the actress gives many sympathetic and very distressing accounts of her issues. 9 It also has Michael Low playing the unforgettably named ‘Lusty Youth’. 10 The Flowerbuds were in reality a London cabaret group who were originally asked to mime on-​set to ‘Fire’ by the Crazy World of Arthur Brown. This would partially explain the ill-​timed choreography. 8



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258     Ladies and gentlemen of character Jacques remained with the series for six more editions, as the series evinced an increasing sense of ennui. A typical Carry On now looked fit only for screening in a crumbling venue in a grey provincial city, or the camp cinema of a failing caravan site. The earlier entry in the series may have been ‘edited like half a pound of sliced stale ham, with cut after cut made relentlessly on a dialogue change and laborious establishing shots about ha-​ha accidents that are going to happen in three minutes’ time’ (Gilliatt 1973: 287) –​but at least they possessed a degree of surface gloss. The producer was wont to claim that ‘the title is the star of the series’ (quoted in Goodwin 2011:  166), possibly in an attempt to justify not paying his actors with outstanding generosity. Gerald Thomas echoed Rogers’s view, contending that the team members were ‘interchangeable, and none of them are really indispensable, although I’d hate to lose any of them’11 (quoted in Webber 2004: 115). But who would have paid 12½ new pence at the ABC to see Carry On Matron (1972) without Hattie Jacques, for it was always the cast who were the main attraction.12 It was their skill that prevented overly critical viewers from asking too many questions as to the plausibility of a forty-​four-​year-​old national serviceman back in 1958 and continued to divert attention from certain technical issues along the lines of inept editing.13 The last few years of Jacques’s screen career allowed for occasional flashes of her talent despite the extreme worst of Gerald Thomas’s direction and many of the screenplays. The sequence in At Your Convenience (1971) with Jacques, Sidney James and a budgerigar almost compensates for the remainder of the picture and in Abroad (1972) Floella, the Spanish cook, is magnificent in her wrath directed towards her inept husband Pepe (Peter Butterworth). But by now Jacques was in very poor health, and here it would be timely to quote William Leith, who referred to actors such as Sidney Greenstreet and John Candy as ‘big sad men communicating their pathos slowly, silently, pound by pound’ (2005: 5). The same words could apply to Jacques in her post-​1963 Carry On roles. In 1978 Jacques stated that she hoped to play a wider variety of roles, such as Nurse in Romeo and Juliet  –​‘As I  get older I  feel there may be more parts available for me’ (quoted in Haysom 1978: 21). But film opportunities were now limited by her health as she was now unable The very idea of Charles Hawtrey being interchanged with Bernard Bresslaw or Sidney James with Kenneth Williams is the very stuff that Hammer horrors are made of. 12 Rogers admitted as much to the National Film Finance Corporation when he wrote to them in 1958 stating that, ‘In order, therefore, to maintain the success of the “Carry Ons” it is essential to my mind, to keep the present team of comics together’ (quoted in Chapman 2012: 104). 13 Again Doctor (1969) seems to end mid-​film. 11

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Hattie Jacques     259 to obtain insurance and shortly before Jacques died, she appeared in advertisements for Asda rather than, as her talents demanded, the Royal Shakespeare Company. Reviews of Jacques’s earlier stage and television work serve as reminders of a range that British cinema so often overlooked. Anthony Cookman said of the revue The Bells of St Martin, ‘she is also agile. She dances lightly, she has a pleasant singing voice, dark expressive eyes and the effective trick of passing from the demure into sudden, formidable truculence’ (1952:  16). The BBC sitcom Sykes, which ran from 1960 to 1965 and was revived for a seven-​year run in 1972, created, at its best, an atmosphere of suburban whimsy equal to an N.  F. Simpson play. Jacques and Eric Sykes, who also wrote the show, played brother and sister for whom every day in 28 Sebastopol Terrace was an adventure –​ ‘where Hancock and James were actively kicking against the pricks, Eric and Hattie have the sublime innocence of children’ (Norris 1964:  12). Mercifully, footage of the 1963 Royal Variety Performance survives, for it is better to watch one moment of Jacques interrupting Eric’s guitar playing than all the reels of Carry On Dick. Melanie Williams observed how such performers were so often forced to play buffoons and mouth idiocies when they were capable of so much more’ (2011: 31). To cite one lost opportunity, Jacques would have been a natural to portray Connie Sachs in the BBC’s adaptation of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (John Irwin 1979). One can easily imagine her exchanging desperately jovial banter with Alec Guinness’s Smiley –​‘Is that booze you’re toting in your pocket, or a bloody great gun?’ just as it is possible to envisage the younger actress in Woman in a Dressing Gown or even The Pumpkin Eater. As with Margaret Rutherford and so many other leading character players, when such a talent achieves even temporary liberation the effect is often cathartic14 and in 1953 Hattie Jacques worked with James Broughton, one of the few writers and directors who recognised her potential. The Pleasure Garden (Broughton 1953) won the Prix de Fantasie Poetique at Cannes in 1954. The critic of Monthly Film Bulletin, who was obviously in a less curmudgeonly state of mind than his/​her counterpart at Films and Filming, thought Pleasure Garden had ‘a freedom all too rare in the cinema’ (Review 1954: 166). William Whitebait referred to the ‘good (and fat) fairy who, brushing away the crumbs as she comes out of a fish-​and-​chip shop will wave her wand to some effect over those within and without the bounds of temptation’ (1954: 147). Mrs Albion is a mistress of misrule who urges the visitors of a park to engage with their passions and defy the official censor Colonel 14

One also thinks of Jack Warner in My Brother’s Keeper, Colin Gordon in Strongroom (Vernon Sewell 1962) or Peter Vaughan in Smokescreen (Jim O’Connolly 1964).

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260     Ladies and gentlemen of character Gargoyle (John Le Mesurier),15 a top-​hatted figure who typified Roger Manvell’s view of British puritanism, suppressing humanity ‘in a straitjacket of ideal moral behaviour’ (1955: 237). Her domain is the ruins of the grounds of Crystal Palace and the time appears to be forever just before afternoon tea, with Jacques literally dancing among the hitherto repressed citizenry. She gleefully waves her magic scarf to liberate everyone from self-​conscious inhibitions. Nicholas de Jongh saw Hattie Jacques as ‘a woman of decided gentility and comic pretensions to dignity and even grandeur who was subject to the whims, tantrums and madnesses of her leading men’ (1980: 2). With The Pleasure Garden, Mrs Albion is indeed a goddess of suburbia; a Miss Pugh freed from tending to the needs of the inmates of 23 Railway Cuttings or, dare one suggest, an off-​duty Matron liberated from supervising the male inadequates on her ward. It is she who has the power to transform the Colonel’s troops into statues that are ‘as dead as official art’ in a vision of England that is a far cry from the latter-​day Carry On films, where ‘you can look but not touch, where the safest way to avoid disappointments is never to have expectations’ (Medhurst 2007: 142–​3). ‘Matron’ defined much of the post-​1958 screen career of Hattie Jacques –​but her principal screen legacy is of Mrs Albion presiding over a post-​war interpretation of a fête galante. Bibliography Barnes, Peter (1954), ‘The Pleasure Garden’, Films and Filming, November, 20. Brooks, Richard (2005), ‘Nurses’, Sunday Times, 3 April. Cecil, Jonathan (2007), ‘Big Is Beautiful’, The Spectator, 7 November. Chapman, James (2012), ‘A Short History of the “Carry On” films’, in Hunter, I. Q. and Porter, Laraine (eds.) British Comedy Cinema, London: Routledge. Cookman, Anthony (1952), ‘The Bells of St. Martin’, The Tatler, 10 September, 16. de Jongh, Nicholas (1980), ‘Obituary: Hattie Jacques’, The Guardian, 7 October, 2. Durgnat, Raymond (1970), A Mirror for England: British Movies from Austerity to Affluence, London: Faber & Faber. Farber, Manny (1962–​ 63), ‘Elephant Art vs Termite Art’, Film Culture, 27, Winter,  9–​13. Fowler, Christopher (2009), Paperboy: A Memoir, London: Doubleday. Geraghty, Christine (2000), British Cinema in the Fifties: Gender, Genre and the ‘New Look’, London: Routledge. Gilliatt, Penelope (1973), Unholy Fools: Wits, Comics, Disturbers of the Peace: Film & Theatre, London: Secker & Warburg. 15

The spirit of the Colonel appears to have been with the critic Peter Barnes when he fulminated that ‘this is an unpleasantly effeminate charade’ and ‘arty, pretentious claptrap’ in Films and Filming (1954: 20). One wonders if he immediately afterwards wrote a stiff letter to the Daily Mail.

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Hattie Jacques     261 Goodwin, Cliff (2011), Sid James: A Biography, London: Virgin Books. Gray, Frances (2004), ‘Certain Liberties Have Been Taken with Cleopatra; Female Performance in the “Carry On” films’, in Wagg, Stephen (ed.) Because I Tell a Joke or Two: Comedy, Politics and Social Difference, London: Routledge. Hallam, Julie (2000), Nursing the Image: Media, Culture and Professional Identity, London: Routledge. Harper, Sue (2000), Women in British Cinema:  Mad, Bad and Dangerous to Know, London: Continuum. Haysom, Ian (1978), ‘Family-​Sized Hattie Just Had to Be Comic’, Ottawa Journal, 28 December, 21. Hudis, Norman (2008), No Laughing Matter: How I Carried On, Clacton-​on-​Sea, UK: Apex Publishing. Hunter, I. Q. and Porter, Laraine (eds.) (2012), British Comedy Cinema, London: Routledge. Kavanagh, Ted (1974), The ITMA Years, London: Woburn Press. King, Barry (1985), ‘Articulating Stardom’, Screen, 26(5), September–​ October,  27–​51. Leith, William (2005) The Hungry Years: Confessions of a Food Addict. London: Bloomsbury. Manvell, Roger (1955), The Film and The Public, London: Penguin Books. Marwick, Arthur (1982), British Society Since 1945, London: Pelican Books. Marwick, Arthur (1998), The Sixties: Cultural Revolution in Britain, France, Italy, and the United States, c.1958–​c.1974, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Medhurst, Andy (1992), ‘Carry On Camp’, Sight & Sound, August, 16–​20. Medhurst, Andy (2007), A National Joke: Popular Comedy and English Cultural Identities, London: Routledge. Merriman, Andy (2008), Hattie:  The Authorised Biography of Hattie Jacques, London: Aurum Press. Mills, Peter (1959), ‘Carry On Nurse’, Films and Filming, May, 22. Murphy, Robert (1992), Sixties British Cinema, London: BFI. Norris, Marjorie (1964), ‘Sykes and a Following’, The Stage, 19 March, 12. Orwell, George (1968), The Collected Essays, Journalism, and Letters of George Orwell: My country right or left, 1940–​1943, ed. Orwell, Sonia and Angus, Ian. San Diego, CA: Harcourt, Brace & World. Ottaway, Robert (1955), ‘ “Why Must They Make Me a Scarecrow?” asks Joan Sims’, Picturegoer, 7 May, 12. Porter, Laraine (1998), ‘Tarts, Tampons and Tyrants: Women and Representation in British Comedy’, in Wagg, Stephen (ed.) Because I Tell a Joke or Two: Comedy, Politics and Social Difference, London: Routledge. Pullen, Christopher (2016), Straight Girls and Queer Guys:  The Hetero Media Gaze in Film and Television, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Review (1954), ‘The Pleasure Garden’, Monthly Film Bulletin, 21(250), November, 166. Review (1963), ‘Carry On Cabby’, Monthly Film Bulletin, 30(357), October, 145. Richards, Jeffrey (1997), Films and British National Identity:  From Dickens to ‘Dad’s Army’, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Shelley, Garry (1978a), ‘Hattie’s Real Life Is No Carry On’, Sydney Morning Herald, 7 September, 15.

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262     Ladies and gentlemen of character Shelley, Garry (1978b), ‘Sykes, But Far from Hilarious’, Sydney Morning Herald, 20 November, 9. Tincknell, Estella (2015), ‘The Nation’s Matron:  Hattie Jacques and British Postwar Popular Culture’, Journal of British Cinema and Television, 12(1), January  6–​24. Webber, Richard (2004), Fifty Years of ‘Hancock’s Half Hour’, London: Arrow. Whitebait, William (1954), ‘The Pleasure Garden’, Sight & Sound, January– ​March,  147. Williams, Melanie (2011), ‘Entering the Paradise of Anomalies: Studying Female Character Acting in British Cinema’, Screen, 52(1), Spring.

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Peter Finch: The ‘actor’s actor?’

Peter Finch was born Frederick George Peter Ingle Finch on 28 September 1916 and died on 14 January 1977, becoming the first actor to be posthumously awarded an Oscar. His prize for Network (Sidney Lumet 1976) should not be allowed to obscure his contributions to British cinema, which rank among the most considerable of any actor of his generation. Peter Finch once stated that, ‘Filming means that the actor is in a constant state of creation’ (1958:  7), while David Thomson wrote of Finch that, ‘Unlike many other British actors, he seemed to leave reserves untapped that implied a full character of which we saw only a part. In essence, it comes from the ability to discover a part of yourself in whatever character you are playing’ (2014: 289). And this is beautifully illustrated by Finch’s supporting roles in just two very different productions. In The Heart of the Matter, he played Father Rank to Trevor Howard’s Major Scobie, always aware of pain but never moralising, and there is a moment in The Flight of the Phoenix (Robert Aldrich 1965) in which his Captain Harris attempts to urge his sergeant (Ronald Fraser) into a suicidal foray. He uses language that is a virtual parody of British military heroism –​ ‘There’s nothing to be frightened of ’ he cajoles the recalcitrant NCO at one point. Harris seems to be aged around fifty but is still only a captain, and the outwardly jovial Sergeant Watson loathes him. Raymond Durgnat once referred to Peter Finch’s ability to convey ‘a vulnerable fatherliness’ (1976: 5) and Michael Powell recalled the actor’s ‘very seductive’ nature (quoted in Lacourbe and Grivel 1977: 61). These are often the two keynotes of Finch’s major contributions to British cinema, where his fluent and plausible heroes are continually on their guard, aware of circumstance, fate or the capricious nature of others and themselves. There are those actors keep their distance from their audience; one could argue Rex Harrison or Laurence Harvey’s most interesting performances were when their carefully constructed mask 265

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266     The art of screen acting

Figure 15  Peter Finch in Judith (1966)

of sangfroid developed cracks –​while Finch embodies neither a plaster saint nor a caricature of the cinematic ‘decent chap’. Such a talent requires a full-​length book, and yet I  have made the ostensibly quixotic decision to concentrate on a select and even eccentric-​ seeming cross section of Finch’s British pictures. His first picture for Hollywood was Elephant Walk (William Dieterle 1954), and from the late 1950s onwards his career often encompassed significant international US-​backed pictures. There are high-​profile offerings such as The Nun’s Story (Fred Zinnemann 1959), Kidnapped (Robert Stevenson 1960), Network (Sidney Lumet 1976)  and pictures that deserved to be buried at sea somewhere off the coast of the Falklands. One treasures Pauline Kael’s description of 10:30 PM Summer (Jules Dassin 1966)  –​‘Do you have daring ideas for sophisticated sexual dramas when you were in high school, and then, realising how ludicrously lurid they were, laugh at yourself whenever you thought of them?’ (1969: 203). Thus, in the fashion of the film career of James Mason, one endures pictures that surface unheralded on minor satellite channels, for one great Finch performance is worth ten mediocre or even dire features. During the 1973 remake of Lost Horizon (Charles Jarrott), one thinks of The Pumpkin Eater or Sunday Bloody Sunday (John Schlesinger 1971), especially during one of the musical numbers or the scenes opposite John

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Peter  Finch     267 Gielgud wearing a very silly hat.1 Finch once reflected of his career that, ‘All of the others have either been films I liked that didn’t make money or films I didn’t like that did make money’ (Ebert 1968: n.p.). Anyone who wishes to chronical the cinematic career of Peter Finch faces three challenges, the first of which is the bulk of material devoted to his affair with Vivien Leigh and the second is that of ‘hell raising’. To read the life and times of Trevor Howard, Richard Burton or Oliver Reed is to be often confronted with near hagiographic descriptions of alcohol-​ induced illness. The two main accounts of Finch’s life by Elaine Dundy and Trader Faulkner do not, mercifully, fall into this category, but there are still rather too many accounts of drink-​related tedium. The often-​ unspoken truth is that stories of ‘hell raising’ are so often unspeakably dull that the many details of various brawls eventually start to merge into one nightmarish monologue, somewhat in the fashion of being trapped in a saloon bar with a talkative inebriate. The third issue primarily relates to Peter Finch’s seven-​year contract with the Rank Organisation and indeed, the attitude of much of his work for British cinema. Many of the accounts of his cinema career have him escaping these ‘confines’ to an international career that culminated in Network, for which he was posthumously awarded the Academy Award for Best Actor 1977. The actor once referred to being on a ‘merry go round of unparalleled mediocrity, getting paid to churn out movie fodder for the moronic masses’ (quoted in Faulkner 1979:  178), while Jeffrey Richards described mainstream cinema of the 1950s regarding ‘the war films that relived old glories, the Norman Wisdom comedies that trod in the footsteps of George Formby, the anaemic “international” epics which aimed futilely to break into the American market and which misused the sensitive talents of such stars as Dirk Bogarde and Peter Finch’ (1997: 147). Finch did indeed look somewhat ill at ease wearing chunky V-​neck pullovers in studio PR shots and he seemed even less at home in the sort of Pinewood comedy in which the cast members were on the verge of saying ‘gosh’, even if they did not do so. In 1955 Penelope Houston cited Finch, together with Jack Hawkins and Dirk Bogarde, as representing British cinema’s ‘tendency to place in casting’ (1955: 13), and they were not the only actors whose talents were often misused by Rank (see, for example, the chapters on Norman Wisdom and Diana Dors in this book). Peter Finch was also frequently cast in traditional leading roles, but although he was never less than effective in the likes of Operation Amsterdam (Michael McCarthy 1959), his forte was his insight into the weak, the foolish and the compromised. Richard Whitehall believed that his work had ‘an element of detached imagination which allows him to 1

Michael Billington cited the film as a reason for establishing a ‘Society for the Protection of Peter Finch’ (1973: 82).

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268     The art of screen acting observe the idiosyncrasies of a character in a style somewhat similar to that of Michael Redgrave’ (1960: 5). Finch’s reputation could equally lie with a select number of UK-​based pictures, and one of his final Rank films contains a performance that is, in the humble view of this scribe, more deserving of an Oscar than his turn in Network. It was the same Rank Organisation that showcased Peter Finch’s depiction of confused and angry middle-​class males in Windom’s Way (Ronald Neame 1957). As Sue Harper and Vincent Porter so appositely note, the 1950s was ‘a dynamic and often confusing period in which new and old methods fought, often to the death’ (2003:  2). Peter Finch was a key actor of this transitional era, as demonstrated by his work with Jack Clayton, Michael Powell, Ralph Thomas, Robert Hamer and Roy Ward Baker. Network may have won Finch an Oscar, but it was so many British productions from No Love for Johnnie (Ralph Thomas 1961) to Somewhere to Hide (Alastair Reid 1972) that displayed a peerless gift for slowly revealing a conflicted interior life. Elaine Dundy noted that, ‘Some works of art are so precisely and accurately set in a certain country, in a certain city, in a certain year, that their reality radiates in all direction –​into the past that led up to them and into the future which they will shape’ (1980: 313). And this encapsulates the best of Finch’s screen work. Peter Finch was born in London and raised in India before settling in Australia where his first feature film was Dad and Dave Come to Town (Ken G.  Hall 1938). After wartime army service Finch was established as one of the leading actors on ABC radio in addition to forming the Mercury Theatre Company. In 1947, acting on the advice of Laurence Olivier, he relocated to the UK, where he signed a theatrical contract with Olivier. His final picture as a full-​time resident of Sydney was a supporting role in the Ealing production Eureka Stockade (Harry Watt 1949)  and his first British film was made for the same studio. Train of Events (Sidney Cole, Charles Crichton and Basil Dearden 1949)  was a portmanteau drama in which Finch portrayed Philip, an actor who has strangled his unfaithful wife (Mary Morris). If, as Gill Plain stated, ‘actors are cumulative cultural products made up of the sum of their previous performances’ (2006: 9), then Finch’s screen persona circa 1954 was one of ambivalence. Over the next six years, he combined theatrical work with essaying a variety of roles, from Richard D’Oyly Carte in The Story of Gilbert and Sullivan (Sidney Gilliat 1953) to supporting Errol Flynn in The Dark Avenger (Henry Levin 1955). His small role as a Royal Australian Air Force (RAAF) officer in The Wooden Horse (Jack Lee 1950) provides a deft illustration of how the actor rarely oversold a role, giving a performance that was perfectly in key with a film concerned with a war largely of loneliness and boredom. For Disney, he was an introspective Sheriff of Nottingham in The Story of Robin Hood

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Peter  Finch     269 and His Merrie Men (Ken Annakin 1952), a figure far removed from Basil Rathbone’s saturnine and witty villain. Finch’s breakthrough year, regarding cinema, came in the mid-​1950s with three films released during this period that deftly illustrate the range and depth of his talents –​Make Me an Offer (Cyril Frankel 1955), Father Brown (Robert Hamer 1954) and Passage Home (Roy Ward Baker 1955). In Make Me an Offer, his ‘Charlie’ is the still centre of a Group 3 whimsy concerning antiques and while several of the other cast members take the opportunities offered by Wolf Mankowitz’s story to indulge in industrial levels of whimsy, Finch conveys a life of the mind. The splendid Eastmancolor cinematography becomes him, and while the setting is a fantasy London, you can believe that Charlie genuinely and almost desperately craves the vase he saw in the British Museum as a child. Melanie Williams saw one of Finch’s strengths as an actor as bringing ‘the right combination of romantic self-​deception and rueful realism to his characterisation of someone falling in love despite his better judgement’ (2005:  130). This applies to Make Me an Offer as much as The Trials of Oscar Wilde (Ken Hughes 1960)  or Girl with Green Eyes (Desmond Davies 1963). The point at which he finally encounters the vase is a moment of genuine love. Father Brown was adapted by Hamer and his co-​scenarist Thelma Schnee, transforming the original short story of G.  K. Chesterton into a game of cat and mouse throughout France between the hero and the jewel thief Hercule Flambeau (Kemp 2003: 80). Gavin Lambert praised Finch’s performance as ‘sardonic and with a dry kind of melancholy’ (1954: 34) as the renegade aristocrat feels adrift in a post-​war France. The narrative is more concerned with his salvation than with detection, and when Brown confronts Flambeau in the latter’s chateau, he observes the preserved nursery –​‘When you were a child you thought as a child but now you are a man, and you still think as a child, and that’s dangerous!’ (Dundy 1980: 195). It is a line of dialogue that virtually anticipates many of Finch’s major future roles, where his characters negotiate the hinterland of being childlike and childish. The crucial second Finch picture of 1955 was Passage Home, which provides a fascinating contrast in British cinematic acting styles. The Bulinger is a tramp steamer operating between South America and the UK during the depths of the Depression with Finch as the Captain ‘Lucky’ Ryland who wishes to make the journey in record time. He is a demonstrably good mariner, but a hopeless manager of men, resulting in a near mutiny below decks, his first mate Llewelyn (Duncan Lamont) wants his job and his second mate Vosper (Anthony Steel) keeps his distance. The last named was an actor of Harper and Porter’s ‘old methods’ (2003) playing Vosper as one who is handsome, solid and with no apparent inner life. As we have previously noted, Steel would develop a talent for

