Magic from Elsewhere

There was a period, in the decade after World War II, when British films achieved without fanfare a broad viewership among Americans. This was true especially for those young enough to be at home watching daytime television. At a time when Hollywood studios hesitated to license their productions to the rival medium, local stations found it convenient to fill stretches of the afternoon and late-night hours with a wide range of British features in frequent rotation: Alec Guinness in The Lavender Hill Mob (1951) and The Man in the White Suit (1951), Alastair Sim and Margaret Rutherford in The Happiest Days of Your Life (1950), David Lean’s Great Expectations (1946), Carol Reed’s Outcast of the Islands (1951), Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s A Matter of Life and Death (1946, under its American title, Stairway to Heaven), and a great many more.

Taken together they provided a simultaneous education in cinema, in British mores and manners, and much else. They touched on matters rarely encountered on TV in those days. Where else would one find the hero slowly bleeding to death while he fled through rain-slicked streets to be joined in suicide by his lover, as in Odd Man Out (1947), or another hero of sorts systematically killing off the relatives who stand in his way to an inheritance, as in Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949)? Images were permanently implanted: Miss Havisham in her ancient wedding dress, Alec Guinness’s indestructible white suit melting in the rain, David Niven caught between life and death on the endless stairway to heaven, Sonia Dresdel’s terrifying Mrs. Baines falling to her death before the frightened eyes of a child in The Fallen Idol (1948), a melancholy Jean Simmons playing the piano music composed by her murdered father in The Clouded Yellow (1950). British movies were regarded in America as foreign films—a notion that began to fade sometime around the American release of Dr. No in 1963—and their otherness was apparent. Such films seemed magic from elsewhere, a magic sometimes comically anarchic, sometimes darkly brooding.

How jarring it was then, a few years further on, as the age of cinephilia dawned along with the Nouvelle Vague, to find that whole repertoire of movies shunted aside as if it had been a childhood misapprehension. François Truffaut was not alone in his notorious suggestion that there was a fundamental contradiction between the words “British” and “cinema”; the back pages of Cahiers du cinéma unfailingly yielded, for virtually every British release, a derisory joke along the same lines. The response seemed almost tribal. Yet British critics themselves were not quick to defend the national output. In 1962 the first issue of the influential magazine Movie led off with a manifesto by V.F. Perkins dismissing virtually the totality of recent British filmmakers excepting only Joseph Losey (an exiled American) and, based on a handful of films, Seth Holt. “The British cinema,” wrote Perkins, “is as dead as before. Perhaps it was never alive.”¹

The critics had their reasons. British films were said to be conformist and overcautious, constrained by censorship, small-minded commercialism, and middle-class biases, and wed to a word-bound aesthetic in which visual style (if any) was illustrative rather than cinematic. In a 1958 issue of Cahiers focused on the denigration of the British film industry, Louis Marcorelles declared that “the British cinema…excels in appropriating for itself the worst of other cinemas, without borrowing any of their qualities, American dynamism or French individualism.” Reporting a conversation with Sir Michael Balcon, the production chief of Ealing Studios, Marcorelles was shocked by his “total ignorance of the primary role of the director in the making of a film,” although Balcon might merely have been echoing the Ealing slogan: “The Studio with the Team Spirit.”² The teamwork of dedicated craftsmen was at least in theory the working principle of much British filmmaking, an approach further bolstered by the collective spirit of the war years. If the slogan suggests an atmosphere of clubby paternalism, one could read through the memoirs of the era’s producers, directors, and actors—there are a good many—to get a more precise idea of the contentions off camera.

In the next decade, responding to this dismissiveness in his pathbreaking book A Mirror for England (1970), the critic Raymond Durgnat wrote, “Whether British films have ever had criticism as detailed as they deserved is a doubtful matter.”³ That may to some extent have changed, although there is no question that the films themselves have been underseen. Judgments shift, but those pronounced in that formative era for film studies and canon making have had a way of lingering. Just as France’s pre–New Wave “tradition of quality” has taken a long time to reemerge from the shadows to which it was once consigned, the scope of British filmmaking in the postwar period has (outside the UK at least) been only very partially appreciated.

