Four from the forties: Arliss, Crabtree, Knowles and Huntington 9781526110565

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BRITISH FILM

Four from the forties

MAKERS

Brian McFarlane, Neil Sinyard series editors Allen Eyles, Sue Harper, T im Pulleine, Jeffrey Richards, Tom R yall series advisers

BRITISH FILM MAKERS

already published Lindsay Anderson: Cinema authorship  john izod, karl magee, kathryn mackenzie, isabelle gourdin-sangouard Anthony Asquith  tom ryall Richard Attenborough  sally dux Roy Ward Baker  geoff mayer Sydney Box  andrew spicer Jack Clayton  neil sinyard Lance Comfort  brian mcfarlane Terence Davies  wendy everett Terence Fisher  peter hutchings Terry Gilliam  peter marks Derek Jarman  rowland wymer Humphrey Jennings  keith beattie Launder and Gilliat  bruce babington David Lean  melanie williams Mike Leigh  tony whitehead Richard Lester  neil sinyard Joseph Losey  colin gardner Carol Reed  peter william evans Michael Reeves  benjamin halligan Karel Reisz  colin gardner Tony Richardson  robert shail J. Lee Thompson  steve chibnall Michael Winterbottom  brian mcfarlane and deane williams

Four from the forties

BRITISH FILM MAKERS

Arliss, Crabtree, Knowles and Huntington

Bri a n McFa rl a ne

Manchester University Press

Copyright © Brian McFarlane 2018 The right of Brian McFarlane to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. 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 1054 1 hardback

First published 2018 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.

Typeset by Toppan Best-set Premedia Limited

For Andrew Spicer, with grateful thanks

Contents

list of figures series editors’ foreword acknowledgements

page ix xi xiii

Introduction

1

1 Leslie Arliss

4

2 Arthur Crabtree

53

3 Bernard Knowles

100

4 Lawrence Huntington

153

Afterword

197

filmographies

199 232 234

select bibliography index

Figures

1 Margaret Lockwood and James Mason in The Man in Grey, 1943 (Gainsborough Pictures: dir. Leslie Arliss, prod. Edward Black) page 12 2 Michael Rennie and Margaret Lockwood in The Wicked Lady, 1945 (Gainsborough Pictures: dir. Leslie Arliss, prod. R.J. Minney) 27 3 Margaret Lockwood and James Mason in The Wicked Lady, 1945 (Gainsborough Pictures: dir. Leslie Arliss, prod. R.J. Minney) 27 4 Kieron Moore and Margaret Johnston in A Man About the House, 1947 (British Lion Films: dir. Leslie Arliss, prod. Edward Black) 37 5 Cicely Courtneidge and Joss Ambler in Miss Tulip Stays the Night, 1955 (Bill Luckwell Productions: dir. Leslie Arliss, prod. John O. Douglas and Bill Luckwell) 48 6 Peter Glenville and Stewart Granger in Madonna of the Seven Moons, 1945 (Gainsborough Pictures: dir. Arthur Crabtree, prod. R.J. Minney) 60 7 Phyllis Calvert in Madonna of the Seven Moons, 1945 (Gainsborough Pictures: dir. Arthur Crabtree, prod. R.J. Minney) 62 8 Dennis Price (seated), Robert Helpmann and Anne Crawford in Caravan, 1946 (Gainsborough Pictures: dir. Arthur Crabtree, prod. Harold Huth) 70 9 Film poster for Fiend Without a Face, 1958 (Producers Associates: dir. Arthur Crabtree, prod. John Croydon) 90 10 Michael Gough in Horrors of the Black Museum, 1959 (Anglo-Amalgamated and Carmel Productions: dir. Arthur Crabtree, prod. Jack Greenwood, Herman Cohen) 94

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11 Nigel Patrick, Patricia Roc, Pamela Devis (Olga the robot) and Miles Malleson in The Perfect Woman, 1949 (Two Cities Films: dir. Bernard Knowles, prod. Alfred Black and George Black) 12 Pamela Devis and Jerry Verno in The Perfect Woman, 1949 (Two Cities Films: dir. Bernard Knowles, prod. Alfred Black and George Black) 13 Richard Attenborough and Bernard Knowles on the set of The Lost People, 1949 (Gainsborough Pictures: dir. Bernard Knowles, prod. Gordon Wellesley) 14 Tom Conway, Brian Worth and John Horsley in Barbados Quest, 1955 (Cipa Productions: dir. Bernard Knowles, prod. Robert S. Baker and Monty Berman) 15 Raymond Lovell and Leslie Dwyer in Night Boat to Dublin, 1946 (Associated British Picture Corporation: dir. Lawrence Huntington, prod. Hamilton G. Inglis) 16 Pamela Kellino and James Mason in The Upturned Glass, 1947 (Triton: dir. Lawrence Huntington, prod. James Mason, Sydney Box, Betty E. Box) 17 Film poster for The Upturned Glass, 1947 (Triton: dir. Lawrence Huntington, prod. James Mason, Sydney Box, Betty E. Box) 18 Rosamund John and Patricia Roc in When the Bough Breaks, 1947 (Gainsborough Pictures: dir. Lawrence Huntington, prod. Betty E. Box and Antony Darnborough) 19 Still from Man on the Run, 1949 (Associated British Picture Corporation: dir. and prod. Lawrence Huntington)

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175 182

Series editors’ foreword

The aim of this series is to present in lively, authoritative volumes a guide to those film-makers who have made British cinema a rewarding but still under-researched branch of world cinema. The intention is to provide books which are up-to-date in terms of information and critical approach, but not bound to any one theoretical methodology. Though all books in the series will have certain elements in common – comprehensive filmographies, annotated bibliographies, appropriate illustration – the actual critical tools employed will be the responsibility of the individual authors. Nevertheless, an important recurring element will be a concern for how the oeuvre of each film-maker does or does not fit certain critical and industrial contexts, as well as for the wider social contexts which helped to shape not just that particular film-maker but the course of British cinema at large. Although the series is director-orientated, the editors believe that reference to a variety of stances and contexts is more likely to reconceptualise and reappraise the phenomenon of British cinema as a complex, shifting field of production. All the texts in the series will engage in detailed discussion of major works of the film-makers involved, but they all consider as well the importance of other key collaborators, of studio organisation, of audience reception, of recurring themes and structures: all those other aspects which go towards the construction of a national cinema. The series explores and charts a field which is more than ripe for serious excavation. The acknowledged leaders of the field will be reappraised; just as important, though, will be the bringing to light of those who have not so far received any serious attention. They are all part of the very rich texture of British cinema, and it will be the work of this series to give them all their due.

Acknowledgements

For a great deal of help in giving me access to viewing copies of some of the films I’d had trouble finding and for so much assistance in tracking contemporary critical appraisals of the films of the four directors, I am much indebted to the staff of the British Film Institute, including Jo Botting and Steve Tollervey. At the BFI Library, I am particularly grateful to Ian O’Sullivan, Sarah Currant, Victoria Crabbe and Adrienne Rashbrook-Coope, who all coped patiently with my technical ineptitude. In Australia, Tom Ryan initiated me into the use of YouTube as a source of rare items, which was very helpful, especially in regard to ancient television episodes. As for my now-fragile copies of Picture Show and Picturegoer, which I have often drawn on for this study, I probably should offer a belated thanks to my late parents for the (meagre) pocketmoney that enabled me to buy them – and to my dear late wife’s tolerance about my storing of these for so many decades. And once again, my thanks to my daughter Sophie for setting me to rights about computer matters and for formatting the book’s final manuscript. Andrew Spicer was enormously helpful in providing copies of key films and the book is dedicated to him with gratitude and affection.

Introduction

There is nothing new in proposing the 1940s as arguably the enduring high point in the history of British cinema. Books continue to appear about the great names of the period, such as David Lean and Michael Powell; but, as well as the ‘quality cinema’ associated with these directors, there was also a popular output from film-makers who have not yet been subject to such detailed treatment. There are also excellent books that focus on the period at large,1 but they are apt to be more concerned with the prestige arm of British film or with thematic concerns. The purpose of the present book is to draw attention to four directors whose career trajectories had a good deal in common and can tell us much about what British filmgoers were flocking to see in this crucial decade when they were at their most prolific. They are Leslie Arliss, Arthur Crabtree, Bernard Knowles and Lawrence Huntington. All were born at the turn of the century (Arliss in 1901, the other three in 1900); all had been active in a range of film-making functions in the 1930s; and each would do his most proficient and popular work in the 1940s. After that they prolonged their careers, if not their reputations, in ‘B’ movies, co-features and television, but even in these reduced circumstances their long-honed professionalism would see them through. If none of them hurdled the decade with the comparative ease of their contemporary Lance Comfort, they are all responsible for some of the better moments to be found in the lower depths of post-1940s cinema in Britain. At whatever levels, they all persisted into the 1960s, and to have maintained thirty-year careers in the often crisis-ridden British film industry says something for their persistence – and entitles them to a closer examination. Taken together, they may offer a commentary on the changing fortunes of British cinema over the period of their prolificacy – and perhaps some insight into why this declined. These are not biographical studies, but, as well as offering some detailed discussion of their major films, the aim is also to reflect on

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the contexts in which they operated, contexts both industrial and social, though the emphasis will be on the kinds of preoccupations and dexterity revealed by a close analysis of their films. There will be some account of the involvement of each member of the quartet in the lead-up to his most significant period. It is not intended to offer a detailed account of all the films with which they were associated in the 1930s but, rather, to identify some tendencies in their work that may help to account for their later successes. They were as much a part of the crucial war and post-war decade as the more obviously prestigious names who have been so much written about. As well as examining the films themselves, both as entities and for how they resonate with the cultural and social climate of the time, part of the aim will be to place them in the spectrum of British film-going at that time when audiences were at a record high. It will be useful to distinguish the sorts of output associated with this quartet from that commonly associated with the idea of Britain’s ‘quality cinema’.2 All four emerged as proficient commercial directors in the 1940s, but this should not elide the different paths by which each reached this status. For instance, Arliss continued as a screenwriter and directed a couple of modest pieces (The Farmer’s Wife and The Night Has Eyes) before staking his claim to box-office success with The Man in Grey in 1943. Huntington also maintained his screenwriting career along with directing five minor genre entertainments before his ‘A’-film breakthrough with Night Boat to Dublin in 1946. Former cinematographers Crabtree and Knowles pursued this aspect of their art before making their directorial debuts in 1945 with, respectively, Madonna of the Seven Moons and A Place of One’s Own. The individual chapter on each will trace the sort of ‘preparation’ each engaged in before his major work as director: certain aspects of that preparation will recur in each, others will be marked by divergence in matters of both work and reputation. Popularity as a phenomenon is always worth considering for what it tells us about society at large at any given time. No doubt film-makers – not just directors but, obviously, producers and studios as well – are always interested in, hopeful that they have tapped into, what will attract the film-going public. The public in its turn will show by its response at the box-office to what extent the film-makers have been successful in this matter. Just what was it about, say, The Man in Grey that occasioned such popular success – and that led to a cycle of films in the costume melodrama genre? Was it just a matter of respite from the difficulties of the wartime period? Or was it also because such films, in more oblique ways than the more obvious realist (and critical) successes of the time, offered other ways of reflecting on lived experience?

int roduc t ion 

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What follows is not essentially a sociological examination of ‘film and society’, but it is impossible in considering the key films of the chosen directors not to be aware of resonances that go beyond – and grow out of – the narrative trajectories of the individual films. As film-making conditions changed, they had to find different opportunities, and these opportunities also reflect on changing audience tastes and production possibilities. Above all, this book aims to focus on four craftsmen who made significant contributions to the ongoing pattern of British film over several decades. These are names that have too often been allowed scant, if any attention in the critical discourse relating to the period of their prolificacy. Admiration for, say, Brief Encounter or The Way Ahead does not necessarily preclude appreciation of the skills involved in Madonna of the Seven Moons. Of course, I have made reference where appropriate to valuable critical writing about films directed by the four highlighted in this study and have also been interested in what various actors and other collaborators have had to say about their work for these directors. In general, though, I have been more concerned with researching how they were received by popular contemporary magazines such as Picturegoer and Picture Show, and what trade papers like Kinematograph Weekly and Today’s Cinema made of them. These might be thought to have had their fingers on the pulse of what was likely to appeal to large, receptive audiences.

Notes 1 For example, Charles Barr, Ealing Studios, London: University of California Press, 1977; Robert Murphy, Realism and Tinsel: Cinema and Society in Britain 1939–48, London: Routledge, 1989; Charles Drazin, The Finest Years: British Cinema of the 1940s, London: I.B. Tauris, 2007. 2 Term used by John Ellis in ‘The Quality Film Adventure: British Critics and the Cinema 1942–1948’, in Andrew Higson (ed.), Dissolving Views, London: Cassell, 1996.

Leslie Arliss

1

There is a tendency among critics when writing about Leslie Arliss’s three big commercial hits for Gainsborough Studios to attribute their success to the studio and thus to undermine the director’s contribution, at least by implication. Whatever critics had to say about these films at the time of their release – and these writers were often scathing – nothing could deny their popular success, and, without invoking auteurist claims, a case must be made for Arliss as director and screenwriter on all three as at least a key collaborator in this success and in such craftsmanlike proficiency as they exhibit.

Writing his way through the 1930s Arliss’s work in the 1930s (and in his thirties) as (co-)screenwriter would scarcely seem to have prepared him for the films of his greatest successes in the following decade. Though the IMDb website lists him as uncredited co-author of the screenplay for Hitchcock’s 1928 version of The Farmer’s Wife, adapted from Eden Phillpotts’s play, it seems likely that this is confused with the 1941 version, on which Arliss received his first credit as co-director. More reliably, he began his credited screenwriting career in 1931 with Tonight’s the Night: Pass It On for British International Pictures (BIP), starring then-popular comedian Leslie Fuller. Like several others who later became directors, including Sidney Gilliat and J. Lee Thompson, Arliss had early training with BIP’s scenario department. For the rest of the decade, he shares screenplay or dialogue credits or is credited as ‘co-author of the scenario’ or for ‘story’ or ‘adaptation’, the shared attribution of course making it difficult to account for Arliss’s input. However, watching the dozen or so of these films available for viewing, there is at least an ongoing sense of readiness to milk a comic

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situation for good-natured laughs and to provide established comics such as Will Hay and George Formby with material they could work to the effect their public expected of them. For instance, ‘the fat boy’, Graham Moffat, and/or ‘the old codger’, Moore Marriott, in Where There’s a Will and Windbag the Sailor (both 1936) bring their distinctive physical presences to bear on some neatly contrived situations and verbally sharp exchanges in scenes involving Hay that render them still amusing eighty years on. Did Arliss (or co-writer Austin Melford) come up with ‘If I thought you mean what I think you mean, I’d slap your face’ for Vera Pearce to threaten Albert Burden with in Road House (1934)? Of the films of the decade available for this study, he received solo credit as ‘author of the screenplay’ on only one film, Said O’Reilly to McNab (1937), though even then Marriott Edgar was credited with ‘dialogue’. The film has an amusing scenario that pits Scots against Irish, UK against US, and Will Fyffe and Will Mahony act out the stereotypes with vigour and comic know-how. But there is really not much point in trying to discern a continuing ‘Arliss touch’ in these films: Hay was a sort of comic genius whose persona of shifty authority (e.g. when catapulted into captaining a ship when he had never before been to sea, in Windbag the Sailor) could probably have risen above much less inventive screenplays than those Arliss was involved with. The same claim might be made for Formby’s immaculate timing, on display in Come on George (1939), an often funny, pacey vehicle for the toothy star as an ice-cream seller who, via a chain of events too complicated (not to say improbable) to discuss here, becomes a hero of the equine racetrack. From 1940 there was a change of generic direction for Arliss as writer. On For Freedom (1940) he shares scenario and dialogue credit with Miles Malleson for a serious and ingenious piece of wartime propaganda – a quite complex amalgam of newsreel, production–studio interaction and staged action footage depicting the battle of the River Plate. In the same year, for the Boulting brothers’ Charter Films, he is one of three credited with the ‘screen story’ for Pastor Hall, a powerful study of the conflict faced by a German pastor who is at odds with the rise of Hitler. Angus McPhail, by this time an Ealing regular, has top billing in the screenplay credits for The Foreman Went to France (1942), his name given in larger type, and followed in order by John Dighton and Arliss, who thus probably does not deserve to be blamed for its tonal uncertainty as it moves between serious wartime exploit and ill-fitting comic inserts to exploit Tommy Trinder’s personality.

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The director emerges The Night Has Eyes (1942) Released in the same month, June 1942, was Arliss’s directorial debut, The Night Has Eyes. The full credit reads: ‘Written and directed by Leslie Arliss’, and the film remains a lively enough thriller, which begins in comic mode before settling into full-blown melodrama, with murder on the moors, a house that seems to have secrets, and a lot of shadowy effects, all enhanced by Günther Krampf’s evocative cinematography and Duncan Sutherland’s art direction. Produced by John Argyle, adapted from Alan Kennington’s novel, made at Welwyn Studios (‘one of the few studios that was not requisitioned at the outbreak of war’1) and distributed by ABPC, it is in fact a melodramatic precursor of Arliss’s time at Gainsborough, which began a year later. This feeling is intensified by the casting of James Mason as the handsome, enigmatic, possibly cruel protagonist. At the end of term, two young schoolmistresses, Marion (Joyce Howard) and American Doris (Tucker McGuire), are going on holiday to the Yorkshire moors where a colleague, ‘poor Evelyn’, was lost the year before. The sniffy headmistress of Carne School suspects they are going off chasing men, believing Doris ‘is no lady’, but an older teacher (Amy Dalby) chides her with: ‘Remember, she isn’t English’. A police officer warns them not to go trekking over the moors in the poor weather, but nevertheless they head off in thickening fog and rain, and Doris inevitably gets stuck in a bog from which Marion has to rescue her. A flash of lightning illuminates a house and a man with a torch who grudgingly takes them in. As Michael Omasta writes: ‘There is one superb scene early on in the film where we first see Mason and the old dark house that stands stark and brooding in silhouette amidst the storm with the single small frame of an open door ominously lit up. Apart from the dramatic effect they created, fog and storm were perfect cover for the use of miniatures disappearing in the depths of the moor, obviously to great success.’2 Omasta rightly claims that Krampf and art director Sutherland ‘worked wonders with their limited B-movie resources’.3 James Mason, who failed to get on with Arliss, paid tribute to Krampf as ‘a perfectionist. He had to see that the fog remained consistent through every scene of that last exciting sequence.’4 Considering the film was made entirely at Welwyn Studios, it no doubt needed all the help it could get in creating its sense of a remote place and mystery. The man lit up in the doorway is Stephen Deremid, who tells the women ‘I like storms’, and, more portentously: ‘The moors are like

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quicksand. They never give up their dead.’ On their first night in this unpromising accommodation, Marion seems to establish some rapport with the brooding, reclusive Stephen, while Doris acts the heroine’s wise-cracking friend. (This kind of complementary female pairing proved to be a common thread in Arliss’s later melodramas.) Stephen is a composer who ‘gave up music for war’, by which he means the Spanish Civil War, during which – he adds bitterly – ‘Civilisation watched on the sidelines to make sure there’d be no fair play.’ This first evening concludes with Marion saying to Doris that she is suddenly feeling ‘nearer to Evelyn than I have since she died’. A detail: Doris’s speech is peppered with ‘damn’ and ‘hell’ – diction the American actress would never have been allowed in her puritanical native US. Arliss would later come up against this prissiness in relation to his Gainsborough pieces, more of which later.5 By this time the full panoply of melodrama has been set in place. Here are two plucky but vulnerable young women, in an isolated house, with an embittered, ‘artistic’ hero who pounds away at the piano late at night, shadows on the wall and the possibility that the missing Evelyn, in spirit at least, is somewhere on the premises. Next morning, floods cut them off from the outside world. Stephen warns them about not looking for hidden rooms and to keep out of his study, the immediate implication being that there are secrets waiting to be discovered. Stephen lends Marion, who has fallen in a trough, an off-the-shoulder dress that belonged to his grandmother; later, at dinner, they talk of men she has met and he offers the perception about ‘the queer fascination cruelty has’, foreshadowing further the kinds of role that would be Mason’s lot at Gainsborough. The film builds up our suspicions of Stephen – he has a revolver, there is a scrap of a Carne School report in the house that Evelyn must have brought there – before introducing the two characters who will prove to have been responsible for Evelyn’s fate. These are handyman Jim Sturrock (Wilfrid Lawson) and housekeeper Mrs Ranger (Mary Clare). Mrs Ranger, whom Stephen has spoken of warmly, seems friendly, though any viewer familiar with Mary Clare’s filmography (think of the Baroness in The Lady Vanishes) would tend to reserve judgement. Jim starts to talk about the ‘last’ lady visitor, then stops himself, and Mrs Ranger, though apparently kindly, seems anxious to get rid of the young women. In Lawson and Clare, Arliss had two very experienced character players and their surface benevolence is convincingly enough depicted to cause viewers, rather than suspect them, to remain wary of Stephen’s potential for cruelty. After all, war may have traumatised him, and he has shown himself capable of verbal harshness, insulting

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Marion as ‘a sentimental little schoolma’am’ when she offers advice about ‘climbing back on a horse’ and urges him to ‘Use me as your cure’. Mrs Ranger warns Marion that ‘this is a bad house’ and tries to persuade her to leave. As the film moves to its quite powerful end, with Stephen and Marion watching while the guilty Mrs Ranger and Jim are sent off to their slimy reward in the quicksand, it is impressive to note how skilfully the details of the plot have been worked into a persuasive whole. Arliss has maintained firm control over narrative elements, achieved (with the help of his key collaborators) a visual patina that is appropriate to the melodramatic context and obtained performances of just enough complexity from an able cast. If he is not yet in top gear, as he would be in the following year, he shows every promise as a popular genre film-maker. Here, the ‘old dark house’ mystery is stiffened by the sense, apt for 1942, of the harm that war might wreak on individual character as well as in wider contexts. It may be the Spanish Civil War that is at issue, but the film implies any war can produce such trauma. This is not to suggest that the film has a solemn or didactic purpose, but its entertainment quotient is subtly enriched by its glancing awareness of what life was like in the contemporary war-torn world. Robert Murphy, after listing a number of films that exemplified the shift ‘from murder mysteries and crime thrillers to films dealing with espionage and resistance’, claims that: ‘More indicative of anxieties which would infect post-war films is The Night Has Eyes (1942)’, which has a ‘hero’ who is ‘undeniably sadistic in his treatment of the fluffy young heroine’.6 In this way, Arliss’s treatment of the character of Stephen not only anticipates Mason’s more brutal protagonists in The Man in Grey, The Wicked Lady and The Seventh Veil, but a more general tendency to depict men damaged, most often by war, in the British film noirs of the later 1940s. Not a great deal has been written about The Night Has Eyes, but it is worth noting for its own merits and as a progenitor of two different strands of British film-making. At least one reviewer at the time enjoyed it, praising it for ‘[f]orthright direction, powerful leading portrayal, plenty of light relief’,7 though another felt that: ‘The direction and production of this film are too stagey to get the most out of quite a good plot.’8 Tony Williams, meanwhile, writes: ‘Although justifiably forgotten, The Night Has Eyes reveals the importance of seeing Gainsborough films against a broader and relevant historical and cinematic canvas.’9 One may take issue with ‘justifiably forgotten’, but the latter claim about the broader canvas deserves attention. Perhaps that is what the reviewer in The Times had in mind in this appraisal: ‘There is some

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ingenuity and not a little cinematic skill in this British film which shows by the quality of its dialogue that it aims to be something more than an ordinary “thriller”.’10 That ‘something more’ is really focused in the role of Stephen, and Mason rewards it with a performance that guarantees the film’s power and watchability. Mason did not get on with Arliss, claiming that he ‘was one of the only two directors with whom, throughout the length and breadth of my career, I have had cross words’.11 However, he certainly owed the director the setting in place here of a persona he would proceed to hone to immense success in the next couple of years.

Gainsborough’s bad men and worse women In a curious way, British commercial film-making never seemed as identifiably a genre cinema as so much of the Hollywood output was. Such genre activity as there was usually required a studio name to place it firmly: thus, Ealing comedy, Hammer horror and, of course, Gainsborough (mainly costume) melodrama. Those 1930s comedies with which Arliss was associated were in many cases introduced by the smiling Gainsborough lady but they have never really acquired that sort of connection with the studio that the famous ‘bodice-rippers’ of the 1940s would. It is essentially Arliss who set this genre success story in motion, though other directors highlighted in this book – Arthur Crabtree and Bernard Knowles – would also make their contribution to this immensely popular vein of British film production. Of course, it is not just the directors who were responsible; the producers, cinematographers, production and costume designers regularly associated with the studio undoubtedly facilitated and left their mark on this string of box-office hits, not to speak of the stars who became household names in them, if, unlike Margaret Lockwood, they were not already so. Ted Black had taken over as studio boss in 1936 (in ‘uneasy partnership’ with Maurice Ostrer 12) and was ‘determined to build up Gainsborough’s very own stable of stars. “It seemed to me,” he observed, “that there was a great dearth of British stars, especially as the best of them usually found a permanent home in Hollywood as soon as they were successful enough.”’13 Black felt that sober realist films were less likely to generate big-name stars than some other genres, and in 1943 he was proved right about this, with The Man in Grey doing exactly what Black had in mind in this respect. There were certainly other factors in the film’s success, but I want to stress that, at the very least, Arliss deserves credit for mixing the artistic ingredients in just

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the right proportions for popular success. Writing over fifty years later, Robert Murphy aptly claims that Arliss ‘deliberately defied the tendency towards restraint, attacking diffidence and insisting on the importance of allowing characters “to express their feelings in films without any embarrassment either to themselves or to their audiences”.’14

The Man in Grey (1943) It was another film [i.e. not a war film] released as early as the summer of 1943, that set the pattern for some of the principal British feature films of the next years. It was the prototype of expensive melodramas, tough and obsessed with sex problems – novelettes, as one critic remarked, elaborately presented on glossy art paper. The film was Leslie Arliss’s The Man in Grey.15

Mention above of stars recalls James Mason’s unfriendly recollection of working with Arliss on The Night Has Eyes and that their professional relationship would be even touchier on The Man in Grey, with Mason, despite his pacifist principles, aiming a punch at the director.16 However, there is no doubt that Mason’s subsequent career grew out of his Gainsborough successes under Arliss’s direction, establishing the sexual, potentially brutish persona that would serve him well in the 1940s as he became, ‘from 1944 to 1947 inclusive, the top British box-office star’.17 Phyllis Calvert and Stewart Granger, neither of whom had complimentary things to say about Arliss, also received exposure in this costume melodrama, which brought them to attention as nothing in their previous film careers had done. Granger is billed ‘With’ after the other three stars, indicating his place on the ladder of fame at the time. The Man in Grey, released in August 1943, was the film that really launched Arliss as a director of popular British cinema. He also coauthored the screenplay with Margaret Kennedy, from Doreen Montgomery’s adaptation of Lady Eleanor Smith’s novel. As well as launching the famous Gainsborough melodramas, in hindsight at least it reveals a quite complex texture as it combines some feeling for the idiom of the age in which it is set (the Regency – and costume and production design collude handsomely to this end) with a sense of the economic, class and gender inequities of the time of the film’s making. Arliss handles the contrasts and confrontations that make up so much of the plot with a sure hand and a sure eye for the telling image. A review by ‘E.H.L.’ praised the film for showing ‘a British studio’s competence to make this type of lavish literary production which hitherto only Hollywood has been able to do with success. Acting, settings, camerawork

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and direction all reach the highest technical standards.’18 Admittedly, the word ‘direction’ is tucked in with other aspects of the film’s making, but the review does suggest that the film had at least a patina of serious professionalism, and this was echoed in the trade paper’s approval: ‘Technically it compares with the best American film, let alone British.’19 The film is bookended with modern episodes featuring Calvert and Granger (billed simply in the credits as ‘Clarissa’ and ‘Rokeby’, though seen in separate roles in the two periods of the film). It opens on an art auction in contemporary London, with the sale of a portrait depicting ‘the man in grey’, Lord Rohan (clearly Mason), for which the auctioneer (A.E. Matthews) starts bidding at £700, thus arousing our interest in the film’s eponym. Granger, in RAF uniform and now sitting next to Calvert, also in uniform, inadvertently bids for the portrait of a Calvert lookalike. When they make conversation, he proves to be wearing the Rohan crest and tells her that the last Lord Rohan was killed at Dunkirk; she proves to be Clarissa Rohan, and it was her brother that was killed. He tells her that an ancestor of his once-loved the Clarissa of the portrait. Among the other items on offer at the auction, including trinkets from the turn of the eighteenth century, is a prospectus from Miss Patchett’s School. Arthur Crabtree’s camera zooms in on this and the film dissolves to a shot of girls playing in the snow a century or so earlier. The film’s fourth protagonist – we have seen Calvert and Granger and been referred to Mason’s character (Lord Rohan) via the portrait – now appears, her entrance we realise having been skilfully built up. She is Hesther Shaw (Margaret Lockwood), who arrives to greet Miss Patchett (Martita Hunt in typically commanding mode) and is treated as a sort of poor relation, though it becomes apparent early on that she will not long submit to this image. The contrast between her and the gentle, well-born Clarissa (Calvert), so central to the rest of the film, is established in a very early detail. When Clarissa arrives back at school, she distributes gifts to the other girls, giving Hesther some sugared violets, to which Hesther replies, ‘I don’t care for sugary things’. In this incident, in Hesther’s words and in the contrasting costumes in which the two girls appear, we are prepared for the ensuing division of sympathies. But the film is not merely simplistic about this: Hesther may appear rude and ungrateful, but she has already enlisted some audience tolerance because of her disadvantaged situation – and her determination not to be constrained by this. She is also tired of having to be grateful all the time. Clarissa, as suggested in her modern counterpart in the auction room, is not a mere goody-goody: she speaks up for Hesther when Miss Patchett tells the girls that Hesther has

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1  Margaret Lockwood and James Mason in The Man in Grey, 1943

disgraced the school by eloping with a penniless ensign. The film’s inbuilt critique of gender stereotypes is felt in Miss Patchett’s statement that it is the duty of every young woman to try to ‘secure an establishment’, a point of view that the viewer is clearly not meant to accept in 1943. By the end of these opening episodes a good deal of ground has been laid for the ensuing action and Arliss negotiates these narrative stages with fluent control. Clarissa’s success in London society brings her to the notice of Lord Rohan (Mason), whom she does not want to marry (‘I don’t love him,’ she asserts), but is urged to do so by her aunt, Lady Marr (Jane Gill-Davis), who clearly adheres to Miss Patchett’s dictum, and she is seen as no more than a brood mare by the sadistic Rohan. ‘Are all husbands and wives like us?’ she wonders. ‘I can’t understand why people like being married.’ The film is surprisingly frank about sex and marriage and their relation to notions of property and inheritance. ‘I must have an heir,’ Rohan states, neither love nor even sexual desire seeming to form part of his agenda, and Clarissa, touchingly at her prayers on her (virginal) wedding night, is victim to what wartime English audiences were no doubt seeing as cruelly outmoded ways of thinking. The idea of women being responsible for their own lives, for having careers of their own, surely resonated with those women in the Second World War who, for the first time, were inducted into lives outside the home. They were not, however, often going to be actresses, which is

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what we next find out about Hesther. At this stage of the film, with Clarissa’s marriage not having brought her any satisfaction or happiness, Arliss’s screenplay brings Hesther back into her life. Hesther has been playing (not all that convincingly) Desdemona to Rokeby’s (Granger) Othello and, in her offstage life, she is far from planning to end up as tragically as Shakespeare’s Venetian heroine. Clarissa, touched by the sad story of Hesther’s life (the penniless ensign husband has died), persuades her to come to live at her grand home as a tutor to the little Rohan heir. Feminist critics have examined the respective fates of Clarissa and Hesther in ways that help to explain the enormous success of the Gainsborough melodramas, the female audiences for which may well have been drawn by both Hesther’s powerful urge for self-gratification and Clarissa’s generous but not feeble incarnation of the wife and mother who also experiences sexual desires that are not met by marriage. One reason for the success of these films may be the way in which they deal, as critic Pam Cook has written, ‘with aspects of women’s experience marginalised by other genres’.20 If one thinks of some of the more obviously realist wartime dramas, such as In Which We Serve (1942), San Demetrio London (1943) or The Way Ahead (1944), there is clearly evidence for this claim. Cook goes on to say: The Gainsborough 1940 melodramas, while retaining some of the characteristics of Hollywood’s melodramas, are different again, differences that can be traced to their circumstances of production in wartime and post-war Britain and its film industry.21

Undoubtedly, all films are in varying degrees the products of their circumstances of production, but I want to suggest here that Arliss, as director and screenwriter, has exercised a strong sense of narrative control in The Man in Grey. Despite its title, the film sets up a potential for dramatic contrast in the characters of Clarissa and Hesther. Emphasised by their very different appearances – Clarissa’s pale beauty and Hesther’s striking brunette – and Elizabeth Haffenden’s costumes, this contrast is really the basis for the film’s chief action. (They are more complexly at odds with each other than are Mason’s Rohan and Granger’s Rokeby.) Whereas Clarissa is instrumental in bringing Hesther into the Rohan household, Hesther in her turn will engineer Rokeby’s entry as Rohan’s librarian. Hesther knows how to present herself to Rohan: she flares up in anger and bites him, and he recognises a like spirit in her and kisses her. Rokeby threatens Hesther about not letting any harm befall Clarissa and slaps her. It is in parallel moments such as these that the narrative

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asserts its grip, and we are prepared for the confrontation between Rohan and Rokeby. ‘You arrogant swine,’ Rokeby addresses Rohan, who lays down a challenge which leads to a fistfight, interrupted by the Prince Regent (Raymond Lovell), and to a comment from the latter’s secret wife, Mrs Fitzherbert (Nora Swinburne), who warns Rokeby about the indignities he might inflict on Clarissa if his feelings for her become known: ‘Influences might be exerted that would be more persuasive than your fists.’ And Mrs Fitzherbert is certainly in a position to know about less-than-conventional relationships. Without going into further detail about the course of the narrative, it is perhaps enough to note that the rest of the film will ensure that the more colourful evil is not allowed final triumph over good. Though our sympathies are enlisted for the burgeoning love between Clarissa and Rokeby, he is not devoid of the less attractive male assumption of superiority. She wants to accompany him to the West Indies to reclaim his estates, but, not only does he display what in more modern times would be construed as racism when he tells her: ‘I can’t take you to an island overrun by half-crazed savages’, he also reinforces his argument with: ‘If you’re to be my wife, you must learn to obey me’. She does not have the chance to challenge this dictum because, before she can leave Rohan, Hesther will deliberately cause her death. As for the other pair, for all that Rohan has been drawn to Hesther, when he learns that she has killed Clarissa (not that he loved his wife), he can only invoke the Rohan motto: ‘Who dishonours us dies’. Like the brute he is, he hurls Hesther to the ground, picks up a pair of fire tongs and beats her, presumably to death, as the music rises to a crescendo and the screen blacks out. Rokeby is thus saved from executing his previous threat to Hesther: Hesther: You say you love her; well, so do I him; and if anyone comes between us, so much the worse. I’ve no quarrel with those that don’t interfere; but if you love her, keep her from getting in my way. Rokeby: Pretty speech but dead in character. For once you’ve spoken the truth, my dear, I do believe you’d stop at nothing. Hesther: Then remember it! Rokeby: There’s one factor you’ve overlooked … me! You see, I’m not a gentleman. But I swear that if she comes to harm through you, I’d break that lovely little neck of yours.

The film returns to the auction site. Clarissa and Rokeby are late arriving, Clarissa after having her fortune told by a gypsy. They appear briefly in a low-angled shot on a balcony that recalls similar compositions in the period-set body of the film, and the descendants of that earlier

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Clarissa and Rokeby now run off to catch a bus, a demotic icon contrasted with the earlier modes of transport we have seen. There is the clear apportioning of guilt and innocence that one associates with the moral judgements of melodrama. The sadistic Rohan and the conniving Hesther are now seen as being unequivocally wicked, though that is not all that has defined them. For example, Rohan is ‘the man in grey’ because he has eschewed the expected dress forms of his class; meanwhile, Hesther has always had going for her a certain determination not to be a victim of inferior circumstances, and to win some kind of acceptable reputation. As for Clarissa and Rokeby, the doomed love of their ancestors could not be fulfilled because of the social transgression involved, but their counterparts in modern times can run off happily to catch the same bus into – we are meant to assume – a future together. The good have indeed survived, and, in the form of the strong positive characters incarnated by Calvert and Granger in both periods, they are allowed to offer the showier figures of Rohan and Hesther a run for their money. In an article two years later for Picturegoer magazine entitled ‘I Like Wicked Women’, Arliss asserted: ‘They are so much more interesting than the average heroine type. They’ve got more colour and more fire – and they’re more human.’ This article was published just before the royal première of The Wicked Lady, but it went on to reflect on his experience with The Man in Grey: I suppose I should have preferred the tender, clinging heroine Clarissa – but I never could! For me the character of Hester [sic] – stormy and wicked – was much more interesting. A heroine annoys me. Clarissa was so very passive in enduring all the blows of unkind Fate. She didn’t seem to be able to fight for herself – she went the wrong way about everything, moral and good as she was.22

In fact, he underestimates the kinds of more complex moral shading that strengthens our interest in the earlier Clarissa (and Rokeby) – for instance, in Clarissa’s willingness to flee with Rokeby, and in his readiness to threaten Hesther and to assert his male dominance over the woman who was ready to become his wife. How would 1943 audiences have received the outcome? Would those women who may have felt a certain empathy with Hesther’s situation, even applauded her efforts to establish herself in a society that seemed bent on relegating her to inferior situations, nevertheless still have wanted to see goodness triumph if it could be allied to intelligence and a capacity for passion? The Clarissa of the modern episodes, in services uniform, is not really the wispy character described by Arliss,

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and, perhaps feeling he had gone too far, Arliss added: ‘She somehow wasn’t human, though Phyllis Calvert played the part so beautifully.’23 It is possible now only to conjecture about the particularities of audience response, but the film was certainly a huge commercial success. The most obvious explanation of this may be that in the stressful days of 1943 there was no doubt a powerful urge towards escapism as an antidote to the rigours and terrors of war. The particular form of escapism offered here is that which lures people away from the alarming present into a distant past where anything might happen but without seeming to invoke similar dangerous possibilities in the present. As Tony Williams writes: ... the film never interrogates a society that makes monsters of two dynamic characters who breach class taboos. They are safely relegated to the domains of a mythic past that the People’s War ideology will ‘never’ allow to return again. Neither Rohan nor Hesther reappears in the contemporary world of the epilogue or prologue.24

So, escapism certainly at one level, but the contemporary bookending with Calvert and Granger in modern dress (and wartime uniforms at that) ensures that something more than the escapism that, say, a Technicolor Hollywood musical might have offered, is at stake. Matters of class and gender oppressiveness in the past are thrown into a different light as a result of the modern prologue and epilogue, which could make the contemporary viewer see the period drama from a more critical perspective. But whatever arguments may be brought forth to account for the film’s popularity, it should also be allowed that Arliss’s contribution as director and (co-)screenwriter is a dominant one. To take such a story, so apparently removed from the times, and to render its contrasts of wickedness and goodness so persuasively as to give weight to those arguments, bespeaks more than ordinary competence in constructing a narrative, in eliciting performances that flesh out characters and relationships as vividly as these do, and in securing and giving rein to those who make the film look so handsome. Behind the camera, he had key collaborators in costume designer Elizabeth Haffenden, previously mentioned for her function in helping to establish the differences between Clarissa and Hesther, Walter Murton (art direction) and Arthur Crabtree, whose cinematography ensured a different sheen between the past and present sequences. Most potently of all, Arliss had a cast of stars who would occupy dominant positions in British cinema for the rest of the decade. Writing about images of men in British cinema, Andrew Spicer asserted: ‘The Man

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in Grey established Mason as the new matinee idol and Gainsborough restructured their production policy to concentrate on costume dramas in which Mason could repeat his performance’,25 as a villain both ruthless and vulnerable. As Phyllis Calvert said, Margaret Lockwood was already a household name, but The Man in Grey elevated the other three to that status as well. It is therefore strange that none of the three new stars had a kind word for the director who made them look so good (Calvert would attribute this to Crabtree). When asked how far Arliss and producer Ted Black were responsible for the film’s success, Calvert’s succinct reply was ‘Arliss not at all’, going on to say: ‘We all said we’d never work with Leslie again and I never did, although the other three did. He was a lazy director; he had got a wonderful job there and he just sat back … Ted Black was the one who would watch it, cut it, and know exactly what the audience would take.’26 Not to underestimate Black’s influential role in shaping the Gainsborough output at this time, Calvert’s severe judgement in the light of the film’s qualities as a fluent piece of narrative cinema, evoking the past and resonating with the present, is hard to accept. At very least, Arliss has to have been the controlling figure who orchestrated all those talents before and behind the camera, regardless of what the actors felt at the time. Only Lockwood, who had originally wanted to play Clarissa, has had no unkind word to say, merely restricting herself to: ‘That picture was a great success for all four of us. People spoke glowingly of it.’27 These of course do not constitute critical commentary, but I include them to suggest that, whatever the actors may have thought, the director’s hand at the wheel indubitably had a crucial function in steering the film to success – at the box-office at least, even if critics were inclined to be disparaging. However, though the New Statesman’s reviewer may have written: ‘My feelings are expressed by the Clarissa of the film: “I don’t think I can bear this. I can’t! I really can’t”’,28 and waspish James Agate headed his review ‘Bosh and Tosh’, claiming that: ‘there was not a moment … when I would not have gladly dived for my hat’,29 C.A. Lejeune, writing for The Observer, allowed: ‘It is never likely to get into a list of the world’s ten best films, but provides a remarkably pleasant way of spending an evening.’30 Subsequent critical attention has been much more responsive to the film’s merits, especially in locating it in relation to its popular reception in 1943, and in reappraising it in the light of changing attitudes since to matters of class and gender, almost crediting the film with a sense of prescience – at least to belief that times were changing in 1943 and would continue to do so.

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Love Story (1944) Arliss’s second project as director/co-screenwriter for Gainsborough, Love Story, may now be best remembered for the ‘Cornish Rhapsody’, composed for the film by Hubert Bath, and perhaps considered as – to use the disparaging descriptor of the time – ‘a women’s picture’, but on closer examination it proves to be quite stylishly made and interesting for what it suggests as a wartime piece. It certainly does not deserve Stewart Granger’s charming remark to Arliss, unaware that the latter, with Doreen Montgomery, was co-screenwriter, that it was ‘the biggest load of crap I’d ever read’, but he did go on to admit that ‘I was wrong of course. It was a smash hit and there wasn’t a dry eye in the house.’31 Despite his earlier response to Arliss, here he is again co-starring with Margaret Lockwood. Lockwood’s role in Love Story is sandwiched between her two wickedwoman starring roles in The Man in Grey and The Wicked Lady (1945). Here, she plays concert pianist Felicity Crichton, allegedly modelled on Dame Myra Hess, famous for her wartime concerts in London’s National Gallery, which were celebrated in Humphrey Jennings’s documentary Listen to Britain (1942). This connection is irresistible in Arliss’s film, which opens on a long shot of Nelson’s Column, Trafalgar Square, before moving inside to find Felicity at the piano before a large and appreciative audience. Lockwood recalls that, though the distinguished musician Harriet Cohen ‘actually played for the soundtrack of the film, the cameras, of course, were trained on me “playing” the whole time. I decided that to give truth to these shots I must learn the whole of the intricate piece – so that my hands and fingers would be in the right places at the right times on the keyboard’,32 and, as a result of her rigorous retraining, she is entirely convincing as the celebrity pianist, providing some climactic moments near the film’s end. The film is structured around two secrets and the larger theme of war as a great leveller, in which anyone, famous or obscure, can be subjected to the same tests, cut down to size. Felicity (or Lissa as she will be known for most of the film’s duration) has a terminal illness: very early in the film she confides to her conductor, Ray (Walter Hudd), ‘I’m going to die’. When she tries to join the armed services, wanting to do ‘something more directly connected with the war effort’ than her piano recitals, she is turned down because the medical examination reveals that she has a ‘creaky heart’, the result of a bout of scarlet fever. This, after establishing her as a performer, is the crucial piece of information we are given, and it will not be made known to the other characters until near the end of the film. Her knowledge of her imminent

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death impels the ensuing narrative as she determines to ‘enjoy every moment … to be in life … [instead of ‘just practice, practice, practice’]. I’m going to walk in the wind and watch the waves break over Cornish rocks. I’m going to catch up on some of the things I’ve missed.’ In this dialogue, her resolve sets in motion the narrative trajectory of the rest of the film. Having made her way to Cornwall, and found herself at a hotel peopled largely by refined elderly types, she does indeed seek out a clifftop view of those Cornish rocks. This brings her into contact with the other ‘secret’ central to the film’s narrative, in the form of Kit Firth (Granger), who comes climbing up from below, pretending to need help as he comes face to face with Lissa. His secret is that his eyesight is failing as a result of what we later learn was his brave behaviour as a fighter pilot: having taken a hit in combat, he ensured his crew escaped to safety before baling out himself. We are made privy to his problem when Lissa finds him reading braille and, though he ‘can’t bear pity’, he tells her about ‘something pressing on the optic nerve’. As he is not in uniform, he has given rise to gossip in the hotel, with some assuming him to be a shirker lacking in guts, as compared with ‘our gallant allies’. Arliss, in both his functions, works this structure – the two secrets which will eventually be revealed – against the wider apprehension of war as a time when people might be pushed beyond their own specific difficulties. This might lead, as it does for Lissa and Kit, to living more dangerously at a time when for many there was every chance that life might not be long. Their love story is structured, then, not just around two secrets but also against the background of a time of shrinking options. Kit claims, ‘Life is far too short to be taken seriously.’ But though the film deals intelligently enough with this situation, it is almost as though it could not quite face the grimmest possibility of a heroine’s death and a blind hero. So, his sight will be restored and he will be seen in uniform, and Lissa, having done a concert tour in North Africa and performed at the Royal Albert Hall, will last be seen, not on a deathbed, but on a clifftop waving as his plane flies over. This no doubt sounds like a soft compromise, even a cop-out, but it also seems to bear out Kit’s urging to Lissa: ‘Darling, let’s take all the happiness we can.’ As a message for wartime audiences, there may well have been something very persuasive about this approach. However, the film has a richer texture than the foregoing may suggest, and the film’s other stars, Tom Walls and Patricia Roc, make important contributions to this. Walls plays Tom Tanner, one of the hotel residents, who, unlike the other guests whose eyes are taken by the way Lissa

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dresses for dinner, recognises her as neither a gold-digger nor a frump, both of which categories are well represented in the hotel dining room. Tom is a somewhat stereotypically blunt Yorkshireman, recalling his late wife with, ‘Aye, she were a grand lass’, and warning Lissa about the hotel lounge, which he calls ‘stiffs’ alley’. The accuracy of this description is testified to when the film cuts to the post-dinner retreat, to the lugubrious beat of the soundtrack. Retired some years previously, his purpose in Cornwall is to ‘pep up mining’ by opening up some shafts in the district at the government’s request, and this will provide a link with the character of Kit, who will be involved in an underground rescue operation, revealing to Tom that he is ‘not the lily-livered critter’ that Tom and the gossiping guests had initially perceived him to be. It is worth quoting such detail to give a sense of the texture of Arliss and Montgomery’s screenplay and of the way Arliss integrates it into the narrative structure. The Walls character will play a more prominent role later in the film and will be briefly linked with Judy, the play producer who is preparing a performance of The Tempest in an outdoor auditorium by the cliffs. As Arliss wrote: In my second film, Love Story, I again had two women in the story, but this time neither could be described as wicked. Patricia Roc was intended to be the bad girl, the girl who loved a man so intensely that she would stoop to deceit and lies to keep him for herself. This character intrigued me because I thought so many women in real life would have acted in the same way. Self-sacrifice may be very beautiful, but it is the exception rather than the rule in real life.33

And, of course, in all three of Arliss’s Gainsborough films we find two women set up in some sort of dramatic opposition to each other (as well as in his later films for Korda, Saints and Sinners and A Man About the House), and in each case there is evidence of care not to make these oppositions mere clichés. Patricia Roc’s character, Judy, offers at once a contrast to the elegant Lissa. Judy is very much a contemporary woman of the wartime period. She smokes, wears trousers and a turban, all this adding up to ‘fast’ in the minds – and mouths – of the hotel’s elderly guests. As she watches Lissa and Kit on the rocks, the film invites us to consider two different concepts of woman: one sensitive and elegant, the other (Judy) practical and tough; one can sit composing at the piano, inspired by the crash of waves and birdsong, the other can put together an ambitious production of The Tempest. (And why this particular play? Is Judy attracted

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to the idea of a protagonist, albeit a man, who exercises such control over his world?) It is Kit who brings the two together. When he speaks of taking her to meet a friend, Lissa repeats the smokes-and-wearstrousers description, leading Kit to ask: ‘What little bird’s been whispering in your ear?’ Her reply, with its inbuilt critique of middle-class gossip, is: ‘It wasn’t a little bird, it was an old vulture.’ Judy is first seen instructing two men to get on with the job of setting up the outdoor theatre when Kit and Lissa arrive. ‘Give me a light,’ she orders Kit briskly, surveying Lissa to see how she measures up to Kit’s other women. From this first coming together of the two women, some kind of future tension seems likely, and Kit’s relation to Judy is unclear. ‘We’ve known each other since we were kids’, Judy informs Lissa, cheekily leaving the latter to wonder about what she and Kit mean to each other. Indeed, the film makes very good use of the ambiguities of their relationship. At times it seems like a rare example on film of friendship between a man and a woman. In a shot about one-third of the way into the film, the four stars are brought together at the hotel. Kit has discovered a molybdenum deposit and (facetiously) tries to blackmail Tom into supporting Judy’s theatrical venture, which is desperately short of funding, in return for Tom’s interest in the mining proposition. Tom’s interest is encouraged by Lissa, and again the film unobtrusively but engagingly brings its interlocking characters and their aspirations to a well-written and attractively played nub of interests. The ensuing scene at the theatre site continues this notion: Tom, who has said he does not have time for theatre, is there helping organise the set-up and joins Judy (whose eyes resemble his late wife’s) as they watch Kit and Lissa on the rocks below. The latter two emerge from swimming to talk: ‘It’s funny in an engineer, this feeling for beauty’, Lissa says, ‘especially in wartime’, and his reply – ‘Couldn’t we forget the war?’ – seems to suggest some kind of secret. The cut from Lissa climbing out of the water to a close-up of fish frying in a pan held by Judy, who smokes as she cooks and is joined by Kit, reinforces the film’s attention to these two women and it is not done in a series of clichés. I want to argue that Arliss as director/co-writer brought some real thoughtfulness to the depiction of these relationships. Kit and Judy are seen to be in some sort of domestic set-up, as she cooks while he lays the table. As he gropes for the appropriate plates from the dresser and scratches his arm on a nail, we are given our first clue as to what his secret is. As Judy bandages it he says, ‘I’ve got to get used to going round in the dark.’ Judy thus knows what he intends to conceal from Lissa, so that the differences in the triangular situation

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are sketched in increasing detail. He can confess to Judy that: ‘The biggest mistake of my life was baling out of that plane. I wish to God I’d crashed with it’, before turning away in distress. What does this tell us of his attitudes to the two women – that he can tell this to Judy but does not plan to reveal it to Lissa? As Tony Williams writes: ‘Although Judy looks after him, Felicity [Lissa] discerns that her rival’s feelings have possessive overtones.’34 The situation is an unexpected one, with the two women in what appear to be disparate stances in relation to Kit: Judy seems to be the only person who knows the truth about Kit’s failing eyesight, but is there more to her feelings for him than that of friend/protector? Lissa, on the other hand, is pushed to asking him, albeit with a gulp of reluctance, ‘Are you really a coward?’ when he turns down a dangerous job connected with the molybdenum-mining project, with Tom having accused him of lacking guts. In an unusual narrative emphasis, it is the man who is the most vulnerable member of the triangle. When Lissa does discover the truth, she urges Judy to persuade Kit to take the ‘hundred-to-one chance’ about seeking treatment for his failing eyesight, and as they confront each other Judy gives her account (quite racy for the times) of her relationship to him. ‘I’ve watched him flirt, curse, sleep his way through a dozen affairs’, and she has kept him with her by being his friend. She has been prepared to keep him ‘whole’. What is impressive here about the writing – and Roc’s acting – is the tough self-knowledge that emerges and the avoidance of any sense of noble self-sacrifice. ‘I do anything to keep him,’ she asserts, as the confrontation between her and Lissa leads to their slapping each other, Lissa’s ruthlessness matching Judy’s. These moments were filmed in a series of close-ups and two-shots, the latter perhaps underlining the idea that the two women, whatever the conflict between them, have more in common than might have been supposed. It is hard to think of another situation in a film of that period in which two women square up to each other so boldly over the man in contention. When both bid farewell to Kit at the station as he heads for London and optical surgery, Judy kisses him in a way that betrays to Lissa the full nature of her love. Two major plot turns need to be noted for the way they contribute to the film’s surprisingly rich texture, and both are connected with Judy’s production of The Tempest. During the rehearsal period, as Kit talks about Lissa to Judy in her role of ‘understanding friend’, news comes of a cave-in at the mines, with Tom in danger. Kit rushes off and the next we hear about it is the hotel waiter telling Lissa how Kit has led the rescue team. The scene of the rescue is filmed with a sense of realism, and with real tension as Kit mounts the explosive device

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that will either save or kill the underground rescue party. The trouble at the mines is filmed in ways that recall such earlier films as The Stars Look Down and How Green Was My Valley, with anxious villagers waiting at the entrance to the mine-shaft. Shortly after this episode, which clears Kit of the accusation of ‘gutlessness’, Lissa learns the truth of his condition. In the second key moment, the real extent of Judy’s feelings for Kit is made clear when news arrives from the London hospital just as the play is about to start. She is too upset to start the play and in a rare display of un-British nastiness, especially in wartime, the audience starts slow-clapping. Lissa steps forward to save the day by playing the ‘Cornish Rhapsody’, for which Kit has been the inspiration. K.J. Donnelly perceptively claimed: ‘The music appears to represent the association of female desire with elemental natural forces’,35 and we recall the basis for its (i.e. Lissa’s) composition. This is the high point of Hubert Bath’s varied and emotionally evocative score for the film. The score, as Donnelly wrote, ‘was a huge popular success. It became one of the most famous light orchestral pieces of the time.’36 Well, it was a triumph for Bath, but in the context of the film it is also one for Lissa, who subsequently faints and tells Judy she is going to die. The relationship between the two women, as it twists and turns, provides the film’s backbone, and Arliss resists the temptation to oversimplify their responses to Kit, to each other and to coming to terms with their individual selves. Before the film ends, Kit will have proposed to Judy, calling it ‘a pretty shop-soiled offer’, which she accepts with ‘I’ll have you Kit’, but, when the engagement is announced at a party, suddenly Lissa’s voice is heard on the radio. Tom realises something’s up, and goes to talk to Judy, saying: ‘Nay, lass, his heart’s tied up with Lissa’, and the penultimate episode, with Lissa playing the full version of the ‘Cornish Rhapsody’ at the Royal Albert Hall, will end with her fainting in Kit’s arms. Perhaps in deference to the times, the film ends without the usual resolving or tying up of all the foregoing strands in the way to which classic Hollywood had habituated audiences. The clifftop ending referred to above provides an image but no more: it reminds the viewer that a good deal of the film’s life was not going to be susceptible to the usual closure. Instead, as Williams writes: ‘The conclusion is temporary rather than permanent. Like many wartime couples, Kit and Felicity can only live for the moment.’37 This final image, in Bernard Knowles’s luminous cinematography (another of the film’s strengths), is thus not just a thing of beauty in itself but also a quite complex summation of much of the film’s openness in matters of heart and mind: that is, it is not a

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syrupy, happy ending, but an acceptance of the possible facts of the time, that a farewell wave, in the direction of an RAF plane heading off to who knew where, might be no more than a gesture to a future impossible to speculate on. My reason for spending more time than might be thought necessary in detailing the film’s plot strands is that I think it repays attention to the care with which apparent parallels and contrasts are worked out and to the structuring of its central relationships. No doubt the production heads at Gainsborough realised they were on to a good thing after the success of The Man in Grey, but the fact remains that, along with the retaining of two of the latter’s star names, the retention of Arliss as director and co-writer needs to be reappraised. Whatever derogatory things his earlier stars, Calvert and Mason, had to say about him, in Love Story he took what might have been the basis for a sloppy magazine tale and made something genuinely interesting and moving from it. If it was hugely popular at the time, it seems patronising to dismiss this response as no more than a mindless wish for escapism, as if only middle-class critics knew how to assess its worth, as if what was popular could not be taken seriously. A look at Arliss’s collaborators helps to understand why it should have been. The screenplay gave the film’s stars enough material to work on and they responded with performances that avoid mere cliché. Lockwood and Roc, contrasted as they are in appearance, costume and emotional motivation, nevertheless avoid conventional good-woman/bad-woman opposition, contriving to win some sympathetic understanding for each of Lissa and Judy in their respective situations, especially of course in relation to their feelings for Kit. And Granger’s Kit, with his ‘Miller of Dee’ approach, is a surprisingly complex apex to the emotional triangle. Early on there is a good deal of showing off of the Granger torso, but even this, which might be seen as an everyday hero image, suggests a sort of compensation for the character’s inner vulnerability. For all his dashing appearance and seemingly hedonistic behaviour, he manages to suggest some of the pain of what he is concealing. ‘There’s so much he stands for that I hate and resent,’ Lissa later confides to Tom, but this is offset by the fact that it is she who has urged him to submit to the dangerous operation. Apart from the actors, those other key personnel behind the camera who are responsible for the film’s hold on viewers’ attention could scarcely be bettered. I refer to Knowles’s cinematography, whether capturing the splendour of coastal Cornwall or the drama inherent in facial close-ups; to Bath’s aptly romantic score; to Haffenden’s costume design as an indicator of character or vocation; and to John Bryan’s

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production design, in relation either to the use made of Cornish locations or to what is achieved in the Shepherd’s Bush studio stages. Whereas a snooty-sounding critic of the time wrote of the film: ‘It’s simpering, mawkish, it makes one squirm in one’s fauteuil’,38 or another that: ‘The film is concocted of a series of incredible misunderstandings and misplaced nobility’,39 Kinematograph Weekly felt it would have ‘Excellent popular booking’ and praised it as: ‘Powerful, graceful, emotionally stimulating romantic triangle melodrama.’40 Looking beyond those harsh critical appraisals and Richard Winnington’s smart-alecky account of ‘the story of three brave, suffering, genteel hearts’, 41 it was not all lofty disparagement in 1944. Over forty years later Robert Murphy discerningly wrote: ... like the best of the realist films, Love Story appeals because it deals deeply and sympathetically with real emotional issues. Not many romances between the war-wounded resemble that of Kit and Lissa, but the problems – the morality of grasping a happiness which might be all too temporary, the humiliating prospect of a life of disability and dependence – would be familiar enough. 42

No one is claiming masterpiece status for the film, but, when compared with some of the Hollywood romantic dramas that have since won auteurist laurels (e.g. some of Douglas Sirk’s lush pieces), it feels well overdue for reappraisal in its welding of the personal and the larger social concerns of its day.

