The Great Ealing Film Challenge 93: The Ware Case (1938)

When discussing Young Man’s Fancy (1939), it was noted that these early Ealing films act as a bridge between the Basil Dean / Associated Talking Picture films produced at Ealing and the Balcon-produced films that the production company called ‘Ealing Studios’ would become known for. Yet even using that framework to approach these films, The Ware Case is an odd and generically unstable contribution to the Ealing back catalogue.

Told through a flashback structure that begins with a murder court case, the bulk of the film follows immature man-about-town Lord Hubert Ware (Clive Brook) as he leaves a litany of angry creditors across London and the continent. Ignorant of the feelings of his wife Meg (Jane Baxter), Hubert is presented as an amusing cad who spins lies and half-truths to get out of a variety of problems, including imminent bankruptcy and a string of mistresses. Hubert’s friend and barrister Michael Adve (Barry K. Barnes) is secretly in love with Meg, while Meg’s rich brother Eustace (Peter Bull) resents Hubert’s attitude to life and money. Meg puts Hubert’s country mansion up for sale, in order to stave off bankruptcy, but while all the major characters are staying there, Eustace’s body is found floating in the lake. The Ware’s money problems are solved, but the testimony of Ware’s ex- gamekeeper (John Laurie) suggests foul play, leading to a high profile murder trial.

It is hard to know how to take the film’s central character: the initial whirlwind of creditors, conspicuous consumption, casinos and women suggests a likeable cad, and the film goes to great lengths to position Hubert at the centre of the film (not least the fact he is in the dock in the opening court scenes). When Michael describes Hubert (and his class) as ‘out of date, museum pieces’ and we see the growing relationship between him and Meg, it is the start of a series of narrative events that wrong-foot audience expectation’s of a light-hearted aristocratic comedy of errors. The death of Eustace offers the next narrative lurch, with the introduction of a revenge-based court case providing another. Yet even here, the film is not finished. With Hubert cleared, he returns to his London flat, hears servants talking about Meg and Michael’s unrequited love, confronts his wife about it, seemingly realises his entire life has been a waste, announces to a crowd that he did murder Eustace, then throws himself off the balcony to his death below.

In its discussion of class dynamics, then, the film clearly ties in (however accidentally) to later notions of the middle class Ealing Studios and its desire to depict the working and middle classes on screen. Yet while Hubert’s class position might be out-of-touch, he remains one of the film’s few dynamic and interesting characters, fuelled by a strong performance by Brook who spits out his dialogue as though in a fast-paced screwball comedy, not this Frankenstein of generic odds and ends. There is solid support from Baxter and Barnes, but they fail to conjure up any of the hidden passion their characters are supposed to share, while Edward Rigby and John Laurie do their best to enliven the working class clichés showered on their drunken bookmaker and vengeful gamekeeper characters.

Although hampered by that strange narrative melange (and a curious flashback structure that begins with the foreman reciting the facts of the case, but never returns to the jury room when the flashback is complete), the film looks good, and is another solid production from director Robert Stevenson, scriptwriter Roland Pertwee and cinematographer Ronald Neame. Stevenson and Neame conjure up some impressive shots here, with good use of deep focus in the courtroom scenes, and some high angle shots that work to heighten the drama (notably down the side of the mansion block before Hubert falls to his death). The set design is also strong, setting up a modern art deco feel for the London apartment, more traditional (and spacious) country house interiors, and a cramped courtroom; this work is aided by extensive location filming, particularly around the Ware estate, that gives some verisimilitude to the film’s aristocratic setting.

Difficult to categorise, and with an uneven balance of comedy and tragedy around its central (and most interesting character), The Ware Case is never dull.

[UPDATED April 2014: The Ware Case is available as part of The Ealing Studios Rarities Collection, Volume 5, from Network]

Next time, Ealing's final British film, the crime thriller Nowhere to Go (1958)...

The Great Ealing Film Challenge 92: His Excellency (1952)

His Excellency is one of those films that is difficult to love, partly because it often fails to deliver a coherent experience or meaning: it has moments of jingoism and anti-foreigner attitudes that feel alien to a 21^st century audience, yet also goes to great pains to mock the British patriarchal attitude to ‘the colonies’; it mocks socialism yet offers a partial celebration of unionism and collective action; ridicules military might but ultimately relies on it to resolve narrative issues; celebrates a particular ‘northern’ personality within Britain but dilutes that through the imposition of upper class knowledge and restraint. And, worst of all for some critics, it is not the darkly wry and subversively witty film that Robert Hamer, director of Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949), was expected to deliver.

