Stricken by primal kitsch

Stricken by primal kitsch

​ I bought a DVD of the 1950 film of 'Dancing Years’, the Ivor Novello musical. This must seem eccentric, my excuse being partly that I was fascinated by Novello’s performance in the British silent films ‘The Rat’ and ‘Triumph of the Rat’. He was magnificent. Also, I read a book about Novello which revealed that not only cynics, but also Novello, referred to the musical as “Prancing Queers”. I was curious to see how someone could go from being the best thing around (‘The Rat’ surely the best British silent film!) to utter junk in such a short time. ‘Dancing Years’ premiered in 1939, only fourteen years after ‘The Rat’. (He had written the original play ‘The Rat’).

​ I occasionally go for an afternoon walk which ends up at a certain pub in Sherwood, down the road for here. One of their ‘furniture books’ is ‘Theatre Review Annual 1951’ (they also have the 1953 volume). I enjoy leafing through these books, redolent of a vanished time (although I know quite a few of the faces). It reveals that his last musical was called “Gay’s the word” – not as a political outcry but because the star is an ageing musical comedy figure called Gay.

​ I am unable to say how I knew that Novello was despicable. It must have been a current idea in the 1960s, when I was a child. Can’t say exactly how it reached me. I think his musicals were still making money in theatres, a favourite for coach excursions to London from less cultured towns. And they were despised. They were completely asexual, they had no trace of African-American rhythm. They were out of date in the 1950s, but very popular, and in the 1960s they just seemed to stand for everything which people disliked about fifties popular culture.
The plot of ‘Years’ involves the year 1910 and a penniless aspirant composer of operettas. He owes the landlady 1000 crowns for six months of unpaid bills. He also has a harmless relationship with her entrancing 15 year old daughter, Grete. A gay throng of officers and operetta chorus girls stay up all night and go for breakfast to a farm amazingly near Vienna. They ask the composer, Rudi, to play for them. Somehow, they start to compete to buy his tunes for their innamoratas, and he auctions his harmless songs. Soon, he has the thousand crowns – mainly paid for by the star of the operetta, Maria, who has also shown up in pursuit of her idle cast. Rapidly, Rudi becomes a hit composer, but this involves him becoming entangled with Maria. Grete has to lose out. Maria’s protector, Reinaldt, also loses out.
There is a love scene between Rudi and Maria which is interrupted by the entry of Reinaldt, a minister (of state), her patron. He wants to collect his dressing-gown from her flat – at this point Rudi realises the true relationship between the Minister and Maria, and breaks off relations with her. This should be an emotional climax, but the mise en scene has so fatally undercut it that we barely react.

Three years later, Grete has trained as a dancer and visits Rudi. She reminds him of a foolish promise which he had made, that he could never marry anyone without asking her first. He goes torough a formal proposal, mere words, for her pleasure and to fulfil his promise. She says no. But Maria has overheard the proposal part of the exchange. She is stricken, and that same day marries Reinaldt.
The love plots are singularly unconvincing. This has to be connected with having a gay writer and a gay leading man. The drama has that thin quality which hides everything deep. We are simply not to regard art as something which expresses feelings that we have. His rejection of involvement is attractive to people with deep anxieties, but also gives a way out for gay men who have no intention of revealing the shape of their wishes but wish to make a kind of art anyway. All the moves are to protect that frail and gleaming surface. Of course, where the depth is successfully excluded, the surface has more freedom to carry out its role of decoration and stylisation.

In the scene which Maria overhears, Price utters the words of a proposal without meaning them, and Dainton listens to them without any intention of accepting them. We are not asked to feel. This is the enchanted and vacuous quality – we are not going to do any work, even emotional work. The two characters are in perfect harmony. They collaborate to drain the scene of meaning. Surely the point of a scene in a drama is usually that the characters disagree, at least at first. That provides the tension. A musical like this one is living in a world where different rules apply.

I had difficulty watching ‘Years’ and it leaves little trace in memory. That is not the same as disliking it. I am not even sure it is kitsch, it is too reliant on music and too light. It is noticeable that it is not funny at any point – unusual for a comedy. I must admit that I enjoyed the music. Also, Patricia Dainton gives a genuinely starry performance as the flaxen-braid-wearing Grete. The leading lady is someone who can sing but not act, and Dennis Price is simply unconvincing as someone moved by love. Clearly he doesn’t want either of the two ladies on offered to him by the script. This is mis-casting; I don’t think Price, thirty-five at the time, ever played an ingenu role successfully, although he was excellent in Caravan (1946) as the villain and in Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949) as a beguiling mass murderer.

