Gone to Earth

Powell and Pressburger made what to my mind are some of the greatest films of all time - not just greatest British films, but films full stop.  In a glorious run from The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp through the The Red Shoes they showcased virtuoso direction, cinematography, and a grasp of the importance of place in their filmaking.

One of the things they did very well was evoking a sense of nature, most notably to the common viewer in I Know Where I'm Going, but it absolutely haunts all their work.  If you watch Powell's much earlier solo venture The Edge of World it quickly becomes clear that the island itself is the star, and the people crossing it of no more real importance than the sheep or the eagles.  It's about impermanence, more than anything, and the sense that sometimes you just have to give up on what you're doing, even at the expense of your life (whether physically, as you cling to the top of a sheer waterfall hundreds of feet above the rocks below; or more spiritually, turning your back on a way of life that has been core to your community for generations.  It must have taken real guts to write the sort of letter to your laird that begged for a steamer to evacuate your village.

Where the wheels slightly come off the wagon though is with the postwar Gone to Earth.  It's beautifully shot up on the Stiperstones, and around Much Wenlock.  There are some marvellous trademark Powell and Pressburger set pieces  - the full immersion baptism in the river, and the slow procession of the traction engine to the village show are as good as anything you will see in any of their other pictures.  They even managed to convincingly portray foxhunting (albeit with what look like beagles).  A common complaint of the connoisseur in everything from Brideshead Revisited to Downton Abbey is that the hunting is all wrong.  But there's none of that artificial blowing the hounds along to the horn and the start of the whip - these hounds are flying, right out ahead.  As an historical record it's marvellous.

I think the real weakness is the plot.  Gone to Earth is an adaptation from Mary Webb's novel, rather than a Pressburger screenplay, and to be quite honest it shows.  There's not much to be going on with here, it's basically Catherine Cookson avant la lettre and pretty thin gruel at that (with a slightly dubious rape/sexual assault plot thread). Jennifer Jones is not really leading lady material in this (and her accent is frankly risible - Long Mynd by way of Savannah maybe?), and the two leading men aren't given much to do except snarl (David Farrar) or pretty much stand around and invite people to walk over you (Cyril Cusack). Some of the supporting players are much better - Sybil Thorndike is solid as ever, and there's a great little cameo by the young George Cole.

It's a wonder there's any film to see at all in some ways.  David O Selznick (probably seeing the rushes and thinking "what in God's name have I just financed?") mauled it terribly so that by the time it went on general release in the US there was only something like 20 minutes of the original film left in it.  However, it was restored and re-surfaced at some point in the 1980s, permitting critical re-examination. This time around, the overriding opinion was more positive, but it has still sunk below the surface again - I had to buy a South Korean import....

So, what are we to make of Gone to Earth? Slender plot, variable acting certainly; but the ambition and skill of P&P manages to shine through regardless.  It's a love letter to rural England, and Shropshire in particular - and it deserves to be more widely viewed.  If I was trying to win new converts to the Powell and Pressburger shrine, there's no way on God's green earth that I would start them off on this film.  But, if you can get hold of it, and you've got an hour or two to spare, then do watch it. It wasn't quite the last of England, but it was very nearly the last of Powell and Pressburger.

Sunday Matinee: The Way to the Stars

Powell and Pressburger had several films which dealt obliquely with the relationship between the British and the Americans in wartime - A Matter of Life and Death and A Canterbury Tale for starters - but the one that I think really nailed it came from a different stable; Anthony Asquith's 1945 picture The Way to the Stars.

From a purely British war film point of view it had everything that made the genre a success, John Mills, Michael Redgrave and Stanley Holloway heading the British contingent, Douglass Montgomery and Bonar Colleano for the US (there's probably a post to written in the future just on Colleano - he's largely forgotten now, but I promise you you'd recognise him if you saw him).

But it had a little bit more than that - something which elevates it above, say, Reach for the Sky, or even Angels One Five.  The Way to the Stars has soul. In part, that's probably down to the Terence Rattigan screenplay, which is spare and econonomical, but at the same time hugely affecting.