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270     The art of screen acting melancholy gentlemanliness, but here his unambiguous masculinity is at odds with Finch’s Ryland. The Bulinga’s sole passenger is Ruth Elton (Diane Cilento), an English governess returning home from South America, and when Ryland tries to force himself on her after his offer of marriage is spurned it is an ineffably ugly moment, shattering the Captain’s precariously maintained facade that at least he is still an officer and a gentleman, albeit in the surroundings of a tramp steamer in 1931. Ryland subsequently uses all his skill to bring the ship to safety through a storm, but there can be no conventional happy ending. The 1950s British films so often celebrated middle-​aged male professionalism, but in Passage Home, this does not automatically bring redemption. Raymond Durgnat compared the film to George Orwell, ‘as a study of a man in the spiritual prison of his class position’ (1970: 47), and there is no moment of reconciliation and narrative conclusion. The epilogue takes place in the present day, with the Captain preparing to spend the rest of his days in a cottage alone with his collection of clocks and the painting awarded by the company for ‘proud service’. Worse, he will have to endure his retirement with himself. Passage Home resulted in the Rank Organisation offering Finch a contract, and when he joined the studio’s roster of stars, the mood within the film industry appeared buoyant. At that time, with the studio ‘realising that contract artist[s]‌could be loaned out to other production companies, Rank tried to corner the market by signing as many potential stars as possible’ (Chibnall 2016: 171). His first leading role for Rank was in Simon and Laura (Muriel Box 1955), adapted from Alan Melville’s West End play about a married theatrical couple who agree to star in a live weekly television soap opera as themselves. Carmen Dillon and Julie Harris created designs that accentuate the heart of the movie (Cave 2003), which coalesces with the colour cinematography to form a London of red buses and green parks that is as vibrant a fantasy as the New York of Gene Kelly and Stanley Donen in On the Town (1949). At the heart of the picture is Finch’s Simon Foster and his wife Laura (Kay Kendall) and although Elaine Dundy referred to his performance as ‘interestingly bad’ (1980: 201), it would be hard to envisage another actor in the role. Rex Harrison was a more acerbic figure, often toying with others and issuing his bon mots with a voice like a sweet but lethal liqueur. Another player who might have made a plausible Simon is Nigel Patrick, whose sardonic gentlemen often have the air of a cashiered major who would not hesitate to betray any last vestiges of honour if his back were to the wall –​‘Nothing personal, old boy’. But Finch’s theatrical grandee has the air of one who has carefully modelled himself on David Niven over the years and is quite lost away from that template. The affected pencil moustache and over-​elaborate wardrobe hint at an insecure actor playing a role that he expects of himself. Simon and Laura was the first

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Peter  Finch     271 picture to display Finch’s talents in light comedy, and it allowed him to act opposite one of his finest leading ladies, Kay Kendall, an actress once very accurately described by David Thomson as ‘a comedienne bemused by her own lofty handsomeness’ (2014: 465). Finch would not have such an adroit female screen partner until No Love for Johnnie some seven years later, and unusually for this period, the Fosters convey a real sense of gender equality. Of the films that Peter Finch subsequently made under Rank, British Lion’s Josephine and Men (Roy Boulting 1955) falls into the class of upper-​ middle-​class comedy that was in very marked contrast to the timing, wit and aesthetic charms of Simon and Laura. Finch’s studio publicity often inferred that here was the sort of chap who should be smoking a pipe even when he is not doing so. Marcia Landy commented that so many British films sought to ‘equate appearance and essence, word and deed’ (1991: 480) and in Josephine and Men, everyone is a type. It is also the sort of picture that Monthly Film Bulletin gloomily reviewed as one that contains ‘most of the traditional jokes of British screen comedy. Bohemians, foreigners and elderly housekeepers are amongst the targets’ (Review 1955:  181). Meanwhile, Sinden hides behind a moustache as Finch attempts to look dashing, vaguely bohemian and sporting in equal measure. During the 1950s, Finch would make several British films with an Australian setting, winning a BAFTA Award for his Joe Harman, an Anzac POW of the Japanese army in A Town Like Alice (Jack Lee 1956), but, as with Sidney James’s upbringing in Johannesburg, Finch’s early life never wholly defined his screen image. Many UK-​based Australian actors such as Ray Barrett, Charles Tingwell, Ed Devereaux and John Meillon were often cast as either nationality, while Russell Napier, Coral Browne, Alan Cuthbertson and Esma Cannon almost always played English characters. Bill Kerr’s accent was part of his stage and broadcasting persona, especially in Hancock’s Half Hour, but Finch was never a ‘professional Australian’. His penultimate picture to be shot on location in Australia was The Shiralee (Leslie Norman 1957), an adaptation of D’Arcy Niland’s novel about an itinerant swagman named Jim Macauley who finds a new sense of responsibility when taking charge of his small daughter. He has neither the inclination nor the motivation to settle, moving through a succession of jobs, always remaining on the move. His world is changing –​the narrative ‘also introduced notions of the urban landscape and experiences’ (Morgan 2012: 172) –​and the role of Macauley marked the end to Finch’s professional connections with Australia. Had The Shiralee been made fifteen to twenty years later, one could fairly imagine it forming a central part of the Australian new wave, with Macauley’s origins and motives more fully explored and fewer imported British co-​stars.

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272     The art of screen acting As it was, some of British cinema’s most rewarding roles for Finch were those of flawed authority, as seen in The Battle of the River Plate (Michael Powell 1956)  and Windom’s Way. The former was based on actual events; in 1939 three Royal Navy cruisers engaged in battle with the German pocket battleship Admiral Graf Spee off the coast of Montevideo, the capital of neutral Uruguay. Its captain, Hans Langsdorff, was given just seventy-​two hours to arrange repairs, and he eventually scuttled his damaged ship rather than face the overwhelmingly superior British forces that he believed awaited him. The plot focuses more on Langsdorff than on the Royal Navy personnel, and Powell reflected that, ‘Sometimes he (Finch) played a role he adored, and, in that case, he gave himself completely and he was superb’ (quoted in Lacourbe and Grivel 1977: 61). The German officer is often seen through the perspective of Bernard Lee’s Captain Dove, resulting in the sense of two fellow mariners united by professionalism, even if one is serving a regime that is an affront to his sense of honour. Robert Murphy argued that this narrative device means that the German officer is ‘unable to become a proper protagonist, and the film lacks a centre’ (2000: 224), but this appears to be Powell and Pressburger’s motive. Langsdorff is almost as enigmatic a figure as Eric Portman’s ‘Glue Man’ in A Canterbury Tale (1944) –​‘I’m like a pretty girl. I change my frock; I change my hat’, the Captain observes at one point. Richard Coombs makes the compelling argument: ‘And is Peter Finch, with his leather jacket and his conspicuous binoculars, such a romantic blank because he really is no one, Captain Nemo, a character whose place is behind the action rather than in it, our master of ceremonies?’ (1995: 20). But once again, Finch was the still centre of a picture, and if Langsdorff appears inscrutable, it is a mask to cope with the intolerable pain of his devotion to duty in the cause of an indefensible regime. The Battle of the River Plate was released in December 1956 and became the third most popular film of 1957 despite Peter Baker’s not unjustified complaint that ‘this is a very British war film with such a stiff upper lip that it is almost expressionless’ (1956: 21–​2). But it is Langsdorff, instead of the professionally jovial chaps of the wardroom, who represents the heart of the film; a German officer trained in the days of the old imperial navy and who now commands a ship under the auspices of the Kriegsmarine. What the merchant navy officer –​and the audience –​may briefly glimpse is a courteous and witty mask in a performance of vulnerability, where Langsdorff ’s masters now compromise his sense of honour. In Windom’s Way, Finch has a more ostensibly conventional role, that of Alec Windom, a doctor working in an unnamed Far East nation with parallels to Malaya. A strike on a rice plantation is handled equally ineptly by local officials and white farm managers. The doctor is a more of a trustworthy figure than the blustering farm manager Patterson

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Peter  Finch     273 (Michael Hordern) or Marne Maitland’s saturnine local police chief, Commissioner Belhedron, but he is also politically naive. Finch’s finely judged performance has Windom as a compassionate but humanly flawed professional caught in a situation where there are no easy or glibly resolved solutions. Earlier in the picture, he argued to the authorities that if the farmworkers were helped, ‘they’ll thank you. If you don’t, they’ll go over to the enemy’, and Jon Cowans notes that, ‘The film hardly sympathises with the ruthless communists, who wear a uniform like Mao’s and who has the hapless mayor (Gregoire Aslan) executed in cold blood, but it blames the workers’ misguided defection to Semcar (the rebels’ leader) on their mistreatment by the British’ (2015:  147). Alec’s attempts at mediation between the parties fail and although he decides to remain in the territory to help its future by providing medical help –​ his position remains an ambiguous one, while outside of his surgery are the sounds of encroaching civil war. British Consul (Robert Flemyng) advises that ‘we are visitors … in this country’, but although Windom speaks in the tones of the British Establishment, he is not of it. Gordon Gow thought that Finch’s naturalism was in marked contrast to some of the other performances (1958:  25–​6), although the scenes between Windom and Hordern’s farm manager are some of the most powerful in the narrative. In such moments, the gulf between the twilight of colonialism and the liberal professional is manifest. Two years later, Finch was hired by Warwick films to star in The Trials of Oscar Wilde, a film that entered production against a background of the intense discussion following the Report of the Departmental Committee on Homosexual Offences and Prostitution. By 1959 the British Board of Film Classification (BBFC) did pass, albeit with an X certificate, Serious Charge (Terence Young 1959), which concerned a hooligan (Andrew Ray) falsely accusing a vicar of molesting him. The Warwick picture attracted further press attention due to a rival project to be directed by Gregory Ratoff and starring Robert Morley, who had previously portrayed Wilde onstage. After a legal battle, both films went on release, The Trials of Oscar Wilde shot in Eastmancolor and Oscar Wilde being a more low-​ key work appeared in black and white. Finch won a BAFTA Award for Best Actor in a Leading Role for his depiction of the playwright and Peter Baker thought that the actor ‘gave the best performance of his career … Stage by stage as the clouds gather, as the friends desert, as public morality demands its pound of flesh, we see Wilde molded’ (1960: 23). The Finch interpretation of the playwright is initially a bold, sardonic figure, sparring with Lord Queensbury  –​brilliantly played by Lionel Jeffries, as the converse to the English eccentrics that populated British cinema –​Stephen Bourne rightly describes his performance as ‘beautifully restrained, understated and seductive’ (2016: 143). In Hughes’s picture, it is Wilde’s romantic nature, as much as his sexual preferences,

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274     The art of screen acting which make him prey to such demonic-​seeming figures as James Booth’s Alfred Wood and John Fraser’s charming, vain, petulant and destructive Lord Alfred Douglas. Hughes’s screenplay has the members of the English Establishment –​not least Queensbury –​as the degenerates. One of the actor’s finest moments comes in the film’s closing moments. The scene of a post-​‘Ballad of Reading Gaol’ Wilde being approached at the railway station by a smiling Bosie in the guise of an Iago-​like betrayer may not be historically accurate, but the reaction of Finch –​recognition, horror, disgust, fear –​is a masterclass in screen acting. Finch’s last film made under the auspices of his Rank contract was No Love for Johnnie, which was the studio’s s first X certificate picture and commissioned in the wake of the commercial success of Room at the Top. Betty Box and Ralph Thomas were, ‘even given their special arrangement with Rank’ (Williams 2005: 125), surprised when John Davis permitted them to produce a screen adaptation of the controversial novel by the Labour MP Wilfred Fienburgh. As the 1950s progressed the team were becoming frustrated with the mechanics of their comedy series, Thomas explaining that, ‘We’d make a deal; one Doctor film for something we really wanted to do’ (quoted in Dixon 1994:  110). Rank’s management possibly ‘liked the Peter Finch character being so corrupt because, after all, he was left wing’ (Betty Box quoted in McFarlane 1997:  87). The film received a somewhat predictable splenetic review in the New Left Review: ‘The film is so bad that I do not think anybody will be affected by it’ (Lovell 1961: 54). Raymond Durgnat described the film in terms of ‘taking a novel which was a laceratingly honest self-​criticism by a Labour MP … and transforming it into pro-​Conservative propaganda’ (1970: 69). But the screenplay, by Mordecai Richler and Box and Thomas’s regular collaborator, the actor-​writer Nicholas Phipps, focuses on the sheer confusion and even angst beneath the smooth carapace of a middle-​aged professional, regardless of his politics. No Love for Johnnie opens with a return to power of a Labour government, with Johnnie Byrne balancing frustrated political ambition with a disastrous marriage to Alice –​in Rosalie Crutchley’s performance we instantly learn how years of mothering a husband has eroded their relationship. Johnnie only seems to come to life when charming a TV camera. Robert Shail saw Byrne as ‘a meretricious Labour MP who puts his career above his principles’ (2007: 201), but for Johnnie, advancement means attention of a sort, to shore up his essential insecurity. It is a film that is as much concerned with exploring the frailties of the middle-​class male psyche than political observation. Byrne commenced his political career as a Labour councillor in his home town before gaining a wartime commission and then becoming an MP in the Atlee administration. His ambitions are more evident than those of Joe Lampton, and Finch creates a devastating portrayal of a

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Peter  Finch     275 deracinated individual. At one point he describes how he worked to lose his Yorkshire accent on promotion to captain in the Second World War –​ ‘For six months in the Mess all I said was “pass the marmalade please” ’. He now affects a manner of an uneasy mock bonhomie when addressing his north-​country constituents, for Johnnie lives in terror of returning to his roots –​‘All that palaver and handshaking’ and ‘evenings in a dreary office by the bus terminus’. Elspeth Grant suggested that, ‘As the excellent Mr. Peter Finch plays him, one had the impression Johnnie might have once cared about the people he represents (1961: 43), but that seems to be no longer the case. What remains is a professional combination of slickness and faux matiness that allows him to survive the threat of a vote of no confidence by his constituency party and narrowly avoiding deselection. Thomas frames the local community from the MP’s viewpoint: an assortment of unionists and activists whose accents represent the world from which Byrne has largely escaped. In Room at the Top Joe Lampton attempts to reconcile his past and his aspirations with a return to his home that was destroyed during the Blitz, but with Johnnie it is ‘not just that he wants to stay in Parliament, it is that he hates and fears, and is so deeply ashamed of where he comes from’ (Dundy 1980:  250). After the vote, Byrne is physically sick. His past is now closed, unless political and professional expediency demands he pay lip service to it, while his present is expressed in edicts to the media. Johnnie’s personal life is even more indicative of his sense of confusion. He engages in an affair with a twenty-​year-​old student, Pauline West (Mary Peach), but her mindset is ultimately too mature to cope with a middle-​aged lover whose emotions are almost childlike –​‘I love you –​ I shall be miserable for a while but I must get away from you’, she tells the uncomprehending Byrne. Upstairs from his London flat lives Mary (Billie Whitelaw) who likes but does not trust Johnnie and when she rejects his clumsy alcohol-​infused pass, his reaction is one of utter devastation: ‘Nobody wants me. There’s nobody anywhere’, he sobs desperately, but the rest of his sentence, significantly, is unclear … Does he say “I just wanted to be someone” or “I just wanted to be with someone”? It hardly matters; for Johnnie, the two have become tragically interchangeable’ (Williams 2005: 131). The recent DVD release reveals that he utters the latter phrase after his pathetic advances. Mary’s sad response is, ‘It’s too late, Johnnie’, for this self-​loathing and self-​deluding figure is trapped within his own delusions. Alice offers him the opportunity of reconciliation, but when Johnnie is finally offered a post in the Cabinet, the Prime Minister (Geoffrey Keen) informs him that the reason he was previously passed over for promotion was his wife’s communist party connections. Byrne’s response is to destroy the note containing her new telephone number and to embark on a future of materially rewarded misery –​‘I just

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276     The art of screen acting want to be a success’. Now he is ‘someone’, in as devastating a performance of male immaturity as seen in post-​war British cinema. Finch won the 1962 BAFTA Award for Best British Actor, a fitting conclusion to his Rank career. He was cast as Caesar in Cleopatra before having to leave the disastrous project due to other commitments. Neither of his leading roles in two MGM-​British melodramas directed by Robert Stevens  –​I Thank a Fool (1962) and In the Cool of the Day (1963) –​were career enhancing, even if the latter did feature some entertainingly bizarre casting. He subsequently reflected that ‘there is a subtle sort of alchemy around scripts that once they start to go wrong, nothing will ever save them. There is a rotten core somewhere’ (Finch 1964: 8). His next significant films for UK production company were Girl with Green Eyes and The Pumpkin Eater. Girl with Green Eyes was adapted for Woodfall by Edna O’Brien from her novel The Lonely Girl. Rita Tushingham’s heroine Kate Braby, who moves from a village in Ireland to Dublin where she falls in love with the middle-​aged writer Eugene Galliard. Finch underplays the role, with not a hint of the ‘Oirish’ accent that other British actors of this period might have employed. He creates an effortlessly charming rake who ‘regards commitment as a moveable feast: “With this ring I thee bed and board for such time as you remain reasonable and kind” ’ (Harper 2000: 113). One could also add the word ‘malleable’, for although Galliard is eloquent and witty, in his own fashion, he is also as oppressive a figure as Kate’s lumpen male relatives and the courteously sinister priest of T. P. McKenna. ‘I liked you better before you started thinking’, Eugene moans. Susan D’Arcy’s obituary of the actor stated that his forte was ‘tortured souls, menopausal identity crises’ (1977:  258), which is achieved with finely observed nuance in Girl with Green Eyes. Eugene is separated from his wife but still loves her, he is a father, and he ultimately cannot face Kate maturing from the image he held of her. She demands commitment from a man who would prefer to hide behind polished aphorisms and at the end of the picture she has moved to London. We hear Tushingham’s voice-​over reading a letter from Eugene regretting that he was unready for a relationship while she was ‘immature’. But, as we have seen, the latter equally applies to Galliard, a ‘flesh and blood man who is lonely and listless, fascinated by her innocence but quickly bored by her gaucherie and irritated by her possessiveness’ (Davies 1964: 146). Of the actor’s pictures in the mid-​1960s, his supporting role in The Flight of the Phoenix is of the most considerable interest; Finch believed that ‘if a film is stupid, I’m going to look twice as stupid in a big part’ (quoted in Dundy 1980:  281). He avoided the histrionics of James Stewart and Richard Attenborough as the cargo plane crashes in the Libyan desert, instead gradually revealing an entire hinterland of Captain Harris’s many years of professional failures, mess bills and being passed

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Peter  Finch     277 over for promotion yet again –​all with compassion. If he speaks in the manner of a bad 1950s British war film, we see that Harris is probably maintained almost solely by illusions  –​and how this facade could be ruinous for the men under his command. When his Sergeant refuses to take part in a potentially suicidal negotiation with a party of local raiders, Harris resorts to the rule book –​‘I shall have to assume you are willfully disobeying a superior officer’. We never know precisely why the NCO is so happy at the Captain’s death, just as we can only guess at previous disastrous sorties in Aden, Malaya or Kenya that might have been organised by this sincere and courteous officer and gentleman. The year 1967 marked the first collaboration between Finch and John Schlesinger on the MGM-​backed production of Far from the Madding Crowd. If nothing dates more rapidly than yesterday’s visions of the future, much the same can be said of cinema’s past attempts at ‘heritage’. Robert Murphy opined that Julie Christie, Alan Bates and Terence Stamp were ‘so closely associated with swinging London that they seem too indelibly modern to fit into Hardy’s Wessex, and it is difficult to shake off the feeling that at any moment they may discard their funny voices and rush off to Annabel’s’ (1992: 264–​5). James Price saw the picture as ‘modern pastoral’ with Finch’s William Boldwood conveying ‘exactly the right degree of style and schizophrenic absurdity’ (1967–​68: 39–​40). His performance transcends the picture’s quasi-​Carnaby Street trappings with a squire whose passions are never monolithic but a maelstrom beneath an impeccable surface. The screenplay by Frederic Raphael takes considerable pains to establish the squire as a far-​sighted and reasonable landowner but, with the merest hint in body language, Finch infers the anguish that has long been lying dormant. The seemingly mild-​mannered gentleman becomes, momentarily, as dangerous as Captain Ryland and so Boldwood bears down on Bathsheba (Christie) ‘too heavily. He so oppresses her with the weight of his middle-​aged love that the pressure of it becomes intolerable and repellent to her’ (Dundy 1980: 289). If the book was a narrative about the bond and struggle between man and nature, then Finch’s performance concerned the conflicts between Boldwood’s outward codes of conduct and his nature. Schlesinger believed that ‘film acting is not just acting. It’s catching something about the essence of personality very often, and I  think that’s what makes someone extraordinary in movies, and it was Peter’s complexity that was inescapable’ (quoted in Faulkner 1979:  251). This was seen to an even greater extent in their next collaboration, Sunday, Bloody Sunday. The script by Penelope Gilliatt follows ten days in the life of a recently divorced career woman Alex Greville (Glenda Jackson), Bob Elkin (Murray Head), a sculptor aged in his twenties, and Daniel Hirsh (Finch), a middle-​aged GP. Elkin, who is bisexual, is conducting simultaneous affairs with the heterosexual Alex and the gay Daniel.

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278     The art of screen acting The role of Dr Hirsch was initially to be played by Ian Bannen, but after a few scenes Schlesinger replaced Finch –​‘He knew the character without, I  think, ever having experienced any of it’ (quoted in Mann 2005:  360). Yesterday’s modishness can ossify within what seems like weeks, and Bob is the least convincing of the trio, one time-​locked in a vision of London as expressed in fashionable magazines of the period and Alex is fairly underwritten. But Dr Daniel Hirsch is neither a symbol nor a plaster saint, for in Bloody Sunday ‘homosexuality is just a fact about a character, not presented at all as an issue in itself ’ (Finch quoted in Taylor 1970: 201). He is a prosperous GP with a Rover 2000 and a thriving medical practice, a respected member of his synagogue –​in short, a recognisable middle-​aged man balancing his professional and personal lives. Gilliatt believed that the actor ‘saw that this was a man who was helping other people all the time and not exposing his own problems, and we see them only gradually’ (quoted in Faulkner 1979: 252). The autumnal cinematography mirrors the restraint displayed by Dr Hirsch in negotiating the gulf between his feelings and social conventions, and even in his concluding monologue to camera, Daniel does not plead for the sympathy of the audience. Tom Milne saw the picture is one where the final mood was one ‘of buoyant reconciliation in which love, though it may not spring phoenix-​like to life again, at least glows as a faint treasured ember beneath the ashes piled up by life’ (1971: 147). At the end of the film, Daniel simply and clearly expresses, without any sense of artifice, his present state of mind: When you’re at school, and you want to quit, people say, ‘You’re going to hate it out in the world’. Well, I didn’t believe them, and I was right. When I was a kid, I couldn’t wait to be grown up, and they said, ‘Childhood is the best time of your life’. Well, it wasn’t. And now, I want his company, and they say, ‘What’s half a loaf? You’re well shot of him’; and I say, ‘I know that … but I miss him, that’s all’, and they say, ‘He never made you happy’, and I say ‘But I am happy, apart from missing him. You might throw me a pill or two for my cough’. All my life, I’ve been looking for somebody courageous, resourceful. He’s not it … but something. We were something. I only came about my cough.