However, for all of the above reasons, the film is never less than fascinating, not least when it is imploding under the weight of its own narrative devices and themes.

From the opening announcement it is clear the film has a political and satirical point to make: ‘Great Britain’s Colonies are known to be the outposts of her Empire. They are reputed also to be the outposts of dressing for dinner, reading “The Times”, cricket and afternoon tea... This film tells of a mythical Colony of this kind during Britain’s recent Labour regime.’ That statement is a clue to the balancing act of mockery and patriotism the narrative tries to accomplish. In the colony (and naval base) of Artisa, the existing governor is replaced after a worker’s strike and dockyard riot. Instead of reliable aristocratic candidate Sir James Kirkman (Cecil Parker), Britain installs northern trade union leader George Harrison (Eric Portman). A man of action rather than a diplomat, Harrison rejects much of Kirkman’s advice and tries to change working conditions for the Arista dockyard workers, leading to a confrontation with Arista’s corrupt Prime Minister (Gerard Heinz) and local union leader Morellos (Geoffrey Keen). As the military are called out to deal with another strike and riot, Harrison relies on a final speech to try and get the workers on his side and back to work.

The class and political conflict is clear from the opening words and dialogue. One of the film’s representations of colonial ‘Britishness’ is a group of old ladies who gather at ‘Ye Olde Tea Shoppe’, read The Times and discuss the latest developments in London society. It is one of these ladies who declares, upon hearing of Harrison’s appointment, ‘I suppose with this wretched government one had to expect a Socialist, but they might at least have sent us one of the right sort’ (i.e. a socialist from the right background) It is tempting to compare this old-fashioned and fusty version of Britain with a similar gathering of old ladies in The Ladykillers (1955) three years later. In both cases, it is possible to read the gatherings as a clash of modernity, tradition and party politics – if the The Ladykillers (as director Mackendrick claimed) was about the Edwardian anachronism of Mrs Wilberforce (and her gloriously skewed house), then His Excellency signals the Victorian/Edwardian colonial mindset is equally anachronistic. If The Ladykillers can be read as a veiled comment on the post-war political landscape (as suggested by Jeffrey Richards and Anthony Aldgate), His Excellency offers a more explicit intervention in such debates.

Ealing’s politics and productions were class-ridden, but the content of their films can also be seen as driven by a reformer’s zeal, an often middle class exploration of modern society and different areas of Britain and abroad. While much of its representation of Britain here is aristocratic or militaristic, Harrison and his daughter Peggy (Susan Stephen) are the voices of the sensible middle classes, mediators that can attempt to talk to both sides and reach a compromise. This is hardly the socialism rejected in the line of dialogue quoted above, but it is a return to wartime values of compromise and coalition (Harrison accepts the need for Kirkman’s upper class help, Kirkman accepts Harrison’s perspective is valid). These are elements and ideals that Ealing understood, given Balcon’s description of their ‘mild revolution’ when many of them supported the post-war Labour government. However, the other side of this exploration of Britishness abroad means the film gives little voice to the natives of Arista, who are broadly scheming or in the pocket of large corporations. The local police chief Dobrieda (Eric Pohlmann), for example, is a caricature, a pompous colourful peacock of a figure that struts around the film like a bad Mussolini impersonator.

Harrison, as the film’s patriarch, believes he can walk the streets of his capital city until he understands the living conditions of his new people and find a solution (notably he never visits the tea shoppe, but prefers local bars). He may still hark back to his working class roots (Portman has a striking Manchester accent throughout), but it is clear from Peggy’s attitudes and accent that theirs is now a middle class life. Harrison, however, does succeed in wrestling sense from both upper and working class perspectives though his language alone – he attends a meeting of striking workers and convinces them to return to work through his oratory alone, while Kirkman and others are browbeaten by his ideas and orders. Where military might failed, working class language and logic triumph.

As might be imagined, this story offers little feminine perspective beyond the old ladies in the tea shoppe. Lady Kirkman (Helen Cherry) makes snide comments about the Harrisons, but is won over by Peggy’s charm and approach to running the governor’s palace; yet this is hardly a celebration of Peggy, who is reduced to a housewife’s role, chastising the chef and giving speeches to the local Red Cross. Stephen gives a solid, light performance but has little role beyond a sounding board for Portman to test rhetoric on.

