My new pamphlet, ‘B- Movie: Serial of Seven Stars’ is now available from Equipage. It follows up my previous Equipage pamphlet, 'Alien Skies', from 1992.
‘B- Movie: Serial of Seven Stars’ is an attempt to recapture the feverish and irrational mythology of the B-movie, initially based on the classic Blood from the Mummy’s Tomb and on the neglected pre-1921 serials which realised the “roulette principle” that coherence reduces the shock value of any plot event. It reacts to that key line from Cobra Woman: it’s a wild dream of her decaying brain. Less credibly, it enters the world of manga and kaiju eiga to describe a monster, liberated from beneath Arctic ice, developing a craving for human males as impossibly cute and moe subjects of reptile fetishism, in a lunatic exaggeration of bishonen style, in a fervour of idealism and romantic craving. More broadly, a cast of methodologically suspect occult scholars pursue seven figurines, the polychrome minstrels, said to contain matter which had leaked through from another universe, detected by subtle and eerie distortions of geology and building fabrics. This quest re-enacts the Storage Wars series, in which junk dealers bid on sealed, abandoned storage lockers. A role is also played by the author’s autobiographical experiences of interviewing ruined horror directors for the Journal of Pulp Critique.”
The project aims to restore the lost innocence of film serials circa 1915.
**
Notes
‘Lud’s Gateway’ began as a poem for Iain Sinclair's birthday, based on themes from ‘Suicide Bridge’, and a tribute to Storage Wars. It was published in the Sinclair tribute volume. Later, I added twelve more poems. The Wars franchise involves junk dealers bidding on sealed, abandoned, storage lockers, and sealed lockers recur in the poem. Blood from the Mummy’s Tomb was a 1972 film based on The Jewel of Seven Stars, a novel by Bram Stoker. Other themes come from The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms, Cobra Woman, La ragazza che sapeva troppo, All the colours of darkness, Zero for tomorrow, Ultus, the Avenger, Scotland Yard jagt Dr Mabuse, Here’s Las Vegas, Kiss Me Deadly, A Walk through H, Muzzle flash in the glass labyrinth, The Tidal Field of the Dark Star, A First-Year Library of Corrosion, and The Red Queen Kills Seven Times.
As well as the B-Movie sequence, there are two other poems, "Homage to Kathleen Byron" and "Locked Up", which is about the outsider artist Madge Gill.
In Seven Stars, a sorceress from Ancient Egypt is entombed but uses magic to bring about reincarnation. When the stars have rotated back to the position they were in at the moment of her death, she will be reborn into a human form who is also the daughter of the archaeologist who brought the sarcophagus back to London. The daughter has seven fingers on each hand, matching the Seven Stars of Tera's star group. In the film, the event requires the re-assembly of parts of her magic equipment, now scattered. In the poem, the parts are seven figurines, the polychrome minstrels, and finding them requires a search based on Storage Wars.
Showing posts with label cinema. Show all posts
Showing posts with label cinema. Show all posts
Saturday, 14 March 2026
Tuesday, 9 May 2023
Poetry and 40s cinema
This follows up a post of 3 March. In Portrait from Life (released as “The girl in the painting” in the US) (1948) a British officer goes to the British Occupied Zone to look for a survivor of concentration camps who is also the daughter of an Austrian research chemist who has survived the war in London. He knows her face because the chemist recognised it in a painting which had been made at a resettlement camp – the painter had given some details before dying (of drink, essentially). The officer locates the girl but she has amnesia and has also another set of parents – mystery. She does not remember being Austrian. There is a doll which the daughter had given to the chemist to keep him from feeling lonely, without his family. He sends this to the officer and he confronts the girl with it. I found this hard to watch. The amnesia is part of what we now call PTSD and the recovery of such painful material was likely to cause her a breakdown, I thought. In the scene, the English major, a dominant older male figure, forces her, in quite a threatening way, to recover her memory ... using toys from her childhood. She is a mentally ill DP, he is an Army officer, it’s like an interrogation… I didn’t want to watch it. The ambiguity of the “dangerous healer” reminds me of “The Seventh Veil”, where the ambivalence is the key thing in the whole film. (also scripted by Muriel Box) So this may be Muriel Box’s personal vision – although both stories come from pre-existing novels. That passage where she is under great stress and trying to remember a lost life struck me as summing up the Apocalyptic drive – her rational mind was of no use and she was swimming through dark waters looking for an exit. The Apocalyptic theory predicted this although their poets were not necessarily able to find it for themselves. Of course she does remember the doll, it is called Mitzi and this means she can find her father again. She also knows how to make a musical box open and play, the things show the truth.
The Apocalyptic thing is related to PTSD, as a legacy from the First World War. They locate culture inside PTSD – inside shell shock, to use the term of 1918. So recovery from PTSD is what they are all directed towards. The poems descend into those dark waters and open senses that do not need light.
The quest for a beautiful face seen only in a picture is in “Girl in the picture” but also in a 1947 film called “Corridor of mirrors”, so part of a sort of pond of floating themes of the time. (Also in a Preminger film called “Laura”, see earlier post.) “Corridor” starts with war trauma, the hero was blown up in WWI and recovered only at the cost of an idee fixe in which he looked for a young woman who would incarnate a 16th century painting he owned. This is a variant on the “painting quest” and he also swam in the same dark waters. It is interesting that culture shows an intact world which traumatised people can look to for undamaged ideals. The doll is a sort of intact version of the shattered living girl.
Of course I would like to find more films using the same themes, but it is hard to search through a lot of B-movies, even with the help of YouTube. I really can’t think of a poem in which the basic 40s problem is resolved and the wandering soul emerges into the daylight. I think the approach via films or paintings shows up aspects of Apocalyptic poetry that are reluctant to surface.
My feel is that Apocalyptic poetry got the neurotic state of Europe circa 1939 but by the time 1945 had come, and the mood had shifted to healing, recovery, rebuilding, new life, the style had broken up and was drifting as wreckage, unable to produce major works. I emailed Jim Keery about this restitution idea and he instantly came back with an example of restitution in poetry, being Julian Orde's "Conjurers". This was published as a pamphlet by Greville Press in 1988, and one would dearly like to know the date of composition. Orde (1917-74) was a 40s poet but this poem (of approximately 30 7-line stanzas) may not be so early. It is about insect metamorphoses in a garden and I thought it was too literal, but if you decide that it is allegorical then it becomes like Peter Redgrove or Nicki Jackowska and is definitely about coming to life and bursting through the slough of old lives. The rhyme scheme is so neurotically exact that I would guess the 1950s.
As a face at window palely pressed
Moves, leaving the glass dark,
So now this bottle
Darkens, though a full
Rigged ship awaits tomorrow’s test
Of spindle spars and stays. The clock
Tells fourteen days have passed in the ark.
(The moth is in the shroud like a ship inside a bottle, waiting to raise its spars and shake out its sails. Stays as in mainstay. The shroud loses transparency as the body inside it swells.) So that is ABCCABB? The poet puts seven caterpillars in a tray, the stanzas have seven lines, the pupae take 14 days before moulting. She was WS Graham's girlfriend and the ships may relate to his Seven Voyages? I can see this was published in Poetry Nation in 1976. David Wright guesses the date as before her marriage in 1949, but gives no support for that.
In the film, the girl gives an earlier description of her childhood. The major sees a poster advertising a brewery, pinned up in the camp, and notices that the details she gives seem to come from the poster. This was good writing, I thought – the idea that the past was such a wound that it could not come back, and screen memories gathered in front of it, rolling out to prevent sight, stilling the questions by supplying something thin as ribbon, rigid, of set expression. This is the origin of kitsch. That was terribly depressing as a story but it also pushed us out into the world of post-war trauma, a genuine world with a large population. One has to ask if the world of Fifties culture was simply systematic kitsch, still in denial, or if it was genuinely recorded reconstruction, loving homes, children being nurtured. There is that trio: the painting that comes to England, the poster with a view of oldtime Salzburg (or wherever it was), and the music-box. I guess Mitzi the doll is like the chrysalis, in the poem, waiting to be unwrapped. And becomes the adult young woman, on being unwrapped?
Jim tells me that his edition of Orde's Selected Poems is coming out from Carcanet during 2024. He claims that someone found a parcel of 150 Orde poems under a bed in New Zealand and sent it to Carcanet. This would actually be Orde's first book.
The Apocalyptic thing is related to PTSD, as a legacy from the First World War. They locate culture inside PTSD – inside shell shock, to use the term of 1918. So recovery from PTSD is what they are all directed towards. The poems descend into those dark waters and open senses that do not need light.
The quest for a beautiful face seen only in a picture is in “Girl in the picture” but also in a 1947 film called “Corridor of mirrors”, so part of a sort of pond of floating themes of the time. (Also in a Preminger film called “Laura”, see earlier post.) “Corridor” starts with war trauma, the hero was blown up in WWI and recovered only at the cost of an idee fixe in which he looked for a young woman who would incarnate a 16th century painting he owned. This is a variant on the “painting quest” and he also swam in the same dark waters. It is interesting that culture shows an intact world which traumatised people can look to for undamaged ideals. The doll is a sort of intact version of the shattered living girl.
Of course I would like to find more films using the same themes, but it is hard to search through a lot of B-movies, even with the help of YouTube. I really can’t think of a poem in which the basic 40s problem is resolved and the wandering soul emerges into the daylight. I think the approach via films or paintings shows up aspects of Apocalyptic poetry that are reluctant to surface.
My feel is that Apocalyptic poetry got the neurotic state of Europe circa 1939 but by the time 1945 had come, and the mood had shifted to healing, recovery, rebuilding, new life, the style had broken up and was drifting as wreckage, unable to produce major works. I emailed Jim Keery about this restitution idea and he instantly came back with an example of restitution in poetry, being Julian Orde's "Conjurers". This was published as a pamphlet by Greville Press in 1988, and one would dearly like to know the date of composition. Orde (1917-74) was a 40s poet but this poem (of approximately 30 7-line stanzas) may not be so early. It is about insect metamorphoses in a garden and I thought it was too literal, but if you decide that it is allegorical then it becomes like Peter Redgrove or Nicki Jackowska and is definitely about coming to life and bursting through the slough of old lives. The rhyme scheme is so neurotically exact that I would guess the 1950s.
As a face at window palely pressed
Moves, leaving the glass dark,
So now this bottle
Darkens, though a full
Rigged ship awaits tomorrow’s test
Of spindle spars and stays. The clock
Tells fourteen days have passed in the ark.
(The moth is in the shroud like a ship inside a bottle, waiting to raise its spars and shake out its sails. Stays as in mainstay. The shroud loses transparency as the body inside it swells.) So that is ABCCABB? The poet puts seven caterpillars in a tray, the stanzas have seven lines, the pupae take 14 days before moulting. She was WS Graham's girlfriend and the ships may relate to his Seven Voyages? I can see this was published in Poetry Nation in 1976. David Wright guesses the date as before her marriage in 1949, but gives no support for that.
In the film, the girl gives an earlier description of her childhood. The major sees a poster advertising a brewery, pinned up in the camp, and notices that the details she gives seem to come from the poster. This was good writing, I thought – the idea that the past was such a wound that it could not come back, and screen memories gathered in front of it, rolling out to prevent sight, stilling the questions by supplying something thin as ribbon, rigid, of set expression. This is the origin of kitsch. That was terribly depressing as a story but it also pushed us out into the world of post-war trauma, a genuine world with a large population. One has to ask if the world of Fifties culture was simply systematic kitsch, still in denial, or if it was genuinely recorded reconstruction, loving homes, children being nurtured. There is that trio: the painting that comes to England, the poster with a view of oldtime Salzburg (or wherever it was), and the music-box. I guess Mitzi the doll is like the chrysalis, in the poem, waiting to be unwrapped. And becomes the adult young woman, on being unwrapped?
Jim tells me that his edition of Orde's Selected Poems is coming out from Carcanet during 2024. He claims that someone found a parcel of 150 Orde poems under a bed in New Zealand and sent it to Carcanet. This would actually be Orde's first book.
Thursday, 2 March 2023
Muriel Box - again
Muriel Box – again
I listened to the Radio 3 documentary about Muriel Box on Sunday and found it quite irritating. Not least because it was called “Carol and Muriel”, pushing the subject aside because she wasn’t interesting enough. Evidently they found Box boring and wanted to reclad it as a Treasure Quest with the focus on the quester and not the cultural material being sought after. The model is “Rat Scabies and the holy grail”, so a historical subject is thrust aside to show more about a perky young presenter. The presenter was perky and we learnt more about her than about M Box. They left out Box as scriptwriter (more or less) because being a director is the Power Job and that is what they found marketable. So the fact that MB was head of the script department at Gainsborough Studios at their peak was not mentioned. I have never found out who invented that style (“The Man in Grey” etc.) but it would have been good to hear a discussion of it. Instead they ignored any change of styles between 1947 or so and 1955 or so… idiotically. They didn't establish any personal style for MB and evidently she didn’t have one. Treatment of someone working deep inside the industry as if they were an auteur pursuing a personal vision is bound to stifle the historical facts. Again, the drive is to find someone Powerful and the possibility of creative collaboration is unacceptable. A key fact about MB is that she moved from febrile melodrama to social realism (“Street Corner”) and on to stultified 1950s smugness. This does not suit auteur theory treatment but it is an intellectual puzzle and one has to ask if the “shadowy person who invented the new period style” actually was Muriel Box at several turning points. On watching “Street Corner” (1953) one is reminded of several hundred cop shows (it is about female police officers) about young coppers learning the ropes, in a semi documentary style, and the question is whether Box had actually worked this out and the idea was then there for a hundred TV producers to pick up as TV matured. Box graduated to directing as the Fifties were getting going and so her films in that job are full of Fifties blandness. “Simon and Laura” isn’t the best British film of the 1950s, as someone claimed in the radio show, it is critical of television and preening actors and smug domesticity, but it exploits those qualities to the utmost and doesn't even propose an alternative. Finch and Kendall are asked to impersonate one-dimensional narcissists, and sleepwalk through their roles. As everyone says, the 1950s saw a roll-back of the feminism which the participation of women in the war effort had advanced between 1939 and 1945, and the Kay Kendall character in "Simon and Laura" wishes only to be beautiful and pampered.
The radio docu was in denial of the fact that directors weren't in control at Rank, so it couldn’t tell the story. Box's films for Rank look just like every other Rank film. I am wondering now who invented Fifties domesticity, smugness, affluence, and blandness… I don’t have a candidate. Some monsters have multiple DNA.
I wasn't impressed by the presenter's repeated claim that nobody except herself and the two people she interviewed had ever taken any interest in MB. I just got the impression that she had never read any books. This is a specialised sort of camera, producing images in which nobody worked on Box’s Rank films except Box and nobody had ever written about Box until the presenter cruised into town. A disappearing camera. This is hardly a way of recovering the truth about cinema history. Erasing the context of collaborative production actually means erasing Box’s own biography.
