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.
Showing posts with label WW2. Show all posts
Showing posts with label WW2. Show all posts
Sunday, 27 January 2013
Sunday, 5 February 2012
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.
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.
Sunday, 29 January 2012
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.
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.
Wednesday, 25 January 2012
Happy Burns Night!
"Titfield. One can't open the newspaper these days without reading about Titfield."
With these exasperated words the Minister of Transport in Ealing Studios' "The Titfield Thunderbolt" wearily resigns himself to the fact that Something Must Be Done. It isn't just going to go away. At the moment, the same can be said about Scotland - and the fact that it's everywhere in the papers at the moment as one side seeks to cut loose, whilst the other searches for elusive positive arguments for why we'd be better off sticking together....
So anyway, given that it's Burns Night, its time to sit down and consider the story of the struggle between a cheery streetwise ginger Scotsman, and his ancestrally Scottish putative overlord up from London with the English accent - yes, Ronald Neame's film of James Kennaway's "Tunes of Glory."
TOG fits perfectly in with the first rule of British cinema - that if it's set in Scotland and was made before about 1965 it's going to be good (the exception, naturally, being Jack Hawkins and David Niven in "Bonnie Prince Charlie"). It tells a complex story of power and identity, that is fairly ambivalent in its presentation of the two protagonists Jock Sinclair (Alec Guinness) and Basil Barrow (John Mills). Indeed, by the end it's difficult to know who you're supposed to be rooting for.
The plot is straightforward enough: Jock, an officer commissioned from the ranks after Alamein, is acting colonel of his highland battalion, garrisoned in a peacetime barracks similar to Stirling Castle. Basil is the 5th generation regimental officer sent up from instructing at Sandhurst to take command over Jock's head.
The antagonism between the two characters provides a window on the eternal questions of Scottish identity, and what is proper behaviour. Jock has his officers dancing reels with gay abandon, hollering and raising their hands above their heads; Basil is convinced that his officers should be dancing "correctly," and orders them to attend remedial dancing classes at dawn with the pipe major. As an aside, as someone who has been given some very stern looks at the Northern Meeting I can confirm these attitudes persist on the 21st century Scottish dancefloor.
Some of it is more subtle - can Basil really be considered Scottish with his English accent, even though he is undoubtedly from north of the border and from an old Scots family? Are the attitudes of his officers to him mirrored in the scorn of the pipe major for the clearly English Regimental Sergeant Major, Riddick? And can any self respecting Scotsman take seriously as his commanding officer a man who will turn down whisky in favour of lemonade?
The officers are an odd bunch. Gordon Jackson is ever-reliable as the adjutant, but then there are characters like Alec Rattray, clearly a bruiser after Jock's heart, and a marvellously malevolent turn from Dennis Price as Major Scott - a man who manages to alienate everyone around him by the end of the film, stealing Jock's lover and completely undermining Basil whilst giving every outward impression of being on his side.
Shot in technicolor, the film is these days a distinctly period piece, but it has some marvellous scenes - particularly of the reeling - and Guinness was never better than in this film: indeed, he saw it as the performance he was most proud of in his career.
Ultimately, it's a study of leadership, and the shifting currents of loyalty within a tightly sealed world. It gets under the skin of the immediate postwar army in a way that perhaps only George Macdonald Fraser's McAuslan stories (interestingly also dealing with a Highland battalion) have matched. It deserves a new audience.
With these exasperated words the Minister of Transport in Ealing Studios' "The Titfield Thunderbolt" wearily resigns himself to the fact that Something Must Be Done. It isn't just going to go away. At the moment, the same can be said about Scotland - and the fact that it's everywhere in the papers at the moment as one side seeks to cut loose, whilst the other searches for elusive positive arguments for why we'd be better off sticking together....
So anyway, given that it's Burns Night, its time to sit down and consider the story of the struggle between a cheery streetwise ginger Scotsman, and his ancestrally Scottish putative overlord up from London with the English accent - yes, Ronald Neame's film of James Kennaway's "Tunes of Glory."