Given the incoherent nature of much of the film, there are elements that can be celebrated: Portman and Parker give committed and enjoyable performances, the opulent set design of the palace is well used throughout (there are several shots of Harrison, Kirkman and Admiral Barclay (Edward Chapman) arranged across those spaces, like chess pieces on the chequered floor beneath them), and it continues Ealing’s strong tradition of location filming (the images of Portman striding through the streets and alleys of Arista, lingering in the empty town square, or yelling at the dockyard add colour to the story). Indeed, in places, the film is crying out for actual colour – Technicolor or Eastmancolour – and it is a shame it wasn’t made two years later, when the studio embraced colour filmmaking.

[UPDATED April 2014: His Excellency is available as part of The Ealing Studios Rarities Collection, Volume 10, from Network]

Next time, we go (almost) back to the start, with the second film after Michael Balcon took over, The Ware Case (1938)...

The Great Ealing Film Challenge 91: The Divided Heart (1954)

‘based... on a factual story taken from the newspapers. Part of its appeal for me was that it was about the mother-child relationship... which, I recognise, was a recurring one in Ealing films.’ (Michael Balcon, quoted in Barr, 192-3) 

The idea that the mother-child relationship was a recurring one in Ealing might seem a strange observation, even coming from the man who ran the studio between 1938 and 1959. Maternal issues can, of course, be found across a range of Ealing’s films: there is the mother-battleaxe figure who has to be defeated (often by the new bride) in films like Young Man’s Fancy (1939) and Turned Out Nice Again (1944), and there are mother-child elements to Cage of Gold (1950), Where No Vultures Fly (1951) and Mandy (1952), but it seems a stretch to call this a recurring theme. Children are more visible in Hue and Cry (1947) and The Magnet (1950), but the mother-child theme is less evident; equally, an argument could be made that father-son (The Long Arm, 1956; Pink String and Sealing Wax, 1945) and father-daughter relationships (Lease of Life, 1954; Touch and Go, 1955, The Shiralee, 1957) are equally important to the studio output.

The focus of The Divided Heart can, however, be seen as a continuation of Ealing’s move into more domestic melodramas from the post-war period, a move that paralleled what Charles Barr and others have seen as a move towards the professional male figure of The Cruel Sea (1953) and The Man in the Sky (1957). Barr also saw this film as ‘worthy but tame – sober, academic, actressy, afraid of getting into any deep emotional water’ (192): an assessment that seems to ignore the film’s desire to elicit emotion in quite direct and manipulative ways. It is also very much (to use a potentially problematic term) a ‘woman’s film’, in that the subject matter appears tailored for an assumed female audience – and the film features two central female characters.

The film opens with Inga and Franz Hartl (Cornell Borchers and Armin Dahlen), on the Bavarian ski-slopes and at the birthday party of their son Toni (Michael Ray / Martin Keller). The party is disturbed by two child repatriation officers, notably Marks (Geoffrey Keen), who informs the Hartl’s that Toni’s biological mother is alive and living in Slovenia. During a court case to assess Toni’s future, and to decide which of his mothers he should end up with, there are flashbacks that fill out other elements of the story: the birth mother, Sonja Slavko (Yvonne Mitchell) was held in a concentration camp during the war, and lost her husband and daughters; after finding Toni at a German orphanage, Inga raised him by herself while Franz is away at war, and captured by the Russians. Toni (or Ivan) gets the chance to meet Sonja, and grows to like her, but tells the judges he would prefer to live with the Hartls. Sonja also comes round to the belief that Toni would be better with them. Despite this, the three American justices vote 2-1 in favour of returning him to Sonja, and the final image is mother and son, reunited, on a train heading home.

The film is richer and more complex than Barr’s assessment allows, not least because it is, like Frieda (1947) before it, a commentary from an English perspective, on the post-war German character and identity. At first, the Hartl’s are just a nice family, but as the flashbacks reveal, Franz was a Nazi soldier and Sonja (and other Slovenians) suffered at the hands of the German army. The symbolism and emotion is laid on fairly thick: Toni/Ivan has hysterics every time he sees a Nazi uniform because it (unconsciously) reminds him of being torn from Sonja; in court, Sonja speaks through a translator, but one word ‘Auschwitz’ echoes round the courtroom and is understood in all languages; there is a concern about whether the Hartl’s will tell Toni the truth about German actions in the war, particularly against Slovenia. Those moments aside, the film rarely takes a direct position for or against Inga, and Borchers gets her fair share of lingering close-ups when she talks about her love for Toni, or longing looks across the courtroom at her competitor for his love, Sonja.

