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.

Happiness

There's always one book I never go anywhere without - it's not that it's a talisman as such, more that I don't know of a time when I haven't felt better for having it to hand.  It's rather unlikely, being, as it's own author describes it, nothing more than the "annals of an ancient actor."

I first read David Niven's "The Moon's a Balloon" when in the sixth form.  One of the advantages of spending half your life on a train to or from school, as well as being able to read reasonably quickly, was that you certainly got through a lot of lengthy books.  The Crowthers of Bankdam, which would now probably be regarded, if it is remembered at all, as a deeply unfashionable sub-Galsworthy saga, is one that has stayed wih me particularly clearly: the politics of a nineteenth century mill-owning dynasty in northern England is not perhaps obvious reading matter for your average seventeen year old public school boy, but I was never one for convention....

Anyway, back to Mr Niven.  I remember being struck at the time by how much he managed to pack into his life - representing Britain in yachting; war hero; oscar winner; womaniser; Errol Flynn's flatmate.  If you're at an impressionable age, a chap can dream about his future as all of those (except the last one, obviously).  I think I read it in about half a day, and was left slightly bereft at the end of it.  I think the key thing is that Niv was such a good story teller.  I wasn't in the least upset when reading Graham Lord's later biography to discover that some of the anecdotes were "embroidered," there was always enough of the truth in them to mean that you could forgive the exaggerations as just helping to make the smile on your face that bit broader.

I'm not going to give you a great stream of examples, except to say that the story of how he eventually broke into Hollywood, aboard a replica of HMS Bounty into which he had been decanted off the coast of California after a particularly boozy night aboard HMS Norfolk, sets the tone for the whole book - imbued as it is with an utterly infectious joie de vivre.

Since that first reading 13 years ago my battered copy of this great little book has made it's way through my training at Dartmouth; been on deployment to the Red Sea, the Falklands, Antarctica, and, admittedly without me, travelled to the Gambia from Oxford in the back of an ambulance.....  Quite simply, it's a wonderful thing to have around, and there's not much excuse for not reading it as soon as you get a minute.

It will make your life a little bit better.