The Wicked Lady (1945) ‘At first, as usual, I did not like the thought of playing a villainous role again, but it was such a good one that I knew it would be madness to refuse it.’43 Thus wrote the wicked lady herself, Margaret Lockwood, and how right, at least in commercial terms, she was. As with Arliss’s two preceding hits, some interesting parallels with contemporary life might also be adduced. Arliss, as we have noted, was a firm believer in the attractiveness of wicked women, on screen anyway, and they do not come much wickeder than Barbara Worth, the protagonist of his 1945 box-office success. By the time of The Wicked Lady a serious rift had occurred between two Gainsborough figures, Edward Black and Maurice Ostrer, the upshot of which was that Black left the company and was recruited by Alexander Korda. The ostensible reason for the disagreement of the two Gainsborough producers was that Black wanted to venture into ‘a realist

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direction to which [Ostrer] was entirely opposed’. 44 Ostrer, with his eye no doubt on the public acclaim for Arliss’s two preceding films, The Man in Grey and Love Story, clearly felt that the studio was on to a good thing commercially, and The Wicked Lady would reunite many of the talents involved in the two earlier successes. Like The Man in Grey, it was adapted from a popular novel, this time the prolific Magdalen King-Hall’s The Life and Death of the Wicked Lady Skelton (1945), reputedly inspired by the true-life escapades of one Katharine Ferrars, who terrorised Hertfordshire in the mid-seventeenth century as she sought escape from domestic tedium. This was the overall scenario which Arliss’s screenplay (with additional dialogue from Gordon Glennon and Aimée Stuart) embraced, with Blickling Hall, Norfolk, standing in for the wicked lady’s launching pad. In passing, it is (trivially) interesting to note that it was Lady Eleanor Smith, author of The Man in Grey, who gave King-Hall’s novel to Arliss and, as he wrote, I knew my search was ended … I told Maurice Ostrer of Gainsborough Pictures that I had found my ideal film subject and found that he had already purchased the rights himself! The character of Barbara is wicked enough even for me, and how vastly interesting is this most complex character as it develops through the action of the story. 45

As shall be shown, he goes on to account for the sort of interest this central character exercises, suggesting that she is not just a dyed-inthe-wool villain without justifying or redeeming features. His own analysis of what he saw in the character of Barbara is borne out in his screenplay and in Lockwood’s interpretation. The film opens on a scene of rural prettiness with Caroline (Patricia Roc) and Ralph Skelton (Griffith Jones) riding through the grounds of his stately home, singing snatches of melody interspersed with protestations of love. It is a setting that just cries out for disruption, and no sooner do they arrive back at the house than the means of disruption is found in a letter from Caroline’s cousin and old friend Barbara, announcing her imminent arrival for Caroline’s wedding to Ralph. Naturally, Ralph is smitten with Barbara (Lockwood dressed in some of Elizabeth Haffenden’s most elaborate costumes) as a few seconds of locked eyes suggest. Just as clearly, through a few moments of her watchful eying of the scene, Barbara’s opportunism is evinced. Barbara may be clearly an opportunist, in contrast with the more gently nurtured Caroline, and in this respect, one recalls Hesther in relation to Clarissa in The Man in Grey. Again, there is more to Barbara just as there was to Hesther. Again, too, circumstances have been kinder

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2  Michael Rennie and Margaret Lockwood in The Wicked Lady, 1945

3  Margaret Lockwood and James Mason in The Wicked Lady, 1945

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to Caroline, who, just as Clarissa was, is devoted to her potentially dangerous friend. In the context of Arliss’s filmography, there is a neat sense of the reversal of Lockwood and Roc’s roles as they were in Love Story. Arliss does favour such contrasts but avoids merely simplistic good/bad oppositions. The reunion of Barbara and Caroline occasions some sharp remarks from the worldlier Barbara. With apparent good humour she calls Caroline ‘the same self-sacrificing little ninny’ she has always been, and of herself makes no bones about wanting ‘to be envied and admired’, and unlike Caroline she holds the view that ‘[a] clever woman can make her husband do as she wants’. Unfortunately, Caroline tells her, ‘all the landowners round here are married – except Ralph’. So, in the first ten minutes the ground is laid for Barbara to go to work – even to the introduction of the gaggle of spinsterish aunts hovering around the house – and the following morning everything will be turned upside down. Recalling how she had to look as if she were actually playing the piano for Love Story, this time Lockwood had to learn to ride, indeed to ride side-saddle: ‘I had never ridden a horse in my life … I went to some stables near Elstree and told them I had one week in which to learn, from scratch, how to become an expert horsewoman.’46 Next morning she is out riding when she meets Ralph, the good landlord, who tells her, ‘I always visit the home farms before breakfast’, whereas she ‘likes danger’. Minutes later she falls from her mount. Ralph goes to her aid, a kiss is exchanged and the rest of the film’s plot is set in motion. Barbara has dismantled Caroline’s wedding plans, mendaciously telling her: ‘We couldn’t help ourselves. It was something stronger than either of us’, whereas in reality it had been a matter of calculated seduction on her part. When Caroline, the ‘self-sacrificing ninny’, offers Barbara her wedding dress, her gesture is met with Barbara’s muttering to herself: ‘Wear that? I wouldn’t be buried in it.’ The film is not without touches of wit. At the wedding which follows, Barbara falls for one of the guests, handsome Kit Locksby (Michael Rennie), who tells her, ‘You are the most exciting woman I’ve ever met.’ All of this is done at a speed which disguises some of its absurdities, but, having said that, it is as well to remember that ‘realism’ is not the only way of dealing with reality, which critics at the time did not always allow for, seeing their function as ‘distinguish[ing] legitimate from illegitimate art and proper from improper modes of aesthetic appropriation’, 47 and usually consigning melodrama to the negative branches of dramatic art. As the bridal chamber is approached, the film is – for the times – unusually outspoken about sex, with saucy innuendoes about what is

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expected of the wedding night. The attending women urge Barbara on: ‘You mustn’t keep your husband waiting. It’s bedtime.’ When Barbara says that her bedclothes do not look very warm, a woman in attendance mutters to another, ‘Barbara won’t feel the cold tonight.’ Meanwhile, men josh Ralph with: ‘Are you ready for the fray?’ Perhaps it was this kind of candour (as well as Lockwood and Roc’s low-cut gowns) that led to the film’s having to be remade to meet with ‘the American standards of “decency”’. 48 Such standards would have chimed well with puritanical steward Hogarth (Felix Aylmer), whose response to Barbara is summed up in: ‘Vanity of vanities. All is vanity.’ It is easy to forget how sensitive the US – at least on film – was about such matters at this time. When a film is being made about a remote period, there has to be some accommodation between what may have been historically verifiable in matters of, say, dress or coiffure or verbal usage, and the time of the film’s production. Even so, it is hard to accept a woman, even one as ambitious as Barbara, giving vent to frustration with: ‘I’ve got brains, looks and personality, and I want to use them instead of rotting in this dull hole.’ However, Raymond Durgnat, writing twenty-odd years later, rightly claimed: ‘The “obvious” solution to the paradoxes of The Wicked Lady is “Oh, make her a bit of a tomboy, say she’s always lived poor and rough.” But no; She’s ladylike too, and far from having lived rough, has lived stuffy.’49 In other words, Arliss has avoided the clichéd explanation, thus retaining an element of tension and complexity in his central character. She has not found married life exciting, especially with the idea of Kit hovering over her, and that posse of elderly relatives (such as her aunts, Beatrice Varley and Amy Dalby, and cousin Agatha, Martita Hunt) who sit about talking of such absorbing matters as ‘the Skelton cough’ or ‘cousins once-removed’. Having had enough of such conversation, Barbara stamps out, and it is easy to reflect on the relevance that women in immediate post-war Britain may have found in her response: after the excitements of wartime when many women experienced the stimulus of lives outside the home, the idea of being confined to domesticity again may well have seemed unexciting. Not that many would have been likely to live in houses with secret escape passages, as the Skelton mansion has, but there were probably more job opportunities open to women in 1945–46 than to Barbara, who is forced into becoming a highwaywoman to ward off the domestic tedium. This tedium is sharpened when Ralph’s sister and brother-in-law, Lady and Lord Kingsclere (Enid Stamp-Taylor and Francis Lister), come to visit, bringing with them malicious news of London’s liveliness. Ralph will not go to London because of all the good work he is doing

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down in the country; he yawns at the talk and goes to bed at midnight, he and Barbara now occupying separate rooms. London looks likely to elude Barbara, but Henrietta Klingsclere’s other topic of gossip – the highwayman Jerry Jackson – catches her attention. Lockwood gives a very persuasive sense of Barbara’s bored petulance after losing to Henrietta at cards, and the loss to her of a brooch that had belonged to Barbara’s mother, ‘the only woman [she] ever cared for’. Barbara, having held up the coach in which the Kingscleres are returning to London, offers a vivid and fanciful narrative of the robbery she has committed and Jackson’s advances to her. Ralph, without any vestige of Freudian intent, says, ‘The pistol in his hand gives him mastery.’ Incidentally, the matter of the brooch recalls Hesther’s treasuring of her mother’s needle case in The Man in Grey: we are shown two wicked women who have known deprivation and lack real affection and yet know how to value the latter. As Sue Harper notes, though in specific relation to matters of physical production: ‘The lines of sexual morality and class power are strictly drawn by the Gainsborough scripts.’50 This is made perfectly clear in Barbara’s dissatisfaction with the boredom of upper-class life as she finds it, and the sexual complications of her loveless marriage to Ralph and attraction to the highwayman Jackson (James Mason). When she does get together with Jackson, she says to him, almost longingly, ‘There’s so much of the road you can teach me’, to which his plainly motivated reply is: ‘It’s not the road I want to teach you tonight. Let’s go to the inn’, and their affair is under way. Near the end, when she has tried to take Kit away from Caroline, to whom he has proposed, Barbara pleads with him, ‘We must be together just once.’ This is 1940s coding for sex, but again unusually direct for the period, and especially as spoken here by a woman. As noted before, there is a surprising openness about sexual matters in Arliss’s screenplay, which may reflect the influence of changing wartime culture in what was acceptable. In their different ways, both Barbara and Jackson are essentially outside the accepted class structures of their era, so that there is an element of critique in their sexual freedom. Nevertheless, while virtue and restraint may be the film’s overt message where sex is concerned, it also seems to acknowledge the vitality of the transgressors. And even the restraint practised by Caroline and Ralph has its moment when she quite boldly announces her feeling for him through song, while acknowledging that ‘We’re not made for it’, by which she means sexual intrigue. As Tony Williams writes: ‘The Wicked Lady may be read as an allegory of the precarious nature of wartime romances, which often ended unhappily.’51

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Barbara of course goes from bad to worse, flinging herself into the business of highway robbery, killing young Ned Cotterill (Emrys Jones), a worker on the Skelton estate, when he tries to capture the masked highway robber he encounters on the road. There is a touch of real remorse from Barbara when she reveals herself to him as he lies dying. There will be no remorse later when she smothers Hogarth, who has rumbled her secret life on the road, in a scene recalling Hesther’s bringing about of Clarissa’s death in The Man in Grey, one of the many echoes in the films that suggest Arliss was responsible for the continuity of approaches in the Gainsborough melodramas that he wrote and directed.52 Barbara had no compunction about stealing Caroline’s fiancé, but when she finds Jackson at the Leaping Stag inn with a doxy, she quickly sets a trap for him which will bring him to Tyburn, where he is to be hanged. Barbara fears he may reveal his accomplice’s name from the gallows, which he ascends with a laugh. There is actually a touching moment of real feeling from Jean Kent as Jackson’s doxy, weeping for his imminent death, though of course he is (improbably) still alive when cut down and on the run. Again, speaking of real feeling, Barbara has by now fallen seriously in love with Kit Locksby, and tries to ward off Jackson’s attentions by telling him, ‘I’m deeply, sincerely in love.’ In the vein of the film’s surprising candour on sexual matters, Jackson, unmoved by her declaration, is allowed to reply, ‘It’ll be a new experience to take you against your will.’ A certain symmetry is invoked when Barbara kills Jackson to prevent him telling Ralph about his wife’s exploits and, later, when Kit causes Barbara’s death, shooting her when as a masked predator she holds up his coach. The film is quite smartly constructed as it works variations on the restraint/gratification duality; it offers, within the bounds of melodrama’s primary need for clearly made oppositions, enough complexity in the writing and acting of its principal characters to maintain our engagement with its narrative manoeuvres. Lockwood and Mason are a charismatic pair, and she in particular imbues her role with a sense of wholeness. In Arliss’s own words: ‘She represents an elemental character full of the most human and natural passions and dragooned by her own desires into crimes the result of which she can never escape.’53 Jack Cox’s cinematography gives her plenty of close-ups in which, via subtle shifts in facial expression, she renders Barbara’s responses from urgent passion to barely concealed duplicity. Patricia Roc and Griffith Jones are also given adequate material to ensure a certain measure of audience sympathy. Roc’s Caroline is not just the ‘self-sacrificing little ninny’ of Barbara’s malicious opinion.

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She restrains herself from Ralph’s caresses long after he has been disillusioned of his love for Barbara, saying, ‘The things we stand for are more important than us’ (almost an echo of Celia Johnson’s quiet assessment in Brief Encounter that love is not everything, that ‘other things matter too’). In another echo of Love Story, Roc gets to slap Lockwood again. As for Jones, he makes convincing Ralph’s commitment to his duties as landowner and member of the bench discussing ways of dealing with highway robbery, Arliss’s screenplay having given him the scope to suggest a certain integrity of purpose allied to humane concern. All this said, the final scene of the reunited Caroline and Ralph singing and riding in rural happiness, recalling how the film began, may be a little too neat in its suggestion of order restored after the preceding mayhem. However, in post-war 1945 this may have been just what audiences needed. In any case, those audiences flocked to the film in vast numbers. Personnel associated with Arliss on more than one of his Gainsborough successes include art director John Bryan and costume designer Elizabeth Haffenden, and these, along with cinematographer Cox are responsible for the film’s handsome visual realisation of Arliss’s screenplay. Bryan takes the exterior splendour of Blickling Hall and creates an appropriately lavish set of interiors at the Shepherd’s Bush studios, contrasting its upper-class comforts with, say, the Leaping Stag inn, scene of Barbara and Jackson’s sexual encounters, or the crowded London streets which serve to emphasise the dull retirement of the Skelton manor. A recent study of production design in British cinema praised Bryan’s work for Gainsborough as ‘display[ing] his ability to produce rich-looking sets for very little money. Moreover, they demonstrated his special feeling for texture, camera placement and architectural coherence.’54 These qualities are on ample display in The Wicked Lady, on which there was little location work and much set-building on a tight schedule and modest budget. Bryan had also worked on the modern-day design for Love Story, and Haffenden was costume designer on all three of Arliss’s Gainsborough films. In these she exercised her skills to differentiate the pairs of women: Calvert and Lockwood in The Man in Grey, Lockwood and Roc in each of the other two. From the moment Lockwood enters in The Wicked Lady, clad in dark voluminous travelling garments, she seems to announce a threat to the more lightly attired Caroline, though for the rest of the film both of them wear the low-cut dresses that caused such anxiety in the US. The three elderly relatives in the house are dressed in a way that makes them look like austere keepers of morality. Others will know how historically correct all this is; I merely

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want to draw attention to the dramatic potential of the look given to these so disparately accoutred women. In a detailed account of how the costumes function in the film, as distinct from mere historical accuracy, Sue Harper has written: ‘Margaret Lockwood’s first appearance links her with the gorgeous aristocratic male; her velvet, fur-trimmed coat is pulled back to reveal a silken interior.’55 Among Arliss’s other Gainsborough collaborators, two who will be of special interest in this study are the cinematographers Arthur Crabtree (The Man in Grey) and Bernard Knowles (Love Story), both of whom would go on to directorial successes in the 1940s, while the other, Jack Cox, would work again with Arliss on the doomed Idol of Paris three years later. All three made significant contributions to the visual sheen of Arliss’s melodramas. In his entry on Jack Cox, author Duncan Petrie makes the following perceptive comment: ‘The photographic style of the melodramas is an economic lighting design with an underlying expressionism which becomes more obvious at key moments of conflict and tension.’56 One has only to think of a moment such as that in which Barbara, disguised, is holding up her first coach and the silhouetted figure of a highwayman, Jackson, is seen observing her from a small hill. The shot at once alerts the viewer to a crucial turning point in the film’s narrative. If Arliss never quite recaptured the momentum of his period as a Gainsborough director, it is indisputable that he made his mark during his incumbency there and then. As noted earlier, there had been a falling-out at production level between Ted Black and Maurice Ostrer, and it is in relation to the latter that Arliss became established as a director of films the public loved, even when critics excoriated them. Of The Wicked Lady, the Sunday Times, for instance, excelled itself in vitriolic mode with: ‘The hoary, the tedious and the disagreeable are married with an infelicity rare even in costume’, while the Manchester Guardian contented itself with: ‘A mixture of hot passion and cold suet pudding. Never misses bathos’,57 and the ever-vicious Richard Winnington deemed it ‘an ugly hodge-podge of servant girls’ lore’.58 Marcia Landy, writing of Arliss’s (and Crabtree’s) Gainsborough successes, offers an insightful summary: ‘These films deviate from the conventional images of female service and domesticity conveyed in so many British films. While the films were popular with audiences, the critics found them unrealistic and trite, if not sensational, objections similar to those levelled at Hammer Films a decade later.’59 Time has probably been kinder to the films than to their critics. Writing of the stars highlighted in these films, Geoffrey Macnab notes: ‘Both Arliss and Ostrer were building on Black’s policy, using

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the stars he had discovered. It was their choice of genre which made the difference. By pushing the studio away from realism towards historical melodrama, they were at last able to forge a definitive Gainsborough identity.’60 In hindsight, Arliss’s legacy at Gainsborough has worn as well as some of the more obviously high-intentioned, realist works that the critics favoured at the time. They emerge as films that managed to work as superior escapism as well as resonating with the troubled days in which they were made. Dulcie Gray, who would work with Arliss on A Man About the House, said: ‘He was underestimated, I think, because he did The Man in Grey and that was his style, and he was being rubbished by the critics all the time.’61 Running through the reviews at the time, it is almost as if they believed that anything the public flocked to must be rubbish. Reviewer ‘K.F.B.’, for instance, claimed that ‘some of the sequences – notably those on the frozen Thames – are as false as the olde teashoppe. From a box-office point of view these shortcomings will no doubt be proved negligible’,62 the note of patronage unmistakeable. The trade paper Kinematograph Weekly, even if saying that the film ‘does not over-estimate the intelligence of the kinema-going public’, at least allowed that ‘towards the end it becomes a really exciting costume piece’, and further: ‘Its appeal to the Dick Turpin in every woman – and youngster – alone guarantees its commercial success.’63 Later writing about such films has displayed alertness to what may have helped account for their success in aesthetic as well as more broadly cultural terms. For instance, American writer Marcia Landy, in accounting for their success with American audiences, believes they ‘introduc[ed] them to new forms of narrative, new faces, a different iconography of Britishness and novel treatments of history’.64 Perhaps their moving beyond the constraints of realism offered something more than either mere escapism or metaphors for the real-life issues of the day.

Arliss after Gainsborough If Arliss needed Gainsborough at least as much as he was responsible for its commercial strength at a crucial time in its (and the nation’s) history, he did manage to maintain his career for nearly twenty further years, though with ever-diminishing results. His first post-Gainsborough film, A Man About the House (1947), was his last success; it was followed by the fiasco of Idol of Paris (1948), a failed attempt at neo-Gainsborough; Saints and Sinners (1949), for Korda’s London Films; and three further, long-forgotten features, The Woman’s Angle (1952), See How They Run

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and Miss Tulip Stays the Night (both 1955). After these his output was restricted to television series and the occasional short film. His later work has some thematic links with his Gainsborough work, but the cultural climate was changing from what it had been in those wartime years when he scored such box-office triumphs.

A Man About the House (1947) Like all three of Arliss’s Gainsborough films, A Man About the House was adapted from a literary source, and again he was co-author of the screenplay, this time with J.B. Williams, working from a dramatisation by John Perry. The adapted author was Francis Brett Young, who, if not much heard of in the mid-2010s, was very popular at the time. Two of Young’s other novels were adapted by British film-makers in the 1940s, namely My Brother Jonathan (1948), which was directed by Harold French and made stars of Michael Denison and Dulcie Gray, and Portrait of Clare (1950), directed, with less commercial success, by Lance Comfort. Made for Korda’s London Films, but with ex-Gainsborough producer Edward Black fulfilling his former role, A Man About the House has some recognisable Arliss characteristics in theme and structure. Once again, there are two women of sharply distinctive personalities, this time two sisters; there are two men, one of whom will prove to be of dangerous tendencies and the other a decent chap. The starring quartet – Margaret Johnston and Dulcie Gray, as respectively the dominant and the lighter-hearted sisters, Agnes and Ellen Isit, with Kieron Moore as the handsome, devious Salvatore and Guy Middleton as amiable Ben Dench – do certainly recall comparable dualistic set-ups in Arliss’s earlier films, as does the recurring preoccupation with the conflict of desire and restraint. The film is a compelling account of two spinster sisters, leading drab lives as teachers in England, who inherit a villa in Italy. Their contrasting responses to the news of the inheritance, then to the actuality and to the handsome servant Salvatore (who in fact has designs on the villa which will lead him to poison the sister he marries and ultimately to his own death) make an absorbing enough narrative which arrives at a not wholly expected denouement. The idea of repressed Englishwomen undergoing liberation in the Mediterranean’s freer modes and warmer climate was not new, but it is done with style, attention to detail (notably in costume and hairstyles) and is strongly acted. It is a film that deserves reappraisal.

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Arliss opens the film on a wet English scene (West Bromwich in the novel), then moves inside to focus on Ellen supervising children at piano lessons, followed by Agnes with a deportment class of young girls. Within a few minutes, and with admirable economy, the film has established a life of essentially unrewarding routine that is also constrained by financial problems. The contrasts between the two sisters, already suggested in facial expression (Ellen’s livelier potential, Agnes’s apparent dourness), are now highlighted by their respective responses to the news that they have inherited an Italian villa and to what, on arrival, they want to do with their inheritance. Agnes, grimfaced about it all, wants to sell the place, whereas Ellen is delighted with it – and the glorious vistas of sea and cliff to be had from the windows. A different contrast was echoed in real life as recorded by Dulcie Gray, who remembered forty years later that, flying from the greyness of London to location in sun-drenched Italy, ‘The transition was magical … Maggie [Johnston] and I from conquering England where clothes were still rationed looked laughably dowdy and we hastily had silk dresses made to save face. The food was ambrosia to our war-rationed palates.’65 Some of Gray’s personal experience no doubt spills over into her performance as Ellen, whose capacity for animated joy in living has been suppressed in the circumstances of her English life. On her first morning in Ravello, she writes: ‘I decided to pull back the curtains exactly like the character I was playing and see how I would react. In my amazement and pleasure at the real surrounding scenery, I gave a gasp which would have been far too exaggerated on the screen!’66 Georges Périnal’s cinematography does ample justice to the vistas from the Ravello location, and Gray’s account and the film version recall those other pictures in which inhibited British travellers respond to the liberating effects of warmer climes, whether Mediterranean or further East – think of Mike Newell’s Enchanted April (1991) or John Madden’s The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel (2012). If the unexpected inheritance and transition to Italy set the narrative in motion, the next crucial element to be introduced is the eponymous man about the house; that is, Salvatore, the Italian butler/major-domo that the women find resident in the villa. Unknown to them, he believes the estate should rightfully belong to him, his ancestors having been landowners. To arrive at this outcome, he sets about charming the severe-looking elder sister, Agnes, causing her to fall in love with him and, for the first time, experience desire. They marry, but soon after she becomes ill, and Ellen’s suspicions are aroused when he refuses to call a doctor. The two actresses give very convincing performances,

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4  Kieron Moore and Margaret Johnston in A Man About the House, 1947

with Agnes’s loosening of her prim ways and Ellen’s delight in her new home giving way to mounting concern for her sister’s safety. Somewhat stereotypically, a standard English gent, Ben, arrives in the nick of time: once in (unreturned) love with Agnes, he now falls for Ellen, and, after examining Agnes’s pulse, realises that Salvatore has been poisoning her. A brilliantly shot clifftop fight between the two men resolves the matter, as Salvatore pleads for ‘my land’ and Ben, perhaps a little improbably, seems to gain the upper hand, walking away from the Italian’s prone body. The satisfying conclusion – Salvatore has suicided rather than live without his land – sees Ben and Ellen leaving Italy, leaving Agnes ignorant of the facts of Salvatore’s death so that she remains infatuated with the idea of the man she married: ‘He was a wonderful man – and a perfect husband.’ Less full-bloodedly melodramatic than Arliss’s earlier films, A Man About the House still recalls some of their elements. As noted, there are two notably different female characters, neither of them simple figures of cliché, and, as with Lissa in Love Story, the two women leave their usual habitat for a distant place and find themselves immersed in a different kind of community. Here, it is a matter of a somewhat conventional idea of Italian exuberance making itself felt in singing, dancing, fruit-picking and grape-treading, into which Ellen, ready for new experiences, throws herself, but these episodes of indigenous life are staged and photographed with a persuasive zest and pictorial appeal. Arliss has an eye for the revealing detail, as in the gradual loosening of Agnes’s costume and hairstyle to signify her sexual awakening, and,

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contrastingly, with the shadows of suspicion that darken Ellen’s natural openness. He endows a storm sequence with a symbolic significance, without reducing this to the stereotypical. It is at this time that Salvatore’s intentions become clearer: there is a telling close-up of him preparing an egg-flip for the ailing Agnes, into which he will drop something less wholesome. As he inspects the empty glass he looks pleased with himself in a way that bodes ill for her; shortly after, we witness the destruction at his instigation of the villa’s ornamental gardens, with their flower beds, trees and shrubs, to make way for the planting of vines, for the productivity of the land. In the villainous tradition of The Man in Grey’s Rohan or The Wicked Lady’s Barbara, but more complex than the former and sharing with the latter the sense of an injured past, Salvatore gave Kieron Moore’s career a major boost. Under his real name of Kieron O’Hanrahan, he had made one previous film, the little-seen The Voice Within (1946). As Moore, his Salvatore received the sort of notices that suggested a star in the making. The fan magazines raved. Picture Show wrote: ‘If this film does not make Kieron Moore your latest favourite, it will be surprising. He has dark good looks, a fine figure … [and] shows himself an actor of force and perception’,67 while Picturegoer eulogised: ‘Whatever else this romantic Edwardian drama does it will set the seal of stellar rating on Kieron Moore, the young Irish newcomer’, praising his ‘subtlety and charm’.68 Even the trade papers such as Kinematograph Weekly were enthused: ‘Kieron Moore, a virile and accomplished young Irish actor, makes a sensational debut as the fascinating but carney villain’, extending its panegyric to the film at large with ‘Outstanding British offering’.69 It is worth looking at what these popular sources say about Arliss’s films, as they were more likely to be accurate reflectors of public taste at large than, say, Sight & Sound, or the waspish likes of Winnington. Actually, the stress on Moore rather distracts from the accomplished performances Arliss gets from Gray and Johnston, who (unlike Calvert and Mason) both spoke well of him. Johnston said: ‘Leslie Arliss, who directed, was fine, and once again it was a good script from a very good novel.’70 And Gray remembered him as having ‘helped very much on characterisations. He was shrewd, very kind and absolutely on one’s side, and he had a very firm, clear vision of Maggie Johnston and me.’ She goes on to recall the film’s disastrous opening, after which ‘Leslie saw at once why it had failed with the audience [for the first screening]. He decided which scenes were failing and he was absolutely right; he cut those scenes and the film was then a great success.’71

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Idol of Paris (1947) When the usually benign Picturegoer begins its review with ‘A complete farrago of nonsense’,72 one cannot but feel that something has gone very wrong. Set in Paris during the reign of Napoleon III, and, as the credits inform us, ‘Adapted from the World Famous Novel – Paiva, Queen of Love, by Alfred Schirokauer’, Idol of Paris was obviously an attempt to repeat the box-office triumphs of Arliss’s Gainsborough days, and there is in the credits a sprinkling of names from those halcyon times. It is even credited as ‘A Maurice Ostrer Picture’, it stars Michael Rennie and the cinematographer is Jack Cox, who both worked with Arliss on The Wicked Lady. As in The Man in Grey, the main narrative is unfolded in a flashback. It opens in the interior of a theatre, and the camera pans the gossiping audience. When ‘Paiva’ (Beryl Baxter) enters, the audience boos and hisses, and in a show of disgust the Empress Eugenie (Margaretta Scott) walks out. At the bar a man describes Paiva as ‘the most expensive woman in Paris’, while another, unidentified and with his back to the camera, responds: ‘She’s only the most misunderstood.’ At this point, questions having been raised, the film dissolves to a flashback of a young woman being ill-treated by her father, and the rest of the film is concerned with establishing the connection between the notorious actress and the youthful victim of male brutality. In doing so, it must be said that it never achieves the firm sense of structure that enabled suspension of disbelief during the running time of the Gainsborough melodramas, and offers little more than a series of mildly salacious, sometimes absurd episodes. There is not much point in going into detail about the ensuing narrative concerning the rise of the young woman, Theresa, from poverty in Russia, via a range of highly coloured vicissitudes, to the status in Paris of ‘Queen of the demi-monde’, having morphed into ‘Paiva’. It’s enough to say that there are several key male figures along the way. Once away from the shifty George (John Penrose), there is the gently solicitous Antoine (Andrew Osborn), who is always tidying up places and whose impotence is signified by the damaged hand that prevented his being a violinist. He is replaced by the pianist Hertz (Michael Rennie) who easily outplays Antoine, both sexually and musically. He and Theresa marry; she longs for domesticity while he wants a constant round of pleasure, and his musical success is created in one of those montage sequences that remind one of Chopin on tour in A Song to Remember (1945), with concert platforms, clapping hands, flowers being thrown and so on.

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Perhaps the character best remembered is that of Cora Pearl (Christine Norden), the emperor’s mistress, described as ‘the most famous and infamous woman in Paris’. The film moves towards the confrontation of two physically contrasted women, yet another example of the recurring imagery of women at odds with each other that runs through Arliss’s 1940s films. Norden and Baxter make their way towards what most people seem to remember as the film’s most outrageous moment: the duel of whips between Cora and Theresa. This has been fuelled by Cora’s insinuations about her relations with Hertz (‘I once knew your husband particularly well’) and is preceded by Theresa slapping Cora (‘Something I’ve wanted to do for a long time’). The emperor happens to be passing in his carriage and is riveted by what he sees, and a crowd gathers to cheer on the women. There is an element of sadism in the episode, but, preposterous as it is, it is staged and filmed with a certain virtuosity with a series of swish pans from one woman’s face to the other. The outcome is in Theresa’s favour; she has Cora at her mercy but settles for whacking her on the bottom. Theresa, despite living a life of ‘secret virtue’, is now feted as ‘the New Queen of the Half World’. In the final scene Theresa’s essential goodness is affirmed in her looking after the frail Antoine: she turns down an offer of marriage from a prince because she is committed to dragging Antoine ‘back from the shadows. He’s going to live.’ The film is full of sexual innuendo, which would have been unusual in the ‘quality cinema’ of the time, such as when the emperor, arriving with his wife, snubs Cora, and Offenbach (Miles Malleson) says: ‘No doubt the emperor will compensate her in private’, adding that such women are ‘the real rulers of France’. But the film lacks the sensual charge of the Gainsborough films. It shares some of the structural firmness but it founders on the lacklustre casting, especially of Beryl Baxter as Theresa. It was her film debut and afterwards she never secured another role in an ‘A’ film, and in fact only Christine Norden and Margaretta Scott, briefly seen as Empress Eugenie, make much impression. Malleson, wandering through the film as Offenbach, does his best with a few smart lines. However, though the film has some interest in the social discriminations involved in Theresa/Paiva’s ascent, there is not really much to be salvaged from Idol of Paris. It is one of those films for which no one has ever had a good word. At the time, Kinematograph Weekly dismissed it as a ‘[h]ighly coloured costume piece … [in which] the very fine sets fail to conceal the unevenness of the acting or the ingenuousness of its drama and sentiment’,73 while the Monthly Film Bulletin considered that it ‘is over-exaggerated in every detail and will appeal only to the very unsophisticated’.74

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Saints and Sinners (1949) It might have been better for Arliss’s subsequent career if he had followed his success with A Man About the House with this second starring vehicle for Kieron Moore, thus avoiding the disaster of Idol of Paris. Saints and Sinners is an engaging, lightweight piece of whimsy set in Ireland, and it offered Moore another chance to hone his virile persona. This time he has to overcome a bad patch in his past to arrive at a hopeful future, thus reversing his function in his previous film for Arliss. As Michael Kissane, he returns to his home town of Kilwirra where there is a crowd on the railway platform and a large sign saying ‘WELCOME HOME’; it does not take Michael long to realise the welcome is not intended for him, but for another revenant, Americanised J.P. O’Brien (Tom Dillon), stereotypically always with a cigar in his mouth. Michael has been in gaol for two years for allegedly stealing money from Flaherty’s (Noel Purcell) pub and is determined to clear his name. O’Brien, with big business success behind him, has come to pay some sort of tribute to the memory of his late mother, whom he neglected during her lifetime. So, a useful narrative parallel – or, rather, contrast, though we do not learn this for some time – is set up, with one man working off a sense of guilt and the other establishing innocence of wrongly attributed guilt. This contrasting set-up is underpinned by that between the two women in their lives. The fact that Michael’s supposed theft was from the father of the girl he loves, Shelah (Sheila Manahan), has not helped his romance and she has now been receiving the attentions of Norreys (Eddie Byrne), who she likes but does not love, while O’Brien’s wife, Blanche (Christine Norden), a glamorous blonde, will later reveal that she and J.P. ‘never got round to walking up the aisle’. She takes a serious fancy to Michael and secures him a post as chauffeur to J.P., a more rewarding job than that of pot-boy at Flaherty’s. A stormy night on the rocky little Isle of Birds will bring all four together. Michael and Blanche’s trip to the island ends with their boat being swept away, leaving them stranded and having chastely – but only just – to take shelter in a hermit’s hut. Shelah, knowing that Michael was due to take Blanche to the island, enlists the help of J.P., who also has a boat. He also has a gun and plans to use it on Michael. If this sounds as if it is turning into film noir, then it should be stated that this is not the case. If a storm is again a major plot-mover, there is another still more crucial to the way things turn out. A further protagonist is old Ma Murnaghan (notable Irish character player Maire O’Neill, who could

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boast nearly fifty British film credits), who has won a reputation as a sort of prophetess in the village. Canon Kinsella (Michael Dolan) thinks of her as an ‘old witch’ and a rival whom he ‘can’t have playing ducks and drakes with the future in my parish’. Having successfully predicted an Irish Grand National win for Dark Glory, to the wild delight of the village, she now foretells the end of the world for midday on the following Tuesday. In frenzies of repentance, all sorts of confessions, comic and otherwise, jostle for the Canon’s attention – and rather neatly tie up several plot strands. Writing about it in this way makes it sound silly and banal, but there actually is a good deal of warmth, charm and wit in the structure and writing. Like Arliss’s Gainsborough films, it exhibits a pleasing interaction of character and an equally deft way of pulling things together for the apportioning of guilt and innocence. The trade paper Kinematograph Weekly summarised quite astutely the range of its potential interests and appeal as follows: ‘An innocuous mixture of blarney and brimstone, it shows how a wild, end-of-the-world scare, started by a pipe-smoking old harridan, helps to straighten out a romantic tangle and bring sly transgressors to heel’, ending its review with: ‘As for its technical presentation, the authentic backgrounds are artistically composed and the camera work is more than adequate.’75 The fan magazines of the day praised it. Picture Show found it ‘[a] ttractively staged, with authentic and charming Irish backgrounds’;76 indeed, much of it was filmed in County Louth, Ireland, and Osmond Borrodaile’s eloquent black-and-white cinematography does justice to the film’s rural beauties of lakes and fells, harvest fields and village streets. Picturegoer believed that there was ‘a deal of charm about this story of a small Irish village, and certainly quite a lot of originality’. This reviewer goes on to say: ‘Leslie Arliss’s direction has fertility of imagination, and emphasizes the comedy without overplaying it.’77 This latter review is quite perceptive in singling out the film’s merits. Arliss’s screenplay, co-written with Irish playwright Paul Vincent Carroll, meshes its plot strands with some dexterity, without overdoing the ‘Faith, now’ Irish whimsy, but equally without letting its lightness of touch obscure its network of sympathies. Picturegoer was right to note the character-drawing, especially in the case of Maire O’Neill as Ma, whose prophecies, allied to some fortuitous meteorological conditions, bring the film to a conclusion that satisfies its comic and other aspirations. Monthly Film Bulletin summed it up as ‘a curious mixture of Irish whimsy and suburban trimmings’, which seemed a trifle negative in the light of its earlier praise for the film’s ‘admirable photography’ and ‘character studies that are certainly effective’.78

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Saints and Sinners is not in any sense a major piece of work and it has attracted virtually no critical attention since its first appearance, but it is a modestly attractive piece and must have restored Arliss’s spirits – and reputation – after the abject failure of Idol of Paris. But he never again made ‘A’ films of any consequence and the remaining titles are at best competent co-features that preceded his settling for television series. The 1950s was not a decade in British films likely to be very susceptible to Arliss’s penchant for the boldly melodramatic.

The 1950s Like the other directors in this study, Arliss did not find such congenial work in the 1950s as in the previous decade. Neither wartime heroics nor Pinewood’s Technicolor comedies would seem to have been his métier; and certainly his features from the 1950s are at best co-features, before his work gave way to television series and the like. I will begin by looking at two of these co-features.

The Woman’s Angle (1952) This finds Arliss at Associated British, Elstree, with an opening title of ‘A Leslie Arliss/Bow Bells’ production, the latter half of the title referring to Walter C. Mycroft’s production company. Mycroft, not a name to inspire much confidence, had been credited as producer on over ninety films, the better ones coming in the 1930s (e.g. 1939’s Poison Pen), and as director of four, including the dire Robert Burns biopic, Comin’ thro’ the Rye (1947). He was also producer on Arliss’s first film as director, The Farmer’s Wife (1941), but had not worked with him since then, and indeed had not produced a film since 1947. If The Woman’s Angle was intended as a comeback for him, it failed in this intention. At 86 minutes, the film is too long to be thought of as a ‘B’ movie, but equally it lacks any sort of ‘A’ film stature: co-feature thus seems the most appropriate descriptor. The film’s credits, after the production title, open on the successive portraits of three women, each with its own caption. They are Cathy O’Donnell as Nina Van Rhyne, whose ‘angle is Love’, Lois Maxwell as Enid, whose ‘angle is Marriage’ and Claude Farell as Delysia Veronova, whose ‘angle is Thrill’. They are followed by Edward Underdown as Robert Mansell, ‘The Angle’. In what sense Robert is the angle is never quite clear, but the three women’s functions in the plot are more or

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less spelt out in the opening portraits: it is almost as if Arliss and co-screenwriter Mabbie Poole are harking back to Gainsborough productions. And like the works of Arliss’s halcyon days, the film is based on a novel by a woman, Ruth Feiner, and adapted for the screen by another, Ealing alumnus Diana Morgan. It must be said that the combined efforts of these writing talents failed to come up with anything very compelling as they lead us predictably through the stages of Robert Mansell’s love life. Like The Man in Grey, The Woman’s Angle unfolds through a series of flashbacks. It opens in the London streets outside the Inns of Court, moves inside to the divorce court presided over by Ernest Thesiger’s judge, who introduces the case against Robert Mansell and the camera then closes in on Enid Mansell, the plaintiff, the back of whose head is all we see at this point. The rest of the film is structured around how Robert (Underdown) became involved with the three main women in his life, the episodes relating to each introduced by a flashback from the courtroom. Enid (Maxwell) becomes secretary, then wife, to Robert, who manages the business side of the Mansell family’s musical careers, believing he lacks the musical gifts of his brothers (John Bentley, Peter Reynolds and Olaf Pooley) and sister Isobel (Isabel Dean). Enid knew their other (late) brother Conrad, in Greece, where she and Robert go for their honeymoon and where a restaurant owner, Stefano (Eric Pohlmann), has manuscripts relating to Conrad’s compositions. The marriage founders on Enid’s not wishing to settle in Greece and, by their second and third anniversaries, each ushered in by a card and gift from Robert, absenting himself from their proposed celebration, it is over. This is clinched when on the latter occasion she spots him in a restaurant with a pretty young woman (Dana [then known as Dagmar] Wynter) who subsequently tries to kill herself because of ‘the lack of understanding between us’. A return to the court will in turn initiate Robert’s dealings with ballerina Delysia (Farell), who is presented as a clichéd idea of the sexy foreigner, and with a seemingly ingenuous young American girl, Nina (O’Donnell). The latter has been saddled with the caption ‘whose angle is Love’, so that we strongly suspect what the outcome will be; what are ‘marriage’ and ‘thrill’ compared with ‘love’? This suspicion is reinforced by the sweet-faced naturalness of Nina, to whom, in the film’s last moments, he makes a bus-stop proposal in the London street outside the law courts (recalling the bus-stop ending of The Man in Grey), as a bus rolls past bearing – and not a moment too soon – the words ‘THE END’.

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Plot-wise, this is an overcrowded but essentially lacklustre piece, as illustrated by the foregoing. Arliss, as co-author of the screenplay, must bear some responsibility for this. The underlying scenario about a man who is indecisive about both his vocation and what he wants of women, and the structural framework provided by the divorce-court setting might easily have laid the basis for an attractive romantic comedy. It founders on a central performance unable to carry the film and on the clichéd characterisations of the three women. Of the latter, Lois Maxwell fares slightly better with a few sharp lines that enable her to suggest something of Enid’s frustration with her marriage, but the other two are mere ciphers. Farell had a long and prolific career, mainly based in France, but in this, her one British film, she is allowed no scope to be more than the stereotype of seductive, glamorously dressed ‘foreign’ beauty from whom no Englishman is safe. O’Connell, on the other hand, got off to a memorable start as the handless veteran’s fiancée in The Best Years of Our Lives (1946), and had several good opportunities before a sadly early death, but her two British films (Eight O’Clock Walk [1954] is the other) were not among them. Here, she exhibits merely a one-note dullness. Given Arliss’s record in writing for and directing contrasting women characters in his Gainsborough days, The Woman’s Angle represents a sad decline. Equally, it might be claimed that Edward Underdown can do little with the role of Robert, who, in being so unsure of himself in both the personal and professional aspects of his life, occupies a somewhat negative place at the film’s core. He claims: ‘It’s my job to look after people who have talent’, and that as a schoolboy he was praised for ‘a very good head for figures’, so naturally we expect the plot will move towards showing that there is more to him than that. But Underdown never really pulls off the moment allocated to this, when he takes over as conductor at the Carnegie Hall rehearsal where the family plays the ‘Mansell Concerto’. Compared with some of Arliss’s other leading men – Mason, Granger, Moore – he simply does not command the screen in a way that holds the viewer’s attention. The rest of what may look like a strong cast on paper is given little of consequence to do, so that actors such as Marjorie Fielding, Miles Malleson and Isabel Dean are more or less wasted. There are two links with Arliss’s previous brush with the world of professional musicians, Love Story. In the earlier film, the climax involves pianist Lissa’s (Lockwood) playing of the ‘Cornish Rhapsody’, which has been inspired by Cornwall’s grandeur and Lissa’s love for Kit (Granger); here, the ‘Mansell Concerto’ derives from Robert having salvaged his late brother Conrad’s score in Greece. The actual

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composer this time is Kenneth Leslie-Smith, carrying out the function undertaken by Hubert Bath in Love Story. The concert-hall sequences are well shot by Erwin Hillier, who from the early 1940s developed a long and often distinguished career as a cinematographer. Just as Love Story benefited from Bernard Knowles’s luminous lighting of the beauties of Cornwall, in The Woman’s Angle Hillier gives a glowing sheen to the Greek and Alpine locations. Whether or not they were shot in the places they are meant to represent, they perform a dramatic function that too often eludes the human content of the film. Monthly Film Bulletin’s put-down is undoubtedly patronising: ‘As the title suggests, this is no more than the filming of a woman’s magazine story, and has the traditional air of unreality. The ingredients – eccentric genius, misunderstandings, music, and a variety of settings – are put together without inspiration.’79 However, there is not much to be said in extenuation.

Miss Tulip Stays the Night (1955) This last film directed by Arliss represents a real falling off in comparison to his Gainsborough successes. Almost everything about Miss Tulip Stays the Night rightly condemns it to the ‘B’-movie status that its running time of 68 minutes enjoins on it. It is also Arliss’s only film as director on which he had no hand in the screenplay, which is the work of John O. Douglas, the film’s producer, with uncredited input from Bill Luckwell, whose company, Jaywell, produced the film for Adelphi Films, and Jack Hulbert, whose presence in the cast recalls some of those 1930s films on which Arliss had worked as (co-)screenwriter. Indeed, Miss Tulip would not have seemed out of place among those many comedies of the earlier decade, although equally it would not have been considered as one of its best. According to Vic Pratt’s account attached to the DVD release of the film, Miss Tulip had a troubled production history, including disagreements about the suitability of the starring pair, Arliss being unimpressed by both Diana Dors and Patrick Holt.80 This may help to account for the lacklustre thinness of the finished product. Further, the film was cut from 81 to 68 minutes, partly to appease the censor, and there is often, perhaps as a result, a choppiness in continuity, with scenes ending abruptly. Its plot is really no more than sub-standard Agatha Christie, without even her routine virtues of calculated suspense and surprise. A popular crime writer, Andrew Dax (Holt), and his wife, Kate (Dors), make a rickety drive across streams and round twisting rural roads to their

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country cottage, and make what would have passed in 1955 for gestures towards sexual pleasures. No sooner have they arrived at the cottage than a Miss Millicent Tulip (Cicely Courtneidge) knocks at their door. It is late and she demands a room for the night, insisting too that Andrew look after her jewellery and gun. When she is found dead next morning, slumped in an armchair, Andrew is naturally suspected by the idiot police officer (Hulbert) and his superior, Inspector Thorne (Joss Ambler). At least Christie would have kept things moving a little more smoothly, whereas the narrative here is merely a thing of fits and starts, culminating in the revelation that the dead woman is Millicent’s twin sister, Angela Tulip. Millicent has killed Angela during the night and exchanged clothes with the corpse so as to ensure their inheritance will now pass solely to her. Not so, of course. Arliss seems to have little interest in the mechanics of a thriller plot, and the casting of such comedy names as Courtneidge, Hulbert (for whom he had co-written scripts in the 1930s) and A.E. Matthews (billed as ‘Guest star’) tends to distract from such tension as the tale might have engendered without adding anything much in the way of comic compensation. Hulbert, in particular, appears like a throwback to his busiest era, with a faulty tap drenching him as he bumbles his way around the cottage, representing the acme of the film’s comic impulses. Courtneidge fares only marginally better with a few imperious moments as the soon-to-be murdered Angela early in the film and a few more at the end as the real Millicent. The cast must have looked promising on paper but they are given little to work with and this also applies to the stars, a word not really applicable for the top-billed Patrick Holt as Andrew or Diana Dors as Kate. As with Edward Underdown in The Woman’s Angle, Holt simply is too anodyne a figure to pull the pieces together, and as for Dors, she may be sexily dressed but for most of the time she is no more than a vacuous presence. The film seems not even to have been reviewed in the popular fan magazines of the day, Picture Show and Picturegoer, and they were not usually overly selective about the films they featured. Monthly Film Bulletin wrote it off as ‘a remarkably poor piece of craftsmanship in almost every respect, and a most unkind sacrifice of a pleasantly incongruous cast’.81 It is sad to see a once-successful film-maker reduced to steering such rubbish after the much more accomplished vehicles of the previous decade. Maybe he needed the superior infrastructure that Gainsborough provided; maybe there is something to be said for those suggestions that his successes under the Gainsborough banner were at least partly the result of a skilled production team, charismatic stars and gifted collaborators.

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5  Cicely Courtneidge and Joss Ambler in Miss Tulip Stays the Night, 1955

Television The rest of Arliss’s career was confined to contributions to television series, which, on the evidence of what is still available for viewing, were not likely to stretch him or to draw very fruitfully on those talents he had put to such popular use in his Gainsborough days. The Douglas Fairbanks Jr Presents series in which Arliss was involved in 1953 and 1954 at least had the advantage of superior casts, and on several occasions batches of three episodes were thrown together to provide feature-length cinema movies.82 The three Arliss-directed episodes that subsequently formed part of these trilogies were ‘Priceless Pocket’ in The Triangle (1953), the title episode in Thought to Kill (1954) and ‘Lowland Fling’ (starring Fairbanks himself) in Destination Milan (1954). They were all reviewed as features in the British Film Institute’s (BFI) Monthly Film Bulletin, even if they failed to arouse much enthusiasm. Of The Triangle, the reviewer claimed that: ‘These three stories, linked by a somewhat irritating commentary from Douglas Fairbanks, would perhaps look better on television than they do in the cinema’, but added: ‘only “Priceless Pocket” … displays any vitality’,83 recalling one of the qualities that made Arliss’s Gainsborough melodramas so watchable. The review of

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Thought to Kill complained that ‘all [three] rely heavily on last minute plot twists. These … fail to camouflage the general thinness of the material.’84 Arliss’s ‘Lowland Fling’, the third of his contributions, was said to rely ‘entirely on the comedy performances of John Laurie and Cyril Cusack, who work hard at a mawkish script’.85 The Fairbanks enterprise seems to have petered out after this. If none of these made much impact, they at least helped to keep Arliss’s name on the big screen for a little longer. The television series that followed, however, may well have helped to relegate his name to obscurity. Those I have been able to see now seem, like so much of 1950s and 1960s television, to have been made with ‘fifteen-year-old boys’ of all ages in mind as the likely viewing audience. Take, for instance, The Buccaneers (of which Arliss directed nine episodes in 1956–57), in which Robert Shaw bounded about the screen as reformed pirate Dan Tempest, sword ever at the ready. In the fourth episode, ‘Dan Tempest’s War with Spain’, his task is to defend British honour from Spanish incursions in the Caribbean in the 1720s, while in ‘Whale Gold’ (episode 6) he settles a conflict between opportunist sailors who are trying to make off with a valuable haul of ambergris (‘whale gold’) and the decent chaps who go after them – and who of course will do well out of the haul in the end, especially when the leader of the thieves is eaten by a shark. These episodes depend on clear distinctions between the goodies and the baddies, between officers and others, between British and Spanish, and so on. Their 25-minute length hardly permitted subtle moral shading, even if their audiences would have wanted this. Each episode of this series was introduced by the rollicking theme song ‘Let’s go a-roving’, and perhaps Arliss had remembered this when writing (but only once directing) episodes of the William Tell series which opened with a robust version of the following: Come away, come away with William Tell, Come away to the land he loved so well.

The land he loved was of course Switzerland, and in the ‘The Emperor’s Hat’ (1958) Tell (Conrad Phillips, dashing about the screen as Shaw did in The Buccaneers), leads a band of locals who ward off the attempts of Austrian soldiery at occupation. These two series are utterly artless in the conflicts they set up; watching them fifty years on, one recalls that Arliss was once able to introduce rewarding shades of grey into the oppositions that laid the basis for his famous 1940s melodramas. His very last foray into television series, or indeed any form of filmmaking, was Forest Rangers (1963–65, set and produced in Canada), of

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which Arliss directed three episodes. Had work in the UK dried up completely? This series, featuring daring youngsters in Indian River, at least had the advantage of colour and handsome locations, and was described as ‘[p]opular outdoor actioner for the junior crew’.86 In ‘The Prospector’ from the first series, Arliss clearly understands the youthful audience at which the adventure – children saving an elderly man from a forest fire – is aimed, and its ingenuousness in plotting is appropriately matched by straightforward structure and performances. Arliss’s career obviously tailed off sadly in the 1950s, but there is enough evidence of his proficiency as a writer and director (often combining both functions) to feel that his exclusion from several key reference books relating to directors of the time is undeserved. At best, he was an accomplished purveyor of popular entertainments, some of which also resonated intelligently with the social climate of their day.

Notes 1 Patricia Warren, British Film Studios, London: B.T. Batsford, 2nd edn, 2001, p. 181. 2 Michael Omasta, ‘Famously unknown: Günther Krampf’s work as cinematographer in British films’, in Tim Bergfelder and Christian Cargnelli (eds), Destination London, New York, Oxford: Berghan Books, 2008, p. 85. 3 Ibid., p. 84. 4 Mason in Clive Hirschhorn, The Films of James Mason, London: LSP Books, 1975, p. 55. 5 See Margaret Lockwood, Lucky Star: The Autobiography of Margaret Lockwood, London: Odhams, 1955, p. 109. 6 Robert Murphy, ‘British film noir’, in Andrew Spicer (ed.), European Film Noir, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007, p. 90. 7 Today’s Cinema, quoted in Hirschhorn, p. 55. 8 Monthly Film Bulletin, April 1942, p. 42. 9 Tony Williams, Structures of Desire: British Cinema, 1939–1955, Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000, p. 29. 10 The Times, quoted in Hirschhorn, p. 55. 11 James Mason, Before I Forget, London: Hamish Hamilton, 1981, p. 128. 12 Robert Murphy, ‘A brief studio history’, in Sue Aspinall and Robert Murphy (eds), Gainsborough Melodrama, BFI Dossier 18, London: BFI Publishing, 1983, p. 4. 13 Geoffrey Macnab, ‘Looking for lustre: Stars at Gainsborough’, in Pam Cook (ed.), Gainsborough Pictures, London: Cassell, 1997, p. 110. 14 Robert Murphy, British Cinema and the Second World War, London: Continuum, 2000, p. 174. 15 Charles Oakley, Where We Came In: Seventy Years of the British Film Industry, London: Allen & Unwin, 1964, p. 172. 16 As recalled by Phyllis Calvert, in an interview with the author, 1989. 17 Jeffrey Richards and Dorothy Sheridan (eds), Mass Observation at the Movies, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1987, p. 14.

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18 Monthly Film Bulletin, July 1943, p. 74. 19 Kinematograph Weekly, 22 July 1943, p. 23. 20 Pam Cook, ‘Melodrama and the women’s picture’, in Aspinall and Murphy, p. 14. 21 Ibid., p. 21. 22 ‘Leslie Arliss says – I like wicked women’, Picturegoer, 10 November 1945, p. 7. 23 Ibid. 24 Williams, p. 32. 25 Andrew Spicer, Typical Men: The Representation of Masculinity in Popular British Cinema, London: I.B. Tauris, 2001, p. 25. 26 Interview with Phyllis Calvert, in Brian McFarlane, An Autobiography of British Cinema, London: Methuen and BFI Publishing, 1997, p. 110. 27 Lockwood, p. 98. 28 Quoted in Hirschorn, p. 66. 29 James Agate, Around Cinemas, Amsterdam: Home and Van Thal, 1948, p. 230 (originally published in Tatler). 30 Quoted in Hirschhorn, p. 66. 31 Stewart Granger, Sparks Fly Upward, St Albans: Granada Publishing, 1981, p. 75. 32 Lockwood, p. 100. 33 Arliss in Picturegoer, 10 November 1945, p. 7. 34 Williams, p. 37. 35 K.J. Donnelly, ‘Wicked sounds and magic melodies: Music in 1940s Gainsborough melodrama’, in Cook (ed.), Gainsborough Pictures, p. 165. 36 Donnelly, p. 164. 37 Williams, p. 38. 38 Time and Tide, 17 October 1944. 39 Monthly Film Bulletin, October 1944, p. 114. 40 Kinematograph Weekly, 12 October, 1944, p. 32. 41 Richard Winnington, review of Love Story, 7 October 1944, in Film Criticism and Caricatures: 1943–53, London: Paul Elek, 1975, p. 46. 42 Robert Murphy, Realism and Tinsel: Cinema and Society in Britain 1939–48, London: Routledge, 1989, p. 50. 43 Lockwood, pp. 108–9. 4 4 Robert Murphy, ‘Gainsborough after Balcon’, in Cook (ed.), Gainsborough Pictures, p. 143. 45 Arliss in Picturegoer, 10 November 1945, p. 7. 46 Lockwood, p. 108. 47 Barbara Klinger, Melodrama and Meaning, Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 199, p. 70. 48 Lockwood, p. 109. 49 Raymond Durgnat, Films and Feelings, London: Faber and Faber, 1967, p. 182. 50 Sue Harper, Picturing the Past: The Rise and Fall of the British Costume Film, London: BFI Publishing, 1994, p. 126. 51 Williams, p. 42. 52 In an illustration attached to Arliss’s article for Picturegoer, the director, armed with a pillow, is shown instructing Lockwood how to do away with the threat of Hogarth. 53 Arliss in Picturegoer, 10 November 1945, p. 7. 54 Laurie Ede, British Film Design: A History, London: I.B. Tauris, 2010, p. 61. 55 Harper, p. 130. 56 Duncan Petrie, The British Cinematographer, London: BFI Publishing, 1996, p. 87.

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57 Both quoted in Hirschhorn, p. 81. 58 Winnington, p. 167. 59 Marcia Landy, British Genres: Cinema and Society, 1930–1960, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991, p. 43. 60 Geoffrey Macnab, Searching for Stars, London and New York: Cassell, 2000, p. 160. 61 Interview with Dulcie Gray, in McFarlane, p. 174. 62 Monthly Film Bulletin, November 1945, p. 130. 63 Kinematograph Weekly, 22 November 1945, p. 24. 64 Marcia Landy, ‘The other side of paradise’, in Justine Ashby and Andrew Higson (eds), British Cinema, Past and Present, London: Routledge, 2000, p. 65. 65 Dulcie Gray, Looking Forward, Looking Back, London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1991, p. 96. 66 Ibid., p. 97. 67 ‘The fortnight’s films’, Picture Show, 29 November 1947, p. 11. 68 Lionel Collier, ‘Shop for your films’, Picturegoer, 22 November 1947, p. 12. 69 Kinematograph Weekly, 12 June 1947, p. 23. 70 Interview with Margaret Johnston, in McFarlane, pp. 333–4. 71 Gray, in McFarlane, p. 174. 72 Lionel Collier, ‘Shop for your films’, Picturegoer, 24 April 1948, p. 12. 73 Kinematograph Weekly, 26 February 1948, p. 16. 74 Monthly Film Bulletin, March 1948, p. 30. 75 Kinematograph Weekly, 23 June 1949, p. 21. 76 ‘The week’s releases’, Picture Show, 13 August 1949, p. 10. 77 Lionel Collier, ‘Shop for your films’, Picturegoer, 23 July 1949, p. 17. 78 Monthly Film Bulletin, July 1949, p. 116. 79 Monthly Film Bulletin, June 1952, p. 82. 80 Vic Pratt, ‘Murder, mystery and missing scenes: Miss Tulip Stays the Night’, insert with BFI’s DVD release of the film, 2011. 81 Monthly Film Bulletin, August 1955, p. 124. 82 Two of the other directors examined in this study, Bernard Knowles and Lawrence Huntington, also prolonged their careers in the Fairbanks enterprise. 83 Monthly Film Bulletin, June 1953, p. 91. 84 Monthly Film Bulletin, November 1953, p. 165. 85 Monthly Film Bulletin, January 1955, p. 9 86 Jon E. Lewis and Penny Stempel, The Ultimate TV Guide, London: Orion, 1999, p. 131.

Arthur Crabtree

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When Crabtree began his directing career in 1944, he came with an established reputation as a cinematographer which often endeared him to actors more than did his directorial skills. Again, though, I suspect these have been undervalued, as closer examination of his features will suggest. As was the case with Arliss, the success of these films tended to be attributed to the studio – Gainsborough, again – rather than to the director.

Lighting his way through the 1930s (and early 1940s) Crabtree entered the film industry in his late twenties as an assistant cameraman (to Alfred Hitchcock, among others) in 1929 at BIP, Elstree, becoming a camera operator (to the likes of Günther Krampf) at Gaumont-British in 1932. After sharing credits with such better-known names of the time as Ernest Palmer and Claude Friese-Greene, he received his first solo credit as director of photography on Michael Powell’s The Love Test (1935). His camera is equal to the images Powell wants to stress regarding the love test, such as close-ups of flowers or chemical apparatus, and ensures the leads – Louis Hayward, Judy Gunn and Googie Withers – are well lit. Thereafter, he was in more or less constant demand in this function throughout the rest of the decade. Much of his work in the 1930s involved lighting the popular comics of the day. On Pot Luck (1936), Crabtree shares the cinematography credit with Roy Kellino in this Ben Travers comedy-thriller, directed by Tom Walls. This obviously makes it hard to know how much Crabtree is responsible for the smart rendering of the opening explosion, or the later car chase, both of which are fluently filmed. There is also astute focus on the eponymous pot and the capture of a lot of mad action, as

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well as doing justice to the Aldwych regulars – and their terrible puns. Eighty years on, it still plays well. But most often, and most notably, it was Will Hay, whose star persona of ignorance disguised under bombast called on Crabtree’s facility for keeping him appropriately lit at the centre of the films’ often manic activity in five comedies directed by Marcel Varnel. In Convict 99 (1938), Crabtree’s photography is necessarily pretty utilitarian but with some comic moments (as in the stone-breaking episode) nicely caught, as well as doing justice to Will Hay’s facial repertoire of duplicitous looks and to Googie Withers’s glamorous appearance as a fraudulent ‘countess’. On Alf’s Button Afloat (also 1938), in the wild comedy that ensues when the Crazy Gang members are inadvertently recruited into the Royal Marines, Crabtree’s camera achieves some neat effects, some of them quite flashily entertaining in themselves. For instance, the lighting and angles vary smartly to distinguish between fantasy and (to use the term loosely) reality, between cramped interiors and broad exteriors, whether at sea or in the countryside, or in capturing a beautiful girl (none other than Glennis Lorimer, the Gainsborough girl herself) suddenly materialising in a diaphanous costume. And his camera deals confidently with a wild hunt chase. In all of these popular Gainsborough comedies, Crabtree’s contribution to the clarity of action is apparent, and sometimes he achieves something more, such as in the spoof Old Bones of the River (1938). Here, he also gives some realism to the jungle setting (darkest Surrey?), and the several river and night scenes anticipate the more ambitious ventures he would go on to shoot at Gainsborough in the next decade. In fact, the main purpose in citing his work in these 1930s films is that they anticipate what will be a major strength of his work in the following decade, first as cinematographer on major films for the studio and then as director. Though spending most of the decade in lighting the popular comics of the day, Crabtree got a major chance on Carol Reed’s romance Bank Holiday (1938). He is responsible for the melding of the documentary look of the bank holiday crowds on beaches or railway station platforms, or in the Mall as a royal carriage goes past (newsreel footage and staged action) with the Hollywood-style lighting of star faces, especially those of Margaret Lockwood and Linden Travers. Reed’s biographer, Nicholas Wapshott, describes how the director ‘decided to open with a montage of shots showing London preparing itself for a bank holiday. He took his cameraman, Arthur Crabtree, to the Hastings carnival to take exterior shots of crowds on the front, and other stock shots were taken of crowds

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setting off from Waterloo Station.’1 Further, Wapshott notes that Reed ‘relied for the most part on the cameraman Arthur Crabtree to frame the shots’.2 Regarding Crabtree’s cinematography, Duncan Petrie also wrote of ‘the interesting locations shot in Margate which have a lively documentary quality’.3 We can see why actors liked being photographed by Crabtree. The film is a tonally somewhat uneasy blend of romance and realism, but it allows Crabtree some scope for visually imaginative work, for example in the flashback of Stephen’s (John Lodge) meeting wife-to-be Ann (Travers), shot over his reflective face, or of his wandering in the rain near Admiralty Arch and recalling being there with Ann on the grand occasion, or imbuing his empty apartment with a poignant melancholy, or in the luminosity he brings to the beach scene at night. It is in Bank Holiday that we most potently see what made him a sought-after cinematographer for the Gainsborough melodramas of the 1940s, when such players as Lockwood, James Mason and others benefited from Crabtree’s star lighting. As the 1940s got underway, there was the usual run of comics at large: Hay in Where’s That Fire? (1940), Arthur Askey and Richard Murdoch in Band Waggon and Charley’s (Big-Hearted) Aunt (both 1940), and I Thank You (1941), the Crazy Gang in Gasbags (1941) and George Formby twice, in South American George (1941) and Much Too Shy (1942). But there were several other genres calling on Crabtree’s now-proven expertise. These included the wartime shorts Channel Incident (1940, for Anthony Asquith, starring Peggy Ashcroft), Mr Proudfoot Shows a Light (1941, directed by Herbert Mason, starring comic Sydney Howard) and Rush Hour (1941, Asquith); three war-based melodramas, For Freedom and (co-credited with Jack Cox) Neutral Port (both 1940), and, somewhat more ambitiously, Uncensored (1942, for Asquith again); Reed’s adaptation of H.G. Wells’s social satire Kipps (1941), when Reed again travelled with Crabtree to film location shots in Wiltshire;4 realist dramas such as Dear Octopus (1943) and Waterloo Road (1945); and, most significantly in view of what lay ahead for him, the costume melodramas The Man in Grey (1943, for Leslie Arliss) and Fanny by Gaslight (1944, for Asquith). Perhaps, as some have suggested, the comparative shortage of directors during the war led to those who had had different behind-camera experiences assuming the directorial reins, and Crabtree may have been one of these. Phyllis Calvert was one such subscriber to this view, recalling that ‘there weren’t enough directors, and so people who were scriptwriters or were behind camera were suddenly made directors, and they had no idea about actors at all’,5 though, as we shall, see she would be more fulsome about his contribution as a director a little

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later. And as Dulcie Gray, when asked about Crabtree, said: ‘There was a revolution going on at Gainsborough at this time – every cameraman wanted to be a director, and quite often was.’6 His forty-odd credits as cameraman at the very least equipped him well to help stars look their best on the screen, and at least two major stars – Margaret Lockwood and Phyllis Calvert, both of whom he had lit in the preceding decade – bear witness to this. He lights their different kinds of beauty to accentuate their contrasting functions in The Man in Grey, and, after a rather long apprenticeship, Calvert comes into her own in the starring role of Fanny by Gaslight, one of the most stylishly shot of the famous Gainsborough melodramas, in which Crabtree contrives to make her look both innocently lovely and subtly sexy. His lighting lent much to the charismatic qualities of their co-stars, James Mason and Stewart Granger, as contrasting male leads in both the forenamed films, and in Fanny he expertly frames Margaretta Scott in some of the most memorable moments of these wildly popular melodramas. In this respect, one of the best accounts of Crabtree’s achievement as a cinematographer comes from Duncan Petrie, who writes: [Ted] Black put his faith in British technicians and, during, the seven years he was in charge at Gainsborough, the bulk of the studio’s films were photographed by either Arthur Crabtree or Jack Cox. [Crabtree responded to] the appeal of stars, as in the Hollywood system, and responded to the imperative of ‘putting the light on the money’. [This was] a major influence on Crabtree’s own development as a cameraman, chiming with Black’s championing of British stars.7

In the years ahead – that is, from the mid-1940s – his making stars look their best would prove to be a major quality of his films as director. He could boast a prolific body of work as cameraman, almost entirely with Gainsborough, and this is the studio that would oversee the next stage of his career.

At the Gainsborough helm As with Arliss, Crabtree’s directorial successes at Gainsborough were too often attributed to something in the metaphoric water at the studio rather than to the skills he brought to his new function there. As with Arliss again, those popular melodramas were often received with critical scorn, as if only the public liked them – and what would the public know? It would be nearly forty years before they were subject to anything like serious scrutiny with the publication of BFI Dossier 18, Gainsborough Melodrama, in 1983. Without wishing to make claims of enduring works

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of art for these films, I (as one who had been slow to recognise their merits) want to argue that the likes of Crabtree’s first films as director – Madonna of the Seven Moons and They Were Sisters – have more going for them than has often been allowed, even in the years of their critical rehabilitation. On another level, according to Mass-Observation, they were also the third and fourth most commercially popular films of the war years,8 and that level of popularity at such a time is not to be dismissed lightly.