It could be argued that Inga gets more than her fair share of the film’s portrayal of this custody case, not least because she speaks English throughout (although, in one of those cases of glorious movie logic, she is actually speaking German), while Sonja – to start with at least – has to speak through a male translator, thus striking her mute for at least half the film. Mitchell makes the most of her mostly silent role and, like Borchers, is given plenty of time for expressive looks and glances – one of the places where the film wades happily into the ‘deep emotional waters’ Barr thinks it incapable of. By the end of the film, when Toni/Ivan has saved Sonja from a snowball attack in his home village, and both mothers have mutely expressed their love, the film is an exercise in manipulative staging, framing and editing. (there are also several nicely composed shots that fir both women into the frame, often with Inga in close-up, Sonja further away, and arguably more distant emotionally) That it ends with clumsy speeches from the three judges giving their opinions is unfortunate, because it shifts the focus from the two actresses who have driven it along so far.

The film is solid throughout, and makes good use of its location work in St. Johann-in-Tirol and Skofja Loka (Yugoslavia), adding a European sheen and a set of different spaces to the tale. Indeed, the Bavarian setting (and much of the story) seems so alien to much of what Ealing was known for – despite Balcon’s claim – that when Sonja gets lost in the streets and alleys of the village, our sympathy as an audience may shift to her, because this is unfamiliar territory for the Ealing audience as well.

[UPDATED April 2014: The Divided Heart is now available as part of The Ealing Studios Rarities Collection, Volume 10, from Network]

Next time, more Ealing European themes in His Excellency (1952)...

The Great Ealing Film Challenge 90: Mandy (1952)

Mandy is a film that can be defined in various ways. The DVD cover, in a departure from the normal Ealing Studios branding, sells the film as ‘by Alexander Mackendrick' (the back cover also notes he is 'the director of The Man in the White Suit’, but the film also has generic similarities to ‘social problem’ films of the early 1950s (such as I Believe in You, 1952), female-targeted stories (the likes of Dance Hall, 1950; The Divided Heart, 1954) and more child-oriented films (Hue & Cry, 1947; The Magnet, 1950). In the grander scheme of Ealing Studios in the 1950s, it is also the first of five successful collaborations between Jack Hawkins and Ealing (following his brief appearance in The Next of Kin, 1942), and the first to position him as a professional, often highly driven and brusque, individual (a role he would pursue in The Cruel Sea, 1953 and The Long Arm, 1956, among others).

There are traces of all those approaches throughout the films performances and narrative. When Christine and Harry Garland (Phyllis Calvert and Terence Morgan) realise their daughter Mandy is deaf, their responses threaten to tear the family apart. Initially living with Harry’s wealthier parents (Godfrey Tearle and Marjorie Fielding), Christine realises the house has becomes a prison for Mandy, and (against Harry’s wishes) takes her to a special boarding school in Manchester run by Dick Searle (Hawkins). Here, Mandy struggles with her new surroundings, but with individual tuition from Searle, begins to become more confident and starts to speak. Harry tries to force Christine to return to London, and uses rumours of Searle and Christine having an affair to take Mandy back to the family home. At the end, female independence (for both Christine and Mandy) is resolved by Mr Garland’s intervention, and the family is reunited.

Although not a ‘social problem’ film in the classic sense, this is a social ‘issue’ film about the one in sixteen thousand children born deaf: an issue which (in true Ealing style) is married to a domestic melodrama. The film does depict Mandy as a problem that can be ‘solved’ through education but, unlike Charles Barr, I don’t think Mandy stands for ‘all children, for the potential locked up inside the new (English) generation’ (152), not least because we meet several (deaf and non-deaf) children in the film, and their potential seems to be happily unlocked already (in fact, the interplay of Mandy and other children is an element that structures much of the story, despite the clear influence of Searle). It is not just Mandy, of course, that needs to be investigated: her family (parents and grandparents) also need attention. So, the film is an amalgam of several of the Ealing elements identified: social issue, melodrama, about children but also the adults who revolve around them.