Charting the evolution of a single air base in eastern England, from use by the RAF through to takeover by the USAAF, it is a powerful study of character - from the initial gung-ho unwillingness of the Americans to listen to hard won advice from the RAF liaison officer (Mills), through to the developing relationships with the women of the village, this film is as affecting a piece of cinema as you'll see.  I'm really not trying to traduce Montgomery when I describe him as a poor man's Jimmy Stewart, but that's the sort of bracket he's operating in, and he's really the star of the film - his developing relationship with Rosamund John's war-widowed landlady is particularly senstively handled, and there is some very affecting use of children's parties to highlight growing and deepening bonds.  Indeed, I defy you to hold back the pricking at your eyes at the end where Colleano has to step in as entertainer when Johnny (Montgomery) has had to "go away." Its all so beautifully done.  And, through it all, like a metronome, is the steady presence of John Pudney's immortal poem "For Johnny."

It's Sunday afternoon, the Rusty Bicycle and Oxfork are full - you won't get a table if you're not already there.  Just sit inside and watch this - it's a little masterpiece.

A few thoughts for Burns night

The other day, I was watching Michael Powell's early masterpiece "The Edge of the World." Inspired by the evacuation of St Kilda, it tells the story of a community torn over the way forward - do they stay and make the best of the only life any of them have ever known, or do they cut their losses and leave?

Of course, Scotland has been gearing up to ask, and answer, a similar question for some time now, with a final agreement reached last year on a referendum for 2014 on whether it should remain part of the United Kingdom. As in Powell's film, there are voices on both sides of the argument, but it is a fairly fundamental question that faces the Scots - stick with the UK, or go it alone; reset the clocks to pre 1707 and forge a new path.

I've always been fairly persuaded that the SNP would lose that vote.  But now we have to factor in something else. Europe.

The prospect on a referendum on the UK's future in the EU is a potential disruptor for the unionist cause.  If the majority of the UK votes to leave the EU, but there isn't a majority in Scotland, then Scotland would presumably be taken out of the EU along with everyone else, but against the wishes of its population.  Scots might presumably look over the border between now and 2014 and wonder what the English are thinking.  The unionists have been saying that a vote for independence would be to introduce uncertainty over Scotland's future, particularly with regard to automatic continued membership of the EU. This is a fairly convincing argument.  However, if we're now saying that the only way to guarantee continued Scottish presence within the EU (even if there has to be a hiatus while they apply for membership) is a vote FOR independence then the rules of the game have changed slightly.  All of this presupposing of course that the Scots are more pro-EU in the first place.

Since devolution a lot of genies have escaped from a lot of bottles, and now that's happening on both sides of the border-that-currently-isn't-a-border. Mr Cameron could be shaping up as the Prime Minister who took Britain out of Europe and presided over the break-up of the UK.  Well, it's certainly a legacy.....

Interesting times.

What If?

Over Christmas, I saw a couple of episodes of 'Allo 'Allo, for the first time in a while.  Although it is obviously bawdy farce, there is a thread running through of making light of a pretty awful situation, the Nazi occupation of France.  One can make a case that half of Britain's issues with Europe at a political level are because we weren't invaded in the twentieth century; there is no folk memory of the tanks rolling across the border, of the mass displacements or refugee crises as the blitzkreig swept through, or of the enemy living amongst us, drinking in our pubs, and consorting with our women.

Of course, one piece of British soil was occupied by the Germans.  Any visitor to the channel islands can see the great concrete fortifications thrown up by the wehrmacht, or the site on Alderney which was home to the only concentration camp in Britain.  The Channel Islands experience ought to give the lie that there is any genuine British particularity; that the experience of being occupied would have been any different for the British subject than it was for the millions of Dutch, Belgians and French that actually had to live with the reality of foreign subjugation.  Yet the idea of what Britain would have been like if the Nazis had been successful in mounting an invasion is a subject that has provided fertile territory for film makers over the years, for a variety of reasons.

1) Film as propaganda.

At the height of the second world war, Alberto Cavalcanti made a film of a specially commissioned Graham Greene script - Went the Day Well?  WTDW is a shocking little film, which is quite nasty in many ways.  It tells the story of a German army unit disguised as Royal Engineers, on a mission to disrupt the British radar network on the South Downs, and their interactions with the villagers of Bramley End from arrival, through detection, to the final battle with the regular army.  Of course, being propaganda, I don't think I'm giving away to much of a spoiler to say that the German invaders are defeated, but WTDW does not make it easy, or say that there is anything inevitable about such an outcome.