Madonna of the Seven Moons (1944) Decades later, I am ashamed to say how silly I thought this film was on first viewing without giving any sustained thought to what it might be saying about divided lives and their potential causes or to how shrewdly in many ways it is put together. Locked into notions of realism as I was, it was easy to overlook the idea that realism was not the only way of dealing with ‘reality’. As we look more carefully at the film now, it is impressive to note how skilfully the different elements of film’s arsenal – music, cinematography, costume and production, and, of course, actors – are deployed to contribute to the overarching narrative and thematic texture, and how these all move towards the film’s final imagistic resolution. Some of these elements have now been carefully scrutinised, their first extended treatment perhaps in the BFI dossier already referred to.9 An opening title tells us: ‘This story is taken from life. There was a real Maddalena. Medical evidence has verified it.’ At least it does not tell us, as so many films do, that it is based on a ‘true story’. The phrase ‘taken from life’ seems to allow more scope to the film-maker and, in this case, this was a wise move as real-life authenticity is not the first impression most would take from it. Like the other Gainsborough melodramas, it was adapted from a popular novel of the time, a romantic fiction by Margery Lawrence with the slightly different title of The Madonna of Seven Moons, and has a screenplay by Roland Pertwee. The film is (recalling The Man in Grey) bookended by Phyllis Calvert as Maddalena; it opens with her as a convent girl who is sexually attacked (rendered in the suggestive but non-explicit manner of the film-making period) while picking flowers in the forest and ends with her dead body lying on her bed. The shocking sexual experience precedes another conflict for Maddalena: it makes her want to stay in the convent, the outside world seeming full of threat, but the Reverend Mother (Helen Haye) tells her

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that her father wants her to join him and, giving her a prayer book inscribed and dated 1919, sends her out into the world she fears. Further, she is subsequently aghast at the idea of the marriage she enters into with gentle-mannered banker Giuseppe Labardi (John Stuart), by whom she will have a daughter, Angela. From the outset, the basis of Maddalena’s tormented inner self has been established, the sexuality which her alarming experience has both suppressed and, in another way, awakened. ‘We’ve got to move with the times, her times,’ Giuseppe cautions Maddalena when, in Rome, they talk of the return after five years at her English school of their shy, retiring daughter. Crabtree cuts from this subdued domestic scene, set in their handsome Roman mansion, to a group of bright young things on hotel steps in Cannes. This is our first glimpse of the grown-up Angela (Patricia Roc) who is about to drive off alone with a young man with the ambiguous name of Evelyn (Alan Haines), a name ambiguous enough to make her parents assume Evelyn is a girl. In a minor parallel with what will prove to be Maddalena’s history, Angela is the object of the attentions of two very different men: the courteous Evelyn, heading for a career as a diplomat, and the dark, faintly sinister-looking Sandro (Peter Glenville). There is a further anticipation of Maddalena’s conflicted life when we are given a proleptic glimpse of Nino (Stewart Granger), who emerges from behind a newspaper to give travel directions to the young couple as they make their way to Rome. Back in Rome, Maddalena’s anxieties about Angela, based on her own sheltered and disrupted childhood, are barely kept in check by the solicitude of her husband and their doctor friend, Ackroyd (Reginald Tate). When Angela arrives, Maddalena is shocked by the shorts she is wearing – and at finding that Evelyn is a he, not a she. The point of offering so much detail about these opening episodes is to stress how they anticipate so much of what follows, and the attention that Crabtree, working from Pertwee’s screenplay, has given to matters of structure and image. We have been prepared for subsequent clashes of generations, of old ways and new, of cultures, of religion and sensuality, and for potential parallels. ‘What I am, I am. I have no other side,’ Maddalena claims, then rushes upstairs, leaving Ackroyd to posit that ‘something seems to be haunting her’. Angela’s return, the gust of the modern world she brings with her and her casual approach to life (for instance, in a moment when in her bedroom she dances to swing music in her underwear and engages in a discussion of the latter with her mother. ‘My education’s finished, you’re just beginning,’ she tells Maddalena), is at least partly responsible for the

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return to the passionate ‘other side’ that her mother has denied to Ackroyd. In her feminist study ‘Gainsborough women’s pictures in the 1940s’, Pam Cook wrote: ‘Madonna of the Seven Moons was publicised as part of the industry’s move to produce a new kind of British picture, showing British ideas and ideals to the public at home and abroad, combining entertainment with fine techniques and originality in story design.’10 For the present study, it is that last clause about story design that interests me, especially in the way that parallels – sometimes used for contrast, sometimes for comparison – keep enriching the film’s texture. On some occasions this will be a matter of two obviously disparate characters; on others, two images will be made to comment on each other. Angela’s return, with its whiff of the modern, outside world, begins to have its effect on Maddalena, and Calvert astutely suggests the troubled spirit that is trying to blossom serenely, observed with affection by Giuseppe and professional concern by Ackroyd. ‘Never let me go,’ she begs Giuseppe, just prior to the night of the party, which seems like a statement about her renewed capacity to deal with the demands of her married world. But Angela’s gift to her of gypsy earrings will herald the return of Maddalena’s other self. She faints when Sandro arrives as partner to Angela’s friend Milly, and, when she later sleeps, she experiences tormented dreams in which she hears a voice calling ‘Rosanna’, as Jack Cox’s camera glides round her bedroom. Waking, she then pulls her hair down in front of the mirror, gets into one of the gypsy costumes that have been glimpsed in her wardrobe, puts on the earrings and rushes off to the station where she asks for a ticket: ‘Florence. No return.’ ‘It’s happened again,’ says Tessa (Amy Veness), the devoted housekeeper: that is, she has disappeared from Roman life once more without leaving any explanation apart from the ‘seven moons’ motif on her mirror. In this other life as Rosanna, as Robert Murphy’s even-handed account of the film notes, ‘she is as fiery, headstrong, and sensual as Maddalena is meek, demure, and conventional’.11 As Rosanna, she finds herself at what seems to be a sort of thieves’ kitchen, presided over by tough old Mama Barucci (Nancy Price); the passionate Rosanna, once there, takes up again with her jewel-thief lover, Nino (Granger). Life here is scruffy and disorderly, with an edge of danger, but for Rosanna it offers a freedom her role as dignified and repressed Roman matron had not. The film is not simplistic about this contrast: each ambience, each lifestyle in part functions as a critique of the other. Dr Ackroyd will later tell Giuseppe that Maddalena is ‘a dual personality … Something

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6  Peter Glenville and Stewart Granger in Madonna of the Seven Moons, 1945

happened to split her mind … perhaps in her childhood. A door in her mind closed and another opened.’ But this didactic account comes over as less persuasive than the notion that the urges to the freedoms of passion and to the pleasures of orderly, virtuous living might co-exist in anyone, whether or not a particular society is flexible enough to allow this. The film ends on an image of resolution when the camera lingers on the cross and the rose side by side on the breast of the dead Maddalena/Rosanna, the cross emblematic of the devout life she led in Rome – a priest administers the last rites – and the rose, thrown on her lifeless body by Nino, who has been lurking in the garden with a knife and slips in when Giuseppe leaves, representing her wilder side. ‘My beloved wife’ is Giuseppe’s farewell; a whispered ‘Goodbye, Rosanna’ is Nino’s, and the beautifully lit images of these last moments fittingly epitomise the conflicting urges at the heart of the film’s meaning. Certainly, adjacency is not the same as resolution, but the possibility suggested by the final image seems more potent than, say, the unfettered modern approach to living incarnated in Angela’s youthful hedonism. Angela also finds a need to take things more seriously. While Maddalena is away from Rome, Angela launches a search for her mother in Florence, initiated by finding a pendant, the source of which she plans to track down. But the real interest of the film is not in anything

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as predictable as a missing-person search. Rather, it is in the way images, events and relationships keep working to suggest the divided nature of Maddalena/Rosanna’s life. For instance, a matter as small as the different sort of rough stone stairs Rosanna runs up to the bedroom she obviously knows, where she puts on the ‘seven moons’ earrings, recalls the elegant descent she made earlier from the grand staircase of the Labardis’ Roman villa to the reception room below. More significantly, there is a surely intended echo of her devout Roman life in Rosanna’s being momentarily stilled by the image of a cross on a carnival banner as a noisy crowd fills the streets. Her face is superimposed on the cross, which is reflected in her eyes, and she then leaves the crowd to go to the church. On another level, the usually self-assured Angela, daringly at ease in Rome, seems somehow afraid of the licence she finds in Florence, unnerved a little by the sensuality of life there, whereas her mother has been released by it. Release, of course, brings with it a wildness unimaginable in, or by, Maddalena. Sandro, acting as a sort of hired guide, takes Angela to an ‘awful place’ and watches as her drugged coffee takes effect. Rosanna soon after runs up the stairs to the room to which Sandro has taken Angela, and from behind mistakes him for Nino (both men were in identical carnival costumes) and stabs him to death. From here, the narrative takes us quickly to the Villa Labardi, where Maddalena/ Rosanna is lain on her bed and left finally with the emblems previously noted. That she is brought to Giuseppe’s mansion to die may imply that Maddalena is the real part of her duality, that the flesh has been defeated by the spirit, but the rose and the cross side by side on her breast hint at a more comprehensive sense of what a life may entail. This is a more suggestive, more convincingly hopeful sign than the conventional pairing of Angela and her fiancé, Evelyn, as they leave Maddalena’s bedchamber. It is pointless to draw attention to unlikely coincidences or to the even more improbable idea that those who knew Maddalena do not see anything of her in Rosanna – literally, in the failure of, say, the English couple, the Logans, to recognise in her their Roman hostess. She does not look as different as all that, of course, except in externals of dress or coiffure, and Angela only recognises her mother when she collapses, killed by Sandro’s last act, hurling his knife at Rosanna. This is not the sort of film in which demands of realism make themselves felt. Rather, it depends for its effect on, for instance, the potency of images and small touches of character that enact the idea of a crucially divided life and the pressures these might exert on such a life.

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7  Phyllis Calvert in Madonna of the Seven Moons, 1945

In the organisation of such patternings into a coherent whole, Crabtree has drawn on some of Gainsborough’s most notable talents. There is Elizabeth Haffenden’s costume design making its astute contribution to our understanding of the film’s central drama. You do not need to be much versed in couture – and I am not – to note such a detail as Phyllis Calvert’s discreet lifting of the skirt of her long, dignified dress as she descends her Roman staircase and to compare it with the flamboyant floral skirt that billows around her as Rosanna runs up the stone steps of her Florentine home, or to compare Nino’s décolleté shirts with Giuseppe’s suits – let alone with his smoking-jacket. On a larger scale, Andrew Mazzei’s production design (or ‘art direction’, as it was then credited) distinguishes vividly between the elegant splendours of Giuseppe’s Roman mansion on the one hand, with its vast spaces, within and without, upstairs and downstairs, and the dusky clutter of the Florentine den on the other. Jack Cox’s cinematography works on these not merely to produce handsome set-pieces but also to imbue them with tellingly appropriate emotional resonances. As Duncan Petrie has written of Cox’s work in the Gainsborough melodramas: The photographic style of the melodramas is rooted in an economical lighting design with an underlying expressionism which becomes more obvious at key moments of conflict and tension. Madonna of the Seven Moons, for example, utilises two contrasting visual styles, each corresponding to an aspect of the fractured psyche of Phyllis Calvert’s central character. The meek and demure Maddalena inhabits brightly lit bourgeois interiors while her alter ego the fiery and sensual Rosanna, lives in a

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shadowy world of excitement, romance and danger at the Seven Moons café, conveyed by an imaginative interplay of light and shade.12

These resonances are reinforced where apt by Hans May’s score, romantic or spiritual as the narrative requires. K.J. Donnelly offers a perceptive and detailed account of how the score provides another insight into the protagonist’s divided life: ‘The repeated “Rosanna” theme overwhelms the film – but there is an organ on the soundtrack that is loosely associated with the Maddalena character, established at the convent near the opening and reappearing at the conclusion when she is given the last rites.’13 But again, as in the case of Arliss’s dealings with Gainsborough melodrama, I want to stress the importance of the director’s orchestration of these undeniably rich talents. With his actors, for instance, I would particularly draw attention to Phyllis Calvert. She manages the transition from Maddalena to Rosanna and back again with precision, appropriate emotional toning and an acuteness in the rendering of moments of troubling insight in either persona. Rather surprisingly, Picturegoer, more populist in its views than, say, the ‘Sunday ladies’ or other trenchant critics, claimed that ‘while Phyllis Calvert is charming as the mother, she fails entirely to put the required fire and passion into the wanton she occasionally becomes’.14 The word ‘wanton’ seems also somewhat to miss the significance of the Rosanna half of the protagonist’s divided personality, appearing to label her more censoriously than the film depicts. Additionally, in my view, Calvert does register the necessary emotional fire that clearly distinguishes Rosanna from the repressed Maddalena. Forty years on, Calvert was clear in her understanding of how the film handled such matters as sexual passion at the time: ‘we [Calvert and Granger] got away with it by having a very dark room, with the two heads on the pillow – there was just a light on our faces made by the cigarettes we were smoking … Sex wasn’t talked about in those days; it was there, implied, we all knew it happened.’ Speaking about Crabtree, she claims that ‘the fact that he had been a lighting cameraman was wonderful for us, because he knew exactly how to photograph us’.15 Hers is of course the most demanding role – or roles, as she treads her dignified, restrained way through Rome and displays much more exuberant behaviour in Florence, and the different kinds of anxiety each enjoins on her. At the very least, Crabtree gives her room to manoeuvre in each. As for Granger, he had certainly made an impression as an athletic hero in his films for Arliss, but, as Andrew Spicer writes: ‘In Madonna

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of the Seven Moons, he was given a more exuberantly swashbuckling role as Nino, prince of the Florentine back streets. With shirts unbuttoned to the waist or gorgeously arrayed in his harlequin costume for the carnival, Granger was consciously fashioned as a new Valentino, the thrilling, hot-blooded Latin lover, fought over by two women.’16 As will be seen, this image is developed further in Crabtree’s next-but-one film, Caravan. It is a different leading-man image from that of James Mason’s and perhaps filled a gap among British male stars of the period. At the time of its release, it was a success at the box-office, again – as with the Arliss films – attracting the kind of critical response Murphy describes as ‘unique even among the Gainsborough melodramas, ranging from condescending indulgence towards what was regarded as engaging nonsense, to harsh condemnation of its betrayal of the principles of British realism’.17 As suggested earlier, there seemed to be little sense of the potential purchase on reality of modes other than certifiable ‘realism’. Hindsight has been kinder to Madonna than its contemporary critics were – and again one realises that the public could be more alert to a film’s value, and values, than those whose profession enabled them to pronounce on it with lofty disdain. It was a stylistically ambitious challenge for Crabtree as first-time director, a challenge which he adroitly met.

They Were Sisters (1945) Decades later, Phyllis Calvert recalled being exasperated with the goodygoody image she acquired in the 1940s, claiming ‘It stuck to me like Araldite’.18 She may well have had in mind her role in Crabtree’s next film for Gainsborough, They Were Sisters – and with good reason, but more of that later. This film is again adapted by Roland Pertwee from a popular novel (‘famous novel’ as the credits say), this time by Dorothy Whipple, and perhaps it is this lineage that helped to confine such films to the patronising and disparaging ‘women’s picture’ label, as if only women had emotional lives or thought them worthy of consideration. In its 1919 opening, in which the three sisters prepare for the social whirl of a thé dansant, the film very quickly differentiates among them: Vera (Anne Crawford), who seems a little flighty and self-absorbed, first seen in period underwear, pulling on her stockings; Charlotte (Dulcie Gray), the most girlish of the three, and of whom Vera says (prophetically as it turns out): ‘Charlotte has a passion for stray dogs; one of these days she’ll get bitten’; and Lucy (Calvert), from the outset the sensible, older one. This opening episode anticipates the course

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their lives will take in the rest of the film. Once the social occasion gets under way, the men who will influence those lives appear: nice William Moore (Peter Murray-Hill), who has come to see the girls’ father about the letting of a house, and is obviously attracted to Lucy; Brian Sargeant (Barry Livesey), who dances an exhibition tango with Vera; and, most significantly, Geoffrey Lee (James Mason), a lower-middle-class chap on the make, who pushes his way through the crowd, wanting an introduction to Vera. She snubs him, after which he takes up with naively smiling Charlotte. Back home later, Lucy, in training to be a ‘good mother’, solicitously pulls the bedcovers over the sleeping Vera and is disturbed to view, from her upstairs window, Charlotte’s late arrival with Geoffrey, to whose dangerous charms she succumbs. Vera will go her hedonistic way, marrying Brian after telling him ‘You have been warned’; Charlotte will be destroyed by her marriage to Geoffrey; and Lucy will become the home-maker we have been led to expect. I do not mean to make the film sound merely schematic as it chronicles three marriages, two of them disastrous and one idyllic, but to suggest that the outcomes of all three have been quite carefully prepared. Crabtree persuasively orchestrates the telling detail in Pertwee’s screenplay (and Katherine Strueby’s adaptation from Whipple), in Yvonne Caffin’s costumes (for the men as well as for the women) and in the sharply contrasted acting styles of his main cast. In terms of plot, it is essentially a tale of the three marriages. Geoffrey’s wild behaviour at his wedding – shouting and cavorting with his drunken friends while the official party goes on next door, or leaping over bannisters, for instance – generates unease that will be justified by his later vile treatment of Charlotte, the ‘naturally happy person’ he has married. James Mason’s comments about Geoffrey’s motivations are interesting. A critic had written about this role: ‘There is absolutely nothing to motivate Mr Mason’s viciousness’, in response to which Mason later wrote: ‘when an actor has to try to make a real character who has only been roughly sketched by those responsible for the screenplay, then he has to work twice as hard filling in all the details of the character’s background so that at least the actor himself is convinced of his reality and can react automatically to the motivations he has invented. So here you had a character, I informed myself, in which an innate three hundred and sixty degree hostility had been exacerbated by careless eating habits.’19 As we watch Geoffrey’s increasingly brutal behaviour towards his wife, son and younger daughter, it is helpful to remember Mason’s words. There is a suggestion of Geoffrey’s belonging to a somewhat lower rung on the social scale than the sisters; his early behaviour is

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socially crude compared with either Brian’s or William’s. There is also an element of sadism in the way he consciously imposes his will on others, eventually causing his son to run away from home and Charlotte to descend into alcoholism and, finally, to suicide. The relationship between Geoffrey and his older daughter, Margaret (Pamela Kellino, in real life married to Mason), who acts as a kind of secretary to him in the business activities in which he claims to be prospering, is also odd. His dealings with Margaret are so different that they almost suggest an incestuous element, though no such preoccupation would have been allowed in a 1940s film. Mason manages by the sheer potency of his screen persona to hold our attention, even as we wonder what has contrived to bring him to this brutal pass. In relation to this marriage, Dulcie Gray’s progression from the ‘naturally happy’ girl of 1919 to the middle-aged woman of 1937 who runs to her death by a passing motorcar is made with impressive subtlety and poignancy. Gray has often seemed an undervalued actress,20 with a sometimes surprising range, so it is good to find that, at the time, Tatler film critic James Agate rated her performance as ‘a really fine piece of acting’,21 while, several decades later, Robert Murphy wrote: ‘Dulcie Gray’s transformation from a delicate, happy girl into an ageing, worn-out woman is very impressive.’22 She never appeared in another film for Crabtree, though she made several for the other three directors featured in this study. Arguably, the role of Charlotte gave her the best opportunities. The Charlotte–Geoffrey marriage is responsible for most of the film’s dramatic substance. There is more to hold attention in the way her innocent joy in life gives way to his not wholly explained but nonetheless persuasive brutality, not to say sadism, than in either of the other two sisters’ unions. There is some interest in Vera’s apparently open marriage to the accommodating Brian, who finally pulls out, generously accepting his share of the blame when he says: ‘The trouble with me is I could never help being a bore.’ Barry Livesey makes something touching about the man who has married Vera, knowing she does not love him and may well look elsewhere for more stimulating male company. When he leaves for America, his little daughter, Sarah (Helen Stephens), weeps quietly into the clothes he has left in a wardrobe. (Irrelevantly, perhaps, it now reminds me of that moment in The Searchers when Martha is glimpsed stroking the jacket of the returning Ethan Edwards, telling us all we need to know of her feelings.) As for Vera, there is a sort of selfish honesty about her; she is conducting an affair with Terry (Hugh Sinclair), whose approach to relationships is probably much the same as hers. ‘You’re very amusing. You’re lovely. And you’re hard as

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nails,’ he tells her. She is, though, shocked at the idea of divorce when Brian mentions it. When Brian has gone, Sarah overhears her mother say to Terry, ‘If I have you nothing else matters’, adding that Sarah is ‘a problem’. The third marriage, Lucy and William’s, as played by Calvert and real-life husband Peter Murray-Hill, is clearly intended to be the film’s great positive. An account of the film forty years on sums up this union as ‘clearly seen as the ideal embodiment of stable monogamous marriage, shared responsibility and enlightened parenthood’.23 More than a decade later, in an account of the film as a product of its period, Tony Williams wrote: ‘Desire is a dangerous thing. It needs repression by acceptable middle-class values.’ That is, a marriage of the kind represented by Lucy and William, of which Williams adds: ‘their marriage exhibits little real desire. They Were Sisters clearly sets out to exile desire from the new postwar world.’24 This may well be the film’s ideological function but it is not enough to distract viewer attention from the too-good-to-be-true feeling that characterises the way this relationship is presented. The film ends with the childless couple creating a happy home for Geoffrey’s unloved younger children and Vera’s daughter in a rural idyll which tends to remind one of how difficult it is to make goodness seem as interesting as wickedness on screen – or in fiction at large. Phyllis Calvert, so often the ‘good’ woman, always believed that ‘it is much more difficult to establish a really charming, nice person than a wicked one – and make it real’.25 Certainly, Lucy’s situation would have taxed her in this respect, though she manages to make something convincing of Lucy’s growing anger with Geoffrey’s treatment of Charlotte, even when the screenplay cannot quite make credible her interference in their cruelly dysfunctional marriage. She is also compelling in the court case in which she accuses Geoffrey of nothing less than Charlotte’s murder. In an article Calvert wrote for Picturegoer at the time of the film’s release, she was alert to the potential problem of being identified with good, suffering women, but, with regard to this film, she wrote: ‘I have always looked forward to having my own home, a husband and a family … My latest film, They Were Sisters, represented the perfect way to combine a happy married life with a screen career, for Peter and I played in the film together as husband and wife, so that we were able to go to work together.’26 The only point in quoting this is to suggest that maybe the personal satisfactions fed into the screen story because, though the Lucy–William household glimpsed in the film’s last moments sounds a sugary concept, she especially imbues it with a kind of believable happiness as she and William, arms around each other, observe their two young nieces at play.

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It is Calvert’s task to persuade us of the dramatic function of Lucy’s character. What might otherwise have seemed to stamp her as merely the ‘good sister’ takes on an appropriate forcefulness as she urges Vera ‘to stop thinking about yourself for one minute’ and focus on Charlotte’s deeply troubled situation, and even more so when she berates Geoffrey for his treatment of her sister. Calvert has the capacity for making essential decency a potent force on film and there is something very gratifying in the way she takes the stand in court to expose Geoffrey’s sadistic behaviour. In an earlier essay I wrote (and would now endorse the view): ‘It is hard to imagine another actress of the period so skilfully suggesting the fundamental nurturing kindness, along with a readiness to speak out strongly when occasion requires.’27 If They Were Sisters ends on a note of (to quote William) ‘God’s in his heaven, all’s right with the world’, the film as a whole is more complex than that might suggest, exploring, as it does, different kinds of selfishness, cruelty, victimhood, and moral energy and ineffectuality. Sue Harper sums it up thus: ‘What might on the face of it seem to be a tale about sisterly affection is in fact a story about the ruthlessness of desire. … They Were Sisters is extremely cynical about the family and its romances.’28 There is of course something schematic about the way in which it moves through different kinds of failed relationships to reach its sun-filled conclusion, but there is real acumen in the way Crabtree has welded together the less sunny elements which comprise the preceding couple of hours. It could be argued that the imagistic flair that brought Madonna of the Seven Moons to its final shot of Phyllis Calvert is at work here in suggesting another kind of resolution: it could be called sentimental, but it could also be seen as hopeful – especially on its mid-1945 release.

Caravan (1946) It would be possible to imagine a critical dismissal of Caravan as a load of romantic tosh. Unashamedly melodramatic, even by Gainsborough’s standards of the time, with some coincidences that strain credulity almost to breaking-point, it nevertheless keeps surprising us with the views on matters such as sexuality and class that underpin – or emerge from – its narrative events. Again, like Crabtree’s previous film, it carries an early title which says: ‘From the famous novel by’, this time Lady Eleanor Smith (also author of The Man in Grey), and as with all three of his Gainsborough melodramas the screenplay is by Roland Pertwee. Like all three, Caravan

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also depends for its effect on how it looks, and with John Bryan as ‘art director’ it is off to a good start in this matter. After we see a serenading couple behind the titles, an image meant to suggest an exotic location, the story proper opens on a night street somewhere in London as footpads set upon a man in evening dress (Don Carlos, played by Gerald Hinze, later Heinz), and another man (Richard Darrell, played by Stewart Granger) comes to his rescue, fights off the assailants and sees Don Carlos home to his elegant mansion. This is the meeting that will set the rest of the narrative in motion: we expect a change of fortune as a result. Darrell has inadvertently left behind the manuscript of his novel, A Way through the Woods, and, when he comes the next day to check on the man he has saved, he finds Carlos has been charmed by it. There is a long flashback in which Darrell tells Carlos of his background, after which Carlos becomes a sort of patron, promising to get the book published and offering Darrell the role of bodyguard. More specifically, he asks Darrell to return to Spain a valuable necklace, once worn by Queen Isabella. Getting Richard Darrell to Spain is crucial to the film’s narrative, as is the situation he leaves behind in England. Since his childhood, during which he learnt to fight when running wild with gypsies in Spain (his mother was Spanish) before coming to England, he has loved Oriana. Anticipating the film’s preoccupation with matters of class, as a young girl she introduces herself to him as ‘the lady of the manor’, ordering him not to set traps for animals or to bathe in the woods. When he pushes her into the pond, she calls on Francis, a young toff, to help her, and Richard pushes him into the pond too. The seeds of cross-class romance – and enmity – have been sewn. All this is being told to Don Carlos, as is the following account of how, now grown-up, Oriana (Anne Crawford) demands an explanation for Richard’s not having come to see her since his return, and his assurance that: ‘We’ll be married when I can support you … and when I ask you’. Class is foregrounded in the figure of Francis (Dennis Price), who has grown up to be an egregious aristocrat who tries to keep Richard, ‘this farm lad’, in his place. Undaunted, Richard asks Oriana’s father (David Horne) for her hand – in a year’s time, and in front of Francis. And so the flashback ends, with matters now set in place for the rest of the film, and, as in Pertwee’s earlier adaptations for Crabtree, these early details will be made to resonate later. The film’s concern with issues of class and sexuality is established very early and these are what give substance to its sometimes crudely melodramatic plotting. When the year he has spoken of to Oriana is up and he is still not published, he is about to undertake Carlos’s

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8  Dennis Price (seated), Robert Helpmann and Anne Crawford in Caravan, 1946

commission to return the necklace to Spain. Meanwhile, Oriana’s father is now dead and she is poor, and in this powerless position – she has class but no money – she accepts Francis’s offer of marriage, not knowing that he has lied about her father’s debt to him. Before Richard heads off to Spain, there is an unpersuasive love scene in which Oriana assures him ‘I shall miss you terribly’. In Spain he is wounded and left for dead in a scuffle organised by Francis’s henchman Wycroft (Robert Helpmann), after which he is nursed back to health by Gypsy dancer Rosal (Jean Kent). The contrast with Oriana is made clear: Rosal stands for a healthy, generous sensuality beside which Oriana’s affections seem pallid, and the rest of the film will ring changes on this dichotomy. In fact, the film is remarkably explicit for its time in the dramatising of such an agenda. For instance, whereas Oriana is always dressed in gowns of white lacy-looking materials, Rosal wears flamboyantly flowered gypsy skirts and skimpy blouses (Elizabeth Haffenden’s work, of course). There is also a moment when Rosal dives nude into a river and is observed by Richard. Their love scenes together, especially before his memory (lost after his injury) of Oriana returns, have a sensual quality lacking in those between him and Oriana. Is this meant to comment on his part-Spanish inheritance? ‘What do you know of love with your cold English ways?’ Rosal challenges Oriana with these words in their

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meeting at Don Carlos’s Spanish home. ‘Love! You don’t know the meaning of the word’, is Oriana’s disdainful reply. As in all three of Crabtree’s Gainsborough romances (and Arliss’s too, for that matter), contrasting women are allowed to put forward their points of view about love and related issues, but in all cases the more ladylike, the more conservative in attitude, will eventually be seen as the positive. This is so in Caravan in spite of Jean Kent’s Rosal offering more in the way of emotional and sensual honesty than Anne Crawford’s anodyne Oriana. K.J. Donnelly, discussing the film’s score, writes: ‘The narrative is ultimately concerned with the reunion of Richard and Oriana, but the music privileges Rosal as the key figure in the action. Moreover, the extended screen time of her spectacular dance performances also asserts her power and importance.’29 What is rather surprising in a 1946 film is the strain of sexual innuendo. For instance, when, at Don Carlos’s Spanish home, Oriana threatens to leave Francis, whom she has struck when she hears that Richard has married, he taunts her with now being penniless and having to remain in Spain to ‘earn your living by a means for which you have shown remarkably little talent’. Shortly after their marriage, he challenges her with her ‘coldness’ and talks of her ‘refusing’ him. Is there another British (let alone American) film of the period which so directly refers to the physical side of marriage? On the issue of sexual undertones, two other matters are worth noting. Francis’s henchman Wycroft is pretty clearly signalled as being gay. This is suggested in the way he is always hovering around Francis and, when he has been dispatched by Francis to follow Richard to Spain to kill him, he pretends to offer help to Richard while delicately fingering his muscular arm. The other, somewhat bizarre event involves Francis possibly paying Oriana back for her ‘coldness’; he sends her a message, unctuously delivered by Wycroft, to say that at the last minute he will not be attending a lavish dinner over which Oriana is to preside. Wycroft adds, ‘Sir Francis, knowing your disappointment, has arranged for some feminine company for you’ – and in marches a troupe of prostitutes formidably led by Bertha (Enid Stamp-Taylor). Oriana, face to face with a very different class, exhibits a cold hauteur which commends itself to Bertha as real breeding: ‘You’ve come out of it like the real lady what you are’ (shades of Belle Watling and Melanie in Gone with the Wind), and, ‘real lady’ as she is, Oriana invites them to stay, in an incident which may have been received sympathetically in the more egalitarian times following the war’s end. Class, as much as sexuality, informs this episode; Bertha’s recognition of Oriana’s upper-class demeanour draws from Oriana an unexpected generosity of response. Both women

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are united in their disdain for Francis, whom the prostitutes attack when he returns. And class makes itself felt throughout the film. When Richard addresses Francis by name, boyhood by now well behind them, the latter reminds Richard that he is properly Sir Francis now and expects appropriate deference. As Robert Murphy writes: ‘The new sort of egalitarian society forged by the war is endorsed by the relationship between Francis – who is an insufferable snob and thinks his landed status makes him a superior being – and Richard, who insists he is equal to any man despite his poverty.’30 It might be claimed that the film opts for a conventional denouement when Richard and Oriana have each been divested of the spouses they acquired during Richard’s amnesiac period in Spain, but in mitigation it could be adduced that the classless gypsy and the vile aristocrat represent some sort of cross-class resolution. And if Oriana is clearly upper-class, Richard’s parents – a doctor father and a Spanish mother – are less easy to classify. Further, the passionate gypsy, while saving her husband’s life, has been killed by the vile aristocrat who, with cowardly whimpering, meets his end in quicksand, Richard having tried in vain to warn him. I do not want to make Caravan sound like a piece of social history, but, as a reflection of the period of its making, it is far more interesting than a bare account of its melodramatic plot might suggest. Tony Williams claims that it ‘symbolically utilizes motifs of wartime cinema. It echoes the People’s War egalitarian ideology by allowing the writer Richard, son of “a country doctor who spent more on his patients than he got from them” access into a privileged class world.’31 As in all three of Crabtree’s melodramas for Gainsborough, what may seem like crowded plotting acquires a coherence through the play of ideas behind this, and as in the others he draws on a battery of behind-camera talents. Notable here are Bryan’s production design and Haffenden’s costumes, both rendered eloquently in Stephen Dade’s cinematography. As an example, Duncan Petrie notes: ‘The low-key lighting in the cave where [Rosal] nurses the injured Richard … creates an erotically charged space (not unlike the Inn of the Seven Moons in Madonna) which contrasts with the furnished, brightly lit and more straight-laced English interiors.’32 As to the actors, Jean Kent, with perhaps more to work on, makes a much more vivid impression than Anne Crawford, who was better served by the vain, self-absorbed Vera in They Were Sisters. Of the men, Granger, baring his torso and sporting some fanciful gypsy garb, does his by now conventional, virile leading-man role efficiently enough, but Dennis Price makes a waspishly vivid presence of Francis. As his

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biographer writes, this role ‘represented a massive leap forward in his career’, claiming that ‘Price displayed real charisma, an edge that I don’t think Granger, for example, ever possessed.’33 More so than in most of the Gainsborough melodramas so far considered, Caravan is concerned with male conflict, often resulting in physical violence, from the street attack which brings Richard to the acquaintance of Don Carlos to the penultimate episode which ends with Francis sinking in the quicksand. Price’s biographer may be right in attributing this shift in emphasis to the fact of men returning from war and once again taking their substantial place in the cinema audiences. When Caravan was reissued in 1949, Kinematograph Weekly vigorously reinforced the film’s commercial appeal: ‘From the first reel until the last, this former GFD [General Film Distributors] offering does exactly what popular audiences expect of it in just the way they’ve always wanted it … Colourful and exciting story, good comedy relief, skilfully timed thrills and box-office cast.’34 Again, what is striking upon re-viewing and reading about the reception granted to a film such as Caravan is how slow even sympathetic recent critical writing is to attribute its virtues to the director. However astute some of the before- and behind-camera collaborators may be, their contributions had to have been orchestrated by some kind of directorial control. It is one thing for Phyllis Calvert to have praised him ‘because he knew exactly how to photograph us’; there was surely a little more than that in the way he could stage melodramatic incident so as to make it yield a coherent discourse (pretentious as that sounds) on such key elements of British cinema as class and sexuality. Crabtree would go on to different kinds of success later in the decade, but arguably his three Gainsborough romances comprise his most substantial success as a director.

Later Gainsborough Crabtree’s next three films, though no longer of the costume melodrama genre, were also with Gainsborough, the studio now under the management of Sydney Box. While there are some pleasures to be had from Dear Murderer (1947), The Calendar (1948) and ‘The Kite’, an episode of Quartet (1948), these do not offer Crabtree the emotional and visual scope, nor the underlying or interwoven elements of social critique that the three earlier films had done. Proficiency, rather than much in the way of imaginative resourcefulness, is what at its best characterises his work in these films.

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Dear Murderer This is based on a successful play by St John Legh Clowes, who died at the age of just forty-four in 1952 and who is probably now best remembered as the author of the screenplay for the then-scandalous No Orchids for Miss Blandish. The screenplay for the film version of Dear Murderer is by Muriel and Sydney Box and Peter Rogers, and immensely talkative it is. This is often a trait of films adapted from stage plays, but so visual a director as Crabtree nevertheless manages to imbue the film’s loquacity with some effective moments. The Picturegoer review picked up on this matter: ‘While this film is mainly a picturization of the stage play in that it has more talk than cinematic action, it entertains both through its acting and its ingenious plot.’35 The film opens with Lee Warren (Eric Portman) arriving home to a darkened flat and finding no one there. He picks up a scarf and a cigarette butt and then goes to look in his wife Vivien’s drawer where he finds cards saying ‘Love from Richard’ and a letter signed ‘Love always, Richard’, as well as the screwed-up telegram he, Lee, has sent to her from America asking why she had not written to him. The answer to this seems likely to have to do with Richard, and, finding Richard’s address on one of his ‘Love always’ cards, Lee decides to call on him. All of this is adroitly and economically enough done, setting up the basis of Lee’s marriage being undermined by his wife’s apparent relations with someone called Richard; so far, Crabtree has aroused interest without recourse to dialogue. But after this episode, talk takes over. Some of it is sharp enough, as it establishes Lee as a threatening presence in the Temple Court flat of Richard Fenton (Dennis Price), who presents himself naturally in a silk dressing-gown. Lee confronts Richard with his guilt in relation to Vivien (Greta Gynt). Richard admits, ‘We’ve been out together’, to which Lee’s reply is: ‘It’s the going in that concerns me’, adding a ‘modern’ sexual edge. Lee dictates a suicide letter to Vivien, saying, ‘I cannot bear to be near you, knowing you’ll never be mine’, and so forth. Price and Portman, under what appears to be a civilised approach to their situation, suggest an undercurrent of danger, which becomes quickly overt as Lee ties Richard’s hands and feet. From early in the episode, Crabtree has positioned the men so as to render, via Stephen Dade’s cinematography, a real sense of the threat Lee poses to Richard. A swish-pan shot of the New York skyline then introduces a flashback in which Lee’s voice-over reveals his knowledge that Vivien has been seeing another man. There is really too much of this narration, and rather clumsily the scene cuts to Vivien talking in their flat to Richard,

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explaining why she has not written, as – in a smart image – a hand comes up from the bottom of the frame to stroke her arm, after which the camera pans down to reveal Richard. The flashback ends with Lee having seen, perhaps a trifle improbably in a bar on Broadway, a copy of Tatler featuring a photo of Vivien dancing with Richard, and then pronouncing to Richard, ‘It was then that I made up my mind to kill you’. Presumably, the flashback with Lee’s voice-over was a way of dealing cinematically with what was necessarily straight dialogue in the play. As Richard tries to bargain with him, Lee initiates the narrative starter of the rest of the film by announcing, ‘I’m going to commit the perfect murder.’ His motives for doing so have been established, though they may prove to be less clear-cut than he imagines, as Richard taunts him with talk of Vivien’s other lovers. ‘Be sensible about it or I won’t let you help me,’ Lee tells his victim, as though seeking to maintain a civilised demeanour as he goes about his preparations – and the film acquires a subtly witty patina as he does so. Without going into plot details about the rest of the film, it is enough to say that the ‘perfect murder’ has been devised to make it appear that Richard has committed suicide via the gas oven, and that the arrival of Vivien with her latest lover, Jimmy (Maxwell Reed), will complicate the outcome. In a neat touch, after Vivien and Jimmy (from whom Lee has remained hidden) have left, Lee is seen putting something in the boot of a car, which the camera obscures from us but which will be picked up later on. In another small detail, Jimmy tells Vivien that he cannot kiss her, ‘not in his [Richard’s] flat’, so that Vivien suggests they go somewhere ‘private’, and they leave without discovering the body. The point made here is to suggest in Jimmy a moral frisson that is foreign to Vivien, who will prove to be the real ‘villain’ of the piece, entirely self-absorbed as she is. And this works, despite Maxwell Reed’s entirely characterless rendering of Jimmy and to a lesser extent Greta Gynt’s overreliance on a series of elaborate costumes (gowns, really) and a bizarre hairstyle. In terms of acting, it is Portman’s film as he subtly adjusts his attitudes in dealing with Richard, Vivien and, later, Jack Warner’s Police Inspector Pembury. Picture Show lauded his ‘splendid portrayal’ in a film it praised as ‘[c]leverly directed … Intelligent, gripping and tingling with suspense.’36 Seventy years on, that appraisal from the fan magazine does not seem too extravagant. According to Geoffrey Macnab, in his discussion of Greta Gynt’s star profile, the film was ‘made on a shoestring at Islington Studios’,37 and perhaps the skimpiness of the exterior shots is a sign of this. There are brief glimpses of streets, for instance, to indicate the move to Scotland Yard for the examination of the letters Lee forced Richard to write and the piece of gas tubing that proves to

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have been the object Lee has hidden in the car boot. Elsewhere, and here is a piece of cultural information for those in the know, Lee follows Vivien and Jimmy to the theatre where a huge billboard announces ‘SID FIELD’, in whose 1946 film flop, London Town, Gynt had had the leading female role.

The Calendar (1948) Crabtree’s next film for Gainsborough represents a thinning out of the material on offer as compared with the robust melodramas that had established him as a director. Nevertheless, The Calendar is also a proficient piece of work, easily digestible as well as light and forgettable. Seen seventy years on, it seems scarcely to have deserved some of the critical obloquy heaped on it at the time. The then-influential critic Paul Dehn headed his review ‘A Waste of Celluloid’, going on to say that Wallace’s story had been ‘brought up to date by inserting a shot of the King and Queen at Ascot. In all other respects its characters are as obsolete as cloche hats and not half as amusing.’38 That other influential critic Richard Winnington deemed it impossible to make a film from Edgar Wallace’s ‘mildewed sporting farce’.39 Like Dear Murderer, Crabtree’s previous production, The Calendar was also based on a successful West End play, this time by the popular thriller writer of the day, Edgar Wallace, having begun its life as a novel in 1930. It had previously been filmed in 1931 by T. Hayes Hunter, also for Gainsborough (in association with British Lion), and with a cast headed by Herbert Marshall, Anne Grey, Edna Best and Gordon Harker, all names to conjure with back then. Crabtree thus appeared to be taking on a title with commercial potential. Like Dear Murderer again, much of its action seems stage-bound, with long dialogue exchanges, but here such episodes are punctuated with wide outdoor shots of race meetings at Epsom and Ascot. Despite no doubt being stock footage for the most part, they nevertheless provide a useful visual punctuation, and Crabtree’s direction is adroit enough to know when such interludes are needed. In terms of plot, The Calendar centres on the fortunes of Captain Garry Anson (John McCallum), whose racehorse, Wilderness, is badly injured in a fall in the race that opens the film and has to be put down. This bit of bad luck is followed by a will-reading in which Garry finds out that his wealthy late aunt has added a codicil to the effect that, contrary to his expectations, Garry will now inherit nothing but a string of pearls. This leads to the end of his romantic prospects with

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Wenda (Greta Gynt), who tells him that ‘there are those who can do without money and those who can’t’, she clearly belonging to the latter group. He will eventually have success on the racetrack with another horse (My Darling), after foolishly agreeing to have his jockey pull the race at Epsom so as to secure better odds for the forthcoming Ascot Gold Cup. At a brisk 77 minutes’ running time, the film does not overstay its welcome, and in Geoffrey Kerr’s screenplay its narrative structure is quite neatly tightened in several ways as it makes its way towards Garry’s eventual success with My Darling at Ascot. For instance, there is the unashamedly gold-digging Wenda’s marriage to pudgy but rich Lord Willie Panniford (Raymond Lovell), who will eventually grow tired of funding her extravagance. This in turn is complicated somewhat by Willie’s sponging friend Tony (Sidney King), whose presence in the Panniford mansion Wenda objects to. There is also the matter of Garry’s aunt’s pearls, which, foolishly even by Garry’s standards, he has ‘lent’ to Wenda with an informality that will later lead predictably to complications, which we know will be resolved to audience satisfaction in the end. Garry’s horse will win, after a certain amount of tension relating to whether or not it will be allowed to run, and, in another little plottightener, he will realise he loves the woman who has trained My Darling, who happens to be Lady Mollie Panniford (Sonia Holm), Willie’s sister. Crabtree has worked Kerr’s screenplay with the sort of narrative efficiency he showed in the more ambitious Gainsborough melodramas, both in reducing reliance on over-talkative staginess by insertion of racing and training scenes and by some gesturing towards the post-war period in which this adaptation of Wallace’s original is now set. The idea of having a woman trainer, Mollie, in what is essentially a maledominated world, may result from a perception about the changing roles for women in the post-war world; as we have seen, Crabtree’s earlier melodramas were often structured around female pairs of strikingly different moral approaches. Here, Greta Gynt’s Wenda, always immaculately attired, tends to suggest, as so many of her roles do, that she was dressed courtesy of the black market in those days of austerity, whereas the wholesome Molly is much less flashily coutured – though each is allowed to display a liking for preposterous headgear. Speaking of possible post-war corruptions, though Willie Panniford is not depicted as dishonest among his other faults, the casting of Raymond Lovell as Willie almost seems to invite suspicion of profiteering, such was the image he acquired in 1940s films. Here, as he returns to England from France, he is caught smuggling luxury goods while trying to cheat customs with some illicit whisky. In fact, Gynt and Lovell, here

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married, have always seemed to me to work as icons of dubious post-war prosperity, and this image is reinforced by the way in which Crabtree presents them. But the most potent echo of the period is in the way the ex-army captain, Garry, is manipulated by his butler, Hillcott (Leslie Dwyer), who was his former batman and who also has a burglarious background. Dwyer, a very enjoyable character actor of the period, notably in working-class roles, usually with a sharp eye and tongue, is allowed the film’s last moments as he reveals that he has used his skills to steal back the pearls. Earlier, questioned as to whether he stole a crucial £100 note, he replies thoughtfully: ‘Let me see. No, I can’t remember a single burglary on Wednesday night.’ There was much publicity at the time about John McCallum’s burgeoning career as ‘Britain’s New Male Star’, and he gives the role an appropriate style and virility. Interest was also raised by the locations at Epsom and Hurst Park racecourses and the use of real jockeys, as well as with the building of a replica of the owners’ stand at Ascot. Josh Billings’ ‘Reviews for Showmen’, critical of the film’s other aspects, stressed this element in its commercial potential, claiming that ‘the actual racing sequences are particularly realistic and exciting, and all the colourful pomp and pageantry of the Royal Ascot, is skilfully worked into the showmanlike finale’, singling out cinematographer Reginald Wyer for praise. 40 But this attention to details of place did the film little good, as those critical assessments quoted above suggest. The Calendar is obviously unremarkable stuff, but it remains a pacey thriller laced with comedy, and with a whiff of the times that makes Dehn’s slur about ‘cloche hats’ seem unduly severe.

Decline Crabtree was still with Gainsborough for his next film, Quartet (1948), and with a Sydney Box-related company, Triton, for Don’t Ever Leave Me (1949) – but the heady days of lavish and sometimes eloquent melodramas, starring the cream of British cinema’s big names, had passed. As, perhaps, had the public taste for such fare that had made stars of such names as Lockwood, Mason, Calvert and Granger.

Quartet (1948) Quartet consisted of adaptations of four short stories by W. Somerset Maugham, introduced (and farewelled) by Maugham himself. As producer

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Sydney Box noted: ‘The studio art department built a replica of Willie’s study at the Villa Mauresque, and … he came to Shepherd’s Bush and recorded the four introductions.’41 Quartet was undoubtedly a prestige film for the company, but the story allotted to Crabtree, ‘The Kite’, offered limited opportunities for either his visual flair or his capacity to tell a well-constructed story with some panache. It is satisfactory within its modest limits, but the others in the quartet evince more character interest, and this of course may be attributable to the author and/or screenwriter R.C. Sherriff. It is essentially concerned with the idea of obsession – in this case, with kite-flying – rather than the interaction of character. The episode opens with a prison visitor (Bernard Lee) coming to see Herbert Sunbury (George Cole), who left his young wife when she smashed his kite and has since refused to pay the maintenance decided by court order. This interview is conducted in Ray Elton’s clearly etched black-and-white cinematography before dissolving to Herbert’s childhood home where we see the early days of his obsession with kites. From here on, the film proceeds in flashback as the prison governor (Frederick Leister) talks to the visitor about Hubert’s case. Two of the other stories in Quartet have their roots in parental backing of sons: in ‘The Facts of Life’, Henry Garnet (Basil Radford) sends his tennis-playing son Nicky (Jack Watling) off to the south of France with warnings about money, women and gambling, while in ‘The Alien Corn’, Sir Frederick Bland (Raymond Lovell) eventually backs the piano-playing ambitions of his son George (Dirk Bogarde). In a portmanteau film of this type, such a recurring motif may be no more than chance, but it nevertheless tightens the film’s overall hold on the viewer. ‘The Kite’ becomes the story of a boy, Herbert (played by David Cole – no apparent relation to George Cole as the adult Herbert), whose fixation with kites comes to dominate his life. His parents, especially his father, Samuel (Mervyn Johns), seem to support him as a child, but his (barely) middle-class mother, Beatrice (Hermione Baddeley), patronises Betty (Susan Shaw), the girl he has become attracted to, describing her as ‘common as dirt’. Their subsequent marriage, pursued despite his mother’s objections, does not stand much chance of success in the light of his ongoing kite-flying, in which Betty has no interest in taking part. As a result, he keeps secret from her his Saturday afternoon walks to the common where he rejoins his parents to practise his all-consuming hobby, and when Betty discovers this she smashes the kite. The prison governor tells the visitor, ‘The kite represents some sort of ideal to [Herbert]’.

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Whereas Maugham’s story has a kind of tightness and toughness in detailing the conflicts at its heart – between the mother and Betty, between Herbert’s obsession and his marriage – the film tends to skim the surface of both. This is especially true of its depiction of the marriage, which is scarcely given enough screen time to establish its decline and break-up. Although George Cole, in an early leading role, suggests persuasively Herbert’s fixation, Susan Shaw’s role as Betty is too thinly written to make the conflict of the marriage a matter for compelling drama. Picturegoer’s review claimed: ‘There is a happy ending which I am sure, though I have not read it, was not in Maugham’s story.’42 He is right in this matter: the story makes no move to reconciliation. Herbert is in prison at its end, refusing to pay Betty the twenty-five shillings weekly maintenance. Maugham’s story opens with the narrator’s saying: I know this is an odd story. I don’t understand it myself and if I set it down in black and white it is only with a faint hope that when I have written it I may get a clearer view of it. 43

Given Maugham’s own involvement in the filming of Quartet, it is somewhat surprising that he apparently sanctioned Sherriff’s softening of the impact of what his story’s narrator rightly describes as ‘an odd story’. Until its feeble opting-out of the original rigour of the short story, there is enjoyment to be had in some of the acting, especially that of Cole and of Baddeley, who makes the most of the bitchy snobberies the screenplay allots to her. But a tougher study overall might have been more rewarding for the audience – and for Crabtree, whose next several films find him dealing with material that is too often anodyne at best, inane at worst.

Don’t Ever Leave Me (1949) The 1983 biography of Petula Clark, This Is My Song, 44 significantly fails to make any mention of Don’t Ever Leave Me, and viewing the film nearly seventy years later this looks like justifiable discrimination. Clark’s character is extremely tiresome and the film itself is at best mildly amusing, if not original, in concept. This was Crabtree’s last film for the studio and represents the very thin end of the Gainsborough wedge. The creaky and largely incredible plot has echoes of O. Henry’s 1907 short story ‘The Ransom of Red Chief’, in which two men kidnap a wealthy man’s son whose behaviour drives them crazy to the point that they pay the boy’s father to take him back. It was filmed in 1952 as one

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segment of the portmanteau film O. Henry’s Full House. The plot is based on the funny but absurd premise of the tedious child’s not wanting to be restored to his father, and this is the narrative line pursued in Don’t Ever Leave Me, but to less effect, possibly because its one comic idea was more suited to the shorter length of the segment in the 1952 film. In his study of Sydney Box, the film’s executive producer, Andrew Spicer wrote: ‘Its storyline … was another example of a Box picture in which the idea could not support a full-length film.’45 Sheila Farlaine (Clark), neglected daughter – and she is so irritating one could understand the neglect – of conceited West End actor Michael Farlaine (Hugh Sinclair), is casually kidnapped by old Harry Denton (Edward Rigby), recently released from prison into the home of his grandson Jack (Jimmy Hanley). Encouraged by Sheila, Harry pretends he is driving her to the theatre where Michael is performing but actually takes her to Jack’s house, where she immediately makes herself at home. That she quickly has the upper hand is caught in Jack’s remark, ‘All right, Dillinger’s made the tea’. The reason she has welcomed being kidnapped is that ‘Daddy’s a romantic actor’ with hordes of adoring fans and in maintaining his image he has kept Sheila in the role of a child. ‘I’m sick of nothing ever happening. I want to go out and see things and have fun,’ she offers by way of explanation. Farlaine, egoist that he is, wants to perpetuate the idea that his ‘little girl’ is being held for ransom, thanks his theatre audience for their ‘patient understanding’ and enjoys playing the grief-stricken father. There is a funny, if preposterous scene when she comes rushing down the aisle shouting ‘Daddy!’ in a carefully planned reunion on stage. Backstage, she begs him, ‘Please darling, let me grow up’, followed by some sentimental talk about the discipline of the theatre. Farlaine’s co-star, Mary (Linden Travers), with whom his relations are strained, stalks out threatening: ‘I shall report it to Equity. If you think I’m going to work with you in the theatre again, you’re crazy. I’d sooner make a picture’, in an unusual example of the film/theatre divide in a movie. In fact, Robert Westerby’s screenplay, adapting a story by Anthony Armstrong, surprises several times with touches of wit, such as when Harry rebukes a younger chum (the ubiquitous Michael Balfour) with: ‘I was making a dishonest living when you had your name down for Borstal’, or when a beautician (a Dora Bryan cameo) tells a client, ‘I’d marry a millionaire … but I don’t like fat men.’ The screenplay is sharp enough and the kidnap plot is given a little more texture by the ways in which it gives Sheila the opportunities to grow up that she craves, in part by restoring Jack’s relationship with

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his girlfriend, Joan (a nothing role for Rank starlet Barbara Murray), and by its dealings with various kinds of dishonesty. The most obvious one, played wholly for comedy, is old Harry’s easy-going approach to his prison past and willingness to engage in Sheila’s kidnapping. We also have Farlaine’s opportunist exploiting of his daughter’s ‘plight’ and the decision of Sheila’s young neighbour Jimmy (Anthony Newley) to get himself kidnapped as well, to the delight of his father (Maurice Denham), with Jimmy entering whole-heartedly into Sheila’s adventure. And the cast is packed with Rank character actors and up-and-coming young players. In the end, none of this is enough to help Don’t Ever Leave Me offer more than patchy entertainment. It founders on Clark’s tiresome, overzealous approach – and to the clumsy insertions of songs for her. Perhaps more crucially, it leads one to suggest that comedy is simply not Crabtree’s forte. Certainly, in the 1930s, as discussed above, he was involved as cameraman on many popular comedies, but their success no doubt depended on their popular comic stars. Monthly Film Bulletin was largely dismissive in its evaluation, allowing that, although it found the film to be unpretentious, it ‘fails to make an impression. It lacks pace and the humour is heavy-handed.’46 The films that made Crabtree a sought-after director were in altogether different genres, essentially melodramas of various kinds, whether costume pieces or contemporary thrillers. Spicer notes the ‘complaints about lack of punch in Crabtree’s direction’ of this film, quoting the review that claimed his direction had ‘the witty touch of an elephant on roller-skates, heavy-handed, dull and devoid of fun’. 47 These two quoted comments are somewhat more severe than the film deserves, but not by much. The trade paper Kinematograph Weekly could only allow that ‘Petula Clark shows no lack of confidence as Sheila … and [the chief supporting players] never let up. No one could have done more with this colourless tale.’48

Two Lilli Marlene films These two films – each relying heavily on the nostalgic emotional appeal of the famous wartime song and its post-war follow-up – find Crabtree dealing with material, which, like that he had in Don’t Ever Leave Me, is a long way from the kind he worked on so successfully in his Gainsborough days. They pass the time easily enough – the first more so – but they never really make serious drama of their potential. By the early 1950s Crabtree perhaps had found himself somewhat out of kilter with such prevailing genres as wartime adventures or domestic comedies.

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Lilli Marlene (1950) The first of the two, Lilli Marlene, at least has vestiges of a thought-out plot, even if it strains credulity. A Monarch Production, made at Gate Studios, Elstree, it begins with the eponymous song heard over the credits, followed by thanks to the War Office for its co-operation, with a Major J.M. Wilson listed as ‘Military adviser’. It is hard to imagine quite what the contribution of these can have been; presumably they were not in relation to the film’s narrative manoeuvres. There is also an early title asserting the fictional nature of the story, as if to ward off obvious potential for criticism. Hugh McDermott, a Scottish-born actor of Irish parentage, seems for no apparent reason to have very often played smooth and sometimes duplicitous Americans or Canadians in British films. In Lilli Marlene, as the action opens on a tank in the western desert of Africa, his voice is heard on the soundtrack as Steve, a US war correspondent talking of ‘someone who would become very dear to him’. That someone is Lilli Marlene, whose uncle ran a café in which Lilli helped until the fateful day when the Germans invaded the town – and the café. Lilli (Lisa Daniely) is accused of betraying her country, where her song has inspired German soldiers, but she insists: ‘Germany is the enemy of my country. I am a daughter of France.’ This stance will provide the basis for the film’s main convolution of plot: the nationality of the singer and the song is at the core of the film. Kidnapped by the Nazis, she is forced to broadcast for them. Between this action and her final triumphant return to the Allies at a post-war celebration at the Royal Albert Hall, when it is explained that she had not betrayed the Desert Rats but had in fact used her broadcasts to send out coded messages for them, the film ‘steers its way unevenly through a variety of implausible situations’, as one reviewer wrote at the time. 49 That is probably a fair assessment overall, but it is also fair to say that, in what is for Crabtree unusual territory, he keeps the film moving at sufficient pace to paper over the cracks of incredulity. Lilli’s dealings with the Germans may provide the framework for the film, but Leslie Wood’s screenplay fills the intervening spaces with the wartime exploits of Steve and other members of the Eighth Army, as they hurtle round North Africa in a captured German armoured car. There is also theatrical entertainment involving quite a lot of tedious badinage among the ranks (played by the likes of John Blythe and Crabtree regular Leslie Dwyer, always a stalwart of non-officer types) and the guest appearance of Richard ‘Stinker’ Murdoch as an egoistic theatrical type more interested in native girls and his own reputation

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than in entertaining the troops. This latter function is fulfilled by Lilli, who, as the concert hall is about to be invaded by German forces, sings ‘Bless ’em All’ and ‘We’ll Meet Again’. There is, of course, a burgeoning romance between Lilli and Steve when they fetch up in Cairo, where whom should they meet but Estelle Brody, the original ‘Mademoiselle from Armentières’ (the ‘Lilli Marlene’ of the previous war), and another woman who announces herself as Steve’s wife, Shirley (Barbara Cummings). Lilli weeps: ‘I never want to see you [Steve] again’, while Estelle reassures her that ‘that little tramp Shirley’ had divorced Steve three months previously. There is a lot more going on in Lilli Marlene, but the foregoing is enough to give an idea of a crowded scenario in which all is meant to reach an emotional climax at the Royal Albert Hall concert. Crabtree would work twice more with Lisa Daniely, in Hindle Wakes (1952) as well as The Wedding of Lilli Marlene (1953), and she plays with enough charm and authority to enlist the viewer’s sympathetic involvement. Whether or not she actually sings is uncertain – one source lists ‘Martha Tilton as Singer – Lilli Marlene (uncredited)’50 – but if Daniely never became a major star she certainly maintained a busy career, much of it on television, for the next forty years. McDermott lived only for a further twenty years but was an amiable, smooth-tongued presence in British film and television to the end. They make an acceptably engaging pair in Lilli Marlene, while Estelle Brody brings the star aura of an earlier era to her scenes, and among the supporting cast, apart from those mentioned, are such other stalwarts of the period as Michael Ward, cast against type as the Nazi agent who makes off from Cairo with Lilli, Carl Jaffe and Walter Gotell as dangerous propagandists and a very early appearance from an already commanding Stanley Baker as one of the Eighth Army types who surface from time to time. Josh Billings, in his ‘Reviews for Showmen’, assesses the film’s prospects as follows: Popular entertainment … is its sole aim, and, thanks to the successful debut of Lisa Daniely and Stanley Black’s expert handling of the music, it squarely hits its mark … The film is not a critic’s picture, and thank heavens for that! … [With its] surefire comedy, sentiment and rough stuff … and artfully embellished with catchy songs, it clearly proves that simplicity is the key to box-office success.51

The Wedding of Lilli Marlene (1953) Before turning to this sequel, also made for Monarch, Crabtree starred Daniely again in the remake of Hindle Wakes, more of which shortly.

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Where the 1952 Lilli climaxed at the Royal Albert Hall, with the heroine’s wartime record not just cleared but celebrated, the sequel opens there with an exterior shot of the building with concertgoers making their way inside. The film as a whole has the air of trying to exploit the nostalgia surrounding the legendary ‘Lilli Marlene’ and the success of the late-1940s hit-parade number ‘The Wedding of Lilli Marlene’. Screenwriter John Baines retained the fictional pairing of Lilli and Steve (again played by Hugh McDermott). Steve now wants to marry Lilli, whom he has not seen for over a year (what happened after their Royal Albert Hall reunion at the end of the earlier film?), but, perhaps in a gesture to the changing post-war times, the screenplay has Lilli refusing to marry until she has found a job. ‘All I can do is cook and sew and sing a little bit,’ she says, but Steve promises that he can get her back into show business. This he will try to effect through theatrical agent Finnemore Hunt (Sidney James, in what is for him a somewhat unusual role), and the rest of the film will prove to be largely what Monthly Film Bulletin dismissed as ‘this tedious picture of show business in London’.52 Without the intermittent excitement of the wartime action of the earlier film, this sequel becomes a contrived pattern of events that weigh up the attractions of marriage and career. These involve Lilli and Maggie (Gabrielle Brune), the vain star Lilli replaces when Maggie marries and leaves Hunt in a desperate situation with an opening night looming. When marriage does not give Maggie’s ego enough scope, she decides to return to the stage and to manoeuvre the less experienced Lilli out. After some quarrels and reconciliation with Steve, Lilli gets the best of both worlds: an opening night triumph followed by a joyous announcement of retirement and her imminent marriage to Steve. Troops from the Eighth Army are there to cheer both announcements and to sing the sequel song. David Quinlan’s terse dismissal of the film as ‘Long, stiff and tedious’ is perhaps a little harsh,53 but Crabtree made no further feature film for five years, picking up largely unrewarding television assignments – unrewarding for him, that is, even if the series he worked on certainly had their audiences.