I had supposed that Box originated the Gainsborough Melodrama style, as head of the script department at Gainsborough, but I now know that is untrue. She didn't join them until 1946 and the films in question began in 1943. Wikipedia suggests that producer Edward Black (1900-48) invented the style, but there is now better evidence on that and based on Sydney Gilliat’s memoirs Black resisted that style.
Robert Murphy's 1989 book about British cinema 1939-49, "Realism and Tinsel" has just arrived. not a great title. Murphy attributes the Melodrama style to the wake of the Tod Slaughter films. No way! they have nothing to do with Slaughter's nostalgic revival of an 1880s theatre style! He does say that Black left Gainsborough at the end of 1943. There is much more detail in his work on “Gainsborough producers”. He says “At the beginning of 1943 Ostrer had told the Kinematograph Weekly that Gainsborough was ‘refusing to bow to the prevailing tendency to concentrate on war subjects.’” And with his ideas vindicated by the success of The Man in Grey he grew increasingly impatient of Black’s desire for a wide range of subjects, particularly when there were men like Minney, who were eager to produce flamboyant melodramas such as Madonna of the Seven Moons." He points to RJ Minney as the producer who wanted melodrama and disagreed with Black. “R J Minney said that 'melodrama is essential in a film if it is to hit the box office since the film is more akin to the music hall and the circus than to a theatre'", and all evidence suggests that Ostrer firmly believed this too.” (Michael Brooke on the BFI website) A check in Wikipedia shows that Minney produced seven key melodramatic films within a few years. So, his involvement was more profound than anyone else’s and the simplest solution is to attribute the style to him. That is, Maurice Ostrer wanted the style but wasn’t a creative figure; Minney was enabled by Ostrer but could actually find stories and put films together. So provisionally the answer is:
-Rank own or control the parent company of Gainsborough from the end of 1941 (but leave artistic control to the team in place)
- the style is first shown in 'Man in Grey' but RJ Minney is the one who works out the blueprint and imposes it on the Gainsborough team
-Maurice Ostrer as studio boss bets on escapism and re-fulfils the blueprint making another dozen films in the same style, usually with Minney
-another dozen imitations surface from various studios
-after quarrels with Arthur Rank, Ostrer leaves; Rank take over artistic control; Sydney and Muriel Box run Gainsborough for roughly two years from late 1946 and abandon the costume melodrama style
- Muriel Box is involved in possibly one of the Gainsborough melodramas, "Jassy"
-Ostrer starts up another company (Premier) and makes a sort of auto-pastiche, "The Idol of Paris", which is widely regarded as the worst film ever made and closes the door
- Rank close down Gainsborough, dislike sensationalism, and the style grinds to a halt
However, Michael Brooke for the BFI says about the origin “The following year [1943], in-house writer-director Leslie Arliss adapted Lady Eleanor Smith's Regency bodice-ripper The Man In Grey. Consciously defying an unspoken convention that British cinema at a time of war should be broadly realistic, Arliss, with cinematographer Arthur Crabtree, production designer John Bryan and costume designer Elizabeth Haffenden, devised a flamboyantly baroque visual approach that established the distinctive "look" of the cycle right from the start, which also belied the film's modest budget.” So Arliss may have made crucial contributions. It was Minney who discovered the novel on which “Man In Grey” is based, and proposed it. I have to add that Alan Lovell’s analysis is that the way the films were made contradicted the basic artistic intent and that they were inconsistent as melodramas. He finds a lack of co-operation, and it is hard to see that the style was the outcome of a creative team effort. Murphy says that the actors involved hated the films. I have a strange feeling that the production team as a whole disliked the style, the dislike is what went down in history, and this is why no-one ever claimed to have been the originator of it.
To recover what Box achieved, we have to see her running that script department, so taking in a variety of original material and re-styling it to match the planned output, matching a proven commercial formula. She was the most important scriptwriter of a certain period and we need to consider about 40 films in which she played a major creative role, not just as director but also as scriptwriter and even as script supervisor. She shifted style the whole time. Murphy says that Box looked at "Love Story" and "Madonna of the Seven Moons" and produced ("successful re-working") a story and script (Pauline Kael called it "a rich, portentous mixture of Beethoven, Chopin, kitsch, and Freud") which yielded "The Seventh Veil" (1945). This is more convincing... she was brilliant at studying the market and at arranging things. This is how films get made. Yes, she got the Oscar. It's a great film.
I have just watched (on Youtube) “The girl In the painting” (1948), with a script by M Box. This misses being a great film but I did enjoy it. The title character has been through several concentration camps and is suffering from amnesia. In one scene, a dominant older male figure (an English major) forces her in quite a threatening way to recover her memory ... using toys from her childhood sent to him by her real father. The ambiguity of the “dangerous healer” reminds me of “The Seventh Veil”, where the ambivalence is the key thing in the whole film. So this scene may be Box’s personal vision – although one of the stories came from a pre-existing novel. That is interesting, but Box’s achievement is surely not to impose a personal style but to organise material, to complete the story arcs, find the drama, and remove or minimise weaknesses. Surely auteur theory was subject to intense criticism in the 1960s, already, because it obscured the collaborative nature of film making. Murphy records that "By the time she [MB] left [Gainsborough] in 1949 there were forty scripts in various stages of development". As Box was supervisor of scripts she probably contributed to all of these.
The quest for a beautiful face seen only in a picture is in “The Girl in the painting” but also in a 1947 film called “Corridor of mirrors”, so part of a sort of pond of floating themes of the time. (Also in a 1944 Preminger film called “Laura”, which may be the start point, who knows.) The idea that one cannot identify with teamwork is irritating… surely the Left approach finds teams at the core of everything. This is closer to how films are made. One does not enter culture to seize power.
Film work starts with a table covered in new pulp novels, which already share the same plot motifs and characters. I am interested in the status of this “pond” of pulp fiction, works which (in the Forties versions] I have had difficulty getting access to. I think they repeated themes endlessly, not being very original; but also that there is a pulp creativity which I admire. “Corridor of Mirrors” is a very distinctive film but there was actually a preceding novel in 1941 which probably has all the story… $40 second hand which I am afraid is too much! It is by Chris Massie (1880-1964). There is a link between this pulp and New Romantic poetry; yet to be defined I think. Somewhere linking Wardour Street and Fitzroy Square. Box started with pulp and added logic and organisation. Then someone else made it visible and visual.
After losing her connection as a director, MB started a publishing company called Femina. I searched for their books in abebooks. They did a 1968 anthology of poetry by women... I think I looked at this before and it was too non-specific, not being contemporary women poets. It wasn’t the first women-only anthology but it deserves honour as being one of the first. The claim is that Femina was the first feminist publisher in Britain, and so far as I know that is true.
The archivist at the BFI interviewed in the radio documentary says in The Observer that “Simon and Laura” is the best British film of the 1950s. This is untrue. It is about two famous actors whose ideal marriage is the subject of a “reality TV” show while off camera they hate each other, and so there are two different stories happening simultaneously. I enjoyed it but it is still very 1950s, full of theatrical glamour, affluent people, and all about marriage. Is it really better than White Corridors, The Ladykillers, the Niven “Elusive Pimpernel”, Gideon's Day, The Cruel Sea, Ice Cold in Alex, The day the earth caught fire… no. But, let's go and watch them all again.
I listened to the Radio 3 documentary about Muriel Box on Sunday and found it quite irritating. Not least because it was called “Carol and Muriel”, pushing the subject aside because she wasn’t interesting enough. Evidently they found Box boring and wanted to reclad it as a Treasure Quest with the focus on the quester and not the cultural material being sought after. The model is “Rat Scabies and the holy grail”, so a historical subject is thrust aside to show more about a perky young presenter. The presenter was perky and we learnt more about her than about M Box. They left out Box as scriptwriter (more or less) because being a director is the Power Job and that is what they found marketable. So the fact that MB was head of the script department at Gainsborough Studios at their peak was not mentioned. I have never found out who invented that style (“The Man in Grey” etc.) but it would have been good to hear a discussion of it. Instead they ignored any change of styles between 1947 or so and 1955 or so… idiotically. They didn't establish any personal style for MB and evidently she didn’t have one. Treatment of someone working deep inside the industry as if they were an auteur pursuing a personal vision is bound to stifle the historical facts. Again, the drive is to find someone Powerful and the possibility of creative collaboration is unacceptable. A key fact about MB is that she moved from febrile melodrama to social realism (“Street Corner”) and on to stultified 1950s smugness. This does not suit auteur theory treatment but it is an intellectual puzzle and one has to ask if the “shadowy person who invented the new period style” actually was Muriel Box at several turning points. On watching “Street Corner” (1953) one is reminded of several hundred cop shows (it is about female police officers) about young coppers learning the ropes, in a semi documentary style, and the question is whether Box had actually worked this out and the idea was then there for a hundred TV producers to pick up as TV matured. Box graduated to directing as the Fifties were getting going and so her films in that job are full of Fifties blandness. “Simon and Laura” isn’t the best British film of the 1950s, as someone claimed in the radio show, it is critical of television and preening actors and smug domesticity, but it exploits those qualities to the utmost and doesn't even propose an alternative. Finch and Kendall are asked to impersonate one-dimensional narcissists, and sleepwalk through their roles. As everyone says, the 1950s saw a roll-back of the feminism which the participation of women in the war effort had advanced between 1939 and 1945, and the Kay Kendall character in "Simon and Laura" wishes only to be beautiful and pampered.
The radio docu was in denial of the fact that directors weren't in control at Rank, so it couldn’t tell the story. Box's films for Rank look just like every other Rank film. I am wondering now who invented Fifties domesticity, smugness, affluence, and blandness… I don’t have a candidate. Some monsters have multiple DNA.
I wasn't impressed by the presenter's repeated claim that nobody except herself and the two people she interviewed had ever taken any interest in MB. I just got the impression that she had never read any books. This is a specialised sort of camera, producing images in which nobody worked on Box’s Rank films except Box and nobody had ever written about Box until the presenter cruised into town. A disappearing camera. This is hardly a way of recovering the truth about cinema history. Erasing the context of collaborative production actually means erasing Box’s own biography.
I had supposed that Box originated the Gainsborough Melodrama style, as head of the script department at Gainsborough, but I now know that is untrue. She didn't join them until 1946 and the films in question began in 1943. Wikipedia suggests that producer Edward Black (1900-48) invented the style, but there is now better evidence on that and based on Sydney Gilliat’s memoirs Black resisted that style.
Robert Murphy's 1989 book about British cinema 1939-49, "Realism and Tinsel" has just arrived. not a great title. Murphy attributes the Melodrama style to the wake of the Tod Slaughter films. No way! they have nothing to do with Slaughter's nostalgic revival of an 1880s theatre style! He does say that Black left Gainsborough at the end of 1943. There is much more detail in his work on “Gainsborough producers”. He says “At the beginning of 1943 Ostrer had told the Kinematograph Weekly that Gainsborough was ‘refusing to bow to the prevailing tendency to concentrate on war subjects.’” And with his ideas vindicated by the success of The Man in Grey he grew increasingly impatient of Black’s desire for a wide range of subjects, particularly when there were men like Minney, who were eager to produce flamboyant melodramas such as Madonna of the Seven Moons." He points to RJ Minney as the producer who wanted melodrama and disagreed with Black. “R J Minney said that 'melodrama is essential in a film if it is to hit the box office since the film is more akin to the music hall and the circus than to a theatre'", and all evidence suggests that Ostrer firmly believed this too.” (Michael Brooke on the BFI website) A check in Wikipedia shows that Minney produced seven key melodramatic films within a few years. So, his involvement was more profound than anyone else’s and the simplest solution is to attribute the style to him. That is, Maurice Ostrer wanted the style but wasn’t a creative figure; Minney was enabled by Ostrer but could actually find stories and put films together. So provisionally the answer is:
-Rank own or control the parent company of Gainsborough from the end of 1941 (but leave artistic control to the team in place)
- the style is first shown in 'Man in Grey' but RJ Minney is the one who works out the blueprint and imposes it on the Gainsborough team
-Maurice Ostrer as studio boss bets on escapism and re-fulfils the blueprint making another dozen films in the same style, usually with Minney
-another dozen imitations surface from various studios
-after quarrels with Arthur Rank, Ostrer leaves; Rank take over artistic control; Sydney and Muriel Box run Gainsborough for roughly two years from late 1946 and abandon the costume melodrama style
- Muriel Box is involved in possibly one of the Gainsborough melodramas, "Jassy"
-Ostrer starts up another company (Premier) and makes a sort of auto-pastiche, "The Idol of Paris", which is widely regarded as the worst film ever made and closes the door
- Rank close down Gainsborough, dislike sensationalism, and the style grinds to a halt
However, Michael Brooke for the BFI says about the origin “The following year [1943], in-house writer-director Leslie Arliss adapted Lady Eleanor Smith's Regency bodice-ripper The Man In Grey. Consciously defying an unspoken convention that British cinema at a time of war should be broadly realistic, Arliss, with cinematographer Arthur Crabtree, production designer John Bryan and costume designer Elizabeth Haffenden, devised a flamboyantly baroque visual approach that established the distinctive "look" of the cycle right from the start, which also belied the film's modest budget.” So Arliss may have made crucial contributions. It was Minney who discovered the novel on which “Man In Grey” is based, and proposed it. I have to add that Alan Lovell’s analysis is that the way the films were made contradicted the basic artistic intent and that they were inconsistent as melodramas. He finds a lack of co-operation, and it is hard to see that the style was the outcome of a creative team effort. Murphy says that the actors involved hated the films. I have a strange feeling that the production team as a whole disliked the style, the dislike is what went down in history, and this is why no-one ever claimed to have been the originator of it.
To recover what Box achieved, we have to see her running that script department, so taking in a variety of original material and re-styling it to match the planned output, matching a proven commercial formula. She was the most important scriptwriter of a certain period and we need to consider about 40 films in which she played a major creative role, not just as director but also as scriptwriter and even as script supervisor. She shifted style the whole time. Murphy says that Box looked at "Love Story" and "Madonna of the Seven Moons" and produced ("successful re-working") a story and script (Pauline Kael called it "a rich, portentous mixture of Beethoven, Chopin, kitsch, and Freud") which yielded "The Seventh Veil" (1945). This is more convincing... she was brilliant at studying the market and at arranging things. This is how films get made. Yes, she got the Oscar. It's a great film.