“Great Expectations: British Postwar Cinema, 1945–1960,” a forty-five-film retrospective at this year’s Locarno Film Festival—juxtaposing such well-known titles as Reed’s Odd Man Out, Powell and Pressburger’s I Know Where I’m Going! (1945), and the Ealing comedies Whisky Galore! (1949) and Passport to Pimlico (1949) with a multitude of others rarely screened—offered a fuller sense of the work being produced in what has prevailed in recent reassessments as British film’s most celebrated period. The program made room for unusual B movies, the output of smaller production companies, and the work of the too-few women directors who made their way in a male-dominated industry. Curated by Ehsan Khoshbakht, the Iranian filmmaker who is the codirector of Bologna’s Il Cinema Ritrovato, it provided a revelatory experience for those who attended regularly. There was certainly no question about the films being alive and still full of surprises. They spoke for themselves—and for the vigorous work of Muriel Box, Charles Crichton, Frank Launder, Lance Comfort, Wendy Toye, Basil Dearden, and other directors rarely singled out for approval. It hardly seems necessary to note the enrichment of their work by those other team members, cinematographers like Douglas Slocombe and composers like William Alwyn, not to mention the writers, Graham Greene, J.B. Priestley, Dylan Thomas, and Kenneth Tynan among them.

The intention, laid out in a profusely illustrated companion volume edited by Khoshbakht, was to assemble a collective national self-portrait of sorts, from the end of the war to the emergence of Britain’s New Wave at the end of the 1950s. (The book includes thirty-eight essays focusing on salient themes including women filmmakers, the prominence of children in films of the period, the influence of film noir, and the work of Americans exiled by the blacklist, along with profiles of the directors in the series.)⁴ In keeping with that premise, the program limited itself to films set in the contemporary world, excluding period films and films rooted in the fantastic or futuristic, so there would be no Shakespeare, no Dickens, no Dead of Night (1945) or Quatermass II (1957) or The Curse of Frankenstein (1957)—and none of the war films that were a staple of British cinema throughout the 1950s: the makings, in short, of a parallel retrospective that would certainly be welcome. But for the purposes of this program, the historical past did not need to be directly depicted, since its institutions and protocols were invoked at every turn. No explicit supernaturalism was needed to sense fatal patterns playing out in haunted landscapes, haunted ruins, haunted households, or to detect, in the spells and Scottish mists of I Know Where I’m Going!, hints of a more benevolent magic. As for the war, it continued to be everywhere, even in the most lighthearted comedies.

Such a retrospective functions as an artwork in itself, creating polyphonic effects as the films seem to watch and comment on one another. Actors major and minor—Dirk Bogarde, Hermione Baddeley, Kathleen Harrison, Trevor Howard, Margaret Rutherford, Ian Carmichael—became familiar presences as they popped up in multiple and distinct roles, suggesting a familial network. Daily immersion established a ghostly identification with the audiences for whom the films were originally intended. The anticipated reactions of those spectators and the historical travails they brought with them into the cinema were etched into the films, whether to farcical or cruel effect. The sunbaked plazas and cobbled vicolos outside the GranRex Cinema might have been painted backdrops to the insistent reality unfolding within. The spectators gathered as if to see what was on at the local that day. It did not take long to feel that one was living for the time being in postwar Britain, that is to say in the aftermath of a catastrophe and with little assurance of where it all was going or of what might already have been lost forever.

Humphrey Jennings’s A Diary for Timothy (1945) provided the most appropriate imaginable prelude. A documentary couched in the form of a letter to a child born in September 1944—the text, by E.M. Forster, is read by Michael Redgrave—it compresses the events and emotions of the last months of the war into forty minutes. Jennings, who brought a poetic sensibility to wartime propaganda in Listen to Britain (1942) and Fires Were Started (1943), juxtaposes hospital wards and pubs, toasts to “absent friends” and mines being cleared from English beaches, the “death and fog” of war and John Gielgud playing the graveyard scene of Hamlet. As a production of the Crown Film Unit (a division of the Ministry of Information), A Diary for Timothy is in some sense a message from the state, but it approaches the war’s end not triumphantly but with uncertainty and an awareness of universal vulnerability. It asks repeatedly what sort of future is coming.