Hindle Wakes (1952) Sandwiched between the two Lilli films was Crabtree’s second of three vehicles for Lisa Daniely. Stanley Houghton’s play, first performed in 1912, was rather advanced for its time in its treatment of a sexual affair and was also a great commercial and critical success. Crabtree’s film was the fourth film version of the play and there were also three television

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adaptations, one of which (the 1947 production) starred Wendy Hiller, whose much-respected name gives some indication of the continuing potency of the title. There had been two silent feature film versions, in 1918 and 1927, followed by Victor Saville’s 1931 adaptation, which boasted a cast headed by John Stuart (repeating his 1927 role as Alan Jeffcote), Belle Chrystall and Sybil Thorndike. So, in 1952, Crabtree was taking on a project with a past – and a popular and well-regarded one at that. It must have seemed potentially more rewarding material than, say, Don’t Ever Leave Me or the second Lilli would prove to be. Made again for Monarch, it gave Crabtree the benefit of a well-known title and a narrative with some substance in relation to matters of gender, class and sexual mores. Critical opinion would probably favour the Saville film, but the later version has the merits of clear-cut storytelling and credible character interaction. The plot’s main line of development can be summarised quite briefly. In the northern town of Hindle, Jenny Hawthorn (Daniely), a mill worker, goes with her friend Mary (Sandra Dorne) to have a good time in Blackpool for the Wakes Week break. After several attempts, initiated by Mary, to set them up with the available male talent, Jenny heads off for a week to Llandudno with Alan Jeffcote (Brian Worth), son of the mill owner she works for. In what may well have been very risqué stuff in 1930 (and is still rather advanced for 1952 film-making), she refuses on return to Hindle to marry Alan, who is ready to disengage himself from his fiancée but also does not really want tie himself to Jenny. Their two mothers are in their separate ways outraged: Mrs Hawthorn (a pre-Marple Joan Hickson) is furious at the prospect of scandal if there is to be no marriage, while Mrs Jeffcote (Mary Clare, repeating her 1931 role), snobbishly ensconced as the mill owner’s wife, is furious at the threatened loss of Alan’s socially upmarket fiancée (Diana Hope). The behaviour of the two mothers is offset by the more restrained responses of the two fathers, Chris Hawthorn (Leslie Dwyer) and Nat Jeffcote (Ronald Adam), who have been friends since they were millhands together and whose friendship has survived the class divide when Nat ascended to the heights of mill ownership. The 1932 version is a tougher piece of work, its director Victor Saville having perhaps a surer feeling for English provincial life than Crabtree had usually shown – or had the opportunity to show. Several of Saville’s later films, such as The Good Companions (1933) and South Riding (1938), would testify to such a view. However, Crabtree’s film, which follows the narrative trajectory of Saville’s to a surprising degree, depicts much the same spread of conflicts in matters of character. Both films open on images that suggest a world you might be grateful to escape for the

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Wakes Week holiday. Whereas Saville starts with pre-credits (and during-credits) imagery of working machinery in the textile mill, Crabtree offers a series of shots of steep northern streets (anticipating the British New Wave fondness for such images) giving way to a very striking aerial shot of the rooftops. These suggest a uniformity that might well strengthen Jenny and Mary’s wish to get away for a break. Both films then cut to Jenny’s home where her father, Chris, tries to offset Mrs Hawthorn’s sharp-tongued sallies, in one of which she tells him, ‘You have no get up and go in you.’ She warns Jenny to behave in Blackpool, before Crabtree cuts to the much posher home of the Jeffcotes, where the mother (Mary Clare in bossier mode than she assumed in 1932) tells her son that his frivolous mate George (Michael Medwin) is not a ‘suitable’ friend. By the time the two families have been introduced, the basis for further action is established and there are impressive long shots of crowds making their way to work or to the station on their way to Blackpool. Veteran cinematographer Geoffrey Faithfull does justice to both these crowd scenes and the more intimate moments of family conflicts – and to the vast shots of the factory in both working and silent mode. The crowd scenes actually recall Crabtree’s similar work on Carol Reed’s Bank Holiday (1938), so that one is tempted to see the director’s influence on the film’s visual style, interleaving shots of hordes of people on the move with the personal dramas in close-up and medium shots. Kinematograph Weekly felt: ‘The picture takes a little time to warm up – its initial Cook’s tour of Blackpool and Llandudno, although colourful and conducive to correct atmosphere, is somewhat repetitious.’54 Given their importance to the film’s drama – the different sorts of escape each represents – this seems a little severe, and the reviewer elsewhere allows that this ‘[d]own-to-earth romantic comedy melodrama … steadily builds to a frank and highly dramatic climax. At the same time, it proves that variety, as well as sex, is the spice of life.’55 There is much more visual appeal in Hindle Wakes than in Crabtree’s Lilli films, even though it does not evoke the North with the same intensity as the 1932 film, whose cameraman was Mutz Greenbaum. The dramatising of issues of class, though still raised in Crabtree’s film, is somewhat undermined by the casting of Lisa Daniely as Jenny. Whereas Belle Chrystall in the earlier film convincingly suggested the working-class daughter of the Hawthorne family, Daniely’s accent and fashionable appearance seem to belong to a class apart from her parents, so aptly played by Dwyer and Hickson. Class tensions are registered more persuasively elsewhere, such as when millhand Bob (Bill Travers), who has feelings for Jenny, takes exception to Alan Jeffcote paying

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attention to her in the Blackpool dance hall. Bob accuses Alan of pulling rank, gets angry and knocks him down. They are also registered in the friendship between the two fathers, which overrides not only Nat Jeffcote’s rise to management but also the snobberies of his wife who is doing her best to put her modest past behind her. As for gender-related matters, Crabtree addresses the relationship between Jenny and Alan with a frankness not all that common in the films of the early 1950s. Jenny agrees with surprising readiness to go off to Llandudno for a week with Alan, the sexual invitation being fully understood by her. She leaves a message for Mary, stating simply, ‘Alan and I are going away together.’ He books them into a hotel as Mr and Mrs A. Jeffcote, and the screen is filled with a rather stormy sea as they go off to bed. When after a while the Hawthorns have had no word from Jenny, her grim-faced mother accurately supposes: ‘She’s gone off with a chap’. What is interesting is the aftermath when Jenny, who appears not to be pregnant (showing this is not that old scenario of women ‘loving not wisely but too well’), refuses to marry Alan. She is allowed her independence here; the week away has been fun, but, anticipating more explicit feminist attitudes in later films, it is her decision not to marry – and he is more than happy to accede to her wishes. What is also interesting is the way in which the two fathers are depicted in a much more sympathetic light than their wives as they try to come to terms with events. When Hawthorn informs Nat Jeffcote of the situation, having been urged by his wife to insist that Alan be forced to marry Jenny, Nat, even when he learns that his son is the man Jenny has gone off with, affirms to Hawthorn, ‘I’ll see that you’re treated right’ – and puts his snobbish wife in her place by reminding her that she was a shop assistant when he married her. No one presumably will want to make great claims for Crabtree’s Hindle Wakes, but it does show him in control of material with some substance. The plot is tightly enough organised and provides a modest platform for airing some ideas that derive from it, and there is some genuine feeling for the northern ambience and the way such ideas might have been registered there.

The later 1950s Two strands emerge in this period of Crabtree’s career: the persistent, if unrewarding television work and a late-career sortie into the horror genre at a time when Hammer was beginning to corner the market, or at least to dominate commercially, in this area of British film

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production. There were several other modest programmers for Crabtree in 1957–58, including West of Suez (1957), Morning Call (1957) and Death over My Shoulder (1958), the latter two starring Keefe Brasselle, one of those minor Hollywood actors so commonly imported to bolster the commercial possibilities of British co-features. Monthly Film Bulletin had scarcely a good word to say about any of them. West of Suez got off most lightly: though ‘the story has many weaknesses, and the characterisation is thinly conventional … Above average camerawork shows off the Middle East backgrounds to good effect.’56 Death over My Shoulder fared less well: ‘Violence, sentimentality and lust are dispensed in more or less equal quantities, but are never more than tedious.’ There is, however, a minor word of praise for the ‘orthodox, competent performances’ of Bonar Colleano and Al Muloc.57 The entire review of Morning Call consists of: ‘It is rare to find a melodrama at once so conventional and so unconvincing as this British second feature’,58 the anonymous author finding no need to justify this dismissal with argument or evidence. Even more revealing, neither of the two popular fan magazines, Picture Show and Picturegoer, reviewed any of the three, despite the latter often having a special half-page devoted to the ‘Co-feature Programme’. All three films appear to have sunk without a trace, like their production companies – Winwell for the first two and Vicar for the third. Crabtree’s most notable film of this period is Horrors of the Black Museum (1959), but his preceding horror title is not without interest.

Fiend Without a Face (1958) Made at Walton Studios for the short-lived Producers Associates company, the film gets off to an atmospheric start. Like Death over My Shoulder, its star is another of those American actors who prolonged their careers, if not their reputations, by appearing in British ‘B’ movies or co-features. In this case it was Marshall Thompson, who had enjoyed a prolific, if unremarkable career in American films and television since 1944. His starring role here can at least be semi-justified by the fact that he is playing Major Cummings of the US Air Force, and the film is set in a remote area of Canada, though was actually made at Walton in the UK. The film’s credits are announced over a forest background scene and loud music. There is a long shot of industrial chimneys – a gun is fired and a dead man is revealed, and four planes are seen flying over. Cummings is uneasy about the local doctor’s explanation for this death (and others preceding), and, unconvinced by the coroner’s verdict

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9  Film poster for Fiend without a Face, 1958

of heart failure, refuses to let the matter drop. The locals are inclined to blame the American Army Experimental Station, which operates at the nearby air base and is working on secret radar research. They have Cold War suspicions of Russian intervention (perhaps thus anticipating 2016 apprehensions about US president Donald Trump’s connections) and in the 1950s this would certainly be regarded as sinister. The murdered man, Griselle, has been spying on the air base because the locals suspect that it is the effects of radiation emanating from the site that are damaging their cattle.

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Cummings, meant to be the voice of common sense, insists that there is a logical explanation for the deaths, asserting as he drives off with the dead man’s sister Barbara (Kim Parker): ‘We’re all human. We’re not monsters from outer space.’ The film will have news for him as it settles into sci-fi mode. If not from outer space, monsters of a kind will begin to make their presences felt, this motif in concert with fears of atomic radiation. Professor Walgate (Kynaston Reeves), a local scientist, is on hand to provide a variant on the ‘mad doctor’ staple of the horror genre. He has been busy inadvertently creating fiends who represent a species of invisible thought creatures, and the bodies of the dead are strangely found to have had the brain and spine sucked out. Cummings claims that these deaths are turning the townspeople against his work on reactors and radar patterns, and, when he takes this up with the professor, Walgate refuses to believe that it is a matter of supernatural powers at work. The creatures die when the power at the air base is turned off, but not before the film has displayed some quite innovative special effects. As one reviewer, not overly impressed with the film as a whole, wrote: What may give the film a special interest for devotees of the genre is the final scene in which the creatures, hitherto invisible, appear as mobile brains with proboscis projections and trailing tails.59

It may seem strange that Crabtree should turn to the horror genre late in his career, but he always had a penchant for the darker aspects of melodrama. In Fiend Without a Face he encouraged cinematographer Lionel Banes to render these creatures with real flamboyance, creating a genuinely eerie atmosphere with a lot of night work and quite impressive special effects. The film ends on a predictable clinch – Cummings, who has killed a creature, and the dead man’s sister having clearly been set up as a couple – and the performances are generally no more than adequate, although Kynaston Reeves gives some convincing authority to Walgate. He almost gives credence to the sci-fi nonsense he talks about ‘thought materialisation’, about how the new atomic plant at the air base gave him the power he needed: ‘I knew I had created a monster but who could I tell?’ There is too much exposition about how the creatures came into being, but aficionados have nevertheless found things to enjoy in it, as a quick look at the views of independent online reviewers testifies. One of these, placing the film in the context of its production period, writes in his review of the film’s DVD release: The creatures themselves are truly unforgettable. Disembodied brains with antennae and a wriggling spinal cord behind them must have

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been an eye-opener for impressionable youth in the 50s, and the stirring, bloody climax of the film was something unheard of at the time. In fact, the film was edited for violence in both England and the United States, and banned outright in several other countries. Compared to films today the violence is certainly tame, but it’s not difficult to see why audiences (and reviewers) were disturbed by the content in a pre-Blood Feast world.60

However, this reviewer, in a detailed account of the film, also describes Crabtree’s direction as ‘flat and pedestrian’. This view is supported by the presence of some rather over-talkative scenes, but to Crabtree’s credit he brings real flair to bear on some of the big horror moments – and his next feature would show him in much more confident control of the genre.

Horrors of the Black Museum (1959) Re-viewing this film, produced by Herbert Cohen at Merton Park studios, twenty years after my first viewing, and specifically in the context of Crabtree’s career, I am struck by the sheer proficiency of its story-telling. I dimly recall the outraged responses that greeted its release in May 1959, and am reminded of this by the following comment from former Chief Film Censor John Trevelyan, who wrote in his memoir: ‘In 1959 we had problems with a film called Horrors of the Black Museum, which was not a standard horror film but which seemed to me both sadistic and nasty.’61 Whether there is such an entity as ‘a standard horror film’ is open to debate. David Pirie wrote about the film in 1973 under the heading of ‘Sadian Movies’, linking it with Sidney Hayers’ Circus of Horrors and Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom (both 1960), claiming that Crabtree, ‘a Gainsborough veteran … inaugurated this particular cycle with a glossy catalogue of tortures called Horrors of the Black Museum’.62 Cinematic sadism has undoubtedly come a long way, but the opening episode still has the power to shock, even if it is far from being as graphic as many a horror film since. This opening sequence has a special place in the lexicon of cinematic horror, but on re-viewing I found that, alarming as it is, it lingers less over images of bloody brutality than I remembered. Opening on a busy London street scene, the camera settles briefly on a red General Post Office van, which stops outside a seedy terrace where a postal worker delivers a parcel to a cheerful blonde, Gail (Dorinda Stevens). The parcel contains a gift – a pair of binoculars, which Gail, admiring what she takes to be their expensiveness, puts to her eyes. When she does so, spikes emerge from them,

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piercing her eyes and brain, and she drops down dead before the appalled gaze of her roommate, Peggy (Malou Pantera). This is frightening stuff, certainly, but it is all over in a very few minutes and the camera registers only the emergence of the spikes and Gail’s blood on the floor without lingering over any aspect. And it does not need to: Crabtree has made his point about the shocking arbitrariness and cruelty of the gift – he has no need to bombard us with further grisly information. It is as striking an entrée to a horror film as I can recall, not because of sadistic attention to nasty detail but because of what it leaves to our horrified imaginations. The film’s central character is a crippled crime journalist, Edmond Bancroft (Michael Gough), whose next book is to be called The Poetry of Murder and whom we first meet when he appears as an unwelcome visitor in the police station office of Superintendent Graham (Geoffrey Keen). He is making enquiries about the Scotland Yard Black Museum (of which he proves to have his own much grislier reproduction) and about the killings of young women in the last few weeks. He insists that he never publishes anything that is not true, but it is clear early on that Bancroft is not just a tenacious journalist after a story. His doctor (Gerald Anderson) shortly after tells him that ‘after each murder you go into a state of shock’, so that we now must consider why he is so concerned with these murders, which are described by the police commissioner (Austin Trevor) as ‘the work of a brilliant maniac’. It is the Bancroft protagonist that holds the film together, and the character is convincingly developed as an obsessive, totally controlling, as is seen especially in his dealings with his young assistant, Rick (Graham Curnow). Rick may at first seem an ordinary young man with a pretty girlfriend, Angela (Shirley Anne Field), but he is utterly under the control of Bancroft who injects him with some kind of obedience drug to ensure that he never deviates from his master’s will. This of course leads to him performing some of the murders, including the decapitation of Bancroft’s discarded mistress, Joan (June Cunningham). But it is not clear until the climax at a funfair that Joan’s murderer was Rick, curiously disguised. Suddenly, his youthful face takes on the ravaged older surface that recalls the head appearing above Joan’s bed, but this time his victim is Bancroft. He throws himself from a high Ferris wheel and buries an antique dagger from Bancroft’s Black Museum in its owner’s heart. There is some imagination in the staging of the murders. For instance, Bancroft himself kills antique dealer Aggie (Beatrice Varley) when she threatens to blackmail him. She expects to see him after each murder and demands a large sum for a pair of tongs that she suspects he is

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10  Michael Gough in Horrors of the Black Museum, 1959

planning to put to use. So he does – but on Aggie herself in her old junk shop. The scenes between Bancroft and Aggie are written with some sly humour as they engage in what seems at first good-natured banter, such as when he tells her, while discussing the recent murders, ‘Until the murderer runs out of younger victims you’re safe enough’. Her sardonic reply is ‘You give a woman confidence’. The screenplay by Herman Cohen and Aben Kandel is at its best here, and Gough and Varley (in an uncharacteristic role) make the most of it, while Desmond Dickinson’s camera prowls the shop to sinister effect. Horrors of the Black Museum is a much more accomplished film than Crabtree’s previous venture into horror territory. It is genuinely alarming, and not just because of the modest but vivid special effects (for example, Rick’s sudden return to his youthful face as the police close in on him at the fair, or the electrocution of Bancroft’s doctor,

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whose body is tipped into an acid bath and is soon after dragged out as a skeleton). Horror film effects certainly made remarkable progress in later CGI-dominated times, but in this film’s 1959 context they still exact the appropriate frissons. Photographed in colour and CinemaScope by the highly accomplished Dickinson and with art direction by C. Wilfred Arnold, who could boast a similarly long record of experience in assorted genres, the film has a much more lavish sheen to it than was the case with Fiend Without a Face. Most important, though, is the central performance of Michael Gough, who makes a compelling figure of Edmond Bancroft. His grip on the role encourages the viewer to wonder what motivates Bancroft. Is it his physical disability that is, as the doctor wonders, ‘driving him from a sane and normal place’? In a fight with his mistress, she grabs his cane and taunts him: ‘Without your cane you’re only half a man; without money you’d be no man at all.’ Why does Rick obey him? How has he established a hold over the young man? When we see Rick with Angela, she wants him to stand up to Bancroft, but Rick can only say, helplessly, ‘I feel I must do as he says’. Gough would of course become famous much later in his film career as Alfred the butler in the Batman films (1989, 1992, 1995, 1997), but his Bancroft is imbued with an apt ambivalence and charisma, and is worth remembering – and re-viewing. His sparring relationship with Keen’s Superintendent Graham early in the film offers touches of wry wit in such exchanges as that in which Graham says: ‘In every war the historian [here read ‘journalist’] receives more money than the foot soldier.’ Bancroft replies: ‘Not a bad line. Do you mind if I use it?’ In a characteristically patronising review, Monthly Film Bulletin writes: ‘It makes the merest nod towards medical jargon, never attempts to penetrate Bancroft’s obsession, and gains any persuasion it may have from the Eastman Colour-and-CinemaScope trappings rather than from Michael Gough’s conventional portrait of menace’, allowing only that ‘the scriptwriters have judged rightly in allowing their monster at least the appearance of a man’.63 Hammer had embarked on its most famous horror phase a couple of years earlier, and maybe Crabtree was influenced by the success of The Curse of Frankenstein (1957), his own film suggesting more than a touch of the Frankenstein motif in Bancroft’s dealings with Rick. In Horrors Crabtree showed enough command of the genre to make one wish he had found further opportunity to exploit this – and certainly enough to make one query Pirie’s assessment: ‘Crabtree’s direction is unashamedly blatant, lingering over the prosecution of each crime with the maximum enjoyment and making the most out of every sexual innuendo.’64

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Crabtree never made another feature and, apart from an episode of Stryker of the Yard (1961), his film-making career was finished. His career certainly had waned in the earlier 1950s, but the two horror films, especially the second, might well have kept him busy for another decade.

Bottom of the barrel – television It is sad to see such a competent craftsman – and at his best rather more than that – reduced to churning out episodes of such ingenuous fare as The Adventures of Sir Lancelot and The Adventures of Robin Hood, which was Crabtree’s fate in the later 1950s. These need not detain us long here. There is no gainsaying the popularity of such series in their time, but watching examples of them now it is hard to believe that many of their viewers were out of short trousers. Both series begin each episode (at least, those that I have been able to see) with what were no doubt seen as ‘rousing’ theme songs. There is plenty of action – swordplay, of course – and there is usually a damsel in some sort of distress. (What feminists would have made of them is beyond conjecture.) In ‘The Magic Sword’ (1956), for instance, it is Lancelot’s (William Russell) task to rescue Lydia (Nora Cheyney) from imprisonment and restore her to her lover, Sir Bernard (Dan Cunningham). All of this is accomplished with the help of Merlin (Cyril Smith), who has earlier recounted the tale of Lancelot and the Lady of the Lake. In the denouement, twenty minutes later, Lydia will seem to re-enact this legendary moment. William Russell makes an athletic if rather incongruously modern Lancelot, and he is supported by a typical roll-call of British character actors (George Woodbridge, Frederick Treves, etc.), but like their director they have little chance to show their mettle. There is an attempt to provide a moral touch when Merlin talks of ‘the human magic’, the confidence that Bernard needs to acquire. There is a comparably moral message about trust in ‘Roman Wall’ (1956), which again involves the rescue of a young woman (Jennifer Jayne), who, it is believed, has been kidnapped by a ghost. This episode involves a wildly improbable scuffle as Lancelot scales the eponymous wall and overpowers several guards. Just for a moment it looks as if a modern, maybe feminist notion is going to be espoused when Iolta claims she has ‘no wish to be rescued’, but naturally it all ends when Lancelot, armed only with a short knife, defeats a villain brandishing a lance. It is possible to watch these and wonder how a former cinematographer of Crabtree’s standing could

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have been content to (or constrained to) allow such simple-minded fare to be filmed with so little redeeming visual flair, even if it was not possible to do much about their narrative content. Contrary to this negative account, a 1999 source described the series as: ‘Lavishly photographed [and using] specially commissioned research from Oxford University to ensure the accuracy of its 14th-century settings.’65 Perhaps I saw the wrong episodes. Writing about the Robin Hood series, the same source was again more enthusiastic than I felt on re-viewing, but this time it does at least temper its praise by suggesting that the series was ‘not quite up to the swashbuckling standards of Hollywood’s 1938 cinematic The Adventures of Robin Hood’, while allowing that ‘Lew Grade’s wholesome version of the noble exploits of England’s legendary 12th-century outlaw kept a young TV nation glued to its sofa.’66 But does ‘young TV nation’ refer to child viewers, or to a nation only recently accustomed to television? From the opening soundtrack (‘Robin Hood, Robin Hood, riding through the glen’, the last word of course designed to rhyme with ‘merry men’), no doubt meant to be rousing, Crabtree’s episode, ‘The Vandals’ (1956), moves swiftly enough to sustain attention. Indeed, its plot (screenplay by C.D. Phillips) contains more varied action than the Lancelot episodes referred to above. It begins with a dead body being wheeled past; the Sheriff of Nottingham (Alan Wheatley) claims Robin Hood – ‘an outlaw and a murderer’ – was responsible. He is not, of course, but there follows plenty of swordplay and other action involving a corrupt baron, as well as a party at which Robin (Richard Greene) charms Lady Irina (Ingeborg Wells), to account for that 1950 audience being ‘glued to its sofa’. Greene played Robin throughout the entire run of 143 episodes, from 1955 to 1959, the series coming at a time when his career as a star of feature films was waning. The same might be said of Crabtree in the mid-1950s: he would have a brief return to notice in the (already discussed) two horror films later in the decade, but his work in such television series as Lancelot and Robin Hood enabled him at least to keep his hand in when the dominant genres of the mid-part of the decade – wartime heroics or bland domestic comedies, for example – may not have seemed to offer him much scope.

Notes 1 Nicholas Wapshott, The Man Between, London: Chatto & Windus, 1990, p. 110. 2 Ibid., p. 112. 3 Duncan Petrie, ‘Innovation and economy’, in Pam Cook (ed.), Gainsborough Pictures, London: Cassell, 1997, p. 126.

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4 Wapshott, p. 142. 5 Interview with Phyllis Calvert, in Brian McFarlane, An Autobiography of British Cinema, London: Methuen and BFI Publishing, 1997, p. 110. 6 Interview with Michael Denison and Dulcie Gray, in McFarlane, p. 173. 7 Petrie, ‘Innovation’, p. 126. 8 Jeffrey Richards and Dorothy Sheridan (eds), Mass-Observation at the Movies, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1987, p. 15. 9 For example, Sue Harper’s essay ‘Art Direction and Costume Design’, in Sue Aspinall and Robert Murphy (eds), Gainsborough Melodrama, BFI Dossier 18, London: BFI Publishing, 1983, pp. 40–52. 10 Pam Cook, ‘Melodrama and the women’s picture’, in Aspinall and Murphy, p. 23. 11 Robert Murphy, Realism and Tinsel: Cinema and Society in Britain 1939–48, London: Routledge, 1989, p. 50. 12 Duncan Petrie, The British Cinematographer, London: BFI Publishing, 1996, p. 87. 13 K.J. Donnelly, ‘Wicked sounds and magic melodies: Music in 1940s Gainsborough melodrama’, in Cook (ed.), Gainsborough Pictures, p. 163. 14 Lionel Collier, ‘Shop for your films’, Picturegoer, 20 January 1945, p. 12. 15 Calvert, in McFarlane, p. 110. 16 Andrew Spicer, Typical Men: The Representation of Masculinity in Popular British Cinema, London: I.B. Tauris, 2001, p. 12. 17 Murphy, p. 50–1. 18 Calvert, in McFarlane, p. 110. 19 James Mason, Before I Forget, London: Hamish Hamilton, 1981, p. 81. 20 A view shared by co-star Phyllis Calvert (in McFarlane, p. 111). 21 Quoted in Michael Denison, Overtures and Beginners, London: Gollancz, 1973, p. 196. 22 Murphy, p. 52. 23 Anthony Aldgate and Jeffrey Richards, British Cinema in the Second World War, Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986, p. 162. 2 4 Tony Williams, Structures of Desire: British Cinema, 1939–1955, Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000, p. 41. 25 Calvert, in McFarlane, p. 111. 26 Phyllis Calvert, ‘This is what I want’, Picturegoer, 23 June 1945, p. 6. 27 Brian McFarlane, ‘Googie Withers and Phyllis Calvert’, in Melanie Bell and Melanie Williams (eds), British Women’s Cinema, Abingdon: Routledge, 2010, p. 69. 28 Sue Harper, Women in British Cinema, London and New York: Continuum, 2000, pp. 45–6. 29 Donnelly, p. 161. 30 Murphy, p. 122. 31 Williams, p. 48. 32 Petrie, British Cinematographer, p. 131. 33 Elliot J. Huntley, Dennis Price: A Tribute, Sheffield: Pickard Communication, 2008, pp. 56–7. 34 Kinematograph Weekly, 27 May 1948, p. 16. 35 Lionel Collier, ‘Shop for your films’, Picturegoer, 3 July 1947, p. 12. 36 ‘The fortnight’s films’, Picture Show, 12 July 1947, p. 10. 37 Geoffrey Macnab, Searching for Stars, London and New York: Cassell, 2000, p. 152. 38 Sunday Chronicle, 30 May 1948. 39 News Chronicle, undated cutting in the Performing Arts Collection, Arts Centre, Melbourne.

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40 Kinematograph Weekly, 27 May 1948, p. 18. 41 Sydney Box, The Lion That Lost Its Way, edited by Andrew Spicer, Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2005, p. 71. 42 Lionel Collier, ‘Shop for your films’, Picturegoer, 20 November 1948, p. 16. 43 W. Somerset Maugham, ‘The Kite’, in The World Over, London: William Heinemann, 1934, p. 625. Available at: www.unz.org/Pub/MaughamWSomerset-1934v02 (accessed 20 March 2018). 4 4 Andrea Kon, ‘This Is My Song’: A Biography of Petula Clark, London: W.H. Allen, 1983. 45 Andrew Spicer, Sydney Box, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006, p. 124. 46 Monthly Film Bulletin, August 1949, p. 136. 47 The Observer, 24 July 1949, quoted in Spicer, Sydney Box, p. 124. 48 Kinematograph Weekly, 21 July 1949, p. 18. 49 Monthly Film Bulletin, January 1951, p. 205. 50 ‘The Wedding of Lilli Marlene (1953)’, IMDb (website). Available at: www.imdb.com/ title/tt0046536 (accessed 14 November 2016). 51 Kinematograph Weekly, 9 November 1950, p. 34. 52 Monthly Film Bulletin, March 1957, p. 35. 53 David Quinlan, British Sound Films: The Studio Years 1928–1959, London: B.T. Batsford, 1984, p. 398. 54 Kinematograph Weekly, 23 October 1952, p. 22. 55 Ibid., p. 21. 56 Monthly Film Bulletin, May 1953, p. 77. 57 Monthly Film Bulletin, January 1958, p. 5. 58 Monthly Film Bulletin, January 1958, p. 7. 59 Monthly Film Bulletin, January 1959, p. 5. 60 ‘Fiend Without a Face (1958)’, Movie Feast (online blog). Available at: http:// moviefeast.blogspot.com.au/2008/06/fiend-without-face-1958.html (accessed 20 March 2018). 61 John Trevelyan, What the Censor Saw, London: Michael Joseph, 1973, p. 159. 62 David Pirie, A Heritage of Horror: The English Gothic Cinema 1946–1972, London: Gordon Fraser, 1973, p. 99. 63 Monthly Film Bulletin, May 1959, p. 59. 64 Pirie, p. 101. 65 Jon E. Lewis and Penny Stempel, The Ultimate TV Guide, London: Orion Books, 1999, p. 15. 66 Ibid., p. 14.

Bernard Knowles

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Like Crabtree, Knowles had a long career as a cinematographer before making his debut as director in 1945, a year after Crabtree but at the same studio. His record as a cinematographer began in 1927 and he had racked up forty-three credits in this role in the ensuing seventeen years, emerging as a major practitioner with a record of making directors’ work visually interesting and lighting stars – ‘the money’ – in such ways as to make them look their glowing best. He had a run of popular films as director in the late 1940s, but, arguably, his filmography as a cameraman is the more impressive, at least in its prolificacy but also perhaps in its range of achievement.

Lighting Hitchcock and others One of the earliest of his 1930s films available for this study is The Good Companions (1933), adapted from J.B. Priestley’s novel. Director Victor Saville, abetted by cameraman Knowles, shows real visual flair in this film, which is full of genuine charm and vitality, as it deals with three unhappily constrained lives finding new momentum through the concert party of the title. Saville was right to trust to Jessie Matthews’s star power, and Knowles lights her to maximum advantage, capturing her liveliness and openness to experience. In two contrasting montage sequences early in the film he catches its sense of ‘the North’ (chimneys and factories and terraced houses) and ‘the South’ (mainly pastoral), for which the protagonists hanker. In these – and later montages depicting the company on the road (or rail) – Knowles colludes eloquently with Frederick Y. Smith’s editing to articulate visually the exhilaration of Susie’s (Matthews) journey to stardom. Like Arliss (as screenwriter) and Crabtree (as cinematographer), Knowles also did time with some of the 1930s comics. In his next

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three films, all for Gainsborough, it fell to him to minister to the essential idiocies of three vehicles for Jack Hulbert, whose silly persona is now not easy to warm to. In the first of these, Falling for You (June 1933, co-directed by Hulbert and Robert Stevenson), Knowles was already exhibiting the behind-camera skills that would make him a sought-after cinematographer for the next decade. His contribution is felt from the opening vistas of snowy Alps as the camera pans to skiers, waiting for one lone skier (Hulbert) to come into sight. And there is a look of hand-held camera as Minnie (Cicely Courtneidge) hurtles down the slope through the hotel window to end up sitting at a table, a neatly executed bit of camera sleight of hand. There are some moments of absurd invention and Knowles’s cinematography (along with Alex Vetchinsky’s sets) confers a gloss at an appropriate remove from reality. Jack Ahoy (February 1934) and The Camels Are Coming (October 1934) are the other two Hulbert pieces, the former directed by Walter Forde, written by Leslie Arliss and having little to distinguish it. There are some noticeable contributions from Knowles’s sometimes imaginative cinematography and Alfred Junge’s art direction, as they work to tell us about being on shipboard or in a submarine or in China, and so on. The Camels was directed by American Tim Whelan, who worked often in England, especially in the 1930s, taking on such ultra-British leads as Hulbert and Cicely Courtneidge. Here, the cinematography credit is shared by Knowles and Glen MacWilliams, whose long career as a cameraman dated back to 1918. The two contrive to give a convincing fake-newsreel look to the opening scenes about drug-trafficking in Egypt, and, once the more or less idiotic story gets going with Hulbert being sent to investigate, it is not hard to see why it was apparently Hulbert’s first critical flop.1 There was, apparently, location filming in Egypt and the camera duo actually catch some quite impressive shots of stretches of desert, with a particularly well-lit episode of a camel train trudging through changing light to mark the passage of time. Whether the pyramids and sphinx are part of the location work or merely model replicas, they are persistently well shot, and overall the camerawork is more than equal to the absurdities of the plot and the lighting of Hulbert and co-star Anna Lee. Knowles’s next lighting job was on Walter Forde’s Forever England (1935) and this represents a real advance, giving him some of his best opportunities in the 1930s, much more than he had found in the preceding three Hulbert escapades. In collusion with Otto Ludwig’s often imaginative editing, he makes the film visually interesting. When Elizabeth Brown (Betty Balfour) and Lieutenant Somerville’s

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(Barry Mackay) respective horse-drawn cabs clash in the night street, they go off together in hers, with Somerville suggesting they go on to Romano’s for supper. At this point the driver’s face peers through the cab’s roof and the camera dissolves from this to the pair sitting at a restaurant table. This is artfully done and anticipates a good deal of obvious intervention from the cameraman in the interests of fluent story-telling. The glittering night seascapes, with images of a darkened ship against a pale sky and silvery water, and young Brown’s (John Mills) escape to a rocky island and its ensuing invasion by German sailors are filmed with real dexterity, as is a sea battle whose visual texture seems influenced by Battleship Potemkin (1925). Sandwiched in between Hulbert and Hitchcock, as Duncan Petrie points out,2 Knowles was also engaged on two of the most ambitious productions made at Shepherd’s Bush, namely Jew Süss (1934, Lothar Mendes) and Rhodes of Africa (1936, Berthold Viertel), which obviously offered serious challenges. In the former, Knowles is credited with ‘Lighting’, Roy Kellino with ‘Camera’. Between them they shot a range of skilfully lit crowd scenes, whether set in schools, streets or ballrooms, as well as the contrasting lighting required of, say, a dim ghetto dwelling or the luxurious chambers of Süss’s mansion. One is often struck by the adept singling out of faces in otherwise crowded settings. In Rhodes of Africa, as well as the evocatively rendered montages of, for example, the quotidian activities of digging, washing, and turning handles, there is also a secure sense of place, contriving to suggest that the film had moved out of the studios. Rachael Low writes: ‘Background material had been shot in Africa in 1934 by the unit under Geoffrey Barkas’.3 It was then Knowles’s function to integrate this footage with his own. But Knowles’s 1930s work is now most prominently associated with the five films he shot for Hitchcock, and this no doubt exercised him as little else had. Part of the effect of exhilarating adventure in The 39 Steps (1935) is due to his capacity to render action over wildly shifting landscapes as well as in more intimate interiors. Not that Hitchcock was a director noted for sharing credit with his collaborators, but even an inferior work such as The Secret Agent (1936) benefits from Knowles’s contribution, and this is much more so the case with Sabotage (also 1936). In The Secret Agent his lighting informs an empty street with a sense of threat in the opening moments, as do the close-ups of a hand holding a crucial button. In different mood and mode, he can capture the gaiety of Tyrolean dance in a restaurant or the workings of a vast chocolate factory (Switzerland), the workers at which are about to be evacuated. But the situation in Sabotage is even more positively

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in Knowles’s favour. There are marvellously evocative close-ups of, say, a light bulb preceding a long shot of a night street, then back to the light bulb going out, as do the lights all over London, when obvious landmarks are silhouetted. No doubt Hitchcock knew what he wanted, but in such cases as these it was Knowles who procured it for him. And there is a nicely achieved sense of busy streets, even though all were shot in the studio, and an imaginative shot as Verloc (Oscar Homolka) fantasises about the crumbling of Piccadilly Circus. When the boy is sent off with the fatal parcel, our apprehensions are strengthened by the close-ups of the package under his arm or on a bus seat, interspersed with close-ups of clock hands ticking away and a long shot of the traffic jam that will cost the boy his life. On his next lensing for Hitchcock, Young and Innocent (1937), he pulled off some very striking effects. In the quarrel between film star Christine and husband Guy during the opening sequence, the camera closes in on his twitching eye, as his slapping of her is echoed in the thunder in the night outside. This of course is recalled in the famous crane shot near the film’s end in the ballroom of the Grand Hotel when the camera comes to rest on the twitching eye of the murderer. Over fifty years later, Peter Graham Scott, who played the fourteen-year-old boy with the message to deliver to the man, recalled: ‘There were no zoom lenses in those days: the camera had to travel all the way, slowly gliding down on its huge cumbersome crane arm, complete with camera operator and focus-puller to the final dramatic moment of truth.’4 Apart from these virtuoso effects, Knowles also brought a refreshing quality to the film’s chiefly rural settings and, in the scene prior to Robert’s (Derrick de Marney) infiltration of the doss house, there is a striking suggestion of darkness closing in as the film moves towards its climax. Knowles’s last film for Hitchcock was Jamaica Inn (1939), on which he shared the cinematography credit with the widely experienced American cameraman Harry Stradling Jr. Knowles’s name appears after and in slightly smaller print than Stradling’s, so that it is difficult to know how much credit belongs to Knowles for the wild seascapes as waves lash against smuggling vessels and rocky cliffs loom ominously over all, or for the contrast with the manorial splendour of Sir Humphrey’s (Charles Laughton) house, or for doing justice to the exquisite freshness of debut-making Maureen O’Hara’s beauty. The Mikado (1939) is important in Knowles’s filmography as it is his first brush with Technicolor, which he would not deal with again until, as director, he made The Man Within eight years later. On The Mikado, his camera operators were his younger brother Cyril, who would

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often repeat this function on Knowles’s films as cameraman, and Jack Hildyard. Knowles’s camera here does justice to the engaging frolics that make up the Gilbert and Sullivan scenario. Not for a moment does any notion of reality intrude, and the camera moves in and around the fanciful sets with a fluidity unthinkable on stage. Directed by Victor Schertzinger, American veteran of musicals and other genres, the film has a stylish sheen and gaiety, as well as an ease in moving between crowds and individuals that suggests Knowles was wholly at one with the – for him – new medium. As Duncan Petrie writes: ‘He was one of the first British cameramen to light a Technicolor film, The Mikado, for which he was given special recognition for technical achievement by the American Academy.’5 In his extraordinarily prolific output – he shot no fewer than eight films released in 1941–42 – Knowles brought his skill in rendering atmospheric threat to four war thrillers: Anthony Asquith’s Freedom Radio (1941) and three directed by Harold French, namely The Day Will Dawn (June 1942), Unpublished Story (August 1942) and Secret Mission (October 1942). Brother Cyril was again camera operator on all four. The war films offered Knowles challenges different from those he had faced in earlier work. He creates a visually arresting sense of threat and danger in Freedom Radio, with eloquently framed interiors of, say, luxurious Nazi headquarters or a church that is invaded, mid-sermon, by German soldiers. More intimately, he imbues a swastika armband with the required sense of menace, or the protagonist Karl’s (Clive Brook) moral quandary with a montage of his wife’s face, troops, burning buildings, street fighting and loudspeakers at their job. Asquith’s films were not always so visually fluent. In Unpublished Story, there is a striking montage of an air attack on London, rubble falling as the camera pans the opening crack in a high wall, and this kind of lighting in Secret Mission renders potently the night landing on the French coast of the four British agents, just as a series of explosions defines the perilous situation in which they find themselves. None of these is a great film, but they all look impressive in Knowles’s collaborations with production designers and editors. Knowles obviously worked well with Asquith and French, as he went on to make other films with them, mainly in lighter modes. For Asquith, he shot French Without Tears (1939), Quiet Wedding (1941) and The Demi-Paradise (1943), all popular films in their day but less dependent on Knowles’s flair for atmospheric lighting; for French, there were also three comedies, namely Jeannie (1941), Talk About Jacqueline (1942) and English Without Tears (1944). For all six of these enjoyable entertainments (and there is sometimes more at stake than this), Knowles achieves an

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appropriate sunniness, even if they make less demand on his other skills. Actors, in particular, had reason to be pleased; for instance, he captures the radiant beauty of Penelope Dudley-Ward in The Demi-Paradise and English Without Tears with such luminous freshness that one wonders that she did not have a longer career in film. Of the four directors with whom this study is concerned, Knowles had acquired arguably the most distinguished record in the decade or more before their mid-1940s directorial successes got under way.

Taking charge Like Arliss and Crabtree, Knowles began directing at Gainsborough with R.J. Minney as his producer and Maurice Ostrer as executive producer, the latter having remained a force at the studio after his falling out with Edward Black caused Black to leave. Most of Knowles’s popular films of the decades are bookended by the Gainsborough lady’s smiling nod of the head.

A Place of One’s Own (1945) There are plenty of films that take as a starting point the idea of a house in some measure haunted by its previous occupants. In 1944, for instance, the US film The Uninvited, set in Cornwall, directed by British-born Lewis Allen, co-written by English author Dodie Smith and derived from Irish writer Dorothy McArdle’s novel, had explored this territory with some success. Behind it and A Place of One’s Own is the notion that, when people quit a house they have lived in for years, they may leave some sense of themselves behind. And the result is not necessarily in the horror vein of, say, The Old Dark House (1932). Writing from another point of view about a batch of British films at this time, including Ealing’s The Halfway House (1944) and Dead of Night (1945), Robert Murphy reflects that: ‘Death became an everyday experience for most people during the war and it is not surprising that there should have been an upsurge of interest in spiritualism and the supernatural.’6 A Place of One’s Own is based on a 1940 novella by Osbert Sitwell, who collaborated on the screenplay with Brock Williams, and who was notably interested in paranormal phenomena. An engaging thematic element of the film is its willingness to accept that there is more to life than rationality can account for. As an article in Picturegoer suggested:

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From ex-cameraman Knowles we might expect something special in the way of photographic trickery in A Place of One’s Own, but the director felt that the public was tired of mechanical tricks and that it was a more intelligent way of treating the supernatural to suggest it rather than by visual manifestation.7

A closer look at the film will bear out the suggestion that A Place of One’s Own reflects a cinematographer’s sensibility at work in its direction. In terms of context, A Place of One’s Own also of course belongs in the loose generic category of Gainsborough melodramas. It shares with these not merely some of their actors but also the high standard of production design and lighting that marked its contemporaries. Moreover, as the first film directed by one who had established a high reputation as a cinematographer, it is not surprising to find it such a handsome film to look at. From its opening moments, when the camera takes in an imposing country house and garden, to the accompaniment of a romantic score, the film looks and sounds like a Gainsborough film of the period. It was shot by Stephen Dade, who would become a Gainsborough regular, and scored by Hubert Bath, who was composer on two of the studio’s other successes, Love Story (1944) and They Were Sisters (1945). That opening image of the house is more than just setting. It is appropriate that the film begins with it, as everything of consequence in the film’s narrative is anchored to it and to the dealings of people with it. The long shot of its façade is followed by a hoarding over which is plastered the word ‘SOLD’; this gives way to a close-up of a hand signing a document of sale, writing ‘Henry Smedhurst – 1900’. On buying the house, the elderly Smedhurst (James Mason) says that he and his wife had always wanted ‘a place of our own’ after forty years in the drapery business in Leeds. Bellingham House has been empty for a long time and local gossip has built up around its abandoned status. When Mrs Smedhurst (Barbara Mullen) arrives, she proves more sensitive than the down-to-earth Henry, as she quietly claims, ‘Houses are more than bricks and mortar’. Her point of view seems to gather some evidence when a woman’s voice is heard on a speaking tube, part of the house’s internal communication system, saying what sounds like ‘Send for Dr Marsham’. So, a mystery – why the house has been so long empty – is set up at the outset and the film’s narrative movement will be partly concerned with Henry coming to accept his wife’s intuition. The next crucial stage in the film’s plot involves the arrival of a pretty young woman, Annette Allenby (Margaret Lockwood), who is applying for the position of companion to Mrs Smedhurst. Asked what led her to come, she replies enigmatically, ‘I felt I’d have to come if you

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engaged me.’ Mrs Smedhurst feels that Annette is ‘what this house needs – youth, laughter, gaiety’. What actually transpires will prove to be at some remove from this. The screenplay chronicles the Smedhursts’ social position in such a way as to give the film another kind of substance than might be expected of the haunted-house genre. They are regarded as ‘new money’, as being of dubious acceptability. At a dinner party to which they have invited their rather snooty county neighbours, Major and Mrs Manning Tutthorn (Michael Shepley, Helen Haye) and the Tutthorns’ nephew Dr Selbie (Dennis Price), the differences are dramatised, with Mrs Tutthorn in particular looking down her nose. There is talk of the ‘ghost’, which is supposedly Elizabeth Harkness, the attractive young daughter of the previous owner. Elizabeth, we learn, fell in love with the doctor who attended her and was found dead, leading to gossip of murder. Dade’s camera glides round the room when, after dinner, Annette plays the piano before stopping abruptly as if possessed. Fleeing the room in tears, she later tells Selbie, who is drawn to her, that she had never played the piece before, that it was as if someone ‘desperately lonely and unhappy’ had taken her over. In the first third of the film, Knowles, abetted by Dade, Bath and production designer John Elphick, builds up a genuine and carefully understated strangeness, which gains from the sympathetic ordinariness with which the Smedhursts are drawn. It may not have pleased James Mason’s fan base to see him ‘in a make-up which has both a touch of Carlyle and Livingstone in it’,8 playing a character at considerable remove from the fascinating brutes that had made him a household name. In fact, Mason himself had asked to play the elderly retiree, at the expense of the ‘absurd degree of popularity’ he had achieved, and thought of the film as a flop.9 However, as the bluff, sceptical, self-made man who has done well in ‘trade’, he delivers one of his subtlest performances, and he is admirably matched by Barbara Mullen’s quietly astute performance as his gentle-mannered but more perceptive wife. Between Smedhurst’s early comment that ‘Things don’t happen without cause’ and the final acceptance that there is more at work in the world than mere ‘common sense’, the cause of and freeing from Annette’s obsession with the house and its past are unfolded with gently persuasive authority in Knowles’s direction. The climax comes when Annette calls for Dr Marsham, in which role Ernest Thesiger glides in, as if more spirit than flesh, emerging from Annette’s room after the consultation, saying, ‘She’ll be quite well in the morning’. But was he there or not? Next day a police inspector reports him as having arrived dead from London the previous night. While Monthly Film

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Bulletin complained that: ‘No attempt is made to explain these mysterious events’,10 it could be argued that the film’s aim is indeed to accept the notion that some things cannot be rationally explained, and this chimes with its pervasive tone of acceptance. Smedhurst comes to echo his wife’s earlier remark about houses being more than bricks and mortar, and laughs as his wife nudges him about repeating her words. Kinematograph Weekly concludes its account of the story with: ‘At last, the doubting Mr Smedhurst believes there is something in the theory that the spirits of the dead can haunt the living.’11 The film is not concerned with the more usual, clear-cut closure of most of the Gainsborough melodramas, choosing to end on a more reflective note – even if this did account for A Place of One’s Own’s not rivalling those others at the box-office. With Lockwood and Mason in the public mind as the dangerously passionate stars of several of these, not only was Mason’s appearance in an elderly character role a shock to his fans but the romantic pairing of Lockwood and Dennis Price, who drive off to a happier future at the end, may well have seemed lightweight compared to what audiences had come to expect of the studio. As Price’s biographer notes: ‘Clearly fans felt short-changed by this particular Mason/Lockwood teaming. Although Lockwood is credible as the possessed girl, fans simply couldn’t come to terms with Mason’s transformation and Price was still too diffident in his second movie to prove an acceptable replacement … when he was asked to play the sweet-natured nice guy, Price was anodyne, faceless, unmemorable, a damp squib.’12 That may be a little hard on Price, but certainly his Selbie makes the least impression of the star roles in the film, which, as usual in the Gainsborough melodramas, has a cast full of enjoyable character players such as O.B. Clarence, Muriel George, Ernest Thesiger and Edie Martin. Special mention might be made of Dulcie Gray, who played the maid without resorting to stereotype or patronage. Decades later she said of her performance: ‘I think the powers-that-be may have been a little shocked at my playing the “below-stairs” character without turning it into a caricature.’13 Surprisingly, C.A. Lejeune, who often adopted a superior stance in relation to such films, called it a ‘fine piece of work’.14 For once, the critic may have been more perceptive than her audience.

The Magic Bow (November 1946) Given the responses of the stars of The Magic Bow to the proposed life (to use that term loosely) of Niccolò Paganini, celebrated violin virtuoso

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of the early nineteenth century, it is surprising that it got made at all – or that it is not worse than it is. Stewart Granger recalled: ‘To my horror I learned that my next film was to be the life of Paganini … I rushed into the producer’s office and held out my hands’, claiming, ‘These aren’t the hands of a violinist – they’re the hands of a boxer.’15 Phyllis Calvert, as the woman he comes to love, was equally outspoken in her distaste for the project: ‘I tried to get out of it, it was the last thing I wanted to do … I didn’t want to do it, it was absurd – I made more laughs out of that film than any other.’16 And Jean Kent, playing Paganini’s mistress, Bianci, believed it was ‘a film that went wrong. Originally I believe they wanted Margaret Lockwood to play [Bianci]. Presumably then it would have been a much better part.’17 This is borne out by Dennis Price’s biographer, who writes: The film was originally due to reunite James Mason and Margaret Lockwood … While Mason was no longer under contract to Gainsborough and could therefore afford to be choosy [and pulled out], Lockwood was not so fortunate. Lined up to play Bianci, effectively a supporting role to Phyllis Calvert’s gentlewoman, Lockwood went over Ostrer’s head and solicited a sick note from Arthur Rank. Rank agreed and she was replaced by Jean Kent.18

So, one of the last films at the Studio before Sydney Box took over got off to a most unpropitious start. Biopics of celebrated composers and other musicians were a not uncommon feature of popular cinema back in 1940s, usually without letting historical authenticity get in the way of a star vehicle. One that comes to mind in relation to The Magic Bow was the tosh-fest A Song to Remember (1945), directed by Charles Vidor, with rising star Cornel Wilde as Chopin and the ever-gorgeous Merle Oberon as the object of his passion, novelist George Sand. Other titles such as Rhapsody in Blue (1945) and Song of Love (1947) made box-office success from the lives of, respectively, George Gershwin and Robert Schumann, but The Magic Bow has more in common with the Chopin film. Like the latter, it places its protagonist’s personal story in a context of historical upheaval, though audiences would not have been likely to see in it either the results of or contribution to historical research. There is an opening narrative title to The Magic Bow that proclaims: ‘While Napoleon’s armies were conquering Europe, there lived in the Italian port of Genoa a musical genius destined to conquer the world.’ In terms of style, both films employ a montage of place and performance to indicate a European progress, a characteristic 1940s mode of narrative compression.

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The Magic Bow’s opening titles seem to solicit our respectful attention to the film’s credentials. After announcing that it is derived ‘From the famous novel by Manuel Komroff’ (could this be a way of suggesting that what follows might not be a wholly factual account?), the audience is informed that ‘Violin solos’ are performed ‘by Yehudi Menuhin, accompanied by the National Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Basil Cameron’. Further information in these titles includes the names of Paganini, Beethoven and Tartini as providers of the film’s ‘Music’, along with Phil Greene’s ‘Romance’, composed for the film. Given that the ensuing credits relating to actors and behind-camera personnel are also presented on what appear to be a series of elegant silver platters, it is as though Knowles and producer R.J. Minney are preparing viewers for a classy entertainment. It does not take long to disabuse us of any such idea. As Granger wrote: ‘The script wasn’t about the real Paganini at all, just a romantic story in which the leading man happened to play the violin.’19 If accepted in this way, the film is entertaining enough. Even if it is not one of the better Gainsborough melodramas of the mid-decade, it draws on the kinds of contrast that made the genre so popular. From the outset Niccolò Paganini is presented as an arrogant, impetuous young man from a humble background, with a fiery mistress, Bianci (Jean Kent). When an aristocratic young woman, Jeanne de Vermond (Phyllis Calvert), hears him playing she engages him to play at midnight to comfort her father, Count de Vermond (Henry Edwards), who is in gaol for some political crime. In fact, she wants the violinist to provide a covering noise that will render inaudible the Count’s attempts to saw away the bars of his cell. The two young women are contrasted from the start, as are the respective backgrounds of the parents of Paganini and of Jeanne, her mother (Marie Lohr) being especially conscious of her superior status. Apart from the meeting of Paganini and Jeanne, the other narrative starter is provided by Signor Fazzini (Felix Aylmer), who is offering a Stradivarius to anyone who can play his composition on sight. Paganini does so, of course, and subsequently heads off for Parma – on foot, having given the money paid him by Jeanne to his mother (Mary Jerrold). Stopping off to play along the way, he attracts the attention of a lawyer, Luigi Germi (Cecil Parker), who proposes a partnership. Jeanne’s family, for no very clear reason, is also in Parma and she invites him to play before ‘powerful and influential’ friends at a reception her mother is hosting. Among the film’s many improbabilities, Bianci is also singing at this occasion, from which Paganini storms off, followed by Jeanne and fuming that ‘The admiration of fools is an insult’. (Why Kent’s

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Bianci is allowed to speak with an accent while all the other major players use their native English is never explained.) The (vestigial) political element resurfaces during Paganini’s first large-scale concert where he is playing Beethoven and Mozart. The theatre’s agitated manager hears that French troops are marching on the city’s outskirts; the audience grows understandably restive and starts to move as soldiers enter the hall. These are led by Paul, Vicomte de la Rochelle (Dennis Price), who smiles, pays his respects to Paganini and leaves, but his presence completes the film’s starring quartet. He will pay court to Jeanne, and if she marries him this will guarantee her father’s safety. Price, it may be noted, displays no hint of French-ness – as Huntley writes: ‘the script is forced to make mention of England having treated de la Rochelle well, to explain away his English sangfroid’.20 Calvert’s Jeanne is in the tradition of Gainsborough’s morally pure women who find themselves caught in serious emotional conflict. Once again, she contrives to suggest a sort of reality in spite of some crass dialogue, and, as in Crabtree’s Madonna of the Seven Moons, she is contrasted with the earthier, more obviously sexy Jean Kent as Bianci. Both had become somewhat trapped in stereotypical roles, with Kent’s character losing out to the higher-born other. Just as Kent’s Rosal lost Granger to the ladylike Oriana (Anne Crawford) in Crabtree’s Caravan, here Bianci begs Jeanne to come to the aid of Paganini when, after a foolish duel with Paul, he has lost heart. ‘You’re the only person who can help us,’ she urges Jeanne, adding nobly, ‘I love him enough to risk losing him.’ The film then moves to a climax in which Paganini is honoured by the Pope, no less. During the recital for His Holiness, Jeanne improbably leaves her front-row seat, followed by Paul, to whom she tells of her love for Paganini. ‘You’re infatuated with this fiddler,’ Paul says, and in the film’s last moments Paganini and Jeanne move tentatively towards each other – as we have expected for some time. There is no point in applying rigorous critical standards to the plotline of this piece. It is manufactured as a star vehicle and within these limits Knowles keeps the piece moving briskly. The stars do what is required of them: Granger and Price are as clearly contrasted as the two women, though there is a reversal of types in their case, with the swaggering, impetuous Granger figure winning the well-born Jeanne, displacing the more elegant Price persona. There are enjoyable performances from supporting players such as Cecil Parker, Marie Lohr, Felix Aylmer and Betty Warren, who make the most of what touches of character and wit the screenplay offers. Parker’s Germi describes Paganini’s weapon for conquering Parma, his Stradivarius, as ‘a shapely

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piece of wood and the intestines of a cat’, and Lohr’s countess berates daughter Jeanne with: ‘You talk like a woman of the people’. Crowd scenes, whether in theatre or streets, are skilfully managed, and Jack Cox’s cinematography renders these with appropriate long, wide shots, just as he creates a vivid montage of a gaming table with close-ups of a clock, roulette wheel, hands, coins and chips. Cox had learnt his trade – or, rather, his art – in the same decade as Knowles, and it serves him well here, as indeed he also serves John Bryan’s art direction. This is a film in which notable names work to make the best of some often dauntingly unlikely material. Monthly Film Bulletin complained that: ‘The story is merely the vehicle for carrying the magnificent playing of Yehudi Menuhin. Unfortunately, much of the fine music is reduced to very brief excerpts, time and time again a theme being interrupted to fit in with the story, rather than being continued to completion.’21 Well, it is a film, not a concert. Perhaps the best account of the film’s dealings with the music comes from K.J. Donnelly, who gives a detailed listing of the sequences of musical performance, the distribution of music credits and recalls how the film’s ‘press book states: “Selling this film to the public is a pushover if you concentrate on the stars and the music”.’22 Despite Granger’s reluctance to make the film, he manages – at least to the non-specialist eye – a convincing enough display of musical proficiency, a fact that Picturegoer picked up on, praising his fingering as ‘extremely efficient’.23 Picture Show, which featured the film on the cover, gave it no stars but felt that ‘the musical interludes are a feast to music-lovers’.24 The matter of class, regularly raised in the Gainsborough output, is interestingly treated here in relation to classical music. As Donnelly points out, other films such as The Seventh Veil and Brief Encounter (both 1945) had popularised classical piano pieces, but what is different here is that, ‘unlike these two films, The Magic Bow did not equate classical music with the middle classes; rather, it attempted to win back such music for the masses’.25 This is borne out at the Countess de Vermond’s soirée by the guests chattering and the old man snoring through Paganini’s performance, which Jeanne has organised to promote the virtuoso. It is not that the film is radical about class in general: the well-born Jeanne will, of course, displace Bianci in the hero’s affections, but the hero is depicted as belonging to a lower social level. However, as Tony Williams has noted, writing of Granger’s roles in Caravan and The Magic Bow: ‘The male achieves a higher status, allowing him to gain a female above his station’, adding that his Paganini gains ‘also incorporation into the establishment via a knighthood granted by the Pope, before whom he performs in the Vatican’.26

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The film performed satisfactorily at the box-office, in spite of a critical mauling for the most part, though later commentators have been more open to what it may have to offer in matters other than historical accuracy. Whereas C.A. Lejeune found it ‘a slow, shiny, genteel, unimaginative piece of work’ and the Daily Graphic summed it up as ‘a luxuriantly dressed period piece, totally incredible and of a banality so complete it is almost impressive’,27 Robert Murphy offers a more balanced judgement. He acknowledges that, ‘As history the film is nonsense, but as melodrama it is very satisfying’, and praises the Calvert–Granger romantic starring combination: ‘Clichéd though it is, Calvert’s handling of the scene where she asks Paganini to play for her while she steadies herself to leave him forever, for example, is superb.’28 Again in relation to Calvert’s role, Sue Harper writes that The Magic Bow along with The Wicked Lady and Caravan illustrated a common attitude to their female protagonists: ‘All these films contained females who risked everything for emotional fulfilment.’29 And elsewhere Harper has found in the film a ‘defence of popular culture … Here the violinist Paganini is emphatically a proletarian whose artistry is free of polite constraints.’30 It is possible that a more receptive reading of The Magic Bow might have revealed a little more substance than contemporary reviewers were prepared to allow. Issues of class and gender underpin its extravagant surface and Knowles’s direction shows his awareness of these in his deployment of his cast and his other collaborators. It is not his finest hour, but there is still plenty of evidence of his capacity to keep a narrative moving fluently – and to make it resonate with the times of its production.

The Man Within (1947) This was Knowles’s first experience, as director, with Technicolor, as it was also for producer Sydney Box, and part of the film’s quality is in Geoffrey Unsworth’s restrained use of colour. Knowles had of course had Academy recognition for his contribution to the colour cinematography on The Mikado. Derived from Graham Greene’s novel of the same name and with a screenplay by Sydney and Muriel Box, The Man Within is a strange and compelling tale of innocence corrupted, of trust and betrayal. Its bland US title, The Smugglers, seems to suggest a simple-minded adventure and to rob the film of its complexities, as was so often the case with transatlantic title tamperings. Though filmed at Gainsborough Studios, Shepherd’s Bush, The Man Within is not officially a Gainsborough production; it was Box’s first film after taking

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over the studio but the film does not feature the Gainsborough lady and the opening credit is simply ‘A Sydney Box Production’. With this, his third film as director, Knowles is still working in the larger category of costume melodrama but at a considerable sub-generic move from A Place of One’s Own and The Magic Bow. Though made at Gainsborough Studios, it resonates differently from the run of films that made the studio’s trademark famous in the mid-1940s. No doubt the Technicolor helps to distinguish The Man Within from Knowles’s two previous productions for the studio, but it is also, within its adventurestory framework, a film of some moral and character subtlety, to which a mere outline of its plot manoeuvres would not do justice. ‘There’s another man within me that’s angry with me,’ quoting from Sir Thomas Browne’s seventeenth-century philosophical classic Religio Medici, is the film’s opening title. This at once alerts us not just to the source of Greene’s and the film’s title but also to the idea that we may be in for something more confronting than an adventure melodrama might usually lead us to anticipate. The acting of Richard Attenborough in particular will justify this promise, which the sombre musical soundtrack behind the quoted title also induces. We also recall Greene’s recurring preoccupation with moral dilemmas, with lies and truth, right and wrong. Attenborough is first seen as young Francis Andrews, being brutally tormented with a red-hot poker and being interrogated by a prison officer (Ralph Truman), who demands to know: ‘When did you first see Carlyon?’ In this exchange, what will prove to be the film’s chief relationship is introduced, and it initiates a flashback to Andrews’s schooldays, with Attenborough looking convincingly youthful. In terms of structure, the film’s narrative is unfolded through a half-dozen flashbacks; a slightly less fractured approach arguably might have increased its momentum, but this is not a major concern – the film’s holding power is in the interplay of character and the issues cited above. In the first flashback, Andrews is seen running to the headmaster’s study where he is given the news that his father has died and that Andrews is to be placed with his new guardian, Richard Carlyon (Michael Redgrave), who has replaced the father as captain of the sailing ship ‘The Good Chance’. ‘I hated my father. I’m glad he’s dead,’ Andrews says angrily as he is left with Carlyon. He tells Carlyon that the other schoolboys have bullied him for reading the Song of Solomon and Carlyon’s odd reaction to this at once alerts us to a strange feeling between the two men. Their relationship will seem to founder on betrayals of trust, but, as Robert Murphy points out, ‘despite the presence of the two women [played by Joan Greenwood and Jean Kent], the real

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love affair is between Andrews and Carlyon’.31 This will become apparent as we explore the film’s coming to terms with Andrews’s tormented growth from cowardly youth to young man just possibly set on the path to more confident adulthood, though such an account could be held to oversimplify the film’s narrative trajectory. ‘I left school that afternoon and I was never so glad to leave anywhere.’ Andrews hated the other boys and the masters, but on board Carlyon’s ship, which proves to be engaged in smuggling, he finds the shipboard bullying even worse than what he had endured at school. These details from the film’s earliest moments set Andrews up as a victim of difficult circumstances in which his only respite comes when Carlyon allows him to read in his cabin while Carlyon plays the flute. In this way, it seems that Carlyon is being presented as Andrews’s protector, a calming influence in what has been for the boy an essentially cruel world. But now that he has found himself aboard a ship engaged in the smuggling trade, such innocence as he has maintained will be under serious strain. These early scenes between Andrews and Carlyon seem both to dwell on father–son conflict and to be characterised by a curiously homoerotic element. His father had been at sea on Carlyon’s smuggling ship, and a shipmate dismisses Andrews as ‘not much like his father’. This father had ill-treated his wife, had other women and been popular with the ship’s crew. When Andrews complains to Carlyon, ‘Everyone despises me because I’m not like my father’, Carlyon gently tells him, ‘I don’t despise you’, to which Andrews replies, ‘Well, you’re the only one who doesn’t.’ Sydney and Muriel Box’s screenplay comes near to spelling out the feeling between the two men. Andrews comes to regard Carlyon as a mentor, ‘the sort of man I’d have chosen for my father … He’d give you one look with those blue eyes and he’d make you do anything for him.’ Redgrave’s Carlyon, with penetrating but benignly staring eyes, seems ever to be suggesting more than the screenplay, unsurprisingly, fails to spell out. In the second stage of the flashback structure, Andrews records how he came to realise the ship was engaged in smuggling brandy from France. He is accused of the theft of four casks, in a framing perpetrated by crew member Cockney Harry (Ronald Shiner), who has planted the money from their sale in Andrews’s pocket. Carlyon has ordered twenty lashes to the culprit but commutes this to ten when he believes this to be Andrews, justifying this because Andrews is ‘only half a man’, when in reality it is out of concern for the boy. In his cabin later, he tries to dress the lashes, but Andrews furiously rejects his ministrations and soon after runs off into the night.