​ ​ It seems that art has a fundamental relation to anxiety, and that, without anxiety, art has little to say – certainly not enough to sustain a 90 minute film. If you can’t bear to depict anxiety, you are forbidden to show the release from anxiety. So, when Rudi is faced with the landlady selling his piano, to pay his bill, he does not face the authority figure direct. Instead, her message is transmitted via Grete and the kindly housekeeper, Hatti, two characters who obviously adore Rudi. The anxiety is the plot point, but it is muffled to the point where you barely notice it. So we stay in a wonderfully smooth state of mind which is almost blankness. The feeling is like being in a hotel - you don't care about the dirty glasses because someone else will do the washing-up.
​ There is a depressing 1959 interview by John Osborne where he defines the whole tenor of Fifties popular theatre as dominated by a gay sensibility which trivialises everything and reduces it to star-worship and spectacle. He was an irritating man. The weaknesses of that culture were too pervasive to be simply defined. The situation is more that gay people could work inside a set of conventions (and inhibitions) which belonged to everybody, and which offered a shelter for the morally accursed (sic) as well as for the chronically inhibited and inexpressive. I don't even think all this reflects gay sensibility, it is something bland and collective which gay creators could find a shelter in, while remaining basically frustrated. We are talking about affluence, harmony, and blandness, where any real preoccupations are buried, gay or not.

There is an invisible wall between men and women in this film. This can be taken in three ways. First, it is a musical. The performers are concerned to deliver their songs and dances without errors. These are narcissistic and exacting activities, and they are little concerned with other performers. Secondly, the wall prevents deep feelings, and is functional for a film of this kind, where depth is simply unpleasant. Thirdly, and hypothetically, it could be a gay sensibility. But the desire for emptiness cannot be explained by the presence of wishes which it automatically frustrates.

​ The story has scenes in 1910, 1913, and 1928. This completely fails to mention the Great War, which presumably wiped out most of the young officers we saw in the opening scene. The Austrian Empire collapses, all the politicians become unemployed, but we hear nothing about it. This smooth covering over of the serious events of life sheds light on the unreal attitude towards sex. Escapism covers everything, so it is not simply to be traced back to gay problems with the public stage. Both evasion and kitsch have a much wider scope. For example, Novello also wrote a patriotic musical, ‘Crest of the Wave’. I have not seen this, but evidently patriotism was a big component of kitsch in the first half of the 20th century, and not just for Novello. (I heard a patriotic song taken from it, but it may not be patriotic all the way through.)

​ ​ An article for the London Magazine records that “Another agent of persuasion to keep him in light entertainment was the Management of the Drury Lane Theatre, which did very well out of him. It objected to a section in the initial text of The Dancing Years where the hero is sentenced to death by the Nazis for protecting Jews. Such material was considered unsuitable for light entertainment. In a new version, the hero is reprieved at the last minute and that was soft-pedalled. One wonders whether Novello resented this interference and resented even more his own complicity in it.“ This episode is not in the film at all. The vacuity of the film may not be simply due to Novello. There was a 1979 TV version which does include this scene - a finale in 1939. Rudi helps Austrian Jews to emigrate, and so his music is banned in Austria and Germany. He remains defiant.

Some shots in 'Years' remind us of 'The Sound of Music', 13 years later. I am unaware of how Novello absorbed the cliches of numerous Austrian or German Heimatfilms. The first 20 minutes are evidently a reminiscence of 'The student Prince' (originally a stage play, 'In Old Heidelberg', 1901). The composer theme derives from any number of films about romantic composers, I don't have the details, but the prototype is possibly Mörike's 'Mozart auf der Reise nach Prag'. The cliches may have been the subjects of operettas before the cinema picked them up. "Der junge Komponist Franz Schubert versucht in Wien Fuß zu fassen, doch aller Anfang ist schwer. Seine Freunde, der Maler Moritz von Schwind und der Sänger Franz von Schober, wollen ihn aufheitern und organisieren einen Ausflug mit den drei hübschen Töchtern des "Dreimäderlhaus". Schubert verliebt sich Hals über Kopf in Hannerl, die jüngste der Schwestern, und schreibt ihr ein bezauberndes Liebeslied. Er bittet Schober, es seiner Angebeteten vorzutragen, doch zu seinem Unglück verliebt sich Hannerl in den Sänger und nicht in den Komponist..." This is a summary of a 1958 film about Schubert. I admit that it doesn't qualify as a source for a 1939 musical, it's just an example of where composers fit into sentimental German/ Austrian cinema. Director, Ernst Marischka. There was a 1918 film of the same story, with Conrad Veidt. And a 1931 film called "Schuberts Frühlingstraum". The idea that Heimatfilms are gay is completely unheard-of.
More, if superficial, reading on the Net suggests that Price was at least bisexual – the idea of him being gay is just too simplistic. It remains, though, that he could not play straightforward characters or simple feelings. Or the heroes of musicals.
The theme of a mature composer whom an under-age girl inappropriately falls in love with appears in 'The constant nymph', a novel popular in the 1920s. It was filmed, and Novello appeared in one of the film versions.

The director, Harold French, was interviewed for the ACTU history project. This was 40 years later. French's recollection is "Of course, I couldn’t do it. I had a go. I was very lightweight." This is super accurate. As for Price: “it wasn’t for him.” That is no less accurate. My reading is that this (and "The bad Lord Byron") ended Price's phase as a leading man in films. He was demoted to a comic actor, usually not as the lead comic. It was a crisis in his life. He worked hard, from then on, and to my memory was very precise and effective in whatever he did. I wish to record that I rather liked two of French's films, "The blind goddess" and 'Dangerous Cargo'.