I have just watched (on Youtube) “The girl In the painting” (1948), with a script by M Box. This misses being a great film but I did enjoy it. The title character has been through several concentration camps and is suffering from amnesia. In one scene, a dominant older male figure (an English major) forces her in quite a threatening way to recover her memory ... using toys from her childhood sent to him by her real father. The ambiguity of the “dangerous healer” reminds me of “The Seventh Veil”, where the ambivalence is the key thing in the whole film. So this scene may be Box’s personal vision – although one of the stories came from a pre-existing novel. That is interesting, but Box’s achievement is surely not to impose a personal style but to organise material, to complete the story arcs, find the drama, and remove or minimise weaknesses. Surely auteur theory was subject to intense criticism in the 1960s, already, because it obscured the collaborative nature of film making. Murphy records that "By the time she [MB] left [Gainsborough] in 1949 there were forty scripts in various stages of development". As Box was supervisor of scripts she probably contributed to all of these.
The quest for a beautiful face seen only in a picture is in “The Girl in the painting” but also in a 1947 film called “Corridor of mirrors”, so part of a sort of pond of floating themes of the time. (Also in a 1944 Preminger film called “Laura”, which may be the start point, who knows.) The idea that one cannot identify with teamwork is irritating… surely the Left approach finds teams at the core of everything. This is closer to how films are made. One does not enter culture to seize power.
Film work starts with a table covered in new pulp novels, which already share the same plot motifs and characters. I am interested in the status of this “pond” of pulp fiction, works which (in the Forties versions] I have had difficulty getting access to. I think they repeated themes endlessly, not being very original; but also that there is a pulp creativity which I admire. “Corridor of Mirrors” is a very distinctive film but there was actually a preceding novel in 1941 which probably has all the story… $40 second hand which I am afraid is too much! It is by Chris Massie (1880-1964). There is a link between this pulp and New Romantic poetry; yet to be defined I think. Somewhere linking Wardour Street and Fitzroy Square. Box started with pulp and added logic and organisation. Then someone else made it visible and visual.
After losing her connection as a director, MB started a publishing company called Femina. I searched for their books in abebooks. They did a 1968 anthology of poetry by women... I think I looked at this before and it was too non-specific, not being contemporary women poets. It wasn’t the first women-only anthology but it deserves honour as being one of the first. The claim is that Femina was the first feminist publisher in Britain, and so far as I know that is true.
The archivist at the BFI interviewed in the radio documentary says in The Observer that “Simon and Laura” is the best British film of the 1950s. This is untrue. It is about two famous actors whose ideal marriage is the subject of a “reality TV” show while off camera they hate each other, and so there are two different stories happening simultaneously. I enjoyed it but it is still very 1950s, full of theatrical glamour, affluent people, and all about marriage. Is it really better than White Corridors, The Ladykillers, the Niven “Elusive Pimpernel”, Gideon's Day, The Cruel Sea, Ice Cold in Alex, The day the earth caught fire… no. But, let's go and watch them all again.
Wednesday, 6 July 2022
Bad Cinema, part 99
Caravan
On a stall in a market in the part of Nottingham where I live, I acquired a package with one part of The Stewart Granger Story, so a batch of dubious 40s melodramas on DVD.
I previously borrowed this package from a lending library of DVDs, now deceased, so I know how bad the films are. And I have a special desire not to see anything with Granger – a non-actor with Chiselled Features and natural authority and height. But he was a star, so he was in expensive and occasionally good films. As a cultural historian, you have to watch bad films sometimes. Caravan (1946) is a ridiculous film which I previously abandoned watching. The plot is that a wild tearaway son of good family, Stewart Granger, is the victim of amnesia and assault, and wakes up to live with the gypsies, with whom he has a natural affinity. He engages in picturesque escapades. Then finally the injustice is reversed, he remembers who he is, and he returns to enjoy the heroine and bourgeois life. It’s The Student Prince, or Doctor Syn (once Captain Clegg, the pirate; first novel 1915). We have seen this plot a few times before. It allows us to see scenes of low life, actually of life without responsibilities or inhibitions, while marginalising the people to whom that life is natural. It is strikingly different from a plot in which the hero would come from income group E. The plot involves Darrell (Granger) as the author of a novel. Helpmann, employed by villain Dennis Price, arranges the assault, by Spanish Gypsies. Darrell also loses a necklace which he was transporting and is then wanted by the police for stealing it. Price hopes to carry off Darrell’s girlfriend (played by Ann Crawford).
H plays a servant, named Wycroft, who is malicious and out for himself. He does not take any responsibility seriously and clearly has no loyalty to his employer. That is an implicit threat to the social order. But, we might continue, the social order is evidently a threat to him fulfilling his desires. He seems childish because he rejects responsibility. But also he is prepared to conform when someone in authority is watching. He is the classic quick-witted slave of a corrupt master. His willingness to accept the role society has allotted him means a profound rift in his being: he has no belief in the merits of his master or in the role he continues to carry out. Any kind of malice or humiliation excites him. He is amused much of the time, but sensitive and easily disgusted. I suppose prissy is the word... so held back by a strong sense of propriety even while rejecting moral restraint. His reactions are quick and ever changing; he seems to be leading his life at ten times the speed of the Stewart Granger character.
The second time I tried to watch it, I was worried about the prospect of a gypsy dancer scene in some bodega. I feared this would be embarrassing. It calls for archaic theatrical virtues. But that dancer is played by Jean Kent and she has archaic theatrical virtues in abundance.
The interest of Caravan is a few scenes in which two obviously gay actors engage in interaction outside the main plot. The claim is not based on them being defined in the film as gay, but on their facial expressions, speech melody, gestures, and so on, which were inevitably gay. That is not to say that they were anything but a minority of gay men, more that if they were allowed on screen then they released a great flow of visual information which says among other things that they were camp and gay. The presupposition is that Granger is going to get 30 times as much screen time as Helpmann. We can guess that Helpmann’s vivacity is related to the need to say everything in such a brief time... in between long days of conformity and deference to employers. Is that guess right? Certainly it is hard to imagine a film in which the normative world had withdrawn into the shadows and Helpmann could be camp and vivacious for the entire film. That film does not exist but we can try to imagine it.
Helpmann says to Jean Kent at one point “You are a wicked girl, but it’s no use trying out your wiles on me.” He is correct, we feel.
Helpmann comes across as frustrated, making the most of a brief stretch on camera. That is like a spectator who is watching a bad film and seizes on some aspect that is much less bad, as a way out of boredom, hoping for it to be prolonged. This is what childhood was like, so much of the time… a state which I have managed to reproduce, in adult life, by involving myself in “the history of culture”. That history is largely made up of bad films. At least in my country.
Helpmann was mostly a dancer with the Vic-Wells Ballet. He wasn't technically a great dancer, we understand, but made up for it by his abilities as an actor – in fact as a mime. His ability to use flows of information other than verbal is what puts him ahead of other performers within a film. His presence is what allows us to connect Caravan, and the world of Gainsborough melodrama, with high culture of the 1940s. The main display in the 1987 Barbican exhibition of the “New Romantics” was a sensational backdrop designed by Leslie Hurry for Helpmann's production of Hamlet with himself as the hero. (Confusingly, there was also a ballet Hamlet in which Helpmann played the lead character, also designed by Hurry.) I presume he didn’t deliver the verse in a camp speech melody… but since it has all disappeared we can't know this. Those Hamlet productions were certainly a key part of the Apocalyptic style which lasted for several years in the Forties. They represent the collapse of objectivity and the advance of feelings and dreams into three-dimensional form. But Caravan does not fit into that (even if other films in this same DVD package do). Nor really is Helpmann’s droll-sinister turn in ‘Caravan’ connected to the visions of the apocalyptics. The ambiguity of a neurotic 40s poet-type is dissimilar to the ambiguity which Wycroft is governed by.
Wikipedia lists the five most successful (box office) films of 1946, with Caravan at number five. One of the others is another Gainsborough melodrama – The Wicked Lady, which also has the “double life” plot. Clearly this is what people wanted to see, and that might explain why some of the projects were not only inherently vacuous but also badly and hastily prepared.
Price marries the girlfriend, who believes Darrell is dead. At one point he cancels a dinner party she has lovingly prepared but replaces the guests with a roomful of high-class tarts, who seem to know him well. This is a bizarre scene. Later he suggests, when she leaves him, that she has no money and also has no talent for following the only profession which is open to her. This indicates that she has not let him sleep with her in their marriage... he had invited the tarts in to educate her about sex. This is a desperate attempt to make the situation stronger than the quality of writing would allow. This isn't melodrama, just bad taste I think.
I see Granger worked for Roger Corman at one point. I hope Corman made him work a bit harder than he usually did. Helpmann played possibly related characters on screen in The Red Shoes and The Tales of Hoffmann.
The same package has Madonna of the Seven Moons, which I actually enjoyed. It starts with a frightening sequence in which a little girl (twelve maybe) is menaced by an adult male. We don’t really find out if she is sexually assaulted but it looks bad. Later a character is shown as split into two personalities... although the rape incident is never mentioned again, it is a medical fact that abuse in childhood can lead to dissociative personality disorder. The film would certainly benefit if there was someone to point this out, on screen or in a voice-over at least. The adult woman is played by Phyllis Calvert. She is a conventional wife of a wealthy man in some Italian city, but periodically she disappears and comes back six months later with no explanation. We found out that in these fugues she takes up a quite different role, as the landlady of a tavern called The Seven Moons, which has a sign with as many half-moons, a motif echoed by earrings which Calvert wears. I never worked out where the word ‘Madonna’ came in. This is an excuse for her to dress in a completely different way… extravagant and sexy as a bar owner who is also the mistress of a prominent bandit. Fairly obviously the “alternate” personality of Calvert is a parallel to Granger’s adventures with the gypsies in ‘Caravan’. The theme is respectable people disappearing into an unrespectable life, a license to daydream. We don’t get a scene in which Granger is sexually abused by a gypsy as a child… that would be a very different film.
The earrings bear a noticeable resemblance to ones worn by Jean Kent in Caravan. The Mediterranean floozy part in Madonna is played by Patricia Roc… a sort of alternate Jean Kent. Gainsborough needed such actresses. And Rank didn't.
David Bourne in his book Brief Encounters mentions the Helpmann role in Caravan as part of a book about gay characters in British films from 1930 to 1971 (and some glimmer of liberation). Each encounter is brief because gays were never the central characters in any script. This approach gives us maybe 80 seconds of a film… from a hundred films. This does seem like the most effective way to approach the subject; given both how crap the films were and how much the unrelated snippets actually do connect to each other, revealing deeper structures. The method is especially likely to reveal changes over time, so between gay stereotypes in 1930 and gay stereotypes in 1960.
The Gypsy character (Jean Kent) remarks to the boring English character (Ann Crawford) at one point that the custom of her people in love rivalry is to fight it out in a duel. We don’t see this take place but the producer obviously remembered it because he went on to make this: "Idol of Paris is a 1948 film based on the novel Paiva, Queen of Love by Alfred Schirokauer, about a mid-19th century French courtesan Theresa who sleeps her way from poverty to the top of Second Empire society. It was an attempt by its makers to imitate the success of the Gainsborough melodramas." This is a lost film, I understand, but it did feature a duel between two women (using whips) and that was on the poster. It may actually have broken the company which made it, Premier Films, and who knows where their prints went to. At the time, Picturegoer said it was “a complete farrago of nonsense”.
On a stall in a market in the part of Nottingham where I live, I acquired a package with one part of The Stewart Granger Story, so a batch of dubious 40s melodramas on DVD.
I previously borrowed this package from a lending library of DVDs, now deceased, so I know how bad the films are. And I have a special desire not to see anything with Granger – a non-actor with Chiselled Features and natural authority and height. But he was a star, so he was in expensive and occasionally good films. As a cultural historian, you have to watch bad films sometimes. Caravan (1946) is a ridiculous film which I previously abandoned watching. The plot is that a wild tearaway son of good family, Stewart Granger, is the victim of amnesia and assault, and wakes up to live with the gypsies, with whom he has a natural affinity. He engages in picturesque escapades. Then finally the injustice is reversed, he remembers who he is, and he returns to enjoy the heroine and bourgeois life. It’s The Student Prince, or Doctor Syn (once Captain Clegg, the pirate; first novel 1915). We have seen this plot a few times before. It allows us to see scenes of low life, actually of life without responsibilities or inhibitions, while marginalising the people to whom that life is natural. It is strikingly different from a plot in which the hero would come from income group E. The plot involves Darrell (Granger) as the author of a novel. Helpmann, employed by villain Dennis Price, arranges the assault, by Spanish Gypsies. Darrell also loses a necklace which he was transporting and is then wanted by the police for stealing it. Price hopes to carry off Darrell’s girlfriend (played by Ann Crawford).
H plays a servant, named Wycroft, who is malicious and out for himself. He does not take any responsibility seriously and clearly has no loyalty to his employer. That is an implicit threat to the social order. But, we might continue, the social order is evidently a threat to him fulfilling his desires. He seems childish because he rejects responsibility. But also he is prepared to conform when someone in authority is watching. He is the classic quick-witted slave of a corrupt master. His willingness to accept the role society has allotted him means a profound rift in his being: he has no belief in the merits of his master or in the role he continues to carry out. Any kind of malice or humiliation excites him. He is amused much of the time, but sensitive and easily disgusted. I suppose prissy is the word... so held back by a strong sense of propriety even while rejecting moral restraint. His reactions are quick and ever changing; he seems to be leading his life at ten times the speed of the Stewart Granger character.
The second time I tried to watch it, I was worried about the prospect of a gypsy dancer scene in some bodega. I feared this would be embarrassing. It calls for archaic theatrical virtues. But that dancer is played by Jean Kent and she has archaic theatrical virtues in abundance.
The interest of Caravan is a few scenes in which two obviously gay actors engage in interaction outside the main plot. The claim is not based on them being defined in the film as gay, but on their facial expressions, speech melody, gestures, and so on, which were inevitably gay. That is not to say that they were anything but a minority of gay men, more that if they were allowed on screen then they released a great flow of visual information which says among other things that they were camp and gay. The presupposition is that Granger is going to get 30 times as much screen time as Helpmann. We can guess that Helpmann’s vivacity is related to the need to say everything in such a brief time... in between long days of conformity and deference to employers. Is that guess right? Certainly it is hard to imagine a film in which the normative world had withdrawn into the shadows and Helpmann could be camp and vivacious for the entire film. That film does not exist but we can try to imagine it.
Helpmann says to Jean Kent at one point “You are a wicked girl, but it’s no use trying out your wiles on me.” He is correct, we feel.
Helpmann comes across as frustrated, making the most of a brief stretch on camera. That is like a spectator who is watching a bad film and seizes on some aspect that is much less bad, as a way out of boredom, hoping for it to be prolonged. This is what childhood was like, so much of the time… a state which I have managed to reproduce, in adult life, by involving myself in “the history of culture”. That history is largely made up of bad films. At least in my country.