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This flight into the fog-shrouded night is brilliantly caught in Geoffrey Unsworth’s muted, evocative cinematography. Working almost entirely on what seems a limited palette, he captures not only Andrews racing blindly through difficult terrain but also renders the pervasive sense of the cloudy area between trust and betrayal that is at the heart of the film’s thematic agenda. When Carlyon’s men scuffle with the law as they unload their illicit cargo, Andrews observes the scene from a distance, watching as Carlyon is caught, and flees further. The men believe Andrews has betrayed them, but Carlyon does not want to believe this. In voice-over, and the film makes considerable use of this, Andrews is heard saying, ‘For two days after that Carlyon haunted me’, with the sound of Carlyon’s flute pursuing him like a lover. This strange, undefined bond is another aspect of the film that Unsworth’s visual flair seems to underscore, just as potently as it registers the pursuit of Andrews through misty terrain. Perhaps the narrative could have been more straightforwardly unfolded, but, given its complexities and the uneasy allegiances it deals in, the move back and forth in time comes to seem like another way of articulating these. On the whole, Knowles has chosen to eschew conventional suspense: there always seems to be more at issue than whether Andrews or Carlyon will be caught. In the episode in which Andrews takes refuge in a church where the parson (Felix Aylmer) allows him to hide in the vestry, he is aware of someone outside. ‘Something made me open the door,’ his voice-over confides (presumably still allied to the interrogation episode from which the flashbacks devolve), and, unobserved, he sees Carlyon outside. ‘I don’t know what it was, but I felt I had to open it.’ So, even here, expectations of suspense melodrama are thwarted, as they are when he subsequently finds himself at a lighted cottage. Here, just as he falls on the floor, he hears a woman’s voice ordering him to ‘Stay where you are’ as she points a gun at him. He unarms her, but the real interest is in the tone he adopts towards her: it is the bullying tone adopted to one in a weaker situation than his own, in which he had been long accustomed to the role of bullies’ victim. ‘You’re completely in my power,’ he tells her. He sleeps but dreams of trying to strangle Carlyon whose image dissolves into that of the woman, Elizabeth (Joan Greenwood), who is trying to wake him, and in such moments Knowles’s long experience behind the camera may well be at work in guiding Unsworth in creating this ambivalence. In pursuing the motif of parent–child relations, Elizabeth’s stepfather, shot by the smugglers, is about to be buried, and Elizabeth – accused by a sanctimonious farmer (Herbert Lomas) of having had more than paternal relations with him after her mother’s death, of being ‘a loose

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beesson’ – passes Andrews off as her cousin. He accompanies her to the church, where Carlyon and others see him and cause him to take flight once more. And this is really the narrative pattern of the film: we are prepared for melodramatic suspense, and then other interests take over. In this flight, the colour photography (quite different in tone from most of Hollywood’s use of colour at the time) again proves one of the film’s great strengths, sometimes, as in the funeral scene, giving the film a look of old paintings. As Murphy writes: ‘the film has little in common with the earlier Gainsborough melodramas. Geoffrey Unsworth’s Technicolor photography gives a completely different atmosphere to the film and its mood of gloomy foreboding is accentuated by the Boxes’ convoluted narrative structure.’32 On return to Elizabeth’s cottage, Andrews tries to frighten her with threats such as ‘You’re quite alone’ and ‘I can do as I like’, but also embraces her, adding, ‘I shouldn’t have done that, I apologise’ – this strange film is full of men saying unusual things. They are interrupted by Carlyon’s arrival, the latter warning Elizabeth not to shelter Andrews, ‘a sort of Judas’. But Elizabeth taxes Carlyon with: ‘Are you sure you’re not running away from someone too?’ Andrews comes out of hiding when Carlyon leaves, and tells Elizabeth the story of his father and Carlyon: ‘I worshipped him’. So why did he betray him? ‘Only after he did me a bitter injustice. Now I hate him.’ Elizabeth then recounts her own difficult life, including the aforementioned farmer’s belief that she had taken her mother’s place with her stepfather. It is echoes and parallels of this kind that account as much for the film’s interest as the more usual demands of a plot involving pursuit, capture and escape. Elizabeth taunts Andrews with cowardice, doubting whether he is brave enough to inform against Carlyon and the smugglers, and even taunting him with being afraid of her. The opening line of the Picture Show review at the time ran: ‘An outstanding performance from Richard Attenborough as a cowardly weakling dominates this film.’33 This is true, as the actor creates a very good sense of aging from frightened schoolboy to bullied shipmate, moving through various cowardly acts, until he gains an awareness of his own growing capacity to call the shots and, eventually, to earn the following assessment from Carlyon: ‘You’ll never be a coward again … I’m proud of you.’ There is still some distance to go before this little final accolade, but it does account for much of the film’s substance. In this drama of a young man needing to find himself, there is an interlude with Lucy, the mistress of Sir Henry Merriman (Basil Sydney), who will bring the smugglers finally to court. In a pub in Lewes, Andrews imagines he sees Carlyon’s face in a mirror, drinks too much, and in talk of

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the assizes and the smugglers who are to be bought to trial insists that only he has the necessary evidence. Merriman claims that all he wants is for Andrews to give the evidence that ‘these men landed and that you were with them’ or be handed over on charges of smuggling and murder. Lucy, played by Jean Kent with real assurance and a style oozing sexuality, flirts with Andrews and accuses him of running away.34 His night of tormented sleep is marked by images of his conflicting feelings for Lucy and Elizabeth, before dissolving to the courtroom the next day, where he points out and names the men who were his former shipmates, faltering only over Carlyon’s name. When he later wakes, Lucy tells him the men were all acquitted and temptingly removes her negligee, but he is afraid, telling her: ‘There’s someone outside’. It is Carlyon, now acting as a sort of father figure. He had planned to kill Andrews, but decides that the boy, who has been a coward all his life, has this time, for once, not given way. Carlyon’s view of him is far more crucial to the narrative than either of his romantic/sexual adventures. In the final flashback, Andrews finds Carlyon sitting in Elizabeth’s cottage (sometimes the actual sequence of events could be clearer) with a gun. He tries to persuade Carlyon to leave to avoid arrest, asking him, ‘What do you want with me?’ At the film’s end, back to where Andrews is being interrogated, Carlyon is brought in in chains. Andrews, refusing to identify him, sobs, ‘I’ve told everything I know’. Under threat of the hot iron, he tells the interrogator that he had found Carlyon at the cottage, and in ‘a lying flashback’ Carlyon and Elizabeth are depicted as lovers. Bare-chested to each other, Andrews falls against Carlyon who delivers the accolade mentioned above, adding: ‘You’ve paid your debts. You’ve got a new life’, and Andrews’s reply is: ‘I don’t know what I’ll do without you.’ Thus ends what now seems a very strange film for the period. It is at some remove from the tradition of the Gainsborough melodramas; it is much more literary, much more concerned with the interior life (as indeed Greene’s title would lead one to expect), much less concerned with a clear-cut sequence of cause-and-effect related events. Events that look like providing narrative climaxes of that sort often prove to have been included with other matters in mind instead. The Man Within was Graham Greene’s first novel, published in 1929 ‘with inexplicable success’, in the author’s own words.35 Reading it nearly eighty years after it first appeared, I do not find its success seems inexplicable at all. It tells an absorbing story of trust and betrayal, and cowardice reclaimed; in addition, it raises some interesting reflections on the way Knowles and the Boxes approached their source material. I would take issue with Monthly Film Bulletin’s rather patronising

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comment on the film’s treatment of Greene’s book: ‘This rather flamboyant film in Technicolor has its moments, but seems to have managed to dispose of a large number of the subtleties to be found in the novel.’36 The film has its own subtleties, especially in the acting of the two male stars and in the cinematography. Two major matters command the viewer’s attention. First, whereas the film is unfolded in a series of flashbacks, with Andrews recalling the encounters and flights that have been the subject of his life in the three years leading up to the present, Greene chose to place him from the outset in Elizabeth’s cottage where he gradually reveals the tormented facts of his life. From there he will go to Lewes where he will testify at the assizes about the smugglers’ trading and murder. This is a much more linear approach than the film adopts, but, utterly readable as it is, it is not necessarily more engrossing than the film’s more fragmented procedures. Second, Greene makes much more of Andrews’s sexual appetite and how this conflicts with other urges in his dealings with both Elizabeth and Lucy. This aspect of his anguished flight is not ignored in the film, but the latter emphasises the homoerotic tension between Andrews and Carlyon much more tellingly. Was there another British film (or a Hollywood one for that matter) at the time that draws attention to such sexual ambivalence? In this issue, the film parts company with the novel where the emphasis is on Andrews finding a father figure in Carlyon, and of his finding something of his own father in himself. What both novel and film have at heart is the idea encapsulated in their shared title, the source of which is actually given on screen at the outset of the movie. In the novel, Andrews thinks of the man within as his ‘inner critic’, who complicates his responses at certain key moments. This is spelt out quite early in the book: ‘Andrews’ character was built of superficial dreams, sentimentality, cowardice, and yet he was constantly made aware beneath all these of an uncomfortable questioning critic.’37 The film renders Andrews’s divided feelings about Elizabeth, Lucy, Carlyon and, indeed, the whole business of his life, through other than such verbal means, most notably through Attenborough’s finely honed performance. As Andrew Spicer’s astute account of the film says: ‘Carlyon is another divided man, able to instil respect and even fear in the crew but also cultivated, enjoying literature and music.’38 Knowles’s film may well have posed some serious challenges to audiences accustomed to a very different kind of product from the Gainsborough production house. Whatever the virtues – and they are considerable – of the hugely popular costume melodramas of the

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mid-1940s, they are much more straightforward in their often adroitly structured narratives and less given to the kinds of introspection that The Man Within deals in. The Boxes made several other historical dramas, though none of the genre was a commercial success, including the disastrous Christopher Columbus (1949) and The Bad Lord Byron (1949), nor were any as atmospherically potent as The Man Within. Spicer rightly draws attention, in this respect, to the production design of Andrew Mazzei, with ‘meticulous attention given to authenticity’, and Unsworth’s ‘subtle Technicolor cinematography … which lends a sombre, brooding tone to the whole piece’.39 The film does not seem to have been very well received in 1947. Lionel Collier’s Picturegoer review felt that its thematic dealing with how Andrews ‘finds his soul and his confidence … is largely negatived by the fact that it is produced in a blood and thunder manner and suffers from an excessively narrational treatment’, going on to opine that ‘it is told too, rather irritatingly in flashback form’. 40 Like his colleague at Picture Show (and like most other reviewers at the time), he does grant that Attenborough is ‘extremely good’. The Boxes reportedly had serious misgivings about how the film would be received and these were not misplaced, with Sight and Sound finding it ‘a sort of introverted freak with no apparent purpose and aimed at no clearly defined audience’. 41 But, even if it failed to find large audiences, it did attract some perceptive reviews that applauded its intelligence and readiness to break with the popular traditions of historical melodrama. The Spectator, for instance, characterised it as ‘a curious and disturbing film, not easy to analyse, creaking a little at the joints, yet at moments most engrossing’.42 Decades later, this latter comment comes nearest to my sense of the film’s achievement. Robert Murphy, writing fifty years after the film’s release, admired the ‘excellent cast’ but felt that, ‘Unfortunately, there was a lack of consonance between Muriel Box’s script and Bernard Knowles’s direction, and the film is shapeless and unsatisfactory.’43 The trade paper Kinematograph Weekly at the time was more positively disposed towards both the screenplay and the direction: ‘The hero is the inhibited, hypersensitive son of a bold bad buccaneer and his conversion from mouse to man, described by him while he is being subjected to grievous torture, is the crux of the arresting and novel screenplay … while the direction, apart from slight initial hesitancy, displays a firm grasp of fundamentals … the only thing against it is that it demands filmgoers shall use their heads.’44 If not enough did so at the time, it now seems a film worthy of extended consideration; its enterprise may just exceed its achievement, but that may no doubt be said of many films.

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Jassy (1947) Adapted from Norah Lofts’s popular novel, Jassy, Gainsborough’s first film in Technicolor, whatever its other virtues, is another example of Geoffrey Unsworth’s exquisitely subtle camerawork, 45 a subtlety that is not at odds with certain bolder effects as shall become clear. It was Unsworth’s second collaboration with Knowles, and, indeed, it was their second film released in the same year, coming just a few months after The Man Within. Perhaps Knowles’s own history as one of the most proficient cinematographers of the 1930s helped to ensure the visual distinction of these films. One is alerted to this in the opening shot of the imposing house, Moderlaine, which dissolves from the night-time façade to its daytime equivalent. This adroitly achieved effect introduces at once the importance of the house in the unfolding action and motivations of the film, which is, in this respect, redolent of A Place of One’s Own. Like all of the Knowles-directed films to this point, it exploits its melodramatic narrative to register socially significant matters of class, ownership and gender, and draws attention to the ways in which the conventions governing their place in society can be subject to change. ‘Does it seem foolish to you to love a house so much?’ asks Barney Hatton (Dermot Walsh), the camera having moved inside the great house to where men are sitting at a gaming table. Gentleman Christopher Hatton (Dennis Price), Barney’s father and the owner of the house, dices unsuccessfully with Nick Helmar (Basil Sydney) and ultimately loses Moderlaine to the vulgarian upstart. Barney and his mother (Nora Swinburne) are forced to retreat to a cottage ‘so miserably small’, where they still maintain the services of a loyal housemaid, Meggie (Jean Cadell). Christopher Hatton, unable to bear his change in status and his own burden of guilt in bringing it about, shoots himself behind a closed door in the cottage. Barney, riding in the neighbouring community, rescues a gypsy girl, Jassy (Margaret Lockwood), and brings her to the cottage where his mother maintains what is left of her class background by interviewing Jassy as a prospective domestic help. This includes inspecting her hands and nails to make sure they are in a suitable condition. Given Jassy’s social situation as daughter of a humble farmer/preacher, Tom Woodroofe (John Laurie), and a gypsy woman who has left the scene, her accent is surprisingly refined, but maybe even this is making a point about class, a task with which these opening episodes are much preoccupied. Jassy not only becomes the embodiment of class and gender issues but her function in the convolutions of the plot is complicated by her

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psychic perceptions. Early in the film, Helmar, now the owner of Moderlaine, is confronted by farmers on his estate. Jassy’s father has cautioned them against violent acts such as rick-burning, but it is he who bears the brunt of Helmar’s rage, and, at a crucial moment, Jassy screams as she intuits her father’s death. The film does not really need this as a plot device, nor does it add much to an understanding of Jassy, though if one is not too constrained by realist notions it might be seen as a metaphorical depiction of the sort of power she will come to wield. When she and Barney fall in love – represented in a lyrical montage of walking, riding on a hay cart, picnicking – Mrs Helmar decides that Jassy will have to leave the cottage. She sends her with a reference to Miss Twisdale’s school for young ladies, where the headmistress (Cathleen Nesbitt) engages her as a domestic. One of the students is Dilys Helmar (Patricia Roc), who revolts against the school and runs away, taking Jassy with her to Moderlaine and dressing her in scarlet finery before presenting her to Nick Helmar. In this image, Unsworth’s delicately controlled palette now makes a striking comment on what the future may hold in store for Jassy. She may promise Nick to ‘let bygones be bygones’ in relation to the death of her father, but by now the film has revealed enough of Jassy’s character to expect more of her than merely the demure friend of his daughter. Further conflict is implied when Jassy and Dilys visit the Hatton cottage and, in a well-contrived shot, Knowles registers them as being in competition for the favours of Barney Hatton, who is awkwardly flanked by the two women. In a small reversal of expectations based on their earlier films, Lockwood’s Jassy moves towards being a woman of character and integrity, while the usually blameless Roc persona is here given a devious twist: her Dilys has an eye to what will most benefit her, including marriage to Edward Fennell (Grey Blake), son of one of her father’s titled friends. Jassy’s love for Barney motivates her to marry Nick Helmar, who has long since got rid of his wife, Beatrice (Linden Travers), whom he had found in the embrace of a lover. Helmar is increasingly depicted as a man with no redeeming features. His gaming with Christopher Hatton led to the loss of Hatton’s home and also motivated Hatton’s suicide; he also killed Jassy’s father, giving both she and Barney reason to hate him. Brutality has thus cut across class, and this is reinforced by meek Lindy (Esma Cannon) having been whipped into muteness by her father. Unable to speak, and now established as a servant at Moderlaine, Lindy has become a hidden observer of all that goes on in the house.

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The class issue, as in all of Knowles’s Gainsborough melodramas (and indeed of his next film, The White Unicorn, made for another studio), is a persistent source of interest. It may be the ever-interesting topic of British fictions on page or screen, but in the Knowles films it is in fact treated with a blatant and invigorating lack of respect for the conventional constraints. Helmar may be an opportunistic, boozing vulgarian, but the Hatton whose estate he usurped is a feeble and dissolute character as well. Mrs Hatton’s attempts to maintain a vestige of the Moderlaine lifestyle in the cottage to which her husband’s folly has reduced her look merely foolish. In matters of sexuality, Helmar’s wife and his daughter are both easy about dispensing their favours, though different degrees of sympathy are required of the viewer in each case. ‘Sweet and rotten … That’s your mother all over again,’ Helmar charmingly tells Dilys, whom he subsequently beats, reminding us of Lindy’s brutal treatment by her farm-labourer father – and of the film’s cross-class critique. It is almost as if it becomes Jassy’s function to make some sense of these cruelties and deceits. ‘There’s more to marriage than being in love,’ she will later say, and puts this insight into practice when she weds Helmar. She has promised Barney: ‘I will get it [Moderlaine] back for you one day’, and agrees to marry Helmar if he will settle the estate on her. In what may have seemed a rather risqué plot move in 1947, she makes it plain there will be no sex in this marriage: ‘I will not live with you as your wife,’ she has warned, and on the wedding night the watchful Lindy observes her shutting Helmar out of her bedroom. From now on Jassy will call the shots, and Helmar, following a riding accident and now bedridden, is in a position in which he is dependent on her – and Lindy’s – severe ministrations. But while Jassy is away from the house she has one of her psychic moments in which she intuits Helmar’s death. Lindy, in retaliation for a life of male bullying, has laced the brandy he has insisted on with rat poison. A trial follows, at the conclusion of which both women are condemned to death, but Lindy’s voice comes back in time to clear Jassy, and Lindy drops dead in court. As in The Magic Bow, the women are the key actors in the drama of class, inheritance and ownership, while the men are largely acted upon. Jassy, now in possession of Moderlaine, passes the title deed to Barney, uttering the enigmatic line: ‘I wish I was a house’. As Marcia Landy has noted: ‘By contrasting Jassy to the traditional notion of the female scatterbrain and seductress, the film makes a concession to women by praising the enterprising qualities of independent women, while directing them into traditional paths.’46 After all its complex and

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melodramatic plot turns, the film ends on a muted note. Jassy and Barney may be set for a future at Moderlaine, but Knowles chooses not to end on a passionate flourish. Given that Lindy’s testimony and death have made this ending possible, Knowles may be exercising a tactful restraint in this matter. Knowles had the advantage of some very distinguished collaborators on Jassy. Unsworth’s invaluable contribution has been noted; in a curious way, his discreet use of colour works in productive tandem with the melodramatic events, as if endowing them with a more realist touch. Maurice Carter, who would go on to design several films for the Sydney Box regime at Gainsborough, is responsible for ‘Design and Art Direction’, under George Provis as ‘Supervising Art Director’. Between them they create a range of convincing settings – whether the grandeur of Moderlaine or the cramped rooms of the cottage to which the Hattons are reduced after the loss of the great house – and Gainsborough regular Elizabeth Haffenden uses costume design to differentiate the Roc and Lockwood characters and to distinguish among the various stages of Jassy’s ascent to the ownership of Moderlaine. Like most of the Gainsborough melodramas, Jassy was based on a popular novel by a now long-forgotten author. Knowles, working from a screenplay by Dorothy and Campbell Christie and Geoffrey Kerr, fashioned an entertainment in which he persuasively meshes together the narrative elements of the genre with those other concerns that provide an undercurrent of some substance to the drama of causes and effects. Among the behind-camera personnel, the one with whom Knowles might have interacted more fruitfully was the editor, Charles Knott. Too often the film settles into a rhythm dominated by a series of long fades, as a result of which the tension is apt to slacken, but in most other respects the film is technically assured. The fan magazines were sceptical about the film’s plotline. Picture Show ends its brief review with: ‘None too convincing but lavishly set’, 47 while Picturegoer’s appraisal begins with: ‘Old time period melodrama with Margaret Lockwood making an attractive heroine in sometimes ludicrous circumstances.’48 Even Monthly Film Bulletin has not a good word to say for it, finding the plot ‘artificial’, without ‘a convincing character in the whole affair’. 49 Had the contemporary public simply begun to lose interest in the once hugely successful genre? Not quite. In Robert Murphy’s study ‘Gainsborough after Balcon’, he rightly claims that Jassy ‘was the one Box film which did conform to the Ostrer formula’ that had produced the earlier successes, but he also acknowledges that ‘the film’s success brought them [the Boxes] little joy’.50 He quotes Muriel Box’s diary entry: ‘Bad notices, bad film – huge commercial success.’51

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Despite the producers’ disdain for the film and the indifference or worse of the popular journals at the time, the film has clearly fared better with later commentators. In his account of the evolution of the Gainsborough output, Duncan Petrie, praising the work of Unsworth, Carter and Haffenden, wrote that, in spite of lavish production, ‘The expressionist undertones are retained, as shadows begin to creep in when the fortunes of the huge country house at the centre of the drama fall into decay, and the odd low camera angle and lighting effect point up the menace of certain scenes.’52 Tony Williams allows that: ‘Despite the unconvincing deus ex machina solution saving Jassy from the gallows … the utopian achievement of equality of desire between the characters deserves commendation.’53 Later writers have taken melodrama more seriously as a narrative mode, whereas the term was apt to be used pejoratively at the time of the release of these popular films. As with so much of the mid-1940s work of the directors highlighted in this study, closer inspection reveals a level of proficiency often overlooked by contemporary critical opinion.

The White Unicorn (October 1947) Made for Harold Huth Productions at Nettlefold Studios, Surrey, this version of Flora Sandström’s novel was Knowles’s third film released in 1947. It was also his third experience of directing major box-office star Margaret Lockwood, but the film’s unlikely structure does not help its overall credibility. Nor does the casting of the star in a role that draws so little on those ‘wicked woman’ qualities that had made her such a household name do much to help, even if, as Kinematograph Weekly noted, ‘her record of popular success is almost unparalleled’.54 In her autobiography, Lockwood has nothing to say about the film except to record working in it with her daughter ‘Toots’, describing a scene in which the child had to weep.55 The film opens in the Midland Mission for Girls, where the inmates are demonstrating by clicking their spoons on the dining tables, leading the matron to call in the warden to quell the incipient riot. The warden, Lucy Glover, is played by Lockwood with a film star-ish assurance rather than the sort of dignified authority one might have expected, but her presence leads the inmates instantly to stand. When she leaves the dining hall, a fight breaks out between two girls, one of whom is Lottie (Joan Greenwood), who hits the girl who has been talking of the lure of being ‘out’ – that is, of the remand home. ‘Drunks waiting for a

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pick-up’ is Lottie’s reply before taking to physical action – and breaking a window. By this time, Lottie and Lucy have been established as the two key female presences, and the film cuts to Lucy’s office, to which Lottie has been ordered. ‘What are you going to do to me?’ Lottie asks truculently, and Lucy replies: ‘To help you. … If I can’t help you I’m no good here. I’m failing myself.’ Lottie’s outburst about ‘hating things’ is answered by Lucy giving her a cup of tea and being endlessly quietspoken. What ensues lays the structure for most of the rest of the film as each tells the other her story in a series of interwoven flashbacks. On this matter, Sandström’s approach was more basically credible. It is one thing for Lottie to gaze at the warden – who has gently said ‘My child’ – and to feel ‘for a fraction of a second, two souls met and understood each other’.56 It is another to believe the warden would tell in detail the ups and downs of her romantic life to an inmate; to this end, the author has Lottie telling her story while Lucy, in listening, is impelled to remember her own. Most of the book is taken up with Lucy’s recollections: that is, it is in a sense an extended flashback for Lucy, with just a couple of references to Lottie, who only reappears in any substantial form in the last twenty-odd pages of the book, ushered in bluntly with: ‘And then Lottie Smith came’57 – that is, into Lucy’s life as warden and as the initiator of her reflections. The Picturegoer reviewer, Lionel Collier, may well have been right in claiming that Sandström’s novel ‘has a wealth of invention in it. There’s enough material in it for three or four films, so that in its picturization one has the impression of a quart being squeezed into a pint pot … and squeezed with too much verbosity.’58 But to deal with the rest of the film, one has to accept the improbability of the warden, however sympathetically inclined, telling a recalcitrant inmate the sad story of her own two marriages. However, this is the way the film proceeds, and within these limits of credibility it achieves some melodramatic potency. A critic at the time was not won over, claiming: ‘These stories are set against one another in a series of dual flashbacks complete with all the trimmings and exaggeration expected in a film of this kind.’59 That last phrase carries with it the hint of patronage associated with reviews of popular romantic melodramas, but it is worth seeing how Knowles and his associates deal with at least the mechanics of such story-telling. As Reginald Wyer’s camera moves in on Lottie’s face, she starts to tell of a rough, bombed neighbourhood and a family of six children. There are images of a mother worn out by the time she was thirty-five and a drunken father who drags her off as she passes the baby to Lottie.

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Marriage is depicted as definitely ‘not a rosy dream’, and this is borne out as the film cuts to Lucy’s tale of marriage to wealthy barrister Philip Templar (Ian Hunter). At their wedding, misgivings about their future are expressed by Philip’s friend Fobey (Guy Middleton) to Lucy’s godmother, Miss Cater (Catherine Lacey), who can only say, ‘I hope you’re very wrong’. Unfortunately, events prove him not to be. It is clear from its beginnings that this will not be a very exciting marriage. (Could this have been Knowles’s reason for casting Hunter, a never overly exciting screen presence?) At first Lucy thinks she has all that she wants, believing ‘no one can be happy alone’. Meanwhile, on their Riviera honeymoon, Philip declares, ‘I’ve been a dull bachelor too long’, and after breakfast on their balcony he announces that he wants to play golf and – lucky Lucy! – she can ‘walk round’ with him. At this point the film cuts to Lottie, who tells of running away from home. Whereas Lucy believes (wrongly) that she has everything she wants, Lottie desperately ‘wanted a room to myself where you could be alone at night and clean … a place of your own’ (perhaps an echo of Knowles’s directorial debut?). Lottie may have wanted a room of her own, but Lucy has found little satisfaction in the grand house in which Philip has installed her, inventing the idea of the presence of ghosts possibly because everything else reflects Philip’s uninspired taste. There is perhaps here a reflection of post-war attitudes having changed so as to require something more for a woman than a mere situation in which to be The Wife. ‘I feel like a squirrel in a cage with nothing to do,’ says Lucy. She wants a baby. While her life was proving somewhat stultifying, Lottie’s was expanding in her account of ‘learning things – how to talk better’, while working in a fashionable store. In this store she meets Paul (Paul Dupuis), and a relationship develops that culminates in a declaration of love. And up to a point, there is some skill in the parallels, in the way the two sets of flashbacks comment on each other. One wants a home; the other has one on a lavish scale that seems emotionally empty. Lucy has a baby who, she is sure, is ‘going to make all the difference’; Lottie’s affair with Paul leads to a baby but not to a marriage, though the film devotes a major slab of its narrative attention to Lucy’s situation before we are made privy to Lottie’s tribulations. The film is thus concerned with two women from different, unsatisfactory backgrounds. Lucy says, ‘I thought to be married to someone who loves you, to have a home and a baby’ was what, above all, a woman needed, implying a critique of stereotypical feminine roles. Her position as warden of the remand home, following the tragic outcome of her second marriage, again seems to resonate with the changed notions of what women might achieve apart from the traditional domestic roles.

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In Philip she has married someone with no understanding of her needs. The baby might have fulfilled some of these needs, but a bossy nurse (Mabel Constanduros) means that she has little to do with raising the child, Norey (played by Lockwood’s own daughter, billed as Julia). Philip wants the nurse to stay, telling Lucy, ‘I don’t want you to be tied down by Norey.’ A new element enters her life when Dick Glover (Dennis Price) comes to a fancy-dress party in the guise of ‘the man in the picture [in the Templar’s drawing room]’ – his great-great-grandfather. He and Lucy fall in love, but she tells him that she is putting her marriage before her love for him. He tells her of finding a ‘white unicorn’ in the woods one day; someone told him it was a symbol of happiness, but he lost it, and the suggestion is that he has found it in Lucy. There is more than a hint of Brief Encounter in Lucy’s deciding to return to her marriage, but the comparison is hardly kind to The White Unicorn. Philip has accused her of having ‘always been irresponsible’ and she him of being ‘afraid to feel’. Another kind of male selfishness – and worse – appears in Lottie’s story. When, while pregnant, she tells the doctor that she ‘can’t have a baby’ (abortion is not mentioned, but presumably that is what she has in mind), the doctor asks, ‘What will the father say?’ The father, Paul, says, ‘I can’t marry – just because I can’t’, and disappears from her life. So, the lives of the two women founder on different kinds of male self-centredness, in each case followed by events that bring them to the edge of what they can bear. The structure of the screenplay (the work of Moie Charles, A.W. Rawlinson and Robert Westerby), without having pretensions to high art, at least creates an ongoing sense of how, despite the radically different backgrounds of the two women, what happens to one finds an echo in the life of the other. Lucy hoped that a baby would fill the gap in her life, while a baby has made Lottie’s life all but unmanageable. Tragedy intervenes in Lucy’s life on a skiing holiday in Norway with her second husband, Dick Glover, who drowns beneath breaking ice. Meanwhile, the homeless and poverty-stricken Lottie finds herself back ‘where I started’, as she tells Lucy, and tries to gas herself and her baby. Back in the present, Lucy is determined that Lottie will not lose her baby, and the film moves towards a courtroom climax, presided over by – no prizes for guessing – Philip. Whereas the counsel (Valentine Dyall) arranged by Fobey wants Lottie to stick to ‘hard facts’ (‘attempted infanticide while balance of mind disturbed’), Lucy makes an impassioned plea, claiming that Lottie ‘never had a chance’ and, ‘This baby is her chance in life’. Philip, after postponing sentencing until the next day,

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has some change of heart, as if moved by Lucy’s plea that there is more to the case than ‘justice’. The ending is predictably sentimental: not only will Lottie keep her baby but Lucy will be reunited with Norey, who, Philip says, ‘needs a love that I can’t give her’. And the film ends on a note of reunion as Norey, now a uniformed schoolgirl, runs into the arms of Lucy who cries ‘My baby’. It is Knowles’s command of the film’s structural strategies that is the film’s strongest claim to attention. Given the initial improbability of the two women, in their contrasting situations, confiding their pasts to each other, the film subsequently maintains enough pace and fluidity as it makes its way through alternating flashbacks to the courtroom. Here, each woman in her different way is allowed a sort of reprieve: Lottie for her attempted crime and Lucy for the mess she has made of her first marriage. Maybe it is the intertextual resonance of Lockwood’s earlier ‘wicked woman’ image that makes it hard to accept her as the elegantly coiffured and coutured remand warden, whereas Greenwood manages to achieve a real poignancy as the woman desperate for a second chance. (A small point: the screenplay does well to give Lottie that line about learning ‘to talk better’, as Greenwood’s voice would not have sounded amiss in Lucy’s drawing room.) Monthly Film Bulletin found Lockwood ‘hardly convincing as the Wardress of a reformatory … Nor does her interpretation of emotional stress ring particularly true. Joan Greenwood, on the other hand, in spite of many limitations [unspecified in the review], gives a moving performance as Lottie Smith.’60 Kinematograph Weekly also felt that, though both stars ‘succeed in clearing many stiff hurdles’, Greenwood ‘steals the acting honours’.61 Of the men, Hunter is characteristically stolid, Price has little chance to create a character out of Dick Glover and Guy Middleton plays with his usual slightly bounderish charm and humour. Oddly, whereas the other popular melodramas have been extensively written about in recent times, The White Unicorn seems to have attracted very little attention. Dennis Price’s biographer claims that the film ‘received a ferocious critical mauling and has rarely been seen since’.62 At the time of its release, Picture Show made it the subject of its storyversion, but refrained from any critical comment,63 and Picturegoer, while praising the acting, especially of Greenwood and Middleton, felt the film suffered from ‘too much verbosity’ and that ‘a little tightening up would have improved the picture quite a lot’.64 In metaphorical mode, Kinematograph Weekly summed up with: ‘The skein from which the play is spun contains more drab than highly coloured strands, but in spite of its sombre tones and dropped stitches, its overall pattern is not bad novelette.’65

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‘Novelette’ is probably an appropriate word for the film. There are just enough moments of perception in the recreation of the lives of the two protagonists to sustain interest and to distract one’s attention from the unlikely structuring device. Allowing for this, Knowles shows enough command of narrative pacing and of his collaborators, such as cinematographer Reginald Wyer and art director Norman G. Arnold, so that the film, in recreating its varied settings, for the most part does not drag unduly and always looks good. But, overall, The White Unicorn, despite some admirable qualities, represents a falling-off for Knowles after his earlier directorial successes.

Easy Money (1948) Though the Boxes would go on to make a couple of ambitious costume films, including (against their wishes) Christopher Columbus (1948) and The Bad Lord Byron (1949), Jassy was really their last in the Gainsborough melodrama mode – and indeed the last of its kind for anyone. They followed it with the portmanteau comedy-drama Easy Money, with Knowles again at the helm and a screenplay by Muriel and Sydney Box. The result is engaging enough with its four varied sets of characters who have in common the winning of the football pools. The set-up makes for parallels, sometimes in the interests of comparison, sometimes of contrast, as the film canvasses the responses of the four winners. Like most of the 1940s films of the directors explored in this study, it also has the advantage of what now seems luxurious casting. Given that the film runs for just over an hour and a half, each of the episodes has to make its impact in little over twenty minutes. Each then becomes something like a short story with the jackpot motif in common, and there is no interlocking narrative among them. What links them, apart from the unifying motif, is a voice-over commentary spoken by E.V.H. Emmett over a visual montage of gambling activities. This montage is followed by another in illustration of Emmett’s comment: ‘Football pools are big business’, contrasting the close-up of a pen filling in pools coupons with the information about ‘£1 million out of the pockets of people saying, “I betcha”’. These introductory images, with commentary about community attitudes to gambling, seem to usher in a sort of documentary about the subject, and the ensuing stories will bear out a range of reactions to such ‘easy money’ – or the promise of it. Despite the huge overall sums involved, we are informed that the average individual weekly investment is 3 shillings, and this information

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is used to introduce an average suburban household – that of the Staffords, who seem to be set up as an average suburban family. A change in their fortunes is about to occur. A querulous old grandmother (Mabel Constanduros), who is reading ‘The Evils of Gambling’, takes a moment to reprimand teenage Jackie (Petula Clark, all legs and overdone gangling exuberance) for making improper wheezing noises; son Dennis (Jack Watling), recently demobbed, wants money to invest in a friend’s dubious business scheme; and older daughter Carol (Yvonne Owen) is ‘walking out’ with the boy next door, Martin (David Tomlinson), who, in what may be a post-war image of keeping men in their place, is holding Carol’s wool while she knits. Parents Philip (Jack Warner) and Ruth (Marjorie Fielding) disagree when Philip says he is giving up cricket because he cannot afford it. ‘Everything’s going up – cigarettes, beer, etc.’, he complains, except ‘my salary’. ‘I won’t let you do it,’ says Ruth. Another brief reflection of the austerities of post-war life? All of this establishes the family’s need for money. Philip comes back into the room saying he has ‘had a bit of a shock’, having just heard on the wireless that he has won the pools. Grandma looks disapproving until she hears the sum; then Jackie realises that she has forgotten to post the pools coupon. Meanwhile, the Stafford family’s reactions push the narrative along by illustrating the harmful effects of money. Ruth (called ‘Mother’ by Philip, a detail that presumably helps place them socially) wants to leave for ‘a nice home in Bournemouth’ while Philip will not go because of his allegiance to the cricket club. Dennis gets into deep water with his pal in motor manufacturing, while Martin now feels he cannot marry Carol because it would look as if he were after her money. There is so much dissension that Philip says, ‘I wish I’d never won the ruddy pools’, the remark that precipitates Jackie’s revelation that the coupon had not been posted. This might have been a neat place to end this episode, with Philip having come to his son’s rescue, the police having arrived in connection with the arrest of Dennis’s business colleagues (a touch of Warner’s ‘Huggett’ persona in dealing with his son), Carol and Martin making up, and so on. It is almost as if the Boxes did not quite trust such a sober ending: in a bit of rather mechanical plotting, they went on to have the Staffords win after all. Warner’s presence as Philip anchors the episode in a convincing family setting, and, though it is a little overplotted and overpopulated for its running time, a strong cast maintains interest in the kinds of aspirations and attitudes that were perhaps typical of the period. The second segment is the one that ends grimly, with the commentary ushering in ‘the most poignant case of Mr Atkins’. Atkins

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(Mervyn Johns) is a meek clerk, bullied by overbearing wife, Agnes (Joan Young), who refuses the publicity of receiving his pools cheque from the local mayor. Agnes insists that he will hand in his notice, and he fears how his employer will react. In an adroit directorial touch, after the build-up about the boss, Knowles chooses not to show him, leaving his presence as just a bullying voice to which we see Atkins’s reactions. When his wife decides to come to the office to resign for him, Atkins decides to feign a heart attack, but, when confronted by the boss’s voice again, the real thing overtakes him and he actually dies. Johns makes credible – even gives a touch of pathos to – the decent but timid man who is destroyed by the access to sudden wealth. The next episode is introduced by Mr Lee (Bill Owen), a claims assessor, who is being interviewed about possible frauds and getting ‘petty crooks’ under control. He recalls ‘The Night Club Case’, and there is a dissolve to a very large setting in which Pat Parsons (Greta Gynt), weaves about the lavish club singing ‘Shady Lady Spiv’. The lyrics, by Vivian Ellis, draw on post-war black-marketing activity, and Gynt – whose characters so often looked as if, in this decade of austerity, they must indeed have been dressed courtesy of the black market – makes the most of her seductive image. She persuades her pools-employee boyfriend, Joe (played by Dennis Price in his fourth film for Knowles), to use his insider’s knowledge of the pools set-up to ‘win’ some money for them. Gynt was 1940s Britain’s idea of the blonde seductress, and Price is characteristically cast as putty in her hands. Their love-making is more frankly depicted than the constrained overtures of the Tomlinson character in ‘The Stafford Story’, maybe suggestive of class-and-morality differences at the time. Investigator Lee (Owen, authentic as always) finds fraud, and the urge to wealth will be their undoing, in a neat touch involving a cheque dated 1848. A final line from this episode sums up the film’s unifying approach to gambling wins: ‘Easy money’s hard to get but much harder to keep.’ Only in the last segment does a pools win bring serious joy to the protagonist, a cantankerous double-bass player (Edward Rigby in a rare leading role). At an orchestra rehearsal the conductor (Raymond Lovell) demands of the Rigby character, ‘What’s your name?’ ‘Ball.’ ‘I beg your pardon?’ ‘Edward Ball.’ ‘How very singular.’ Was the censor not listening at this point? (Greta Gynt recalled that she was ‘always surprised that the censor let that through.’66) Ball is

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about to be discharged when his number comes up, and he resigns, but subsequently finds that his new wealth – and the glamorous life it has bought for him – does not compensate for the loss of his double-bass career. When the orchestra hits financial problems, an ‘anonymous donor’ (Ball, of course) offers to foot its bills for a year, with a condition relating to the double-bass’s position in the orchestra, and the film ends with him prominently placed where the audience can get a clear view of him. It does seem to end abruptly, and perhaps a return to the fauxdocumentary motif that introduced and linked the segments might have rounded the film off more coherently. However, Kinematograph Weekly, confident of the film’s box-office potential, felt that its four tales ‘cover a wide range of human conduct and emotions, but appropriate commentary, smoothly delivered by E.V.H. Emmett, gives them some semblance of continuity and, at the same time, enables them to be encased in the same “boards”. Topical, cunningly varied popular entertainment.’67 This view was not supported by Picturegoer’s response: having been ‘genuinely intrigued’ by the opening tale of the Stafford family, Collier found the way in which it moved from this episode to the rest ‘disconcerting’, and, though praising the acting, especially of Rigby (showing himself ‘a class comedian’), ends his review with: ‘Pleasant entertainment, but too disjointed.’68 Picture Show, on the other hand, had only praise: ‘Thoroughly human and entertaining is this “four-in-hand” … its four distinct stories linked only by one thing – a winning coupon … It is excellently cast, well acted.’69 The film recovered its costs, making a modest profit described as ‘good’ by John Davis, Rank’s financial right-hand man,70 and he was not usually lavish with his praise. The thematic concern with the perils of gambling underpinning the episodes, two of them ending badly for their respective protagonists, ‘might have sat nicely with J. Arthur Rank’s Methodism’, as Dennis Price’s biographer suggests.71 He does, though, write with undue severity of ‘the dreariness and monotony of the whole film’. In fact, one of the film’s virtues is in the range of responses to winning the pools and in the social settings in which these are found, and another is in the way in which three of the episodes depict the women characters as, in Sue Harper’s words, ‘easier prey to cupidity and absurdity than the males’.72 Compared with Jassy, Knowles’s previous film for the Boxes, Easy Money was closer to being in the realist mode that was their preference. As with so many of the popular films of the period, later critical studies have found more to interest them than was often the case with contemporary reviewers.

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To more modern viewing eyes, Easy Money seems an enjoyable if not particularly demanding entertainment, with plenty of talent before and behind the camera. Knowles would make only one further film for the Box regime, The Lost People (1949), on which ‘Muriel took over and reshot most of the film’.73 Before that, though, Knowles would return to comedy, a genre in which he had spent so much of his 1930s career as a cinematographer.

The Perfect Woman (1949) There were touches of comedy in Easy Money, but The Perfect Woman was Knowles’s only full directorial venture in the genre. It represented not only a switch of genre but also of studio: it was made for Two Cities Film at Denham, for producers George and Alfred Black, neither of whom made any further feature films. George Black and Knowles were responsible for the adaptation of the play by Wallace Geoffrey and Basil Mitchell, and there was a dialogue credit for J.B. Boothroyd, who would work again with Knowles on The Reluctant Widow the following year. The Perfect Woman is an engagingly silly piece, descending into some well-staged farce towards the end, and along the way having some fun with class and gender stereotypes. Nigel Patrick plays Roger Cavendish, one of those men-about-town who, despite being short of cash, seem able to retain the service of a butler, in this case Ramshead (Stanley Holloway). Ramshead wakes him at 8 am, reminds him how broke they are and directs his attention to a newspaper ad: ‘Young gentleman with good connections … and in search of adventure.’ This leads them to make contact with Professor Belman (Miles Malleson) who, in a parallel situation, is as much under the thumb of his housekeeper, Mrs Butters (Irene Handl), as Cavendish is of his manservant. There are obviously well-worn class distinctions involved in each set-up, but there is also a comic deployment of the recognisable types: the raffish young Cavendish (ex-army, we learn, where he was better paid than he is by Universal Biscuits – a touch of post-war malaise?) and the more astute butler; the absent-minded professor and the sharperwitted housekeeper. This pairing gives a certain structure to the film’s action: employees privileged in what they say and in their attempts to keep their employers in order. The Professor has ‘created’ a perfect woman, Olga (Pamela Devis), a robot who obeys all instructions, and he wants to have her ‘tried out’ in public before making a presentation to a scientific body. His niece Penelope (Patricia Roc) objects to his preoccupation with Olga, and

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Figure 11  Nigel Patrick, Patricia Roc, Pamela Devis (Olga the robot) and Miles Malleson in The Perfect Woman, 1949

longs to get out into the world. The film’s view of young women would be unlikely to endear it to feminists, who might well have wondered why Penelope was so sheltered, as well as being outraged by the idea of a ‘woman’ created to do exactly what she is told; equally, it could be argued that the film also offers a critique of both approaches. Penelope is overprotected, while Olga is to be escorted out by the adventurous young man. The comic plot turns on the substitution of Penelope for the robot and Patricia Roc carries this wild premise through with some wit and precision, obeying orders such as ‘stand’ and ‘sit’ when these words pop up in conversation, and indulging a tiny smile or stealing a bun to eat when no one is looking at her. Of course, the two will be brought together – in the bridal suite of a hotel, where most of the cast will descend in a climax of wild physical comedy, when Roger’s aunt (Anita Bolster) jabs Olga in the arm. This causes a short-circuit in Olga’s robotic structure and some lively slapstick which reminds one of Knowles’s filming of such japes in the 1930s. The comic nub of the film is sustained by Knowles’s maintaining a good pace and by the deployment of a cast who know exactly what their stereotypes expect of them. Patrick seems like a precursor of the Leslie Phillips persona in the decades ahead, while Holloway, Malleson, Handl and others do their character turns as to the manner born. Adapted as it is from a play, Knowles has contrived to prevent it from feeling stage-bound, offering some further evidence as to his versatility as a director. Kinematograph Weekly felt that the film was ‘a little stagey

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in design’, but allowed that ‘the zest with which it is put over by the featured players and the accurate timing enable it to expand beyond the proscenium arch and smother its exuberant clichés with spontaneous laughs’.74 This kind of small reservation about its stage origins is echoed in Picture Show, which ended its review with: ‘Its obvious theatricalities are cloaked by the joyful gusto with which it is acted.’75 In fact, the film was generally well received at the time, with Monthly Film Bulletin offering unequivocal praise: ‘It is exceedingly well produced and directed, maintaining an even pace throughout; the dialogue is witty, the background music appropriate, and the whole is a superb piece of nonsensical fun.’76 And Picturegoer rounded off its positive review with: ‘It’s good, clean fun and plenty of it.’77 It is a pity that Knowles, with his 1930s comedy experience behind him, never had another chance to work in the genre. There were glimpses of his skill in this matter in Easy Money, but The Perfect Woman was his major comedic opportunity, and his next film was never going to have comparable popularity.

The Lost People (1949) Sydney Box’s first film about the plight of displaced persons in post-war Europe, Portrait from Life, was released in January 1949, its box-office performance eliciting ‘good’ from John Davis.78 The Lost People, released in August of the same year, was pretty much a disaster for Knowles. Most critics and those involved in the production would probably have understood Davis’s rating of ‘poor’. As noted previously, Box was dissatisfied with Knowles’s work on the film and had some of it reshot by Muriel Box, who is credited with ‘Additional scenes written and directed by’. Though officially a Gainsborough production, the film’s final credit reads: ‘Made at Gate Studios, Elstree & Denham Studios, Denham’. Does this reflect the film’s divided authorship? Patricia Warren’s studies of the British film studios list neither Gate Studios nor the film’s name.79 Elliot Huntley reports that, following the film’s release, Gainsborough’s ‘studios at Islington and Shepherd’s Bush were sold and the remaining handful of Gainsborough movies were all made at Pinewood’.80 So, how does the film measure up nearly seventy years later? It is in line with Box’s wish to make films of topical significance and The Lost People’s opening title would seem to bear this out: This story takes place in a Dispersal Centre in Germany at the end of the war. Refugees, coming from all parts of Europe, had no common language, except a smattering of German picked up in concentration

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Figure 12  Pamela Devis and Jerry Verno in The Perfect Woman, 1949

camps. For clarity’s sake the dialogue in this film has been interpreted entirely in English.

That title seems to imply a concern with a serious matter – the dealing with displaced persons – and the film’s conscientious approach to making the issues intelligible to its audiences. As to the former, the narrative is as much of a shambles as the lives it depicts; as to the latter, there is some serious inconsistency of accent, despite its being ‘interpreted entirely in English’, and not always easy on the viewer’s ear. As if to offset the potential staginess of a film adapted from a play, in this case Bridget Boland’s Cockpit, shabby figures are seen trudging, and soldiers marching, behind the credits, before a cut to British Captain Ridley (Dennis Price) being driven by jeep on a country road. Stopping

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to have a smoke in the nearby woods, he somewhat improbably encounters a French refugee, Marie (Siobhan McKenna), who emerges from a small trench and tries to steal a cigarette. When he is happy to give her one, she asks, ‘What do I have to do in return?’ Her look suggests experience in being used. She wants to return to Paris, her husband having been beaten to death because ‘he wouldn’t talk’. There is a certain provocative quality in this episode that will be echoed when Marie later turns up at the dispersal centre where Ridley is in charge, but it can be difficult to discern in the mish-mash of lives and behaviours at the centre. At the centre, a disused theatre, the film too easily degenerates into extreme talkativeness, interrupted not often enough with bursts of action, whether physical (say, a stabbing) or emotional (a wedding). Kinematograph Weekly, which regarded the film’s prospects as ‘ticklish booking’, claimed: ‘The idea of putting a group of violent, politically opposed people under one roof and allowing them to let off steam is one of the oldest of stage formulae.’81 This may well be true, but that does not necessarily preclude more dramatic interest than this film achieves. In fact, the idea of a disparate mob of people herded into the same space, some of them looking for repatriation to the East, others to the West, and this conflict leading to some angry exchanges, might have made for compelling topicality in the Cold War days of 1949. For instance, a Polish doctor (Gerald Heinz) is unwilling to inspect a Russian who is seriously ill, his stand based on what he sees as Poland’s ill treatment by the Russians as much as by the Germans. Within the larger political action, a couple of difficult pairings are set up. Two young refugees, Lili (Mai Zetterling) and Jan (Richard Attenborough), fall in love, but their national affiliations should take them in opposite directions, with Lili urging Jan to make for the West when the lorries come to the centre. In a highly theatrical touch, Ridley organises their wedding in the theatre, the ceremony to be performed by a refugee priest (Harcourt Williams). Surely intended as a heartwarming episode in the grim fortress of the theatre, with the usually squabbling and messy refugees for once all quietly seated in the auditorium, it hardly rises to the occasion. It all looks too contrived, with the crowd made to look like a theatre audience. This marriage and its brief rooftop honeymoon come to a tragic end when Lili is stabbed by a man who mistakes her for the political firebrand Marie. Marie has made advances to Ridley, who has been asking: ‘What am I living for? What does it all mean?’, to which she replies, as she flings her arms around him, that she is fighting for a ‘new world. It makes me happy and I’m going to make you happy too.’ McKenna

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brings a potent sense of belief, of commitment to a cause, which is persuasive in itself but has the unfortunate effect of making Price’s Ridley seem even less authoritative than the role needs. Price was Knowles’s most frequent leading man, but he habitually proved unequal to the challenges posed by his more determined-seeming co-stars such as Lockwood, Calvert, Kent and Gynt. His role as Ridley requires a commanding presence which he fails to deliver, not only in relation to McKenna’s impassioned display but also in contrast to William Hartnell’s tough-talking, bullying Sergeant Barnes. A more imposing performance at the film’s centre might have helped to pull it together more rigorously. The putative subject matter is

Figure 13  Richard Attenborough and Bernard Knowles on the set of The Lost People, 1949

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sufficiently engrossing – the post-war rigours that have brought these dispossessed people together and now have them engaged in constant quarrelling – but is too sprawling to generate a powerful effect. Andrew Spicer rightly diagnoses one of the film’s deficiencies in dealing with this topical matter when he writes: ‘Its concern with a pressing social issue and attempt to give voice to the unheard become, in the film version, a rather hackneyed triumph of British fair play over the unruliness of foreigners.’82 The plot device of a suspected outbreak of bubonic plague brings a fleeting and fearful calm, but, once this fear is allayed as a result of medical diagnosis, the conflict is resumed. Boland adapted her own play for the screen, and there are touches of real sharpness in the writing. However, despite the action’s being confined to the theatre, there is something too shapeless and sprawling for the film to make a sustained impact. In spite of its comparative failure commercially, and of the general sense of a troubled production history – and of Mai Zetterling’s describing her role as ‘yet another refugee in a charade of a film’83 – the film found at least one critical supporter. Picturegoer wrote enthusiastically: ‘We have had a number of pictures dealing with Occupied Germany, but none I feel that deals with the subject with more humanity and sincerity than this one. Not only is it extremely well directed, but it is also extremely well acted.’ The review, which may have offered minor consolation to Knowles, goes on to praise ‘the brilliance of the acting’ of Zetterling and McKenna.84 The film, for all its faults, is not devoid of touches of poignancy and is quite watchable for its hour-and-a-half running time. However, it is a pity that Knowles’s Gainsborough career did not finish on a higher note.

The Reluctant Widow (May 1950) There is a kind of symmetry in Knowles’s finishing his feature directing career for the decade – and indeed his ‘A’-feature career overall (with one little-seen exception in 1967) – with a film in the genre in which he did his most popular work: the costume melodrama. The Reluctant Widow was a Two Cities attempt at the sort of fare that Gainsborough had made its own, and with Jean Kent (who had been the good-hearted ‘bad’ girl in Knowles’s The Magic Bow) as its star the echo is even stronger. While such comparisons are viable, it must be said that The Reluctant Widow lacks the bold forward thrust of the narrative of those earlier costume pieces. It is also more prone to settle for touches of comedy, which, while sometimes amusing enough in themselves, do

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not always sit easily with the film’s overall preoccupation with the more usual matters of the genre – situations to do with wills, estates, corrupt relatives and bold relationships. Derived from Georgette Heyer’s Regency romance, the film begins promisingly when Elinor Rochdale (Kent), an impoverished gentlewoman on her way to take up a position as a governess, boards the wrong carriage and ends up knocking on the wrong door. As she arrives by night at a dark and lonely house, the carriage-driver bids farewell to her with: ‘Good luck. You’ll need it’, and what with hounds howling and the door creaking open to reveal a rather dishevelled housekeeper, Mrs Burrows (Jean Cadell), we can only believe he was right. A gentleman, Lord (‘Ned’) Carlyon (Guy Rolfe), appears silhouetted in a doorway and greets Elinor with: ‘You’re not quite what I expected’. Elinor was expecting to be a governess, but Carlyon requires a woman to marry his young drunkard cousin, Eustace Cheviot (Peter Hammond), who is dying. Carlyon’s motive is to free himself from inheriting the estate. The plot then hinges on Elinor’s willingness to marry Eustace, motivated apparently by her impecunious condition, and she is shortly to become the eponymous widow, though is not perhaps as reluctant as might have been expected. She quickly assumes management of the substantial house, declaring: ‘I’m over twenty-one and a woman of the world’, and proceeds to act as one. The film’s real strength is in Kent’s performance as she goes about establishing herself in her new domain. As Picturegoer wrote: ‘Jean Kent acts with immense vigour – you are aware all the time that she is giving a performance’,85 and I take that to mean that her Elinor – as well as the actress – knows what is required of her. As Kent plays her, the ‘widow’ can look and seem affectionate, provocative or imperious, as required. She also has a good way with Heyer-type dialogue, such as: ‘I cannot wait to reach the tranquillity of London after the uproar of the country.’ The complicated manoeuvres of the plot include a smuggler (Ralph Truman) pushing his way through Elinor’s window to demand payment for the late Eustace’s brandy, the comic near-emergence of Nicky (Anthony Tancred) from a trapdoor that has closed on his neck, other housebreakers, an attempted murder, the finding of a bag of French gold coins (La Marseillaise comes up on the soundtrack to ensure we get the point), and so on. But all this is set in the time of the Napoleonic Wars, and the mysterious comings and goings at the house, High Noons, are about to be seen as connected with foreign espionage, and there will be a well-staged duel between Carlyon and a dangerous Frenchman, François Cheviot (Julian Dallas), who has tried to strangle Elinor as well as seeking to kiss her.

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Though Elinor’s words as she confronts Carlyon – ‘shootings, skirmishes, scandals’ – may seem to recall the stuff of the Gainsborough melodramas in their heyday, Knowles is really in slightly different territory. There is an undercurrent of playfulness, almost suggesting a satire on the genre at times, and the love scenes between Rolfe and Kent have a more robustly sexy flavour. For instance, when Carlyon apologises to Elinor for his ‘overbearing manner’, she shuts his mouth with a fervent kiss, and as they head for the bedroom he issues an order: ‘Tonight we must not be disturbed.’ Next morning, when he presents her with a necklace and lifts her to the bed, she says knowingly, ‘I shall want proof of your love before I wear it.’ Knowles maintains an impressive tonal control over a screenplay (by Gordon Wellesley and J.B. Boothroyd) that allows a series of melodramatic incidents to be peppered with moments of saucy by-play. As the Picturegoer review quoted above summarised: ‘The whole thing is resourcefully enough contrived and a lively pace is maintained’, while Picture Show, featuring Rolfe and Kent on the cover, praised it as ‘colourful, its melodrama lightened by a dash of comedy’.86 While one would not claim that Knowles finished his ‘A’-feature career on his highest note, there are still echoes of some of his best work, of A Place of One’s Own or The Man Within. As well as the tonal control noted above, he also makes notable use of such collaborators as cinematographer Jack Hildyard and art director Carmen Dillon, who work towards giving the film a handsome surface. As for costume, Beatrice Dawson makes both Jean Kent and, in a frustratingly small role, Kathleen Byron look appropriately decorative and inviting. The cast enters into the spirit of the thing as it moves from its melodramatic finale to Carlyon’s carrying Elinor up the stairs to bed, with her voice-over proclaiming: ‘And so I came to the end of my adventures and found happiness and peace – well, happiness anyway.’ It seemed a good note for the film to end on.

Downhill The Reluctant Widow was Knowles’s last ‘A’ film until 1967. After that, as with the other directors in this study, it was essentially a matter of ‘B’ movies and television series. However, whereas the other three held on a little more tenaciously to making co-features as distinct from irrefutable ‘B’s, Knowles was generally less fortunate. His first two in the 1950s were thrillers of a kind that gave him little chance to shine; the genre was not one that drew on his strengths as, say, costume melodrama had done.

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Park Plaza 605 (1953) and Barbados Quest (1955) Both of these films are utterly reflective of the British supporting film, the lower half of the double bill, with convoluted plotting and an imported star, Tom Conway (not American but long resident there). The older brother of George Sanders, Conway had been busy enough in Hollywood since the early 1940s without ever becoming a certifiable star, except on the ‘B’-movie circuit. It was common practice in 1950s British film production to bring minor Hollywood actors such as Mark Stevens, Alex Nicol, Bill Williams and Dane Clark among many others over to appear in films that most often prolonged careers rather than status. The motivation was presumably to increase the films’ chances of being screened in the US. In both Park Plaza 605 and Barbados Quest (renamed in the US as, respectively, Norman Conquest and Murder on Approval), Conway plays a supposedly sophisticated investigator involved in crimes that make their way from theft and forgery to the upper level of murder. In Park Plaza 605 he plays a private detective improbably called Norman Conquest, who, even more improbably, while playing golf, hits a carrier pigeon bearing the message ‘Contact 8 o’clock this evening. Room 605, Park Plaza Hotel’. Of course, he goes to this address, where he becomes involved with a ‘foreign’ diamond-smuggling gang, including a glamorous woman, Nadina (Eva Bartok), who drugs him and leaves him as a suspect in a murder. It is not really worth persevering with plot details. As Herbert Lom once said, ‘in English eyes all foreigners are villains’,87 and that is certainly what the screenplay (of which Knowles was co-author) implies here, though the shapely Nadina is allowed to save Conquest’s life, while losing her own, at the film’s end. He is then able to return to his nice English fiancée, Pixie (Joy Shelton). There is a sort of comic sparring across the class divide between Conquest and Police Superintendent Williams (Sidney James), who warns Pixie in the last scene, ‘Do me a favour – keep him [Conquest] out of trouble.’ In this sort of film, that is what nice English girls are there for; with never a hair out of place and with refined vowels, they are more than a match for duplicitous foreigners, however glamorous they may be. Monthly Film Bulletin was critically dismissive with its assessment: ‘An involved and indifferently made thriller; the actors give the impression that they have all been there before.’88 In truth, there is little to remind one of Knowles’s earlier successes. There are settings more elaborate and more varied than was often the case in ‘B’ films of the time; there is a smartly shot car chase that recalls Knowles’s earlier career as cinematographer (here, it is actually Eric Cross who bears this credit);

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and there is some comedy in the relations between the (supposedly) suave Conquest and the plod-cop Williams. A supporting cast of such reliables as Michael Balfour and Richard Wattis, or, keeping up the foreign element, Carl Jaffe and Anton Diffring, ensures that the film’s entertainment value is somewhat above the thumbs-down view quoted above. Barbados Quest is more or less made to the same recipe as Park Plaza 605. This time, the item in contention is a wildly valuable stamp (a ‘Barbados over-print’, possibly a forgery) instead of a bag of diamonds. Like its predecessor, its screenplay is somewhat overcomplicated and too talkative, but it also has some pleasing touches of humour. ‘The Duke’, aka Tom Martin (Conway), finds Barney (Michael Balfour again), a cheery ex-criminal friend, ensconced in a surprisingly upmarket flat belonging to a pal. When Tom asks, regarding the flat’s absent owner, ‘Oh, what’s he doing?’, ‘Nine months’ is Barney’s succinct reply. When Barney asks Tom about the subject of the new investigation and is told ‘Philately’, he answers ‘Oh, a medical job?’ It certainly is not Oscar Wilde, but such exchanges and other touches in Kenneth R. Hayles’s original screenplay compensate somewhat for the talkiness. Knowles again keeps the film moving quickly and there are enough twists and surprises in the action to maintain audience interest in the convolutions of plot that involve dubious parties on both sides of the Atlantic and a couple of murders. Again, there is a well-staged car chase, and also a ‘foreign’ crook, engraver Gordoni (Ronan O’Casey), but the real villain proves to be the upper-class nephew (Brian Worth) of Lady Hawksley (Grace Arnold), the original owner of the stamp. Her country mansion, Tom is informed, is not a ‘house’ but a ‘seat’. Arnold’s amusing study of the elderly woman who muddles names, along with Balfour’s cheery Barney, and the inevitable John Horsley as the Detective Inspector involved in the forgery/theft case, contribute as the character players so often did to the enjoyment quotient of the British ‘B’s of the period. The film’s producers, Robert S. Baker and Monty Berman, had a better grasp than most of the exigencies of economy film-making, and they ensure the film at least has a certain sheen. Knowles could certainly have fallen into worse hands during his descent into the lower half of the double bill. However, it is hard to find a kind word about either of these thrillers. David Quinlan called Barbados Quest a ‘Tired thriller’ and summed up Park Plaza 605 as: ‘Indifferent thriller with tired performances’.89 As in relation to the earlier film, Monthly Film Bulletin was again dismissive of what it saw as a ‘confused and rather tiresome

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Figure 14  Tom Conway, Brian Worth and John Horsley in Barbados Quest, 1955

production’. It found that Conway’s ‘sophistication appears as spurious’ and allowed only that ‘Michael Balfour wrings the utmost out of some miserable light relief’.90 The popular fan magazines, Picture Show and Picturegoer, seem by this time almost to have stopped reviewing ‘B’ movies, British ones anyway.

Frozen Alive (1964) and Spaceflight IC- 1: An Adventure in Space (1965) If the two thrillers with Tom Conway hardly seemed like Knowles’s territory, the two that followed appeared to be even less so. A decade after Barbados Quest, the intervening years having been occupied with television series, he ventured into the science-fiction genre, which must have seemed remote from his Gainsborough days. The first of the two, Frozen Alive, was a surprisingly effective example of the genre on a presumably limited budget, while Spaceflight shows more obvious signs of straitened circumstances. However, these two and the thrillers reveal a certain generic dexterity on Knowles’s part and the first three particularly reveal his story-telling skills to be still intact. They belong in the upper reaches of British ‘B’-film production. Frozen Alive is a British/German co-production, with at least half of the personnel involved, before and behind the camera, being of

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German origin. The film is set in the World Health Organisation’s [sic] ‘Low Temperature Unit – Berlin Division’, as identified by the sign on the door of the laboratories in which most of the action takes place, although whether any of the film was actually shot in Germany is unclear. It opens as a conference is due to begin and a quite attractive sense of camaraderie is established between Dr Frank Overton (Mark Stevens, another US import) and his colleague Dr Helen Wieland (German actress Marianne Koch), who is about to present a lecture. The film then cuts to an apartment where Frank’s wife, Joan (Delphi Lawrence), whose talk on fashion next week has just been announced on the radio, tells a man friend, Tony (Joachim Hansen), that she is not excited about going to the conference to hear ‘the beautiful scientist’. ‘They stick chimpanzees into the deep freeze and bring them out a few months later and they’re alive,’ Joan says, as Knowles cuts back to the applause that greets Helen’s paper. Working from Evelyn Frazer’s screenplay, Knowles ensures these first five minutes or so develop anticipations about the rest of the film. There is some care in the setting up of relationships and the nature of the research, with the prospect of their impacting on each other. Frank and Helen are serious in their project of freezing a human being, believing this might have valuable possibilities for medical science, and ultimately Frank will insist on being used as the human guinea pig. His marital relations with his semi-alcoholic wife are given more attention than might have been expected. He wants her to quit her job, move to the country and have children, and in her response to this is a 1960s critique of conventional ideas of what women should be about. There is clear attraction between Frank and Helen, but they – she particularly – shy away from acting on this. Before they reach the last scene of domestic harmony, Frank’s wife has committed suicide. There is more going on in Frozen Alive than I was expecting. It is rather perfunctory in pulling its threads together in, say, the last ten minutes, but until then it has made the most of the tensions, the opportunities for conflict that the screenplay has set up. Stevens and Koch make an interesting enough couple to convince us of their professional interests and their barely acknowledged mutual personal attraction, while Lawrence, given more to do here than in Park Plaza 605, makes the most of the showy role of the egoistic, morally sloppy wife. According to the website IMDb, the film has quite an enthusiastic fan base, but Monthly Film Bulletin is not one of its admirers. Overall, the film deserved better than the journal’s put-down: ‘A soporific thriller which achieves some semblance of animation only

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in the climax in the laboratory. Acting and direction are as stodgy as the script.’91 While I am not seeking to make more than modest claims for Frozen Alive, in the sci-fi stakes it feels like Kubrick by comparison with Knowles’s next venture in the genre, Spaceflight IC-1: An Adventure in Space. Set in 2015, its premise is an interstellar exploration for the purposes of possible future colonisation. The functions of an assorted crew, under the dictatorial leadership of Captain Mead Ralston (US actor Bill Williams), are identified by chest-labels that indicate Psychology, Botany, Education, etc. Such labels are all the more necessary because the actors fail to bring their wearers to life or to distinguish otherwise between the four interchangeable married couples who, along with a couple kept in suspended animation, constitute the crew. The relationships among them are much less clearly articulated than in the earlier film. Williams offers a study in unrelieved grimness and the married others are given little to work on in Harry Spalding’s screenplay. One wife wants to have another child, a funeral takes place on the vessel and the three children already on board are entertained by the antics of a hologram clown. The film is introduced by a portentous pre-credits speech from a military officer about the purpose of the eponymous spaceflight. Made at Shepperton Studios, the film is set wholly inside the spacecraft, the scene shifting from one undifferentiated cabin to another. The only relief from this sense of confinement, which might have worked to create a satisfactory level of tension, is the intermittent punctuation offered by some unimaginative shots of space, the work of veteran cinematographer Geoffrey Faithfull. The dramatic potential of personal relations under the abnormal strain of space exploration founders on what Monthly Film Bulletin severely but accurately attributes to ‘dreary dialogue and indifferent acting’.92 As to the latter, Williams, who had a long career in film and television, is so devoid of character interest here as to make one wonder why anyone supposed that bringing him to Britain would improve the film’s box-office chances.