In the words of Raymond Durgnat, ‘The film also forbids, as a moral luxury, any easy criticism –​Finch finally addresses us as friends would address us in those rare and precious moments when all the guards are down and whatever is, is understood as inevitable’ (1976:  n.p.). Daniel simply and clearly expresses, without any sense of artifice, his present state of mind. Many would contend that those few moments convey more power than all the reels of Network –​and they would probably be right. Peter Finch died from a heart attack in 1977, five years after his last low-​key but devastating exploration of the psyche of the middle-​aged, middle-​ class British male in Something to Hide. After picking up a

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Peter  Finch     279 pregnant teenaged hitch-​hiker (Linda Hayden), Harry Field slowly loses all sense of self and judgement. The film survives the truly odd casting of Shelley Winters as his wife Gabriella, with Harry existing in the mildewed world of the Isle of Wight, where the 1950s have not quite ceased and where he tends his collections of plants and records, and carefully drives his Morris Minor Traveller. After a great actor passes away, there is all too often a tendency to cast a headmasterly eye over unfulfilled projects. Peter Finch co-​wrote and directed an award-​winning short, The Day (1961), and planned to direct Alan Bates in The Hero, based on Derek Monsey’s Second World War novel, but the finances collapsed. He would have been a natural for the BBC’s John le Carré adaptations, but ultimately, such speculation is fascinating but otiose. In my highly subjective view, his finest role was as Jake Armitage in The Pumpkin Eater, adapted by Harold Pinter from Penelope Mortimer’s novel. Dilys Powell found the picture to be ‘a supremely skilled copy of life’ (1989: 207) and the Monthly Film Bulletin argued that ‘Jake, in particular, is left pretty much a blank’ (Review 1964: 132). Meanwhile, Alan Dent wailed, ‘How can one know where one really is with a character who says at the end of the film “Some of these things happened, and some were dreams” ’ (1964: 30). The answer is they are all true, as Jo Armitage (Anne Bancroft) ‘understood truth’, for mental illness can be to view life through a glass, darkly and our glimpses of Jake are partially filtered through the eyes of his spouse. He is variously childlike, vulnerable, dismissive, selfish and loving. The role of the jovial father and stepfather, so delighted to arrive home in a chauffeured Vanden Plas Princess and shower his offspring with largess, is one he can discharge without any sense of real responsibility. The Armitages reside in a Hampstead townhouse, Jo is a mother of many healthy children, some from her previous marriages, and Jake is a successful scriptwriter. But Douglas McVay saw how the opening scenes established a mood of ‘paranoia’ (1967), with Clayton timing every shot and gesture to perfection. Pinter’s use of sparse dialogue is seamlessly enhanced by the mellow cinematography to create an upper-​middle-​class corner of London where an orderly surface is demon-​ridden. Penelope Houston complained of how ‘style, carried to such conscious lengths, chills the heart of the film’ (1964: 168), but Jo exists in a world of smart cocktail parties awash with glib aphorisms, moving from room to room in the antiseptic surroundings of her townhouse. All the while, she is attempting to stave off the encroaching mental illness that threatens to trap her in a very English Hades. Jake’s initial response to his wife’s mood is to ask, ‘Do you think you’re going to get over this period of your life? Because I find it very depressing’. Finch’s slightly overdone joviality expressing Armitage’s fear that this temple to his success is merely temporary.

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280     The art of screen acting And so, when Jo suffers from a nervous breakdown, it is in the temple of respectable affluence that is, theoretically, Jake’s reward for his work as a writer –​‘In Harrods of all places!’ he expostulates. A mental collapse cares neither for rank nor position, which Jo’s charming, philandering and emotionally immature husband fails to realise. Isabel Quigly praised Finch as being as ‘excellent as ever as the homme moyen sensuel’ (1964: 16), but Jake’s material success has furnished a home straight from Queen magazine, a chic Renault Caravelle is parked in the driveway. Jo even has an expense account in Knightsbridge. As Raymond Durgnat argues, his ‘insistence on a glittering social life is scarcely less neurotic than her pleasure on an untidily warm community within it’ (1972: 105). Finch’s performance allows the audience to infer Jake’s own fragility and we are left to surmise whether such material rewards are in part due to his genuine happiness as being greeted as a bringer of happiness, a form of selective dissociation permitted by his recent professional successes, or to assuage his guilt for his affair with Philpott (Maggie Smith). After Jo’s collapse, we see him leaving in another chauffeured car for another film location, his waving arm signalling as a temporary farewell to his responsibilities. Does Jake regard his casual infidelities as the natural prerequisites of a successful scriptwriter or is he fleeing from a life with a ‘bloody great army of kids … I  can’t even have a bath … I  can’t even go to bed with you without them barging in in the middle … I’m sick of living in a bloody nursery!’ Elaine Dundy refers to Finch’s devastating honesty (1980:  273) and Jake’s own emotions are not easy to neatly categorise. His pose as a careless soul unaffected by the pain of others (regardless of his being its cause) is not constant. He has an affair with the wife of Bob Conway, portrayed in a performance of demonic intensity from James Mason who menaces Jo in the genteel surroundings of the London Zoo tearoom. The two men meet in a bar to exchange threatening barbs, which concludes with Jake pouring his drink on Bob’s shoes; Mason’s immaculate delivery of Pinter’s ‘You’ve made me wet!’ serving as a form of black comedy. At the end of The Pumpkin Eater Jo has retreated to the family’s mill holiday home only to see Jake leading all the children across the grounds. This conclusion of Jake and Jo attempting to reconcile is as adult as it is moving precisely because it entirely lacks glibness. Andrew Sarris once referred to film as ‘the art to which all other arts aspire. It produces the most sublime emotions’ (quoted in Walsh 1998), and this applies to The Pumpkin Eater, a picture that should be ranked alongside those of Antonioni or Bergman. It is a laceratingly honest work, dominated by the performances of Anne Bancroft and Finch, which illustrate the patinas of human emotion and ‘the tension that Chekhov thought lay at the heart of all great drama; the tension between life as it is and life as it ought to be’ (Sinyard 2000: 117).

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Peter  Finch     281 Ultimately, it is nearly impossible for me to write with objectivity about The Pumpkin Eater. I  can only echo Andy Medhurst, when he described his reaction to the climactic scene in Victim –​‘Simply writing those words cannot convey the strength of Dirk Bogarde’s delivery’ (1984:  31). Thus, I  am equally unable to do justice to Finch’s delivery when amid a hideous row Jake tells his wife, ‘I hope you die’. Then his mood changes to one of infinite regret  –​‘I love you. I’ve always loved you’. A  guilty, charming, insecure man expressing the sheer incomprehension of dealing with his own conscience and a partner suffering from mental illness. The actor’s best work displayed his belief that ‘good acting should teach people to understand rather than judge’ (quoted in Faulkner 1979: 243) –​and never less so in this cinematic masterpiece. Bibliography Baker, Peter (1956), ‘Battle of the River Plate’, Films and Filming, December.  21–​2. Baker, Peter (1960), ‘The Trials of Oscar Wilde’, Films and Filming, July, 23. Billington, Michael (1973), ‘Cinema:  Implausible History’, Illustrated London News, 1 July, 82. Billington, Michael (1996), The Life and Work of Harold Pinter, London: Faber & Faber. Bourne, Stephen (2016), Brief Encounters: Lesbians and Gays in British Cinema 1930–​1971, London: Bloomsbury. Box, Betty (2000), Lifting the Lid: The Autobiography of Film Producer, Betty Box, OBE, Hove, UK: Book Guild. Brantley, Will (ed.) (1996), Conversations with Pauline Kael, Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. Cave, Dylan Andrew (2003), ‘Simon and Laura’, BFI Screenonline. Available at www.screenonline.org.uk/​film/​id/​533349/​index.html (accessed 7 December 2019). Chibnall, Steve (2016), ‘ “Above and Beyond Everyday Life”:  The Rise and Fall of Rank’s Contract Artists During the 1950s’, in Hunter, I. Q., Porter, Laraine and Smith, Justine (eds.) The Routledge Companion to British Cinema History, London: Routledge. Coombs, Richard (1995), ‘Powell and Pressburger and “The Battle of the River Plate” ’, Film Comment, 13 March. Coultass, Clive (1996), ‘The Battle of the River Plate’, History Today, August. Cowans, Jon (2015), Empire Films and the Crisis of Colonialism, 1946–​1959, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. D’Arcy, Susan (1977), ‘Peter Finch: The Beginning and the End’, Films Illustrated, 6 March, 258. Davies, Brenda (1964), ‘Girl with Green Eyes’, Sight & Sound, Summer, 146–​7. Dent, Alan (1964), ‘The World of the Cinema:  A Case of Non-​Involvement’, Illustrated London News, 1 August, 30. Dixon, Wheeler Winston (ed.) (1994), Re-​Viewing British Cinema 1900–​1992 Essays & Interviews, Albany: State University of New York Press.

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282     The art of screen acting Dundy, Elaine (1980), Finch, Bloody Finch: A Biography of Peter Finch, London: Michael Joseph. Durgnat, Raymond (1970), A Mirror for England: British Movies from Austerity to Affluence, London: Faber & Faber. Durgnat, Raymond (1972), Sexual Alienation in the Cinema:  The Dynamics of Sexual Freedom, London: November Books. Durgnat, Raymond (1976), ‘Britannia Rules the Waves’, Film Comment, July–​August. Ebert, Roger (1968), ‘Interview with Peter Finch’, Chicago Sun-​Times, 29 January. Faulkner, Trader (1979), Peter Finch: A Biography, London: Macmillan. Finch, Peter (1958), ‘How I  Learned to Laugh at Myself ’, Films and Filming, September, 7. Finch, Peter (1964), ‘Peter, Peter Pumpkin Eater’, Films and Filming, June, 7–​8. Geraghty, Christine (2000), British Cinema in the Fifties: Gender, Genre and the ‘New Look’, London: Routledge. Gow, Gordon (1958), ‘Windom’s Way’, Films and Filming, February, 25–​6. Gow, Gordon (1970), ‘The Mind’s Eye’, Films and Filming, August. Grant, Elspeth (1961), ‘The Howl of a Lone Wolf ’, The Tatler, 22 February, 43. Harper, Sue (2000), Women in British Cinema:  Mad, Bad and Dangerous to Know, London: Continuum. Harper, Sue and Porter, Vincent (2003), British Cinema of the 1950s: The Decline of Deference, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hennessy, Peter (2006), Having It So Good:  Britain in the 1950s, London: Penguin Books. Houston, Penelope (1955), ‘The Undiscovered Country’, Sight & Sound, Summer,  10–​14. Houston, Penelope (1964), ‘Keeping Up with the Antonionis’, Sight & Sound, Autumn,  163–​8. Hunter I. Q., Porter, Laraine and Smith, Justin (eds.) (2016), The Routledge Companion to British Cinema History, London: Routledge. Kael, Pauline (1969), Kiss Kiss Bang Bang. New York: Bantam Books. Kemp, Phillip (2003), ‘The Long Shadow:  Robert Hamer After Ealing’, in MacKillop, Ian and Sinyard, Neil (eds.) British Cinema in the 1950s:  A Celebration, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Lacourbe, Roland and Daniele, Grivel (1977), ‘Rediscovering Michael Powell’, in Lazar, David (ed.) Michael Powell Interviews, Jackson:  University of Mississippi Press. Lambert, Gavin (1954), ‘Father Brown’, Sight & Sound, Summer, 33–​4. Landy, Marcia (1991), British Genres: Cinema and Society 1930–​1960, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Lazar, David (ed.) (2003), Michael Powell Interviews, Jackson:  University of Mississippi Press. Lovell, Alan (1961), ‘No Love for Johnnie’, New Left Review, March–​April, 54. MacKillop, Ian and Sinyard, Neil (eds.) (2003), British Cinema in the 1950s:  A Celebration, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Macnab, Geoffrey (1993), J. Arthur Rank and the British Film Industry (Cinema and Society), London: Routledge.

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Peter  Finch     283 Macnab, Geoffrey (2000), Searching for Stars:  Stardom and Screen Acting in British Cinema, London: Continuum. Mann, William J. (2005), Edge of Midnight: The Life of John Schlesinger, London: Arrow. McFarlane, Brian (1997), An Autobiography of British Cinema, London: Methuen. McFarlane, Brian (ed.) (2005), The Cinema of Britain and Ireland, London: Wallflower Press. McVay, Douglas (1967), ‘The House That Jack Built’, Films and Filming, October. Medhurst, Andy (1984), ‘  “Victim”:  Text as Context’, Screen, 25(4–​5), July–​October,  22–​35. Milne, Tom (1971), ‘Sunday, Bloody Sunday’, Monthly Film Bulletin, 38(450), July, 147. Morgan, Stephen (2012), ‘Ealing’s Australian Adventure’, in Duguid, Mark, Freeman, Lee, Johnston, Keith M. and Williams, Melanie (eds.) Ealing Revisited, London: BFI/​Palgrave Macmillan. Murphy, Robert (1992), Sixties British Cinema, London: BFI. Murphy, Robert (2000), British Cinema and the Second World War, London: Continuum. Plain, Gill (2006), John Mills and British Cinema:  Masculinity, Identity and Nation, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Powell, Dilys (1989), The Golden Screen: Fifty Years of Films, London: Headline Book Publishing. Price, James (1967–​ 68), ‘Far from the Madding Crowd’, Sight & Sound, Winter,  39–​40. Quigly, Isabel (1964), ‘Home Fires’, The Spectator, 17 July, 16. Report (1954), ‘Peter Finch Wins £87,500 Contract’, Sydney Morning Herald, 20 November, 3. Review (1955), ‘Josephine and Men’, Monthly Film Bulletin, 22(263), December, 181. Review (1956), ‘Battle of the River Plate’, Monthly Film Bulletin, 23(275), December, 148. Review (1964), ‘The Pumpkin Eater’, Monthly Film Bulletin, 31(368), September. 131–​2. Richards, Jeffrey (1997), Films and British National Identity:  From Dickens to ‘Dad’s Army’, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Shail, Robert (2007), British Film Directors: A Critical Guide, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Sinyard, Neil (2000), Jack Clayton: British Film Makers, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Sinyard, Neil (2013), Filming Literature:  The Art of Screen Adaptation, London: Routledge Press. Spicer, Andrew (2003), Typical Men:  The Representation of Masculinity in Popular British Cinema, London: I. B. Tauris. Taylor, John Russell (1970), ‘Bloody Sunday’, Sight & Sound, Autumn, 200–​1. Thomson, David (2014), The New Biographical Dictionary of Film (6th ed.), London: Abacus.

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Walker, Alexander (1974), Hollywood England: The British Film Industry in the Sixties, London: Michael Joseph. Walsh, David (1998), ‘An Interview with Film Critic Andrew Sarris’, World Socialist. Available at www.wsws.org (accessed 18 November 2019). Whitehall, Richard (1960), ‘Personality of the Month’, Films and Filming, September, 5. Williams, Melanie (2005), ‘No Love for Johnnie’, in McFarlane, Brian (ed.) The Cinema of Britain and Ireland, London: Wallflower Press.

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Peter Sellers: ‘There used to be a me but I had him surgically removed’

Peter Sellers was born in Southsea, Hampshire on 8 September 1925 and died in London on 24 July 1980. Sellers rose to fame in The Goon Show, achieved international stardom as Inspector Clouseau in The Pink Panther (Blake Edwards 1963)  and was nominated for an Oscar for Dr. Strangelove (Stanley Kubrick 1964) and Being There (Hal Ashby 1980). His main legacy is his leading character performances, both comic and dramatic, for British cinema. The Boulting brothers thought Peter Sellers was ‘perhaps, the greatest comic genius this country has ever produced since Charles Chaplin’ (Boulting and Boulting 1980: 11)1 and his output for British cinema during the late 1950s and early 1960s provides a myriad of near perfect illustrations of how great acting is ‘reacting’. There is a moment in I’m All Right Jack when the hurt and betrayal that flashes across Sellers’s face is a masterpiece of performance in miniature, a talent that he illustrated throughout his major films. It could be the visceral glee of Lionel Meadows cornering his quarry in Never Let Go, or Wilfred Morgenhall in The Dock Brief facing the collapse of the illusions that sustained him for decades. And in Dr. Strangelove: Or How I  Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, there is the white knight figure of Group Captain Lionel Mandrake confronting General Jack D. Ripper (Sterling Hayden) in Ken Adam’s glass and concrete netherworld. It was in such moments that Sellers was the epitome of Durgnat’s creative actor who could ‘rewrite the story’ (1992: 19). In 1963 Douglas McVay cited a long list of comics and comedy actors from both side of the Atlantic as mirroring the human instinct for ‘stupidity, carnality and cowardice, rather than melancholy or genuine 1

The same paragraph went on to state that ‘as a human being in many ways, he was also a “disaster area” ’ (Boulting and Boulting 1980: 11). Little is straightforward in a chronicle of Sellers’s career.

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286     The art of screen acting

Figure 16  Peter Sellers in Doctor Strangelove: Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964)

bitterness’ (1963: 43). It was within these two last-​named elements that Sellers was most at home, together with a sense of wistfulness  –​or a sense of malevolent rage. David Robinson described his talents for mimicry as withering all they touched through a subtle and imperceptible shading that ‘shows up any flaw or sham or absurdity; and the subject –​ however unfairly –​is destroyed’ (1956 52). Yet as a screen performer, one of Seller’s major gifts was, even more than his vocal range, an ability to ‘suggest embarrassed solicitude better than any actor in England’ (Gilliatt 1961: 27). He was so often at his finest in his depiction of the maintenance of their self-​esteem in the face of economic and social oppression. It was a theme that was highly familiar to the actor; on his 1959 LP Songs for Swinging Sellers, a self-​penned dramatic sketch entitled ‘We’ll Let You Know:  An Actor Auditions’ concerns an ageing ham auditioning for a snide producer. The thespian’s name may be schoolboy humour2 but his dignity in the face of mockery and, worse, disdain is palpable. 2

‘Warrington Minge’.

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Peter Sellers     287 Lawrence Shaffer noted how some actors were fine mimics but could ‘only produce, or rather reproduce, the appearance of an identity, like the Frankenstein monster or a robot’ (1973: 106), but the sketch illustrates how Sellers innately understood the frailty of illusion. The elderly thespian’s nightmare is conveyed in the variously dismissive, snide and disinterested reactions (all voiced by the actor) and still the performer carries on with, ‘Now is the winter of our discontent’, seemingly oblivious to the sotto voce mutterings from the stalls of ‘Get him out of here’. On-​screen, Peter Sellers’s work frequently juxtaposed ‘the lunatic with the sombre’ (Editorial 1959: 5); his characters had a complex inner life beneath their mundane exterior or were frequently attempting to retain their sense of poise while a mere flicker of their eyes betrays panic or despair. On occasions, he portrayed figures driven by an idiosyncratic morality. C. A. Lejeune praised his Dr Ahmed el Kabir in The Millionairess3 (Anthony Asquith 1960)  for the doctor’s ‘tremendous quiet’ and his ‘authority which cannot be denied. This man is a Shavian actor just as one day, I’m sure, he will be a Shakespearian actor, and no mean one. It is both in his capacity and in his nature to seduce and convince spectators with the providence of power within’ (1960: 26). There was a coarsening of Sellers’s work after 1964; vide the utter horror that is the 1967 version of Casino Royale (Ken Hughes et al.) or the three increasingly turgid Pink Panther films of the 1970s. But even in his later career, a period when Sellers was seemingly devoted to making the brand of ‘international comedy’ that deserves to sink somewhere off the coast of the Isle of Wight, he was still capable of gems of observation. Peter Sellers was born into a theatrical family, and after wartime service with the RAF and a career as a jazz drummer, he embarked on a variety and radio career as an impressionist. These were augmented by a small number of B-​film comedies such as Down Among the Z Men (Maclean Rogers 1952) and Orders Are Orders and Sellers also gained a supporting role in a significant Group 3 production John and Julie. The two eponymous children (Colin Gibson and Leslie Dudley) run away from the West Country to see the Coronation and discovering a capital city ‘which blazes with ruby reds (buses, hats, lipsticks, flags)’ (Lewis 1994: 362). It is a film where the antiquity of royal traditions, Victorian-​ built steam railways and architecture happily coalesce with the polished Morris Minors, with Sellers’s PC Diamond co-​existing between the two. He is a slow-​moving young man in a Dorset backwater, a deadpan figure who is content to observe the insanities of others without judgement. Bosley Crowther of the New York Times commented that ‘the adults in this whimsy seem an acid or saccharine lot. None of them seems precisely 3

Casting that is impossible to imagine in the twenty-​first century.

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288     The art of screen acting normal’ (1957), but Sellers and the irate father Sidney James are the sole believable characters in what may be reasonably described as an urban fairy tale. BBC Radio initially brought Sellers stardom in the form of The Goon Show (1951–​60), and his vocal dexterity is mesmerising; in one 1955 episode, ‘The Greenslade Story’, it is near impossible to believe that one actor plays six characters. During the 1950s he was often employed in post-​synching films and released some acclaimed LPs; one fan was Satyajit Ray who believed that ‘Sellers was doing things with his voice and tongue which bordered on the miraculous’ (quoted in Robinson 1989:  290). In The Ladykillers Harry the Teddy boy speaks in a South London whine suffused with a measure of bravado and Penelope Houston praised Sellers’s ‘awkward and unexpected ventures into gentility’ (1955–​ 56: 149). Two years later Chief Petty Officer Doherty of Up the Creek (Val Guest 1957) has an Ulster rather than the ‘Orish’ accent often used by British actors of this era. It was with The Smallest Show on Earth that the actor was allowed to convey an almost indelible sense of melancholy. In an unforgettable scene, Sellers’s projectionist, Mr Percy Quill, in the company of the equally venerable Mrs Fazackalee (Margaret Rutherford) and Old Tom (Bernard Miles), treat themselves to long-​forgotten silent films after hours in a near-​derelict cinema. Percy, despite being played by an actor then aged thirty-​one, looks far the oldest of the trio, his ‘snappish, drunken’ demeanour’ (Houston 1957: 13) symptomatic of a sad, lonely figure who is sustained by alcohol and the silent films he screens after hours. Quill was the first in a succession of ‘little men’ roles essayed by Sellers, although McVay thought the actor was intrinsically a ‘simple and stylised performer’, who should ‘leave the everyday vacillations and contradictions of vulnerable homo sapiens’ to Alec Guinness. The critic further opined that Sellers’s talents were more akin to the misanthropic Groucho Marx or W. C. Fields (McVay 1963: 47), but there is much celluloid evidence to suggest otherwise. In The Battle of the Sexes (Charles Crichton 1960) Mr Martin, the venerable company secretary of a firm of Highland tweed maker, is driven to sabotage and even potential homicide in retaliation for being sidelined by Constance Cummings’s American efficiency expert. Dilys Powell cited Sellers’s performance as ‘delicate and funny’ because his comedy was ‘rooted in character’ (1989: 163) and the actor imbues Martin with a sly intelligence.4 By contrast, Wilfred Morgenhall, the middle-​aged barrister of The Dock Brief (James Hill 1962), attempts to shore up his confidence –​despite his possessing a suit so worn you can almost smell the mothballs 4

There is also the subtext that Martin is extremely good at his job and that the traditional methods he champions keeps a rural community in work.