The film deals with all the obvious points that you would expect the British authorities to want to hammer home to their population: careless talk, reporting anything that looks suspicious, etc, but then goes beyond that.  It raises the existence of fifth columnists in unlikely places, and throughout the film is perfectly clear about the sort of sacrifices which the ordinary citizen may be required to make - from the postmistress killing a German in her kitchen before being killed by another soldier in her turn, to the scene at the manor house where the village's very own version of Linda Snell saves the evacuees by calmly picking up the handgrenade which has landed in their bedroom and walking out onto the landing with it, no one has an easy time.  There's even an eight year old boy who manages to get shot while trying to escape.  WTDW does not pull its punches, and is in many ways a remarkable film - even if some of the acting is a bit dodgy (but full marks to Elizabeth Allen and the young Thora Hird!)

2) Film as escapist fantasy.

By the 1970s, most of the key events of WW2 had been filmed, with varying degrees of success, but the budgets and demand existed for a succession of thrillers, which began to deviate further and further from actual events.  Fitting into this canon are films like The Eye of the Needle, starring Donald Sutherland, and of course The Eagle Has Landed.

Based on the novel by Jack Higgins, TEHL uses the story of a Luftwaffe paratroop unit trying to assassinate Churchill during a visit to Norfolk as the backdrop for what is basically sunday afternoon popcorn fodder.  However, it does, consciously or otherwise, hark back to WTDW in many ways, including the difficulty of villagers trying to communicate their plight with the outside world, and the varying levels of competence displayed by their putative rescuers.  Like the earlier film, TEHL relies for its plot development on the existence of traitors within the local community (In this case Donald Sutherland and Jean Marsh), who are clearly outnumbered by "decent"British types who eventually see them off.  As with the wartime propaganda films, there is never any real doubt about the final outcome.

3. Film as historical counter-factual.

This is what we might call the Virtual History approach, and the exemplar is the most difficult of all the films in the German Invasion genre, Brownlow and Mollo's It Happened Here.  IHH sets out to provide a documentary style investigation of what it would have been like if a German invasion of the UK had been successful, and followed up with prolonged German occupation.  In the 40 odd years since its release IHH has never been very far from controversy; from its use of actual British fascists as extras, through to a clinical style which is totally non-judgmental about what it is portraying.  The result is a deeply unsettling, uncompromising thesis that turns the British national folk myth of WW2 on its head.

For Brownlow and Mollo, the British would have capitulated before the Germans every bit as readily as was the case anywhere else.  Of course, there would have been partisans and resistance, but the great majority would have settled down quietly under some form of crypto-Vichy regime (in this case under the aegis of the paramilitary Immediate Action organisation, which apparently works in support of a British puppet government, headed by Oswald Mosley).  IHH raises important questions about the role of free will and individual choice, as well as the capacity for realistic resistance in the face of totalitarianism.  Indeed, it asks (and answers in exactly the same way) the core question from Powell and Pressburger's Life and Death of Colonel Blimp - how far should people be prepared to go to fight fascism, given that the alternative to winning is no alternative at all? 

The problem for IHH is that it doesn't supply any easy answers, or offer much in the way of hope. Yes, the film ends with news coming over the wireless of a series of landings by the United States Army in the West Country (a sort of alter-D-Day), but this doesn't kick off delirious national celebrations so much as an orgy of score-settling on the part of the partisans, machine gunning British SS members and anyone that can be loosely defined as a collaborator in woodland clearings and generally setting the scene for a new dictatorship of the left, qua eastern Europe.

All of the films use the national myth of British exceptionalism for their own purposes - whether to stiffen national resolve in the face of external threat, or to provide a cheerful way of spending 2 hours in a cinema in the case of TEHL.  What makes IHH so unsettling is that it attempts to question the veracity of the stories that we tell about ourselves as a nation, and show that we are simply just another part of a wider humanity. 

In this analysis, there is nothing special about Britain or the British, except the luck of having 30 miles of water between us and a succession of European tyrants.

How We See Ourselves

I was going to write about Hampton Gay today, but the Oxfordshire mists have descended and made photography impossible - and it really needs photographs.  So, instead, it's film matinee time.

I wrote last year about Powell and Pressburger's lyrical hymn to England, A Canterbury Tale.  Although I think overall ACT edges it as a film, Englishness was a theme they returned to in colour in The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp.

Starring P&P regular Roger Livesey in the title role, the film conducts a microscopic dissection of what it means to be English in the age of total war; by following the life of Clive Candy from dashing war hero just back from South Africa, through the Kaiser's Berlin and the Western Front to the period after Dunkirk when, as a general, his carefully planned military exercise is finished before it has properly begun by the actions of a young army officer who refuses to play by his rules.