This might have been the last time everyone was in it together, leaving aside the question, to be asked later on, if that was ever actually the case. Toward the end of the war there were movies with titles like Journey Together (1945) and The Way Ahead (1944). Now the audiences for such films were about to go their separate ways—ways (judging by some of the movies that followed) that might lead to one private hell or another. Wartime films had often focused on strangers from different classes and regions flung into the common mobilization and making the best of it. In the postwar era, people might still be randomly brought together—the rail passengers unwittingly heading toward collision in Train of Events (1949), the female convicts released into the perils of the city in Turn the Key Softly (1953)—but they are not joined in a collective effort or moving toward a common destiny.

The power of Jennings’s film is that it foresees that possibility, even as the tone of Redgrave’s narration, with its confidence and intimacy, asserts a shared bond with his listeners. In 1938, just before the war, Redgrave had been the roguish, carefree adventurer of Hitchcock’s The Lady Vanishes; in 1945 he was the voice of the nation at its most compassionate, but he was there to close out an era. By the end of the Locarno cycle, he was the guilt-ridden alcoholic writer of Joseph Losey’s Time Without Pity (1957), in a performance so extreme that he seems to be dissolving before our eyes.

The world after the war, as the movies show it, is scarred, knocked about, and waiting for some kind of change, as well as for relief from the rationing and wartime restrictions that would linger too long. Watch the films together and an urban landscape takes shape, a map punctuated by threadbare or hastily built accommodations, hole-in-the-wall cafés, backroom gambling dens, warehouses stocked with black-market goods, ubiquitous advertising amid scarcity, pubs that have survived everything, and the unavoidable bomb sites, “the negative spaces of the city” as Khoshbakht described them at one screening: places for children to play, for criminals to hide, for lovers to find some privacy. A bomb site might be where the trouble starts: a child falls to his death (The Yellow Balloon, 1953); another child stumbles on a murder (Hunted, 1952).

In the interiors there is never enough room. Well before the arrival of “kitchen-sink realism” in the late 1950s, Robert Hamer’s masterful It Always Rains on Sunday (1947) seems to revolve around a kitchen sink as the nexus of simmering domestic trouble, while family members bump uncomfortably against one another and try to hide their secrets, sneaking in late, furtively locking a bedroom door. As Googie Withers sweeps a kitchen towel to conceal a bit of telltale evidence from her stepdaughter—her former lover, now a criminal on the run, is hidden upstairs—the pressures of a world without privacy are clumped together in a single gesture: take away the towel and the whole structure would collapse. Streets and entire neighborhoods are as cramped as the rooms. People spy on what others are up to and conduct shady business under the counter with black-marketeering spivs whose flashy clothes provide makeshift ornament. Brutal violence is enacted from time to time by gangs under the direction of leaders more unromantically cruel than their Hollywood counterparts, such as Richard Attenborough as the emotionally blank Pinkie in John Boulting’s Brighton Rock (1948) or Griffith Jones as the preening sadist Narcy in Alberto Cavalcanti’s They Made Me a Fugitive (1947).

What the stories map are generally routes of escape. People are always looking to get away, whether it is a child evading a murderer in the depths of a bombed-out underground station (The Yellow Balloon) or an escaped convict running from the police in a dark rail yard (It Always Rains on Sunday). Children run from perils imagined (The Fallen Idol) or real (Hunted), criminals from prison or from other criminals (They Made Me a Fugitive), while the police comb the streets for escapees or innocents in jeopardy. (The police in the earlier films tend to be represented as improbably well coordinated and generally beyond reproach; by the end of the 1950s, in films like Hell Is a City [1960] and Never Let Go [1960], rougher edges are permitted to emerge. In the interim, politicians and civil servants bear the brunt of criticism, both for their inefficiency and their indifference.) We come to know the alleys and stairwells well enough to gauge narrow misses and approaching threats. This urban claustrophobia is brought home in a constant succession of attempts to defy its barriers, whether by sneaking into open windows, clambering over rooftops, slipping through cellar doors left ajar, or climbing unseen into the backs of lorries.