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Peter Sellers     289 and having endured a career of almost unremitting failure –​by adopting the manner and the wardrobe of a QC. Only Two Can Play has the librarian hero John Lewis trapped in a provincial Hades partially of his own making. In one moment, he lies back in his seedy armchair, surveys his truly grim lodgings and bemoans his current fate: ‘What did I do it for? Why did I spend my time cramming for degrees if all I do now is stare at the vomit-​coloured wallpaper?’ As with Laurence Harvey’s Joe Lampton, Sellers’s performance evokes a palpable sense of imprisonment and anger that hard-​won skills and qualifications are not in themselves sufficient for social advancement, in a performance that Gilliatt saw as reflecting a comic genius for ‘slow-​churning instincts, not outraged ideas’ (1973: 208). The most famous of Sellers’s ‘little men’ roles were under the auspices of the Boulting brothers, with whom the actor had first worked in Carlton-​Browne of the F.O., an amiable farce that primarily focused on the comic talents of Terry-​Thomas supported by Peter Seller’s corrupt Levantine prime minister. In 1959 the actor signed a five-​film contract with the Boultings, and I’m All Right Jack reunited several of the characters from their Second World War satire Private’s Progress and in doing so displayed the brothers’ real anger and pain at the failures and hypocrisy of modern existence. The inept upper-​middle-​class graduate Stanley Windrush (Ian Carmichael), the Boultings’ Candide figure, persuaded by his uncle, Bertram Tracepurcel (Dennis Price), to take a job in the family firm as a blue-​collar worker. The position is an essential part of an elaborate, industrial confidence trick devised by Tracepurcel and his sinister spiv-​like partner Cox (Richard Attenborough), but Stanley enters factory life with a merry will. In a 1959 interview the Boulting brothers accepted ‘with equanimity, the disapproval of those whose professed love for “the masses” invariably leads them to disapprove anything “the masses” endorse’ (quoted in Conrad 1959:  7). If the workers are now enjoying greater affluence, the Boultings also deftly establish both that the factory is indeed a bleak environment and that if Stanley does work hard, it is ultimately to little purpose. The directors are corrupt, and of the managerial classes we have Major Hitchcock (Terry-​Thomas), a figure perfectly defining Parkinson’s Law of officials rising to their own level of incompetence. The only character within the factory who displays any vestige of community values is Fred Kite. When the film entered production in 1958, strikes were headline news,5 but Kite is far more than a famous folk devil of the day. Isabel Quigly saw Sellers’s performance as achieving ‘something that sounds impossible –​the sort of shift of sympathy in his audience intended by 5

One possible role model for the union leader was the Briggs body-​shop union leader Johnnie McLoughlin (Kynaston 2013: 32).

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290     The art of screen acting Shakespeare for Malvolio’ (1960: 18). Kite’s politics are confused, ruminating upon the brotherhood of man and life in a worker’s state (‘all them cornflowers and ballet in the evening’) but when faced with the possibility of a threat to the status quo –​‘Before you know it, they’ll have the blacks working here, like they do on the buses in Birmingham!’ However, the shop steward also appears to be a figure of the immediate post-​war years, the period described by Michael Sissons and Philip French as ‘an exciting time’ where ‘the great social experiment that was being conducted gave rise to a sense of crusading idealism, and to virtually all a feeling of involvement in national affairs which was to become muffled in the following decade’ (1963:  xvii). He is also determinedly bent on self-​improvement  –​he speaks with glowing pride of having once attended Balliol summer school. If he can barely comprehend the tomes on his bookshelf, then it might equally be the case that ‘with his immensely laudable aspirations [he] has, in fact, been educationally stunted by the class society in which he grew up’ (Marwick 1998: 120). Many of the union members drive cars –​one of the major social changes of the 1950s6 –​Fred Kite’s main perks are not a company Ford Consul and an expense account but an office cubicle. As Michael Shanks noted, ‘The average salaries [of trade union shop stewards] range from £750 to £1,250 per year. This means that many full-​time officials are being paid a good deal less than their members on the factory floor, though they are no doubt getting some “perks” which they would not get at the workbench’ (1961: 94). The voice Sellers employs for Kite is a strange mixture of London vowels overlain with a certain degree of gentility, for his social position is an ambiguous one. As the shop steward, he is carefully negotiating the path from the respectable working class and the petite bourgeoisie. His household is comfortably but not extravagantly furnished, with little sign of a headlong rush to consumerism –​the paterfamilias isolated among his proudly assembled library. One of the major strengths of I’m All Right Jack is that Kite’s regard for Windrush is expressed in idiosyncratic but utterly sincere terms. His offer to Stanley of room and board as the prospect of a fellow ‘Oxford man’ joining the struggle of the proletariat is enticing indeed. Aldgate and Richards see the relationship between the two as being short-​lived:  ‘Stanley is unwittingly timed working harder than the other men would like; new schedules are introduced, and Kite calls a strike. At first, Stanley is merely “sent to Coventry” but when he insists, at his Aunt’s prompting … upon going to work, and breaks the picket line, he becomes a “blackleg” and is totally ostracised’ (1999: 179). 6

Francis Williams sadly noted in An American Invasion how outside of one factory ‘the parked cars give an American air to the scene. The old social life, born of the close community of home and mill and chapel is shrinking’ (1962: 33).

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Peter Sellers     291 But the picket-​line confrontation provides the best illustration of their relationship, an example of how a tiny scene may act as the fulcrum to a film (Williams 2011: 103). The revelation that Stanley is Tracepurcel’s nephew elicits not so much anger from Kite but more of a sense of betrayal –​his guest was, all along, a member of the ‘boss class’. Windrush apologises –​‘I didn’t mean to hurt you’ –​but it is too late; someone he held in some regard has hurt Kite. In his review of I’m All Right Jack, Peter Baker wrote that, ‘Something rather frightening has happened to the Boulting brothers. They have turned sour’ (1959:  21). It was a viewpoint echoed by Penelope Houston –​‘soured liberals, men who have retired from the contest and are spending their time throwing stones at the players’ (1959: 163). The film now appears to be less embittered and more faintly despairing, for if the mass public is all too willing to indulge in synthetic ‘Num Yum’ confectionary and other cheap consumer goods, the managerial classes are variously idle and corrupt. In 1955 the Daily Mirror ran a series of articles heralding the ‘robot revolution’, with the 28 June edition promising that ‘workers in robot factories will have short hours and better pay’ (1955: 10). The reality is a workplace of outdated practices controlled by corrupt members of the gentry in cahoots with spiv-​like new money. Meanwhile, the factory workers are played by actors familiar from countless British war films: Victor Maddern, David Lodge and Sam Kydd. At a time when an Americanised ‘mass culture’ was threatening to destroy existing urban culture (Hoggart 1957: 9), the workers are quite content to accept the invitation to a candy floss world. Meanwhile, the lonely, confused but sincere shop steward of Peter Sellers refuses to engage with the prevailing mood. Julian Petley believed that the Boultings’ ‘superficially modish cynicism and scatter-​gun satire can be read as the expressions of profound disillusionment, and a deeply disappointed idealism’ (2000: 26) –​as embodied by the shop steward. In the television studio, he urges his ‘comrades’ to cease behaving like ‘gabardine swine’ in the face of temptation. The response is his being physically attacked by one of his union members. Such melancholy dreamers were just one aspect of Sellers’s film work during this era. Two-Way Stretch (Robert Day 1960) and The Wrong Arm of the Law (Cliff Owen 1962) saw his criminal gang bosses ‘Dodger’ Lane and ‘Pearly’ Gates act as sardonic straight men for Lionel Jeffries’s desperate authority figure. In 1959 he co-​created and produced the short The Running Jumping and Standing Still Film, which was nominated for an Academy Award for the Best Short Live-​Action Film in 1960. Spike Milligan claimed that, ‘We just went to the hill, and I wrote the script out, what I wanted roughly, and we had just to improvise how to do it’ (quoted in Dutton 2015:  100). But Paul Gallagher argues that, ‘The Running, Jumping and Standing Still Film was considered mainly a Milligan film,

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292     The art of screen acting when in truth, it should be seen as a film devised by Peter Sellers in collaboration with (“thoughts”) Dick Lester, Spike Milligan and Mario Fabrizi –​ just as the film’s opening credits have it’ (2013). Sellers’s vision in the ten-​minute short is of Edwardian Englishmen, following their pastimes without any self-​consciousness that they may appear absurd, and shortly afterwards he embarked on his only feature film as a director. Mr. Topaze was an adaptation of Marcel Pagnol’s 1928 play about a humble schoolmaster who loses his job for being too honest and then decides to become an amoral businessman. It marked Sellers’s first and only direction of a major feature, with his main protagonist as the still centre in a confederacy of grotesques, yet with subtle early hints of the capitalist within. Auguste Topaze was indeed ‘a serious and tender piece of acting’ (Gilliatt 1961: 27) and the final scene of the former schoolmaster framed against his mansion makes one wish that Sellers had developed his directorial career, but Mr. Topaze remains a unique entry in his canon. Robert Murphy perceived an underlying threat of violence in the actor’s best roles (1992:  246), and certainly several of Sellers’s performances in Macmillan-​era British films appear driven by a sense of anger. The Naked Truth (Mario Zampi 1957)  has the ITV quiz show MC ‘Wee Sonny’ MacGregor as a failed actor eaten up with contempt for his elderly audience and when General Fitzjohn of Waltz of the Toreadors (John Guillermin 1962) tells his wife (Margaret Leighton), ‘My God, woman, I  hate you’, it is horribly believable. In Never Let Go (John Guillermin 1960), Richard Todd’s commercial traveller John Cummings  –​figuratively and literally a ‘little man’,7 must descend into an urban nightmare of Teddy boys and coffee bars in order to rescue his stolen car, with Sellers’s Lionel Meadows at the centre of this post-​war British hell. The new Ford Anglia that Cummings can barely afford is his latest attempt to impress his employer (Peter Jones) that he understands a new world where ‘we can’t stand still; we’ve got to do better, move faster, even to keep up’. If his car, the symbol of masculinity,8 is to be retrieved, then the salesmen must do battle with Meadows, the stolen vehicle racketeer and embodiment of working-​class enrichment. Here Sellers creates one of the great heavies of post-​war British cinema, a dapper figure who attempts to cloak his sociopathic nature with false bonhomie and a seemingly warm north-​country accent that sharpens into a nasal snarl during his sudden descents into violence. Lionel Meadows has the external trappings of a post-​war British screen villain –​he drives a 1956 Oldsmobile 88 and attempts to disguise 7 8

Sellers and Todd swapped roles before shooting. The on-​screen cars were provided by Dagenham and even the cod-​American lines of the 105E-​series Anglia infers Cummings’s desperate attempts at a trans-​Atlantic style dynamism.

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Peter Sellers     293 his Lancastrian vowels with American vocabulary –​but Alan Falconer’s screenplay (and Sellers himself ) goes much further than this template of 1950s filmic criminality. Meadows is sexually rapacious –​he forces himself on his very young mistress Jackie (Carol White), an escapee from a reform school –​and openly invades Cummings’s home. If many post-​war British films ignore, in the words of Charles Barr, ‘the dark world; the Lawrentian otherness’ (1998: 57), then Never Let Go has the underworld intruding upon lower-​middle-​class security. The gang boss is even seen to kill harmless pets –​this last being possibly his most shocking example of villainy to a British audience. The review of the Guardian opined, ‘As we all know by now, Mr. Sellers is no Goon but a serious actor who can play almost any part and give it stature. In Never Let Go he seems all set to prove he can play one of the dirtiest dogs in London. Well, he’s proved it and I hope he’ll never try it again’ (Review 1960: 16). Throughout the film Meadows forces home phraseology that deliberately mirrors that of Cummings’s employers. ‘Keep moving, get organised’ is Meadows’s often uttered motto and Steve Chibnall perceived the car dealer as ‘the anti-​social reality behind the facade of the new economic order. His “legitimate business” is barely more ruthless than Cummings’s employer’ (Chibnall and Roberts 1999: 104). Contrasted with this sadism is Meadows’s craving for bourgeois status, as displayed by his domestic pride in his well-​furnished apartments and aspirations of respectability as a local businessman. Lionel Meadows could have feasibly begun his career in the wartime black market, but he is now keen for almost quasi-​Establishment status, anticipating the 1960s England of early corporate raiders. More frightening still was Claire Quilty in the US-​set but British-​ filmed Lolita (Stanley Kubrick 1961). The director said of Sellers that he was ‘the only actor I ever knew who could really improvise’ (quoted in Case 2014: 34) and in a five-​minute sequence, Quilty taunts, in perfectly judged New York tones, James Mason’s Humbert with the continual use of the word ‘normal’ as a mantra. Shaffer referred to Sellers’s performance as a series of ‘mad, solipsistic flights’ (1973: 106) and if the character is a form of demon, then the disquieting horror of the motel sequence is intensified by the actor’s sober appearance. As Pauline Kael argued, Quilty is Humbert’s ‘walking paranoia’ (1962) and the soberly dressed figure could almost be an American version of the actor’s ‘little men’ –​or indeed the epitome of the ‘normal guy’. Lolita was one of many UK-​based films backed by Hollywood money that Sellers began to appear in from 1958 onwards with Tom Thumb (George Pal 1958) and The Mouse That Roared (Jack Arnold 1959), the latter a film that demonstrated that the actor was not at home playing bashful comic juvenile leads.9 After 1963 Sellers’s pictures for the 9

George Cole would have been a far better casting as ‘Tully Bascombe’.

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294     The art of screen acting international market dominated his career, a development that was accelerated by Dr.  Strangelove (Stanley Kubrick 1963). Group Captain Lionel Mandrake is a character who is often overshadowed by President Merkin Muffley and the Doctor himself –​but it is arguably the subtlest performance in the entire film. In the 1950s, as Raymond Durgnat observed, American and British protagonists were frequently ‘buddies locked in complete identity of interest’ (1970:  60), but Strangelove entered production when the one-​ time heroes of war narratives were elevated in rank and supporting the perma-​tanned Hollywood leading men with their sound advice. During the Second World War Harold Macmillan considered the British relationship with the USA to be analogous to the Greeks in Ancient Rome, ‘great big vulgar, bustling people, more vigorous than we are and also more idle, with more unspoiled virtues, but also more corrupt. We must run Allied Force Headquarters (AFHQ) as the Greeks ran the operations of the Emperor Claudius’ (quoted in Thorpe 2011: 170). While Ripper is a vulgarian the Group Captain is a Battle of Britain veteran who is intelligent, rational and a gentleman in all circumstances  –​a virtual 1960s echo of Basil Radford and Naunton Wayne’s Charters and Caldicott –​‘a solidly middle-​class, invulnerably insular front to the challenges of social change and foreign intrigue’ (French 2011). In The Lady Vanishes (Alfred Hitchcock 1938) their sangfroid and coolness under fire save the day and in Dr. Strangelove Mandrake deciphers the recall code. ‘Once again the Englishman has come through, late, but still triumphing against the odds’ (French 2011:  17), but this time, the efforts of the English gentleman prove to be too late. Ripper is more than merely the brash American –​he is as insane as the system he serves. Sellers’s first major success in a film shot overseas was The Pink Panther, and his performance virtually carried the film through its travelogue-​ style longueurs of the Alpine landscape. Amid the expensive skiwear and Autobianchi Bianchina Cabriolets was the Inspector –​Penelope Gilliatt viewed Jacques Clouseau as ‘a kind of hopelessly inefficient Maigret’ in a performance ‘that is one of the most delicate studies in accident-​ proneness since the silents’ (1973:  250). Clouseau is, on the surface at least, entirely confident of his abilities and endearingly pompous in the manner of one who has learned etiquette from a series of guidebooks; his desperate attempts at sociability when trying to dance the Bossa Nova off-​duty remain a highlight of the film. The semi-​sequel A Shot in the Dark was filmed in the UK and was Sellers’s most accomplished outing as the Sûreté Inspector. Ed Sikov sees the film as providing ‘one of the richest, most fully realised, films of Peter’s career’ (2002: 108), although he further claimed that Clouseau is ‘an idiot, an imbecile beyond either hope or contempt’ (2002: 110). This is perhaps a little too harsh, as the Inspector is another Sellers character

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Peter Sellers     295 adrift in a world they do not comprehend. They often attempt to mask their confusion with attempts at sartorial accuracy; Morgenhall’s striped trousers and faded barrister’s wig, or Clouseau’s rather dapper trench coat. Even Superintendent Quill of the Scotland Yard B-​Film spoof The Case of the Mukkinese Battlehorn (Joseph Sterling 1955) has an efficient appearance to match his Wolseley 6/​80 squad car. But Sellers’s infinitely sad eyes constantly infer a suppressed panic. Lewis argues that ‘his genius was to play failures in such a responsive way that they become paradoxical successes; there was a division, which we could accept and enjoy, between their shallowness and Sellers’ still waters’ (1994:  898). We first encounter the Inspector in A Shot in the Dark rehearsing an array of facial expressions he deems suitable for his rank and position. During Clouseau’s off-​duty hours, you can imagine him watching Jean Gabin in Maigret tend un piège (Jean Delannoy 1958), studiously noting how the great actor depicted a police detective of note. The Inspector strives to maintain the dignified pose of a figure from a police recruitment film, even when investigating a nudist colony and as the Guardian film review noted, ‘The delight is that Mr Sellers nowhere attempts to guy the character or his antics’ (1965: 4). From the outset, Clouseau will not allow the fact that he falls from a police car into a fish pond to compromise his dignity. Durgnat believed that while the home key of Alec Guinness was ‘a gentle passive wistfulness, Sellers’s is more sardonic, playful and outgoing’ (1970: 208), but one of the actor’s dominant motifs is one of fear of an incomprehensible and often hostile society. In late 1963 Sellers made his first Hollywood picture The World of Henry Orient (George Roy Hill 1964), but during the production of his second US-​made film Kiss Me Stupid (Billy Wilder 1964)  he suffered a near-​fatal heart attack. James Morrison’s description of how the director planned to focus on the small-​town songwriter Orville Spooner trapped in an American of faded chrome-​plated vulgarity, but Sellers left the project and gave an intemperate interview to the Evening Standard regarding US studio practices; he seldom filmed in Hollywood again. His first major feature post-​recovery was What’s New Pussycat? (Clive Donner 1965), where his psychiatrist Dr Fritz Fassbinder was played as a refugee from The Goon Show in a picture with an almost overwhelming sense of smugness. Andrew Sarris may have found ‘new nuances in the direction, the writing, the playing, and, above all, the music’ (1965: n.p.), however, it is now hard not to disagree with Bosley Crowther’s opinion that the cast was apparently ‘allowed to do anything they wanted, say anything they wished, wear any kind of crazy costume, walk out whenever they pleased (1965: n.p.). This observation, unfortunately, anticipated Sellers’s film career of the later 1960s, where high budgets often emphasised his worse fault as

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296     The art of screen acting an actor –​a penchant for self-​indulgence, one that seemingly increased in harmony with the monies involved in the production. Roger Lewis believed that ‘the richer and more famous Sellers became, the more lethargic was his acting’ (1994: 632). The actor who once epitomised understatement now appeared to believe that international stardom meant that he no longer felt the need to tailor his talents to a role. Robert Murphy (1992) cites The Wrong Box (Bryan Forbes 1966), After the Fox (Vittorio De Sica 1966), Casino Royale, The Bobo (Robert Parrish 1966), The Magic Christian (Joseph McGrath 1969), Hoffman (Alvin Rakoff 1970)  and There’s A Girl in My Soup (Roy Boulting 1970) as the worst of Sellers’s performances.10 However, the faults of The Wrong Box lie with the self-​conscious direction of Bryan Forbes as opposed to Sellers, whose cameo as ‘Dr Pratt’ is a masterpiece of seedy despair, awaking from his gin-​sodden nightmares with the cry of ‘I tell you the woman was already dead when I  came in!’ Pratt, as Philip Strick observed, lives in ‘superbly introvert isolation’ (1966:  149), unlike the playing to the gallery of certain other cast members. We will discuss Hoffman later as an example of Peter Sellers’s capacity for depicting menace at its most banal, but Murphy is largely correct about the remainder of his cinematic charge sheet. There’s a Girl in My Soup is West End farce lumpenly adapted for the cinema and Casino Royale is especially unwatchable  –​a product of ‘what one might call the playboy years of Sellers’s career. This was a period when his films attracted less attention than his headline marital troubles, amorous adventures and first serious heart attack’ (Milne 1980: 32). As The Mouse That Roared had demonstrated, Sellers was not at his best in straight leading roles and Casino Royale, his ‘Evelyn Tremble’ was a hybrid of suburban Cary Grant and ITC ‘international man of mystery’ hero in a ‘swinging’ 007 spoof. It did not augur well, and the resulting picture involved seven directors working across the UK and Ireland, together with various forms of gossip concerning the star’s bad behaviour. The circumstances of the actor prematurely leaving the production remain confused. One reason was his antipathy to his co-​star Orson Welles, another was his physical attack on the director Joe McGrath, which in retrospect appear symptomatic of a nervous breakdown. The final picture employed seven directors across three studios and the result was as coherent as one might have envisaged with the mostly absent leading man compensated by hurling guest stars at the production in the manner of those desperately trying to stave off the Wardour Street equivalent of the Black Death. In the wise words of Penelope Gilliatt:

10

‘Films which ought to be shipped to a desert island and screened continuously to those responsible for them’ (1992: 246).

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Nobody concentrates on the story for more than a second. Every scene has a preening gag or an egomaniacal bit of business. When it penetrates even this film’s confused skull that all action and no motive are suffocating under the weight of the awful ‘guest’ cast, then it is time for yet another hair-​raising piece of the producer’s folly. Let’s interest them with a flying saucer in Trafalgar Square; let’s have a parachute-​ drop of Cowboys and Indians; oh yes, I  know, let’s have somebody famous. (1967: 25)

Casino Royale does not even have the excuse of being ‘camp’. To quote Susan Sontag, ‘Camp taste nourishes itself on the love that has gone into certain objects and personal styles’ (1982: 119) and there little of that in an incoherent mess. Penelope Houston mused, ‘Poor James Bond. Not even a consortium of Dr No, Rosa Klebb and Ernst Stavro Blofeld could have wished on him or devised for him any fate quite like Casino Royale’ (1967: 26). At the heart of this tribute to self-​conscious zaniness is Peter Sellers, whose suave hero creates even more of a screen vacuum than Tully Bascombe. Raymond Durgnat wittily claimed that if Guinness was ‘Ealing’s England, Sellers was Frost Over England’ (1970: 209). Leaving aside the thought that Casino Royale might have been more entertaining had it starred David Frost, his observation does highlight that Sellers the leading man was infinitely less interesting than Sellers, the leading character actor. The former was now informing readers of advertisements for Gillette razors what constituted ‘that indefinable something called “style”  ’, appearing in 1968 Daily Telegraph colour supplement profiles of his motor car collection  –​and making pictures that put one in mind of Blossom Dearie sardonically intoning ‘I’m Hip’. During this period two promising film projects came to nothing –​the actor met with Michael Powell to discuss starring in an adaptation of Michael Frayn’s The Russian Agent, but the project fell apart when Sellers rejected the director (Howard 1996: 90). Satyajit Ray also approached him to play the lead in his fantasy The Alien: ‘I have three main reasons for casting Peter Sellers: (a) My great admiration for him, it’s good to work with a virtuoso once in a while; (b) I thought it would be fun to see him playing an Indian in an Indian film, and I thought the idea would intrigue Sellers too (I was right)’ (quoted in Malik 1967–​68: 20). The third reason was the need to attract audiences in the UK and USA, but The Alien proved to be a further Sellers project that never reached fruition.11 The years following the release (or escape) of Casino Royale marked the most depressing phase of his career, with nuance replaced by the narcissistic mannerisms of There’s A Girl in My Soup. Sellers’s CV was 11

http://​satyajitrayworld.org/​unmade_​ray.html tells the depressing story of this lost opportunity (accessed 8 December 2018).