Helpmann was mostly a dancer with the Vic-Wells Ballet. He wasn't technically a great dancer, we understand, but made up for it by his abilities as an actor – in fact as a mime. His ability to use flows of information other than verbal is what puts him ahead of other performers within a film. His presence is what allows us to connect Caravan, and the world of Gainsborough melodrama, with high culture of the 1940s. The main display in the 1987 Barbican exhibition of the “New Romantics” was a sensational backdrop designed by Leslie Hurry for Helpmann's production of Hamlet with himself as the hero. (Confusingly, there was also a ballet Hamlet in which Helpmann played the lead character, also designed by Hurry.) I presume he didn’t deliver the verse in a camp speech melody… but since it has all disappeared we can't know this. Those Hamlet productions were certainly a key part of the Apocalyptic style which lasted for several years in the Forties. They represent the collapse of objectivity and the advance of feelings and dreams into three-dimensional form. But Caravan does not fit into that (even if other films in this same DVD package do). Nor really is Helpmann’s droll-sinister turn in ‘Caravan’ connected to the visions of the apocalyptics. The ambiguity of a neurotic 40s poet-type is dissimilar to the ambiguity which Wycroft is governed by.
Wikipedia lists the five most successful (box office) films of 1946, with Caravan at number five. One of the others is another Gainsborough melodrama – The Wicked Lady, which also has the “double life” plot. Clearly this is what people wanted to see, and that might explain why some of the projects were not only inherently vacuous but also badly and hastily prepared.
Price marries the girlfriend, who believes Darrell is dead. At one point he cancels a dinner party she has lovingly prepared but replaces the guests with a roomful of high-class tarts, who seem to know him well. This is a bizarre scene. Later he suggests, when she leaves him, that she has no money and also has no talent for following the only profession which is open to her. This indicates that she has not let him sleep with her in their marriage... he had invited the tarts in to educate her about sex. This is a desperate attempt to make the situation stronger than the quality of writing would allow. This isn't melodrama, just bad taste I think.
I see Granger worked for Roger Corman at one point. I hope Corman made him work a bit harder than he usually did. Helpmann played possibly related characters on screen in The Red Shoes and The Tales of Hoffmann.
The same package has Madonna of the Seven Moons, which I actually enjoyed. It starts with a frightening sequence in which a little girl (twelve maybe) is menaced by an adult male. We don’t really find out if she is sexually assaulted but it looks bad. Later a character is shown as split into two personalities... although the rape incident is never mentioned again, it is a medical fact that abuse in childhood can lead to dissociative personality disorder. The film would certainly benefit if there was someone to point this out, on screen or in a voice-over at least. The adult woman is played by Phyllis Calvert. She is a conventional wife of a wealthy man in some Italian city, but periodically she disappears and comes back six months later with no explanation. We found out that in these fugues she takes up a quite different role, as the landlady of a tavern called The Seven Moons, which has a sign with as many half-moons, a motif echoed by earrings which Calvert wears. I never worked out where the word ‘Madonna’ came in. This is an excuse for her to dress in a completely different way… extravagant and sexy as a bar owner who is also the mistress of a prominent bandit. Fairly obviously the “alternate” personality of Calvert is a parallel to Granger’s adventures with the gypsies in ‘Caravan’. The theme is respectable people disappearing into an unrespectable life, a license to daydream. We don’t get a scene in which Granger is sexually abused by a gypsy as a child… that would be a very different film.
The earrings bear a noticeable resemblance to ones worn by Jean Kent in Caravan. The Mediterranean floozy part in Madonna is played by Patricia Roc… a sort of alternate Jean Kent. Gainsborough needed such actresses. And Rank didn't.
David Bourne in his book Brief Encounters mentions the Helpmann role in Caravan as part of a book about gay characters in British films from 1930 to 1971 (and some glimmer of liberation). Each encounter is brief because gays were never the central characters in any script. This approach gives us maybe 80 seconds of a film… from a hundred films. This does seem like the most effective way to approach the subject; given both how crap the films were and how much the unrelated snippets actually do connect to each other, revealing deeper structures. The method is especially likely to reveal changes over time, so between gay stereotypes in 1930 and gay stereotypes in 1960.
The Gypsy character (Jean Kent) remarks to the boring English character (Ann Crawford) at one point that the custom of her people in love rivalry is to fight it out in a duel. We don’t see this take place but the producer obviously remembered it because he went on to make this: "Idol of Paris is a 1948 film based on the novel Paiva, Queen of Love by Alfred Schirokauer, about a mid-19th century French courtesan Theresa who sleeps her way from poverty to the top of Second Empire society. It was an attempt by its makers to imitate the success of the Gainsborough melodramas." This is a lost film, I understand, but it did feature a duel between two women (using whips) and that was on the poster. It may actually have broken the company which made it, Premier Films, and who knows where their prints went to. At the time, Picturegoer said it was “a complete farrago of nonsense”.
Friday, 30 July 2021
Muriel Box, scriptwriter-director
Muriel Box, scriptwriter-director (continuation)
If you read the classic work on British Cinema of the 1950s, they say that there is a 1951 film called White Corridors which is the best of the time because it continues the documentary style, and expands it into drama which also deals with the welfare state and the new society. It is morally mature and not rushing off into nostalgia and fantasy. But, the BFI decided to restore the very old and perishable negatives first, so they won’t get around to White Corridors for a long time. So it was a lost film, you couldn't see it. I posted about this several years ago. But – White Corridors is now on You-Tube. The first thing I noticed about it was that it was scripted by Jan Read, who wrote the story for Street Corner. Then – this is a great film. God knows how it comes to be on You-tube. It overlaps with “My Brother Jonathan”, if you like that kind of thing. And, yes, they are both films about the Welfare State, and explaining why it is a good thing.
Two of Muriel Box’s films seem to be about the nature of fantasy – so “The Passionate Stranger is a gentle satire on the conventions of the romantic novel and the perils of confusing reality with fiction. Directed in inventive fashion by Oscar winner Muriel Box, (sharing writing credits with husband Sydney Box), this hugely engaging comedy is made available here in a brand-new transfer...” and Simon and Laura [1955] “stars Peter Finch (in one of his first British lead roles) and Kay Kendall as an unhappily married couple who decide, for strictly financial reasons, to play idealised versions of themselves in a kind of quasi-fictional soap opera for the newfangled medium of television. The final act anticipates reality TV by around half a century, as a Christmas special broadcast live turns messily chaotic thanks to the machinations of mischievous child-performer Timothy”. This belief that fantasy is unreal is a sort of critique of conventional romance which sounds like the critiques you got in 70s feminism, or leftism in general. This is not to say that a Rank Film could ever be just like an essay in Screen, but the idea of staging the story in a pleasurable way while also analysing its remoteness from reality sounds like a brilliant solution to well-known problems. It sounds a bit familiar, as a lot of professional screen-writers want to tell a story which exposes screenplay conventions as brain-damagingly artificial. So Box accepted that fantasy had to play a role in film.
I now have a DVD of ‘Strangers’ and it is effectively unwatchable. Too much the Fifties Rank film. It definitely is a critique of romantic fantasy – and this is what we can connect with the Seventies. In the film, the female lead is a romantic novelist who has run out of ideas. A new chauffeur arrives, young and good-looking, she has the idea for a romance about an illicit love affair between a bourgeois heroine and a chauffeur. By accident the real chauffeur gets to read the novel. He tries to take her up on it. Just before this point the film shifts into colour and we see the novel story. The cleverest part is the adjustments the novelist (Margaret Leighton) makes to reality. She becomes a concert pianist – a few steps above silly romantic fiction. For her husband, the heightening invovles him trying to stop her from playing the piano – she is now in the right and has a Grievance. The maid, kind and demure in the scenes of ‘reality’, now becomes sexy, scheming and forward – heightening her role as Threat to the lead figure. All this is very good, exquisite even, but it is the kind of thing which appeals to writers rather than making for real cinema. The fact that the heroine has a total of three servants makes it difficult to take her seriously. Leighton has no personality. Patricia Dainton, as Emily the maid, produces the best and most contrasting performances- out-acting Ralph Richardson, in this case. She is also a lot prettier than Richardson. I admit to being an admirer of Dainton – although I am not sure she ever appeared in a good film. With “Passionate Strangers”, the content certainly involves the critique of art itself, the creative control certainly comes from a Left feminist – but the film is thoroughly conservative and reinforces marriage, wealth, and the status quo.
My conclusion, for the Seventies – if people in 1975 thought that a ton of reforms were inevitable and long overdue and utterly obvious, it is because popular art had been frozen for 20 or 25 years. It’s not that the new ideas were wrong, more that they had been available for a couple of decades and the business of popular culture had failed to do anything with them. Left culture was underdeveloped, although developing fast by 1975, because of funding problems – the culture industry conspired to block and repress it. ‘Strangers’ turns out to be pretty much a film about The Servant Problem.
Box’s film “The Truth about Women” may be the only feminist feature film made in the 1950s. I haven’t seen it and, frankly, it sounds pretty dire. But, as I suspect, every woman who graduated during the 1950s could have made a series of convincing and modern-sounding feminist arguments. It’s just that these weren’t seen as cinematic. Jill Craigie's 1950 short documentary about equal pay for women has got all the arguments, even if the Equal Pay Act took another 25 years. You could find ten Fifties films about the servant problem for every one about the Employer Problem. This is just not a reflection of reality.
An actress called Julia Lockwood played a teenage fantasist figure in two films, 'Please Turn Over' and 'No Kidding', where her fantasies are a significant part of the plot. I think this idea may have been copied from 'Passionate Strangers'.
“Muriel Box described The Truth about Women, at 107 minutes by some way her longest work, as “the film personally significant to me above all others”. It is a portmanteau affair in which an elderly aristocrat (Laurence Harvey) reminisces about the numerous ladies in his life, each episode making unambiguous assertions about gender equality and the wrongs of patriarchal oppression. The days of submissive spouses are over: a woman can and should be “an equal partner in the business of life”, as one character puts it.“
I really don’t much want to see this.
If you read the classic work on British Cinema of the 1950s, they say that there is a 1951 film called White Corridors which is the best of the time because it continues the documentary style, and expands it into drama which also deals with the welfare state and the new society. It is morally mature and not rushing off into nostalgia and fantasy. But, the BFI decided to restore the very old and perishable negatives first, so they won’t get around to White Corridors for a long time. So it was a lost film, you couldn't see it. I posted about this several years ago. But – White Corridors is now on You-Tube. The first thing I noticed about it was that it was scripted by Jan Read, who wrote the story for Street Corner. Then – this is a great film. God knows how it comes to be on You-tube. It overlaps with “My Brother Jonathan”, if you like that kind of thing. And, yes, they are both films about the Welfare State, and explaining why it is a good thing.
Two of Muriel Box’s films seem to be about the nature of fantasy – so “The Passionate Stranger is a gentle satire on the conventions of the romantic novel and the perils of confusing reality with fiction. Directed in inventive fashion by Oscar winner Muriel Box, (sharing writing credits with husband Sydney Box), this hugely engaging comedy is made available here in a brand-new transfer...” and Simon and Laura [1955] “stars Peter Finch (in one of his first British lead roles) and Kay Kendall as an unhappily married couple who decide, for strictly financial reasons, to play idealised versions of themselves in a kind of quasi-fictional soap opera for the newfangled medium of television. The final act anticipates reality TV by around half a century, as a Christmas special broadcast live turns messily chaotic thanks to the machinations of mischievous child-performer Timothy”. This belief that fantasy is unreal is a sort of critique of conventional romance which sounds like the critiques you got in 70s feminism, or leftism in general. This is not to say that a Rank Film could ever be just like an essay in Screen, but the idea of staging the story in a pleasurable way while also analysing its remoteness from reality sounds like a brilliant solution to well-known problems. It sounds a bit familiar, as a lot of professional screen-writers want to tell a story which exposes screenplay conventions as brain-damagingly artificial. So Box accepted that fantasy had to play a role in film.
I now have a DVD of ‘Strangers’ and it is effectively unwatchable. Too much the Fifties Rank film. It definitely is a critique of romantic fantasy – and this is what we can connect with the Seventies. In the film, the female lead is a romantic novelist who has run out of ideas. A new chauffeur arrives, young and good-looking, she has the idea for a romance about an illicit love affair between a bourgeois heroine and a chauffeur. By accident the real chauffeur gets to read the novel. He tries to take her up on it. Just before this point the film shifts into colour and we see the novel story. The cleverest part is the adjustments the novelist (Margaret Leighton) makes to reality. She becomes a concert pianist – a few steps above silly romantic fiction. For her husband, the heightening invovles him trying to stop her from playing the piano – she is now in the right and has a Grievance. The maid, kind and demure in the scenes of ‘reality’, now becomes sexy, scheming and forward – heightening her role as Threat to the lead figure. All this is very good, exquisite even, but it is the kind of thing which appeals to writers rather than making for real cinema. The fact that the heroine has a total of three servants makes it difficult to take her seriously. Leighton has no personality. Patricia Dainton, as Emily the maid, produces the best and most contrasting performances- out-acting Ralph Richardson, in this case. She is also a lot prettier than Richardson. I admit to being an admirer of Dainton – although I am not sure she ever appeared in a good film. With “Passionate Strangers”, the content certainly involves the critique of art itself, the creative control certainly comes from a Left feminist – but the film is thoroughly conservative and reinforces marriage, wealth, and the status quo.
My conclusion, for the Seventies – if people in 1975 thought that a ton of reforms were inevitable and long overdue and utterly obvious, it is because popular art had been frozen for 20 or 25 years. It’s not that the new ideas were wrong, more that they had been available for a couple of decades and the business of popular culture had failed to do anything with them. Left culture was underdeveloped, although developing fast by 1975, because of funding problems – the culture industry conspired to block and repress it. ‘Strangers’ turns out to be pretty much a film about The Servant Problem.
Box’s film “The Truth about Women” may be the only feminist feature film made in the 1950s. I haven’t seen it and, frankly, it sounds pretty dire. But, as I suspect, every woman who graduated during the 1950s could have made a series of convincing and modern-sounding feminist arguments. It’s just that these weren’t seen as cinematic. Jill Craigie's 1950 short documentary about equal pay for women has got all the arguments, even if the Equal Pay Act took another 25 years. You could find ten Fifties films about the servant problem for every one about the Employer Problem. This is just not a reflection of reality.
An actress called Julia Lockwood played a teenage fantasist figure in two films, 'Please Turn Over' and 'No Kidding', where her fantasies are a significant part of the plot. I think this idea may have been copied from 'Passionate Strangers'.