Candy is everything that the British capacity for self-mythmaking would have the ideal army officer be - chivalrous, brave, kind to defenceless women, honourable.  P&P's point in the film is that ultimately this is not enought to beat forces driven by evil ideology - a theme returned to slightly less successfully in Brownlow and Mollo's "It Happened Here" ("the terrible thing about fascism is that you have to use fascist methods to defeat it.")

The portrayal of Blimp is sympathetic, but underscored with the thesis that his time has passed and that a new approach is required to secure Britain's safety.  This was not an opinion that went down well with Churchill, who tired to have the film banned as unpatriotic, but it is one that they advance very powerfully. The core argument is essentially that much of what Britain/England values about itself will have to be sacrificed to ensure that any of it survives at all.  In one of the most poignant scenes, when Candy realises that his frontline military career is over, it is explained to him by his friends that this is a new kind of war, it's not a rugby match, and there will be no peace with honour for the loser - just a descent into darkness.  Therefore, given that losing is not an option, you can't choose how you want to fight.

Although these days P&P are rightly lauded for their cinematography and direction, one of their bravest strokes in this film is the writing of a sympathetic German character as second lead, played brilliantly by Anton Walbrook.  That even in the depths of the Second World War they were able to put a German army officer centre stage says a great deal for both their readiness to take risks, and their absolute humanity. 

This is a film that will make your hair stand up on the back of your neck on several occasions, but never more so than when Walbrook's character, making his case for political asylum in a 1939 London police station, relates the story of how his children became Nazis, and howm therefore, with the death of his English wife, his life has essentially come to an end.

The female lead is Deborah Kerr, who plays no fewer than three parts spanning 45 years - Theo's wife, Candy's wife, and Candy's ATS driver.  She carries a lot of the weight of the film and makes it look effortless. 

Of course, being Powell and Pressburger, there has to be at least one scene of jawdropping technical achievement, but this one provides two.  The real film technicians get very excited about the duelling scene (again, typical of P&P, you never actually see the duel) where the camera pans down over a snowy Berlin and in through the gymnasium skylight in a single take, but that's not the high point.

For something utterly dislocating the film takes the viewer into a First World War POW camp.  But one in England, full of German officers.  Candy goes to visit his German friend and finds the officers sitting by the side of lake listening to a concert.  During the interval he picks his way through the prisoners and catches sight of his old friend just as the music starts up again.  Walbrook looks straight through him before turning away, kicking off a beautiful shot of groups of Germans turning in differenct directions to face the music to the opening bars of Fingal's Cave.  It's powerful, magical, heartbreaking, and utterly captivating.

The film was mauled by unsympathetic postwar editing, but is generally now shown essentially as Michael Powell intended.  It's long, but there are fewer more genuinely pleasurable ways to spend a Sunday afternoon than to watch it.  As a portrayal of friendship it's unmatched, as an examination of national values, and whether these should be set in stone, or adapted to changing realities, it stands alone.

Notes on A Canterbury Tale

Given that it's the weekend, and a Sunday afternoon no less, I thought it would be worth writing up a matinee film...

Last week I looked at the Powell and Pressburger masterpiece "I Know Where I'm Going!" - I've had a couple of requests to give "Peeping Tom" the treatment, but today I'd rather re-examine their earlier wartime film "A Canterbury Tale."

ACT is in many ways a troubling film - it's clearly a lyrical hymn to England and a certain type of Englishness, but at the same time there is a definite undercurrent which, whilst not quite sinister, is somehow not quite as innocent as it might look either.

The plot is on the face of it quite slight, 3 modern day pilgrims waylaid on their way to Canterbury and forced to spend some time in the fictional town of Chillingbourne.  While there, Alison, a land girl, has an encounter with the Glue Man, a local figure notorious for pouring glue into the hair of village girls.  The rest of the film follows their efforts to unmask the culprit, before they head to Canterbury to complete their pilgrimage in different ways - either to receive a blessing, or, in the case of the Glue Man, to do penance.

It is the direction and cinematography of the film, as so often with P&P, that is the real glory, however.  The opening, where a swooping hawk is transformed into a diving Spitfire somewhere over the Kentish weald is rightly famous, but it is outclassed completely shortly before the end with a wonderful sequence where Alison walks through the bombed out streets of Canterbury - one of the great P&P moments.  There is a propaganda function to the film no doubt, of the gentler "Britain can take it" type rather than the more full on how-to-kill-a-German-invader that you might see in for example Cavalcanti's "Went the Day Well," but there's also something else; something far more interesting.