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298     The art of screen acting increasingly littered with cinematic wrecks that had audiences harking back nostalgically for the subtleties of Down Among the Z Men. The Ghost in the Noonday Sun (Peter Medak 1973)  went unreleased for several years, and the limited audience for Soft Beds, Hard Battles (Roy Boulting 1974) wished that the same fate had applied to this prime example of that cinematic oxymoron, the ‘British sex comedy’. The publicity promised ‘six best Sellers in one’, but the result was the sort of film populated by ashen-​ faced well-​known character players acting with the artistic impetus of a recent letter from their bank manager. There was also The Great McGonagall (Joseph McGrath 1975), described by Michael Billington as ‘Spike Milligan as the hairy Scottish rhymester and Peter Sellers as Queen Victoria enjoy themselves hugely while we stand gaping helplessly on the side-​lines. At this rate. Milligan and Sellers will before long be both Goon and forgotten’ (1975). Sellers himself recalled, ‘I had six or seven years of one flop after another –​so much that I just didn’t work. I was getting to the stage where people were crossing the road, so they wouldn’t have to embarrass themselves by saying “hello” ’ (quoted in Sikov 2002). By 1975 The Return of the Pink Panther (Blake Edwards 1975) –​which was originally devised as a television series –​was seen as a comeback. In fact, between 1967 and 1974, only three British film productions show Sellers’s talents to be undimmed. The earliest of these was Hoffman, based on Ernest Gébler’s novel Call Me Daddy, which had been adapted for ABC TV’s Armchair Theatre in 1967 and starred Donald Pleasence. If the plot now appears utterly repellent –​a businessman blackmails Janet Smith (Sinéad Cusack), the fiancée of corrupt employee Tom (Jeremy Bulloch), into spending the week with him –​Sellers brings no pleasure to his manipulation but more of a sense of dead-​eyed ennui, virtually floating through his elegant townhouse. The likes of Benjamin Hoffman were not uncommon in post-​war British cinema –​feline, malicious and corroded with loathing for themselves and the wider world. In the 1950s one might encounter the fey and menacing figures portrayed by Marius Goring, Harold Lang or Alan Badel, and in 1960s cinema there were ‘the odd slightly sinister men played by Dudley Foster or Jeremy Kemp’ (Murphy 1992:  8). But these were usually support12 or character roles, menacing the hero with their feline malice, or emanating resentment from the fringes of a group. One major exception is, of course, Barratt (Dirk Bogarde) in The Servant (Joseph Losey 1963) and Hoffman might conceivably be the manservant several years on –​confronted by his own emptiness as he prowls around his townhouse. Derek Malcolm thought the picture ‘plodding, indeterminate and desperately mundane’ (1970: 8), 12

Another such character is Michael Shepley’s blackmailer in Lost (Guy Green 1956), a cameo that exudes contempt.

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Peter Sellers     299 but compared with Benjamin Hoffman informing Sinead Cusack’s ‘Miss Smith’ that, ‘I smell your hair in my bathroom. I smell your female skin smell in my bathroom’, Anthony Hopkins’s Hannibal Lecter was a pantomime demon with an unconventional choice of dinner menus. Three years later Sellers starred in the POW drama The Blockhouse (Clive Rees 1973), the plot of which has a group of prisoners seeking escape from D-​Day battle by taking refuge in a Nazi store. A bomb seals the entrance closed and although there is food, water and even wine to last for several years, no one can estimate when or if they will be rescued or for how long the candles will last. The scenario is a nightmare  –​ six years living underground, the last four of which in total darkness, with Sellers’s Rouquet, a peacetime schoolteacher, quietly tallying the supplies as the surroundings descend into a hell. Shortly afterwards, Sellers essayed Sam the Busker in The Optimists of Nine Elms (Anthony Simmons 1973), a variety show relic framed against the deeply unlovely surroundings of early 1970s South London. ‘Garbage dumps, looming power stations, squalid housing erected some 80 years ago and the new council flats that are the hope of a more comfortable life for thousands of people’ (van Gelder 1973: n.p.). Sam’s domestic world appears to be that of abandoned spaces, bomb sites and slum clearance; an urban realm where the ordinary rules and conventions of everyday life seem to have little meaning. He is in a capital city circa 1973 but not entirely of it. Gareth Jones saw the remote manner of Sam as reflecting ‘a subdued frustration at life, and his conversation turns time and again via the jokes and songs to the inevitability of death and his sense of loss and isolation’ (1974: 50). Such is the busker’s sense of angry but resilient pride and melancholy it is challenging to believe he was the creation of an actor who was not yet fifty years old. Peter Sellers died of a heart attack on 24 July 1980, shortly after he realised a plan he had nurtured for nine years to make a film version of Jerzy Kosinski’s novella Being There (Hal Ashby 1980). The role of Chauncey Gardner, the possibly autistic protagonist, served as a welcome counterbalance to three more entries in the Pink Panther series, which displayed a progressive lack of discipline. For any devotee of British cinema, it is an interesting, if ultimately futile, mental exercise to consider what would have transpired had Sellers not died so young. One can envisage him starring in Remains of the Day (James Ivory 1993) or The Madness of King George (Nicholas Hytner 1994),13 just as it is equally possible also to imagine Sellers in a range of British comedies doomed to gather dust in the Betamax section of a provincial video library. He would almost certainly have been knighted –​and there is an equally plausible 13

Sellers could have been plausibly cast as James Stevens, William Stevens or Lord Darlington.

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300     The art of screen acting chance that his filmic output would have varied from the unspeakable to the sublime. And regarding the latter category, there is Heavens Above! (John Boulting 1963), Sellers’s last major black-​and-​white British film. The screenplay, written by John Boulting and Frank Harvey and based on an idea by Malcolm Muggeridge, concerns how a filing error by a Church of England clerk causes the appointment of Peter Sellers’s John Smallwood to the living of Holy Trinity Church in place of Ian Carmichael’s clergyman of the same name. This Smallwood is a former prison chaplain from the West Midlands, and on arrival, he shocks the local community by replacing Major Fowler (William Hartnell) as churchwarden with Matthew (Brock Peters), a West Indian dustbin man. He also allows the extended Smith family to set up home in the vicarage after the police evict them when the town’s main employer Traniquilax acquires their campsite. Smallwood’s initiatives so move Lady Despard (Isabel Jeans), the owner of the company, that she puts her whole fortune at his disposal, and he starts to distribute free food from the church –​a development with disastrous economic consequences for the town. In Heavens Above! the middle-​class townsfolk are seen as unsympathetic or time-​servers. Fowler is a local builder concerned with social status; the bank manager Eric Barker is genially ruthless while the town’s leading officials and the senior clergy are both portrayed as variously elderly, hidebound and bureaucratic. Some of the Church of England bishops appear somewhat more concerned with their television appearances and promotional prospects than contending with spiritual issues and the masses seem content with their hire-​purchased television sets. There is no form of earthly paternal guidance from Cecil Parker’s Archdeacon Aspinall. ‘The Church has to live with the world as it is. We have to compromise’, he informs Smallwood. But this is what Smallwood cannot and will not do so –​‘If I’ve come to Orbiston Parva, it’s because I was meant to come. I’m not packing it in now’. Wilfred Sheed accurately noted how the Boultings fail to quell their tendency to ‘never pass up a laugh, however much it weakens the film’ (quoted in Wells 2000: 48) –​and the dialogue allotted to the West Indian dustman Matthew (Brock Peters) must have sounded patronising even in 1963. Much of the subplot concerning Carmichael’s Smallwood is wholly dispensable, and all too often the narrative indulges in mean-​spirited slapstick humour that would have been slightly out of place in a contemporary Carry On. Such quasi-​rebellious moments do not entirely mask a sense of despair, and Durgnat observed that: Idealists of a pre-​war vintage, such as Muggeridge (who provided the basic idea for the film) and the Boultings, had fought the good fight in the 1930s and 1940s, hoping the peace and social reform would

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generate a new, less selfish spirit. Now they were the Angry Old Men, as the Common People, so long the great Old Left cause, enthusiastically embraced ‘Admass’. (2000: 218)

And providing an alternative to consumerism is Smallwood in a performance where Sellers eschews all possibility of descending into caricature. Francesca Orestano saw the clergyman as a modern version of the hero of William Coombe’s The Three Tours of Doctor Syntax –​‘cordial, dedicated, stubborn, fearless, not reacting against, but slightly diverging from, the established values of his culture’ (2003: 167). Alan Dent thought that ‘almost any actor one can think of might have made a ghastly mess of the character’ (1963: 34). Some of the film’s best moments are in the confrontation between Smallwood and Sir Geoffrey, the youngest scion of the Despard family. The latter is given extra weight by the incisive performance of Mark Eden, who plays Geoffrey as a squire who is adapting with ease to the world of business; the Bentley Flying Spur and the First XI manners combined with the direct approach of a straightforward businessman. He believes that the wages paid by his factory are what are principally required to keep the populace contented and in the welfare state as the panacea for all social ills. His opinion of the Smith tribe is succinct: ‘Human beings? That idle, dirty, thieving bunch! What do you imagine they think of all this? They’re laughing at you –​both of you. Making rude signs behind your back!’ As the story progresses, it would initially appear that Sir Geoffrey is correct. The Smiths seem to be utterly corrupt, and the Despard’s factory is the town’s economic mainstay. Lady Despard’s funding of free food distribution causes the local shops to empty but the basis for Smallwood’s establishment of a ‘charitable centre’ is by no means presented as devoid of rationale. In a television interview with Ludovic Kennedy, the clergyman questions both the ability of the welfare state to alleviate all poverty and the modern world’s denial of the individual, by ignoring their spiritual needs. Smallwood is neither as deluded nor romantic as to assume that his task will be at all easy: ‘They’re not saints, I don’t expect them to be. They’ve had it pretty rough all of their lives; they’re not going to suddenly sprout wings overnight.’ It is the mass media, by misreporting one of Smallwood’s sermons, that helps to cause the collapse of the factory and the centre to fail, but through manipulation of the Establishment and the greed of the mass mob. The Church of England, in their capacity as one of the nation’s largest property owners, bail out the Despards’ empire. Sir Geoffrey, meeting with the Prime Minister (Colin Gordon), agrees for the Commissioners of the Church of England to refinance his factory on the condition that Smallwood leaves the town. Lady Despard withdraws her support and now the eccentric patriarchy familiar from the later T.  E. B.  Clarke-​ scripted Ealing films or Group  3 productions ally themselves with the

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302     The art of screen acting voraciously demanding forces of mass consumerism, with its potential to destroy the individual. The loss of the Despard funding for the charitable centre causes riots, and Teddy boys attack Matthew. He abandons Smallwood and advises the clergyman also to flee, but the clergyman defies his, and all official orders and remains in the church. Outside, the local community is now virtually indistinguishable from the invading spivs and wide boys of the economic liberation zone of Passport to Pimlico some sixteen years earlier. The scenes of the riot are lent an extra piquancy by being staged in this stable and reassuring cinematic environment –​the redbrick town hall, the Edwardian villas and the Wolseley 6/​99 and Humber Hawk squad cars are all familiar sights from so many British cinematic celebrations of gentle English eccentricity. A few years earlier, the Boulting brothers commented that Macmillan-​era Britain was a ‘steady, plodding, dull, monotonous and, to a large extent, cushioned world’ (Conrad 1959:  31). But now the respectable townsfolk of Orbiston Parva are captured in Max Greene’s gently lit black-​ and-​white cinematography as their potential viciousness is now turned against this English ‘alien’. Smallwood manages to deliver his message to his parishioners –​‘What you want I can’t give. What you need, you don’t want’ –​but he is almost inevitably doomed to be unheard. After Smallwood narrowly avoids being lynched, he is exiled to a Bishopric on a British rocket base in the Outer Hebrides, a move seen as one of complete cynicism on the part of the Establishment. Smallwood gives comfort to a terrified astronaut (Howard Pays), who asks of the new Bishop if he has even been in the condemned cell. Julian Petley observes how Smallwood’s tying up of the spaceman is ‘presented explicitly as an act of Christian kindness to an astronaut who has lost his nerve as well as an escape from his job of Bishop of Outer Space which his employers have forced upon him and which the film shows he realises is an absurdity’ (2000: 30). There is the inference that his superiors have placed the astronaut into a role to which he is unsuited; John Smallwood’s act of mercy is to another victim of Establishment betrayal. Somewhat inevitably, such a sad, angry, unpredictable picture would inevitably attract controversy. The Monthly Film Bulletin saw it as ‘remarkable chiefly for the amount of schoolboy smut it manages to incorporate, and for the nastiness of its view of people’ (1963: 95), but Elspeth Grant of the Tatler thought it was the actor’s ‘finest performance ever’ (1963:  45), while Alan Dent believed that ‘the satire of this Boultings’ film is only successful when Mr. Sellers is on screen –​and this, fortunately, is almost always’ (1963:  34). The most perceptive analysis was from Bosley Crowther, who compared the film to ‘Ingmar Bergman’s “Winter Light” –​with jokes’ (1963: n.p.). The conclusion has Smallwood circling the earth in a spaceship, broadcasting a message of hope to anyone who cares to listen. Below, the vacuous social rituals of Middle

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Bibliography Aldgate, Anthony and Richards, Jeffrey (1999), Best of British:  Cinema and Society from 1930 to Present, London: I. B. Tauris. Baker, Peter (1959), ‘I’m All Right Jack’, Films and Filming, September, 21. Baker, Peter (1961), ‘Mr. Topaze’, Films and Filming, May, 25. Balio, Tino (2010), The Foreign Film Renaissance on American Screens 1946–​ 1973, Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Barr, Charles (1998), Ealing Studios (3rd ed.), London: Continuum. Billington, Michael (1975), ‘Cinema: Good News from Britain’, Illustrated London News, 1 March, 64. Boulting, John and Boulting, Roy (1980), ‘Peter the Great’, The Guardian, 25 July, 11. Burton, Alan, O’Sullivan, Tim and Wells, Paul (eds.) (2000), The Family Way: The Boulting Brothers and British Film Culture, Trowbridge, UK: Flicks Books. Case, George (2014), Calling Dr. Strangelove: The Anatomy and Influence of the Kubrick Masterpiece, Jefferson, NJ: McFarland & Co. Chibnall, Steve and Murphy, Robert (eds.) (1999), British Crime Cinema, London: Routledge. Conrad, Derek (1959), ‘What Makes the British Laugh?’ Films and Filming, February,  7–​31. Crowther, Bosley (1957), ‘Screen: “John and Julie”: Tale of Tots on a Trip to Queen at Guild’, New York Times, 7 May. Crowther, Bosley (1963), ‘Screen:  “Heavens Above!” British Film Has World Premiere at Sutton’, New York Times, 21 May. Crowther, Bosley (1965), ‘The Screen:  “What’s New Pussycat?” Wild Comedy Arrives at Two Theatres’, New York Times, 23 June. Daily Mirror (1955), ‘The Robot Revolution; But What About Me?’ 28 June, 10. Davenport-​Hines, Richard (2013), An English Affair: Sex, Class and Power in the Age of Profumo, London: William Collins. Dent, Alan (1963), ‘The World of Cinema: A Week of Aitches’, Illustrated London News, 8 June, 34. Dolan, Josie and Spicer, Andrew (2010), ‘On the Margins:  Anthony Simmons’ “The Optimists of Nine Elms” and “Black Joy” ’, in Newlands, Paul (ed.) Don’t Look Now: British Cinema in the 1970s, Bristol: Intellect. Durgnat, Raymond (1970), A Mirror for England: British Movies from Austerity to Affluence, London: Faber & Faber. Durgnat, Raymond (1992), ‘Elegance versus Vehemence’, Sight & Sound, January, 19. Durgnat, Raymond (2000), ‘St. Smallwood: Or left of Heaven’s Above’, in Burton, Alan, O’Sullivan, Tim and Wells, Paul (eds.) The Family Way:  The Boulting Brothers and British Film Culture, Trowbridge, UK: Flicks Books.

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304     The art of screen acting Dutton, Julian (2015), Keeping Quiet:  Visual Comedy in the Age of Sound, Gosport, UK: Chaplin Books. Editorial (1959), ‘Peter Sellers: Goon-​in-​Tune’, Films and Filming, May, 5. Farber, Manny (1962–​ 63), ‘Elephant Art vs Termite Art’, Film Culture, 27, Winter,  9–​13. Forbes, Bryan (1992), A Divided Life: Memoirs, London: Random House. French, Philip (2011), I Found It at the Movies:  Reflections of a Cinephile, Manchester: Arcane Press. Gallagher, Paul (2013), ‘Peter Sellers vs. Spike Milligan: “The Running, Jumping & Standing Still Film”, 1960!’ Dangerous Minds, 24 January. Available at https://​ dangerousminds.net/​ c omments/​ p eter_​ s ellers_​ v s._​ s pike_​ m illigan_​ t he_​ running_​jumping_​standing_​still_​film_​19 (accessed 7 December 2018). Gilliatt, Penelope (1961), ‘At the Films; Discarding the Joker’, The Observer, 26 March, 27. Gilliatt, Penelope (1967), ‘Casino Royale’, The Observer, 16 April, 25. Gilliatt, Penelope (1973), Unholy Fools: Wits, Comics, Disturbers of the Peace: Film & Theatre, London: Secker & Warburg. Grant, Elspeth (1963), ‘Films: A Heavenly Send-​Up’, The Tatler, 5 June, 45. The Guardian (1965), ‘A Shot in the Dark’, 15 February, 4. Hoggart, Richard (1957), The Uses of Literacy; Aspects of Working-​Class  Life, London: Penguin. Houston, Penelope (1955–​56), ‘The Ladykillers’, Sight & Sound, Winter, 148–​9. Houston, Penelope (1957), ‘The Smallest Show on Earth’ The Observer, 14 April, 13. Houston, Penelope (1959), ‘Comedy and Conscience’, Sight & Sound, Summer and Autumn, 163. Houston, Penelope (1967), ‘Cinema:  Bond Dishonoured’, The Spectator, 21 April, 26. Howard, James (1996), Michael Powell, London: Basford. Jones, Gareth (1974), ‘The Optimists of Nine Elms’, Monthly Film Bulletin, 41(482), 50. Kael, Pauline (1962), ‘Lolita’, Partisan Review, Fall, 29(4), n.p. Kael, Pauline (1965), I Lost It at the Movies, New York: Little, Brown & Co. Kynaston, David (2013), Modernity Britain 1957–​1962: Opening the Box Book 1, London: Bloomsbury. Lehman, Peter and Lahr, William (1981), Blake Edwards, Athens:  Ohio University Press. Lejeune, C. A. (1960), ‘Joey’s Late Frolic’, The Observer, 23 October, 26. Lewis, Roger (1994), The Life & Death of Peter Sellers, London: Century. Malcolm, Derek (1970), ‘Hoffman’, The Guardian, 16 July, 8. Malik, Amita (1967–​68), ‘In the Picture’, Sight & Sound, Winter, 20. Manvell, Roger (1960), ‘The Millionairess’, Films and Filming, December, 29. Marwick, Arthur (1998), The Sixties: Cultural Revolution in Britain, France, Italy, and the United States, c.1958–​c.1974, Oxford: Oxford University Press. McFarlane, Brian (1997), An Autobiography of British Cinema, London: Methuen. McVay, Douglas (1963), ‘One Man Band’, Films and Filming, May, 43. Milne, Tom (1963–​64), ‘Dr. Strangelove’, Sight & Sound, Winter, 37–​8. Milne, Tom (1980), ‘The Comic Chameleon’, The Observer, 27 July, 32.

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Peter Sellers     305 Mortimer, John (2010), Clinging to the Wreckage, London: Penguin Books. Murphy, Robert (1992), Sixties British Cinema, London: BFI. Orestano, Francesca (2003), ‘The Revd William Gilpin and the Picturesque: Or, Who’s Afraid of Doctor Syntax?’ Garden History, 31(2), Winter, 163–​79. Petley, Julian (2000), ‘The Pilgrim’s Regression: The Politics of the Boultings’ Films’, in Burton, Alan, O’Sullivan, Tim and Wells, Paul (eds.) The Family Way: The Boulting Brothers and British Film Culture, Trowbridge, UK: Flicks Books. Powell, Dilys (1989), The Golden Screen: Fifty Years of Films, London: Headline Book Publishing. Quigly, Isabel (1960), ‘Cinema: Hitting Off the Present’, The Spectator, 4 March, 18. Review (1960), ‘Never Let Go’, The Guardian, 5 June, 16. Review (1963), ‘Heavens Above!’ Monthly Film Bulletin, 30(354), September, 95. Robinson, Andrew (1989), Satyajit Ray:  The Inner Eye, Berkeley: University of California Press. Robinson, David (1956), ‘Television: An Absurdity Called Fred’, Sight & Sound, Summer, 52. Sarris, Andrew (1965), ‘What’s New Pussycat’, Village Voice, 10(42), 5 August. Shaffer, Lawrence (1973), ‘Some Notes on Film Acting’, Sight & Sound, Spring,  103–​6. Shanks, Michael (1961), The Stagnant Society, Harmondsworth, UK: Pelican. Sikov, Ed (2002), Mr. Strangelove: A Biography of Peter Sellers, London: Pan Books. Sissons, Michael and French, Philip (1963) (eds.), Age of Austerity, London: Hodder & Stoughton. Sontag, Susan (1982), A Susan Sontag Reader, New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux. Strick, Philip (1966), ‘The Wrong Box’, Sight & Sound, Summer, 149. Thorpe, D. R. (2011), Supermac: The Life of Harold Macmillan, London: Pimlico. van Gelder, Lawrence (1973), ‘Screen: For Anglophiles: “Optimist” Tells Tale of the Other London’, New York Times, 19 October. Walker, Alexander (1974), Hollywood England: The British Film Industry in the Sixties, London: Michael Joseph. Walker, Alexander (1981), Peter Sellers:  The Authorized Biography, London: Macmillan. Walker, Alexander, Taylor Sybil and Recti Ulrich (1999), Stanley Kubrick, Director: A Visual Analysis, London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson. Wells, Paul (2000), ‘Comments, Custard Pies and Comic Cuts: The Boultings at Play’, in Burton, Alan, O’Sullivan, Tim and Wells, Paul (eds.) The Family Way: The Boulting Brothers and British Film Culture, Trowbridge, UK: Flicks Books. Williams, Francis (1962), The American Invasion, New York: Crown. Williams, Melanie (2011), ‘Entering the Paradise of Anomalies: Studying Female Character Acting in British Cinema’, Screen, 52(1), Spring. Wright, Ian (1963), ‘New Films in London’, The Guardian, 24 May, 11.

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Conclusion

This has been the work of an unabashed cinephile writer, one with blatant tendencies to rant about life, the universe and the importance of the Wolseley motorcar to post-​war cinema. British cinema is no longer the ‘unknown cinema of Britain’, as famously described by Alan Lovell in 1972, or the ‘lost continent’ that Julian Petley wrote of in 1986. Indeed, we have progressed from the days when a liking for the works of Basil Dearden or Bryan Forbes could once render you persona non grata in smart cinematic circles, doomed to roam the South Bank. As recently as the 1990s, the reaction of one academic to the mere suggestion of parallels between El espíritu de la colmena (Victor Erice 1973) and Whistle Down the Wind (Forbes 1961) was akin to a H. E. Bateman cartoon. And this tome is but a further illustration of how such performers could serve as ‘the repository of currents of feeling’ (Smith 2008: n.p.). Raymond Durgnat believed that post-​war British cinema often depended on ‘not concepts, which hardly appear, but atmosphere’ (1970: 9). Each of the actors discussed in this book were essential elements in the creation of a mood or evoking a given moment. The fleeting look of complete terror of Lionel Mandrake in Dr.  Strangelove, Jack Hawkins’s reaction to being referred to as ‘old darling’ by Nigel Patrick in The League of Gentlemen or Sylvia Syms regarding Laurence Harvey’s jiving in Expresso Bongo with weary resignation. It is such ‘tiny, mysterious interactions’ (Farber 1971: 145) that demonstrate why such performances can never be merely dismissed as relics of a lost era. Edgar Morin believed that cinema was a work that was ‘aesthetic, that is, destined for a spectator who remains conscious of the absence of the practical reality of what is represented: the magical crystallization thus reconverts itself, for this spectator, into subjectivity and feelings, that is, into affective participation’ (Morin and Mortimer 2005: 97). Morin additionally considered that such a process could not work on television, as the medium presented 306

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Conclusion     307 itself not within a darkened auditorium but ‘in the light, among practical object[s]‌’ (Morin and Mortimer 2005:  97). But those flickering shades could still reassure, challenge or even enlighten via the hired DER set next to the rack of Rick Wakeman LPs. The evanescence of cinematic forms and the interplay of consciousnesses lost no power through the circumstances of viewing and the world they conveyed. The style of dress of Superintendent Halloran with his trilby ever at an aggressive angle, the genial yet clipped diction of Ambrose Claverhouse and the urban landscape of Lyons’ Corner Houses and striped traffic light poles –​all were already becoming so remote as to appear virtually fantastic. But those figures who once populated the Odeon or the ABC on Above Bar Street still inspired ‘with new possibilities. That is what ghost stories are for’ (Inglis 2003: 50). Bibliography Durgnat, Raymond (1970), A Mirror for England: British Movies from Austerity to Affluence, London: Faber & Faber. Farber, Manny (1971), Negative Space:  Manny Farber on the Movies, Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger. Inglis, Fred (2003), ‘National Snapshots:  Fixing the Past in English War Films’, in MacKillop, Ian and Sinyard, Neil (eds.) British Cinema in the 1950s:  A Celebration, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Lovell, Alan (1972), ‘The Unknown Cinema of Britain’, Cinema Journal, 11(2), Spring. Morin, Edgar and Mortimer, Laraine (trans.) (2005), The Cinema, or the Imaginary Man, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Petley, Julian (1986), ‘The Lost Continent’, in Barr, Charles (ed.) All Our Yesterdays: 90 Years of British Cinema, London: BFI. Smith, Justin (2008), ‘Film History in Making History’, Institute of Historical Research. Available at www.history.ac.uk/​makinghistory/​resources/​articles/​ film_​history.html (accessed 8 December 2018).