“Muriel Box described The Truth about Women, at 107 minutes by some way her longest work, as “the film personally significant to me above all others”. It is a portmanteau affair in which an elderly aristocrat (Laurence Harvey) reminisces about the numerous ladies in his life, each episode making unambiguous assertions about gender equality and the wrongs of patriarchal oppression. The days of submissive spouses are over: a woman can and should be “an equal partner in the business of life”, as one character puts it.“
I really don’t much want to see this.
Monday, 21 June 2021
Notes on 50s Leftist art
Two elements of the 1950s Left
This is going to talk about a 1950 poem by EP Thompson and a 1953 film by Muriel Box.
The theme which is stirring me up is the question of whether art reacted to and celebrated the new welfare state. I think the answer is yes, and some art has been subject to selective memory just as poverty is written out of the past by selective memory. The 1951 general election saw a Conservative victory but also saw Labour getting 175,000 more votes than they did. This would suggest that the Welfare State was popular as well as expensive. That is heavily suggested by the fact that the Conservatives left it in being – going for a high tax policy which would have alienated their middle-class supporters. They have remained a high tax party. They remained in power for 13 years but did not demolish either the welfare state or nationalised industries (with a couple of exceptions – steel and road haulage). Policies which had recently been Left or even far Left had become consensual. I think this is is reflected by the art of the time – even if something consensual does not fuel intense conflict and debates. The context is essay collections (Declaration and Conviction), the first edited by Tom Maschler, in which Left intellectuals say how bored they are by the Left in the 1950s. The situation will stand a closer examination than those essayists give it. (Actually, some of the essayists are quite far Right.) Not everyone was equally bored by the Welfare State.
Thompson published a poem called ‘The Place Called Choice’. This was in a magazine, California Quarterly, emanating from the Marxist Left in America. The site is memorable while explaining why this poem was little-known in Britain until many years later. It is 14 pages long, over 400 lines I guess.
Old iron workings. Mica. Quartz. The monotonous peatbog,
Black roots, ling, harebell, the wet relics of a forest.
The gutted stannary. Scrub oak on the old encampment,
Brambles and St. John’s wort, among the chalkbits and pellets,
The droppings of rabbits, a sherd of pottery, a flint, a coin.
Or with more grace at Burford, integral with Cotswold stone,
Entering the ceremony of cottages, sweet william and crown imperial,
Buried among neighbours and labourers, the Leveller corporals.
Riding by night the Roundheads forded the river
(Fifty miles since dawn, Fairfax and Cromwell),
- this is very convincing descriptive poetry, clearly related to the documentary films which had been a feature of the previous 20 years (and which were still going in 1950). Another passage is:
Across the Piltdown gravel,
Over the Swanscombe skull, crunched among ammonites and shells,
Over the tiny Crustacea, the bric-a-brac of chalk,
First cousins to our father
Who lies crouched in the abandoned road of memory
Clutching in his stone fist a charm against the centuries:
Trawling the turfs of Fosberry with a net of shadows,
Vaulting the Countless Stones, the barrows, the temple to Mithras,
Bursting the hinges of Stonehenge and entering on Halifax,
Howling in the eyeteeth of the boar, through the saurian’s crutch,
I am eager to say how much I like the poem partly because my friend JE Keery turned it down for his Apocalyptics anthology. Thompson said the poem had “apocalyptic expectations”, which is why Jim was considering it. He was a bit bemused by the “saurian’s crutch” phrase. In the end, a long poem is not going to show well in an anthology. For me, this poem changes the balance of 1950s poetry. It is especially significant for 1950s Left poetry, but it is a vital part of the whole picture.
England, buried somewhere under bricks, oddments, worn tyres:
Under the shady transaction clinched in the flashy roadhouse:
Buried with Arnald and Lockyer, with Holberry, with Linell,
With the victims of anthrax: in the back courtyards of Bradford
Where the applewood is black, bearing fruit by the oldest mills:
Stupefied in the smoke of Sheffield, sullen in Derbyshire,
For the concept of roadhouse, let me quote Michael John Law (this is actually a summary of a paper I haven’t read):
In the inter-war Home Counties, the roadhouse, a sizeable country club style location of entertainment and dancing was an iconic destination of consumption and leisure aimed at the wealthier middle classes. These establishments were marketed in newsreels as exclusive and sophisticated but in reality were open to wider groups in a settings that offered anonymity by virtue of their suburban locations. Reflecting this, roadhouses were also used in literature and in cinema as a locus of transgression and danger.
The word “roadhouse” comes trailing a narrative of social aggression. This positions Thompson's poem – it provides sites which are not physical but embodiments of social myths. His poem is composed of pre-existing symbols and this allows it to make statements on the symbolic plain. All the sites in his poem are recognisable, and there are dozens of them. It follows that it has the freedom of abstract thought and yet its object is a shared social world, the one we live in. Thompson is always interested in the argument rather than originality. The poem takes us back to the real world at each point. Jim Keery pointed out that "Arnald" and the others were 17th C radicals, Levellers and so on.
(I doubt that roadhouses had the moral atmosphere which the commentator hopes they do. About 30 minutes’ walk from where I live is what I take to be a 1930s roadhouse, by the main road out of town and unrelated to what housing would have been around it when it was built. It was surely aimed at motorists. It is what we now call art deco – I find it beautiful rather than flashy. CAMRA says “The main entrance leads to an internal porch with a lovely timber and glass screen. Behind this is a lobby with woodwork that looks as though it would have been at home on an ocean liner or an up-market '30s cinema.” - the use of glass and chrome is what gets called “flashy”.) Thompson's poem is about commitment. That decision may be suspected of reducing the available interpretations to one, and throwing the evidence away, but his patient compilation of maybe 80 individual "shots" frees the imagination and makes it very likely we will start speculating and having chains of association of ideas. The impetus builds up and becomes irresistible.
Muriel Box directed 12 feature films during the 1950s and this is more than any other female director in Britain. She was a vocal feminist and spent much of her time, after her film career was over, advocating feminist ideas. I saw her 1953 film “Street Corner” on You-Tube. It is about policewomen. This is really a film about the welfare state as well as a feminist film. Despite certain artistic problems, it is a Left film which allows us to think about vital issues of Left art in Britain.
The initial problem with Box is that she has been forgotten. First, her films as a director have been abandoned by the “collective memory” of film fans. Secondly, she was a team player and without a distinctive visual style. Third, her films as director were part of commercial cinema, made for Rank Film, which means they were highly conventional and part of a period of cinema which virtually every film fan is eager to forget. (“her films were all shot quickly and relatively cheaply, with second-tier stars, aimed squarely at the mainstream of commercial domestic cinema.” - BFI) They would not have got made if they had stood out, at the script stage. Fourth, the great films she was associated with were her scripts directed by other people. “The Seventh Veil” and “Dear Murderer” are major films with stars and budgets which her films as director do not stretch to. “Seventh Veil” got the script Oscar and deserved to. So her filmography is a recovery project rather than a body of work accepted as classic, or which people can recall if you start talking about it.
‘Street Corner’ shows violence as undesirable and violent people as anti-social. I couldn’t help thinking, while watching this, about Sixties cinema presenting violent criminals as enviable and liberated. Really, it was as if the psychopath had taken control of the camera. My feeling is that I like films which enable me to think, and that the residue of such films may be a layer of moral sensibility which has sustained me and which has shaped the way I think about politics. Films which want the weak to be protected against the strong may not get discussed in high-powered essays, but they may have affected people's values. Box’s films are not remembered by film theorists, they did not produce posters which get stuck up on the bedroom walls of teenagers, but they are part of a whole realm of film narrative which has expressed values we live by. I am tempted to say that some films are unconnected to the life of society because they admire psychopaths, who are unable to connect, because they lack empathy. Films which connect you to society tend to draw social problems into the cinema, which interferes with fantasy, but they connect to you and you connect to them.
‘Street Corner’ is shot in documentary style and tells three stories, all of which concern the policewomen at an unnamed police station somewhere in London. The lead story has an 18 year old with a 15-month old baby, who is effectively thrown out of the house by a tyrannical mother-in-law, and takes up with a flashy young man whose economic basis, we find out, is as a jewel thief. He ends up getting nicked by two policewomen – somewhat surprisingly, but that is how the story works out. The young woman hangs out at a nightclub – we might think it would look like a flashy roadhouse, but it is in a cellar and glamour is in short supply. She gets to wear some nice clothes, but again the fantasy element (“I dress up in expensive clothes, stay up late, insult people, throw off restraints, and behave badly”) is constrained. A typical detail is bargaining with the fence – he offers the thief £80 for jewels worth £1000. Having read Ghost Squad I know that this is a good offer, fences were offering 5% of the real value for stolen jewels at that time. However, the point is that Box does not allow wishes to take over, the jewel thief is just as constrained by economic limits, by the stance of his employer, as a skilled labourer would be.
Peggy Cummins plays the 18 year old and had already made “Gun Crazy” in America. Date, 1950. Direction, Joseph H Lewis. This is probably a better film than ‘Street Corner’, but there are points on both sides. Cummins adds brilliant performances to both films.
So, we know that the character is 18 and has a 15-month old baby. These facts bespeak a sociological approach - her life situation is being described through events, rather than subjective wishes. She is frustrated, but not by by being a wife and mother- it is her mother-in-law who makes her unhappy. I said that Box does not have a visual style, but her artistic powers come out in other aspects of mise en scène, in the way she puts characters in a situation and gives them autonomy. The priority of the script is to give us information about the characters so that we know what their possibilities are and what decisions they are taking. Box takes great care about this, and it is obvious that this care corresponds to the ideas animating the Welfare State. Almost all the characters are female– this is a feminist and Left film and we can’t read it properly unless we build those ideas in. We are being asked to care and to think about the welfare of people. One feature is the idea of forgiveness – the story offers characters a way back in if they have stumbled, and this introduces the idea of being popular, of being approved by social opinion, as something indefinable which is of great importance to each individual. In fact, this idea is the collective. As follows, the film excludes the concept of pure evil – and the Peggy Cummins character goes to the bad but is clearly offered redemption, and shows repentance, at the end. The villains do not get the chance to express their hatred of society – this embracing of evil is significant in some films, but I just wonder if it is overrated. “Gun Crazy” is a good example, the Cummins character is brilliant with guns and has a complete fury against people who get in her way, but my feeling when I saw the film was that I wasn't enjoying this and the cruelty was not turning me on. I think Box’s patient interest in human character may get us further. Joseph H. Lewis had strong simple ideas for making cheap films (King Studios didn’t do expensive ones), but they aren’t necessarily great films. In ‘Terror in a Texas Town’, the sailor hero has a duel in which he has a harpoon and the bad guys have guns. This is a memorable idea, but it doesn’t make it a great film.
There is a brilliant essay on Box (by Josephine Botting and Sarah Castagnetti) on the BFI website: “After The Lost People, Muriel was set to make her solo directorial debut with a high-profile adaptation of Anthony Thorne’s bestselling novel So Long at the Fair – until star Jean Simmons insisted that she be replaced, foreshadowing similarly ‘unsisterly’ stances taken by Box’s subsequent stars Kay Kendall and Muriel Pavlow.“
I don't know the story here, but I suspect that the problem was Box wishing to show ordinary women working and fulfilling duties, as part of her vision of a society busy looking after people, and the actresses wishing to become Screen Goddesses (and go to Hollywood). I would make more of this, because it is part of a basic issue with Left cinema, and the imitation of reality is incompatible with the staging of fantasies, but after all I don’t have the basic stories. Box was not making “women's pictures” because she was not much interested in glamorising her actresses. (I have new information, from Box herself, interviewed on 16 January 1991, which partially disproves this: "she suddenly said to me - this was Kay Kendall - tears started to flow and she became very emotional, 'I've never been directed by a woman before!'" - so it wasn't about glamour, it was about not trusting women.) It may well be that feminism is incompatible with women’s pictures – which have largely disappeared since 1970. Jeanine Basinger codified the genre and ends her account in the 1960s. Box, in the interview, commented on how the studio always gave director jobs to men. So women were distrusted, and this was ”the intelligence of the system”. But, if you look at 100 male directors working in Britain in the 1950s, you really have to ask how many of them ever made a good film. And sifting through bad films lets you measure that ”intelligence of the system”. (The interviews project was set up by BECTU, the stage union, together with the BFI. I have to record that because people are so eager to record cinema union activity as damage rather than care and welfare. 700 interviews on this site.)
My feeling with Street Corner is that the film story does not allow the characters to sink into fantasy, and the way it is written does not allow the creator to give way to fantasy. Two of Muriel Box’s films which I haven’t seen seem to be about the nature of fantasy – (see next post).
The climax of Street Corner involves a police dog chasing down the villainous jewel thief. Reading up definitely shows it was a male dog… I feel this is a flaw, surely the film mission statement required a female police dog? Botting and Castagnetti give astounding details from preserved documents about the making of the film:
[producer] Sydney Box sought approval for Street Corner from the authorities well before filming began. As well as maintaining good relations, they needed police support to ensure accuracy and to keep the budget down by providing access to locations and equipment.
Collaboration on Street Corner began in early December 1951, with the police commissioner laying out the conditions on which assistance would be given. One key stipulation was an involvement at the script stage, leading to protracted negotiations as the producer’s desire for lurid and melodramatic events came up against the police commissioner’s insistence on authenticity. Shooting didn’t start until the following September, partly due to “innumerable battles with Scotland Yard” over the production.
TNA’s file includes no less than four treatments and various script iterations peppered with comments from the Met’s public information officer, Percy Fearnley, and Chief Superintendent Elizabeth Bather, [...]
It is incredible that a film got made at all under these conditions. This is reminiscent of Soviet reportage, where the institutions or sectors being described could raise objections to how the story went. This is an under-discussed problem – by getting so close to reality, Box could deal with real social problems in a convincing way. But then reality actually takes over, the creative autonomy of the artist sinks beneath the waves, and the main problems in making the story have directly to do with the government and their PR offices. The quality of “Street Corner” clearly has to do with government interference as well as with its impressive authenticity and accuracy of observation. This is something which was still causing problems in the 1970s, I mean that the collectivist artist wanted to abandon the imagination and hand control of stories over to the collective. But when someone turned up who claimed to be the voice of the people - maybe not someone working for the Metropolitan Police, but someone - the story lost purpose and the project lost conviction.
The most interesting thing I saw while tracing Box over the swamps of the Internet was a still from a film set in an “approved school” for girls (i.e. they were sent there by a court after committing crimes) which shows a riot... an extraordinary thing, other directors were spending the money on colonial battles which Box spends on a huge scene showing rioting 13-year olds. The anarchic energy is almost unnerving – just get 100 13-year olds on camera and they will look like the end of civilisation, I suppose. The thing is, the rule of cinema is to get the female characters wearing as enviable clothes as they possibly can, and all these half-grown tearaways are wearing prison clothing which most teenagers wouldn't be seen dead in. This is Box staging a grand tableau – of a scene which nobody else would even want to film. (I think the film is "Good-time girl", 1948, which she wrote but didn't direct.)