The television decade Spaceflight IC-1 is the nadir of Knowles’s directing career, though it is not likely that any director would have made much more of such feeble material. Perhaps after five years of television series anything might have sounded attractive. He directed episodes in ten series between 1955 and 1959, and samplings of these fifty-odd years later can only

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lead one to speculate on the audiences of the time. Can grown-ups ever have been seriously responsive to such fare as, say, Colonel March Investigates (1954–56) or The Adventures of Robin Hood (1955–59)? The answer is presumably yes, as so many of them, including the two named, ran to several years’ claim on viewers’ attention. Knowles directed eleven of the twenty-six episodes of Colonel March – Crabtree with seven, was runner-up – derived from the short stories The Department of Queer Complaints by John Dickson Carr (credited as Carter Dickson). Among those now available to view on YouTube, ‘The Silver Curtain’ (1956), is a fair example. A man is found stabbed in a night-time street and suspicion falls on a hapless American who had accepted a deal from the dead man in the nearby casino. The eponymous March reveals the crime to be the work of a shady doctor who had flung the knife from an upper storey, his identity masked by the ‘silver curtain’ of a spouting fountain in the adjacent square. Within its extremely modest limits, it just about maintains interest in the 25 minutes of its running time, mainly because of Boris Karloff’s playing of the enigmatic March, complete with black eye-patch. All that Knowles can do is to keep its meagre plot moving, homing in now and then with an expressive close-up of a face, a blade or a fountain. There is some neat editing from Thelma Connell, who worked with Michael Powell, and Knowles puts this, together with Lionel Banes’s cinematography, to as productive use as could be expected with such limited material. Television crime series have come a long – and often very convoluted – way since the 1950s. The Adventures of Robin Hood ran to no fewer than 144 episodes, of which Knowles directed 19, after his (uncredited) co-directing with Ralph Smart of the first in the series. The series, which drew on such diverse directors as Lindsay Anderson, Terence Fisher and Crabtree again, looks a much more lavishly funded affair than Colonel March, and the entire series has been made available on DVD. Knowles solodirected the second episode, ‘Husband for Marion’, and manages to maintain an appropriately light touch as John Dyson’s screenplay makes us wait to see how Robin (Richard Greene) will respond to and intercept the fortune-hunting Sir Hubert De Vere’s (Brian Worth) plans for marrying Marian (Bernadette O’Farrell). The comic element is in the hands of Thora Hird, who pretends to be Marian to test Hubert’s intentions, and all is resolved in a fight between the two men, each equipped with ball and chain. Once the gratingly noisy opening, repeated throughout the series, is over, the rest is watchable, without in any way stretching the talents of the man who made films of the quality of A Place of One’s Own. Directors, like the rest of us, have to eat, and all

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he can do with this sort of material is to be brisk and unpretentious about it, and certainly enough people liked it in the 1950s. As one writer says: ‘This popular action series was a rousing success on both sides of the Atlantic and helped unleash a score of filmed costume adventures series on to British (and American) TV screens.’93 Knowles directed a mere eight episodes of The Adventures of Sir Lancelot (1956–57) and was credited as producer on fourteen. Following quickly in the wake of the Robin Hood series, like its predecessor it draws on a key element of British mythology. Not that the Lancelot episodes are much concerned with anything as lofty as the moral or cultural importance of the legends surrounding the court of King Arthur. The episodes draw on action sequences deriving from the Knights of the Round Table, with flashes of magic from the resident Merlin (Cyril Smith), and, as the previously quoted writer claims, it is ‘handsomely mounted, for its time’.94 Again, executive producer Hannah Weinstein managed to acquire the services of some skilled behind-camera personnel, including some US blacklisted writers, and Ealing alumnus Sidney Cole and Dallas Bower as Knowles’s fellow producers. The series also features some more than competent actors, such as William Russell as Lancelot, Ronald Leigh-Hunt as Arthur and the striking Jane Hylton as Guinevere. Like Robin Hood, viewed more than sixty years later Lancelot seems aimed at an undiscriminating viewing audience aged somewhere between ten and twenty, but it must have appealed more widely back then. Perhaps it is just the element of reassurance that characterises such an episode as ‘Sir Bliant’ that accounts for the easy popularity it once enjoyed. In ‘Sir Bliant’, Merlin magically transforms Lancelot’s outer self so that it is a replica of the titular knight whose unruly sons have become out of hand in a neighbouring castle. Lancelot/Bliant challenges them to a series of ‘games’ – wrestling, spear-throwing, etc. – and they are astonished to be defeated by their elderly father. The point made is that Lancelot is motivated by a wish to bring a state of peaceful coexistence between the two houses and this is his benign requirement at the end of the challenges. In another episode, ‘The Black Castle’ (1956), Knowles was uncredited co-director with the much younger Anthony Squire and one can only speculate that the veteran was called on to support the comparative newcomer. Again, Lancelot, in helping to save the future father-in-law of another knight, is depicted as a man of serious principle who can, nevertheless, be an invincible opponent of the weak and the wicked. As it did for Crabtree, the general run of 1950s television may have helped Knowles to maintain his career, if not his status. His

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third-last feature, Frozen Alive, shows a certain narrative dexterity and character interest, neither of which is much in evidence in its successor, Spaceflight CI-1. His last feature assignment as director, Hell Is Empty, has proved unavailable for this study. Apparently, Knowles began filming this muddled-sounding thriller in 1965, but the production was suspended following the death of its leading lady, Martine Carol. When shooting resumed, John Ainsworth had taken over the direction, and the British/Czech co-production, completed in 1967, seems not to have been released until 1970. When it finally appeared, Monthly Film Bulletin had not a good word to say for its ‘nonsensical story’, and of the acting claimed that ‘no one could be expected to perform any miracles with the dilapidated dialogue [screenplay is credited to Ainsworth, George Fowler and Knowles], and no one does’.95 As for his very last project, Magical Mystery Tour (1967), which recounts a surreal bus tour enjoyed by the Beatles, it is hard to imagine what function as (uncredited) co-director to the Fab Four he might have performed. Whether Knowles’s post-1940s work suggests a director trying to extend his range or merely one taking whatever work could be found, it is true to say that almost none of it recalls his stylish dealings with, say, A Place of One’s Own or The Man Within. In such films as these two, he showed himself an acute observer of character with a flair for evoking strange places and times. His talents were not likely to be much drawn by the war heroics and lightweight comedies that figured commonly in the succeeding decade.

Notes 1 David Quinlan, British Sound Films: The Studio Years 1928–1959, London: B.T. Batsford, 1984, p. 46. 2 Duncan Petrie, The British Cinematographer, London: BFI Publishing, 1996. 3 Rachael Low, Film Making in 1930s Britain, London: George Allen & Unwin, 1985, p. 142. 4 Peter Graham Scott, British Television: An Insider’s History, Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co., 2000, p. 12. 5 Petrie, British Cinematographer, p. 113. 6 Robert Murphy, Realism and Tinsel: Cinema and Society in Britain 1939–48, London: Routledge, 1989, p. 171. 7 Picturegoer, 11 November 1944, p. 5. 8 Lionel Collier, ‘Shop for your films’, Picturegoer, 26 May 1947, p. 12. 9 James Mason, Before I Forget, London: Hamish Hamilton, 1981, p. 143. 10 Monthly Film Bulletin, April 1945, p. 46. 11 Kinematograph Weekly, 22 March 1945, p. 37. 12 Elliot J. Huntley, Dennis Price: A Tribute, Sheffield: Pickard Communication, 2008, p. 55.

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13 Interview with Dulcie Gray, in Brian McFarlane, An Autobiography of British Cinema, London: Methuen and BFI Publishing, 1977, p. 173. 14 Quoted in Jocelyn Lukins, The Fantasy Factory: Lime Grove Studios, London, London: Venta Books, 1996, p. 78. 15 Stewart Granger, Sparks Fly Upward, St Albans: Granada Publishing, 1981, p. 95. 16 Interview with Phyllis Calvert, in McFarlane, p. 111. 17 Interview with Jean Kent, in McFarlane, p. 340. 18 Huntley, p. 58. 19 Granger, p. 97. 20 Huntley, p. 59. 21 Monthly Film Bulletin, December 1946, p. 122. 22 K.J. Donnelly, ‘Wicked sounds and magic melodies: Music in 1940s Gainsborough melodrama’, in Pam Cook (ed.), Gainsborough Pictures, London: Cassell, 1997, p. 166–7. 23 Lionel Collier, ‘Shop for your films’, Picturegoer, 23 November 1946, p. 14. 24 Picture Show, 30 November 1946, p. 10. 25 Donnelly, p. 167. 26 Tony Williams, Structures of Desire: British Cinema, 1939–1955, Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000, p. 45. 27 Both quoted in Sue Aspinall and Robert Murphy (eds), Gainsborough Melodrama, BFI Dossier 18, London: BFI Publishing, 1983, p. 77. 28 Murphy, Realism, p. 126. 29 Sue Harper, ‘From Holiday Camp to high camp’, in Andrew Higson (ed.), Dissolving Views, London: Cassell, 1996, p. 104. 30 Sue Harper, Picturing the Past: The Rise and Fall of the British Costume Film, London: BFI Publishing, 1994, p. 134. 31 Murphy, p. 128. 32 Ibid., p. 126. 33 Picture Show, 17 May 1947, p. 9. 34 In an interview with the author in 1989, Jean Kent recalled the heading of one newspaper review of the film: ‘Miss Kent puts the sex into Sussex’. She could not recall the source of the review. 35 Graham Greene, ‘Author’s note’, The Man Within, London: William Heinemann, 1929; Reprinted, London: Vintage, 2001. 36 Monthly Film Bulletin, April 1947, p. 47. 37 Greene, p. 43. 38 Andrew Spicer, Sydney Box, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006, p. 66. 39 Ibid., p. 67. 40 Lionel Collier, ‘Shop for your films’, Picturegoer, 10 May 1947, p. 13. 41 Arthur Vesselo, ‘Films of the quarter’, Sight and Sound, Summer 1947, p. 76. 42 Basil Wright, The Spectator, 18 April 1947. 43 Robert Murphy, ‘Gainsborough after Balcon’, in Cook (ed.), Gainsborough Pictures, p. 150. 4 4 Kinematograph Weekly, 10 May 1947, p. 13. 45 Unsworth has chief billing for ‘Technicolor Photography’, with a lesser credit for Jack Asher as ‘Cameraman’. 46 Marcia Landy, British Genres: Cinema and Society, 1930–1960, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991, p. 312. 47 Picture Show, 28 September 1947, p. 10. 48 Lionel Collier, ‘Shop for your films’, Picturegoer, 13 September 1947, p. 12. 49 Monthly Film Bulletin, August 1947, p. 111.

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50 Murphy, ‘Gainsborough ’, p. 150. 51 ‘The Diary of Sydney and Muriel Box’, 1 February 1947, cited in Murphy, ‘Gainsborough’, p. 151. 52 Duncan Petrie, ‘Innovation and economy’, in Cook (ed.), Gainsborough Pictures, p. 133. 53 Williams, p. 104. 54 Kinematograph Weekly, 16 October 1947, p. 20. 55 Margaret Lockwood, Lucky Star: The Autobiography of Margaret Lockwood, London: Odhams, 1955, pp. 132–3. 56 Flora Sandström, The Milk-White Unicorn, London: Cassell, 1946, p. 8. 57 Ibid., p. 188. 58 Lionel Collier, ‘Shop for your films’, Picturegoer, 8 November 1947, p. 13. 59 Monthly Film Bulletin, November 1947, p. 154. 60 Ibid. 61 Kinematograph Weekly, 16 October 1947, p. 20. 62 Huntley, p. 76. 63 Picture Show, 14 November 1947, p. 9. 64 Collier, 8 November 1947, p. 13. 65 Kinematograph Weekly, 16 October 1947, p. 20. 66 Interview with Greta Gynt, in McFarlane, p. 265. 67 Kinematograph Weekly, 22 January 1948, p. 15. 68 Lionel Collier, ‘Shop for your films’, Picturegoer, 28 February 1948, p. 12. 69 Picture Show, 6 March 1948, p. 9. 70 Quoted in Spicer, p. 210. 71 Huntley, p. 75. 72 Harper, ‘From Holiday Camp’, p. 105. 73 Spicer, p. 96. 74 Kinematograph Weekly, 12 May 1949, p. 17. 75 Picture Show, 25 June 1949, p. 10. 76 Monthly Film Bulletin, May 1949, p. 116. 77 Lionel Collier, ‘Shop for your films’, Picturegoer, 18 June 1949, p. 16. 78 Quoted in Spicer, p. 210. 79 Patricia Warren, British Film Studios, London: B.T. Batsford, 2nd edn, 2001. 80 Huntley, p. 95. 81 Kinematograph Weekly, 29 August 1949, p. 20. 82 Spicer, p. 114. 83 Mai Zetterling, All Those Tomorrows, London: Jonathan Cape, 1985, p. 85. 84 Lionel Collier, ‘Shop for your films’, Picturegoer, 24 September 1949, p. 16. 85 Lionel Collier, ‘Shop for your films’, Picturegoer, 27 May 1950, p. 16. 86 Picture Show, 13 May 1950, p. 10. 87 Interview with Herbert Lom, in McFarlane, p. 377. 88 Monthly Film Bulletin, January 1954, p. 11. 89 Quinlan, pp. 280 and 359. 90 Monthly Film Bulletin, August 1955, p. 122–3. 91 Monthly Film Bulletin, August 1967, p. 124. 92 Monthly Film Bulletin, July 1967, p. 110. 93 British Television: An Illustrated Guide, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2nd edn, 1996, p. 46. 94 Ibid., p. 54. 95 Monthly Film Bulletin, November 1970, p. 226.

Lawrence Huntington

4

Keeping busy from 1930 Unlike the other three directors explored in this study, Huntington had plenty of experience in this role in the 1930s before entering his peak period in the middle of the next decade. By 1940 he had directed twelve mainly forgotten ‘B’ movies (also claiming writing credits on eight of them) and there were a further five in the early 1940s before he hit his stride with Night Boat to Dublin in 1945. Unfortunately, most of his films of this period are no longer available for viewing, whereas the other three all served their apprenticeships, either as writer or cinematographer, under directors of some standing and whose films tend to be more accessible even eighty years after their release. However, the few of the pre-1945 period that it has been possible to view suggest a fluent handling of the thriller genre in the modest circumstances of the British ‘B’ movie – or ‘quota quickie’, to use the common but probably too dismissive put-down of films thus placed. The earliest such item found available is Passenger to London (1937), a nippy, entirely watchable spy thriller. An English agent (Victor Hagen), who has recovered some stolen British blueprints, is travelling home from Paris to London by train when he is stabbed to death by foreign agents. Fortunately, he has taken the precaution of stowing the documents in the luggage of an unsuspecting traveller, Barbara Lane (Jenny Laird), and writing to his London supervisor Sir James Garfield (Aubrey Pollock) with this information. The subsequent investigation by English agent Drayton (John Warwick) involves bringing a pair of sinister foreigners to a deserved end – and a happy end for Drayton in the arms of Miss Lane. While the film moves predictably to a conventional climax, it maintains a brisk pace along the way and enough grip on the characters to make it one of the more acceptable quota quickies. The comedy involving a

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frightfully refined hotel proprietor (Dorothy Dewhurst) and a vinegary spinster lodging there (Sybil Brooke) may seem now about as politically incorrect as could be but was probably de rigueur in 1937 (and perhaps even as late as Brief Encounter in 1945). This is not allowed to interrupt the film’s story unduly, and Huntington is already showing the kind of narrative fluency that would characterise his best work in the next decade. And it does not deserve David Quinlan’s verdict of: ‘Good settings but otherwise feeble thriller.’1 The other Huntington quickie available for viewing, Dial 999 (1938), written by Huntington and Ernest Dudley just after the new emergency number was announced,2 is a less engaging piece. It is replete with obscure figures in night scenes in potentially dangerous settings, has too many scenes of men standing around talking, foreigners who are inevitably sinister and a meet-cute romantic pairing. The story concerns a gang of forgers, headed by ‘The Badger’, who are finally brought to heel by Police Inspector Waring (John Longden). He in turn is rewarded romantically with the pretty woman (Elizabeth Kent) whom he meets when her car bangs into his. The print viewed was less than perfect, but like Passenger to London it was shot sometimes quite expressively by Stanley Grant, who amassed an amazing twenty cinematography credits between 1936 and 1939. Monthly Film Bulletin praised the film as ‘well photographed and produced, with specially significant sound effects, and [with a story that] contains a real surprise’.3 Both films were edited by Peter Tanner, who went on to enjoy a distinguished ‘A’-film career, and he and Grant contrive to make Huntington’s ‘B’s look more inventive than was often the case at this level of British film-making in the 1930s. As for the rest of Huntington’s career in the 1930s, altogether he directed eleven films – all of them destined for the bottom half of the double bill – and was also responsible for the screenplay (or ‘story’) for seven of them. Those with the two Huntington credits include After Many Years (1930), Romance in Rhythm (1934), Full Speed Ahead (for which he chartered a steamer from Goole to Copenhagen to film his screenplay4) and The Bank Messenger Mystery (both 1936), and Bad Boy (1938), as well as the story for Dial 999. These presumably lost films, mostly thrillers, often featured actors who were either regulars in 1930s British productions, such as John Longden, John Warwick and George Mozart, or would go on to better things, such as Geraldine Fitzgerald and Derrick de Marney, who starred in the romance Café Mascot (1936), or Kay Hammond and (later, director) Harold French in the comedy Two on a Doorstep (1936).

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In the absence of the relevant prints, though, it is not possible to generalise about these films; they were part of the British film industry of the decade but, in most cases, are both now unavailable for viewing and, until Steve Chibnall’s 2007 study, Quota Quickies,5 the subject of little research. At the turn of the decade, Huntington began to be associated with a somewhat more upmarket product – that is, films that were either co-features, as distinct from ‘B’ quickies, or modest ‘A’ films. A film such as This Man Is Dangerous (1941), made for John Argyle Productions (Rialto) and not available at the time of this study, was at least strongly cast with James Mason, Mary Clare, Margaret Vyner and several reputable character players, but with a running time of 73 minutes can have been intended only as a co-feature. However, when it was re-released as The Patient Vanishes several years later, this melodrama of kidnapping and murder was well received by The Cinema, whose reviewer ‘C.A.W.’ wrote of it: ‘With its alternations of comedy relief and quiet romance, the film boasts of all the required ingredients for arresting melodrama … [with] all the cast doing justice to the considerable melodramatic meat.’6 Given their running times (generally between 75 and 85 minutes), Huntington seemed to have moved out of the ‘B’ film territory without quite making it to full-blown first features. As with This Man Is Dangerous, co-feature status must also have been the case with the other thrillers of this period: Tower of Terror (1941), Suspected Person (1942, for which Huntington also wrote the screenplay) and Warn That Man (1943), and the sole comedy Women Aren’t Angels (1943). Suspected Person was lauded as being among the best-made British thrillers of the period by one reviewer, ‘E.R.’, who summed up with: ‘The direction is slick, the suspense and excitement being well sustained.’7 The same journal rated Women Aren’t Angels as ‘ridiculous stuff, of course, as farce should be, but of its sort very well produced and slickly directed’.8 Unlike the other three directors in this study, Huntington seems always to have had his eye set on directing, and it is interesting to note the gradual approach he made until his breakthrough success with Night Boat to Dublin. Fortunately, two of these early-1940s thrillers can still be viewed, namely Tower of Terror and Warn That Man, both made for Associated British Production Company (ABPC). Though each has some points of interest, they are still some distance from the powerful studies of obsession that characterised his later work. The opening image of Tower of Terror, as the credits unroll, is one of waves crashing on a rocky coast at night, followed by a map of the North Sea as the camera tracks east to near Heligoland. Strident music increases as two men leave the lighthouse and set off for the ‘office’ – on shore, one assumes.

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The film stars Wilfrid Lawson as Kristan, the (crazed, as will emerge) lighthouse keeper stationed, as an opening title tells us, ‘Three Miles off the German Coast – WESTERODE LIGHTHOUSE – lonely outpost of the North Sea’. A former lighthouse colleague tells the harbour master (Morland Graham) that he refuses to return because Kristan is crazy and has not spoken to him for three weeks. When Kristan enters the office later, he claims he can work alone. Up to this point, the film, despite some of the murkiest photography ever, has built up our interest in the strange character of Kristan, who proves to have a hook instead of a right hand. The complications of plot involve an English agent, Anthony Hale (Michael Rennie), who presents himself on the lighthouse island under an assumed name and takes the place of the former assistant lighthouse keeper. There is also a beautiful young woman Marie (Movita), whom Kristan rescues from her attempted drowning and, consumed by jealousy when she falls for Hale, eventually wants to kill. Just before the overdue end Kristan has tried to do away with them both. There are also German soldiers hovering in pursuit of Hale when British forces arrive in the nick of time. It is all wildly convoluted and the fact that so much of it takes place in the dark makes it no easier to keep up with. Its saving graces are in Lawson’s vivid dealings with the maniacal Kristan and Huntington’s flair for a sudden elucidating close-up amid the endemic murk. In hindsight, the film’s preoccupation with Kristan’s obsessive behaviour may seem to anticipate the protagonists of his later films in the decade. However, Monthly Film Bulletin felt that ‘Wilfrid Lawson is not always convincing – he is inclined to over-act’, and went on to say: ‘The Nazi atmosphere and details are not very impressive, and although some of the sea scenes make up for what these others lose, there seems to be something lacking in the general composition of the film.’9 Somewhat vague as that assessment sounds, and though Tower of Terror can appear turgid in its narrative habits, every now and then a sharply rendered confrontation reminds us of a director who would go on to do more impressive work. Warn That Man, like the preceding film, also begins by establishing a sense of place and a mysterious figure in relation to it. The first image – a receding car – gives way to a panning shot of a farmhouse and sheds, then of a ladder down to a kind of cellar from which a man is watching from a window as another man emerges from the front of a stately home and seems to flee in a waiting car. Huntington, abetted by Günther Krampf’s noirish lighting, has set up in short order a satisfactory series of thriller expectations. These are further raised by the scene of the escaping man’s being held up by a police officer who asks for

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his ID card. ‘I’m travelling on business,’ he says, prior to knocking the officer down and hurtling off. Shortly after, the film cuts to a theatrical performance of Othello, at the point when the star declaims, ‘I have done the state some service’, a line that will resonate in Huntington and Vernon Sylvaine’s screenplay (adapted from the latter’s stage success). In what is perhaps his only starring role in films, Raymond Lovell plays, as well as Othello, the dual role of Hausemann and Lord Buckley. Hausemann is the actor and he will later impersonate Buckley in the interests of the plot’s machinations. ‘That man’ who is to be ‘warned’ was said to be ‘presumably Churchill’, according to David Quinlan,10 and Kinematograph Weekly elaborated on this point with: ‘It is not openly admitted that the big game stalked by the Nazis is Winston Churchill, but, on the other hand, there is no denying that the reference to a large cigar and “blood, toil and sweat” are significant.’11 German infiltrators, led by Hausemann, lock up Buckley and his staff in order to carry out their wartime plans. The day is finally saved by Buckley’s niece, Frances (Jean Kent), who contrives to carry out the eponymous action, with the help of her unexpectedly arriving fiancé (Philip Friend), with a cockney steward (Gordon Harker) and a naval captain, Fletcher (Finlay Currie). It is all quite briskly handled, as it unravels its tangle of events and motives; the sheer unlikeliness of the Hausemann/Buckley duo does not really detract too much from the film’s narrative interest and is indeed the subject of some quite cunning cinematography by Krampf. There is perhaps more comic punctuation from Harker (star of Huntington’s previous film, Women Aren’t Angels) than the film needs, but some of it is amusing enough and maybe ensures that we do not take the rest of the film too seriously. There is, for instance, talk about the Blitz when Captain Fletcher tells how he and four maiden ladies were all sleeping together, to which Harker’s George ripostes ‘Metaphorically, I hope’, and elsewhere George jokes about ‘luxury’ foods, meaning wartime rations of corned beef, condensed milk and strawberry jam. Top-billed Harker offers a style of comedy – often faintly suggestive – that may seem anodyne to more modern viewers but was certainly popular in its day. The film deals quite neatly with the dual roles played by Lovell, who was one of the most enjoyable character actors in 1940s British cinema, often as not the embodiment of cravatted duplicity but more versatile than this image might suggest. Here, in a rare leading role, he makes an engrossing pair of the dangerous German and the English aristocrat. As Huntington had shown in his direction of Wilfrid Lawson in Tower

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of Terror, he again reveals a capacity for allowing a compelling actor to hold the screen, as he would with Robert Newton, Eric Portman and others later in the decade. Warn That Man offers a thriller scenario adequately laced with humour and human interaction so as to make its 82 minutes pass enjoyably and with touches of sophistication in its observation and structure that bode well for what is to follow as Huntington entered indisputable ‘A’-film territory.

High time – from the mid-1940s Unlike the other three directors in this study, Huntington did not serve time at Gainsborough, and he had no experience of the costume melodrama genre in which they established their credentials. He had made several films for Associated British, where he was given his first chance to direct what was clearly a main feature – Night Boat to Dublin – though his subsequent and most impressive work would be done for other companies. His genre shifts are interesting as he moves from pacey thrillers to studies of obsessive character in action to much more lighthearted comedy-drama after the 1940s. Of the four directors considered in this study he is also the one whose body of work most often reflects recurring personal interests, in matters to do with both thematic preoccupations and film-making techniques. He seems also to have been the one most highly regarded by actors. Some typical appraisals in this respect came from Michael Denison: ‘a very funny man and splendid with actors’; Dulcie Gray: ‘He knew what he wanted from you, but seemed relaxed, friendly and easy-going. He was very much underrated’;12 and Marius Goring, who lauded him as one who ‘understood actors very well, and, above all, had a great sense of humour’.13 It is worth quoting these comments because there were some unenthusiastic remarks made about the other directors in their dealings with actors, whatever their other virtues. Further, the reference to Huntington’s sense of humour is revealing: he made very few comedies as such, but even near the end of his career some of his television episodes benefit from a quirky lightness of touch.

Night Boat to Dublin (1946) A Swedish atomic research scientist, Dr Hansen (Martin Miller), has been reported missing. In the Tower of London an Austrian prisoner, Jannings (Marius Goring), claims Hansen is dead and refuses to answer

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questions relating to him. Suspected of being a Nazi spy, Jannings is executed (off-screen) in the film’s opening sequence. British Military Intelligence (BMI) is concerned that the results of Hansen’s advanced experiments will be made available to the Germans, and the rest of the film – full of the narrative complications that Huntington handles well – is motivated by the search by BMI to find him. The film, made soon after the war ended, has thus a whiff of recent history in the matter of atomic research and in the use of Irish wartime neutrality as a plot mechanism. BMI, in the persons of Captain David Grant (Robert Newton) and Captain Robert Wilson (Lawrence O’Madden), are next seen on the titular night boat travelling to the Irish capital, aiming to track down a Nazi contact, Keitel (Herbert Lom, suavely villainous as ever), to whom they believe Hansen’s findings are being passed on. While on the night boat, Wilson meets an old acquaintance, legal consultant Faber (Raymond Lovell), who is actually the intermediary responsible for passing on the atomic secrets to Keitel. Also involved is the steward on the boat, George Leggett (Leslie Dwyer), who provides (via a copy of Esquire magazine) crucial information to Faber. There certainly is a lot going on and a lot of people involved, either as crooks or investigators, but Huntington keeps the whole thing moving very fluently and the many characters are given – by both screenplay and direction – enough opportunity to register. Even the actors who play very small parts – such as those of the inquisitive landlady (Olga Lindo), Leggett’s extravagant wife (Brenda Bruce), suspected spy Jannings (Goring), a moustachioed taxi-driver (Wilfrid Hyde-White) and O’Madden’s Wilson, disposed of briskly by Faber – all vivify their roles. Another key figure is that of Austrian refugee Marion Decker (Muriel Pavlow), who needs to marry to gain British citizenship; in a neat convolution of plot, David Grant joins her at the registry office to bring this about. Pavlow, incidentally, recalled Night Boat as ‘my first film role of any importance’ and Huntington as ‘very workmanlike, very professional, with a good understanding of actors’.14 Evidence for this comment is borne out not only by the cast of Night Boat but also in his major films that followed. But it is Newton, in what is for him almost a conventional leading-man role, who provides a compelling focus for the large cast of often ambiguous figures and the complex comings and goings that constitute the busy narrative. His chief competition, both in terms of plot manoeuvres and in the matter of holding audience attention is Lovell, whom Huntington had used to such good effect in Warn the Man and who is such an expert in well-dressed corruption: ‘ideal as a suave villain’, as

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Figure 15  Raymond Lovell and Leslie Dwyer in Night Boat to Dublin, 1946

Picturegoer’s review had it.15 In the film’s climax, at the Devon home of Faber’s mistress, Sidney Vane (Joan Maude), where the atomic scientist is located, Lovell and Newton confront each other with no holds barred and, for the first time, with the intentions of each in the open. The film was well-regarded at the time of its release, with Kinematograph Weekly recommending it strongly to ‘Showmen’: ‘This well-knit, tightly packed story moves at an exhilarating pace, the characterisation is vital, the light relief slick and spectacular climax expertly timed … A showmanlike job from start to finish.’16 The Monthly Film Bulletin reviewer shared the trade paper’s enthusiasm: ‘if you are susceptible, as the reviewer is, to the hair-breadth, imminent and deadly, then the film is most entertaining. Its excitements are continuous, and although it is a box-office piece it wears the air of enjoying itself immensely, which is captivating, anyway.’17 Perhaps the writer’s support for the film could be more precisely phrased, but the intention to praise is clear. As in his earlier thrillers, Huntington keeps the film moving swiftly and, despite its many threads, achieves an admirable clarity as he charts the veering narrative. On re-viewing the film after many years, what I wrote after my first viewing still seems true: ‘Huntington in his first “A” feature, is aiming at no more than a lively entertainment, and, abetted by a very good cast and Otto Heller’s camera-work (which does justice to both studio set and location shooting), he establishes his proficiency in the chosen genre.’18 Huntington had unequivocally entered the upper bracket of feature film-making, but it is his next film that really brought him to serious attention.

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Wanted for Murder (1946) Released just five months after Night Boat, Wanted for Murder, made for Marcel Hellman Productions and distributed in the UK and the US by 20th Century Fox, is again a thriller but this time with a potent psychological element that lifts it above the conventional expectations of the genre. As far back as Tower of Terror with Wilfrid Lawson as the crazed lighthouse keeper, Huntington had evinced an interest in protagonists driven by obsession, and with Eric Portman in Wanted for Murder, Marius Goring in Mr Perrin and Mr Traill (1948) and James Mason in The Upturned Glass (1947) he had the advantage of working with three actors more than capable of rendering this motif persuasively. Wanted for Murder was called A Voice in the Night in the US, partly no doubt because of Mischa Spoliansky’s song of that name, which is part of his eloquent musical score for the film. For once, the American change of title does not seem like a dumbing down of the original, which was so often the case. The idea expressed in the song’s title suggests the haunted quality that characterises Portman’s Victor Colebrooke – and the film’s (and Huntington’s) preoccupation with the darkness and the look and feel of film noir, then so powerful a stylistic mode in film-making. The film’s opening title is a quotation from Sir Thomas Browne’s Religio Medici, recalling Knowles’s use of this source to introduce The Man Within; it could also be said that Huntington’s interest is also in the man within Victor. He prefaces the action with what is made to look like an old manuscript on which the following sentence is quoted: ‘No man can justly censure or condemn another, because no man truly knows another.’ Before our first glimpse of Victor, there is a scene of everyday normality and rush as a young woman, Anne (Dulcie Gray), runs down a London Underground escalator and boards a crowded train. A young man, Jack (Derek Farr), eyes her admiringly, then tells her he had been a conductor on the number 13 bus on which she was a regular traveller. There is an openness about these attractive young people that, in hindsight, prepares us for the contrast of Victor. The scene cuts from the train to a carnival on Hampstead Heath and the rear view of a man in a hat and coat in the foreground. A woman in the crowd by the Punch and Judy show (an evocative detail in the light of the rest of the film’s action) catches his eye and he follows her as she leaves with an air of intent at odds with the couple we saw on the tube. Just as Anne and Jack, now also at the carnival, are beginning to enjoy themselves,

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Anne catches sight of Victor, the man she had been due to meet. He is very angry with her for keeping him waiting and this first glimpse of Victor’s face suggests another ‘man within’. Victor, Anne and Jack will be crucial actors in the ensuing drama, along with Victor’s mother (Barbara Everest) and Chief Inspector Conway (Roland Culver). The latter will enter the scene the next day when a woman has been found strangled. By about the end of the first quarterhour, the basis has been deftly laid for a potential love story, a study in strange, possibly obsessive behaviour and a police hunt. Huntington, working from a screenplay by Emeric Pressburger and Rodney Ackland,19 shows admirable control over the melding of the film’s range of narrative interests. The most compelling aspect of the film is its dealing with this issue of obsession. Victor Colebrooke has killed four women when the film opens; the woman he has eyed in the carnival becomes the fifth victim; and the sixth, the first we see as a victim, has gone with him to Regent’s Park where they are observed by an American soldier, Nick (Bonar Colleano), and his girlfriend (Edna Woods). Nick begs a light for his cigarette from Victor, who proffers the lighter but does not turn his head. Nick, a tailor in civilian life, will later identify the coat and hat Victor is wearing when Inspector Conway cunningly gets his underlings and Victor, whom he has called into New Scotland Yard, to put these on and to turn their backs towards Nick. In this moment, the film echoes its first rear view of Victor at the carnival. How far Conway suspects Victor is not spelt out, but he is increasingly sure that the murderer, who keeps sending notes to Scotland Yard, wants to establish that he is cleverer than the police. Before Conway’s first visit to Victor’s home, having by some means found that Victor was on Hampstead Heath on the night of the fifth murder, we are introduced to Mrs Colebrooke, Victor’s mother. At first it seems that she is simply being overprotective and possessive. She rebukes her snobbish sister Mabel (Viola Lyel) with: ‘I will not have you upsetting Victor’, to which Mabel retorts, ‘You’ve always kept him under a glass case since he was a boy.’ But there is more than maternal cosseting at issue here. She is aware of what he has inherited from his father’s side of the family and has tried to shield him from this – from the father who died when Victor was very young, and who was in his turn haunted by the memory of his father, a notorious hangman of the Victorian era, whose likeness appears in a statue at Madame Tussaud’s wax museum. There is something touching in Victor asking his mother, ‘What was Father like? I was so young when he died.’ His mother, in a scene devoid of cliché or melodrama tells him quietly that his father

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was always worried, as Victor is, and that she ‘knew his worries, and I tried to help him to fight them’. Barbara Everest’s performance finds compassion and understanding in this scene, in which she also urges Victor to ‘find a nice girl’. And this moment provides a link to the film’s last sequences when Victor goes off to meet Anne for a last conversation when, in Hyde Park, she nearly becomes his seventh victim. If this mother–son relationship curiously deflects the audience’s conventional expectations, so too does the police investigation. First, though, the issue of class, not a crucial matter in the film’s plot, is nevertheless a small item in its texture. There is, for instance, a neat parallel between Mrs Colebrooke’s treatment – not meanly patronising but still maintaining a social gap – of her housekeeper, Florrie (Kathleen Harrison, forever at the lower end of the scale), and Inspector Conway’s easy social superiority over Sergeant Sullivan (Stanley Holloway) and other lower-ranked officers played by Bill Shine and John Salew. Again, in the police setting this sense of different social levels is not played for easy laughs but as a matter of observation of gradations of seniority. In yet another setting, Anne’s co-worker in the record store, Muriel (Beatrice Campbell), makes a slighting reference to Anne’s ‘bus conductor friend’, Jack, who was going to be an engineer before the war but is now undecided. It is only worth mentioning these details to suggest that this is a film that takes its settings, physical and social, into account in creating its character interactions. There is some ingenuity in the way the police procedures are handled, at some distance from those television series where a detective stands in front of a dry-wipe board and lectures his or her colleagues, all the while adding details to the board. Huntington allows time to establish the working order of Conway’s office and the varied nature of the relationships with his staff, especially allowing a comedic element in his dealings with Sullivan, who is not inhibited by his senior’s obvious class superiority, nor is Conway patronising in his turn. Sullivan claims that his ‘missus’ is ‘certain there’s going to be another murder tonight’, adding by way of explanation, ‘She’s septic – I mean psychic’. Another neat touch is in the berating of Walton (Salew) for smoking the broken piece of cigar Victor has left behind in Conway’s office, while the gawky Ellis (Shine) is also ticked off for having lost the corroborating cigar leaf found at the scene of the murder. Another small but telling detail is in the murderer’s sending of missives to Conway, as if to represent himself as smarter than his pursuer, and, on a more crucial level, the way Victor voluntarily comes to the office where he is received as what? Reliable witness or possible suspect? Portman’s performance deals subtly with such possible ambiguities.

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Once outside the office, the police search gains from the film’s impressively realistic look of busy streets and night-time parks, with Conway making his way to the Chamber of Horrors where he finds the decapitated statue of hangman Colebrooke, and Ellis trailing Victor. There is an expansiveness in the depiction of the procedures, echoed in the shifting settings to which Max Greene’s cinematography does full justice, giving an unusually potent sense of the kind of work they involve. The climax to the search is played out in Hyde Park, where Victor has arranged to have his final meeting with Anne. A concert is called to a halt and the hordes of people are shepherded out when the police arrive, having been alerted to the scene of the prospective seventh murder. Victor has lured Anne out in a boat, planning to take her to the opposite, wooded bank of the Serpentine to kill her. The police and Jack arrive in the nick of time, of course, but even though this was to be expected, Huntington’s dextrous staging of the episode generates serious apprehension. The third plot strand that deserves some attention is the love story – though that designation makes it sound more advanced than the screenplay requires – between Anne and Jack. There is unaffected charm in Dulcie Gray’s playing of the shop girl who has been sufficiently attracted to Victor to agree to the fairground meeting, where his anger at her lateness unnerves her somewhat. She conveys, too, a convincing sense of decency in the way she means to break off her friendship with Victor, unaware of the danger she is courting in doing so, when she realises she has fallen in love with Jack. Gray was a rather underrated actress (as Phyllis Calvert also claimed20), but there was a freshness and openness in her playing that often brought conventional characters to life. Picturegoer praised her as being ‘natural’ in the role.21 Derek Farr complements her with an appropriately likable and believable Jack, who, post-war, has not quite felt up to returning to his engineer’s training and genuinely enjoys the contacts with people he meets as a bus conductor. A small but maybe telling gesture towards more egalitarian post-war times? If the motif – and motive – of obsession is at the heart of the film, its great strength is in Portman’s rendering of the complex role of Victor, and his playing is admirably served by Huntington’s use of tight compositions. In the first meeting between Victor and Conway, the camera frames them in a series of shot-reverse-shot close-ups that suggest that the film’s central conflict will be played out between these two men. Culver’s easy urbanity, suggestive also of a sharp intelligence, complements Portman’s blandly upper-class manners, which we, by this time, know are but one aspect of his persona. We have seen him

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angrily rebuke Anne for lateness, as well as listening to his mother’s concern about him, meaning the courteous exterior is already problematic for the audience. The way he seems purposely to leave behind incriminating bits of evidence as if to challenge the police, his manner with his work assistant and the controlled deviousness of his interviews with Conway all contrive to produce a much more interesting protagonist than many thrillers can boast of. As a result, there is almost a poignant touch to his final capture when he emerges from the Serpentine. A piece of trivia noted by his biographer records: ‘Eric must have been in prime physical condition, because he performed twenty-five successive retakes in an ice-cold tank for the drowning scene in the movie.’22 Portman’s Victor was the first of Huntington’s obsessed protagonists, a persona Portman had honed in such films as The 49th Parallel (1941) and A Canterbury Tale (1944, both for Michael Powell), and in Lance Comfort’s Great Day (1945); for both Portman and Huntington it remains one of their most compelling achievements. The popular magazines of the day would support such a judgement, with Picture Show describing it as an ‘[u]nusual and exciting thriller, that grips from beginning to end … Brilliantly acted and directed’,23 and Picturegoer as: ‘A really good thriller, well-constructed, well-acted and imaginatively directed’, adding that, ‘While grim in theme, the drama is relieved by well-introduced, unforced humour.’24 But it is Monthly Film Bulletin that most aptly summarises the film’s two strengths: ‘first, its admirable use of London backgrounds … and second the distinction of Eric Portman’s convincing and sincere portrait of a man pathetically the victim of a psychological inheritance for which he is not responsible, but, in the moments of aberration, proud of his own cunning’.25 The comment about Portman’s playing of Victor recalls the opening title that quotes Sir Thomas Browne. So, in a different way, does the protagonist of Huntington’s next film.

The Upturned Glass (1947) Co-produced by Betty Box and James Mason for Sydney Box’s Triton company, The Upturned Glass offers another Huntington study of a mind in the grip of obsession – and another riveting performance from the actor whose job it is to incarnate this. This time, it is Mason, as compelling as Portman in the preceding film, whose character must grapple with threats to his sanity. He plays neurosurgeon Michael Joyce, who is lecturing students about (unknown to them) himself and the possibility of the ‘perfectly sane, valuable member of society’ who once acts madly, as distinct from ‘those minds conditioned by exceptional

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nervous stress and an unhealthy environment’. He claims that the sane criminal is the much more interesting phenomenon; that is, the man who is prepared to pursue his ethical convictions even to the point of murder. There are, he proposes, such men who are as likely to be inspired by integrity as those who sit in judgement, a perception which recalls that remark of Thomas Browne’s that introduced Wanted for Murder. Working from a screenplay by John (credited as Jno) P. Monaghan, an American friend of Mason’s, and Mason’s wife, Pamela Kellino, Huntington has fashioned an absorbing exercise in unusual tensions that is more concerned with why people act as they do than with the violent incidents that might have been expected. Using the lecture-room setting was an inspired idea, and it is only when certain key events seem to be repeated that we realise Joyce was using the lecture partly to induct us into the chain of events that have brought him to this point and to try to sort out in his own mind where he should go from there. As he puts before the crowded lecture theatre his idea of the ‘sane’ murderer, he tells his own story, of a man ‘reserved in personal relationships’, one who lives for his work, with music his only relaxation. He never knew what he was missing until he met Emma Wright (Rosamund John), whose daughter Ann (Ann Stephens) was going blind until Joyce performs an operation that restores her sight. He and Emma fall in love, despite their sense that neither is free to form a relationship, and pursue their common interest in music. After Emma falls from a window and dies, her mischief-making sister-in-law, Kate Howard (Pamela Kellino), claims in court that Emma always had a fear of heights. Unconvinced that her death was an accident, a view confirmed by the gardener at her country house, Joyce pursues the matter. Becoming convinced that Kate has pushed Emma to her death, he metes out the same treatment to her, having lured her to accompany him to Emma’s house. He then throws himself from a cliff at the film’s end. This bare outline of the film’s plot can give no idea of how absorbingly – and ingeniously – it unfolds, drawing on the kinds of aptitude that would become Huntington’s trademark during this decade of his major achievement. He always seems more concerned with what prompts the behaviours of his protagonists than in offering a strictly linear narrative. In The Upturned Glass, how the events outlined above are revealed and how they grow out of Joyce’s preoccupations account for much of the fascination of the film. It seems – to us, though not to the students – as if Joyce’s lecture is a relating of his dealings with Emma and Kate, and their deaths. Then, in a remarkable structural turn, the lecture comes

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Figure 16  Pamela Kellino and James Mason in The Upturned Glass, 1947

to an end and Joyce, in what looks like a repetition of an earlier episode, drives Kate to look over Emma’s house. ‘You must be demented,’ she tells him, and this casual comment resonates with his lecture-hall talk of motives for supposedly sane people committing murder. At the end of the lecture, a student asks if the murderer Joyce was describing was ever suspected and if, like all paranoiacs, he had to tell someone. When he and Kate arrive at the house, Joyce carries out the action he has been describing to the students, when it was visually depicted as accompaniment to Joyce’s voice-over. It is almost as though he was trying out his plan on the students before putting it into action. The actual episode of Kate’s death is very skilfully done. Joyce accuses her of having tried to blackmail Emma about her lover, and of trying to poison Ann’s mind against her mother. As a physical struggle ensues, with Kate screaming as Joyce tries to push her towards the window from which Emma had fallen, Huntington, well served by cinematographer Reginald Wyer and editor Alan Osbiston, brilliantly exercises the tight framing that is so characteristic of his best work. Where such tight compositions had previously been invoked to establish the growth of Joyce and Emma’s relationship, here they work to create the desperate struggle of victim and assailant, ending with his strangling her and her falling to the path below. What follows has a curious quality of

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poignancy along with the more usual suspense as Joyce stows Kate’s body in his car, just as the gardener (Morland Graham) comes by, singing ‘We plough the fields and scatter’, a hymn that has its own echoes here. Driving off in a dense fog, Joyce is hailed by a roadside figure who also proves to be a doctor, Farrell (Brefni O’Rourke), and to whom Joyce gives a lift to a farmhouse where a child has been involved in an accident. The two engage in a philosophical discussion about values, what makes life worth living; Farrell’s views are more pragmatic, even opportunistic, than those of Joyce, who has just committed a murder. Farrell asks Joyce to come into the house to give a second opinion about the child’s chances of survival, to take some of the weight of decision from him. Huntington is not afraid of a straining of credibility in Joyce’s agreeing not just to offering a second opinion but also to performing the life-saving operation. Meanwhile, Kate’s body is in the back seat of his car, to which he has sent Farrell for a piece of equipment. This kind of suspense, emphasised by a close-up of Joyce’s eyes above his surgical mask when Farrell returns, is efficiently handled, but Huntington’s main concern is with what the episode reveals of Joyce – and how this tallies with his lecture about murders being committed by sane men of integrity. Farrell now says he is talking not of the perfectly sane but of ‘obsessionals’, delivering his verdict as the police arrive (having been alerted by the gardener at Emma’s house): ‘My diagnosis was quite correct. You are mad.’ Marcia Landy, writing some decades later and perceptively pinpointing a key element in the film’s complex morality, notes that: ‘Through Farrell, the film indicts him [Joyce] as a pathological case, but the actions of the protagonist himself expose the ambiguity surrounding the meaning of normality.’26 Conventional expectations are thwarted here. Joyce escapes out of the back of the farmhouse before a confrontation can take place and drives over a bleak country road, but there is nothing as predictable as a police pursuit. The film cuts to a close-up of Joyce’s distraught face as he recalls in voice-over what he had said to the student who asked the question referred to above. Attention here is not on whether Joyce will be caught but how he can or will reconcile his earlier statements about, for instance, whether a murderer may also be a man with a strong sense of justice. Huntington is subtle enough not merely to repeat these ponderings; he is prepared to leave it – and is right to do so – to James Mason’s eloquent playing of the role. As he stands on the edge of the cliff from which he will throw himself, he manages to register a coming to terms with beliefs and their enactment in a way that excites admiration and pity. The struggle with Kate, in the cause

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of justice as he sees it, and the interlude with the sick child, in which he put himself at risk in the cause of integrity, in a curious way informs the melancholy image of Joyce at the cliff’s edge, emotional strain and self-scrutiny having taken their toll. The sources of the film’s power are as much in the idea of the sane murderer as purveyor of justice as in the way the plot that explores this idea is revealed. Flashbacks – and what at the time we mistakenly believe to be flashbacks – are played out over the lecture scene, most notably over Joyce’s face. In this way, the nature of his involvement, both in terms of external action and inner self-exploration, is made provocative. In praising Mason’s performance, at some remove from his Gainsborough villains, the Monthly Film Bulletin reviewer wrote: ‘This time he combines the educated suavity of the Harley Street specialist with the ruthless and, in this case, just desire for revenge.’27 Huntington keeps the focus on Mason and is rewarded with some of the actor’s most compelling work. And, as Picturegoer claimed: ‘James Mason narrates, James Mason acts, James Mason actually is the beginning and the end of this loosely constructed psychological thriller.’28 I would take issue with ‘loosely constructed’ – in my opinion the structure is unusual and stimulating, not loose – but the rest is accurate. Kinematograph Weekly’s recommendation to ‘Showmen’ is that the film would be an ‘[o]bvious general money spinner’, describing it as a ‘[p]sychiatric thriller, rigorously spun from the romantic vicissitudes and homicidal eccentricities of a brilliant but mentally unstable brain specialist’, and praising Mason for his ‘polished performance’.29 Mason, in fact, seems to have enjoyed widespread praise for his playing of Joyce, and it is certainly he who holds together the film’s unusual structure – and unusually complex moral attitudes. Rosamund John, who would have more opportunity in Huntington’s next film, suggests well enough the gentle-mannered married woman who finds herself trembling on the brink of an affair. The role, though, does not allow for much variety before she is out of the window and, thus, of the film. Pamela Kellino as the prickly sister-in-law offers a somewhat more vivid impression, making the most of the chances afforded her by the screenplay. In passing, one notes Huntington’s most obvious link to Gainsborough is his use of some of its acting alumni, most notably Mason but also the likes of Dulcie Gray and Patricia Roc, all of whom found rewarding roles in his films. Apart from the acting, the strengths of the film are in the ways in which Huntington deals with the obsessional behaviour of Joyce, often calling into play his apparent preference for tight composition. As previously noted, this is brilliantly on show in the scene of struggle

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before Kate’s death or in the uneasy exchanges between Emma and Joyce, and this predilection throws into contrast his other strength – that of establishing a potent sense of place, as seen in the lecture hall, the hospital operating theatre, Emma’s country house and the final vast clifftop vista. He is a director with a strong spatial sense that he works so as to help articulate complex psychological and emotional states. In this matter in The Upturned Glass he is abetted by the brilliant art director Andrew Mazzei, then at the height of his powers, as well as by cinematographer Wyer. A more recent commentator has aptly described it as ‘a moody revenge tragedy, [which] has a single-minded intensity’.30 The film was commercially very successful, its box-office performance rated as ‘excellent’ by John Davis, who managed Rank’s finances.31 Powerful melodrama, realised with some vivid noir stylistics, make this a film very much of its time – and one still to be relished many decades later.

When the Bough Breaks (1948) In contrast to Wanted for Murder and The Upturned Glass, Huntington’s next film was more ‘domestic’ in its preoccupations, with no murder or police investigation to propel its narrative, except for a brief but crucial police announcement in the film’s first few minutes. But without wanting to make unsustainable auteurist claims for the director, When the Bough Breaks, released a few months after The Upturned Glass, displays again an interest in the obsessional elements in human behaviour in one of its protagonists, as well as some of Huntington’s recurring stylistic traits. It was made at Gainsborough Studios, Islington, for Sydney Box Productions, with Betty Box as producer, her soon-to-be husband Peter Rogers as screenwriter, and the uncredited assistance of her brother Sydney and his then-wife, Muriel, making it is very much a family affair. The screenplay was derived from a story by Moie Charles and Herbert Victor, who had previously worked together on Lance Comfort’s Bedelia (1946), another study in obsessive behaviour. In an essay written at the time, Sydney Box argued for ‘the amalgamation of documentary method of social reporting with a fictional story’, regarding this as ‘a real contribution to cinema’.32 Robert Murphy wrote fifty years later: ‘If a Box identity is to be discerned at Gainsborough, it would form around When the Bough Breaks, a film about an unmarried mother’s attempt to regain the son she allowed to be adopted’;33 that is, with matters of overtly contemporary concern, rather than costume

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Figure 17  Film poster for The Upturned Glass, 1947

melodrama. As Andrew Spicer writes in his study of Box’s career: ‘His development of this “method” at Gainsborough covered a varied range of post-war concerns: child adoption (When the Bough Breaks)’ and other matters such as displaced persons, delinquency, gambling and seaside recreation.34 Films such as The Lost People and Easy Money, both directed by Bernard Knowles, were obviously issue-based, and, along with, say, Holiday Camp (1947), directed by Ken Annakin, show a concern for the sorts of lives many cinemagoers might be supposed to lead. In the light of this, the opening salvo from Josh Billings of Kinematograph Weekly

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may have seemed a little severe to Box: ‘Mother-love melodrama built on novelettish lines’.35 There is some justification for this but such a put-down does not account for all that the film has to offer. Like several of Huntington’s films, When the Bough Breaks opens on a large building with people arriving, as if to suggest from the outset some key element of the environment in which the ensuing action will take place. This time it is a hospital, where a police official, Adams (Torin Thatcher), has come to visit Mrs Gardiner (Patricia Roc), who has recently had a baby boy. Adams’s news is that her husband (never seen in the film) has been arrested for bigamy and henceforth she will revert to the name of Lily Bates. Roc, unusually playing a lower-middleclass character, brings a convincing touch of belligerence to the role. She assures the very upper-middle-class almoner (Catherine Lacey) that she will not accept money from the child’s father: ‘I’ve been working since I was fourteen. I can manage.’ Whatever the contemporary reviewers said, and they were generally stern in their comments, the film is off to a spanking start, and maintains momentum as, via a long panning shot of the city’s grim-looking rooftops, it enters Lily’s drab lodging house. Here, she tries unavailingly to calm the crying baby, but other tenants complain and the landlady (Muriel George) unsympathetically passes on the complaints, suggesting Lily may need to seek other living arrangements. The next crucial development of the plot takes place in the nursery school where the superintendent, Mrs Frances Norman (Rosamund John), takes down the particulars of Miss Lily Bates and child, Jimmy. Her own child has died a year ago, and she soon becomes obsessively devoted to Jimmy. Since Frances’s child died, she ‘just has to be near babies’, the matron (Edith Sharpe) tells Lily. When Lily says she’s moving away, Frances says with an edge of urgency, ‘But you’ll still be able to bring Jimmy here [to the nursery].’ To underline Frances’s (perhaps understandably) obsessive preoccupation with the child, the film cuts to the Normans’ handsome middle-class home with its empty cradle. Husband Robert (Patrick Holt) raises the issue of adoption. The film, with quiet economy, contrasts the two houses, and, when Lily collapses under the strain of working full-time on the perfume counter of a store and trying to look after the child, Frances arrives with an offer to take the baby for a few days, which ultimately turns into a more permanent arrangement. What she is given to say and do at this point may seem rather patronising, but Rosamund John’s easy naturalness keeps patronage at bay. When working-class friends Ruby and George Chapman (Brenda Bruce and Lesley Dwyer – ‘married’ again as they were in Huntington’s Night

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Boat to Dublin) take Lily for a spell at a holiday camp, she meets tobacconist Bill Collins (Bill Owen). There is a montage of Lily and Bill getting to know each other (dancing, darts, drinks), followed by a quite touching account of Bill’s proposal, which Lily turns down. Her eyes kept in shadow seem to disguise her confused feelings at this point. Lily and Bill meet again in London by chance and take up their friendship once more, but Lily still insists that it is no more than friendship, giving no reason at this point. Later, she tells him, ‘There’s someone else … Jimmy.’ In Huntington’s characteristic tight framing, Bill finally gets Lily to agree to marriage, having modestly declared his situation: ‘I know I’m no catch really. There’s just the shop and all that goes with it … Security, and a lot of love.’ Owen’s performance as Collins is a major strength of the film: while not being conventional romantic-lead material, he nevertheless brings an unpretentious, sympathetic quality to the role that grounds the subsequent marriage in a recognisable reality. Encouraged by Ruby and George, Bill and Lily raise the question of bringing Jimmy back from the Normans, whose adoption of him was never formalised. This is the film’s turning point, and an appropriately emotionally charged one it proves to be. The conflict that follows, as the two women confront each other’s needs, is where the film has been heading since Lily first brought her baby into the nursery, then allowed Frances to take him to her home for a few days, and later still sanctioned the unofficial adoption. There is a painful tussle between the birth mother, who feels she has unquestionable rights to have her son restored to her now that she is in a position to keep him, and the other woman, whom Jimmy calls ‘Mummy’ and who has never told him he was adopted. Huntington’s framing of this episode is typically taut, creating the bitter tension at its heart. When the matter comes to court, the judge (Noel Howlett) rules that the boy be restored to Lily, while criticising both parties for not carrying out formal adoption procedures and for having settled for ‘a haphazard personal contract’. Jimmy’s upper-middle-class values quickly clash with what he finds at Lily and Bill’s house and shop – no garden, no maid, no drawing room – and he resists Lily’s attempts to have him call her and Bill ‘Mummy and Daddy’. Class matters raise their ugly heads at every turn, with Lily ashamed of what she can offer Jimmy, and with Jimmy getting into a fight because the other boys at school tell him he is ‘stuck up’. He is a snobbish little boy, but this is understandable in view of what he has been transported from and to. Kindly Bill warns Lily: ‘Now … don’t go getting snobbish and trying to get above yourself, it always causes unhappiness.’ Lily’s unease translates into shouting at Jimmy,

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who eventually runs away. Huntington, through Bryan Langley’s camera, keeps stressing the cramped conditions of the Collins home, and focuses on Jimmy’s note telling his parents that he has run away and is not coming back. The camera on the Collinses’ backyard almost seems to be narrating a reasonable cause for Jimmy’s unhappiness – that is, it is so very different from what he has grown up in – and offers further evidence of Huntington’s capacity for imbuing spatial settings with emotional and/or psychological meaning. There is real pain in the way this conflict is worked out, and this makes the film’s conclusion seem facile in contrast to all that has gone before. Lily and Bill are shown as happily being the parents of their own baby, while the Normans, to whom Jimmy has been restored, celebrate Jimmy’s birthday. After dealing with a serious matter – how far the birth mother is responsible for her son’s life as compared with the adoptive parents who have given him a home – and for the most part treating this issue seriously, the film opts to leave the audience smiling. This recalls the way Wanted for Murder ends happily, with the characters played by Dulcie Gray and Derek Farr serenely joyous as they contemplate a future together, but is at odds with Huntington’s grim denouement in The Upturned Glass. All three of these films have a bleak potential, but When the Bough Breaks evades the consequences of this most obviously. Monthly Film Bulletin may well be right when it claims that ‘this film is probably meant to be popular entertainment rather than a tract on the dangers of haphazard adoption’.36 Nevertheless, it is a pity that it was unable in the end to tackle fully the potential trauma of the crucial conflict, as Huntington might well have been equal to doing. As Tony Williams wrote of the film decades later, ‘It reveals the postwar bankruptcy of People’s War ideals’, adding that its contrived ending ‘never questions conservative ideological mechanisms influencing its climax’.37 This problem of the ending is echoed in Andrew Spicer’s study of Box: ‘The film handles the struggle over the child even-handedly, and presents a genuine dilemma sympathetically, but it is let down … by too neat a resolution’.38 Despite the facile ending, there is still plenty of interest in When the Bough Breaks. Most notably it offers a rewarding study of two determined women in Lily and Frances, their obsessive tendencies evinced convincingly and, on occasion, movingly in the performances of Patricia Roc and, especially, Rosamund John. Perhaps this can be seen as a phenomenon of post-war Britain when women were more bent on following their own dictates as distinct from acting in mere deference to their husbands’ wishes. Here, the two husbands, played

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Figure 18  Rosamund John and Patricia Roc in When the Bough Breaks, 1947

by Patrick Holt and Bill Owen, are distinctly milder in their approaches to their wives’ situations. There is also a well-observed social contrast between the two homes in which Jimmy finds himself: the cramped, multi-purpose quarters in which the Collinses spend their days at a remove from the Normans’ leafy outer-suburban spread in which the boy has had a free run that is out of the question in the Collins home. The issue of adoption may well have been more acutely raised in post-war than in pre-war Britain, and for a good deal of the film’s length it is taken seriously. And speaking of post-war Britain, there are glimpses of the way ordinary folk went about their lives, in shopping scenes, in regularly going to ‘the pictures’ and in the holiday camp (which had been foregrounded in the film of that name just a few months earlier). Those ordinary lives, too, are convincing portrayed not only in the way Lily and Bill live but in the doings of their working-class friends, played by Brenda Bruce and Leslie Dwyer. Neither of these, of course, ever had much chance in films to make their way up the social ladder, but here they are believably likable and friendly. Given these elements of dramatic and social interest, it is easy to feel that the two popular fan magazines of the day were unnecessarily severe in their judgements. Picture Show felt that: ‘The dialogue is uninspired, and there are no moves in it that can’t be foreseen’,39 while Picturegoer complained: ‘Here’s a completely unconvincing game of battledore and shuttlecock, played with the life of a child’, though it did grant some praise for the acting of Rosamund John and Bill Owen, the latter picked out as giving ‘easily the best performance’. 40 In more

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recent times, Spicer, writing of Sydney Box’s ‘commitment to continuing the drama-documentary format that had evolved during the war’, allowed that such films as ‘The Lost People, Boys in Brown and When the Bough Breaks may be flawed, but they are prepared to tackle difficult issues and to challenge orthodoxies’. 41

Mr Perrin and Mr Traill (1948) Huntington’s second 1948 release makes serious claims to being his finest hour. Made for Two Cities at Denham and produced by German refugee Alexander Galperson (his first of only two films before his early death), Mr Perrin and Mr Traill is adapted from Hugh Walpole’s third novel and the first major success in his prolific output. It draws on his own experiences as a teacher at Epsom College, which was displeased when one reviewer revealed the novel’s real-life source location. The screenplay is by the popular novelist L.A.G. Strong, with additional dialogue by T.J. Morrison, and the resulting powerful film certainly does not present its public-school setting in a flattering light. Mr Perrin and Mr Traill was also really Huntington’s last major success. There were some enjoyable lesser entertainments to follow, but this is the film that caps his ‘A’-feature run in the 1940s, and it is characterised by some of the recurring interests and strengths of those preceding titles, from Night Boat to Dublin to When the Bough Breaks. Thematically, it is again a study in growing obsession, and the not always predictable outcomes of such a disturbed mindset. Stylistically, the kind of conflict that this behaviour gives rise to is, as in the earlier films, created through carefully framed close compositions, especially in relation to characters in conflict. More specifically, the film again opens on a long shot of the institution that will control so much of what follows, reminiscent of the way in which The Upturned Glass opened on the large building in which the lecture takes place or When the Bough Breaks on the hospital in which Jimmy is born. Huntington is always acutely aware of how places and spaces come to bear on the behaviour of his protagonists. Mr Perrin’s first shot is of the rooftop of Banfield School, where the effect of setting will be almost claustrophobic, and, as with The Upturned Glass, it is accompanied by sombre music that seems to be at odds with the pupils arriving back from the holidays. A new boy, Benson (Cavan Malone, who also played Jimmy in When the Bough Breaks), is subject to teasing and bullying. Later, the sort of conflict in which Benson is seen will be paralleled by how the new master will have to deal with tensions.