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Filmography

10:30 PM Summer (Jules Dassin 1966) 266 39 Steps, The (Ralph Thomas 1959) 65–​6, 208 Accident (Joseph Losey 1967) 78, 91–​2 Ace in the Hole (Billy Wilder 1951) 23 Admirable Crichton, The (Lewis Gilbert 1957) 64 Adventures of a Private Eye (Stanley Long 1977) 56 Adventures of a Taxi Driver (Stanley Long 1976) 156 After the Ball (Compton Bennett 1957) 100 After the Fox (Vittorio De Sica 1966) 296 Alligator Named Daisy, An (J. Lee Thompson 1955) 149, 149n15, 223, 238 Alphabet Murders, The (Frank Tashlin 1965) 245 Amazing Mr. Blunden, The(Lionel Jeffries 1972) 155–​6 Amorous Milkman, The (Derren Nesbitt 1975) 140 Angels One Five (George More O’Ferrall 1951) 16, 63 Angry Hills, The (Robert Aldrich 1959) 88 Another Time, Another Place (Lewis Allen 1958) 206 Appointment with Venus (Ralph Thomas 1951) 59 As Long as They’re Happy (J. Lee Thompson 1955) 141–​2 Asylum (Roy Ward Baker 1972) 136 Aunt Clara (Anthony Kimmins 1954) 240 Autumn Crocus (Basil Dean 1934) 15 Baby and the Battleship, The (Jay Lewis 1956) 51 Bachelor of Hearts (Wolf Rilla 1958) 126 Bad Day at Black Rock (John Sturges 1954) 206 Barnacle Bill (Charles Frend 1957) 21 Barretts of Wimpole Street, The (Sydney Franklin 1956) 244 Battle of the River Plate, The (The Archers 1956) 13, 272 Battle of the Sexes, The (Charles Crichton 1960) 288 Bawdy Adventures of Tom Jones, The (Cliff Owen 1976) 194, 194n20 Beast in the Cellar, The (James Kelley 1970) 93 Beauty Jungle, The (Val Guest 1964) 209–​10

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Filmography     309 Being There (Hal Ashby 1980) 285, 299 Ben Hur (William Wyler 1959) 23 Berserk! (Jim O’Connolly 1967) 153 Big Job, The (Gerald Thomas 1965) 123, 135, 135n18 Black Memory (Oswald Mitchell 1947) 205 Black Rose, The (Henry Hathaway 1950) 15 Blind Date (Joseph Losey 1959) 80, 86 Blithe Spirit (David Lean 1945) 236, 238 Blithe Spirit (Joan Kemp-​Welch 1964) 256 Blue Lamp, The (Basil Dearden 1950) 21, 24, 79n3, 84 Blue Murder at St Trinian’s (Frank Launder 1957) 187 Birds of Prey (Basil Dean 1930) 14 Birthday Present, The (Pat Jackson 1957) 126 Bless This House (Gerald Thomas 1972) 214 Blockhouse, The (Clive Rees 1973) 299 Bobo, The (Robert Parrish 1966) 256, 296 Body Stealers, The (Gerry Levy 1969) 230n12 A Bout de Souffle (Jean-​Luc Godard 1960) 210n6 Boy, a Girl and a Bike, A (Ralph Smart 1949) 146 Boys, The (Sidney J. Furie 1962) 247 Brandy for the Parson (John Eldridge 1952) 59 Bridge on the River Kwai, The (David Lean 1957) 3, 23 Bright Young Things (Stephen Fry 2003) 51 Brothers, The (David MacDonald 1947) 220 Brothers in Law (Roy Boulting 1957) 187 Brown on Resolution (Walter Forde/​Anthony Asquith 1935) 37 Browning Version, The (Anthony Asquith 1951) 110, 239 Bulldog Breed, The (Robert Asher 1960) 166, 167, 169, 171 Bunny Lake Is Missing (Otto Preminger 1965) 229 Cage of Gold (Basil Dearden 1950) 38, 62 Cairo Road (David MacDonald 1950) 102 Campbell’s Kingdom (Ralph Thomas 1957) 87, 93, 222–​3 Car of Dreams (Graham Cutts/​Austin Melford 1935) 36 Carlton-​Browne of the F.O. (John Boulting 1959) 187–​8, 289 Carry On Abroad (Gerald Thomas 1972) 212, 258 Carry On At Your Convenience (Gerald Thomas 1971) 213, 258 Carry On Behind (Gerald Thomas 1975) 214n12 Carry On Cabby (Gerald Thomas 1963) 171, 171n7, 204, 206, 209, 212, 251,  255–​6 Carry On Camping (Gerald Thomas 1969) 176, 211–​12, 257 Carry On Cleo (Gerald Thomas 1964) 210–​11 Carry On Columbus (Gerald Thomas 1992) 195 Carry On Constable (Gerald Thomas 1960) 208–​9, 225n8 Carry On Cowboy (Gerald Thomas 1965) 211, 213 Carry On Cruising (Gerald Thomas) 209, 212, 213, 231 Carry On Dick (Gerald Thomas 1974) 213–​14, 259 Carry On Doctor (Gerald Thomas 1967) 189, 211, 256–​7

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310     Filmography Carry On Emmanuelle (Gerald Thomas 1978) 214n12 Carry On England (Gerald Thomas 1976) 214n12 Carry On Follow That Camel (Gerald Thomas 1967) 211 Carry On Loving (Gerald Thomas 1970) 123, 213 Carry On Matron (Gerald Thomas 1972) 212–​13, 258 Carry On Nurse (Gerald Thomas 1959) 181, 185, 189–​90, 251, 252–​3, 253–​5, 256, 257 Carry On Regardless (Gerald Thomas 1961) 210, 211 Carry On Sergeant (Gerald Thomas 1958) 253, 254, 256 Carry On Screaming (Gerald Thomas 1966) 211 Carry On Teacher (Gerald Thomas 1959) 255 Carry On Up the Jungle (Gerald Thomas 1970) 212 Carry On Up the Khyber (Gerald Thomas 1968) 211, 213 Case of the Mukkinese Battlehorn, The (Joseph Sterling 1955) 295 Casino Royale (Ken Hughes 1967) 287, 296–​7 Castle in the Air (Henry Cass 1952) 238 Catch Us If You Can (John Boorman 1965) 252 Ceremony, The (Laurence Harvey 1963) 109 Chance of a Lifetime (Bernard Miles 1950) 58–​9 Checkpoint (Ralph Thomas 1956) 82–​3, 224 Child in the House, A (Cy Endfield 1956) 82 Chimes at Midnight (Orson Welles 1965) 246–​7 Chitty Chitty Bang Bang (Ken Hughes 1968) 230 Clouded Yellow, The (Ralph Thomas 1950) 59 Colditz Story, The (Guy Hamilton 1955) 43 Comedy Man, The (Alvin Rakoff 1964) 5, 69–​70, 176 Confessions from the David Galaxy Affair (Willy Roe 1979) 156 Conflict of Wings, A (Don Sharp 1954) 61 Cottage to Let (Anthony Asquith 1941) 36 Countess from Hong Kong, A (Charles Chaplin 1967) 246 Cover Girl Killer (Terry Bishop 1959) 146 Craze (Freddie Francis 1974) 154 Criminal, The (Joseph Losey 1960) 88–​9 Crooks Anonymous (Ken Annakin 1962) 191, 201, 219, 227 Crowded Day, The (John Guillermin 1954) 146, 205 Cruel Sea, The (Charles Frend 1953) 6, 18–​19, 63, 77, 80–​1, 82, 91, 149n14 Curtain Up! (Ralph Smart 1952) 240 Dad and Dave Come to Town (Ken G. Hall 1938) 268 Daleks’ Invasion Earth 2150AD (Gordon Flemyng 1966) 230n12 Dam Busters, The (Michael Anderson 1954) 25 Dance Hall (Charles Crichton 1950) 141, 145 Dandy in Aspic, A (Anthony Mann 1967) 110, 113 Danger Route (Seth Holt 1967) 135, 135n8, 154 Damned, The (Joseph Losey 1963) 229 Darling (John Schlesinger 1965) 110–​11 Date with a Dream (Dicky Leeman 1948) 177, 184 David and Bathsheba (Henry King 1951) 221

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Filmography     311 Deep Blue Sea, The (Anatole Litvak 1955) 62–​3, 184 Deep End (Jerzy Skolimowski 1970) 155 Demi-​Paradise, The (Anthony Asquith 1943) 238 Desert Mice (Michael Relph 1959) 208, 212 Devil Girl from Mars (David MacDonald 1954) 46n5 Diamond City (David MacDonald 1949) 144 Dingaka (Jamie Uys 1964) 91 Dock Brief, The (James Hill 1962) 285, 288–​9 Doctor at Sea (Ralph Thomas 1955) 222 Doctor in Clover (Ralph Thomas 1966) 192, 229, 231 Doctor in Distress (Ralph Thomas 1963) 227–​8 Doctor in Love (Ralph Thomas 1960) 181, 190, 225 Doctor in the House (Ralph Thomas 1954) 61–​2, 190, 218, 219, 221–​2, 227, 228, 231 Doctor in Trouble (Ralph Thomas 1970) 194, 231 Double X: The Name of the Game (Shani Grewal 1992) 177 Down Among the Z Men (Maclean Rogers 1952) 287 Dr. Strangelove: Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (Stanley Kubrick 1964) 281, 285, 294, 306 Dulcima (Frank Nesbitt 1971) 51 Dunkirk (Leslie Norman 1958) 43–​4 Dusty Ermine (Bernard Vorhaus 1936) 238 Early Bird, The (Robert Asher 1965) 166, 167, 170, 171, 173, 174 Elephant Walk (William Dieterle 1954) 231 Emergency Call (Lewis Gilbert 1952) 205 Entertainer, The (Tony Richardson 1960) 70 El espíritu de la colmena (Victor Erice 1973) 306 Eureka Stockade (Harry Watt 1949) 268 Expresso Bongo (Val Guest 1959) 6, 101, 108–​9, 114, 130, 134, 306 Extra Day, The (William Fairchild 1956) 146 Eva (Joseph Losey 1962) 89–​91 Face of Fu Manchu, The (Don Sharp 1965) 230 Fallen Idol, The (Carol Reed 1948) 15, 133–​4 Family Way, The (Roy Boulting 1966) 50–​1 Far from the Madding Crowd (John Schlesinger 1967) 277 Fast Lady, The (Ken Annakin 1962) 181, 191–​2, 218, 227 Father Brown (Robert Hamer 1954) 269 Father Came Too! (Peter Graham Scott 1964) 181, 218, 227 Father’s Doing Fine (Henry Cass 1952) 127 Fiction-​Makers, The (Roy Ward Baker 1968) 136 Fiddlers Three (Harry Watt 1944) 220 Flame in the Streets (Roy Ward Baker 1961) 49–​50, 130–​1 Flight of the Phoenix, The (Robert Aldrich 1965) 230, 276–​7 Follow a Star (Robert Asher 1959) 163, 166, 167, 170, 255 For Those in Peril (Charles Crichton 1944) 220 Four Feathers (Zoltan Korda 1939) 103, 223

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French Connection, The (William Friedkin 1971) 219 French Mistress, A (Roy Boulting 1960) 226 From Beyond the Grave (Kevin Connor 1974) 156 From Here to Eternity (Fred Zinnemann 1953) 206 Games, The (Michael Winner 1970) 93 Genevieve (Henry Cornelius 1953) 21, 56, 59–​61, 111, 125 Ghost in the Noonday Sun, The (Peter Medak 1973) 298 Girl on the Boat, The (Henry Kaplan 1962) 172 Girl with Green Eyes (Desmond Davies 1963) 269, 276–​7 Going Gently (Stephen Frears BBC 1981) 177 Good Die Young, The (Lewis Gilbert 1954) 62, 81, 101, 104, 111, 239n4 Good Time Girl (David MacDonald 1948) 150 Grand Hotel (Edmund Goulding 1932) 245 Grand National Night (Bob McNaught 1953) 146 Grande Vadrouille, La (Gérard Oury 1966) 193 Great McGonagall, The (Joseph McGrath 1975) 298 Green Cockatoo, The (William Cameron Menzies 1937) 36 Green Helmet, The (Michael Forlong 1961) 201, 209 Green Man, The (Robert Day 1956) 183–​4 Greengage Summer, The (Lewis Gilbert 1961) 67–​8 Guns at Batasi (John Guillermin 1964) 26–​7 Guns of Navarone, The (J. Lee Thompson 1960) 68, 78 Hancock’s Half Hour (BBC 1954–​60) 20, 201, 205, 207, 220, 253, 255, 271 Happiest Days of Your Life, The (Frank Launder 1950) 186, 236, 240–​1 Happy Family, The (Muriel Box 1952) 39 Heart of the Matter, The (George More O’Ferrall 1953) 110, 265 Heavens Above! (John Boulting 1963) 300–​3 Hell Drivers (Cy Endfield 1957) 47n6, 80, 83–​5, 208 Hell is a City (Val Guest 1960) 80, 87–​8 Here Come the Huggetts (Ken Annakin 1948) 39, 143–​4 History of Mr. Polly, The (Anthony Pelissier 1949) 39–​40 Hoffman (Alvin Rakoff 1970) 296, 298–​9 Holiday on the Buses (Bryan Izzard 1973) 175 Hound of the Baskervilles, The (Paul Morrissey 1978) 194 House Across the Lake, The (Ken Hughes 1954) 206 House in Nightmare Park, The (Peter Sykes 1973) 170 House of Darkness (Oswald Mitchell 1948) 101 How to Murder Your Wife (Richard Quine 1965) 192 Hue & Cry (Charles Crichton 1947) 240 I Am a Camera (Henry Cornelius 1955) 103 I Believe in You (Basil Dearden and Michael Relph 1952) 86, 101, 103–​4, 123, 134, 205, 219 I Married A Woman (Hal Katner 1958) 152n18 I Thank a Fool (Robert Stevens 1962) 276 Ice Cold in Alex (J. Lee Thompson 1958) 43, 44–​5, 47, 48, 127, 128, 130

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Filmography     313 I’m All Right Jack (John Boulting 1959) 7, 188, 243–​4, 285, 289–​91 Importance of Being Earnest, The (Anthony Asquith 1952) 240 In the Cool of the Day (Robert Stevens 1963) 276 In the Doghouse (Darcy Conyers 1961) 196, 255 In Which We Serve (Noel Coward/​David Lean 1942) 34, 35 Innocent Bystanders (Peter Collinson 1972) 84 Innocents in Paris (Gordon Parry 1953) 103, 240 Intimate Games (Tudor Gates 1976) 154 Intruder, The (Guy Hamilton 1953) 20 Ipcress File, The (Sidney Furie 1965) 27, 193 Iron Petticoat, The (Ralph Thomas 1956) 205–​6 Is Your Honeymoon Really Necessary? (Maurice Elvey 1953) 147–​8, 201 It’s a Grand Life (John E. Blakeley 1953) 148 It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World (Stanley Kramer 1963) 192–​3 It’s Great to Be Young! (Cyril Frankel 1956) 42–​3 It’s Not Cricket (Alfred Roome and Roy Rich 1949) 144 Jet Storm (Cy Endfield 1959) 78 Joe MacBeth (Ken Hughes 1955) 206–​7 John and Julie (William Fairchild 1954) 204, 287–​8 Josephine and Men (Roy Boulting 1955) 271 Just My Luck (John Paddy Carstairs 1957) 166, 239 Keep It Up Downstairs (Robert Young 1976) 156 Kid for Two Farthings, A (Carol Reed 1955) 148–​9, 204 Kill or Cure (George Pollock 1962) 193n15 Killer Walks, A (Ronald Drake 1952) 102 Killing of Sister George, The (Robert Aldrich 1968) 252 Kind Hearts and Coronets (Robert Hamer 1949) 106, 185 King in New York, A (Charlie Chaplin 1957) 206 King Rat (Bryan Forbes 1965) 24, 51 King Richard and the Crusaders (David Butler 1954) 102 Kiss Me Stupid (Billy Wilder 1964) 295 L-​Shaped Room, The (Bryan Forbes 1962) 134, 134n16 Lady Godiva Rides Again (Frank Launder 1951) 143, 147 Lady in the Van, The (Nicholas Hytner 2015) 247n11 Ladykillers, The (Alexander Mackendrick 1955) 170, 185, 219, 288 Land of the Pharaohs (Howard Hawks 1955) 20–​1, 223 Lash, The (Henry Edwards 1934) 36–​7 Last Page, The (Terence Fisher 1952) 147 Last Remake of Beau Jeste, The (Marty Feldman 1977) 184 Lavender Hill Mob, The (Charles Crichton 1951) 39, 106, 145n6, 186, 207 Lawrence of Arabia (David Lean 1962) 26 League of Gentlemen, The (Basil Dearden 1960) 24–​6, 27, 69, 89, 187, 306 Les Girls (George Cukor 1957) 192 Life at the Top (Ted Kotcheff 1965) 101, 110, 111–​13 Live Now, Pay Later (Jay Lewis 1962) 146n7

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Lizard in a Woman’s Skin, A (Lucio Fulci 1971) 93 Lolita (Stanley Kubrick 1961) 293 Long and the Short and the Tall, The (Leslie Norman 1960) 109 Long Arm, The (Charles Frend 1956) 21–​2 Long Haul, The (Ken Hughes 1957) 152 Long Memory, The (Robert Hamer 1952) 41–​2 Look Up and Laugh (Basil Dean 1935) 58 Lost Horizon (Charles Jarrott 1973) 266–​7 Madness of King George, The (Nicholas Hytner 1994) 299 Maggie, The (Alexander Mackendrick 1954) 20 Magic Christian, The (Joseph McGrath 1969) 296 Maigret tend un piège (Jean Delannoy 1958) 295 Make Me an Offer (Cyril Frankel 1955) 269 Make Mine a Million (Lance Comfort 1959) 207–​8 Make Mine Mink (Robert Asher 1960) 184, 255 Malta Story (Brian Desmond Hurst) 20 Man About the House (John Robins 1974) 195n21 Man in Black, The (Francis Searle 1949) 205 Man in the Moon (Basil Dearden 1960) 66–​7 Man in the Sky, The (Charles Crichton 1957) 22–​3 Man in the White Suit, The (Alexander Mackendrick 1951) 219 Man Inside, The (John Gilling 1958) 206 Man on the Run (Lawrence Huntington 1949) 58 Man Who Liked Funerals, The (David Eady 1959) 181 Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, The (John Ford 1962) 203 Manchurian Candidate, The (John Frankenheimer 1962) 101, 110 Mandy (Alexander Mackendrick 1952) 13, 16–​18, 22 Marilyn (Wolf Rilla 1953) 146 Maroc 7 (Gerry O’Hara 1967) 193 Marty (Delbert Mann 1955) 206 Masquerade (Basil Dearden 1965) 27–​8 Matter of WHO, A (Don Chaffey 1961) 196 Midshipmaid, The (Albert de Courville 1924) 36 Millionairess, The (Anthony Asquith 1960) 287 Miss Robin Hood (John Guillermin 1952) 221, 240 Monte Carlo or Bust! (Ken Annakin 1969) 193 Morning Departure (Roy Ward Baker 1950) 40–​1, 47 Mother Riley Meet the Vampire (John Gilling 1952) 253 Mouse on the Moon (Richard Lester 1963) 245 Mouse That Roared, The (Jack Arnold 1959) 293 Mr. Perrin and Mr. Traill (Lawrence Huntington 1948) 239 Mr. Topaze (Peter Sellers 1961) 292 Murder at the Gallop (George Pollock 1963) 245 Murder Most Foul (George Pollock 1964) 245 Murder She Said (George Pollock 1961) 226, 245 My Brother Jonathan (Harold French 1948) 224 My Brother’s Keeper (Alfred Roome 1948) 80, 259n14 My Teenage Daughter (Herbert Wilcox 1956) 124–​5, 127

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Filmography     315 Naked Truth, The (Mario Zampi 1957) 292 Network (Sidney Lumet 1976) 266, 267, 268, 278 Never Let Go (John Guillermin 1960) 285, 292–​3 Next to No Time (Henry Cornelius 1958) 57 Nicholas and Alexandra (Franklin J. Schaffner 1971) 28 Night and the City (Jules Dassin 1950) 214 Night They Raided Minsky’s, The (William Friedkin 1968) 175 Night to Remember, A (Roy Ward Baker 1958) 64–​5 Night Watch (Brian G. Hutton 1973) 114 Night We Got the Bird, The (Darcy Conyers 1961) 170 No Highway in the Sky (Henry Koster 1951) 16 No Kidding (Gerald Thomas 1960) 190 No Love for Johnnie (Ralph Thomas 1961) 70, 90, 268, 271, 274–​6 No Orchids for Miss Blandish (St John L. Clowes) 206 No Time for Tears (Cyril Frankel 1957) 126 No Trees in the Streets (J Lee Thompson 1959) 127, 129 North West Frontier (J. Lee Thompson 1959) 65 Not Now, Comrade (Ray Cooney 1976) 194 Not Now, Darling (Ray Cooney/​David Croft 1972) 194 Nothing But the Best (Clive Donner 1964) 193 Nudist Paradise (Charles Saunders 1958) 211 Number 1 of the Secret Service (Lindsay Shonteff 1977) 154 Nun’s Story, The (Fred Zinnemann 1959) 266 October Man, The (Roy Ward Baker 1947) 36, 37–​9 Of Human Bondage (Ken Hughes 1964) 109 Oh, What a Lovely War! (Richard Attenborough 1969) 28 Oliver Twist (David Lean 1948) 144, 253 On the Beat (Robert Asher 1962) 166, 167, 168, 169, 170, 171, 172 On the Double (Melville Shavelson 1961) 153, 244 On the Town (Gene Kelly and Stanley Donen 1949) 270 Once a Jolly Swagman (Jack Lee 1949) 205 One Good Turn (John Paddy Carstairs 1955) 166, 167, 169, 171 Only Two Can Play (Sidney Gilliat 1962) 7, 123, 133, 289 Operation Amsterdam (Michael McCarthy 1959) 267 Orders Are Orders (David Paltenghi 1955) 186, 207, 287 Orders to Kill (Anthony Asquith 1958) 224–​5 Oscar Wilde (Gregory Ratoff 1960) 247 Our Girl Friday (Noel Langley 1953) 65n6 Paper Orchid (Roy Ward Baker 1949) 203 Park Plaza 605 (Bernard Knowles 1953) 205 Passage Home (Roy Ward Baker 1955) 269–​70 Passport to Pimlico (Henry Cornelius 1949) 240, 302 Passport to Shame (Alvin Rakoff 1958) 152–​3, 152n19 Payment in Kind (Peter Duffell 1967) 135n17 Peeping Tom (Michael Powell) 109n8 Perfect Friday (Peter Hall 1970) 93 Pickwick Papers, The (Noel Langley 1952) 253