There certainly were left-wing artists at work in the 1950s, it wasn't all self-centred pangs about losing commitment, and the art of the time can be analysed to shed light on the upsurge of Left art after 1968. That is, there is a collective which works on difficult questions and whose results individuals have used.
This is going to talk about a 1950 poem by EP Thompson and a 1953 film by Muriel Box.
The theme which is stirring me up is the question of whether art reacted to and celebrated the new welfare state. I think the answer is yes, and some art has been subject to selective memory just as poverty is written out of the past by selective memory. The 1951 general election saw a Conservative victory but also saw Labour getting 175,000 more votes than they did. This would suggest that the Welfare State was popular as well as expensive. That is heavily suggested by the fact that the Conservatives left it in being – going for a high tax policy which would have alienated their middle-class supporters. They have remained a high tax party. They remained in power for 13 years but did not demolish either the welfare state or nationalised industries (with a couple of exceptions – steel and road haulage). Policies which had recently been Left or even far Left had become consensual. I think this is is reflected by the art of the time – even if something consensual does not fuel intense conflict and debates. The context is essay collections (Declaration and Conviction), the first edited by Tom Maschler, in which Left intellectuals say how bored they are by the Left in the 1950s. The situation will stand a closer examination than those essayists give it. (Actually, some of the essayists are quite far Right.) Not everyone was equally bored by the Welfare State.
Thompson published a poem called ‘The Place Called Choice’. This was in a magazine, California Quarterly, emanating from the Marxist Left in America. The site is memorable while explaining why this poem was little-known in Britain until many years later. It is 14 pages long, over 400 lines I guess.
Old iron workings. Mica. Quartz. The monotonous peatbog,
Black roots, ling, harebell, the wet relics of a forest.
The gutted stannary. Scrub oak on the old encampment,
Brambles and St. John’s wort, among the chalkbits and pellets,
The droppings of rabbits, a sherd of pottery, a flint, a coin.
Or with more grace at Burford, integral with Cotswold stone,
Entering the ceremony of cottages, sweet william and crown imperial,
Buried among neighbours and labourers, the Leveller corporals.
Riding by night the Roundheads forded the river
(Fifty miles since dawn, Fairfax and Cromwell),
- this is very convincing descriptive poetry, clearly related to the documentary films which had been a feature of the previous 20 years (and which were still going in 1950). Another passage is:
Across the Piltdown gravel,
Over the Swanscombe skull, crunched among ammonites and shells,
Over the tiny Crustacea, the bric-a-brac of chalk,
First cousins to our father
Who lies crouched in the abandoned road of memory
Clutching in his stone fist a charm against the centuries:
Trawling the turfs of Fosberry with a net of shadows,
Vaulting the Countless Stones, the barrows, the temple to Mithras,
Bursting the hinges of Stonehenge and entering on Halifax,
Howling in the eyeteeth of the boar, through the saurian’s crutch,
I am eager to say how much I like the poem partly because my friend JE Keery turned it down for his Apocalyptics anthology. Thompson said the poem had “apocalyptic expectations”, which is why Jim was considering it. He was a bit bemused by the “saurian’s crutch” phrase. In the end, a long poem is not going to show well in an anthology. For me, this poem changes the balance of 1950s poetry. It is especially significant for 1950s Left poetry, but it is a vital part of the whole picture.
England, buried somewhere under bricks, oddments, worn tyres:
Under the shady transaction clinched in the flashy roadhouse:
Buried with Arnald and Lockyer, with Holberry, with Linell,
With the victims of anthrax: in the back courtyards of Bradford
Where the applewood is black, bearing fruit by the oldest mills:
Stupefied in the smoke of Sheffield, sullen in Derbyshire,
For the concept of roadhouse, let me quote Michael John Law (this is actually a summary of a paper I haven’t read):
In the inter-war Home Counties, the roadhouse, a sizeable country club style location of entertainment and dancing was an iconic destination of consumption and leisure aimed at the wealthier middle classes. These establishments were marketed in newsreels as exclusive and sophisticated but in reality were open to wider groups in a settings that offered anonymity by virtue of their suburban locations. Reflecting this, roadhouses were also used in literature and in cinema as a locus of transgression and danger.
The word “roadhouse” comes trailing a narrative of social aggression. This positions Thompson's poem – it provides sites which are not physical but embodiments of social myths. His poem is composed of pre-existing symbols and this allows it to make statements on the symbolic plain. All the sites in his poem are recognisable, and there are dozens of them. It follows that it has the freedom of abstract thought and yet its object is a shared social world, the one we live in. Thompson is always interested in the argument rather than originality. The poem takes us back to the real world at each point. Jim Keery pointed out that "Arnald" and the others were 17th C radicals, Levellers and so on.
(I doubt that roadhouses had the moral atmosphere which the commentator hopes they do. About 30 minutes’ walk from where I live is what I take to be a 1930s roadhouse, by the main road out of town and unrelated to what housing would have been around it when it was built. It was surely aimed at motorists. It is what we now call art deco – I find it beautiful rather than flashy. CAMRA says “The main entrance leads to an internal porch with a lovely timber and glass screen. Behind this is a lobby with woodwork that looks as though it would have been at home on an ocean liner or an up-market '30s cinema.” - the use of glass and chrome is what gets called “flashy”.) Thompson's poem is about commitment. That decision may be suspected of reducing the available interpretations to one, and throwing the evidence away, but his patient compilation of maybe 80 individual "shots" frees the imagination and makes it very likely we will start speculating and having chains of association of ideas. The impetus builds up and becomes irresistible.
Muriel Box directed 12 feature films during the 1950s and this is more than any other female director in Britain. She was a vocal feminist and spent much of her time, after her film career was over, advocating feminist ideas. I saw her 1953 film “Street Corner” on You-Tube. It is about policewomen. This is really a film about the welfare state as well as a feminist film. Despite certain artistic problems, it is a Left film which allows us to think about vital issues of Left art in Britain.
The initial problem with Box is that she has been forgotten. First, her films as a director have been abandoned by the “collective memory” of film fans. Secondly, she was a team player and without a distinctive visual style. Third, her films as director were part of commercial cinema, made for Rank Film, which means they were highly conventional and part of a period of cinema which virtually every film fan is eager to forget. (“her films were all shot quickly and relatively cheaply, with second-tier stars, aimed squarely at the mainstream of commercial domestic cinema.” - BFI) They would not have got made if they had stood out, at the script stage. Fourth, the great films she was associated with were her scripts directed by other people. “The Seventh Veil” and “Dear Murderer” are major films with stars and budgets which her films as director do not stretch to. “Seventh Veil” got the script Oscar and deserved to. So her filmography is a recovery project rather than a body of work accepted as classic, or which people can recall if you start talking about it.
‘Street Corner’ shows violence as undesirable and violent people as anti-social. I couldn’t help thinking, while watching this, about Sixties cinema presenting violent criminals as enviable and liberated. Really, it was as if the psychopath had taken control of the camera. My feeling is that I like films which enable me to think, and that the residue of such films may be a layer of moral sensibility which has sustained me and which has shaped the way I think about politics. Films which want the weak to be protected against the strong may not get discussed in high-powered essays, but they may have affected people's values. Box’s films are not remembered by film theorists, they did not produce posters which get stuck up on the bedroom walls of teenagers, but they are part of a whole realm of film narrative which has expressed values we live by. I am tempted to say that some films are unconnected to the life of society because they admire psychopaths, who are unable to connect, because they lack empathy. Films which connect you to society tend to draw social problems into the cinema, which interferes with fantasy, but they connect to you and you connect to them.
‘Street Corner’ is shot in documentary style and tells three stories, all of which concern the policewomen at an unnamed police station somewhere in London. The lead story has an 18 year old with a 15-month old baby, who is effectively thrown out of the house by a tyrannical mother-in-law, and takes up with a flashy young man whose economic basis, we find out, is as a jewel thief. He ends up getting nicked by two policewomen – somewhat surprisingly, but that is how the story works out. The young woman hangs out at a nightclub – we might think it would look like a flashy roadhouse, but it is in a cellar and glamour is in short supply. She gets to wear some nice clothes, but again the fantasy element (“I dress up in expensive clothes, stay up late, insult people, throw off restraints, and behave badly”) is constrained. A typical detail is bargaining with the fence – he offers the thief £80 for jewels worth £1000. Having read Ghost Squad I know that this is a good offer, fences were offering 5% of the real value for stolen jewels at that time. However, the point is that Box does not allow wishes to take over, the jewel thief is just as constrained by economic limits, by the stance of his employer, as a skilled labourer would be.
Peggy Cummins plays the 18 year old and had already made “Gun Crazy” in America. Date, 1950. Direction, Joseph H Lewis. This is probably a better film than ‘Street Corner’, but there are points on both sides. Cummins adds brilliant performances to both films.
So, we know that the character is 18 and has a 15-month old baby. These facts bespeak a sociological approach - her life situation is being described through events, rather than subjective wishes. She is frustrated, but not by by being a wife and mother- it is her mother-in-law who makes her unhappy. I said that Box does not have a visual style, but her artistic powers come out in other aspects of mise en scène, in the way she puts characters in a situation and gives them autonomy. The priority of the script is to give us information about the characters so that we know what their possibilities are and what decisions they are taking. Box takes great care about this, and it is obvious that this care corresponds to the ideas animating the Welfare State. Almost all the characters are female– this is a feminist and Left film and we can’t read it properly unless we build those ideas in. We are being asked to care and to think about the welfare of people. One feature is the idea of forgiveness – the story offers characters a way back in if they have stumbled, and this introduces the idea of being popular, of being approved by social opinion, as something indefinable which is of great importance to each individual. In fact, this idea is the collective. As follows, the film excludes the concept of pure evil – and the Peggy Cummins character goes to the bad but is clearly offered redemption, and shows repentance, at the end. The villains do not get the chance to express their hatred of society – this embracing of evil is significant in some films, but I just wonder if it is overrated. “Gun Crazy” is a good example, the Cummins character is brilliant with guns and has a complete fury against people who get in her way, but my feeling when I saw the film was that I wasn't enjoying this and the cruelty was not turning me on. I think Box’s patient interest in human character may get us further. Joseph H. Lewis had strong simple ideas for making cheap films (King Studios didn’t do expensive ones), but they aren’t necessarily great films. In ‘Terror in a Texas Town’, the sailor hero has a duel in which he has a harpoon and the bad guys have guns. This is a memorable idea, but it doesn’t make it a great film.
There is a brilliant essay on Box (by Josephine Botting and Sarah Castagnetti) on the BFI website: “After The Lost People, Muriel was set to make her solo directorial debut with a high-profile adaptation of Anthony Thorne’s bestselling novel So Long at the Fair – until star Jean Simmons insisted that she be replaced, foreshadowing similarly ‘unsisterly’ stances taken by Box’s subsequent stars Kay Kendall and Muriel Pavlow.“
I don't know the story here, but I suspect that the problem was Box wishing to show ordinary women working and fulfilling duties, as part of her vision of a society busy looking after people, and the actresses wishing to become Screen Goddesses (and go to Hollywood). I would make more of this, because it is part of a basic issue with Left cinema, and the imitation of reality is incompatible with the staging of fantasies, but after all I don’t have the basic stories. Box was not making “women's pictures” because she was not much interested in glamorising her actresses. (I have new information, from Box herself, interviewed on 16 January 1991, which partially disproves this: "she suddenly said to me - this was Kay Kendall - tears started to flow and she became very emotional, 'I've never been directed by a woman before!'" - so it wasn't about glamour, it was about not trusting women.) It may well be that feminism is incompatible with women’s pictures – which have largely disappeared since 1970. Jeanine Basinger codified the genre and ends her account in the 1960s. Box, in the interview, commented on how the studio always gave director jobs to men. So women were distrusted, and this was ”the intelligence of the system”. But, if you look at 100 male directors working in Britain in the 1950s, you really have to ask how many of them ever made a good film. And sifting through bad films lets you measure that ”intelligence of the system”. (The interviews project was set up by BECTU, the stage union, together with the BFI. I have to record that because people are so eager to record cinema union activity as damage rather than care and welfare. 700 interviews on this site.)
My feeling with Street Corner is that the film story does not allow the characters to sink into fantasy, and the way it is written does not allow the creator to give way to fantasy. Two of Muriel Box’s films which I haven’t seen seem to be about the nature of fantasy – (see next post).
The climax of Street Corner involves a police dog chasing down the villainous jewel thief. Reading up definitely shows it was a male dog… I feel this is a flaw, surely the film mission statement required a female police dog? Botting and Castagnetti give astounding details from preserved documents about the making of the film:
[producer] Sydney Box sought approval for Street Corner from the authorities well before filming began. As well as maintaining good relations, they needed police support to ensure accuracy and to keep the budget down by providing access to locations and equipment.
Collaboration on Street Corner began in early December 1951, with the police commissioner laying out the conditions on which assistance would be given. One key stipulation was an involvement at the script stage, leading to protracted negotiations as the producer’s desire for lurid and melodramatic events came up against the police commissioner’s insistence on authenticity. Shooting didn’t start until the following September, partly due to “innumerable battles with Scotland Yard” over the production.
TNA’s file includes no less than four treatments and various script iterations peppered with comments from the Met’s public information officer, Percy Fearnley, and Chief Superintendent Elizabeth Bather, [...]
It is incredible that a film got made at all under these conditions. This is reminiscent of Soviet reportage, where the institutions or sectors being described could raise objections to how the story went. This is an under-discussed problem – by getting so close to reality, Box could deal with real social problems in a convincing way. But then reality actually takes over, the creative autonomy of the artist sinks beneath the waves, and the main problems in making the story have directly to do with the government and their PR offices. The quality of “Street Corner” clearly has to do with government interference as well as with its impressive authenticity and accuracy of observation. This is something which was still causing problems in the 1970s, I mean that the collectivist artist wanted to abandon the imagination and hand control of stories over to the collective. But when someone turned up who claimed to be the voice of the people - maybe not someone working for the Metropolitan Police, but someone - the story lost purpose and the project lost conviction.
The most interesting thing I saw while tracing Box over the swamps of the Internet was a still from a film set in an “approved school” for girls (i.e. they were sent there by a court after committing crimes) which shows a riot... an extraordinary thing, other directors were spending the money on colonial battles which Box spends on a huge scene showing rioting 13-year olds. The anarchic energy is almost unnerving – just get 100 13-year olds on camera and they will look like the end of civilisation, I suppose. The thing is, the rule of cinema is to get the female characters wearing as enviable clothes as they possibly can, and all these half-grown tearaways are wearing prison clothing which most teenagers wouldn't be seen dead in. This is Box staging a grand tableau – of a scene which nobody else would even want to film. (I think the film is "Good-time girl", 1948, which she wrote but didn't direct.)