What then about star and director? The claim for Mackendrick seems fuelled by the need to demonstrate an author’s vision at work, but the gulf between a critic’s need to discover a vision and the actuality of such a vision appear quite distant here: the film is beautifully shot by Douglas Slocombe, the actors are strong, and the storyline is potent and dramatic stuff – but the dark, satirical and joyful notes of Whisky Galore! (1949), The Man in the White Suit (1951), The Maggie (1954) or The Ladykillers (1955) are nowhere to be seen here. That is not to reduce the often powerful work in Mandy, more to note that it does not have that immediate connection to what came before or after. The film is playful around its use of sound (including early scenes of Christine and Harry making noise to try and attract Mandy’s attention), and in attempts to connect the audience to Mandy’s experience: often the camera will push in on Mandy’s face, and the soundtrack will fade, until we are left with only the visual information. Although not a complete sense of her point-of-view, these occur at dramatically important moments (a van driver shouting at her; a teacher trying to get her to speak). As noted below, the film also isolates Mandy within the frame (in the empty garden of the Garland house, in a park), also helping to visually identify her ‘otherness’ within the narrative world.

Performance-wise, Hawkins is a reliable actor and gives Searle a requisite grumpy passion that matches his calling as a teacher. He is also largely secondary to the Garland family: Calvert and Morgan are solid, but they tend to be overshadowed by Mandy Moore’s startling turn as the title character, a piece of acting that, given her age and lack of dialogue, remains powerful to this day. The film doesn’t give her an easy task, either, with several long close-ups that require the young actor to perform wholly through expression, and convey the frustration of Mandy’s attempts to speak and understand.

However, while Mandy’s story is always central, the Garland family dynamic is at the heart of the film’s concerns, particularly its exploration of female imprisonment, escape and isolation. One of Mandy’s first actions is to try and escape the tall cage of the Garland home, with its ornate hallways, prim rooms, paved courtyard garden: isolated in these spaces, her ‘escape’ is onto the neighbouring bombsite (almost required for an Ealing film at this stage) and streets, where she is almost run over (by a van she cannot hear). The motif of escape continues when Christine and Mandy flee London and the Garland family; yet their new life is isolating for both. Mandy is visually separate from many of her classmates, unable to fit in; while Christine is often pictured alone in the hallways of the school. While Harry sporadically appears to fill some of those empty spaces, Searle is the more comforting figure (it is telling that he is the one who fills the male role in a celebratory montage showing Mandy’s improvement), but he and Christine rarely make a compelling couple, and he ends the film as isolated as the Garland women he has been helping. Returning to the London house, Mandy is visually pictured within door frames that trap her back into this old life. The unlikely saviour to her isolation (and Christine’s) is Mr Garland: after hearing Mandy speak, he reunites Christine and Harry, and they watch as Mandy, on the same bombsite, is included in a game with the local children.

So, in the end, a film that is almost all of the things listed above, but which survives largely because of the committed performance of Moore in the central role.

[Mandy is available on DVD from Studio Canal UK. See www.studiocanal.co.uk for more details]

Next time, more child-centred drama in The Divided Heart (1954)...

The Great Ealing Film Challenge 89: Young Man's Fancy (1939)

Between 1938 and 1940, director Robert Stevenson, cinematographer Ronald Neame and scriptwriter Roland Pertwee were part of the creative bridge between Basil Dean’s Associated Talking Pictures (which were based at the studios in Ealing) and Michael Balcon’s new production company called Ealing Studios. While they produced a number of films together, including The Ware Case (1938), Young Man’s Fancy and Return to Yesterday (1940), they were also individually responsible for fourteen of the first sixteen films produced by the new studio, including The Four Just Men (1939) and Let George Do It (1940).

While there is still one film from that period of Ealing’s production history left to watch – The Ware Case – it is already clear that these films exist in that no man’s land between 1930s low budget British studio productions and the infusion of drama-documentary styles that wartime circumstances would force on Ealing, and others in the British film industry. It would be wrong to dismiss these films, either creatively or as a picture of production trends, but they feel more bound by well-trodden narrative structures and thin characterisations than some of the complex Ealing work of the 1940s and 50s. Certain continuities are there to be made – the reliance on ensemble casts, with certain actors recurring across films, can be seen in later productions – but a direct comparison likely reduces the content of these early productions.