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For both Benson and the new master, Banfield represents a new world, and it will not be easy for either to adjust to its rigidities. Again, Huntington’s world view, as expressed in his key films, is usually more dark than light, both in the way they look and how they feel. Of the film’s two eponyms, we are introduced first to Perrin (Marius Goring), making some heavily ‘classical’ jokes that are apt to be lost on his students, who refer to him – out of his hearing – as ‘Pompo’. The scene cuts to the study of Headmaster Moy-Thompson (Raymond Huntley), giving his start-of-term address to the staff. Without too much tact or empathy, he tells them that the new teacher about to start will bring ‘relief, a breath of fresh air’ to the school, at once suggesting (or instigating) tension among the ranks, as if they have not been performing adequately. Perrin is clearly less than impressed by the account of this new teacher, Traill (an ex-army man), and is not alone in this reaction, but it is his that will be crucial to the narrative. The other aspect of Perrin’s cloistered, unfulfilling life is hinted at in the next episode when he goes to the home of his mother (Mary Jerrold), who tries to encourage him by talking of the women who admire him. ‘A mother always knows,’ she says, but she is not depicted as a stereotypical possessive parent, nor is he confined by the cliché of the repressed man. ‘One waits for the propitious moment … if it doesn’t come, one engineers it’, is his reply, before leaving to walk on the nearby cliff with the school nurse, Isobel Lester (Greta Gynt). He talks to Isobel in the same laboured way as he does to the boys, and she, good-naturedly enough, fears his idea that the place of women is ‘in the home’ is somewhat outdated. After another classroom scene in which Perrin emerges as very dull but efficient, with a touch of Rattigan’s Crocker-Harris in The Browning Version (though with a slightly more robust, if polysyllabic wit), he is commanded to the Headmaster’s study. In a typical Huntington framing, the unpleasant Moy-Thompson dominates the right-hand side of the screen in a way that diminishes the entering Perrin, the unpopularity of whose house is the subject of the interview. At this point, when Perrin’s position has been made to appear vulnerable on several fronts, the other half of the title, Mr Traill (David Farrar), makes his first appearance, meeting Miss Lester on the way in, significantly, at once announcing a threat to Perrin’s already insecure situation. Traill and Lester’s interactions point from the outset to their mutual sexual attraction, which will be a major cause of Perrin’s increasingly obsessive behaviour. Also, as a returning soldier, Traill will be depicted as unwilling to settle for the outmoded practices of this minor public school. While Perrin is giving Traill a tour of the school, Traill lightly speaks of ‘the

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attractive girl’ he has just met. No doubt fearing that Traill’s more youthful and robust persona will make him a favourite with the boys, Perrin also gives him patronising advice about not being ‘too familiar’ with them. In Traill’s first classroom encounter with the pupils, they test him by creating a stench of burning rubber, but he deals with this in a manly way that wins approval. The film’s structure is now soundly established, with the two protagonists having made appropriate claims on our attention, so that we are ready for the development of the sort of tensions between them that will ultimately lead to the film’s striking climax. Goring and Farrar present a clear-cut contrast of demeanours and values, but the film avoids allowing merely simplistic depiction of their differences. It is not just a matter of two disparate personalities: the film also establishes the sense of everyone ‘living here in a small community’ and hating the sight and sound of each other, as Isobel confides to Traill. In doing so, she underlines a crucial element in the source of the film’s drama: a community in which tensions are bound to arise, especially one presided over by the ‘dreadful Moy-Thompson’, as she describes him. Another staff member, Birkland (Edward Chapman), warns Traill to get out of Banfield as soon as possible before the place kills his ambition. ‘Everyone here is a failure,’ he claims, and calls the Headmaster ‘a sadist’. The visual style of the film, frequently characterised in episodes framed by low ceilings, with confined spaces darkly lit, intensifies the sense of a community not likely to make for rewarding lives. The villain of the film, though ‘villain’ suggests a level of more obvious melodrama than is the case here, is indeed the overbearing Moy-Thompson. As Picturegoer claimed, ‘Raymond Huntley is perfect as the headmaster’, 42 and given Huntley’s long experience in enacting wintry-faced disdain or small-scale tyranny this is unsurprising. The screenplay gives him plenty to work with, and the way Erwin Hillier’s camera frames him ensures a compelling performance as a man to whom authority is a tool for keeping others in check, humiliating them when it suits his purpose. In one scene with Perrin, whose sense of self-esteem and personal control are slipping, Moy-Thompson warns him, ‘As long as you are at Banfield, you will do as you are told’, and continues with his tirade after Traill has entered, so that Perrin’s humiliation is the more painful. It is a strength of the film, as suggested above, that it resists easy oppositions. Birkland may tell Traill that everyone at the school has ‘wanted to strangle Perrin’, and of course the film moves towards Perrin’s attempt to murder Traill, but there is always a suggestion that there is a more balanced man within, who, in other circumstances, might have

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behaved differently. The film is perceptive about the ease with which the popular, represented by Traill, may get away with behaviour that the less obviously prepossessing would not. For instance, Traill yanks a boy out of the detention in which Perrin has legitimately placed him, because he is needed for the junior rugby team. Traill, in sports gear, is clearly a popular figure with the boys, but what does this sort of popularity add up to? Perrin is properly angry to have had his order countermanded, but in the end treats the boy humanely. The chief weakness of the film, and it does not undermine the mounting drama very seriously, is in Isobel’s place in it. She is introduced in her role as school nurse, and later she is first glimpsed by Traill as she goes about treating a boy’s scratched knee. Her fiancé has been killed in the war and she lives as ‘a paying guest’ with one of the masters, Comber (Ralph Truman), and his wife (Viola Lyel). Her background is barely sketched, and Greta Gynt, so much more often – and more at home as – the slinky seductress, looks and sounds unconvincing for the most part. For instance, in the episode of the Combers’ dinner party, when a game of bridge is begun and Perrin is excluded, she kindly joins him. He blurts out the words ‘get married’, then succumbs to a fit of spluttering and trembling. He knows himself to look absurd, and this matters in the film’s plotline, but Gynt’s character, neither in the writing nor the performing rings true. Decades later, she was aware of how wrong she was in the role: ‘I was completely miscast as the school matron [sic] … The make-up people told me to wear my hair flowing down and it was so wrong for the part.’43 Monthly Film Bulletin accurately claimed that she ‘has little to do beyond looking attractive’, 44 and might have added, ‘in all the wrong ways’. It is the developing romance between her and Traill that pushes Perrin closer and closer to the breaking-point of hatred and jealousy. On the night of Traill’s successful proposal to Isobel, he finds himself locked out of the building where he shares lodgings with Perrin. Climbing through the window, he knocks over some crockery, which wakes Perrin. Next morning, when the Headmaster berates Traill for late arrival at ‘early morning school’, it is clear that Perrin has told MoyThompson of Traill’s indiscretion the previous night. From this point, conflict escalates between the two men, leading to a ‘scrap in the common room’, when it emerges that Traill has borrowed Perrin’s umbrella without asking. Perrin’s obsession is unhinging him: a nightmare of humiliation leads him to sleepwalk to Traill’s room, then stop short when he realises what his lethal intentions are. All this is rendered in Huntington’s characteristically noirish composition and lighting as the plot progresses towards the final clifftop

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confrontation. This climactic episode is staged and shot with admirable assurance, with Perrin accusing Traill: ‘You’ve taken away everything that makes life endurable.’ Traill has become the focus for all his pent-up frustration and sense of inadequacy, even where these have clearly been set in motion before Traill’s arrival at the school. In a reversal of melodramatic expectations, when he threatens Traill, it is the manly, athletic type who falls backward over the cliff’s edge, while the insecure, timid Perrin climbs down to the beach to try to rescue him as waves crash in to the sound of Allan Gray’s pounding score. ‘I didn’t push him’ are the last words Perrin speaks, and Traill, rescued as Perrin is lost, is next seen in the Headmaster’s study. He accuses Moy-Thompson of having made life a torment against which Perrin has had to create a fantasy life as a protection, and the film ends on a note of sympathy for Perrin as a boy, apparently unaware of Perrin’s death, goes to his room to say ‘Goodbye, Pompo’. The film thus ends unexpectedly, not with an upbeat shot of Traill and Isobel facing the future together, but with a moment of respect for the unhappy man destroyed by the pressures of an uncongenial life. Traill is allowed to emerge likably, but we remember Perrin’s efforts to save the man he has hated. And in Goring’s Perrin, Huntington secured one of the finest performances in his films, with early touches of comedy giving way potently to the growing sense of jealousy, pain and obsession. The Perrin–Traill conflict is not all that the film has going for it, and, as Geoff Mayer writes, one of the strengths of the film ‘emanates from its determination not to polarise the conflict between absolute figures of virtue and evil’. 45 Its recreation of the claustrophobic qualities of the staff common room, the ways in which the lives of the other teachers have been confined by the school’s limited expectations and how this can lead to moments of tension, even of bitterness, is perceptively handled by Huntington. He allows his excellent cast enough time and space to establish their presences, sometimes with wit, sometimes with sharp social perception, as when one (ex-public school) master insults another with ‘dirty little council school tick’. Kinematograph Weekly wrote enthusiastically for its ‘Showmen’ readership: ‘it is the cleverly and faultlessly etched supporting cameos, as much as the accurate full-length portraits, that account for [the film’s] moving, human and exciting assessment of schoolmaster psychology’, naming it ‘the best school yarn since “Goodbye Mr Chips”’. 46 In its tougher appraisal of the life, it is at some remove from the popular Chips, and remains one of Huntington’s major achievements, exhibiting some of his key strengths as a director.

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What follows The three films that followed his strong 1940s dramas are all comparatively lightweight, though certainly not lacking in merits and entertainment value. They are all a little over 80 minutes in length, and have attractive leading players, if not actually stars then of the first rank in British film such as had been the case with, say, Eric Portman or James Mason. They may betoken the beginning of the end of Huntington’s career as a front-runner, but are all worthy of some attention.

Man on the Run (1949) Man on the Run, which Huntington wrote as an original screenplay as well as directed, suffers somewhat from a basic implausibility. Picture Show drew attention to this, describing the film as ‘exciting and romantic, even if at times a little far-fetched’. 47 If this can be accepted – and for a good deal of the film’s running time, it can be – what we are left with is a tense and quite ingeniously worked out thriller. Made at Elstree for Associated British Picture Corporation, it not only generates a good deal of appropriate tension but also offers fleeting glimpses of life in post-war, austerity Britain, and these give the film a richer texture than might have been expected. Photographed by distinguished veteran Wilkie Cooper, the film moves smoothly from the peaceful street of a seaside village into the cramped quarters of a pub, where barman Peter Brown (Derek Farr) makes apprehensive eye contact with a man called Newman (Kenneth More, in a very early role). When Newman leaves, Peter looks very anxious, then follows him into the street where they are identified as former army colleagues. They go for a ‘quiet chat’ to Peter’s lodgings where (Corporal) Newman challenges Peter (former Sergeant Burden – ‘Brown’, we learn, is an alias) with: ‘Why did you desert?’ Peter’s explanation will follow some time later; now he is only prepared to say: ‘If they want me they’ve got to catch me. The war’s over; I just want to be left alone.’ To which Newman makes his position clear: ‘What’s it worth to you?’ That is, how much is Newman’s silence about Peter’s situation and location worth to a blackmailer? At this point the drama inherent in the film’s title is set in motion. However, there is also some talk of post-war life, of the sort of malaise that has overtaken men who have had to make new lives after their army service, as Farr’s character did in Wanted for Murder or Farrar’s in Mr Perrin and Mr Traill. Even the blackmailer Newman does not want to

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go back down the mines, but says, ‘The only other profession I know is killing.’ Has the army taught him nothing new or useful? Peter’s situation is more poignant. After four years in the army, and promotion to sergeant, he deserted to care for his mother when his father had been killed in a bombing raid. Now penniless after Newman’s demands, he goes to a pawnbroker’s shop to try to sell some of his belongings, including his service revolver. While he is in the shop, two masked men burst in with guns, knock out the shopkeeper and race off into the street where they shoot the police officer who has pursued them. Like several of Huntington’s films, Man on the Run makes good use of the streets, often in contrast with the confined interiors in which Peter will find himself, when radio broadcasts describe him as the third man involved in the pawn shop hold-up. Taking a brief respite in a crowded bar he punches a bullying soldier (Howard Marion-Crawford) who drunkenly taunts him with: ‘What did you do in the war daddy?’ The feeling of post-war unease is confirmed when Peter dashes from the pub and runs into an open door that leads to the lodgings of Jean Adams (Joan Hopkins), who is living a constrained life following the wounding and later death of her husband at Dunkirk. They had been separated but she had looked after him when he returned wounded. Jean’s character is thus established – and Joan Hopkins’s gently unaffected performance works convincingly in this matter. Huntington’s screenplay is not wholly credible in having her so readily believe Peter’s story and then give him shelter, including the hiding of him from the police.

Figure 19  Still from Man on the Run, 1949

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Hopkins and Farr, despite the basic implausibility of this situation, nevertheless make an attractively understated pair, creating the necessary sympathy for Peter’s lot – his being mistaken for a member of the hold-up gang – and her response to this. They share their wartime pains and the firmness of the relationship carries one over several awkward plot manoeuvres. For instance, when Peter realises that his gun is of the same make as the one that killed the police officer, he says he cannot risk getting rid of it ‘in a place like London in broad daylight’ (perhaps another reference to the damaged post-war scene). Jean offers to throw it into the river at night, and, later on a bridge, attracts the attention of a police officer who fears she may be about to jump. Instead, when he has passed, she hurls the weapon into the river; unfortunately, it lands in mud near the bank, where it is later found by a bargee (Howard Douglas) and becomes part of the police investigation. All this is too contrived for easy conviction, but characteristically Huntington maintains enough pace and creates enough tension for such narrative contrivance not to cause too much damage. Another minor issue of credibility: when the two criminals, who are now also after Peter to stop him from identifying them, find Peter, bind him and take him off in a stolen car, we are left to wonder if it could really have been so simple to steal a car and, without its keys, make off with it. Not that this sort of detail matters too much in the film’s overall appeal. As the Picturegoer reviewer Lionel Collier wrote: ‘I don’t think this story … is altogether credible, but I do pay credit to the director and the actors, who have made it good and quite thrilling entertainment.’48 There is something nicely restrained about the film’s ending, too. Peter is taken to court where he appears before an Army Judge Advocate (Valentine Dyall), who acknowledges Peter’s role in the capture of the hold-up pair but still cannot allow this to expunge his crime of desertion and sentences him to a year’s prison. Jean promises to be waiting for him when he is released, and the camera focuses on her face in close-up as he is led away. A lesser director (and writer) might have settled for wiping Peter’s slate clean and allowed for a final clinch. Kinematograph Weekly claimed the film was ‘obviously inspired by the Antiquis murder’ (after a real-life raid on a jeweller’s shop49) and felt that the film ‘leans too heavily on the long arm of coincidence, but smooth acting and direction enable it to put up a good case for the harassed hero and underline its plot with well-timed thrills’.50 This seems a fairer assessment than Monthly Film Bulletin’s summing-up, after accusing the screenplay of ‘maudlin sentimental excuses’ for Peter’s desertion: ‘The unnecessary inclusion of the court-martial after the

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climax of the film results in pure bathos.’51 As another of Huntington’s studies in confined lives – this time partly as a matter of character, partly of the circumstances of wartime and post-war Britain – the film still has a good deal to recommend it, in matters of narrative verve and visual accomplishment.

The Franchise Affair (1951) Like the preceding film, this was made at Elstree Studios for Associated British Corporation, and again Huntington had a writing credit, this time shared by Robert Hall, with whom he had also worked on Night Boat to Dublin. They had the advantage of basing their screenplay on Josephine Tey’s accomplished mystery novel, drawn from a famous eighteenth-century disappearance case, which gave them the basis of a very neatly plotted narrative. If the result is lightweight by comparison with some of the director’s 1940s work, it nevertheless provides a lively and engaging hour-and-a-half’s entertainment, with some smart dialogue and a cast accomplished enough to make the most of it. With loud and ominous music from Philip Green, similarly credited on Man on the Run, and equally ominous night-time photography from Günther Krampf, the film opens with an oil-tanker truck charging through the rain and darkness when it is hailed by a young woman seeking a lift. Drenched, she climbs into the cab of the truck – a number of close-ups of the windscreen wipers at work build up a sense of menace. When she leaves the vehicle she runs to what seems to be a middle-class street and dashes into a house. The girl’s whereabouts leading up to her roadside encounter will be central to the film’s mystery. The scene cuts to daytime the next day, and Huntington’s gift for imbuing streets with character and significance is again on show. Lawyer Robert Blair (Michael Denison) is seen walking confidently along the main street of a provincial town, seeming perfectly at home in this peaceful ambience, greeting others as he makes his way to his legal offices. His life is now about to be crucially disrupted by a phone call from a woman who claims to need a lawyer urgently. The caller, Marion Sharpe (Dulcie Gray), lives with her mother (Marjorie Fielding) at a little remove from the town in an elegant house called The Franchise. When Robert arrives at the house, which offers another of Huntington’s imposing facades that will figure prominently in the narrative, a police car is already stationed at the gate, with a young woman waiting in it. Robert is ushered in by Marion to where she and her mother are being questioned by Police Inspector Hallam (Martin Boddey) of the local

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constabulary and Scotland Yard Inspector Grant (John Bailey), the latter a regular figure in Tey’s mystery thrillers. The police are seeking information about the alleged kidnapping of a girl called Betty Kane by the Sharpe women, their motive being her retention as their servant. Neither of the women has any alibi for the supposed crime, and as they live solitarily in the big house no one can corroborate their actions or presences at key times. Betty’s background includes her parents’ being killed in Second World War bombings (a similarly contemporary touch to Huntington’s previous film, Man on the Run). She now lives with a Mrs Wynn (Avice Landone), whom she calls ‘mother’, and whose son Leslie (John Forrest) is now a close friend. When the police usher Betty (Ann Stephens) into the house to confront the Sharpes, she tells her tale of kidnapping and so on, replete with detailed descriptions of The Franchise. How she comes to have all this information will be revealed in the film’s denouement; just now, her account elicits this asperity from Mrs Sharpe: ‘You’re a remarkable liar’, Fielding making the most of some enjoyably spiky dialogue. Robert, though not a criminal lawyer, is drawn to the case, partly out of scepticism about Betty’s story, partly through attraction to Marion. There is a touch of tension between him as the sympathetic amateur and Grant as the more cynical professional, less inclined to believe the Sharpes’ professions of innocence without more proof. Robert’s gossiping Aunt Lin (Athene Seyler) fills him in on the Sharpes’ background and how they came to The Franchise. If her gossip is mainly harmless, the town at large takes a much tougher line, displaying an upsurge of anti-Sharpe feeling, and the film makes a surprisingly severe critique of the ways in which it expresses this. The Sharpe women are refused a seat in the local tea rooms; anonymous letters are sent; there are stones thrown through the windows of The Franchise and the words ‘FILTHY SCUM’ are painted on its outer wall. This quiet-seeming provincial town shows itself capable of ill-informed malice and the peaceful street has become a scene of noisy – and nosy – folk irresistibly drawn to the possibility of sensational drama. As the film continues towards its courtroom finale, Robert pursues various leads (e.g. one relating to a double-decker bus which may have been the site of Betty’s observation of The Franchise) and at the same time his relationship with Marion grows. Played by the married couple of Denison and Gray, this romance has a pleasing freshness and Gray especially gets a chance to assert a convincing firmness of character. The courtroom scene, which is a trifle rushed, establishes Betty’s status as a liar. The case involves a married man (Peter Jones), with whom Betty had been having a fling, his wife (Hy Hazell), whose suspicions

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of him help to undermine Betty’s lies, and a former maid at The Franchise (Maureen Glynne), from whom Betty had got the information she needed to construct those lies. Outside the courtroom, Marion feels a moment’s sympathy for Mrs Wynn, who has been duped by Betty, and she also turns down Robert’s marriage proposal, saying that she and her mother are going to Canada. The film is not about to finish on that note, and the next shot shows Robert appearing in the seat behind the Sharpe women on a plane. It is an engaging if not perhaps very credible touch, but not at odds with the film’s overall appeal. Picture Show praised it as ‘beautifully acted and well directed, with attractive backgrounds, crisp dialogue and some amusing comedy to liven it up’.52 This seems a fairer assessment than Monthly Film Bulletin’s grudging summary: ‘As a whole the film needs more force and control both in direction and playing, but the material has sufficient interest to hold the attention to the end.’53 One can but wonder what actually does hold the attention if the material is suffering under the cavils referred to. It is worth drawing attention to the cast. Not only are Denison and Gray an agreeable co-starring team, but character players such as Marjorie Fielding, Athene Seyler, Anthony Nicholls, John Bailey, Everley Gregg (her chatterbox here recalls her Dolly Messiter in Brief Encounter) and others, including another early role for Kenneth More as a garage mechanic, give the film a richer texture than might have been expected. And other collaborators, especially Günther Krampf, who was always able to invest the everyday with a suggestion of potential danger, also contribute to this texture and to the film’s unpretentious appeal.

There Was a Young Lady (1953) This film represents a rare Huntington venture into the comedy genre, his first in fact since Women Aren’t Angels ten years earlier, and that title echoes in the centrality of the ‘young lady’ in the later film. There Was a Young Lady is again written by Huntington, this time from a story by Vernon Harris and John Jowett. The film’s credits list it as ‘An Ernest G. Roy Production’, made for Nettlefold Films at Walton-onThames Studios, and though it darts about from city to countryside there is no credit relating to location. Probably best described in generic terms as a comedy-thriller, its main interest is in the ways it seems to bring a (mildly) feminist approach to its plotting and to provide a vehicle for Dulcie Gray, whose gift for comedy was rarely exploited. Here, she carries off a lot of daft plotting

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with enough spirit and élan to cause the running time of 84 minutes to pass enjoyably enough. Co-starring again with husband Michael Denison, she really carries the film, and only at the end is he given a chance to show off his manly abilities. Almost a trademark of Huntington’s, a busy street is the opening image of the film, appearing even before the credits are finished. On this London street, David Walsh (Denison) is seen in negotiation with an elderly man who sells him a ring, after which David makes for his business office where his sharply spoken secretary, Elizabeth Foster (Gray), quickly informs him that he has bought a ‘phoney’. As he has inherited his uncle’s diamond merchant business, this is a blow to his self-esteem. He has also ‘inherited’ Elizabeth, whom he tries to keep in place with his ‘old boy’ approach, but she snaps back, and shortly after leaves the firm. This is where the main business of the narrative starts. When she moves out on to the street, she bangs into the open door of a car owned by three crooks who are in the act of robbing a jeweller’s. Fearing she will recognise them, they bundle her into the car and drive off. They later transfer her to a taxi and still later the back of a hay wagon on a rural road before they finally arrive at a stately home, which, by illegal processes, they have come to inhabit. ‘Is this your house?’ Elizabeth asks. ‘You must do very well out of smash and grab.’ Gang leader Johnny (Sydney Tafler) replies, ‘We get by’ (one of the film’s pleasures is in the banter between Elizabeth and the gang members). Elizabeth is told she must help Arthur (Charles Farrell) with the cooking, and soon – and smoothly – she assumes a certain level of control here as she produces a domesticating effect on the household. By contrast, inserted shots of David in the office show him to be bungling: the leading man is an incompetent whereas Elizabeth’s efficiency, which he once undervalued in the office, is depicted as keeping the all-male household in order. The gang is actually planning another robbery and draws on her information about the city; meanwhile, she plans to use their comic ineptness to make her escape. In a series of mad coincidences, this second attempted robbery brings them into contact with David and his business acquaintance Charlie (Bill Shine): at every jewellery store the gang attempts to rob, David and Charlie are either looking in the window or inside the shop. Naturally, David will come to the rescue eventually when he receives a note from the taxi-driver who drove the gang away with Elizabeth, and, in a moment recalling Mr Perrin and Mr Traill, he breaks into the manor house at night, knocking over and smashing some crockery. In yet more improbable but amusing fashion, David deals with the crooks

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one by one. Male supremacy is upheld – insofar as Denison can be accepted as an action hero – and he and Elizabeth are of course reunited, after some rather surprisingly racy dialogue. It all sounds very lightweight, and is so, but as Monthly Film Bulletin pointed out: ‘This is a story in which a bright, efficient and very feminine leading character has all the rest of the players in the hollow of her hand. The crooks are never to be taken seriously and the film has a light-hearted gaiety throughout.’54 That is a fair summing up of the film’s quality and the reasons for its appeal. The cast strikes the right notes and Huntington’s screenplay gives them some engaging material to work with. Charles Farrell is particularly droll as the crooks’ cook who brings Elizabeth, on her first night in the house, cocoa and a hot-water bottle, with a ‘nice cover – my mum made that while she was doing six months’, and later, when a new robbery is planned, says, ‘I haven’t felt so excited since I played Sleeping Beauty in the panto in Dartmoor.’ There is enough of this sort of thing to keep the viewer mildly amused and Gray’s winning performance gives the film the firm centre it needs. It was a change of pace for Huntington, and he makes the most of it.

Winding down As to Huntington’s three remaining features available for this study, they are little more than co-features – too long and, to some extent, over-cast for ‘B’-movie status – and not for the most part in the sort of generic territory of his earlier successes. They were interspersed with television work, as was the case with the other three directors explored here.

Contraband Spain (1955) ‘Oh, that was a terrible film,’ said one of its stars, Michael Denison, thirty-four years later.55 That is perhaps rather an overstatement, but it certainly represents a serious falling-off in Huntington’s output. It is hard to associate this clumsily told tale of murder, smuggling and counterfeit with the man who made such stylish 1940s thrillers as Night Boat to Dublin and Wanted for Murder. However, as his name appears not only on the credits as director but also as author of the original story and of the screenplay, he must bear the brunt of any critical salvos it has earnt. The website IMDb claims that the film’s

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co-director was Spanish film-maker Julio Salvador,56 but his name does not appear on the film’s credits where Huntington alone is listed as director. In plot terms, the film feels very much like a ‘B’ movie, but with a running time of 82 minutes, use of Eastmancolor, some rather superior production design and some upmarket casting, it was probably screened as a co-feature. (It would have struggled for ‘A’-film exhibition.) It opens with the camera prowling the empty night streets (a key ‘B’-film location and manoeuvre) of the French town of Urdos, a few miles from the Spanish border, as an opening title tells us. Three men – smugglers and forgers of dollar bills – leave a man for dead, but the latter fires at the getaway car. Martin Scott (Philip Saville), one of the gang, is murdered by his associates, and this brings his older brother Lee (Richard Greene), a Federal agent, to fly to Spain to investigate. It is scarcely worth giving any detailed account of how the narrative proceeds. There is something terribly clumsy about the unidentified use of voice-over as a story-telling mode, for instance when it informs the viewer: ‘It is clearly a case of murder.’ Lee gives a long expository account to his American Embassy superior of the background to the gang’s gold-smuggling and forging activities, and of his own distant relationship with his brother. This latter may be in the interests of maintaining the film’s often-jocular tone: we are not invited to feel any particular sympathy for Lee, and in his dealings with Spanish singer Elena (Anouk) and British customs agent Ricky (Michael Denison) there is an intermittent jokiness, at odds with the seriousness of the crimes involved. Elena, too, is allotted a long burst of narrative, about how she has come to be singing in a nightclub and about her non-affair with the dead Martin, whose friendship she claims to have valued. Despite a good deal of hurtling about the town and countryside, the film never really gathers momentum, and the static sequences of dialogue, much of it banal, do not help in this respect. Nor do the national stereotypes of the protagonists. Richard Greene’s Lee sports an intermittent American accent (e.g. he says ‘brass’ with a short ‘a’) and is given lines such as ‘Well, Bub, I’ll be seein’ ya’ to suggest his transatlantic connection. Anouk’s character is a conventionally attired songbird who behaves as Continental women tend to in British films of the decade. Poor Michael Denison comes off worst of all as the facetiously womanising Ricky. There is, for the period, some rather surprising sexual innuendo, arch rather than sophisticated, in both Ricky’s ‘corruption of the Englishman abroad’ and in Lee’s coy way of insisting that he and Elena will need separate rooms at a hotel from which they are pursuing the murderer because ‘we are not married’.

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In an opening title, the Dover Harbour Board is thanked for its facilities and assistance, and the coastal episodes have a touch of authenticity, especially in the last scenes in which Martin’s murderer is apprehended after making an attempt to flee through a cinema. Elsewhere, episodes meant to be taking place in France or Spain but filmed on undisclosed locations (the credits merely list Riverside Studios as the production site) are agreeably if not very excitingly shot. Overall, Monthly Film Bulletin’s summary seems justified: ‘Lethargically-paced smuggling melodrama, which takes in a good deal of territory without employing its various locations to any particular advantage.’57 In fact, the look of the film, in Harry Waxman’s cinematography and Cedric Dawe’s art direction, is probably its chief distinction

Death Drums Along the River (March 1966) It was inevitable that this British/West German co-production, ‘Suggested by Edgar Wallace’s Sanders of the River’, would be unfavourably compared with Zolton Korda’s 1935 version of the story, which starred the charismatic actor and singer Paul Robeson. Huntington was wise to use ‘suggested’, presumably to give him more licence in adapting and in setting the film in contemporary Africa, with some more obviously politically correct references to the state of things in the mid-1960s. The film, made for Big Ben Films and Hallam Productions, was produced by Harry Alan Towers, whose first feature credit this was and who would go on to enjoy a very prolific career, much of it in the horror genre. Towers also collaborated with Huntington, Nicolas Roeg and Kevin Kavanagh on the screenplay, which in general moves along quite smartly, if on occasions it is overburdened with explanation. For most of the film’s 83 minutes, though, action is what it is about, and in this matter it gets off to a brisk start on the Gondra docks when a native takes a small bag from a cargo of groundnuts. This is snatched by another man, who is watched by police as he opens it before he runs off, climbs on a roof and stabs the pursuing police officer. Inspector Sanders (Richard Todd, near the end of his starring career) arrives at his office to find a knife on his desk. He suspects the murder is connected with diamond-smuggling and that the up-river hospital, run by Dr Schneider is possibly being used as a ‘staging post’ for getting the diamonds out of the state. As Monthly Film Bulletin claimed, ‘poor old Sanders is here nothing more than a police detective’,58 compared with his previous incarnation

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by Leslie Banks in 1935 when his major function is to uphold the principles of British rule in a colonial territory. In Huntington’s film, in which there is much less sense of colonial mission, he will hunt down the murderer active in the opening scene, deal with a corruptseeming storekeeper in the town market (a colourfully staged episode) and follow up his doubts about the hospital. A further complication arises at the hospital when a new appointee proves to be a very attractive young woman, Dr Inge Jung (Marianne Koch), this giving rise to some mildly amusing gender-based banter. She becomes a centre of attention for Sanders, and also for his off-sider, the twittish Hamilton (Jeremy Lloyd) and an American journalist, Jim Hunter (Robert Arden), who has come ‘to do a story on Dr Schneider’ and who is presented as a stereotypical womanising type. There is some comedy in the early scenes involving the men and Inge, but naturally Sanders will be around for the final clinch. He offers to take her by boat up the river to the hospital, but the boat is sabotaged and they are forced to spend the night under the stars. The romantic build-up is rapid, but she is also depicted as being devoted to her vocation and has jumped at the chance of working with Dr Schneider. No one familiar with images of Nazis in British films in the preceding decades will be surprised when Schneider’s assistant Dr Weiss (Albert Lieven) proves to be guilty of both murder and diamond-smuggling. There are some moments of tension involving Weiss, one of which seems to show his hand levelling a gun at Inge’s head, when it is actually a python he has in his sights. True to his cowardly-swine image, he kidnaps Inge, who is of course rescued by Sanders, while Weiss meets his end in the jaws of a crocodile. Sanders’s image as manly British administrator is perpetuated by the way he leaps on Weiss rather than simply shooting him. As well as Lieven’s obvious villain, the other characters are more or less perfunctorily drawn, with Todd given little chance to appear as anything other than a one-note upholder of British law in tropical climes. Marianne Koch and Vivi Bach (as a nurse, possibly involved in poisoning Dr Schneider) are improbably glamorous, given their circumstances. Only Walter Rilla’s Schneider suggests more ambiguous possibilities. Huntington always knows how to keep the action moving, and he makes some adept use of locations. Even the otherwise scathing Monthly Film Bulletin allows that ‘the native village looks authentic and the chants [accompanying a burial] sound like the real thing’.59 But Death Drums is a long way from the kind of material in which this director showed his mettle. The most one can say of his work in this film, Contraband and the last film before his death, The Vulture, is that he seems to have made the best of some not very promising material.

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The Vulture (1966) Filmed largely at Pinewood Studios, which would be home to much more illustrious science-fiction productions in the decades ahead, The Vulture was actually a British/Canadian co-production. The opening title is ‘Tolferro, Cornwall’, and there was location shooting in Devon and Cornwall. The listed production companies involved – Homeric Films Ltd., Iliad Films, Film Financial Co. – appear never to have made another film, making it tempting to think that Huntington was a little desperate in getting this bizarre film off the ground. This time, as for Contraband Spain, Huntington is not merely the film’s director but also the author of the story and the screenplay, which suggests that he was drawn to its story of a mad scientist’s taking of revenge for an action committed against an ancestor of two centuries earlier. It seems, in generic terms, largely at odds with his earlier work, but what it has in common with, say, Wanted for Murder or The Upturned Glass is the preoccupation with obsession, with the workings of an obsessive mind in the grip of a dangerous way of dealing with its perceptions of human behaviour. And as in The Upturned Glass, there is a recurring thematic interest in points of view, as suggested in statements such as: ‘You’re meddling with the supernatural. No good will come of it’, or in the visiting US scientist’s attempts to find rational explanations for extraordinary events. However, it has to be conceded that The Vulture never begins to approach the quality of those earlier films. Apart from other considerations, such as some creaky plotting, it is also far too talky: everyone is always explaining what has happened or is about to happen, and the film, at 84 minutes, comes to seem overlong. Like Contraband, it seems to be in the ‘B’-movie mould, but its length and some more than usual attention to design (Duncan Sutherland was the art director) and cinematographic effect (Stephen Dade, cinematographer) suggest higher aspirations. Of the bizarre plot, suffice it to say that, in Cornwall, investigations are set off when a woman, Ellen West (Annette Carrell), sees something so terrifying while walking home in the dark that her hair turns white overnight. This object of such terror is a fearsome creature, a huge bird with a man’s face, which she has seen erupt from a coffin. This will prove to be the work of a local scientist, Professor Koniglich (Akim Tamiroff), who, invoking processes of advanced ‘nuclear transmutation’, is turning himself into this creature in order to seek revenge for the burying alive of a forebear whose vulture was killed by ancestors of the neighbouring Stroud family.

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If that sounds absurd, so it is, even by the standards of the sciencefiction/horror genre. It is sad to report that Huntington’s last film reveals so little of the virtues of his best work. Not only is it unduly talky but the actors doing the talk comprise for the most part the dullest cast he ever assembled. Akim Tamiroff as the deranged professor and Edward Caddick as the sexton of the local church inject some of the gothic frissons a tale like this requires to ward off audience scepticism. In the 1950s/1960s tradition of importing minor and/or passé American stars to bolster American box-office takings, here the leads are played by Robert Hutton, surely one of the blandest of Hollywood male stars even in his busiest years, and Broderick Crawford, long past his Oscarwinning days of All the King’s Men (1949). They play here the descendants of the Stroud family, which numbers also two colourless others played by Diane Clare (as Hutton’s wife) and Gordon Sterne (as Crawford’s brother). Could it be that Huntington the writer simply had not given his actors enough to work on and that Huntington the director was consequently at a loss? It was dismissed as a ‘tame variation on The Fly (1958)’ in one reference book,60 and as a ‘pitifully stilted horror film’ by Monthly Film Bulletin.61 Its release was also apparently delayed by two years. Yet, for all the reservations above, there are still, at the end of his career, some reminders of the man who made those compelling dramas of twisted minds in the 1940s. Akim Tamiroff is an imposing enough actor to register persuasively the sorts of dangerous mental inheritance that made Portman so riveting in Wanted for Murder, despite the frequent verbosity of the screenplay. There is also an intelligent consideration of, say, how rationality and a belief in other possibilities might come into conflict, reminding one of the crucial oppositions that troubled Mason’s character so memorably in The Upturned Glass. Finally, in terms of Huntington’s narrative capacities, there is sense of fluid control that pilots the film over its too static moments, and the flair for tight composition that characterised his best work.

Television Like all the directors in this study, Huntington eked out his late career with television work, most of it well below the standard of his 1940s films. As with Arliss and Knowles, he had stints with the Douglas Fairbanks Jr Presents compendia, directing an episode in each of The Genie (‘Emerald Green’, 1953), Thought to Kill (‘Parlour Trick’, 1954) and Destination Milan (title segment, 1954). Huntington also directed episodes

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in other series, including eighteen episodes of The Rheingold Theatre, one episode of The Errol Flynn Theatre, ‘The Sealed Room’ (1956), a fragment of which can be seen on YouTube, and The Adventures of Sir Lancelot, of which he directed six episodes, most of them available online. ‘The Sealed Room’, which Huntington also wrote, opens on a wedding, the principals of which are played by Patrick Allen and Glynis Johns, followed by the honeymoon journey down the Rhine. The only point worth noting in the present context is that the wife, Lou, becomes possessed by the idea of knowing in vivid detail places where she has never been before, in this way recalling some of those obsessed protagonists in Huntington’s major work. Apparently (the extract lasts for less than ten minutes), she will later be restored to psychiatric health by a strange-seeming professor played by Herbert Lom, and it is mildly frustrating not to be able to follow this process. The viewed episodes of Sir Lancelot that Huntington directed were all produced by Bernard Knowles and shot by Ernest Palmer, to the accompaniment of Albert Elms’s boisterous score (including ‘Now listen to my story … of days of old in England’, etc., over the closing credits) as the hero and side-kicks ride through forests as they make their way from Camelot to other locations that need setting in order. At least this series has the advantage of colour and quite lavish settings. It is claimed that ‘the series used specially commissioned research from Oxford University to ensure the accuracy of its 14th-century settings’,62 and another reference work describes it as a ‘handsomely mounted, for its time, costume series’.63 Whatever credentials the series may have offered, it must surely have seemed the most unlikely project for Huntington, but in the event he handles this improbable material with some skill. There are, for instance, some nicely comic touches in the episodes I have been able to see, as in his dealings with spirited heroines in ‘Lady Lilith’ and ‘The Prince of Limerick’, more so than in some of the other episodes. This is of course partly attributable to the screenplays and to the actors, but Huntington does allow the latter the time and space to breathe. The recurring cast, led by William Russell’s Lancelot, who perhaps looks too modern but deals smartly with both verbal and more dangerous parries, and actors such as John Bailey (also in The Franchise Affair), here playing a duplicitous knight, make their presences felt enjoyably. Further, his use of imposing facades, common in his major films, finds some outlet in differentiating between this castle and another. If these television series were a long way from, say, The Upturned Glass, there are still moments that recall the director of those earlier

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pieces, and in some matters they are preferable to some of his late features.

Notes 1 David Quinlan, British Sound Films: The Studio Years 1928–1959, London: B.T. Batsford, 1984, p. 128. 2 Steve Chibnall, Quota Quickies: The Birth of the British ‘B’ Film, London: BFI Publishing, 2007, p. 106. 3 Monthly Film Bulletin, January 1938, p. 8. 4 Chibnall, p. 47. 5 Chibnall. 6 The Cinema, 3 January 1945, p. 361. 7 Monthly Film Bulletin, July 1942, p. 84. 8 Monthly Film Bulletin, December 1942, p. 154. 9 Monthly Film Bulletin, October 1941, p. 131. 10 Quinlan, p. 258. 11 Kinematograph Weekly, 15 July 1943, p. 36. 12 Interview with Michael Denison and Dulcie Gray, in Brian McFarlane, An Autobiography of British Cinema, London: Methuen and BFI Publishing, 1997, p. 173. 13 Interview with Marius Goring, in McFarlane, p. 228. 14 Interview with Muriel Pavlow, in McFarlane, p. 450. 15 Lionel Collier, ‘Shop for your films’, Picturegoer, 30 March 1946, p. 12. 16 Kinematograph Weekly, 17 January 1946, p. 25. 17 Monthly Film Bulletin, January 1946, p. 2. 18 Brian McFarlane, ‘Lance Comfort, Lawrence Huntington, and the British program feature film’, in Wheeler Winston Dixon (ed.), Re-Viewing British Cinema, 1900–1992, Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994, p. 63. 19 Derived, in turn, from a stage play by Terence de Marney and Percy Robinson, The Crime of Margaret Foley (1937). 20 Interview with Phyllis Calvert, in McFarlane, p. 111. 21 Lionel Collier, ‘Shop for your films’, Picturegoer, 8 June 1946, p. 13. 22 Andy Owens, Our Eric: A Portrait of Eric Portman, Ammanford: Sigma Press, 2013, p. 85. 23 Picture Show, 14 June 1946, p. 9. 24 Collier, 8 June 1946, p. 12. 25 Monthly Film Bulletin, April 1946, p. 45. 26 Marcia Landy, British Genres: Cinema and Society, 1930–1960, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991, p. 272. 27 Monthly Film Bulletin, June 1947, p. 78. 28 Lionel Collier, ‘Shop for your films’, Picturegoer, 2 August 1947, p.12. 29 Kinematograph Weekly, 19 June 1947, p. 22. 30 Robert Murphy, Realism and Tinsel: Cinema and Society in Britain 1939–48, London: Routledge, 1989, p. 182. 31 Quoted in Andrew Spicer, Sydney Box, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006, p. 210. 32 Sydney Box, ‘Puzzle – find the director’, in Peter Noble (ed.), The British Film Yearbook 1949–50, London: Skelton Robinson, 1949, p. 91.

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33 Robert Murphy, ‘Gainsborough after Balcon’, in Pam Cook (ed.), Gainsborough Pictures, London: Cassell, 1997, p. 150. 34 Spicer, p. 109. 35 Kinematograph Weekly, 27 November 1947, p. 17. 36 Monthly Film Bulletin, December 1947, p. 172. 37 Tony Williams, Structures of Desire: British Cinema, 1939–1955, Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000, pp. 104, 105. 38 Spicer, p. 113. 39 Picture Show, 24 January 1948, p. 11. 40 Lionel Collier, ‘Shop for your films’, Picturegoer, 17 June 1948, p. 13. 41 Spicer, p. 139. 42 Lionel Collier, ‘Shop for your films’, Picturegoer, 25 September 1948. 43 Interview with Greta Gynt, in McFarlane, p. 265. 4 4 Monthly Film Bulletin, September 1948, p. 125. 45 Geoff Mayer, Guide to British Cinema, Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2003, p. 274. 46 Kinematograph Weekly, 19 August 1948, p. 13. 47 Picture Show, 11 June 1949, p. 9. 48 Lionel Collier, ‘Shop for your films’, Picturegoer, 4 June 1949, p. 16. 49 ‘Antiquis murder verdict’, Cairns Post, 30 July 1947. Available at: http:// trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/42550747 (accessed 20 March 2018). 50 Kinematograph Weekly, 28 April 1949, p. 22. 51 Monthly Film Bulletin, May 1949, p. 79. 52 Picture Show, 10 March 1951, p. 12. 53 Monthly Film Bulletin, March 1951, p. 232. 54 Monthly Film Bulletin, February 1956, p. 26. 55 Author’s interview with Michael Denison, 1989. 56 See ‘Contraband Spain (1953)’, IMDb (website). Available at: www.imdb.com/ title/tt0046872 (accessed 20 March 2018). 57 Monthly Film Bulletin, May 1955, p. 74. 58 Monthly Film Bulletin, April 1966, p. 59. 59 Ibid. 60 The Aurum Film Encyclopedia: Horror, London: Aurum Press, 1985, p. 186. 61 Monthly Film Bulletin, October 1968, p. 161. 62 Jon E. Lewis and Penny Stempel, The Ultimate TV Guide, London: Orion, 1999, p. 15. 63 British Television: An Illustrated Guide, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2nd edn, 1996, p. 54.

Afterword

In the literature about British cinema of the 1940s, the contributions made by the four directors who are the subject of this study are in general inadequately reported, or, when their films are discussed, it is not usually to the credit of these men. For instance, feminist – and other – critics have made very intelligent examinations of some of the Gainsborough melodramas, often in the light of their temporal and social contexts. However, they have not often seemed to show much interest in the directorial skills that made the films interesting to them: skills that ensured a strong narrative flow, deriving from the interaction of character and action, or the co-ordination of some potent behindcamera collaborators. There are plenty of notable names among the cinematographers, editors, production and costume designers, but their talents are at the service of a guiding hand that ensured their maximum effectiveness. And whether actors thought favourably or otherwise of one or other of the four directors, they owed their favourable appearance to directors who knew how to handle them. Of the four directors at issue, Huntington was clearly the one most applauded by his actors, but even when actors expressed reservations about one of the others they were very often indebted to him for their well-presented exposure. Think of Mason or Granger’s comments about Arliss: their work for him at least propelled them towards popular stardom. Why the work of the four directors tapered off in the 1950s, as compared with those major figures of the previous decade – David Lean, Anthony Asquith, Michael Powell, the Boulting brothers or Carol Reed – who all continued to work in high-profile films, is largely a matter for speculation. They may not have had the highly individual talents of those critically regarded purveyors of the ‘quality’ British films, but they were all sufficiently astute in the assembling of popular cinema for it to be expected that they would maintain their level of achievement of the 1940s. Another near-contemporary of theirs, Lance

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Comfort, was somewhat more fortunate in that, though working at less expensive levels, did some work in the 1950s that bears comparison with his finest films of the preceding decade. Perhaps the changing emphasis in generic terms had something to do with the decline of Arliss, Knowles, Crabtree and Huntington. It is hard to imagine their coming to terms with the big-screen demands that Lean or Reed met with seemingly effortless ease, directing the likes of Summer Madness (1955) or The Key (1958), on a large scale. Nor do such other common 1950s genres as wartime adventures or cosy Technicolor comedies seem likely to have offered much to the four who had achieved their successes in very different generic territory. Another factor – and perhaps a key one in this context – was the rise of television. While television was perhaps not attractive to the big names of the 1940s, it at least provided ongoing work for directors who had shown themselves to be more than competent purveyors of popular entertainment. All four directors in this study had shown themselves to be so (and Huntington arguably something more than that) and all prolonged their careers in such household-name series as The Adventures of Robin Hood, The Adventures of Sir Lancelot and Colonel March of Scotland Yard. These may appear ingenuous to twenty-first-century viewers, but every now and then there is a spark of inventiveness in the episodes viewed for this study that reminds one of what the four were capable in their palmy days of feature film-making. The rapid expansion of television production certainly provided competition for cinema film-making: a tiny symptom of the times is found in the changing title of Peter Noble’s annual The British Film Yearbook to The British Film & Television Year Book from the 1951–52 edition. The strain of potent melodrama, costume or contemporary, was no longer a major element of British production, and this was the genre in which the four had achieved their most notable successes. Some of the stars who had made their presences felt in those films would go on to further success in the US, especially James Mason and Stewart Granger, and to a much lesser extent Phyllis Calvert and Greta Gynt. Certainly, none of these were such fixtures in British films of the 1950s as they had been in the previous decade. Indeed, the film-making world in which Arliss, Crabtree, Huntington and Knowles had flourished had changed considerably, but that is no reason for undervaluing what they achieved. And there is almost something gallant in the way they soldiered on through the two decades after their peak period had receded.

Filmographies

With a few exceptions, the following filmographies relate to the directorial careers of the four in this study, in particular regard to their 1940s films. Other films are listed but mostly without detailed credits.

Leslie Arliss As screenwriter or author of story only 1932

1934

1935 1936

1937 1939 1940

1941

Tonight’s the Night The Innocents of Chicago Strip! Strip! Hooray!!! (short) Josser on the River Holiday Lovers Jack Ahoy! Orders Is Orders My Old Dutch Road House Heat Wave Rhodes of Africa Where There’s a Will Everybody Dance Windbag the Sailor Good Morning, Boys Said O’Reilly to McNab Too Dangerous to Live Come On George! The Second Mr Bush For Freedom Pastor Hall Bulldog Sees It Through South American George

200  1942 1943 1953

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The Foreman Went to France The Saint Meets the Tiger Top of the Form

As director (other functions are included) The Farmer’s Wife, 1940, 82 mins

Directors: Norman Lee, Leslie Arliss Production Company: Associated British Producer: Walter C. Mycroft Screenplay: Lee, Arliss, J.E. Hunter Cinematography: Claude Friese-Greene Editing: Flora Newton Art Direction: Charles Gilbert Music: Guy Jones Main Cast: Basil Sydney (Samuel Sweetland), Wilfrid Lawson (Churdles Ash), Nora Swinburne (Araminta Grey), Patricia Roc (Sibley), Michael Wilding (Richard Coaker), Enid Stamp-Taylor (Mary Hearne), Betty Warren (Louisa Windeatt)

The Night Has Eyes, 1942, 81 mins

Director: Leslie Arliss Production Company: Associated British Producer: John Argyle Screenplay: Argyle, Arliss, Alan Kennington (from his novel) Cinematography: Günther Krampf Editing: Flora Newton Art Direction: Duncan Sutherland Costume Design: Jill Casson Music: Charles Williams Main cast: James Mason (Stephen Deremid), Wilfrid Lawson (Jim Sturrock), Mary Clare (Mrs Ranger), Joyce Howard (Marian Ives), Tucker McGuire (Doris), John Fernald (Dr Barry Randall), Amy Dalby (Miss Miggs), Dorothy Black (Miss Fenwick)

The Man in Grey, 1943, 116 mins

Director: Leslie Arliss Production Company: Gainsborough Producer: Edward Black

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Screenplay: Arliss, Margaret Kennedy, Doreen Montgomery (from a novel by Eleanor Smith) Cinematography: Arthur Crabtree Editing: R.E. Dearing Art Direction: Walter Murton Costume Design: Elizabeth Haffenden Music: Cedric Mallabee, Louis Levy Main cast: Margaret Lockwood (Hesther Shaw), Phyllis Calvert (Clarissa Marr), James Mason (Lord Rohan), Stewart Granger (Peter Rokeby), Harry Scott (Toby), Martita Hunt (Miss Patchett), Helen Haye (Lady Rohan), Beatrice Varley (Gypsy), Raymond Lovell (Prince Regent), Nora Swinburne (Mrs Fitzherbert) Love Story, 1944, 108 mins

Director: Leslie Arliss Production Company: Gainsborough Producer: Harold Huth Screenplay: Arliss, Doreen Montgomery, Rodney Ackland Cinematography: Bernard Knowles Editing: A. Charles Knott Art Direction: John Bryan Costume Design: Elizabeth Haffenden Music: Hubert Bath, Louis Levy Main cast: Margaret Lockwood (Lissa Campbell), Stewart Granger (Kit Firth), Patricia Roc (Judy), Tom Walls (Tom Tanner), Reginald Purdell (Albert), Walter Hudd (Ray), A.E. Matthews (Col. Pitt Smith), Beatrice Varley (Miss Rossiter), Moira Lister (Carol) The Wicked Lady, 1945, 104 mins

Director: Leslie Arliss Production Company: Gainsborough Producer: R.J. Minney Screenplay: Arliss, Aimée Stuart, Gordon Glennon (from a novel by Magdalen King-Hall) Cinematography: Jack Cox Editing: Terence Fisher Art Direction: John Bryan Costume Design: Elizabeth Haffenden Music: Louis Levy Main cast: Margaret Lockwood (Barbara Worth), James Mason (Capt. Jerry Jackson), Patricia Roc (Caroline), Griffith Jones (Sir Ralph Skelton), Michael Rennie (Kit Locksby), Felix Aylmer (Hogarth), Enid Stamp-Taylor (Lady Henrietta Kingsclere), Francis Lister (Lord Kingsclere), Jean Kent

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(Jackson’s doxy), Martita Hunt (Cousin Agatha), Beatrice Varley (Aunt Moll), Amy Dalby (Aunt Doll), Emrys Jones (Ned Cotterill).

A Man About the House, 1947, 99 mins

Director: Leslie Arliss Production Company: British Lion Producer: Edward Black Screenplay: Arliss, J.B. Williams, John Perry (from a novel by Francis Brett Young and play by Perry) Cinematography: Georges Périnal Editing: Russell Lloyd Costume Design: Georges K. Benda Music: Nicholas Brodszky Main cast: Margaret Johnston (Agnes Isit), Dulcie Gray (Ellen Isit), Kieron Moore (Salvatore), Guy Middleton (Sir Benjamin Dench), Felix Aylmer (Richard Sanctuary), Lillian Braithwaite (Mrs Armitage), Jone Salinas (Maria), Marisa Finiani (Assunta)

Idol of Paris, 1948, 105 mins

Director: Leslie Arliss Production Company: Premier Productions Producer: R.J. Minney Screenplay: Norman Lee, Harry Ostrer, Stafford Dickens (from a novel by Alfred Schirokauer) Cinematography: Jack Cox Editing: A.E. Bates Art Direction: Albert Jullion Costume Design: Honoria Plesch Music: Mischa Spoliansky Main cast: Michael Rennie (Hertz), Beryl Baxter (Theresa), Christine Norden (Cora Pearl), Miles Malleson (Offenbach), Andrew Osborn (Antoine), Andrew Cruickshank (Prince Nicholas), Margaretta Scott (Empress Eugenie), Kenneth Kent (Emperor Napoleon)

Saints and Sinners, 1949, 85 mins

Director: Leslie Arliss Production Company: London Films Producer: Arliss Screenplay: Arliss, Paul Vincent Carroll Cinematography: Osmond Borrodaile

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Editing: David Newhouse Art Direction: Wilfred Shingleton Costume Design: Honoria Plesch Music: Philip Green Main cast: Kieron Moore (Michael Kissane), Christine Norden (Blanche), Sheila Manahan (Sheila Flaherty), Michael Dolan (Canon), Maire O’Neill (Ma Flanagan), Tom Dillon (O’Brien), Pamela Arliss (secretary), Eddie Byrne (Norreys), Anita Bolster (Julia Ann Dermody)

The Woman’s Angle, 1952, 86 mins

Director: Leslie Arliss Production Company: Bow Bells Productions Producer: Walter C. Mycroft Screenplay: Arliss, Mabbie Poole (from a novel by Ruth Feiner) Cinematography: Erwin Hillier Editing: B. Jarvis Art Direction: Terence Verity Costume Design: Babs Gray Music: Robert Gill, Louis Levy Main cast: Edward Underdown (Robert Mansell), Cathy O’Donnell (Nina Van Rhyne), Lois Maxwell (Enid Mansell), Claude Farell (Delysia Veronova), Peter Reynolds (Brian Mansell), Marjorie Fielding (Mrs Mansell), Anthony Nicholls (Dr Jarvis), Isabel Dean (Isobel Mansell)

The Triangle, 1953, 77 mins

This film consists of three episodes which first appeared separately on television before being spliced together for cinema release. Director: Leslie Arliss (‘Priceless Pocket’; other episodes directed by Lance Comfort, Bernard Knowles) Production Company: Douglas Fairbanks Productions Producer: Douglas Fairbanks Jr Screenplay: Guy Morgan (from a story by Geoffrey Wallace) Art Direction: Norman Arnold Music: Bretton Byrd Main cast: James Hayter (Henry Popple), Muriel George (Martha Popple)

Thought to Kill, 1954, 77 mins

This film consists of three episodes which first appeared separately on television before being spliced together for cinema release.