There certainly were left-wing artists at work in the 1950s, it wasn't all self-centred pangs about losing commitment, and the art of the time can be analysed to shed light on the upsurge of Left art after 1968. That is, there is a collective which works on difficult questions and whose results individuals have used.
Sunday, 3 June 2018
a new angle on New Romantic poetry
The
prism of my crystal fears: a new angle on New Romantic poetry
It
is almost 20 years since James Keery re-invented the study of the New
Romantics with his work
“Schönheit Apocalyptica”, and the era of sensational new interpretations has given way to a more
solid phase of cataloguing and labelling the finds. But I am offering a new line on the poetry – not to
cast into doubt the findings of modern research, by Keery, John Goodby, Nigel Wheale, and others,
but to shed light from a different direction. This is by approaching the poetry from cinema.
“Schönheit Apocalyptica”, and the era of sensational new interpretations has given way to a more
solid phase of cataloguing and labelling the finds. But I am offering a new line on the poetry – not to
cast into doubt the findings of modern research, by Keery, John Goodby, Nigel Wheale, and others,
but to shed light from a different direction. This is by approaching the poetry from cinema.
There is a whole line of cinema criticism which presents British cinema as succeeding only where it is realistic and frankly faces social issues. Bypassing these is taken as a sort of evasion of responsibilities, a refusal to honour your debts. Lindsay Anderson seemed to believe, at his desk, that understanding the arrangements for finance and censorship in the British industry, grasping British social problems, and making great films, were roughly the same thing. One cannot get far with this subject without mentioning Julian Petley’s 1986 essay “The Lost Continent”, where he suggests that the climactic form of cinema is not realism and even that there is a current of English cinema which has avoided realism and swum towards quite other goals. This whole debate is highly relevant to Apocalyptic poetry and its frank rejection of realism and social relevance – and suggests a link between that stance and certain highly emotive and assiduously forgotten films of the 1940s. This line of cinema is described in The British Cinema Book, a collection edited by Robert Murphy. Two passages are of special interest. One quotes the producer Herbert Wilcox: he made “happy, unclouded pictures. We do not want sadism, abnormality, and psycho-analysis” and clarifies “What he was referring to was a loose group of psychological melodramas (usually crime thrillers) which could be classified as British film noir. The central type in these films was the misfit, often a fugitive […] always tormented, desperate, unable to find a safe haven or a secure identity. In some films these protagonists begin to doubt their own sanity, and the result is breakdown or uncontrolled violence […] the actor who most often embodied this type was Eric Portman.” Portman (1901-69) was the Nazi submarine commander in 49th Parallel. He “starred in Great Day (1945), Wanted for Murder (1946), Daybreak (1946), Dear Murderer (1947), The Mark of Cain (1948), Corridor of Mirrors (1948) and The Spider and the Fly (1949). In all these films he played tormented, sexually insecure failures.” "Leonard Wallace noted that Portman had a large female following: ‘It’s the strength being harried and tested by circumstances that really gets the girls suffering for him … No-one is better than Portman at expressing with a haunted, tortured, expression of the eyes and face otherwise taut and immobile, the inner bitterness of a strong man’s soul.’ Picturegoer readers, presumably from both sexes, voted him into fourth place in the 1947 poll for his performance as the tormented serial killer in Wanted for Murder.” Another chapter in the same book (by about 40 film scholars) also recalls Portman: “his intellectual forehead, hooded eyes – now cloudy, now gleaming – and tight yet sensual mouth suggest ‘ordinary people’ thoughtfulness.” “In Wanted for Murder he plays the Hyde Park strangler, and attributes his murderous drives to his hangman forefather (hereditary tendencies? Or morbid imagination? or both?).” In two films where he is the rival of Maxwell Reed, he is “suave, supercilious, secretive, rational, deadly jealous.”
Fans
of Apocalyptic poetry will recognise many of these traits in the
poetry we like. It would be crude to state that the fugitive’s
exclusion from society echoed the Apocalyptic rejection of the State,
the war effort, science, reason, and so on – but not untrue. While
the analogies with dreamlike thrillers split the poetry, since only
some of the poetry fits inside them (notably Thompson, Barker, and
Beecham), the popularity of the films suggests first, that we would
have Apocalyptic poetry even if there had been no manifestos,
secondly, that we do have to allow for an element of the public mood
during a finite period of the 1940s which fuelled art, in various
genres, with specific predilections. How could Portman be fourth most
popular star of 1947 for playing a serial killer? In Daybreak he plays a hangman whose wife is involved with the thuggish and yet sexually charged Maxwell Reed. He fakes his own death to frame Reed, who is convicted– and Portman visits him in his cell, before carrying out the final act of revenge. In a compromised resolution, Portman confesses rather than completing the story. Then he hangs himself.
I found a copy of Film Review for 1948 which has an interview with Portman. He says "Something aloof, uncertain, perverse perhaps [...] these are the qualities I look for in film roles." (The omitted words were 'not necessarily unpleasant, if that is a quality'.) He says that 'Corridor of Mirrors' was his favourite role. Portman
was not the cineaste who gave rise to this whole line of films, he
was just an actor who had certain qualities, of ambiguity, high
intellect, good looks, and anguish, among other things, which were necessary to
carry these strange and perverse plots. Yet, the interview suggests that he was choosing roles as part of an artistic strategy, so that his films (for that time) are part of a single statement, however obliquely made. Evidently, over a period of
roughly three years, he had a “drawing power” which meant that
this was a commercial formula and that people bought tickets because
they knew that a film with Eric Portman would carry certain moods and
that was what they wanted. An actor saying that he seeks out perverse roles is as close as you were allowed to get in 1948 to saying "I am a pervert and I want to play gay roles". Film Review shows him in the top ten (British) actors in 1947 but not in 1948, the mood was already evaporating.
Corridor
of Mirrors is related to French films by Jean Delannoy and
Jean Cocteau, as the write-up in ImDB says. “In Corridor of
Mirrors he plays a rich mystical aesthete who thinks he
murdered Welsh beauty Edana Romney in a previous life. In effect, he
frames, and then hangs, himself.” He has a French name because the film has a French plot. The text on the cover of the DVD
tells us “Mangin [Portman] becomes obsessed with his new muse
believing she is the reincarnation of his lover from a former life,
whose portrait hangs in his home. He adorns Myfanwy with antique
jewels and precious fabrics, making her the double of his first
mistress. As their relationship escalates, Mangin’s controlling
nature becomes too much and during a sumptuous Venetian-style ball he
has planned for her, Myfanwy rebels against his brainwashing and
tries to run away…” Mangin was recuperating from wounds
after the First World War when he received the insight that he had
lived before and loved a woman who looked exactly like the Edana
Romney character. The unstated link between prophecy and PTSD or
shell-shock is significant. (Cocteau made a film of Beauty
and the Beast and Corridor is a version of
Bluebeard.) He frames himself for a murder he did not commit - repeating the climax of Daybreak by hanging himself. This was a commercial formula - crazy, why was this commercial?
The
writer and producer was Rudolph Cartier, better known as the producer
of all the first three series of “Quatermass” on television. To
be exact, he co-wrote the script with Edana Romney, the female star.
The words “antique jewels and precious fabrics” and “sumptuous
ball” are code-words, people in 1948 simply wanted to see these
things no matter what the plot of the film was. (Cartier was
Austrian and directed, as Rudolf Katscher, a 1933 Peter Lorre film,
for UFA.)
The
agreed break-through moment for poetry is around 1933. George Barker, Dylan
Thomas, and David Gascoyne are starting to write poems in a
fundamentally new style. This was the substance on which the theory
of Apocalypse, in 1937 and later, was founded. It had tendencies in
common with Surrealism – which was of all things a productive idea,
one which spread in a thousand directions. My argument is that the
Surrealist line in cinema produced a kind of film in the mid-40s
which coincided with Apocalyptic poetry because this too had
Surrealist DNA. But also – the poets watched films.
As
is well-known, the 1943 American film Night of Fear starts
with a sequence in which the protagonist enters a room full of
mirrors, apparently in a trance, to kill someone in an act for which
he has no motive. The next day, he has a memory of it but thinks it
was a dream. I wanted to address the link between a corridor of
mirrors and a room full of them. Both are an excuse for exotic and
ambiguous sequences of visual information. Both tend to abolish the
outside world of objectivity – the actor is as it were trapped in
his own head, advancing only into mirrored space. But also, to expose
the presence of Surrealism in American popular cinema – in a
sub-genre of film noir where the hero is carrying out dream-like
actions, under the influence of concussion, hypnosis, or traumatic
dissociation. This is not presented as the free dissociation of the
Parisian surrealists. Nor, due to censorship rules, is it presented
as due to drugs – we have to imagine the trance-like and
suggestible states of various noir heroes as taking place without
drugs. Key elements of certain New Romantic poems were thus present
in cinematic culture. In the novel, significant examples of
dissociation and involuntary but compulsive action are in Hangover
Square (by Patrick Hamilton), and Traitor's Purse,
by Margery Allingham. In Allingham’s novel, the hero has concussion
and amnesia, only able to follow a plan he does not understand and to
escape from the police, who want him for murder. These plots
noticeably resemble the stories of many Apocalyptic poems, where the
protagonist is moving through the plot of a dream or an allegory,
hunted by terrible dangers, unable to plan rationally but able to
utter unnatural knowledge of Fate. The original Apocalypse, of John,
can be fitted back into this realm, as an allegory involving
prophecy, involuntary and inexplicable knowledge, visions which are
partly paranoia.
If
we take a passage from a Dunstan Thompson poem –
Where
skullbone banners, no pity flags, are flying
Before
the cruel and radium caves, he lairs
His
treasure. There, while jackals scream, Lord Vulture,
Wing
caged in crystal, sings his subtle airs
Of
praise, recalls how orchid adder hissed
Above
the crypt when lion and lover kissed.
Nightmare
is livelong by a never-ending:
In
the most mandrake forest, I walk, love lost,
Through
panther grass towards no good morrow. Agave
Leaves
like hundred years impale my ghost
On
yesterdays of youth. At crossroad stands
The
strangler with his four and frantic hands.
(“Lament
for the Sleepwalker”)
–this
resembles Night
of Fear because
of the four hands (two people trying to strangle each other in the
mirrored room) and the sleepwalking quality. But the striking
resemblance is in emotional ambience. Whatever the brilliance of
Thompson’s language, the tone is one of hysteria, doom, persecutory
anxiety. The raw material of Night
of Fear is
also what Thompson is drawing on. Film and poem have the same high
pitch. (The image of a bird’s wing trapped in crystal also appears
in a poem by Audrey Beecham, “Whose blunted beak has tried a
million years/ To breach the prism of my crystal fears.”) Thompson
and Cornell Woolrich, the source writer of Night
of Fear,
were in the same place, hearing the same music.
Corridor has
a protagonist, Paul Mangin [Portman], who is animated by involuntary
and compulsive actions due to re-incarnation. This is a variant on
hypnosis, dissociation, drugs, etc. It is, however, the exit of a man
from daily life into a myth – which is what the Apocalyptic poets
were trying to bring about. (The model was certainly
Delannoy’s L’éternel retour rather than recent
poetry.) The reincarnation theme, illustrating a fantasy about love
outlasting death, was present in popular films quite outside film
noir – for example The Man in Grey and Morning
in Mayfair. In Corridor the scenery is a house
which is quite literally created by the protagonist as the
realisation of a dream, a besetting vision. Objective scenery is thus
replaced by dream symbols – mimicking what the director of an art
film might do, and this is a step towards an English art cinema, but
also mimicking a large number of New Romantic poems where the action
is taking place in a dream landscape. A fully realised art film would
be an apocalypse – an unveiling of what is hidden, where the
unknown exhibits itself in highly sensuous and yet irrational form.
We are entitled to imagine New Romantic poems being recited by
Portman. In the mansion, there is a corridor of mirrors – behind
each one is a 16th C style dress – for Romney to wear, as
she opens each door. (The echo is of Bluebeard, but what we
experience is unchained narcissism.)
Watching Corridor has
a strong retrospective colouring for someone who watches Hammer
films: because their standard scene of the travellers entering a
magnificent castle from which the host is mysteriously absent is so
clearly taken from Corridor. The standard costume of the
vulnerable female stars is also derived from the brocaded dresses
worn by Edana Romney. Corridor is a women's picture:
there are almost no scenes without Romney, and her affair with Paul
Mangin is viewed entirely from her point of view. She dresses up,
tries on jewels, and looks at herself in the mirror, and
Mangin is present mainly as a spectator for her display. At one level, Mangin is a male character who collects women's clothing: but he is not a gay character in any way, the emotional seduction of the film is that a female star is acting passively in submerging in a complete fantasy world set up by a perverse male character. This is the propulsion of the film and it's very sexy. The brocade dresses are just elements of his amour fou scenario. Naturally the film shows her breaking free and, in flash forwards, getting married to someone else and leading a healthy life in Wales; it's 1948, she can't just go on enjoying the fantasy.
Nigel
Wheale has already written expertly on the links between Michael
Powell’s “A matter of life and death” and a sequence in Lynette
Roberts’ Gods with Stainless Ears. There is another
style of cinema, the melodrama associated with Gainsborough Films,
which has links with Forties poetry and which needs to be brought in
when we are considering the tenor of the time. What I am saying is
that we need to look beyond the high-budget romances of Gainsborough
and consider also the paranoiac and dreamlike noir which seized on
Eric Portman as its face.
The
movement “Apocalypse” had legitimate sources in Lawrence,
Berdyaev, in the critique of merely sociological literature, in
Personalist theology, and so forth. But some of the poems also bear
noticeable resemblances to scenes in the films of the time. The view
of film historians is that, although the Forties saw a great number
of realistic films, in which the techniques of the documentary moment
were adapted into fiction which reflected the objective nature of the
war and of military technology, the cinema audience also wanted
escapist films – to get away from rationing, bad war news, the
absence of lovers on war matters. A larger share of the audience at
home was female – without simplifying too much, this inclined
film-makers to have female protagonists, to make melodramas, and to
use luxurious settings (especially clothes). The melodrama did not take off in 1939: it only took off when the war was won, roughly. It expresses boredom with the war. Since the 1960s, maybe
specifically since an article by Andrew Sarris in 1963, historians
have tended to agree that the practice of film history in mid-century
devalued women’s films and devised several negative aesthetic
categories into which women’s pictures could be safely stored and closed in darkness. As Petley pointed out, British film critics didn't like melodrama and only gave points to films which had a large component of documentary and social realism
The
memory of L’éternel retour is clouded by its role
as something which was aimed to please the Nazis. The Nazi grip on
the French film industry, during the Occupation, was especially hard.