A Canterbury Tale is a celluloid record of an England that has utterly vanished.  The early scenes around the village, in the timber yard, the wheelwright's shop, or up on the weald, are straight out of Stanley Baldwin's idealised England, short only of the plough team coming over the hill.  In many ways, this part of the film unconsciously presages Ronald Blythe's much later literary work "Akenfield," capturing a record of a community unchanged for centuries being turned upside down by the rapid pace of technological change (in this case the arrival of Bren gun carriers and the United States Army in their quiet corner of a near mythic Albion).

Of course, it was never quite like that, but watching ACT it is difficult not to believe that well within living memory we were closer to John of Gaunt's demi-Eden than we are now.   I defy you to watch the mock battle between the gangs of local children without feeling an immense sadness and nostalgia for something that we've never known, and which probably never was.  Perhaps that's what gets to the heart of what's unsettling about ACT - it holds up a mirror to the English sense of self, to the hopes and fears of a nation at war, and yet is still relevant to the current generation of English men and women.  I  shows our country as we would like to imagine it, whilst pointing out the flaws with that dream.  At the same time, it holds out a tremendous sense of hope, of optimism, and the feeling that miracles really can happen to deserving people (and the undeserving).

A final word on the acting performances - all are competent (and the future Mrs Richard Attenborough is particularly luminous as Alison), but I want to say something very particular about Sergeant John Sweet, an amateur actor loaned fron the US Army.  Given that his entire acting career essentially was this film, he puts in a controlled performance well beyond what ought to be expected of someone of his experience, and he just doesn't get the credit that he should in my view.  Quite a talent there, that was never really followed up.

If this was just a hymn to P&P, I could wax lyrical about how they got around the fact that Pressburger (as an enemy alien), was refused permission to travel to Canterbury, leading to the construction of a replica of the cathedral interior at Denham studios just to get round the problem.  And about how that bleends seemlessly with genuine shots so that you would never have noticed the join if you hadn't been told.

But it's more than a hymn to P&P, it's a hymn to England.

Summer in Stanley

In the post on I Know Where I'm Going, I described it as portraying an utterly vanished way of life. That's not quite true - if you want to really get back to the England of the past, then you could always try the Falklands. You would also be visiting the Falklands of the 21st century, which is somewhere you really shouldn't miss....



One of the benefits of spending a bit of time in the navy is the opportunity to see a few places that are further off the beaten track than many people get to go, and not having to pay for it! I'd always wanted to get down to these remote islands at the bottom of the world, and when I finally got there they more than lived up to expectations.



In many ways, it's more like the Western Isles than the Western Isles are - similar latitude, geology, weather (and in many ways people); but with a distinctive history and character like nowhere else on earth.

We might as well get the war out of the way early on. You ought to visit the battlefields, particularly Tunbledown, to get an idea of the conditions and terrain of that bleak little conflict in 1982 in which so many on both sides died. There's a good little museum in Stanley, with some heartbreaking artefacts from the conflict, including notes passed from Argentinean conscripts to the curfewed islanders asking for food.



But there's much more to the islands than a war that occupied only a few months in one year. Penguins, obviously, which give their name to the excellent local newspaper, the Penguin News, as well as a large number of highly picturesque shipwrecks in the harbour.



We’ll gloss over the massive military complex at Mount Pleasant, because, except for landing there, you won’t be allowed to spend much time at it.  The drive down the road to Stanley is pretty crazy – built on a causeway and unmade, it winds through the boulder strewn countryside down to the coast and is about the only place in the islands where you’ll get your Land Rover out of second gear.  After passing Sapper Hill, you round a bend and the little capital is laid out before you. 



Stanley is an extraordinary place, with a row of terraced houses that wouldn’t look out of place in Coronation Street, and the most southerly Anglican cathedral in the world, complete with whalebone arch.  As there’s a bit of a dearth of natural roofing materials, the north west England look is slightly tempered by the fact that almost every building sports a roof of brightly painted corrugated iron.



The post-war development has seen a suburb growing up towards the racecourse, with flatpack houses shipped down from Scandinavia, lending a slightly surreal touch to the landscape.



Then there are the pubs.  It’s possible to go on a decent crawl around Stanley, from the Upland Goose to the Globe via points in between, finishing up at the Trough nightclub (which was BYO when I went!).  The house band, the Fighting Pigs, weren’t half bad either….