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316     Filmography Pink Panther, The (Blake Edwards 1963) 285, 294 Please Turn Over (Gerald Thomas 1959) 127 Pleasure Garden, The (James Broughton 1953) 251, 259–​60 Pool of London, The (Basil Dearden 1951) 184n5, 220 Popsy Pop (Jean Herman 1971) 93 Postman’s Knock (Robert Lynn 1962) 170 Press for Time (Robert Asher 1966) 166, 168, 171, 174–​5 Prisoner, The (Peter Glenville 1955) 28–​9 Private Life of Sherlock Holmes The (Billy Wilder 1970) 231 Private’s Progress (John Boulting 1956) 181, 184, 185–​7, 188, 243, 289 Prize of Arms, A (Cliff Owen 1962) 89 Pumpkin Eater, The (Jack Clayton 1964) 135n17, 252, 259, 266, 279–​81 Punch and Judy Man, The (Jeremy Summers 1962) 132–​3 Quatermass 2 (Val Guest 1957) 146, 201 Quatermass Conclusion, The (Piers Haggard 1979) 51 Queen, The (Stephen Frears 2006) 136 Ragazza Del Palio, La (Luigi Zampa 1958) 152n18 Railway Children, The (Lionel Jeffries 1970) 156 Rainbow Jacket, The (Basil Dearden 1954) 203, 218 Raising a Riot (Wendy Toye 1955) 62 Raising the Wind (Gerald Thomas 1961) 212, 226 Rake’s Progress, The (Sidney Gilliat 1945) 182 Rampage (Phil Karlson 1963) 27 Ramsbottom Rides Again (John Baxter 1956) 205 Reach for the Sky (Lewis Gilbert 1956) 25, 63–​4, 65, 66, 67 Rebel, The (Robert Day 1960) 146n7 Rebus (Nino Zanchin 1969) 113 Remains of the Day (James Ivory 1993) 299 Return of the Pink Panther, The (Blake Edwards 1975) 298 Rob Roy, the Highland Rogue (Harold French 1953) 221 Robbery (Peter Yates 1967) 92–​3 Rocking Horse Winner, The (Anthony Pelissier 1949) 49 Romeo and Juliet (Renato Castellani 1954) 102 Room at the Top (Jack Clayton 1959) 6, 101, 105–​8, 113 Run Wild, Run Free (Richard C. Sarafin) 135–​6 Runaway Bus, The (Val Guest 1954) 146, 242 Running, Jumping and Standing Still Film, The (Richard Lester/​Spike Milligan/​ Peter Sellers 1959) 291–​2 Running Man, The (Carol Reed 1963) 110 Ryan’s Daughter (David Lean 1970) 51 San Demetrio London (Charles Frend 1943) 186 Sands of the Kalahari (Cy Endfield 1965) 91 Sandwich Man, The (Robert Hartford-​Davis 1966) 193 Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (Karel Reisz 1960) 80, 153, 225, 226

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Filmography     317 Scandal (Michael Caton-​Jones 1989) 195 Scarlet Thread (Lewis Gilbert 1952) 102 School for Scoundrels (Robert Hamer/​Cyril Frankel 1960) 181, 188–​9 Scott of the Antarctic (Charles Frend 1948) 35–​6, 39, 40, 44, 58, 220 Scrooge (Brian Desmond Hurst 1950) 253 Seagulls Over Sorrento (John Boulting 1954) 205 Seekers, The (Ken Annakin 1954) 21 Serious Charge (Terence Young 1959) 273 Servant, The (Joseph Losey 1963) 229 She’ll Have to Go (Robert Asher 1962) 255 Sheriff of Fractured Jaw, The (Raoul Walsh 1958) 65 Ship That Died of Shame, The (Basil Dearden 1955) 47n6, 62, 186–​7 Shiralee, The (Leslie Norman 1957) 271 Shop at Sly Corner, The (George King 1947) 143 Shot in The Dark, A (Blake Edwards 1964) 7, 294, 295 Side by Side (Bruce Beresford 1975) 194–​5 Silent Dust (Lance Comfort 1949) 184 Silent Enemy, The (William Fairchild 1958) 104–​5, 205 Simon and Laura (Muriel Box 1955) 270–​1 Sink the Bismarck! (Lewis Gilbert 1960) 66, 225 Sky West and Crooked (John Mills 1965) 51 Small Back Room, The (Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger 1948) 15, 203 Small World of Sammy Lee, The (Ken Hughes 1963) 112 Smallest Show on Earth, The (Basil Dearden 1957) 185, 242–​3, 288 Smokescreen (Jim O’Connolly 1964) 259n14 Some People (Clive Donner 1962) 68 Somewhere to Hide (Alastair Reid 1972) 268, 278–​9 Sound Barrier, The (David Lean 1952) 62 Spaceman and King Arthur, The (Russ Mayberry 1979) 70 Spanish Fly (Bob Kellett 1975) 195, 195n21 Spare the Rod (Leslie Norman 1961) 47n6, 170 Sparrows Can’t Sing (Joan Littlewood 1963) 146 Square Peg, The (John Paddy Carstairs 1959) 166, 167, 171, 175 State Secret (Sidney Gilliat 1950) 15, 28 Steaming (Joseph Losey 1985) 156–​7 Stitch in Time, A (Robert Asher 1963) 166, 168, 168n5, 169, 171, 173–​4 Stop Exchange (Howard Rennie 1970) 210 Stop Press Girl (Michael Barry 1949) 222 Storm Over the Nile (Zoltan Korda/​Terence Young 1955) 100n3, 103, 103n6, 223 Story of Esther Costello, The (David Miller 1957) 206 Story of Gilbert and Sullivan, The (Sidney Gilliat 1953) 268 Story of Robin Hood and His Merrie Men, The (Ken Annakin 1952) 221, 268–​9 Strongroom (Vernon Sewell 1962) 259n14 Sunday Bloody Sunday (John Schlesinger 1971) 266, 277–​8 Sword and the Rose, The (Ken Annakin 1953) 221 Sykes (BBC 1960–​65/​1972–​79)  259

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318     Filmography Tales That Witness Madness (Freddie Francis 1973) 28 Tamarind Seed, The (Blake Edwards 1974) 136 Taste of Honey, A (Tony Richardson 1961) 251–​2 Tempest, The (Derek Jarman 1979) 195 Term of Trial (Peter Glenville 1962) 47n6 There Is Another Sun (Lewis Gilbert 1951) 103 There Was a Crooked Man (Stuart Burge 1960) 172–​3 There’s A Girl in My Soup (Roy Boulting 1970) 296, 297 They Came to City (Basil Dearden 1944) 247 Third Secret, The (Charles Crichton 1964) 27 This Happy Breed (David Lean 1944) 35 Three Hats for Lisa (Sidney Hayers 1965) 210 Three Into Two Won’t Go (Peter Hall 1969) 176 Three Men in a Boat (Ken Annakin 1956) 103 Those Magnificent Men in their Flying Machines; Or, How I Flew from London to Paris in 25 Hours 11 Minutes (Ken Annakin 1965) 173, 193 Tiara Tahiti (Ted Kotcheff 1962) 26, 50 Tiger Bay (J. Lee Thompson 1959) 36 Tiger in the Smoke (Roy Ward Baker 1956) 83, 245 Time Bomb (Ted Tetzlaff 1953) 185 Time Gentlemen, Please! (Lewis Gilbert 1952) 205 Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (John Irwin 1979) 259 Titfield Thunderbolt, The (Charles Crichton 1953) 61, 204 Tokoloshe: The Evil Spirit (Peter Prowse 1964) 210 Tom Thumb (George Pal 1958) 293 Tommy the Toreador (John Paddy Carstairs 1959) 201, 204 Too Many Crooks (Mario Zampi 1959) 184 Town Like Alice, A (Jack Lee 1956) 271 Town on Trial (John Guillermin 1957) 22, 36, 45–​6, 47, 50, 86 Touch and Go (Michael Truman 1955) 21 Train of Events (Sidney Cole, Charles Crichton and Basil Dearden 1949) 184n5, 268 Trapeze (Carol Reed 1957) 205 Tread Softly Stranger (Gordon Parry 1958) 152 Trials of Oscar Wilde, The (Ken Hughes 1960) 269, 273–​4 Trouble in Store (John Paddy Carstairs 1953) 163, 165–​6, 167, 170, 171, 172, 241, 242 Trygon Factor, The (Cyril Frankel 1966) 230 Tunes of Glory (Ronald Neame 1960) 36, 47–​9, 50, 69 Twice Round the Daffodils (Gerald Thomas 1962) 123 Two Loves (Charles Walters 1961) 109 Two-​Way Stretch (Robert Day 1960) 291 Undercover (Sergei Nolbandov 1943) 80 Up in the World (John Paddy Carstairs 1956) 164, 166 Upstairs and Downstairs (Ralph Thomas 1959) 225 Value for Money (Ken Annakin 1955) 154–​5 Vault of Horror (Roy Ward Baker 1973) 194, 194n19

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Venetian Bird, The (Ralph Thomas 1952) 201 Very Important Person (Ken Annakin 1961) 191, 226–​7 Vice Versa (Peter Ustinov 1948) 221 Victim (Basil Dearden 1961) 128, 131–​2 V.I.Ps., The (Anthony Asquith 1963) 236, 245–​6 Voice of Merrill, The (John Gilling 1952) 221, 222 Wacky World of Mother Goose, The (Jules Bass 1967) 246 Walk on the Wild Side (Edward Dmytryk 1962) 109 Waltz of the Toreadors (John Guillermin 1962) 292 Waterloo Road (Sidney Gilliat 1945) 37 Way to the Stars, The (Anthony Asquith 1945) 35, 37 We Dive at Dawn (Anthony Asquith 1943) 37 Weak and the Wicked, The (J. Lee Thompson 1954) 149 West 11 (Michael Winner 1963) 153 What a Carve Up (Pat Jackson 1961) 209 What a Whopper (Gilbert Gunn 1961) 126, 208 What the Swedish Butler Saw (Vernon P. Becker 1975) 154 What’s Good for the Goose (Menahem Golan 1969) 175–​6 What’s New Pussycat? (Clive Donner 1965) 296 When Eight Bells Toll (Etienne Perier 1971) 28 When the Wind Blows (Jimmy T. Murakami 1986) 51–​2 Where the Spies Are (Val Guest 1965) 27 Whisky Galore! (Alexander Mackendrick 1948) 220 Whistle Down the Wind (Bryan Forbes 1961) 306 Wide Boy (Ken Hughes 1952) 109 Windom’s Way (Ronald Neame 1957) 268, 272–​3 Woman Eater, The (Charles Saunders 1958) 146 Woman in a Dressing Gown (J. Lee Thompson 1957) 90, 127–​8, 259 Women of Twilight (Gordon Parry 1952) 102 Wooden Horse, The (Jack Lee 1950) 268 World of Henry Orient, The (George Roy Hill 1964) 295 World Ten Times Over, The (Wolf Rilla 1963) 133–​5 Worm’s Eye View (Jack Raymond 1951) 186 Wrong Arm of the Law, The (Cliff Owen 1962) 291 Wrong Box, The (Bryan Forbes 1966) 296 Yesterday’s Enemy (Val Guest 1959) 80, 96–​7 Yield to the Night (J. Lee Thompson 1956) 149–​51, 155 Young Winston (Richard Attenborough 1972) 28 Zeta One (Michael Cort 1969) 230–​1 Zulu (Cy Endfield 1963) 26, 77, 89

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Index

ABPC see Associated British Picture Corporation Ackroyd, Peter 237 Adair, Gilbert 211 Addams, Dawn 230 Aldgate, Anthony 45, 85, 290 Aldrich, Robert 78, 252, 265 Allied Film Makers 24, 66n8 Alwyn, Nicholas 52 Anderson, Lindsay 5, 19, 46, 63, 79, 175, 244 Anderson, Michael 25 Andrews, David 68 Andrews, Harry 44, 128 Andrews, Nigel 51 Annakin, Ken 21, 39, 46, 103, 154, 173, 181, 191, 193, 195, 221, 226, 227, 240, 269 Antonioni, Michelangelo 280 Armes, Roy 2, 16 Ashcroft, Peggy 51 Asher, Robert 6, 166, 167, 184, 255 Askey, Arthur 205, 207 Askwith, Robin 214 Asquith, Anthony 35, 36, 37, 110, 224, 236 Associated British Picture Corporation (ABPC) 2, 4, 6, 24, 42, 44, 77, 100, 101, 102, 105, 121, 122, 125–7, 130, 132n13, 133, 136, 142, 146, 149, 152, 154, 170, 180 238, 240, 244, 246, 287 Attenborough, Richard 24, 26, 28, 43, 51, 78, 244n7, 276, 289

Axelrod, George 110 Aylmer, Felix 38 Babington, Bruce 15, 28, 219, 240–1, 242 Baddeley, Hermione 101 Badel, Alan 298 Bader, Douglas 63, 64, 67 Baker, Roy (Ward) 36, 40, 46, 49, 64, 83, 136, 194, 203, 245, 268, 269 Baker, Stanley viii, 4, 6, 18, 63, 67, 69, 77–97, 104 Balchin, Nigel 15, 16 Balcon, Michael 3, 59, 185 Balio, Tino 3 Bancroft, Anne 279, 280 Bannen, Ian 22, 156, 188, 278 Barber, Antonia 156 Bardot, Brigitte 222 Barker, Dennis 56 Barker, Eric 208, 209, 254, 300 Barnes, Peter 260n15 Barr, Charles 18, 21, 44, 186, 240, 293 Barrett, Ray 271 Barrie, Amanda 211 Barrie, John 132 Basehart, Richard 81, 104 Bates, Alan 110, 193, 277, 279 Bates, Barbara 45 Bateson, Timothy 172 Baxter, Stanley 191, 226, 227 Bean, Robin 51, 190, 203 Beckett, Francis 229 Beckwith, Reginald 61

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Index     321 Bedoya, Alfonso 15 Bell-Williams, Melanie 133 Bennett, Compton 100 Bennett, Hywel 50 Bennett, Richard Rodney 191 Bentine, Michael 193 Beresford, Bruce 194–5 Bergman, Ingmar 175, 280 Berkoff, Steven 145 Betjeman, John 60, 126, 212 Billington, Michael 71, 155, 212, 267, 298 Bogarde, Dirk 46n5, 59, 61–2, 78, 83, 91, 91n10, 111, 128, 130n12, 131, 153, 165, 205, 218, 221, 227, 267, 281, 298 Boland, Bridget 28 Borgnine, Ernest 206 Boulting Brothers 50, 185–8, 243, 275, 285n1, 289, 291, 300, 302 John 7, 181, 187, 205, 300 Roy 50, 187, 226, 271, 296, 298 Bourne, Stephen 134, 273 Bowles, Peter 210 Box, Betty 61, 82, 83, 221, 224, 231, 274 Box, Muriel 39, 270 Braden, Bernard 78n1 Braine, John 105, 106 Brando, Marlon 70, 77, 94 Brennan, Michael 166, 241 Brent, George 147 Bresslaw, Bernard 176, 211, 257, 258n11 Bret, David 142, 144, 147n10, 149, 153 Brevet, Dawn 132 Brooks, Ray 68 Brooks, Richard 252n3 Browne, Angela 174, 175 Browne, Coral 271 Burke, Alfred 152n17 Burton, Alan 240 Burton, Richard 63, 79, 112, 154, 246, 267 Butterworth, Peter 14 Bygraves, Max 170 Caine, Michael 3, 6, 27, 79, 93 Calder, Angus 25, 35, 52, 64 Callow, Simon 247

Calvert, Phyllis 16, 82 Cameron, Earl 49, 130 Cammell, Donald 93 Canby, Vincent 3, 113 Cannadine, David 67, 113, 224, 236 Carmichael, Ian 43, 186–7, 189, 243, 300 Carter, Youngman 166n3 Carthew, Anthony 105 Cass, Henry 127, 239 Castellani, Renato 102 Caton-Jones, Michael 195 Cavalcanti, Alberto 38 Cave, Andrew Dylan 270 Chaplin, Charles 6, 206 Chapman, Edward 16, 17, 20, 39, 171, 189 Chapman, Graham 231 Chapman, James 26, 65, 244, 258n12 Chase, James Hadley 89 Chibnall, Steve 4, 68, 83, 128, 129, 150, 270, 293 Christie, Agatha 245 Christie, Julie 3, 191, 277 Clarke, T. E. B. 301 Clayton, Jack 6, 105, 107, 111, 252, 268, 279 Cole, George 214, 293n9 Cole, Sidney 184n5, 268 Colleano, Bonar 147n11, 201, 206 Collins, Joan 28, 104, 122, 145 Columbia Pictures 45, 64, 68, 152, 206 Connery, Sean 3, 28n8, 79, 206 Conte, Richard 23 Conyers, Darcy 170, 196, 255 Cookman, Anthony 165n2, 253, 259 Cooney, Ray 194 Corbett, Harry H. 146, 211 Cornelius, Henry 56, 57, 59, 61, 103, 240 Cort, Michael 230 Courtenay, Tom 6, 79 Courtneidge, Cicely 134n16 Cowan, Margaret 23 Cowan, Maurice 166 Cowans, Jon 273 Coward, Noel 19, 34, 196 Craddock, Fanny 98 Craig, Michael 150, 224n7, 225, 227 Craigie, Jill 165

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322     Index Crichton, Charles 22, 27, 39, 61, 141, 184n5, 220, 240, 268, 288 Croft, David 194 Crowhurst, Donald 196 Crowther, Bosley 15, 50, 63, 90, 102, 109, 148, 148n13, 163, 184, 192, 207, 223, 226, 246, 287, 295, 302 Crutchley, Rosalie 274 Culver, Roland 186 Cummins, Peggy 135 Curram, Roland 111 Curtis, Tony 15, 193 Cusack, Sinéad 298, 299 Cushing, Peter 156, 195 Cuthbertson, Allan 107, 271 Cutts, John 110, 128, 173n8, 196 Dacre, Richard 166, 167, 169, 172 Dailey, Dan 23, 24 Dale, Jim 204, 210n6, 256, 257 Dassin, Jules 214, 266 Davenport, Nicholas 194 Davenport-Hines, Richard 27, 61, 106, 228, 229 Davie, Michael 195n21 Davies, Betty Ann 39 Davies, Brenda 276 Davies, Desmond 269 Davies, Jack 226, 231 Davies, John Howard 40 Davis, John 68 Davis, Richard 167 Dawson, Graham 43 Dawson, Richard 153 Day, Robert 183, 184, 239, 291 Day, Vera 146 De’Ath, Wilfred 58, 63, 64 De Banzie, Brenda 49, 131 De Courville, Albert 36 De Sica, Vittorio 23, 296 Dearden, Basil 21, 24, 27, 38, 66, 85, 86, 104, 128, 132, 184n5, 185, 203, 212, 218, 220, 247, 268, 306 Dee, Simon 28n7 Demongeot, Mylène 210, 225 Denham, Maurice 222 Dent, Alan 15, 41, 42–3, 46, 69, 149, 164, 172, 203, 219, 221, 231, 241, 279, 301, 302 Desmonde, Jerry 166, 169, 171–2

Devereaux, Ed 271 Di Venanzo, Gianni 90 Dietrich, Marlene 16n2 Dillon, Carmen 270 Disney Studios 46, 221, 268 Dixon, Wheeler Winston 66, 98, 227, 231, 274 Dmytryk, Edward 109 Dobie, Alan 69 Docker, Bernard 98n2 Docker, Norah 98n2, 147 Doleman, Guy 27 Dors, Diana vii, 6, 45, 98, 100, 111, 123, 126, 130, 134, 140–59, 223, 267 Drake, Charlie 170 Drake, Ronald 102 Duguid, Mark 145 Dundy, Elaine 267, 268, 269, 270, 275, 276, 277, 280 Durbridge, Francis 45 Durgnat, Raymond 5, 19, 23, 24, 41, 47, 49, 61, 68, 79, 90, 94, 103, 128, 131, 132, 134, 142, 171, 173, 188, 192, 209, 228, 238, 265, 270, 274, 278, 280, 294, 295, 297, 300, 306 Dutton, Julian 291 Dyer, Peter John 58, 64, 80, 107, 167, 225 Dyer, Richard 4, 29, 100, 151 Ealing Studios 16, 21, 22, 44, 62, 80, 103, 106, 145, 185, 186, 209 Eaton, Shirley 146, 254 Ebert, Roger 135, 175, 267 Eddington, Paul 78n1, 194 Eden, Anthony 224 Eden, Mark 301 Edwards, Blake 7, 136, 285, 298 Edwards, Glyn 93 Edwards, Henry 36 Edwards, Jimmy 98n2, 223 Ekberg, Anita 206 Ekland, Britt 256 Eldridge, John 59 Elliott, Denholm 81, 193 Ellis, Jacqueline 111 Elstree Studios 2, 78, 99, 121, 138, 255 Endfield, Cy 26, 47, 77, 78, 80, 82, 83, 84, 91 Ericsson, Peter 4

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Index     323 Fairbanks Jr, Douglas 28 Fairchild, William 104, 146, 204, 205 Fairclough, Robert 244 Fairhall, John 163 Fairlie, Henry 242 Faith, Adam 137, 208n3 Falconer, Alan 293 Farber, Manny 19, 26, 41, 203, 240, 306 Farr, Derek 46, 58 Farrar, David 38, 62, 83, 203 Faulkner, Trader 267, 277, 278, 281 Fayne, Tony 177 Feldman, Marty 194 Ferris, Barbara 122 Ffrangcon-Davies, Gwen 204 Fielding, Fenella 123, 228, 252 Fienburgh, Wilfred 274 Finch, Peter viii, 7, 90, 265–84 Finlay, Frank 93, 214 Finney, Albert 105n7 Fisher, John 169, 205, 211, 214 Fisher, Mark 1 Fisher, Terence 80, 147 Fleming, Ian 113 Flemyng, Gordon 230n12 Flemyng, Robert 86, 273 Forbes, Bryan 24, 43, 51, 134n16, 296, 306 Forde, Walter 37 Forster, Peter 164 Foster, Dudley 298 Francis, Freddie 28, 154 Frankel, Cyril 42, 126, 181, 188n9, 230, 269 Frankenheimer, John 101 Fraser, John 229 Fraser, Liz 124n2, 130, 146n7 Fraser, Ronald 265 Frayn, Michael 228, 297 Frears, Stephen 136, 177 French, Harold 221, 233 French, Leslie 225 French, Philip 27, 112, 192, 290, 294 Frend, Charles 6, 21, 35, 186 Friedkin, William 175, 219 Frost, David 246n10, 297 Galton, Ray 207 Gassman, Vittorio 152n18

