Maurice Elvey, scapegoat?

Maurice Elvey, scapegoat?

“Maurice Elvey was one of the most prolific film directors in British history. He directed nearly 200 films between 1913 and 1957. During the silent film era he directed as many as twenty films per year. He also produced more than fifty films – his own as well as films directed by others."

Elvey (1887-1967) was some sort of old master /wisdom figure at the film school which Sinclair attended circa 1961. In interview, Sinclair recalls with incredulity him announcing ideas which totally failed to impress the film students. So the question arises whether we can identify the whole idiocy of British film history in this one man and his lack of knowledge of how to make films.
My conclusion is that he wasn’t especially bad. I say this because the cinema here in Nottingham put on a set of 3 of the Sherlock Holmes films made in 1918, restored by the BFI. One was “produced” by Elvey, “A scandal in Bohemia”. It wasn’t bad, and it certainly wasn’t worse than the other two. So, we have to be fair to Elvey. He wasn’t a freak. He just wasn’t very talented. And the British cinema had strict genre rules which minimised the role of anyone creative, and didn’t require directors to be original or think for themselves.
I saw another film of his, circa 1932. I can’t remember its name. I thought it was OK. He just wasn’t exceptional. You have to match it up against the cinema of the time, which I have a limited knowledge of – I feel that he was competent, just not worth comparing with the talented directors, of whom there were very few in England, but quite a number in the USA and Germany.
He made his last film in 1957. The film trade union ACT interviewed Elvey in 1963. “And Elkington... we took the little theatre which was in the Adelphi, a very famous little theatre. And, of course, you could hire it then for two pounds a performance, and it was a charming theatre. I was very avant-garde, you see. I was the sort of - what shall I say - the Peter Brook of my period! I produced plays by Chekov, Strindberg, Ibsen and all the... what were then the new dramatists of the day. Inevitably, this brought me into contact with the best sort of minds of the day.” This would be, maybe, 1911? He may have made a first film in 1912, and it was “The murder in the red barn”, an old melodrama.
The counter-view to the general distaste for British cinema up to 1943 or so (or, up to 1965?), is that it has been neglected. There are no studies on individual directors or designers, no fan write-ups. So, the guess was that there were distinctive stylists hidden in the data, hiding in the largely unviewed mass of films. An operation could be carried out by fans to recover the paths of Cinematic Masters. Auteurs would surface into view, like marble statues from beneath the sea. Or the Docks, perhaps. This operation has not been very successful. The truth seems to be that English directors were not very distinctive. In the US, people like King Vidor, Joseph Sternberg, Ernst Lubitsch, Erich von Stroheim, constructed unique, personal, films, recording the way they saw the world. In Britain, this was not the function of directors. The one exception is Hitchcock, as we know. Later, Michael Powell made films in a distinctive way. Another exception, indirectly, is Ivor Novello. He was author and star of two films, The Rat (1925) and The Triumph of the Rat (1926), which are actually great. I saw them because the society for British silent films held its weekends in Nottingham, at one time. He was not a director, but those films must not be shut out of history. (The director was Graham Cutts, Hitchcock’s rival at Gainsborough, who saw Hitchcock out-distance him.) (I have just realised there was a third film in the series, which I have not seen.)
I have a book of interviews with people from the British film industry, edited by Brian MacFarlane (who conducted most of the interviews). He has the actress Rosamund John, who says “He asked Maurice Elvey to finish the film. I had never heard of Elvey but everyone in the studio said, “Oh no, that terrible man!” He was a very pompous little man who had made a lot of films before the war.” Again, Q “how did you find Maurice Elvey?”, she says: “I was appalled: he had no idea of what to do or how to do it. The electricians would be shouting, “Print number three, Maurice!”. He was unbelievable.” This was in 1943. Other interviews (out of 186 in all) mention Elvey, not saying the same thing. I couldn’t work out how someone could work so much, and had been in the business for 30 years in 1943, and not have a clue how films are made. I think the answer is in everyone taking the easiest route, so that the scripts were totally unambitious and the components after that were so predictable that the crew didn’t need the director very much. In the Holmes film, a lot of the plot is conveyed through intertitles. So, it reproduces Conan Doyle’s words. And it has scarcely become cinema. It is still words. Equally, the star is Eille Wood, impersonating Holmes and putting on a star performance. Between Norwood and Doyle, there is a limited role for Elvey. Everyone knew what Homes looked like, based on the illustrations in the Strand Magazine publication and how the stories had to go. The films which Stoll made, a series of forty-seven, had to observe the formula – a classic one but a set-piece all the same. You can’t be an auteur in a context like that. (Wiki says Elvey directed all 15 of the 1921 series of Holmes adaptations. The second series was directed by George Ridgwell.)

Britain before the later 1940s did not produce megalomaniac and failed auteurs, rather it did not produce auteurs at all. Elvey is not a metaphor for collective failure, rather he was a figure without artistic identity in a business which was designed to run without artistic identity. Cinema did not create its own forms, rather it reproduced much-loved patterns from literature and theatre, without rethinking them significantly.

Postscript. I have just seen that Elvey directed a version of '"At the villa Rose", 1920, from the novel by AEW Mason. I have seen one 'Villa Rose'.... if this was the 1920 one, it is actually a good film, for the time. Another piece of evidence. with Manora Thew and Langhorn Burton, I understand.