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Director: Leslie Arliss (‘Thought to Kill’; other episodes directed by Lawrence Huntington, Bernard Knowles) Production Company: Douglas Fairbanks Productions Producer: Douglas Fairbanks Jr Screenplay: Selwyn Jones Art Direction: Norman Arnold Music: Allan Gray Main cast: Ernest Thesiger (Burden, Sr), Eileen Moore (Isobel), Brian Worth (Camden)

Destination Milan, 1954, 78 mins

This film consists of three episodes which first appeared separately on television before being spliced together for cinema release. Director: Leslie Arliss (‘Lowland Fling); other episodes directed by Lawrence Huntington, John Gilling) Production Company: Douglas Fairbanks Productions Producer: Douglas Fairbanks Jr Screenplay: Paul Vincent Carroll Music: Bretton Byrd Main cast: Cyril Cusack (Paddy O’Clafferty), Barbara Mullen (Miss Busbee), John Laurie (Walter McHarry)

See How They Run, 1955, 84 mins

Director: Leslie Arliss Production Company: Winwell Producers: Bill Luckwell, D.E.A. Winn Screenplay: Arliss, Val Valentine, Roy Miller (from a play by Philip King) Cinematography: Ken Talbot Editing: Sam Simmonds Art Direction: Ivan King Music: John Bath Main cast: Ronald Shiner (Wally Winton), Greta Gynt (Penelope Toop), James Hayter (Bishop of Lax), Wilfrid Hyde-White (Brig. Buskin), Dora Bryan (Isa), Richard Wattis (Rev. Lionel Toop), Viola Lyel (Miss Skilton)

Miss Tulip Stays the Night, 1955, 68 mins

Director: Leslie Arliss Production Company: Bill Luckwell Productions Producer: John O. Douglas, Bill Luckwell Screenplay: Douglas, Luckwell, Jack Hulbert

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Cinematography: Kent Talbot Editing: Sam Simmonds Art Direction: Ivan King Music: De Wolfe Main cast: Diana Dors (Kate Dax), Patrick Holt (Andrew Dax), Cicely Courtneidge (Miss Tulip), Jack Hulbert (P.C. Feathers), A.E. Matthews (Mr Potts), Joss Ambler (Insp. Thorne)

Arthur Crabtree As cinematographer (* = co-cinematographer) 1932 1935 1936

1937

1938

1939 1940

1941

*The Maid of the Mountains *After Office Hours Lazybones The Love Test The First Offence Pot Luck Everybody Dance All In Good Morning, Boys *The Great Barrier Said O’Reilly to McNab Oh, Mr Porter! Bank Holiday Convict 99 Alf’s Button Afloat Hey! Hey! USA Old Bones of the River Three on a Weekend The Frozen Limits Where’s That Fire? *Band Waggon For Freedom Charley’s (Big-Hearted) Aunt Neutral Port Channel Incident (short) Mr Proudfoot Shows a Light (short) Gasbags Kipps Inspector Hornleigh Goes to It Once a Crook I Thank You Rush Hour (short) South American George

206  1942 1943 1944 1945

filmogr aphies

Uncensored Much Too Shy King Arthur Was a Gentleman The Man in Grey Dear Octopus Fanny by Gaslight Waterloo Road

As director Madonna of the Seven Moons, 1945, 110 mins

Director: Arthur Crabtree Production Company: Gainsborough Producer: R.J. Minney Screenplay: Roland Pertwee, Brock Williams (from a novel by Margery Lawrence) Cinematography: Jack Cox Editing: Lito Carruthers Art Direction: Andrew Mazzei Costume Design: Elizabeth Haffenden Music: Louis Levy Main cast: Phyllis Calvert (Maddalena), Stewart Granger (Nino), Patricia Roc (Angela), Peter Glenville (Sandro), John Stuart (Giuseppe), Reginald Tate (Ackroyd), Peter Murray-Hill (Logan), Dulcie Gray (Nesta), Alan Haines (Evelyn), Jean Kent (Vittoria), Nancy Price (Mama Barucci), Amy Veness (Tessa), Hilda Bayley (Mrs Fiske), Robert Speaight (Priest), Helen Haye (Mother Superior), Danny Green (Scorpi)

They Were Sisters, 1945, 115 mins

Director: Arthur Crabtree Production Company: Gainsborough Producer: Harold Huth Screenplay: Roland Pertwee, Katherine Strueby (from a novel by Dorothy Whipple) Cinematography: Jack Cox Editing: Charles Knott Art Direction: David Rawnsley Costume Design: Yvonne Caffin Music: Hubert Bath, Louis Levy Main cast: Phyllis Calvert (Lucy Moore), James Mason (Geoffrey Lee), Hugh Sinclair (Terry Crawford), Anne Crawford (Vera Sargeant), Dulcie Gray

f il mogr aphie s 

207

(Charlotte Lee), Peter Murray-Hill (William Moore), Barry Livesey (Brian Sargeant), Pamela Kellino (Margaret Lee), Ann Stephens (Judith Lee), Helen Stephens (Sarah Sargeant), Brian Nissen (John Watson), John Gilpin (Stephen Lee), David Horne (Mr Lee), Brefni O’Rourke (coroner)

Caravan, 1946, 122 mins

Director: Arthur Crabtree Production Company: Gainsborough Producer: Harold Huth Screenplay: Roland Pertwee (from a novel by Eleanor Smith) Cinematography: Stephen Dade, Cyril Knowles Editing: Charles Knott Art Direction: John Bryan Costume Design: Elizabeth Haffenden Music: Louis Levy Main cast: Stewart Granger (Richard Darrell), Jean Kent (Rosal), Anne Crawford (Oriana Camperdene), Dennis Price (Sir Francis Castleton), Robert Helpmann (Wycroft), Gerard Hinze (Don Carlos), John Salew (Diego), Enid Stamp-Taylor (Bertha)

Dear Murderer, 1947, 94 mins

Director: Arthur Crabtree Production Company: Gainsborough Producer: Betty E. Box Screenplay: Muriel and Sydney Box, Peter Rogers (from a play by St John Legh Clowes) Cinematography: Stephen Dade Editing: Gordon Hales Art Direction: John Elphick Costume Design: Yvonne Caffin Music: Benjamin Frankel Main cast: Eric Portman (Lee Warren), Greta Gynt (Vivien Warren), Dennis Price (Richard Fenton), Jack Warner (Insp. Penbury), Maxwell Reed (Jimmy Martin), Hazel Court (Avis Fenton), Jane Hylton (Rita), Andrew Crawford (Sgt Fox)

The Calendar, 1948, 80 mins

Director: Arthur Crabtree Production Company: Gainsborough

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Producer: Antony Darnborough Screenplay: Geoffrey Kerr (from a play by Edgar Wallace) Cinematography: Reginald Wyer, Cyril Knowles Editing: Charles Knott Art Direction: John Elphick, George Provis Costume Design: Julie Harris Music: Arthur Wilkinson Main cast: Greta Gynt (Wenda Panniford), John McCallum (Capt. Garry Anson), Raymond Lovell (Lord Willie Panniford), Sonia Holm (Lady Mollie Panniford), Leslie Dwyer (Sam Hillcott), Charles Victor (John Dory), Felix Aylmer (Lord Forlingham), Sidney King (Tony), Barry Jones (Sir John Garth), Diana Dors (Hawkins), Noel Howlett (lawyer)

Quartet, 1948, 120 mins

Director: Arthur Crabtree (‘The Kite’) Production Company: Gainsborough Producer: Antony Darnborough Screenplay: R.C. Sherriff (from a story by W. Somerset Maugham) Cinematography: Ray Elton Editing: Charles Knott Art Direction: Cedric Dawe Costume Design: Julie Harris Music: John Greenwood Main cast: Mervyn Johns (Mr Swinley), Hermione Baddeley (Mrs Swinley), George Cole (Herbert), Susan Shaw (Betty), Bernard Lee (Prison Visitor), Frederick Leister (Prison Governor), David Cole (Herbert as a boy)

Don’t Ever Leave Me, 1949, 85 mins

Director: Arthur Crabtree Production Company: Triton Producer: Betty E. Box Screenplay: Robert Westerby (from a novel by Antony Armstrong) Cinematography: Stephen Dade Editing: Charles Knott Art Direction: John Elphick Costume Design: Joan Ellacott Music: Lambert Williamson Main cast: Jimmy Hanley (Jack Denton), Petula Clark (Sheila Farlaine), Linden Travers (Mary Lamont), Hugh Sinclair (Michael Farlaine), Edward Rigby (Harry Denton), Anthony Newley (Jimmy Knowles), Barbara Murray (Joan Robbins), Maurice Denham (Mr Knowles), Anthony Steel (Harris), Brenda Bruce (Miss Smith)

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209

Lilli Marlene, 1950, 85 mins

Director: Arthur Crabtree Production Company: Monarch Producer: William Gell Screenplay: Leslie Wood Cinematography: Jack Asher Editing: Lister Laurance Art Direction: R. Holmes Paul Costume Design: Michael Whittaker Music: Stanley Black Main cast: Lisa Daniely (Lilli Marlene), Hugh McDermott (Steve), Richard Murdoch (F/Lt Murdoch), Leslie Dwyer (Berry), Estelle Brody (herself), Cecil Brock (O’Riley), John Blythe (Holt), Stanley Baker (Evans), Judith Wharton (Auntie), Michael Ward (Wintertree)

Hindle Wakes, 1952, 88 mins

Director: Arthur Crabtree Production Company: Monarch Producer: William Gell Screenplay: John Baines (from play by Stanley Houghton) Cinematography: Geoffrey Faithfull Editing: Max Benedict Art Direction: Andrew Mazzei Music: Stanley Black Main cast: Lisa Daniely (Jenny Hawthorn), Brian Worth (Alan Jeffcote), Leslie Dwyer (Mr Hawthorn), Joan Hickson (Mrs Hawthorn), Sandra Dorne (Mary Hollins), Ronald Adam (Mr Jeffcote), Mary Clare (Mrs Jeffcote), Michael Medwin (George Ackroyd), Bill Travers (Bob), Beatrice Varley (Mrs Hollins)

The Wedding of Lilli Marlene, 1953, 89 mins

Director: Arthur Crabtree Production Company: Monarch Producer: William Gell Screenplay: John Baines Cinematography: Arthur Grant Editing: Douglas Myers Art Direction: Ray Simm Music: Eric Rogers

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Main cast: Lisa Daniely (Lilli Marlene), Hugh McDermott (Steve Moray), Sidney James (Fennimore Hunt), Gabrielle Brune (Maggie Lennox), Jack Billings (Hal Marvel), Robert Ayres (Andrew Jackson), Joan Heal (Linda), Wally Patch (Wally), Rosie (Irene Handl)

Stryker of the Yard, 1953, 67 mins

Comprises two episodes of the television series: ‘The Story of the Studio Payroll’, ‘Uncle Henry’. Director: Arthur Crabtree Production Company: Republic Producer: William N. Boyle Screenplay: Guy Morgan, Lester Powell Cinematography: Basil Emmott Editing: John Seabourne Sr Music: Lambert Williamson Main cast: Clifford Evans (Insp. Stryker), Jack Watling (Tony Ashworth), Susan Stephen (Peggy Sinclair), George Woodbridge (Sgt Walker), Eliot Wakeham (Henry Petheridge)

Morning Call, 1957, 75 mins

Director: Arthur Crabtree Production Company: Winwell Producer: Alfred Strauss Screenplay: Paul Tabori, Bill Luckwell, Tom Waldron Cinematography: James Harvey Editing: John Ferris Art Direction: John Stoll Music: John Bath Main cast: Greta Gynt (Annette Manning), Ron Randell (Nick Logan), Bruce Seton (Insp. Brown), Virginia Keiley (Vera Clark)

West of Suez, 1957, 85 mins

Director: Arthur Crabtree Production Company: Winwell Producer: Kay Luckwell, Derek Winn Screenplay: Norman Hudis Cinematography: James Harvey Editing: Peter Mayhew

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211

Art Direction: John Stoll Music: Wilfred Burns Main cast: Keefe Brasselle (Brett Manders), Kay Callard (Pat), Karel Stepanek (Langford), Ursula Howells (Eileen), Bruce Seton (Major Osborne), Harry Fowler (Tommy)

Death over My Shoulder, 1958, 89 mins

Director: Arthur Crabtree Production Company: Vicar Producer: Frank Bevis Screenplay: Norman Hudis, Alyce Canfield Cinematography: James Harvey Editing: Seymour Logie Art Direction: Herbert Smith Music: Douglas Gamley Main cast: Keefe Brasselle (Jack Regan), Bonar Colleano (Jo Longo), Jill Adams (Evelyn Connors), Sonia Dresdel (Miss Upton), Arlene de Marco (Julie), Charles Farrell (Chiv)

Fiend Without a Face, 1958, 74 mins

Director: Arthur Crabtree Production Company: Producers Associates Producer: John Croydon Screenplay: Herbert J. Leder (from a story by Amelia Reynolds Long) Cinematography: Lionel Banes Special Effects: Ruppel and Nordhoff, Peter Neilson Editing: R.Q. McNaughton Art Direction: John Elphick Music: Buxton Orr Main cast: Marshall Thompson (Major Jeff Cummings), Terence Kilburn (Capt. Al Chester), Stanley Maxted (Col. Butler), Kim Parker (Barbara Griselle), Kynaston Reeves (Professor Walgate)

Horrors of the Black Museum, 1959, 80 mins

Director: Arthur Crabtree Production Company: Anglo-Amalgamated Producer: Jack Greenwood, Herman Cohen Screenplay: Cohen, Aben Kandel Cinematography: Desmond Dickinson

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Editing: Geoffrey Muller Art Direction: Wilfred Arnold Costume Design: Anna Duse Music: Gerard Schurmann Main cast: Michael Gough (Edmond Bancroft), Graham Curnow (Rick), June Cunningham (Joan), Shirley Anne Field (Angela), Geoffrey Keen (Supt Graham), John Warwick (Insp. Lodge), Beatrice Varley (Aggie), Gerald Anderson (Dr Ballan)

Bernard Knowles As cinematographer 1927 1928 1929 1930

1931 1932 1933 1934 1935 1936

1937 1939 1940

Mumsie Dawn Love’s Option The Broken Melody Auld Lang Syne The Silver King Rookery Nook French Leave School for Scandal Canaries Sometimes Sing The Calendar The Hound of the Baskervilles White Face The Good Companions Falling for You Jack Ahoy! The Camels Are Coming Jew Süss (lighting technician) Forever England The 39 Steps King of the Damned Rhodes of Africa Secret Agent East Meets West Sabotage Take My Tip Young and Innocent The Mikado Jamaica Inn French Without Tears Spy for a Day Gaslight

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1941

1942

1943 1944

213

Freedom Radio Quiet Wedding The Saint’s Vacation Jeannie The Day Will Dawn (uncredited) Unpublished Story Secret Mission Talk About Jacqueline The Demi-Paradise English Without Tears Love Story

As director A Place of One’s Own, 1945, 92 mins

Director: Bernard Knowles Production Company: Gainsborough Producer: R.J. Minney Screenplay: Brock Williams (from a novel by Osbert Sitwell) Cinematography: Stephen Dade Editing: Charles Knott Art Direction: John Elphick Costume Design: Elizabeth Haffenden Music: Hubert Bath Main cast: Margaret Lockwood (Annette), James Mason (Mr Smedhurst), Barbara Mullen (Mrs Smedhurst), Dennis Price (Dr Selbie), Helen Haye (Mrs Manning Tutthorn), Michael Shepley (Major Manning Tutthorn), Dulcie Gray (Sarah), Ernest Thesiger (Dr Marsham), Moore Marriott (George), O.B. Clarence (Perkins), Edie Martin (Cook), Muriel George (Nurse)

The Magic Bow, 1946, 106 mins

Director: Bernard Knowles Production Company: Gainsborough Producer: R.J. Minney Screenplay: Roland Pertwee (from a novel by Manuel Komroff) Cinematography: Jack Cox Editing: Alfred Roome Art Direction: Andrew Mazzei Costume Design: Elizabeth Haffenden Music: Louis Levy

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Main cast: Stewart Granger (Nicolo Paganini), Phyllis Calvert (Jeanne de Vermond), Jean Kent (Bianci), Dennis Price (Paul de la Rochelle), Cecil Parker (Luigi Germi), Felix Aylmer (Signor Fazzini), Frank Cellier (Antonio), Marie Lohr (Countess de Vermond), Robert Speaight (Cardinal), Mary Jerrold (Teresa Paganini), David Horne (Rizzi)

The Man Within, 1947, 90 mins

Director: Bernard Knowles Production Company: A Sydney Box Production/Production Film Service Producers: Sydney and Muriel Box Screenplay: Sydney and Muriel Box Cinematography: Geoffrey Unsworth Editing: Alfred Roome Art Direction: Andrew Mazzei Costume Design: Elizabeth Haffenden Music: Clifton Parker Main cast: Michael Redgrave (Richard Carlyon), Richard Attenborough (Francis Andrews), Jean Kent (Lucy), Joan Greenwood (Elizabeth), Francis L. Sullivan (Mr Braddock), Felix Aylmer (Priest), Ronald Shiner (Cockney Harry), Basil Sydney (Sir Henry Merriman), Ernest Thesiger (Farne), Allan Jeayes (Judge), Ralph Truman (Prison Interrogator)

Jassy, 1947, 102 mins

Director: Bernard Knowles Production Company: Gainsborough Producer: Sydney Box Screenplay: Dorothy and Campbell Christie, Geoffrey Kerr (from a novel by Norah Lofts) Cinematography: Geoffrey Unsworth Editing: Charles Knott Art Direction: Maurice Carter Costume Design: Elizabeth Haffenden Music: Louis Levy Main cast: Margaret Lockwood (Jassy Woodroofe), Patricia Roc (Dilys Helmar), Dennis Price (Christopher Hatton), Basil Sydney (Nick Helmar), Dermot Walsh (Barney Hatton), Linden Travers (Beatrice Helmar), Esma Cannon (Lindy Wicks), Cathleen Nesbitt (Elizabeth Twisdale), Nora Swinburne (Mrs Hatton), Jean Cadell (Meggie), John Laurie (Tom Woodroofe), Grey Blake (Stephen Fennell), Bryan Coleman (Sedley), Torin Thatcher (Wicks), Beatrice Varley (Mrs Wicks)

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215

The White Unicorn, 1947, 97 mins

Director: Bernard Knowles Production Company: John Corfield Productions Producer: Harold Huth Screenplay: Robert Westerby, A.R. Rawlinson, Moie Charles Cinematography: Reginald Wyer Art Direction: Norman Arnold Costume Design: Mattli Music: Bretton Byrd Main cast: Margaret Lockwood (Lucy), Joan Greenwood (Lottie Smith), Ian Hunter (Philip Templar), Dennis Price (Richard Glover), Joan (Eileen Peel), Guy Middleton (Fobey), Catherine Lacey (Miss Cater), Paul Dupuis (Paul), Valentine Dyall (Storton), Julia Lockwood (Norey)

Easy Money, 1948, 94 mins

Director: Bernard Knowles Production Company: Gainsborough Producer: A. Frank Bundy Screenplay: Muriel and Sydney Box (from a play by Arnold Ridley) Cinematography: Jack Asher Editing: V. Sagovsky Art Direction: Cedric Dawe Costume Design: Joan Ellacott Music: Temple Abady Main cast: Jack Warner (Philip Stafford), Marjorie Fielding (Ruth Stafford), Petula Clark (Jackie), David Tomlinson (Martin), Yvonne Owen (Carol), Jack Watling (Dennis), Mervyn Johns (Atkins), Joan Young (Agnes), Greta Gynt (Pat), Dennis Price (Joe), Bill Owen (Lee), Edward Rigby (Teddy), Guy Rolfe (Archie), Raymond Lovell (conductor), Frank Cellier (manager)

The Perfect Woman, 1949, 89 mins

Director: Bernard Knowles Production Company: Two Cities Producer: George and Alfred Black Screenplay: Knowles, George Black, J.B. Boothroyd (from a play by Wallace Geoffrey, Basil Mitchell) Cinematography: Jack Hildyard Editing: Peter Graham Scott Art Direction: J. Elder Wills Music: Arthur Wilkinson

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Main cast: Patricia Roc (Penelope Belman), Nigel Patrick (Roger Cavendish), Stanley Holloway (Ramshead), Miles Malleson (Prof. Ernest Belman), Irene Handl (Mrs Butters), Pamela Devis (Olga the robot), Anita Bolster (Lady Diana), Dora Bryan (model), Fred Berger (Farini), David Hurst (Wolfgang Winkel)

The Lost People, 1949, 88 mins

Director: Bernard Knowles Production Company: Gainsborough Producer: Gordon Wellesley Screenplay: Bridget Boland (from her play) Cinematography: Jack Asher Editing: Gordon Hale Art Direction: John Elphick Costume Design: Julie Harris Music: John Greenwood Main cast: Dennis Price (Ridley), Mai Zetterling (Lily), Richard Attenborough (Jan), Siobhan McKenna (Marie), Maxwell Reed (Peter), William Hartnell (Barnes), Gerard Heinz (Professor), Zena Marshall (Anna) Olaf Pooley (Milosh), Harcourt Williams (Priest), Jill Balcon (Rebecca)

The Reluctant Widow, 1950, 91 mins

Director: Bernard Knowles Production Company: Two Cities Producer: Gordon Wellesley Screenplay: Wellesley, J.B. Boothroyd (from a novel by Georgette Heyer) Cinematography: Jack Hildyard Editing: John D. Guthridge Art Direction: Carmen Dillon Costume Design: Beatrice Dawson Music: Allan Gray Main cast: Jean Kent (Helena), Guy Rolfe (Lord Carlyon), Paul Dupuis (Lord Nivelle), Lana Morris (Becky), Kathleen Byron (Annette de Chevreaux), Julian Dallas (Francis Cheviot), Peter Hammond (Eustace Cheviot), Anthony Tancred (Nicky), Jean Cadell (Mrs Barrows), Andrew Cruickshank (Lord Bedlington), George Thorpe (Col. Strong)

Park Plaza 605, 1953, 75 mins

Director: Bernard Knowles Production Company: B & A Producers: Albert Fennell, Bertram Ostrer

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217

Screenplay: Knowles, Fennell, Ostrer Editing: Clifford Boote Art Direction: John Elphick Costume Design: Elsa Fennell Music: Philip Green Main cast: Tom Conway (Norman Conquest), Eva Bartok (Nadine Rodin), Joy Shelton (Pixie Everard), Sidney James (Supt Williams), Michael Balfour (Ted Birston), Richard Wattis (Theodore Feather), Carl Jaffe (Boris Roff), Anton Diffring (Gregor)

The Triangle, 1953, 77 mins

This film consists of three episodes which first appeared separately on television before being spliced together for cinema release. Director: Bernard Knowles (‘A Lodging for the Night’; other episodes directed by Lance Comfort, Leslie Arliss) Production Company: Douglas Fairbanks Productions Producer: Douglas Fairbanks Jr Screenplay: Larry Marcus (from a story by Robert Louis Stevenson) Art Direction: Norman Arnold Main cast: Douglas Fairbanks Jr (François Villon), Felix Aylmer (Brisetout)

Thought to Kill, 1954, 77 mins

This film consists of three episodes which first appeared separately on television before being spliced together for cinema release. Director: Bernard Knowles (‘The Five Pound Note’; other episodes directed by Leslie Arliss, Lawrence Huntington) Production Company: Douglas Fairbanks Productions Producer: Douglas Fairbanks Jr Screenplay: Robert Westerby, Larry Marcus Cinematography: Eric Cross Art Direction: Norman Arnold Music: Allan Gray Main cast: Ernest Thesiger (Burden, Sr), Eileen Moore (Isobel), Brian Worth (Camden)

Handcuffs, London, 1955, 76 mins

Director: Bernard Knowles Production Company: Trinity Producer: John Larkin Screenplay: Brock Williams

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Cinematography: Brendan Stafford Editing: Peter Seabourne Art Direction: Norman Arnold Music: Eric Spear Main cast: Bruce Seton (Supt Robert Fabian), Kathleen Byron (Janet Tedford), Michael Craig (Roger Garven), Isobel Dean (Doris Tedford), Alexander Gauge (Nicholas Bardwill), Ursula Howells (Madelaine Perry)

Barbados Quest, 1955, 70 mins

Director: Bernard Knowles Production Company: Cipa Producers: Robert S. Baker, Monty Berman Screenplay: Kenneth R. Hayles Cinematography: Monty Berman Editing: Jack Slade Art Direction: Wilfred Arnold Main cast: Tom Conway (Tom Martin), Delphi Lawrence (Jean Larson), Brian Worth (Geoffrey Blake), Michael Balfour (Barney Wilson), Campbell Cotts (Robert Coburn), John Horsley (Det. Insp. Taylor), Grace Arnold (Lady Hawksley), Ronan O’Casey (Stefan Gordoni)

Frozen Alive, 1964, 80 mins (UK/West Germany)

Director: Bernard Knowles Production Company: Alfa, Creole Producers: Arthur Brauner, Ronald Rietti Screenplay: Evelyn Frazer Cinematography: Robert Ziller Editing: Steve Collins Art Direction: Jürgen Klebach Costume Design: Vera Mügge Music: Eric Spear Main cast: Mark Stevens (Dr Frank Overton), Marianne Koch (Dr Helen Wieland), Wolfgang Lukschy (Insp. Prenton), Delphi Lawrence (Joan Overton), John Longden (Prof. Hubbard)

Spaceflight IC-I: An Adventure in Space, 1965, 65 mins

Director: Bernard Knowles Production Company: Lippert Films Producers: Robert J. Lippert, Jack Parsons Screenplay: Henry Cross

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219

Cinematography: Geoffrey Faithfull Editing: Robert Winter Art Direction: Harry White Costume Design: Jean Fairlie Music: Elizabeth Lutyens Main cast: Bill Williams (Capt. Mead Ralston), Kathleen Breck (Kate Saunders), John Cairney (Dr Steven Thomas), Donald Churchill (Carl Walcott), Linda Marlowe (Dr Helen Thomas)

Hell Is Empty, 1967, 109 mins

Director: Bernard Knowles Production Company: Dominion Producer: Michael Eland, Ronald Rietti Screenplay: Knowles, John Ainsworth, John Fowler Editing: Jim Connock Music: Georges Garvarentz Main cast: Martine Carol (Martine Grant), Anthony Steel (Major Morton), James Robertson Justice (Angus McGee), Shirley Anne Field (Shirley McGee), Isa Miranda (Isa Grant)

Lawrence Huntington As screenwriter or author of story only 1939 1941 1951 1952 1961 1969

I Killed the Count (with Alec Coppel) Sheepdog of the Hills One Wild Oat (with Vernon Sylvaine) Deadly Nightshade A Question of Suspense The Oblong Box

As producer only 1935 1961

Lieutenant Daring R.N. The Trunk

As director (other functions as noted) After Many Years, 1930, 70 mins

Director: Lawrence Huntington Production Company: Savana

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Producer: Alvin Saxon Screenplay: Huntington Main cast: Henry Thompson, Nancy Kenyon, Savoy Havana Band

Romance in Rhythm, 1935, 73 mins

Director: Lawrence Huntington Production Company: Allied Film Productions Producer: Huntington Screenplay: Huntington Cinematography: Desmond Dickinson Editing: Challis Sanderson Main cast: Phyllis Clare (Ruth Lee), David Hutcheson (Bob Mervyn)

Strange Cargo, 1936, 68 mins

Director: Lawrence Huntington Production Company: British & Dominions Producer: Huntington Screenplay: Gerald Elliott Cinematography: Francis Carver Main cast: Kathleen Kelly (Sonia), George Mozart (’Orace), George Sanders (Roddy)

Two on a Doorstep, 1936, 71 mins

Director: Lawrence Huntington Production Company: British & Dominions Producer: Anthony Havelock-Allan Screenplay: Gerald Elliott, George Baraud Cinematography: Francis Carver Main cast: Kay Hammond (Jill Day), Harold French (Jimmy Blair), George Mozart (George)

Café Mascot, 1936, 77 mins

Director: Lawrence Huntington Production Company: Pascal Films Producer: Gabriel Pascal Screenplay: Gerald Elliott

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221

Cinematography: Stanley Grant Main cast: Geraldine Fitzgerald (Moira O’Flynn), Derrick de Marney (Jerry Wilson)

Full Speed Ahead, 1936, 71 mins

Director: Lawrence Huntington Production Company: Lawrence Huntington Productions Producer: Huntington Screenplay: Huntington, Gerald Elliott Cinematography: Stanley Grant Main cast: Paul Murton (Capt. Murton), Moira Lynd (Jean), George Mozart (Chief Smith)

The Bank Messenger Mystery, 1936, 57 mins

Director: Lawrence Huntington Production Company: Hammer Producer: Will Hammer Screenplay: Huntington Cinematography: Eric Cross Main cast: George Mozart (George Brown), Paul Neville (Harper)

Screen Struck, 1937, 38 mins

Director: Lawrence Huntington Production Company: U.K. Films Producers: John Barter, John Baxter Screenplay: Herbert Ayres Cinematography: Jack Parker Main cast: Julian Vedey (Al Sugarman), Diana Beaumont (Marjorie)

Twin Faces, 1937, 67 mins

Director: Lawrence Huntington Production Company: Premier Sound Films Producer: J. Steven Edwards Screenplay: Gerald Elliott Main cast: Anthony Ireland (Jimmy Strangeways), Francesca Bahrle (Judy Strangeways)

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Passenger to London, 1937, 57 mins

Director: Lawrence Huntington Production Company: Fox-British Producer: Huntington Screenplay: David Evans Cinematography: Stanley Grant Editing: Peter Tanner Art Direction: William Hemsley Music: Charles Cowlrick Main cast: John Warwick (Frank Drayton), Jenny Laird (Barbara Lane), Paul Neville (Vautel)

Dial 999, 1937, 46 mins

Director: Lawrence Huntington Production Company: Fox-British Producer: Edward Dryhurst Screenplay: Ernest Dudley Cinematography: Stanley Grant Editing: Peter Tanner Art Direction: William Hemsley Main cast: John Longden (Bill Waring), Elizabeth Kent (Margot Curtis), Neville Brook (Hicks)

Bad Boy, 1938, 69 mins

Director: Lawrence Huntington Production Company: Radius Films Producer: Vaughan N. Dean Screenplay: Huntington Cinematography: Stanley Grant Main cast: John Warwick (Nick Bryan) John Longden (Insp. Bryan), Kathleen Kelly (Ann Travers)

The Patient Vanishes/This Man Is Dangerous, 1941, 82 mins

Director: Lawrence Huntington Production Company: Rialto Producer: John Argyle Screenplay: Argyle, Edward Dryhurst (from a novel by David Hume) Cinematography: Bryan Langley

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223

Music: Guy Jones Main cast: James Mason (Mick Cardby), Mary Clare (Matron), Margaret Vyner (Molly Bennett), Gordon McLeod (Insp. Cardby), Barbara Everest (Mrs Cardby)

Tower of Terror, 1941, 78 mins

Director: Lawrence Huntington Production Company: Associated British Producer: John Argyle Screenplay: Argyle, John Reinhardt Cinematography: Walter J. Harvey, Ronald Anscombe Editing: Flora Newton Art Direction: J. Charles Gilbert Music: Charles Williams Main cast: Wilfrid Lawson (Wolfe Kristan), Michael Rennie (Anthony Hale), Movita (Marie Durand), Morland Graham (Kleber)

Suspected Person, 1942, 75 mins

Director: Lawrence Huntington Production Company: Associated British Producer: Warwick Ward Screenplay: Huntington Cinematography: Günther Krampf Editing: Flora Newton Music: Guy Jones Main cast: Clifford Evans (Jim Raynor), Patricia Roc (Joan Raynor), David Farrar (Insp. Thompson), Anne Firth (Carol), Robert Beatty (Franklin)

Women Aren’t Angels, 1942, 85 mins

Director: Lawrence Huntington Production Company: Associated British Producer: Warwick Ward Screenplay: Huntington, Bernard Mainwaring, Vernon Sylvaine (from Sylvaine’s play) Cinematography: Günther Krampf Music: Charles Williams Main cast: Robertson Hare (Wilmer Popday), Alfred Drayton (Alfred Bandle), Joyce Heron (Thelma), Mary Hinton (Thelma Bandle), Peggy Novak (Elizabeth Popday)

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Warn That Man, 1943, 82 mins

Director: Lawrence Huntington Production Company: Associated British Producer: Warwick Ward Screenplay: Huntington, Vernon Sylvaine (from Sylvaine’s play) Cinematography: Günther Krampf Music: Charles Williams Main cast: Raymond Lovell (Lord Buckley/Hausemann), Finlay Currie (Capt. Fletcher), Philip Friend (John Cooper), Jean Kent (Frances Lane), Frederick Cooper (Charles/Frampton)

Night Boat to Dublin, 1946, 99 mins

Director: Lawrence Huntington Production Company: Associated British Producer: Hamilton G. Inglis Screenplay: Huntington, Robert Hall Cinematography: Otto Heller Editing: Flora Newton Art Direction: David Rawnsley Costume Design: Anna Duse Music: Charles Williams Main cast: Robert Newton (Capt. David Grant), Raymond Lovell (Paul Faber), Muriel Pavlow (Marion Decker), Guy Middleton (Capt. Toby Hunter), Herbert Lom (Keitel), John Ruddock (Bowman), Martin Miller (Prof. Hansen), Brenda Bruce (Lily Leggett), Leslie Dwyer (George Leggett), Julian Dallas (Lt Allen), Marius Goring (Jannings), Olga Lindo (Mrs Coleman), Stuart Lindsell (Insp. Martin), Valentine Dyall (Sir George Bell)

Wanted for Murder, 1946, 103 mins

Director: Lawrence Huntington Production Company: Excelsior Producer: Marcel Hellman Screenplay: Emeric Pressburger, Rodney Ackland (from a play by Percy Robinson and Terence de Marney) Cinematography: Max Greene Editing: E.B. Jarvis Art Direction: Charles Gilbert Costume Design: Anna Duse Music: Mischa Spoliansky

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225

Main cast: Eric Portman (Victor Coleman), Dulcie Gray (Anne Fielding), Derek Farr (Jack Williams), Roland Culver (Insp. Conway), Stanley Holloway (Sgt Sullivan), Barbara Everest (Mrs Coleman), Bonar Colleano (Cpl Mappolo), Jenny Laird (Jeannie), Kathleen Harrison (Florrie), Viola Lyel (Mrs Cooper), Bill Shine (Det. Ellis)

The Upturned Glass, 1947, 86 mins

Director: Lawrence Huntington Production Company: Triton Producers: Sydney Box, James Mason, Betty E. Box Screenplay: Jno P. Monaghan, Pamela Kellino Cinematography: Reginald Wyer Editing: Alan Osbiston Art Direction: Andrew Mazzei Costume Design: Mattli Music: Bernard Stevens Main cast: James Mason (Michael Joyce), Rosamund John (Emma Wright), Pamela Kellino (Kate Howard), Brefni O’Rourke (Dr Farrell), Morland Graham (Clay), Ann Stephens (Ann Wright), Henry Oscar (Coroner), Jane Hylton (Miss Marsh)

When the Bough Breaks, 1947, 81 mins

Director: Lawrence Huntington Production Company: Gainsborough Producer: Betty E. Box, Antony Darnborough Screenplay: Muriel and Sydney Box, Peter Rogers Cinematography: Bryan Langley Editing: Gordon Hales Art Direction: John Elphick Costume Design: Yvonne Caffin Music: Clifton Parker Main cast: Patricia Roc (Lily Bates), Rosamund John (Frances Norman), Bill Owen (Bill Collins), Cavan Malone (Jimmy), Patrick Holt (Robert Norman), Brenda Bruce (Ruby Chapman), Leslie Dwyer (George), Catherine Lacey (almoner), Muriel George (1st landlady), Torin Thatcher (Adams), Edith Sharpe (Matron), Jane Hylton (maid)

Mr Perrin and Mr Traill, 1948, 92 mins

Director: Lawrence Huntington Production Company: Two Cities

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Producer: Alexander Galperson Screenplay: L.A.G. Strong (from a novel by Hugh Walpole) Cinematography: Erwin Hillier Editing: Ralph Kempton Art Direction: Tom Morahan Music: Allan Gray Main cast: David Farrar (David Traill), Marius Goring (Vincent Perrin), Greta Gynt (Isabel Lester), Raymond Huntley (Moy-Thompson), Edward Chapman (Birkland), Mary Jerrold (Mrs Perrin), Ralph Truman (Comber), Finlay Currie (Sir Joshua Varley)

Man on the Run, 1949, 82 mins

Director: Lawrence Huntington Production Company: Associated British Producer: Huntington Screenplay: Huntington Cinematography: Wilkie Cooper Editing: Monica Kimick Art Direction: Terence Verity Costume Design: Peggy Henderson Music: Philip Green Main cast: Derek Farr (Sgt Peter Burden, aka Brown), Joan Hopkins (Jean Adams), Edward Chapman (Insp. Mitchell), Laurence Harvey (Det. Sgt Lawson), John Stuart (Det. Insp. McBane), Howard Marion-Crawford (1st paratrooper), Kenneth More (Cpl Newman), Eleanor Summerfield (May Baker), Valentine Dyall (Army Judge Advocate)

The Franchise Affair, 1951, 88 mins

Director: Lawrence Huntington Production Company: Associated British Producer: Robert Hall Screenplay: Huntington, Robert Hall Cinematography: Günther Krampf Editing: Clifford Boote Art Direction: Terence Verity Music: Philip Green Main cast: Michael Denison (Robert Blair), Dulcie Gray (Marion Sharpe), Marjorie Fielding (Mrs Sharpe), Anthony Nicholls (Kevin MacDermott), Athene Seyler (Aunt Lin), Ann Stephens (Betty Kane), Hy Hazell (Mrs Chadwick), John Bailey (Insp. Grant), Kenneth More (Stanley), Avice Landone (Mrs Wynn), Peter Jones (Bernard Chadwick)

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227

There Was a Young Lady, 1953, 70 mins

Director: Lawrence Huntington Production Company: Nettlefold Producer: A.R. Rawlinson Screenplay: Huntington (from a radio serial by Vernon Harris, John Jowett) Cinematography: Gerald Gibbs Editing: Joseph Sterling Art Direction: Fred Pusey Costume Design: June Kirby Music: Wilfred Burns Main cast: Dulcie Gray (Elizabeth Foster), Michael Denison (David Walsh), Sydney Tafler (Johnny), Charles Farrell (Arthur), Bill Owen (Joe), Robert Adair (Basher), Geraldine McEwan (Irene)

The Accused, 1953, 52 mins

This film consists of two episodes prepared for and shown on television before being spliced together for cinema release. Director: Lawrence Huntington (for episode ‘The Accused’; other episode by Charles Saunders) Production Company: Douglas Fairbanks Productions Producer: Douglas Fairbanks Jr Screenplay: John and Gwen Bagni Cinematography: Gerry Gibbs Editing: Joseph Sterling Music: Allan Gray Main cast: Clifford Evans (Dan Anderson), Mary Laura Wood (Edna), Jean Lodge (Sheila)

The Genie, 1953, 75 mins

This film consists of three episodes which first appeared separately on television before being spliced together for cinema release. Director: Lawrence Huntington (for episode ‘Emerald Green’; others directed by Lance Comfort) Production Company: Douglas Fairbanks Productions Producer: Douglas Fairbanks Jr Screenplay: Paul Vincent Carroll Cinematography: Eric Cross Editing: Peter Taylor Art Direction: Norman G. Arnold Music: Allan Gray

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Main cast: Tommy Duggan (Mike), Bernadette O’Farrell (Molly), Sean Barrett (Brian)

Thought to Kill, 1954, 77 mins

This film consists of three episodes which first appeared separately on television before being spliced together for cinema release. Director: Lawrence Huntington (‘The Parlour Trick’; other episodes directed by Leslie Arliss, Bernard Knowles) Production Company: Douglas Fairbanks Productions Producer: Douglas Fairbanks Jr Screenplay: Roland Pertwee Art Direction: Norman Arnold Music: Bretton Byrd Main cast: Bill Owen (Arthur Preece), Avice Landone (Maud), Lana Morris (Ruby)

The Red Dress, 1954, 76 mins

This film consists of three episodes which first appeared separately on television before being spliced together for cinema release. Director: Lawrence Huntington (‘The Red Dress’ and ‘Panic’; the other by Charles Saunders) Production Company: Douglas Fairbanks Productions Producer: Douglas Fairbanks Jr Screenplay: Guy Morgan (‘The Red Dress’, from a story by Rhys Davies); Larry Marcus, Peter Quinn (‘Panic’) Cinematography: Ken Talbot, Jimmy Wilson Editing: Sam Simmonds, Peter Taylor Art Direction: Norman G. Arnold Music: Allan Gray Main cast: ‘The Red Dress’ – Renée Asherson (Megan), Clifford Evans (Sam); ‘Panic’ – James Kenney (Fred), John Salew (Karl)

Destination Milan, 1954, 78 mins

This film consists of three episodes which first appeared separately on television before being spliced together for cinema release. Director: Lawrence Huntington (other episodes directed by Leslie Arliss, John Gilling)

f il mogr aphie s 

229

Producer: Tom D. Connochie Production Company: Douglas Fairbanks Productions Screenplay: Huntington, Robert Hall Cinematography: Jimmy Wilson Editing: Peter Taylor Art Direction: Norman G. Arnold Music: Allan Gray Main cast: Tom Duggan (Leonard), Lorraine Clewes (Arlette), Christopher Lee (Svenson)

Contraband Spain, 1955, 82 mins

Director: Lawrence Huntington Production Company: Diadem Producer: Ernest Gartside Screenplay: Huntington Cinematography: Harry Waxman Editing: Tom Simpson Art Direction: Cedric Dawe Music: Edwin Astley Main cast: Richard Greene (Lee Scott), Michael Denison (Ricky Metcalfe), Anouk Aimée (Elena Vargas)

Deadly Record, 1959, 58 mins

Director: Lawrence Huntington Production Company: Independent Artists Producer: Vivian A. Cox Screenplay: Huntington, Cox Cinematography: Eric Cross Editing: Eric Boyd-Perkins Art Direction: Harry Pottle Music: Neville McGrah Main cast: Lee Patterson (Trevor Hamilton), Barbara Shelley (Susan Webb), Jane Hylton (Ann Garfield), Geoffrey Keen (Supt Ambrose)

The Fur Collar, 1962, 71 mins

Director: Lawrence Huntington Production Company: Albatross

230 

filmogr aphies

Producer: Huntington Screenplay: Huntington Cinematography: S.D. Onions Editing: Peter Weatherley Art Direction: Robert Jones Music: John Fox Main cast: John Bentley (Mike Andrews), Philip Friend (Eddie Morgan), Nadja Rejin (Marie Lejeune)

Stranglehold, 1962, 73 mins

Director: Lawrence Huntington Production Company: Argo Producers: Jack Lamont, David Henley Screenplay: Guy Elmes Cinematography: S.D. Onions Editing: Peter Weatherley Art Direction: Duncan Sutherland Costume Design: Eve Faloon Music: Eric Spear Main cast: Macdonald Carey (Bill Morrison), Barbara Shelley (Chris Morrison), Philip Friend (Steffan), Nadja Rejin (Lilli)

Death Drums Along the River, 1963, 83 mins

Director: Lawrence Huntington Production Company: Planet Producer: Harry Alan Towers Screenplay: Towers, Nicolas Roeg (from a novel by Edgar Wallace) Cinematography: Bob Huke Editing: Alan Morrison Costume Design: Mary McFadden Music: Sidney Torch Main cast: Richard Todd (Insp. Harry Sanders), Marianne Koch (Dr Inge Jung), Albert Lieven (Dr Franz Weiss), Walter Rilla (Dr Schneider), Robert Arden (Jim Hunter), Jeremy Lloyd (Tom Hamilton)

The Vulture, 1967, 91 mins

Director: Lawrence Huntington Production Companies: Homeric, Iliad, Film Financial Co.

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231

Producer: Huntington Screenplay: Huntington Cinematography: Stephen Dade Editing: John S. Smith Art Direction: Duncan Sutherland Costume Design: Dulcie Midwinter Music: Eric Spear Main cast: Robert Hutton (Dr Eric Lutens), Akim Tamiroff (Prof. Hans Koniglich), Broderick Crawford (Brian Stroud), Diane Clare (Trudy Lutens), Philip Friend (Vicar)

Select bibliography

NB I have made extensive use of references to the four directors and their films in contemporary sources including Kinematograph Weekly, Today’s Cinema, Picture Show, Picturegoer and Monthly Film Bulletin. Ashby, Justine and Higson, Andrew (eds), British Cinema, Past and Present (London: Routledge, 2000). Aspinall, Sue and Murphy, Robert (eds), Gainsborough Melodrama, BFI Dossier 18 (London: BFI Publishing, 1983). Babington, Bruce (ed.), British Stars and Stardom (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001). Barr, Charles, English Hitchcock (Moffat: Cameron and Hollis, 1999). Box, Sydney, The Lion That Lost Its Way, edited by Andrew Spicer (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow, 2005). Chibnall, Steve, Quota Quickies: The Birth of the British ‘B’ Film (London: BFI Publishing, 2007). Cook, Pam (ed.), Gainsborough Pictures (London: Cassell, 1997). Dixon, Wheeler Winston (ed.), Re-Viewing British Cinema 1900–1992 (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994). Gifford, Denis, The British Film Catalogue 1895–1970 (Newton Abbot: David and Charles, 1973). Granger, Stewart, Sparks Fly Upward (St Albans: Granada Publishing, 1981). Gray, Dulcie, Looking Forward, Looking Back (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1991). Harper, Sue, and Porter, Vincent, British Cinema of the 1950s (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003). Higson, Andrew (ed.), Dissolving Views (London: Cassell, 1996). Huntley, Elliot J., Dennis Price: A Tribute (Sheffield: Pickard Communication, 2008). Landy, Marcia, British Genres: Cinema and Society, 1930–1960 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991). Lewis, Jon E., and Stempel, Penny, The Ultimate TV Guide (London: Orion, 1999).

se l ec t b i b l i o g r a p h y  

233

Lockwood, Margaret, Lucky Star: The Autobiography of Margaret Lockwood (London: Odhams, 1955). Lukins, Jocelyn, The Fantasy Factory: Lime Grove Studios, London (London: Venta Books, 1996). McFarlane, Brian, An Autobiography of British Cinema (London: Methuen and BFI Publishing, 1997). McFarlane, Brian (ed.), The Encyclopedia of British Film (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 4th edn, 2014). Macnab, Geoffrey, Searching for Stars (London and New York: Cassell, 2000). Mason, James, Before I Forget (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1981). Mayer, Geoff, Guide to British Cinema (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2003). Murphy, Robert (ed.), Directors in British and Irish Cinema (London: BFI Publishing, 2006). Murphy, Robert, Realism and Tinsel: Cinema and Society in Britain 1939–48 (London: Routledge, 1989). Owens, Andy, Our Eric: A Portrait of Eric Portman (Ammanford: Sigma Press, 2013). Petrie, Duncan, The British Cinematographer (London: BFI Publishing, 1996). Richards, Jeffrey and Sheridan, Dorothy (eds), Mass-Observation at the Movies (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1987). Scott, Peter Graham, British Television: An Insider’s History (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co., 2000). Spicer, Andrew, Sydney Box (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006). Spicer, Andrew, Typical Men: The Representation of Masculinity in Popular British Cinema (London: I.B. Tauris, 2001). Williams, Tony, Structures of Desire: British Cinema 1939–1955 (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000).

Index

NB For persons in stills, see list of figures, p. ix ABPC see Associated British Production Company Ackland, Rodney 162 Adam, Ronald 86 Adelphi Films 46 Adventures of Robin Hood, The 96–7, 148–9 Adventures of Sir Lancelot, The 96–7, 149, 194 After Many Years 154 Agate, James 17, 66 Ainsworth, John 150 Alf’s Button Afloat 54 ‘The Alien Corn’ 79 Allen, Lewis 105 Allen, Patrick 194 Ambler, Joss 47 Anderson, Lindsay 148 Annakin, Ken 171 Anouk (Aimée) 189 Arden, Robert 191 Argyle, John 6, 155 Arliss, Leslie 1, 2, 4–52, 101 and television 48–50 Arnold, C. Wilfred 95 Arnold, Grace 144 Arnold, Norman G. 130 Ashcroft, Peggy 55 Askey, Arthur 55 Asquith, Anthony 55, 104

Associated British Production Company 6, 43, 155, 157, 181, 184 Attenborough, Richard 114, 120, 138 Aylmer, Felix 29, 110, 111, 115 Bad Boy 154 Bad Lord Byron, The 120, 130 Baddeley, Hermione 79 Bailey, John 185, 186 Baines, John 85 Baker, Robert S. 144 Baker, Stanley 84 Balfour, Betty 101 Balfour, Michael 81, 144 Band Waggon 55 Banes, Lionel 91, 148 Bank Holiday 54–5, 87 Bank Manager Mystery, The 154 Banks, Leslie 191 Barbados Quest 143, 144–5 Barkas, Geoffrey 102 Bartok, Eva 143 Bath, Hubert 18, 23, 24, 46, 106, 107 Baxter, Beryl 39, 40 Beatles, the 150 Bedelia 170 Bentley, John 44

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Berman, Monty 144 Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, The 36 Billings, Josh 78, 84, 171 Black, Edward (Ted) 9, 17, 25, 33, 35 Black, George 134 Black, Stanley 84 Blythe, John 83 Boddey, Martin 184 Bogarde, Dirk 79 Boland, Bridget 137, 140 Bolster, Anita 135 Boothroyd, J.B. 142 Borrodaile, Osmond 42 Boulting brothers 5 Bower, Dallas 149 Box, Betty 165, 170 Box, Muriel 74, 113, 115, 120, 124, 130, 134, 136, 170 Box, Sydney 73, 74, 78, 79, 81, 113, 114, 115, 120, 130, 136 Boys in Brown 176 Brasselle, Keefe 89 Brief Encounter 3, 32, 112, 128, 154 British International Pictures (BIP), Elstree 4, 53 British Lion 76 Brody, Estelle 83 Browne, Sir Thomas 114, 161, 165, 166 Browning Version, The 177 Bruce, Brenda 159, 172, 175 Brune, Gabrielle 85 Bryan, Dora 81 Bryan, John 24–5, 32, 69, 72 Buccaneers, The 49 Burden, Albert 5 Byrne, Eddie 41 Byron, Kathleen 142 Caddick, Edward 193 Cadell, Jean 121, 141 Café Mascot 154 Caffin, Yvonne 65 Calendar, The 73, 76–8 Calvert, Phyllis 10–17 passim, 32, 55, 56, 57–63 passim, 64, 73, 109–12 passim, 164

235

Camels Are Coming 101 Cameron, Basil 110 Cannon, Esma 122 Canterbury Tale, A 165 Caravan 64, 68–73, 113 Carol, Martine 150 Carr, John Dickson (as Carter Dickson) 148 Carter, Maurice 124, 125 Channel Incident 55 Chapman, Edward 178 Charles, Moie 128, 170 Charley’s (Big-Hearted) Aunt 55 Charter Films 5 Christie, Dorothy and Campbell 124 Christopher Columbus 120, 130 Chrystall, Belle 86, 87 Churchill, Winston 157 Circus of Horrors 92 Clare, Diane 193 Clare, Mary 7, 86, 87, 155 Clark, Petula 80–2, 131 Clowes, St John Legh 74 Cockpit 137 Cohen, Herbert 92, 94 Cole, David 79 Cole, George 79, 80, 149 Cole, Sidney 149 Colleano, Bonar 162 Collier, Lionel 120, 126, 133, 183 Colonel March Investigates 148 Come on George 5 Comfort, Lance 1, 35, 170 Comin’ thro’ the Rye 43 Connell, Thelma 148 Constanduros, Mabel 128, 131 Contraband Spain 188–90, 191, 192 Convict 99 54 Conway, Tom 143–5 Cook, Pam 13, 59 Cooper, Wilkie 181 ‘Cornish Rhapsody’ 18, 23, 45 Courtneidge, Cicely 47, 101 Cox, Jack 31, 33, 39, 55, 56, 59, 62, 112

236 

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Crabtree, Arthur 1, 2, 9, 11, 16, 17, 33, 53–99, 111, 149 Crabtree’s horror films 89–96 Crabtree and television 96–7 Crawford, Anne 64, 69, 71, 72, 111 Crawford, Broderick 193 Crazy Gang 54, 55 Cross, Eric 143 Culver, Roland 162, 164 Cunningham, June 93 Currie, Finlay 157 Cusack, Cyril 49

Dors, Diana 46, 47 Douglas, John O. 46 Douglas Fairbanks Jr Presents 48–9, 193 Dudley, Ernest 154 Dudley-Ward, Penelope 105 Dupuis, Paul 127 Durgnat, Raymond 29 Dwyer, Leslie 78, 83, 86, 87, 159, 172, 175 Dyall, Valentine 128, 183 Dyson, John 148

Dade, Stephen 72, 74, 106, 107, 192 Dalby, Amy 6, 29 Dallas, Julian 141 Daniely, Lisa 83–4, 86, 87 Davis, John 133, 136, 170 Dawe, Cedric 190 Dawson, Beatrice 142 Day Will Dawn, The 104 Dead of Night 105 Dean, Isobel 44, 45 Dear Murderer 73, 74–6 Dear Octopus 55 Death Drums Along the River 190–1 Death over My Shoulder 89 Dehn, Paul 76, 78 Demi-Paradise, The 104, 105 Denham, Maurice 82 Denham Studios 136 Denison, Michael 35, 158, 184–9 passim Destination Milan 48, 193 Devis, Pamela 134 Dial 999 154 Dickinson, Desmond 94 Diffring, Anton 144 Dighton, John 5 Dillon, Carmen 142 Dillon, Tom 41 Dolan, Michael 42 Donnelly, K.J. 23, 63, 71, 112 Don’t Ever Leave Me 80–2 Dorne, Sandra 86

Ealing Studios 9, 44, 105 Easy Money 130–4, 135, 171 Edgar, Marriott 5 Edwards, Henry 110 Elphick, John 107 Elton, Ray 79 Emmett, E.V.H. 130, 133 Enchanted April 36 English Without Tears 104, 105 Errol Flynn Theatre, The 194 Everest, Barbara 162, 163 ‘Facts of Life, The’ 79 Fairbanks Jr, Douglas 48 Faithfull, Geoffrey 87, 147 Falling for You 101 Fanny by Gaslight 55, 56 Farell, Claude 43 Farmer’s Wife, The 2, 4, 43 Farr, Derek 161, 164, 174, 181, 183 Farrar, David 177, 178 Farrell, Charles 187, 188 Field, Shirley Anne 93 Fielding, Marjorie 45, 131, 184, 186 Fiend Without a Face 89–92 Fisher, Terence 148 Fitzgerald, Geraldine 154 For Freedom 55 Forde, Walter 101 Foreman Went to France, The 5 Forest Rangers (series) 49–50 Forever England 101 Formby, George 5, 55

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Forrest, John 185 49th Parallel, The 165 Franchise Affair, The 184–6 Frazer, Evelyn 146 Freedom Radio 104 French, Harold 35, 104, 154 French Without Tears 104 Friend, Philip 157 Friese-Greene, Claude 53 Frozen Alive 145–6, 150 Full Speed Ahead 154 Fuller, Leslie 4 Fyffe, Will 5 Gainsborough Studios 4, 6, 7, 9–34 passim, 35, 39, 40, 45, 47, 53–7 passim, 62, 63, 64, 68, 71, 72, 73, 76, 105–13, 114, 117, 118, 123, 124, 136, 141, 169, 170, 171 ‘Gainsborough lady’ 54, 105 Galperson, Alexander 176 Gasbags 55 Gate Studios, Elstree 83, 136 General Film Distributors (GFD) 73 Genie, The 193 Geoffrey, Wallace 134 George, Muriel 108, 172 Gilliat, Sidney 4 Glennon, Gordon 26 Glenville, Peter 58 Glynne, Maureen 186 Good Companions, The 86, 100 Goodbye Mr Chips 180 Goring, Marius 158, 159, 161, 177, 178, 180 Gotell, Walter 84 Gough, Michael 93–5 Granger, Stewart 10–25 passim, 58–64 passim, 69, 72, 73, 109, 110, 111 Grant, Stanley 154 Gray, Allan 180 Gray, Dulcie 34, 35–8 passim, 56, 64, 66, 108, 158, 161, 164, 169, 174, 184, 185, 186, 187

237

Great Day 165 Green, Philip 184 Greenbaum, Mutz (Max Greene) 87, 164 Greene, Graham 113, 118, 119, 148 Greene, Phil 110 Greene, Richard 97, 189 Greenwood, Joan 114, 116, 125, 129 Gregg, Everley 186 Gynt, Greta 74, 75, 76, 77, 132, 177, 179 Haffenden, Elizabeth 13, 16, 24, 26, 32, 62, 70, 124, 125 Halfway House, The 105 Hall, Robert 184 Hammer Films 9, 88 Hammond, Kay 154 Handl, Irene 134, 135 Hanley, Jimmy 81 Harker, Gordon 157 Harold Huth Productions 125 Harper, Sue 30, 68, 112, 133 Hartnell, William 139 Hay, Will 5, 54, 55, Haye, Helen 57, 107 Hayles, Kenneth R. 144 Hayward, Louis 53 Hazell, Hy 185 Hell Is Empty 150 Heller, Otto 160 Helpmann, Robert 70 Heyer, Georgette 141 Hickson, Joan 86, 87 Hildyard, Jack 104, 142 Hiller, Wendy 86 Hillier, Erwin 46, 178 Hindle Wakes 85–8 Hinze (Heinz), Gerald 69, 138 Hird, Thora 148 Hitchcock, Alfred 4, 53, 102–3 Holiday Camp 171 Holloway, Stanley 134, 135, 163 Holm, Sonia 77 Holt, Patrick 46, 47, 172, 175 Homolka, Oscar 103

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Hopkins, Joan 181, 183 Horne, David 69 Horrors of the Black Museum 89, 92–6 Horsley, John 144 Houghton, Stanley 85 Howard, Joyce 6 Howard, Sydney 55 Howlett, Noel 173 Hudd, Walter 18 Hulbert, Jack 46, 47, 101 Hunt, Martita 11, 29 Hunter, Ian 127 Hunter, T. Hayes 76 Huntington, Lawrence 1, 2, 153–98 Huntington and television 193–5 Huntley, Elliot J. 111 Huntley, Raymond 177, 178 Hutton, Robert 193 Hyde-White, Wilfrid 159 Hylton, Jane 149 I Thank You 55 Idol of Paris 33, 34, 39–40, 41, 43 Islington Studios 75 Jack Ahoy 101 Jaffe, Carl 84, 144 Jamaica Inn 103 James, Sidney 85, 143 Jassy 121–5, 130, 133 Jeannie 104 Jennings, Humphries 18 Jerrold, Mary 110 Jew Süss 102 John, Rosamund 166, 169, 172, 174, 175 Johns, Glynis 194 Johns, Mervyn 79, 132 Johnson, Celia 32 Johnston, Margaret 35–8 passim Jones, Emrys 31 Jones, Griffith 26, 31–2 Karloff, Boris 148 Kavanagh, Kevin 190

Keen, Geoffrey 93 Kellino, Pamela 66, 166, 169 Kellino, Roy 53, 102 Kennedy, Margaret 10 Kent, Elizabeth 154 Kent, Jean 31, 70, 71, 72, 109, 110, 114, 118, 140–2, 151n.34, 157 Kerr, Geoffrey 77, 124 King, Sidney 77 King-Hall, Magdalen 26 Kipps 55 ‘Kite, The’ 73 Knott, Charles 124 Knowles, Bernard 1, 2, 9, 23, 24, 33, 46, 100–52 passim, 171 Knowles as cinematographer 100–5 Knowles and television 147–50, 194 Knowles, Cyril 103–4 Koch, Marianne 146, 191 Korda, Alexander 20, 25, 34, 35 Korda, Zoltan 190 Krampf, Günther 6, 53, 156, 184, 186 Lacey, Catherine 127, 172 Lady Vanishes, The 7 Laird, Jenny 153 Landone, Avice 185 Landy, Marcia 34, 123, 168 Langley, Bryan 174 Laurie, John 49, 121 Lawrence, Delphi 146 Lawrence, Margery 57 Lawson, Wilfrid 7, 156, 157, 161 Lee, Anna 101 Lee, Bernard 79 Leigh-Hunt, Ronald 149 Leister, Frederick 79 Lejeune, C.A. 17, 108, 113 Leslie-Smith, Kenneth 46 Lieven, Albert 191 Lilli Marlene 83–4 Lindo, Olga 159 Listen to Britain 18

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Lister, Francis 29 Livesey, Barry 65, 66 Lloyd, Jeremy 191 Lockwood, Julia 128 Lockwood, Margaret 9, 11–33 passim, 45, 54, 56, 106, 108, 109, 121, 124, 125, 128, 129 Lodge, John 55 Lofts, Nora 121 Lohr, Marie 110, 111 Lom, Herbert 143, 159 Lomas, Herbert 116 London Films 34, 35 London Town 76 Longden, John 154 Lorimer, Glennis 54 Lost People, The 134, 136–40, 171, 176 Love Story 18–25, 26, 28, 33, 37, 45, 46, 106 Love Test, The 53 Lovell, Raymond 14, 77, 79, 132, 157, 159 Luckwell, Bill 46 Ludwig, Otto 101 Lyel, Viola 162, 179 McCallum, John 76, 78 McDermott, Hugh 83, 84, 85 McGuire, Tucker 6 Mackay, Barry 102 McKenna, Siobhan 138, 139, 140 Macnab, Geoffrey 33, 75 McPhail, Angus 5 MacWilliams, Glen 101 Madonna of the Seven Moons 2, 57–64 Magic Bow, The 108–13, 114, 123, 142 Magical Mystery Tour 150 Mahony, Will 5 Malleson, Miles 5, 40, 45, 134, 135 Man About the House, A 20, 34, 35–38, 41 Man in Grey, The 2, 8, 9, 10–17, 18, 30, 31, 32, 34, 55, 56 Man on the Run 181–4

239

Man Within, The 113–20, 150, 161 Manahan, Sheila 41 Marcel Hellman Productions 161 Marion-Crawford, Howard 181 Marriott, Moore 5 Mason, Herbert 55 Mason, James 6, 8, 9, 10–17 passim, 30, 31, 38, 45, 55, 64, 65, 66, 106–8 passim, 155, 161, 165–70 passim, 193 Matthews, A.E. 11, 47 Matthews, Jessie 100 Maugham, W. Somerset 78, 80 Maxwell, Lois 43, 44, 45 May, Hans 63 Mazzei, Andrew 62, 120, 170 Melford, Austin 5 Mendes, Lothar 102 Menuhin, Yehudi 110, 112 Merton Park studios 92 Middleton, Guy 35, 127, 129 Mikado, The 103–4, 113 Miller, Martin 158 Mills, John 102 Minney, R.J. 105, 110 Miss Tulip Stays the Night 35, 46–8 Mitchell, Basil 134 Moffatt, Graham 5 Monaghan, John (Jno) P. 166 Monarch Productions 83, 84, 86 Montgomery, Doreen 10, 18, 20 Moore, Kieron 35–8 passim, 45 More, Kenneth 181, 186 Morgan, Diana 44 Morning Call 89 Morrison, T.J. 176 Mozart, George 154 Mr Perrin and Mr Traill 161, 176–80, 181, 187 Mr Proudfoot Shows a Light 55 Much Too Shy 55 Mullen, Barbara 106, 107 Murdoch, Richard 55, 83 Murphy, Robert 7, 10, 25, 64, 66, 72, 105, 113, 114, 117, 120, 124, 170

240 

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Murray, Barbara 82 Murray-Hill, Peter 65, 66 Murton, Walter 16 My Brother Jonathan 35 Mycroft, Walter C. 43 National Symphony Orchestra 110 Nesbitt, Cathleen 122 Nettlefold Studios 125, 186 Neutral Port 55 Newley, Anthony 82 Newton, Robert 157, 159 Night Boat to Dublin 2, 153, 158–60, 176, 188 Night Has Eyes, The 2, 6–9, 10 No Orchids for Miss Blandish 74 Norden, Christine 40, 41 O’Casey, Ronan 144 O’Donnell, Cathy 43, 44, 45 O’Farrell, Bernadette 148 O’Hara, Maureen 103 O’Madden, Lawrence 159 O’Neill, Maire 41, 42 O’Rourke, Brefni 168 Old Bones of the River 54 Old Dark House, The 105 On For Freedom 5 Osbiston, Alan 167 Osborne, Andrew 39 Osmasta, Michael 6 Ostrer, Maurice 9, 25, 33, 39, 105, 109, 124 Owen, Bill 132, 173, 175 Owen, Yvonne 131 Paganini, Niccolò 108–9, 110 Palmer, Ernest 53, 194 Park Plaza 605 143–4, 145 Parker, Cecil 110, 111 Passenger to London 153 Patrick, Nigel 134, 135 Pavlow, Muriel 159 Pearce, Vera 5 Peeping Tom 92 Penrose, John 39 Perfect Woman 134–6

Périnal, Georges 36 Pertwee, Roland 57, 58, 64, 65, 68, 69 Petrie, Duncan 33, 55, 56, 62, 72, 104, 125 Phillips, Conrad 49 Phillpotts, Eden 4 Pinewood Studios 192 Pirie, David 92 Place of One’s Own, A 2, 105–8, 114, 121, 150 Pohlmann, Eric 44 Poison Pen 43 Poole, Mabbe 44 Pooley, Olaf 44 Portman, Eric 74, 157, 161–5 passim, 193 Portrait from Life 136 Portrait of Clare 35 Pot Luck 53 Powell, Michael 1, 53, 92 Pratt, Vic 46 Pressburger, Emeric 162 Price, Dennis 69, 72, 73, 74, 107, 108, 110, 111, 121, 128, 129, 132, 137, 139 Price, Nancy 59 Priestley, J.B. 100 Provis, George 124 Purcell, Noel 41 Quartet 73, 78–80 Quiet Wedding 104 Quinlan, David 85, 144, 154, 157 Quota Quickies 155 Radford, Basil 79 Rank, J. Arthur 82, 109, 133, 170 Rawlinson, A.W. 128 Redgrave, Michael 114, 115 Reed, Carol 54, 55, 87 Reed, Maxwell 75 Reeves, Kynaston 91 Religio Medici 114, 161 Reluctant Widow, The 140–2 Rennie, Michael 28, 39, 156 Rhapsody in Blue 109

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Rheingold Theatre, The 194 Rhodes of Africa 102 Rigby, Edward 81, 132, 133 Rilla, Walter 191 Riverside Studios 190 Roadhouse 5 Roc, Patricia 19–24 passim, 26, 28, 31–2, 58, 122, 124, 134–5, 169, 172, 174 Roeg, Nicolas 190 Rogers, Peter 74, 170 Rolfe, Guy 141 Romance in Rhythm 154 Roy, Ernest G. 186 Rush Hour 55 Russell, William 96, 149 Sabotage 102–3 Said O’Reilly to McNab 5 Saints and Sinners 20, 34, 41–3 Salew, John 163 San Demetrio, London 13 Sandström, Flora 125, 126 Saville, Philip 180 Saville, Victor 86, 100 Schertzinger, Victor 104 Scott, Margaretta 39, 40, 56 Scott, Peter Graham 103 Searchers, The 66 Secret Agent, The 102 Secret Mission 104 See How They Run 34 Seventh Veil, The 8, 112 Seyler, Athene 185, 186 Sharpe, Edith 172 Shaw, Robert 49 Shaw, Susan 79, 80 Shelton, Joy 143 Shepherd’s Bush Studios 25, 32, 79, 102, 113 Shepley, Michael 107 Shepperton Studios 147 Sherriff, R.C. 79 Shine, Bill 163, 187 Shiner, Ronald 115 Sinclair, Hugh 81 Sirk, Douglas 25

241

Sitwell, Osbert 105 Smith, Cyril 96, 149 Smith, Eleanor 10, 26, 68 Smith, Frederick Y. 100 Song of Love 109 Song to Remember, A 39, 109 South American George 55 South Riding 86 Spaceflight IC-1: An Adventure in Space 145, 147, 150 Spalding, Harry 147 Spicer, Andrew 16, 63, 81, 82, 119, 140, 171, 174, 176 Spoliansky, Mischa 161 Stamp-Taylor, Enid 29, 71 Stars Look Down, The 23 Stephens, Ann 166, 185 Stephens, Helen 66 Sterne, Gordon 193 Stevens, Mark 146 Stevenson, Robert 101 Stewart, Aimée 26 Straddling Jr, Harry 103 Strong, L.A.G. 176 Strueby, Katherine 65 Stryker of the Yard 96 Stuart, John 58, 86 Suspected Person 155 Sutherland, Duncan 6, 192 Swinburne, Nora 14, 121 Sydney, Basil 117, 121 Sydney Box Productions 170 Sylvaine, Vernon 157 Tafler, Sydney 187 Talk About Jacqueline 104 Tamiroff, Akim 192, 193 Tanner, Peter 154 Tate, Reginald 58 Tempest, The 20, 22 Tey, Josephine 184, 185 Thatcher, Torin 172 There Was a Young Lady 186 Thesiger, Ernest 44, 107, 108 They Were Sisters 55, 64–8, 106 39 Steps, The 102 This Is My Song 80

242 

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This Man Is Dangerous 155 Thompson, J. Lee 4 Thompson, Marshall 89 Thorndike, Sybil 86 Thought to Kill 48, 49, 193 Todd, Richard 190–2 Tonight’s the Night: Pass It On 4 Tower of Terror 155–6, 161 Towers, Harry Alan 190 Travers, Ben 53 Travers, Bill 87 Travers, Linden 54, 55, 81, 122 Trevelyan, John 92 Trevor, Austin 93 Triangle, The 48 Trinder, Tommy 5 Triton Productions 78, 165 Truman, Ralph 114, 141, 179 Two Cities Films 134, 140, 176 Two on a Doorstep 154 Uncensored 55 Underdown, Edward 43, 44, 45, 47 Uninvited, The 105 Unpublished Story 104 Unsworth, Geoffrey 113, 116, 117, 121, 122, 124, 125 Upturned Glass, The 161, 165–70, 174, 176, 192, 193, 194 Varley, Beatrice 29, 94–5 Varnel, Marcel 54 Veness, Amy 59 Vetchinsky, Alex 101 Victor, Herbert 170 Viertel, Berthold 102 Voice Within, The 38 Vulture, The 191, 192–3 Vyner, Margaret 155 Wallace, Edgar 76, 190 Walls, Tom 19–20, 53 Walpole, Hugh 176 Walsh, Dermot 121 Wanted for Murder 161–5, 166, 170, 174, 181, 188, 192, 193

Ward, Michael 84 Warn That Man 155, 156–8, 159 Warner, Jack 75, 131 Warren, Betty 111 Warwick, John 153 Waterloo Road 55 Watling, Jack 79, 131 Wattis, Richard 144 Waxman, Harry 190 Way Ahead, The 3, 13 Wedding of Lilli Marlene, The 84–5 Wellesley, Gordon 142 Wells, H.G. 55 West of Suez 89 Westerby, Robert 81, 128 Wheatley, Alan 97 Whelan, Tim 101 When the Bough Breaks 170–6, 176 Where There’s a Will 5 Where’s That Fire? 55 Whipple, Dorothy 64, 65 White Unicorn, The 123, 125–30 Wicked Lady, The 15, 18, 25–34, 39 William Tell series 49 Williams, Bill 147 Williams, Brock 105 Williams, Harcourt 138 Williams, Tony 8, 16, 23, 30, 67, 72, 112, 125, 174 Windbag the Sailor 5 Winnington, Richard 25, 33, 38, 76 Withers, Googie 53, 54 Woman’s Angle, The 34, 43–6, 47 Women Aren’t Angels 155, 157, 186 Wood, Leslie 83 Worth, Brian 86, 144, 148 Wyer, Reginald 78, 126, 130, 167, 170 Wynter, Dagmar (Dana) 44 Young and Innocent 103 Young, Francis Brett 35 Young, Joan 132 Zetterling, Mai 138, 140