But it’s not all about the “urban” areas.  Outside Stanley, in camp, you’ve got fine upland scenery, scattered settlements, sheep, and some of the best beaches you’ll ever see (Calgary Bay has got nothing on this). The weather is, er, changeable – you can go from sunbathing to putting on the fifth layer in the course of the afternoon, but once you’re down there, you wouldn’t want to be anywhere else.  I’d go back tomorrow.



So, the Falklands – it’ll take you 24 hours to get there, but they’re worth the effort.

The Last of Scotland...

“I reached the point of thinking there were no more masterpieces to discover, until I saw I Know Where I’m Going!” – Martin Scorsese

A couple of years ago, I went up to Mull for a holiday – I say holiday but it involved 16 of us in a rented house and culminated in two nights of carnage at the Argyllshire Gathering and Northern Meeting…

Although Mull is worth a visit in its own right, it held a special attraction for me as the location of my favourite film – I Know Where I’m Going!

Mention British film to the average man in the street and you’ll get, depending on your respondent, reference to the “kitchen sink” films of Lindsay Anderson, all grim back streets and domestic violence; the Carry On school of tired jokes and more tired actors; or The Full Monty.  Occasionally, you’ll strike gold – and someone will mention Powell and Pressburger, Britain’s answer to, well, nobody really.  Nothing in Hollywood has ever touched them for inventiveness, storytelling, or the sheer artistry of filmmaking.

Reaching a critical peak towards the end of World War Two with The Life & Death of Colonel Blimp and A Matter of Life and Death, they also found time to knock out more routine propaganda fare like The Way Ahead.  But it was I Know Where I’m Going!, made as a black and white quickie while they awaited the colour film stock to produce Life and Death, that deserves to stand as their masterpiece.

The plot is slight enough – Joan Hunter (Wendy Hiller), is a young woman determined to get on in life, travelling to the remote island of Kiloran to marry rich industrialist Sir Robert Bellinger at the end of the war.  Bellinger is at least twice her age, but he can give her the money and status this middle class daughter of a bank manager desires more than anything else.  Stormbound on Mull, she falls under the spell of Torquil MacNeil (Roger Livesey, possibly the only credible romantic lead in the history of the world to be called Torquil), and is forced to confront what it is that she really wants from life.

Roger Livesey was something of a mainstay of P&P’s films, both as a supporting actor and lead (most notably as the title character in Colonel Blimp), but he was never better in his career than as the cash strapped laird, on leave from Navy, and trying to get home through the storm to his island. Wendy Hiller is a little more grating at first, but soon becomes utterly believable as a spoilt young woman slowly coming to life more than she ever imagined possible.

As usual with P&P, an entire thesis could be written on their use of inventive camera work to convey the dream like world of the Scottish Highlands – from the steam emerging from the stationmaster’s hat at Buchanan Street station, through to the bizarre sequence where she is married off to the factory hooter at Consolidated Chemical Industries by her father who is dressed as a vicar.

But the real power and artifice is in what they don’t show – Bellinger is never anything more than a voice at the end of a telephone, whilst one of the most spell-binding moments comes with Miss Crozier’s description of the Argyllshire Gathering; a lesser filmmaker would have put in some trite sub-Brigadoon ceilidh scene, whereas here it’s all in the description and the way first Crozier’s eyes come alive as she describes the clothes and music, and then Joan’s expression changes in reaction. 

Before we leave the subject of eyes, in a film which trades largely on reaction and heightened emotion, one of the most powerful and unsettling pieces of British cinema is surely the end of Livesey’s recitation of Nut Brown Maiden halfway up a step ladder at the Campbell’s diamond wedding(!), where he fixes Hiller with an absolute gaze of steel and says “You’re the Maid for Me.”

The real star of the film is of course Scotland, and P&P write an absolute hymn to a now vanished way of life.  The cinematography is superlative (without even going into the fact that Livesay never left Buckinghamshire throughout the shoot  - contractual obligations meant he couldn’t travel to Scotland so all his outdoor scenes feature body doubles interspersed with close ups of his face!).  From the first meeting with Torquil’s old childhood friend Catriona, silhouetted against the dusk skyline with her baying hounds, to the famous scene at the Corryvreckan whirlpool, this film takes you to the highlands in the 1940s and does its best to leave you there.  Although I’ve always resisted the temptation, it would be perfectly possible to get to the end and just start watching it all over again.

As Raymond Chandler said,

“I’ve never seen a picture which smelled of the wind and rain in quite this way, nor one which so beautifully exploited the kind of scenery people actually live with, rather than the kind which is commercialised as a show place.”