The title is a translation of die ewige Wiederkehr, a
phrase used by Nietzsche. The neo-classical composition of the
visually gorgeous film was arguably a homage to the neo-classicism of
Nazi visual art, such as Arno Breker sculptures. Even Jean Marais’
fair hair was interpreted as a homage to Aryan values. Pushing that
idea away, we can agree that the utter material deprivation of France
during the Occupation, with the occupation administration
confiscating every commodity to support the German economy, favoured a
stylised genre of spectacular fantasy film, of which Delannoy
was the chief director. (The exactions were part of the peace
conditions accepted by the Vichy government and affected the
unoccupied zone as much as the occupied one.) Les visiteurs du soir is the other obvious example of spectacle-film for the hungry. The point is that war
conditions favoured luxurious dreamlike fantasy, even if
democratic countries also had a dominant line of realist dramas
involving ordinary people. When we see English poetry involving
mythic fantasy and super-sensuous images, it does resemble certain
Forties films. A more fundamental aspect of Apocalyptic poetry is the
focus on the self and its subjective states to the exclusion of
objective factors and even realism. This is easily detached from the
“ideological ground” of living in a permanent state outside
history and inside apocalypse, as argued by Berdyaev. Indeed, we can
quite easily attach it to melodramatic films – both the lush
Gainsborough romances of the period and the dark thrillers
in which Eric Portman starred. We can even see it as a protest
against the close-down of the consumer economy for the benefit of war
production (and expenditure on aggression).
There is an American
film called The Brighton Strangler (Max Nosseck, 1945) in which an
actor who has had a long run of playing a murderer in a play called
The Brighton Strangler suffers concussion after a bomb strike and
then starts to re-enact the play by committing real murders. This is
an unwatchably bad film due to the stupid psychological basis.
However, it shows the lead figure acting out a compulsion in complete
disregard of reason and calculation, and this suspension unignorably
resembles the basic rule for Apocalyptic poetry. Humans generally
consider their actions and conduct an inner argument to maximise
success in a set of long-lasting social games. They exploit
predictability by means of complex inhibitions, and compulsion makes
them unattractive as allies as well as unable to react to
circumstances. But evidently the point of departure for the
Apocalyptic style in poetry is to suspend all that and give way to a
compulsion – in which you can hear prophetic truths. Even if you dislike
the poetic style, you have to explain why its key feature is also
present in the dregs of popular culture, a cliché which a tired
scriptwriter can resort to without thought.
A corollary is that
we may need to look past the intellectual sources of Apocalyptic
poetry (in Lawrence and Berdyaev, as worked out first by John
Goodland) and look for broader reasons why these “trance
narratives” were accepted and also why people desired to experience
them in art. There is almost too much evidence. It may be that the
worst of the films, and also the worst of the poetry, both surviving
in large quantities, give us a less defended, more naïve, version of
the theme.
Take the motif of a
character who drinks to excess and where the resolution of a mystery
is that he has committed a murder in a dream state, had a blackout
afterwards, and cannot remember that he has committed the murder. In
“The Black Angel” (film, American), he actually investigates the
murder and helps to solve it. As you pile up stories that use this
theme, it becomes obvious that Apocalyptic poetry is written in a
blackout, the poems tend to be inconsistent and inconclusive because
a “second draft” is impossible – the creative process is
disconnected from the conscious self. In poetry, the trance state is
felt as desirable – it is interesting that in film it is mostly
frightening and involves the protagonist in horrible acts. The
playing out of buried compulsions reminds us of drug culture, a few
decades later – but this is just an interesting coincidence. The
use of opium and cocaine was hardly unknown to the Surrealists or to
Hollywood scriptwriters, but it doesn't explain why audiences found
the “compulsive state” so attractive. We
can list various narrative settings:
The
hero is a prophet and focuses the true forces of history as knowledge, which he utters in this state (Gascoyne)
The
hero commits murder in a trance-like state, possessed by hypnosis or
morbid heredity
The
hero is sleepwalking
The
hero is enacting a myth under the influence of ancestral dramas
The
hero is acting irrationally under the control of l’amour
fou
Obviously
these are quite different, but they all have in common the
disappearance of reason in the surrender to irrational compulsions. I
would like to add the spirit possession described in Kathleen Raine’s
poem ‘Invocation’. James Kirkup’s poem ‘The Glass Fable’
(published in Poetry Quarterly in 1943) describes a
dream which affects two people, who travel to the same place to meet.
He
rises, slowly, in a long,
slow
trance
ritual,
receptive
dance
an
iridescent manuscript
is
buried in the tomb of his loins.
While we would not normally see Kirkup as an Apocalyptic poet, he is very close to some of the poets we have mentioned. His poem takes the male lovers to a palace made of jewels – this is a literal echo of the jewelled landscapes of the Biblical Book of Revelations, but also resembles the “precious jewels” of Corridor of Mirrors. This would redefine Revelations as a spectacle film in the line of L’éternel retour!
The
crystal floors are deep, and spring
from
wells of molten glass, the rooted walls
that
fluctuate are fluted coral cliffs
rising
from the antipodes, and lift
diminishing
perspectives, turrets, towers
The
effect is as if the molten glass were semen, and the frozen glass
were a social surface, a place where two male lovers are happy –
which is threatened with collapse (“pour in avalanches down/ deep
deliquescent graves”). The crystals are a climax before it happens
(so to speak). Fable also includes a corridor of
mirrors. The link of prophetic trance to noir blackouts is a stretch,
but Gascoyne’s diaries of the time show the kind of character who
inhabits sleepwalking film noir: anxious, drugged-up, hyper,
obsessed, vagrant. So the besetting impulses of Night of
Fear connect to the dreamlike beasts of Apocalypse (where
heaven has a "sea of glass"). Is Kirkup's
the same glass as in the corridor of mirrors?
There
is a group of poets who fall outside the well-defined Apocalyptic
realm but who represent an obvious shared ideal, one which is typical
of the Forties. We might benefit from defining another centre of
attraction for poets, and temporarily masking out the Treece/Hendry
statement of ideals. There is a whole anti-realist hemisphere of the
world. If you make Raine, Barker, Beecham, and Kirkup the centre, you
develop a different map.
John
Goodby’s work on Dylan Thomas’ Notebooks, especially, has
emphasised that the key developments were around 1933. So how do we
align this with a line of cinema that patently wasn’t there until
1945? I think we have to re-think the development of Apocalyptic
poetry. It was a broad movement and the subdivisions could be of
great importance. Poetry written in 1933 or 1935 could not be a protest against the deprivations of the war economy – this is a puzzle. As for the end of the movement (and James Keery has
been collecting Fifties Apocalyptic poetry on a large scale), the end
of the tormented/fugitive hero film cycle (and the effective end
of Portman’s career as a star) suggests that this was a brief
flare-up, and that public taste moved on. (Some of the thematic
material migrated into the genre of horror film.) The suppressed broke out, briefly, and the sense of release was wildly exciting; and then suppression was re-installed. The Fifties saw a
new sensibility, family-oriented, Christian, aimed at reconstruction
and the revival of trade, etc. The British melodramatic film is scarcely there in the 1950s. A group of works, in painting,
theatre, cinema, and ballet as well as in poetry, went out of fashion
and was buried and forgotten – ready to be salvaged to memory in
the 1987 New Romantic exhibition, or later. The return to normality in film may not have followed exactly the same dates as the normalisation in poetry. The 1950s ended, culturally, in 1965, as so many people have said.
I
think we have to consider a new definition of Forties poetry in which
"total subjectivity and access to a egocentric Sublime" are
the key terms, and which is still sharply visible when we contrast
70s publications by those poets – so Raine, Gascoyne,
Barker, Jack Beeching – with other publications, in the
70s. This sidelines the straight Apocalyptic line, with its
derivation from Berdyaev. The consequence of passivity and steadfast
belief in feelings is that this manner erases the masculine – it
converges rather clearly on the (traditionally) female genre of
melodrama. When you release what was repressed and unconscious, in a society which imprisons gay men, some of what is released will be homosexual narratives, allowed to flourish and complete. But this new style is not straightforwardly gay poetry (or gay cinema),
rather it advances into a territory where the oppositions are
erased.
[Many
Forties pictures arrived on a memory stick which I acquired I know
not how, perhaps while sleepwalking. One of these is Frenzy (Vernon
Sewell, 1945?, aka Latin Quarter), which has much the
same plot as Corridor of Mirrors. A sculptor kills a
model to put her inside a sculpture which records the image of his
dead former beloved, etc. Although I am a Derrick de Marney fan, in a
modest way, I admit I couldn’t watch this – it is too similar to
Roger Corman’s Bucketful of Blood, and I couldn’t
take it for that reason. Also the plotline is much like an ancient
Janet Gaynor film (possibly Street Angel, 1927). All too
obviously, the young woman inside the stone is like the wing inside
the crystal. I intend to watch this batch as time allows, and it does
include three Eric Portman films.]
[I
was distracted by a minor character in Corridor. As the
couturier, he struck me by his slyness, perversity, and the ambiguity
and tension which he gave to his lines. After searching a bit, I
realised that I had recently seen him in two other films (the
1952 Pickwick Papers and The Return of Paul
Temple) and also that there was an infantile memory, as he had
played the sheriff of Nottingham in the long-running Fifties TV
serial of Robin Hood. This was an early example for me of
being fascinated by the villain and bored by the psychological
blankness of the hero (Nigel Greene?). Wheatley was an astute
actor who could suggest complex and not necessarily pleasant
twists of his personality in brief screen appearances. Alan Wheatley boxed set, anyone?]
Julian Petley's essay was published in All Our Yesterdays: 90 Years of British Cinema (edited by Charles Barr, British Film Institute) in 1986.
REACTIONS POST RELEASE
addendum. From a chat strand:
The recently published uncensored version of Kenneth Tynan's diaries contains an interesting entry that sheds light on the roots of the obsessional aspects of Eric Portman as person and performer. Tynan mentions knowing this "this ferocious, self-loathing, sporadically brilliant actor in the fifties" when he began working on a biography he never completed. One evening Tynan and his first wife visited the actor in his Chelsea apartment where he lived alone with his Irish valet. The evening began well until Portman [...]After providing Tynan with this revealing anecdote, Portman became paranoid and accused the critic of being responsible for the recent arrest of John Gielgud for importuning and planning "to do the same to me". The actor became violent and pounced towards the Tynans forcing them to seek refuge in his bedroom. Portman's Irish valet smuggled the Tynans out and apologised for his master's behaviour. "He's always like that. Every weekend we go down to his cottage in Conwall. He gets tight and the first thing he does is smash every mirror in the house. I have to replace them every Monday morning. Good-night, sir".
The link between the mirror story and a film called ‘Corridor of mirrors’ is so obvious that it seems clunky and suspect. However, I am convinced that Portman influenced a group of films he starred in towards being a “personal myth”, which is what neo-romanticism was supposed to achieve and generally did not. He must have chosen 'Corridor', it was a semi-independent art film and he can't have got paid very much for it. Tynan gives that story at second hand, and there are reasons for suspecting Tynan’s version as being camp backstage gossip rather than literal truth. Tynan made a living (late in life) out of retailing showbiz gossip, albeit at a very high literary level. It fulfilled his emotional needs (and not just economic ones). A actor has to spend a lot of time looking in the mirror. The story is answering the question why nobody wrote a biography of Portman - Tynan abandoned his project for writing one.
>>
Very
engrossing piece with a fairly novel vantage onto Apocalyptic poetry
and noir cinema of the late 40s. However in advocating an ‘egocentric
Sublime’ are we not risking a sensate preoccupation, hedonism and
an amount of moral ambivalence, not a naturalising realism to anchor
us to our place of acting and being. However, a very unexpected
perspective!<< - James Allison
reply:
I
think this makes concrete the argument against the Apocalyptic mode.
I agree about the risks. But there was another risk. People doing war
work all day and at night studying for a technical exam or watching
films about people doing war work. The films show bad people who do
not give way to the group. The risk is of a total loss of
entertainment value. Conformism taking over every cell. The art world
losing autonomy and just being an
extension of the state/corporate sector, which defines people as
workers. In about 1950, a lot of people who had been working as
propagandists for years saw this as an imminent possibility and were
radically against it. You can be too group-oriented! So
this is a risk too. The Apocalyptic theory foresaw this in circa
1937, on theoretical grounds, and designed a counter-measure. The
insistence on subjectivity
in the Forties movement is not aggrandizement but a withdrawal to a
reduced zone, a refuge. It was the warfare state which did all the
aggrandizement. The alliance of States, in the war, which
desired peace and freedom, had to have a refuge area, where this
desire was in sight in the form of subjectivity. People needed art,
in 1942, in a way we can't comprehend. I agree there was a risk, in
the egocentric manner, and it's significant that the romantic style
in cinema had disappeared by 1950 – while declining in poetry (but
not vanishing). I don't have analogous data for ballet, music,
painting. The 1940s were full of crosscurrents and, while you can
find the “new romantic” style all over the place, it obviously
wasn’t dominant.
The
problem in the 1950s was conformism – most people agree on that by
now. Julian Petley's point was that a lot of virtuous English realist
cinema was rather boring. That applies to poetry as well. (AD)
The recently published uncensored version of Kenneth Tynan's diaries contains an interesting entry that sheds light on the roots of the obsessional aspects of Eric Portman as person and performer. Tynan mentions knowing this "this ferocious, self-loathing, sporadically brilliant actor in the fifties" when he began working on a biography he never completed. One evening Tynan and his first wife visited the actor in his Chelsea apartment where he lived alone with his Irish valet. The evening began well until Portman [...]After providing Tynan with this revealing anecdote, Portman became paranoid and accused the critic of being responsible for the recent arrest of John Gielgud for importuning and planning "to do the same to me". The actor became violent and pounced towards the Tynans forcing them to seek refuge in his bedroom. Portman's Irish valet smuggled the Tynans out and apologised for his master's behaviour. "He's always like that. Every weekend we go down to his cottage in Conwall. He gets tight and the first thing he does is smash every mirror in the house. I have to replace them every Monday morning. Good-night, sir".
The link between the mirror story and a film called ‘Corridor of mirrors’ is so obvious that it seems clunky and suspect. However, I am convinced that Portman influenced a group of films he starred in towards being a “personal myth”, which is what neo-romanticism was supposed to achieve and generally did not. He must have chosen 'Corridor', it was a semi-independent art film and he can't have got paid very much for it. Tynan gives that story at second hand, and there are reasons for suspecting Tynan’s version as being camp backstage gossip rather than literal truth. Tynan made a living (late in life) out of retailing showbiz gossip, albeit at a very high literary level. It fulfilled his emotional needs (and not just economic ones). A actor has to spend a lot of time looking in the mirror. The story is answering the question why nobody wrote a biography of Portman - Tynan abandoned his project for writing one.
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