Since the city itself is a trap, the final effort must be to get beyond it altogether, by rail or barge or truck, across moors and marshlands, sleeping rough among crags or absconding with a fishing craft. The documentary tradition that had flourished in the 1930s and during the war persists in the exploration of the rural landscapes through which fugitives move in films like Hunted and The Clouded Yellow. Basil Dearden’s Pool of London (1951) preserves the London docks before their precipitous decline a decade later, with the Thames as a figure of free passage sealed off by official checkpoints from the treacherous milieu onshore, a morass of criminality and, for the West Indian sailor played by Earl Cameron, racist brutality.

The wide-open spaces of, say, an American western—the sort of film just as likely to be playing in a British cinema at the time—are nowhere to be found. But while there is no riding off into the sunset or sailing toward an untroubled horizon, the motivating force of such imaginary spaces is palpable. Happy endings do come to pass, but typically they are abrupt and rapidly sketched, lacking conviction because the rest of the film has so persuasively demonstrated how unlikely they are. Any resolution can only be provisional—this is as good as it gets—in contrast to Hollywood finales suggesting that even the toughest problems can simply be erased. When the sympathetic criminals Dirk Bogarde (Hunted) and Trevor Howard (They Made Me a Fugitive) are taken into custody at the end, we can only hope that things work out for them. The ultimate fate of the unhappy lovers in The Fallen Idol remains unknown.

Alexander Mackendrick’s Mandy (1952), a drama centering on the problems of a deaf child and her parents, in many ways echoes the didacticism of the documentary tradition. It traces the reluctance of the child’s parents to recognize her deafness, their attempt to isolate her in a world of private care, and the mother’s eventual conviction—bitterly resisted by the father—that she must be educated with other deaf children, under the guidance of an impassioned pedagogue played by Jack Hawkins. From this premise Mackendrick creates a beautifully compressed and emotionally complex work in which power struggles play out at every level, within both the parents’ marriage and the school at which Hawkins teaches, while six-year-old Mandy (the extraordinary child actress Mandy Miller), the ostensible center of everyone’s concern, exists in her own world of silence.

Mandy is kept apart at first, for reasons of protection or perhaps of shame, in the house of her father’s upper-class parents—a house that seems almost literally a castle, protected by a wall through whose aperture she watches neighborhood children playing at a bomb site. The children taunt her for keeping aloof; she expresses herself in violent assaults and then makes very gradual progress at the special school; the father, exercising his ancient rights, eventually abducts her from the school, where, he has been led to believe by a scheming bureaucrat, his wife is having an affair with the director. Mandy’s isolation is mirrored by the mutual isolation of those around her. From first to last we witness no human exchange that does not involve a breaching, or failed breaching, of barriers. Here too there is a happy ending of sorts—Mandy goes beyond the wall and says her name to a child at the bomb site—but it is altogether tentative.

Mackendrick was otherwise a specialist in comedy, at least until he went to Hollywood to make his lacerating masterpiece Sweet Smell of Success (1957), but all his films share a moment-to-moment tension stringently observed. Whisky Galore! might have been an anguishing suspense drama if something else had been at stake than the crates of whisky salvaged by Hebridean islanders from a wrecked ship, despite all the efforts of the local English army commander and a ruthless customs official to stop them. It’s the relentless seriousness of all concerned and the military precision of their tactics that make for a comedy at the edge of melancholy. Whatever is suggested humorously could just as easily be the mere truth, not least the islanders succumbing to terminal despair in the absence of drink. The remoteness and barrenness of the place are too real to be taken lightly, as are the fierce fundamentalist injunctions of a good-hearted young soldier’s Bible-quoting mother. We can even feel some compassion for Basil Radford as the helplessly officious commander, imprisoned by the sense of duty that turns him into a mockery. The islanders’ celebration, when it comes, has the rough force of something long pent up, the fulfillment of an archaic pagan ritual predating the mother’s joyless religion. If anybody was trying to be funny, even for an instant, the entire film would be lost.