Gates, Tudor 154 Gayson, Eunice 111, 144 Gebler, Ernest 298 Geisler, Rodney 22, 164 Geraghty, Christine 18, 44, 66, 87, 125, 145, 222, 242 Gielgud, John 238, 267 Gilbert, Lewis 3, 25, 57, 62, 63n4, 64, 66, 67, 102, 103, 126, 205 Gilbert, Stephen W. 220 Gillett, John 19, 128, 186 Gillett, Phillip 148 Gilliat, Sidney 7, 15, 37, 182, 240, 241, 268 Gilliatt, Penelope 50, 153, 165, 168, 168n5, 175n10, 184, 191, 228n9, 256, 258, 277, 278, 286, 289, 292, 294, 296 Gilling, John 206, 221, 253 Glaessner, Verrina 193 Glenville, Peter 28, 47 Godard, Jean-Luc 210n6 Golan, Menahem 175 Goodwin, Cliff 203, 204, 208, 209, 214, 248 Gordon, Colin 259n14 Gough-Yates, Kevin 35, 81, 91 Goulding, Edmund 245 Gow, Gordon 68, 273 Granger, Stewart 37, 105, 230 Grant, Arthur 87 Grant, Cary 67, 206 Grant, Elspeth 91, 100, 100n3, 108, 109, 169, 204, 209, 227, 275, 302 Grant, Richard E. 104 Gray, Charles 28 Gray, Frances 247, 254 Green, Benny 168 Green, Guy 298n12 Green, Nigel 27, 77 Green, Terry 155 Green, Hughie 121 Greene, Max 302 Greenwood, Joan 5n5, 39 Grierson, John 5, 166n4 Group 3 59, 61, 242, 269, 287, 301 Guest, Val 20, 27, 77, 79, 80, 86, 87, 108, 130, 146, 209, 242, 288 Guillermin, John 22, 26, 146, 205, 221, 292

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Guinness, Alec 23, 28, 39, 47, 207, 204, 207, 259, 288, 295, 297 Gunn, Gilbert 126 Haigh, Kenneth 126 Hakim brothers 89 Hallam, Julie 257 Hamer, Robert 41, 181, 185, 188n9, 268, 269 Hamilton, Dennis 145, 147, 151, 153 Hamilton, Guy 20, 43 Hamilton, Patrick 38 Hammer Films 38, 86, 88, 121, 194, 258 Hammond, Kay 238 Hancock, Tony 1n1, 121, 132–3, 170, 174n9, 177, 207, 214, 251 Harding, Gilbert 98 Harper, Sue 2, 3n4, 4, 14, 19, 39, 43n3, 79n3, 122, 123, 125n4, 125n5, 131, 134, 135, 141, 147n9, 149, 152, 166, 167, 169, 173, 251, 268, 269, 276 Harris, Anita 257 Harris, Julie 270 Harrison, Kathleen 5n5, 143 Harrison, Rex, 27, 182, 214, 238, 265, 270 Hartnell, William 84, 133, 300 Harvey, Laurence vii, 4, 62, 81, 98– 117, 130, 201, 204, 239n4, 265, 289, 306 Hassall, Imogen 111, 123 Hathaway, Henry, 15 Hawkins, Jack vii, 5, 13–33, 56, 69, 78, 81, 82, 86, 89, 109, 146–7, 222, 245, 267, 306 Hawks, Howard 20 Hawtrey, Charles 142n1, 190, 209, 210n6, 230, 231, 253, 258n11 Hayden, Linda 279 Hayden, Sterling 285 Hayers, Sidney 210 Hayes, Douglas 70 Hayes, Melvyn 129 Haysom, Ian 254, 258 Head, Murray 277 Hearne, Richard 240 Hedling, Erik 5 Helpmann, Robert 230

Hemmings, David 68, 129 Hendry, Ian 78, 193 Hennessy, Peter 43 Henrey, Bobby 15 Henson, Gladys 79n3 Henson, Nicky 192 Hepburn, Audrey 122, 125n5, 145n6 Hepburn, Katherine 206 Herman, Jean 93 Heywood, Anne 225 Hickson, Joan 254 Hill, Benny 121, 170, 230 Hill, Bernard 177 Hill, Derek 35, 85, 143, 145, 147 Hill, George Roy 295 Hill, James 288 Hill, John 50, 85, 104, 127 Hinxman, Margaret 4, 57, 99, 142, 142n2, 167, 169, 171 Hitchcock, Alfred 66, 192, 294 Hoare, Phillip 236n1, 238 Hodges, Mike 93 Hogg, James 230, 231 Hoggart, Richard 106, 145, 291 Holliday, Julie 153, 255 Holloway, Stanley 39 Holt, Patrick 38 Holt, Paul 221 Holt, Seth 135 Hopcraft, Arthur 144 Hope, Bob 206 Hope-Wallace, Phillip 35, 40 Hopkins, Anthony 28n8, 299 Hopkins, Harry 22, 23, 60, 134, 146 Hordern, Michael 246, 273 Howard, Alan 132 Howard, James 297 Howard, Ronald 129 Howard, Trevor 5n5, 110, 154, 267 Howerd, Frankie 170, 223 Howells, Ursula 22 Houston, Glyn 169 Houston, Penelope 4, 5, 18, 24, 60, 66, 91, 107, 111, 226, 239, 242, 267, 279, 288, 291, 297 Hudis, Norman 190, 208, 209, 253, 254 Hughes, David 183 Hughes, Ken 109, 112, 152, 206, 230, 269, 287

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Index     325 Hunt, Martita 238 Huntington, Laurence 58, 102, 239 Huntley, Raymond 14, 106, 108, 147, 172, 218, 239 Hutchings, Peter 84, 147, 156, 194, 222 Hutchinson, Tom, 98, 100 Hutton, Brian G. 114 Hyde-White, Wilfrid 238, 239n4, 256 Hytner, Nicholas 247n11, 299 Inglis, Fred 18, 307 Izzard, Bryan 175 Jackson, Glenda 277 Jackson, Gordon 48, 49, 87, 136 Jackson, Pat 126, 209 Jacobs, Gerald 214 Jacques, Hattie viii, 6, 175, 189, 190, 209, 210n6, 213, 251–62 James, Sidney viii, 1n1, 6, 66, 101, 148, 176, 189, 201–17, 251, 255, 257, 258n11, 259, 288 Jarman, Derek 195 Jarrott, Charles 266 Jayston, Michael 28 Jeffries, Lionel 155–6 Jenkins, Megs 39 Johns, Glynis 240 Johnson, Celia 103 Johnson, Richard 78, 135n19 Jones, David Cellan 70 Joyce, Yootha 135n17, 252 Judd, Edward 78, 133 Jurgens, Curt 194n19 Justice, James Robertson viii, 6, 22, 62, 83, 149, 172, 190, 191, 192n15, 203, 218–35, 245 Kael, Pauline 6, 40, 130, 266, 293 Katner, Hal 152n18 Kaufmann, Stanley 237 Kavanagh, Kevin 89 Kavanagh, Ted 253 Kaye, Danny 153, 244 Kellett, Bob 195 Kelly, Barbara 78n1 Kelly, Gene 205n2 Kemp, Jeremy 298 Kemp, Phillip 17, 41, 269

Kemp-Welch, Joan 256 Kendall, Kay 5n5, 60, 125, 270, 271 Kennaway, James 47, 85 Kennedy, Arthur 245 Kennedy, Ludovic 301 Kenney, James 82 Kent, Jean 62 Kerr, Bill 271 Kimmins, Anthony 240 Kneale, Nigel 51 Korda, Alexander 15, 63, 81, 82 Korda, Zoltan 103 Kossoff, David 148 Koster, Henry 16 Kotcheff, Ted 36, 101, 111 Kramer, Stanley 192 Kruger, Hardy 86, 126 Kruse, John 83 Kubrick, Stanley 285, 293, 294 Kuhn, Annette 17 Kydd, Sam 64n5, 202, 291 Kynaston, David 14, 21, 25, 148, 221, 289, 289n5 Laffan, Patricia 46n5 Lamar, Hedy 144 Lambert, Gavin 4, 5, 269 Lamont, Duncan 269 Lancaster, Burt 205n2 Landy, Marcia 62, 78, 146, 151, 223, 271 Lang, Harold 20, 41, 202, 298 Langley, Noel 65, 253 Laski, Harold 18 Launder, Frank 29, 143, 186, 187, 240, 241 Lawson, Sarah 133 Laye, Dilys 211 Le Mesurier, John 70, 189, 260 Lean, David 3, 26, 34, 35, 37, 51, 56, 62, 144, 147, 238, 253 Lee, Belinda 122, 146 Lee, Christopher 195 Lee, Jack 14, 205, 268, 271 Lee, Laurie 2, 140 Leech, Richard 22, 44, 47 Leigh, Vivien 63, 267 Leighton, Margaret 101, 104, 149, 292

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326     Index Leith, William 258 Lejeune, C. A. 3, 5, 24, 41, 58, 102, 104, 124, 126n8, 165, 207, 239, 287 Lemmon, Jack 191 Lennard, Robert 100, 122 Lesley, Carole 125, 126n6 Lester, Mark 135 Levy, Gerry 230n12 Lewis, Jay 51, 146 Lewis, Roger 7, 168, 209, 220, 287, 295, 296 Lewis, Roy P. 14, 60, 62, 67 Lister, Moira 146, 166 Littlewood, Joan 146 Litvak, Anatole 52–3 Lloyd, Jeremy 210 Loach, Ken 213 Locke, Harry 150 Lockhart, Freda Bruce 3, 16, 38, 40, 103 Lodge, David 44, 156, 171, 174, 176, 202, 291 Lom, Herbert 129, 150, 153, 204 Longdon, Terence 208n3, 254 Lord, Justine 135n17 Losey, Joseph 77, 78, 79, 80, 86, 88, 89, 90, 91, 92, 157, 229, 298 Lotis, Dennis 6 Lovell, Alan 274, 306 Lumet, Sidney 255, 265 Lusted, David 154n22, 155 Lustgarten, Edgar 88, 153 Lyons, Bridget Gellert 247 McCallum, David 85 McCallum, John 41 McCann, Graham 184n2, 186, 193, 194n20, 195 McCarthy, Michael 267 McCowen, Alec 46 MacDonald, David 46n5, 102, 144, 150, 220 McFarlane, Brian 57, 63n4, 83, 87, 122, 123, 124, 142, 225, 274 McGill, Donald 168 McGillivray, David 195, 230 McGrath, Joseph 296, 298 Mackendrick, Alexander 13, 17, 21, 170, 174, 185, 219, 220 McKenna, Virginia 126, 146, 242, 276

Mackenzie, Compton 143n3 MacKenzie, S. P. 63, 64, 185 McKern, Leo 87 MacKillop, Ian 57, 222n4 MacLaine, Shirley 109 Macnab, Geoffrey 17, 38, 61n3, 148n12, 169, 220, 226 McNaught, Bob 146 MacNaughton, Alan 132 McShane, Ian 51 MacTaggart, James 194 McVay, Douglas 279, 285, 288 Maddern, Victor 186, 291 Magee, Patrick 88 Maitland, Marne 273 Malcolm, Derek 211–12, 213n9, 298 Malik, Amita 297 Malleson, Miles 238, 240, 243 Mankowitz, Wolf 108, 114, 148, 269 Mann, Anthony 110, 113 Mann, Delbert 206 Mann, William J. 278 Mannock, P. L. 221 Manvell, Roger 7, 14, 25, 52, 98, 260 Marwick, Arthur 243, 290 Maskell, Virginia 78n1, 123 Massie, Paul 224 Maude, Angus 14, 60, 62, 67 Maughan, Robin 20 Mayer, Geoff 39, 70, 154 Meacham, Michael 124 Meades, Jonathan 27, 183 Medak, Peter 298 Medhurst, Andy 43n4, 131, 190, 213, 255, 257, 260, 281 Medwin, Michael 20, 222 Meillon, John 271 Menzies, William Cameron 36 Merriman, Andy 236, 238, 241, 256, 257n8 Merton Park Studios 80, 88, 92 Metro Goldywn Mayer 3, 170, 193, 226, 236, 244, 245, 276, 277 Middleton, Guy 186, 241 Miles, Bernard 58, 59, 242, 243, 288 Milligan, Spike 121, 170, 291, 292 Mills, Hayley 50, 51 Mills, John vii, 5, 6, 22, 34–55, 56, 64, 69, 86, 128, 129, 130–1, 224n7, 245

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Index     327 Mills, Juliet 37, 123, 126, 146 Milne, Tom 92, 93n13, 127, 194, 278, 296 Minchinton, John 43 Mitchell, Julien 58 Mitchell, Neil 52 Mitchell, Oswald 101, 205 Mitchell, Yvonne 90, 127 More, Kenneth vii, 5, 16n2, 18, 56–74, 190, 208, 222, 225 Morecambe, Eric 121, 177 Morgan, James 5 Morgan, Terence 16, 17, 82 Morgan, Stephen 271 Morin, Edgar 306, 307 Morley, Robert 5n5, 21, 104, 218, 221, 237, 238, 239n4, 240, 245, 247, 273 Morrissey, Paul 194 Mortimer, John 110 Mortimer, Penelope 176n12, 231, 279 Mosley, Nicholas 91 Moulder-Brown, John 155 Mount, Peggy 155 Mower, Patrick 168 Mullard, Arthur 251 Murphy, Robert 20, 23, 66, 81, 105, 112, 134, 135n19, 167, 184, 244, 245, 272, 277, 292, 296n10, 298 Murray, Andy 51 Murray, Barbara 133 Murray, Chic 208n4 Murray, Pete 16n2, 144 Murray, Stuart 136 Nabarro, Gerald 183 Nairn, Ian 9, 173 Naismith, Laurence 65, 156 Napier, Russell 85, 271 Neagle, Anna 39, 124, 124n3 Neame, Ronald 36, 47, 268 Nesbitt, Derren 140, 177 Nesbitt, Frank 51 Neve, Brian 82 Newford, Peter 86 Newley, Anthony 206 Newman, Nannette 25 Newnham, John K. 21 Ney, Marie 151 Nichols, Dandy 150, 170, 253

Nicholson, Virginia 128 Niland, D’Arcy 271 Niven, David 27, 67, 68n10, 183, 192, 270 Nixon, David 165 Nolbandov, Sergei 80 Norris, Marjorie 259 Nowell-Smith, Geoffrey 3 Nuttall, Jeff 155 Oakhurst Productions 92 O’Brien, Edna 276 O’Callaghan, Richard 213 O’Connolly, Jim 153, 259n14 O’Ferrall, George More 16, 110 O’Hara, Gerry 193 O’Toole, Peter 26 Oldham, Andrew Loog 104, 109, 114 Olivier, Laurence 70, 81, 101, 238, 268 Orestano, Francesca 301 Orr, Deborah 126n6 Orwell, George 35, 228, 244, 270 Osteen, Mark 136 Oulton, Brian 171 Oury, Gérard 193 Palance, Jack 154, 206 Paltenghi, David 186 Parker, Cecil 14, 42, 103, 219, 226, 300 Parnes, Larry 108 Paton, Maureen 156 Patrick, Nigel 15, 24, 57, 62, 184, 206, 270, 306 Pays, Howard 302 Peach, Mary 275 Petley, Julian 90, 244, 291, 302, 306 Pelissier, Anthony 39 Percival, Lance 251 Perier, Etienne 28n8 Perkin, Harold 172 Perkins, Victor 85–6, 132, 138 Pettigrew, Terence 221 Phillips, Leslie vii, 6, 110, 181–98, 218, 225, 226, 227, 231 Phillpotts, Ambrosine 107, 238, 239n5 Phipps, Nicholas 61, 221, 274 Pinewood Studios 2, 64, 82, 86, 99, 175, 177, 192, 203, 210, 225, 226, 231, 239, 255, 267 Pinter, Harold 91, 135, 214, 279, 280

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328     Index Pirie, David 156 Pizer, Larry 133 Plain, Gill 36, 37, 42, 45, 46, 47, 50, 85, 125, 268 Pleasence, Donald 298 Pohlmann, Eric 204 Pollock, George 193, 226, 244 Porter, Laraine 255 Porter, Vincent 2, 3n4, 4, 14, 39, 43n3, 79n3, 122, 125n4, 141, 149, 152, 166, 167, 169, 173, 268 Portman, Eric 37, 43, 82, 272 Potter, Dennis 68n11, 220n3 Powell, Dilys 14, 62, 67, 78, 203, 211, 279, 288 Powell, Michael 14, 15, 109n8, 265, 268, 272, 297 Preminger, Otto 229 Presle, Micheline 86 Pressburger, Emeric 203, 272 Price, Dennis 15, 20, 49, 57, 183, 244, 246 Priestley, J. B. 50 Proctor, Maurice 87 Pudney, John, 35 Pullen, Christopher 257 Pym, John 195 Quayle, Anna 251 Quayle, Anthony 44, 127, 128 Quigly, Isabel 86, 123, 129, 151, 223, 224, 280, 289 Quine, Richard 126, 192 Rachman, Peter 147n10 Radford, Basil 58, 59, 144, 204 Rakoff, Alvin P. 5, 152, 152n19, 214, 296 Randall, Tony 191 Randle, Frank 148, 148n12 Rank Organisation 2, 4, 6, 23, 24, 59, 61, 65, 68, 77, 80, 82, 83, 84, 91, 110, 125, 126, 130, 140, 142, 144, 145, 149, 150, 165, 166, 167, 168, 169, 170, 172, 173, 174, 175, 176, 177 Raphael, Frederic 110, 111, 277 Rathbone, Basil 269 Rattigan, Neil 37 Rattigan, Terence 57, 59, 63, 68n11, 245

Redgrave, Michael 110, 239 Reed, Carol 15, 110, 136, 148, 205 Reed, Oliver 78, 267 Reid, Alastair 268 Reid, Beryl 242 Reid, Pat 43 Reisz, Karel 4, 80, 153, 225 Reivorn-Pegay, Floriane 247 Relph, Michael 103, 132, 208 Rennie, Howard 210 Reynolds, Peter 147 Richards, Dick 185 Richards, Jeffrey 23, 26, 45, 47, 64, 65n6, 85, 107, 208, 267, 290 Richardson, Maurice 214 Richardson, Ralph 16 Richardson, Tony 70, 251–2 Richler, Mordecai 111, 274 Rietty, Robert 28, 228 Ritchie, June 133 Ritt, Martin 122 Rix, Brian 170 Robards Jr, Jason 175 Robertson, Cliff 27 Robins, John 195n21 Robinson, Andrew 288 Robinson, David 103, 164, 171, 286 Robinson, Joe 148, 148n13 Robson, Flora 93, 150, 245 Roche, Catherine de la 21 Roeg, Nicolas 89, 93 Rogers, Ginger 81 Rogers, Peter 124n2, 135n18, 190, 208n4, 209, 212, 257, 258n12 Rolfe, Guy 87 Roome, Alfred 80, 144 Rose, George 78n1 Rossellini, Roberto 113 Rossen, Robert 81 Rothwell, Talbot 209, 212, 256 Roud, Richard 84, 88, 192n5 Russell, Ken 170n6 Rutherford, Margaret viii, 6, 166, 236–50, 256 Ryall, Tom 37, 246 Sallis, Peter 52, 246 Sampson, Anthony 228 Sandbrook, Dominic 43, 60, 65, 222, 225

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Index     329 Sanders, George 113, 183, 192, 230n12 Sangster, Jimmy 88 Sanjek, David 86 Sarafin, Richard C. 135 Sarne, Michael 92n11 Sarris, Andrew 155, 280, 295 Sassard, Jacqueline 91 Saunders, Charles 146, 220 Schlesinger, John 110, 112, 266, 277, 278 Sears, Heather 107 Secombe, Harry 78n1, 121, 231 Sekka, Johnny 49, 130 Sellars, Elizabeth 41 Sellers, Peter viii, 4, 7, 15n1, 174n9, 188, 205, 242, 243, 256, 285–305 Seton, Bruce 18 Seyler, Athene 223 Shail, Robert 80, 81, 86, 88, 94, 209, 274 Shaw, Mercia 149 Shaw, Susan 144 Shepperton Studios 206, 255 Sheridan, Dinah 68 Shiner, Ronald 170n6 Shipman, David 35, 46, 64, 100, 144, 237, 247 Shonteff, Lindsay 154 Signoret, Simone 107 Sikov, Ed 204, 298 Silvers, Phil 211 Sim, Alastair 218, 240n6 Simmons, Jean 122, 299 Simpson, Alan 207 Sims, Joan 166, 175, 192n15, 211, 214n12, 241, 251n1, 255 Sinai, Anne 105 Sinden, Donald 18, 80, 81, 149, 223, 271 Sinyard, Neil 47, 48, 49, 57, 70, 105, 107, 108, 222n4, 280 Sissons, Michael 290 Skolimowski, Jerzy 155 Smith, Constance 144n4 Smith, Maggie 247n11 Sommer, Elke 214n12 Sparos, John 2 Stamp, Gavin 7 Stamp, Terence 277 Stanbrook, Alan 102, 103, 105

Stead, Peter 59, 77, 79 Steel, Anthony 5n5, 57, 82, 269 Steele, Barbara 122 Steele, Tommy 4, 108 Steiger, Rod 176, 176n11 Stoddard, Sarah 130n12 Summers, Jeremy 132 Sweet, Matthew 6, 36, 41, 45, 46, 165, 171 Sykes, Eric 193, 259 Sykes, Peter 170 Syms, Sylvia vii, 6, 108, 121–39, 141, 146, 306 Tafler, Sydney 22, 64, 102, 109, 145n5, 146, 204, 205, 251 Tashlin, Frank 245 Tavernier, Bertrand 109n8, 116 Taylor, Elizabeth 154, 246 Taylor, Gilbert 133 Taylor, John Russell 3, 89n8, 91, 278 Terry-Thomas vii, 6, 125n3, 181–98, 289 Thomas, Gerald 123, 123n1, 127, 135n18, 146, 190, 213n8, 214, 226, 258 Thomas, Ralph 59, 61, 65, 70, 77, 82, 181, 192, 194, 201, 203, 206, 208, 222, 225, 231, 268 Thorburn, June 111 Thorndike, Sybil 78n1 Tigon Productions 176, 230 Tincknell, Estella 254 Tingwell, Charles 245, 271 Todd, Richard 136, 154, 292n7 Tomalin, Nicholas 70 Tracy, Spencer 206 Truffaut, François 222n4 Truman, Michael 21 Tydeman, John 52 Tynan, Kenneth 14, 22, 57, 70, 111, 112, 127, 185, 193, 247 Tzelniker, Meier 109 Ustinov, Peter 221 Van Dyke, Dick 129n11 Vaughan, Dai 226 Vaughan, Peter 259n14 Vickers, Mike 174

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Vinen, Richard 185n6, 185n7 von Trier, Lars 148n12 Wagstyl, Stefan 163n1 Walker, Alexander 4, 67, 107, 111, 114 Wallis, Shani 146 Walsh, David 280 Walsh, Kay 38 Walsh, Raoul 65, 80 Walsh, Robert 203, 240 Wanamaker, Sam 89 Wansell, Geoffrey 68 Ward, Michael 171n7 Warner Brothers 80, 102, 126, 223 Warner, Jack 21, 39, 79, 143, 144, 259n14 Warwick Films 152, 206, 273 Warwick, John 46 Wattis, Richard 43, 172, 202, 241, 246 Waymark, Peter 153n20 Wayne, John 203 Wayne, Naunton 144, 294 Webber, Richard 255, 258 Weeks, Jeffrey 101 Weight, Richard 185 Weiler, A. H. 83n5, 109 Wharton, Michael 228 Whitehall, Richard 48, 267

Whitelaw, Billie 69, 275 Whitfield, June 251n1 Whittingham, Jack 16 Wilcox, Herbert 124n4 Wilde, Marty 78n1 Wilder, Billy 23, 231, 295 Williams, Francis 126, 290n6 Williams, Kenneth 21n4, 190, 210n6, 214n12, 254, 257, 258n11 Williams, Melanie 26, 37, 127, 157, 202, 203, 238, 251, 259, 269, 274, 275, 291 Williams, Tony 38, 40 Willis, Ted 42, 127, 129, 130, 166 Willman, Noel 88 Winder, Simon 206, 229 Winner, Michael 93, 153 Wisdom, Norman vii, 6, 56, 163–80, 241, 242, 267 Wise, Ernie 121, 177 Wyler, William 23 Wynne, Alan 99 Yates, Peter 92 Young, Terence 165, 168n5, 273 Zampa, Luigi 152n18 Zampi, Mario 184, 292 Zinnemann, Fred 206, 266