TOG fits perfectly in with the first rule of British cinema - that if it's set in Scotland and was made before about 1965 it's going to be good (the exception, naturally, being Jack Hawkins and David Niven in "Bonnie Prince Charlie"). It tells a complex story of power and identity, that is fairly ambivalent in its presentation of the two protagonists Jock Sinclair (Alec Guinness) and Basil Barrow (John Mills). Indeed, by the end it's difficult to know who you're supposed to be rooting for.
The plot is straightforward enough: Jock, an officer commissioned from the ranks after Alamein, is acting colonel of his highland battalion, garrisoned in a peacetime barracks similar to Stirling Castle. Basil is the 5th generation regimental officer sent up from instructing at Sandhurst to take command over Jock's head.
The antagonism between the two characters provides a window on the eternal questions of Scottish identity, and what is proper behaviour. Jock has his officers dancing reels with gay abandon, hollering and raising their hands above their heads; Basil is convinced that his officers should be dancing "correctly," and orders them to attend remedial dancing classes at dawn with the pipe major. As an aside, as someone who has been given some very stern looks at the Northern Meeting I can confirm these attitudes persist on the 21st century Scottish dancefloor.
Some of it is more subtle - can Basil really be considered Scottish with his English accent, even though he is undoubtedly from north of the border and from an old Scots family? Are the attitudes of his officers to him mirrored in the scorn of the pipe major for the clearly English Regimental Sergeant Major, Riddick? And can any self respecting Scotsman take seriously as his commanding officer a man who will turn down whisky in favour of lemonade?
The officers are an odd bunch. Gordon Jackson is ever-reliable as the adjutant, but then there are characters like Alec Rattray, clearly a bruiser after Jock's heart, and a marvellously malevolent turn from Dennis Price as Major Scott - a man who manages to alienate everyone around him by the end of the film, stealing Jock's lover and completely undermining Basil whilst giving every outward impression of being on his side.
Shot in technicolor, the film is these days a distinctly period piece, but it has some marvellous scenes - particularly of the reeling - and Guinness was never better than in this film: indeed, he saw it as the performance he was most proud of in his career.
Ultimately, it's a study of leadership, and the shifting currents of loyalty within a tightly sealed world. It gets under the skin of the immediate postwar army in a way that perhaps only George Macdonald Fraser's McAuslan stories (interestingly also dealing with a Highland battalion) have matched. It deserves a new audience.
Tuesday, 20 December 2011
London
London. Sooner or later we were always going to have to talk about London, that teeming agglomeration of places you wouldn’t want to live that casts its baleful eye over the rest of the country and looks for fresh prey. It started with Middlesex, most beautiful and unassuming of counties, despoiled beyond recognition – what price Betjeman’s “rural Rayner’s Lane” now? – and then began work on the people and places further afield, sucking talent and opportunity away from the rest of the country in its insatiable lust for commerce.
Of course, there are nicer parts, Wimbledon is generally lovely; Soho has a mystique all its own; but for every place you’d want to live there’re two where you’d only exist. Most of west London, for example, for which the best that can be said is that the house prices aren’t as bad as Fulham; or Angel/Islington, that weird combination of Guardian reading public school luvvies and Telegraph reading public school lawyers and city types – not that you could put a cigarette paper between them. Or Stoke Newington: about as “edgy” these days as Bloomsbury was in the 1890s.
London has always been a graveyard of hopes and dreams, but this has occasionally led to great art – as poverty, in a clichéd fashion, sometimes does. Patrick Hamilton has been experiencing something of a renaissance lately, his chronicles of lower middle and upper working class London life in the interwar period (most notably “Hangover Square” or the trilogy “Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky”) perhaps chiming with the uncertainties and economic hardships of our own time.
Hamilton, of course, was an uneven writer – his star burned brightly enough to begin with, and reached its zenith with “The Slaves of Solitude,” before beginning the long slide into mediocrity with the Gorse trilogy (the last volume of which, “Unknown Assailant,” is probably only worth reading for the sake of completeness; the reader is long past caring about the story or the character).
Then there’s Julian Maclaren-Ross. You’ve probably come across Maclaren-Ross, even if you haven’t realised it. He was the template for the self destructing idiot writer; a prototype for the sort of chap (other than himself) that Cyril Connolly had in mind when he wrote “Enemies of Promise.” He was also the model for X Trapnel, far and away the most intriguing character in Powell’s “A Dance to the Music of Time.” If you haven’t read this sequence, then go and do so immediately – for Trapnel’s appearances you want volumes 10, 11, and 12, respectively – or, for the York Notes crib, just watch Sean Baker’s brilliant portrayal in the Channel 4 adaptation from the late 1990s.