Like the islanders executing with balletic exactness the concealment of all traces of the contraband whisky from the intruding excisemen, the local residents of Henry Cornelius’s Passport to Pimlico draw on skills instilled in wartime. Having discovered a royal parchment (in a bomb site again) establishing South London’s Pimlico as territory of the Duchy of Burgundy, they are quick to seize the opportunity to do away with ration cards and pub closing hours and soon find themselves in a standoff with the British government. When a state of siege is imposed, the Burgundians launch a deft commando raid across the border. As the situation deteriorates, images from the war years continue to recur as comedy: sealed-off neighborhoods, identity checks, halted trains, airlifts. The fantasy of seceding from Britain and enjoying the pleasures and permissions of a Continental enclave ultimately gives way to a negotiated reentry, at which point, in the midst of a celebratory outdoor banquet, heavy rain begins to fall: “We’re back in England!”

The fantasy wars of the postwar era are waged against bureaucracy. Muriel Box’s The Happy Family (1952), a close companion of Passport to Pimlico, sets a family of shopkeepers against the urban planners who intend to demolish their premises to make way for the Festival of Britain. In short order a family member inclined to the occult accesses Robespierre on her Ouija board, and the talk turns to revolution: “What was the election of 1945 but a revolution?” The shop becomes a fortress; tin cans rain down on the police bent on eviction. The family become national heroes, and the aunt with the Ouija board levitates into the sky.

The tart beauty of the best comedies is that they don’t even pretend to offer a happy ending. They escape into their own laughter and leave it at that. Frank Launder’s The Happiest Days of Your Life creates, at first gradually and then insistently, a mechanism for chaos that must go nowhere because there is nowhere for it to go. It is again a matter of bureaucratic error and indifference, but here no war can be declared against the bureaucrats: they are not even at their desks. Wartime damage requires the consolidation of selected schools; blundering officials have merged a girls’ school with a boys’ school. Alastair Sim, who has been running Nutbourne College as his admittedly seedy fiefdom, finds his premises invaded and engages in a predictably futile battle with Margaret Rutherford as the indomitable headmistress of St. Swithin’s. Before long they are forced into collaboration to conceal what is going on from prying parents and school inspectors, resorting to wartime methods involving synchronized mass exits and entrances worthy of a prison camp escape. An ecstasy of acceleration culminates in a bureaucratic remedy that only piles anarchy on anarchy. Youth runs wild as the older generation abandons the fight.

Seen on television in the 1950s, this seemed like the purest kind of comedy, undiluted by the slightest appeal to sentiment. Every action, remark, or image was in the service of humor and nothing else; it was a paradise. The further wonder, on seeing it again so many years later, was in how much invention had been folded into a running time of eighty minutes, how much trust had been put in the audience to fill out the implications of each passing gesture or inflection.

In Locarno the film was introduced by Angela Allen, who worked on it as continuity supervisor, one of her first credits in a long and exceptional career in film. She remarked that, to the crew, Margaret Rutherford seemed so eccentric that they couldn’t tell if she realized how funny she was. One may well wonder. I had occasion in my early teens to meet Rutherford at a dinner where she was the guest of honor; to me she appeared not so much eccentric as otherworldly, as if the headmistress of St. Swithin’s, the medievalist from Passport to Pimlico, and Blithe Spirit’s bicycle-riding medium Madame Arcati had all taken up residence at the same time. Yet there was no touch of theatricality in her manner. Many years later I became aware of the tragic circumstances of her early life—a parental history of psychosis, murder, institutionalization, and suicide—and found it hard not to think of that when watching her onscreen. Then, as if to put a cap on it, there came the memory of her in Orson Welles’s Chimes at Midnight (1965), relating the death of Falstaff as if it had just happened. As much as one might think of a film as a material object, none can be considered in isolation. Film history can never be anything but a web of continuities.