JM-R was, in truth, a bit of an oddball. A somewhat peripatetic childhood in France, and broken schooling, eventually saw him washed up in pre-war London. He didn’t really trouble the literary world over much until towards the end of the Second World War when, managing to extricate himself from the army, who were probably as glad to see the back of him as he was then, he became a fixture of the Soho scene. Reading his excellent “Memoirs of the Forties” is like having a front row seat in a parade of mid 20th century British greats. Waugh is there, as is Betjeman (both of whom were admirers of his prose), Orwell, Tambimuttu, Connolly and Horizon magazine….
Maclaren-Ross completed only one “literary” novel (as opposed to some dreadful penny shockers), 1947’s “Of Love and Hunger,” but this alone would be enough to see him occupying a creditable place in the English novelist’s second XI. I’ll be honest that it probably doesn’t sound totally promising when I say it’s about a door to door vacuum cleaner salesman in 1930s Brighton, but it speaks eloquently of lost love, drudgery, hardship and heartbreak. Much as with Waugh, the bad end unhappily and the good even more so, but it is crystal clear prose that you can lose yourself in. Possibly the only comparable prose stylist working today is Edward St Aubyn.
The chief glory of the JM-R oeuvre, however, is the short stories. You can still pick up first and second editions reasonably cheaply, but they have been collected into a couple of volumes that are easily available on Amazon, notably “Selected Stories” and “Bitten by the Tarantula.” These demonstrate Maclaren-Ross’ pitch perfect ear for dialogue, particularly the army stories, which limn with devastating accuracy the predicament of the over intellectual under achiever conscripted into the machine of total war. Then there’re the peppery ex colonials, the young men on the make, and a cast of grotesque suburbanites and central London bohemians. He was on to a good thing and, during the war when there was a hunger for reading material of all types, literary magazines were booming in the publishing mainstream, and the short story was enjoying its last hurrah as an artistic form, he made absolute hay.
Maclaren-Ross was however afflicted with Sohoitis in a big way – Tambimuttu’s term for spending all one’s time in the pubs of Soho and never getting any work done. He spent periods of time sleeping rough, suffered psychotic episodes (in the grip of one of which he stalked and plotted to murder George Orwell’s widow Sonia), and died much too young in the 1960s. Paul Willetts did an excellent job of bringing him back to life in his 2005 biography “Fear and Loathing in Fitzrovia,” which is heartily recommended.
I thought about Maclaren-Ross as I sat in the bar of the Fitzroy Tavern the other week. Sam Smiths have managed to keep the place looking appropriately unmodernised, and it was easy to imagine the man in the dark glasses and the teddy bear overcoat, wielding his swordstick and knocking back the drinks as he kept the hordes of hangers on entertained before going home to get on the Benzedrine and write until dawn in his miniscule handwriting. Essays, reviews, short stories, parodies, begging letters to the Royal Literary Fund…. For a short time London came alive again, and its depressing descent into plastic consumerism was arrested. The provinces have had their literary hymners too, Priestley say, or Francis Brett-Young. But it is perhaps appropriate that the chronicler of 20th century London should have been so heroically underachieving.
Julian Maclaren-Ross, then, in the words of Paul Willetts “a mediocre caretaker of his own immense talent.”
Sunday, 27 November 2011
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.
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.
Monday, 21 November 2011
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.”
Sunday, 20 November 2011
BAS Port Lockroy - forgotten gems
Given the short time this blog has been running, I'm going to apologise for cheating slightly already and going out of England (and indeed the shires) for this post. Without wanting to get into the rights, wrongs or do-you-mind-if-we-dont's of the Antarctic Treaty, this place is technically in the British Antarctic Territory, and so is as British as Kent dammit...
When I was a young naval officer, I was lucky enough to spend six months in HMS ENDURANCE, our ice-breaker, resupply vessel and general White Ensign flier in the Antarctic. While we were down in the ice, we were tasked to resupply the British Antarctic Survey station at Port Lockroy. We were a bit blase about things like that, as we went to almost one station a day at some points (covering a wide variety of nationalities), and one laboratory is very much like another. This one, however, was different - Port Lockroy is a museum.
Originally built as part of the Len Deighton style Operation_Tabarin, it later functioned as a BAS scientific base until the mid 1960s. These days, it's run as a small museum of the way Britain used to do Antarctic science missions.
Inside, the building is a gem, with each room fitted out with 1950s furniture and accessories. The current staff during the Antarctic summer months numbers just three, all of whom live in a single bunkroom at the back of the building, maintaining the fabric of the building, and stamping the passports of the small number of tourists and adventurers who are lucky enough to find themselves knocking on the door.
Although extremely remote, Port Lockroy is now a popular fixture on the itenerary of the growing number of Antarctic tourist vessels, so the staff do have the opportunity to see some friendly faces reasonably regularly. Situated on an island less than the size of a football pitch, with no boat or helicopter, it can get quite lonely when there are no tourists about.
I'm not sure what I think about Antarctic tourism if I'm totally honest. Certainly, were it not for the traffic down there it is likely that Port Lockroy would have gone the way of Port Foster at Deception Island and fallen into ruin, but at the same time Antarctica is still pretty untouched, and the numbers visiting have gone through the roof in the past decade. There is a place for responsible tourism, but not if it harms the delicate balance of the ecosystem. The growth of adventure tourism, and the unsuitability of some of the vessels used, particularly at the luxury travel end of the market, means that it is probably only a matter of time before there is a serious incident.
Actually, Port Lockroy has provided BAS with the opportunity to study the effect of human presence on the local residents, because the island is home to a large breeding colony of Gentoo Penguins. Through the simple expedient of placing half of the island off limits to humans (a triumph of self-denial if you are one of the three spending half your year on the aforementioned football pitch), they are able to study what results interaction (or lack of it) has on the wildlife. There are still plenty of penguins to go around for the curious though!
When I was a young naval officer, I was lucky enough to spend six months in HMS ENDURANCE, our ice-breaker, resupply vessel and general White Ensign flier in the Antarctic. While we were down in the ice, we were tasked to resupply the British Antarctic Survey station at Port Lockroy. We were a bit blase about things like that, as we went to almost one station a day at some points (covering a wide variety of nationalities), and one laboratory is very much like another. This one, however, was different - Port Lockroy is a museum.
Originally built as part of the Len Deighton style Operation_Tabarin, it later functioned as a BAS scientific base until the mid 1960s. These days, it's run as a small museum of the way Britain used to do Antarctic science missions.
Inside, the building is a gem, with each room fitted out with 1950s furniture and accessories. The current staff during the Antarctic summer months numbers just three, all of whom live in a single bunkroom at the back of the building, maintaining the fabric of the building, and stamping the passports of the small number of tourists and adventurers who are lucky enough to find themselves knocking on the door.
Although extremely remote, Port Lockroy is now a popular fixture on the itenerary of the growing number of Antarctic tourist vessels, so the staff do have the opportunity to see some friendly faces reasonably regularly. Situated on an island less than the size of a football pitch, with no boat or helicopter, it can get quite lonely when there are no tourists about.
I'm not sure what I think about Antarctic tourism if I'm totally honest. Certainly, were it not for the traffic down there it is likely that Port Lockroy would have gone the way of Port Foster at Deception Island and fallen into ruin, but at the same time Antarctica is still pretty untouched, and the numbers visiting have gone through the roof in the past decade. There is a place for responsible tourism, but not if it harms the delicate balance of the ecosystem. The growth of adventure tourism, and the unsuitability of some of the vessels used, particularly at the luxury travel end of the market, means that it is probably only a matter of time before there is a serious incident.
Actually, Port Lockroy has provided BAS with the opportunity to study the effect of human presence on the local residents, because the island is home to a large breeding colony of Gentoo Penguins. Through the simple expedient of placing half of the island off limits to humans (a triumph of self-denial if you are one of the three spending half your year on the aforementioned football pitch), they are able to study what results interaction (or lack of it) has on the wildlife. There are still plenty of penguins to go around for the curious though!
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