Young Man’s Fancy is a faintly absurd romantic comedy sporadically saved by spirited performances from Seymour Hicks and Anna Lee, and some strong comic exchanges (courtesy of Pertwee, Rodney Ackland and EVH Emmett). The story is set in September 1870, with the Duke and Duchess of Beaumont (Hicks and Martita Hall) eager to marry their son Alban (Griffith Jones) to Miss Crowther (Merial Forbes), the daughter of wealthy brewer Sir Caleb (Felix Aylmer). Alban, uninterested in Miss Crowther, meets Ada O’Grady (Lee), a working class Irish ‘human projectile’ (cannonball) at the Cavendish music hall. Hoping to use the scandal of his association with Ada to break off the marriage, and with Ada schooling him in rebellion against his mother, they end up in Paris together where, while the city is under siege by the Prussian army, they (naturally) fall in love. On return to London, Alban has to decide whether to obey his mother or follow his heart.

While it breaks little new story ground (although the introduction of the siege of Paris as a narrative obstacle is a little odd), the film does enjoy some creative flourishes, notably the framing of the whole story by a wedding album motif. While this is initially used to present the crew details, and photographs of the main cast (a hand turns each page during the credits), it also functions to introduce scenes of Paris and London when the story shifts location, and then literally closes the story / album at the end. While such a motif is now commonplace in romantic comedies (the film also ends with an aborted wedding, another standard element) it works well here to establish generic expectations. Director Stevenson also uses editing and optical printing to emphasise travel later in the film: Alban and Ada’s Paris-to-London return journey is told in a simple shot of them in a carriage, over which are superimposed British railway signs, place names and advertisements. It is a striking sequence that offers a simple visual representation of their journey and their descent back into British society and habits.

Given the thin plot, the film relies heavily on its performances and dialogue: the Duke is the broadest comic character, but Hicks is able to perform both drunken well-meaning idiot and thoughtful father roles equally well. Hunt as the Duchess gets some enjoyably scathing dialogue (her dislike of the common brewing family, snide asides to arriving party guests, demands to have bedclothes burned after Ada had slept in them), but her character is largely a one-dimensional posh battleaxe. The Crowther family have little real personality, while Alban is similarly one-note, Jones’ performance often pulled up by Lee’s enthusiasm and skill. She plays Ada as mischievous and loud, emotional and independent: the success of the Ada and Alban romance is fuelled mainly by her work. The film skirts Ada’s working class origins and the Beaumont’s treatment of the poor (they appear to be slum landlords). Ada’s father (Edward Rigby) is given some potent lines about capitalism and social inequality (he’s embarrassed his daughter is associating herself with ‘the idle rich’), but they are thrown away, rarely central to the plot: tempting to see an early element of Ealing’s interest in social issues, but more likely a coincidence.

Given Ealing’s British reputation, it is also curious to see another film where travelling (or escaping) abroad becomes an important element, but returning back to Britain is always essential: Frieda (1947), Cage of Gold (1950) and The Lavender Hill Mob (1951) would all revisit those themes in later years. That said, the view of 1870s Paris as a besieged and war torn city, with foreigners fighting their way onto the final trains, and buildings occupied by the military, would also prove to be prophetic of what 1939-40 would bring.

[UPDATED April 2014: Young Man's Fancy is now available as part of The Ealing Studios Rarities Collection, Volume 8, from Network]

Next time, a different kind of 1950s social problem in Mandy (1952)...

The Great Ealing Film Challenge 88: Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949)

Re-watching Kind Hearts and Coronets for the sake of this blog post (the film is one of the Ealing films I’ve seen several times in my life, although admittedly not in recent years), I’d forgotten how sexual a film it is. Many of the films seen over the course of this challenge have challenged Ealing’s reputation as a studio more at home with restrained and repressed subjects, but this film stands alongside Another Shore (1948), Cage of Gold (1950) and The Feminine Touch (1956) as films that are quite wonderfully overt about sex, lust and longing.

It may be that the perceived knowledge of this film works to soften some of that sexual sting: the pitch-black nature of much of the comedy, as Dennis Price’s Louis Mazzini has his murderous revenge on the D’Ascoyne family (after they disinherit and shun his mother); Alec Guinness’ masterful performance of eight characters from the D’Ascoyne family; the reputation of the film among the ‘Ealing comedies’.

Yet good as Price and Guinness are, Joan Greenwood as Sibella is in danger of walking away with the whole film, developing from an apparently flighty and flirtatious society girl to a sly and cunning mistress, before blooming into a lying and mischievous blackmailer. Despite being almost constantly buttoned up in a series of ornate outfits, Greenwood uses her husky low tones and coquettish manner to position Sibella as a strong sexual figure on par with Mazzini and the D’Ascoynes. It is true that the film often resorts to a simplistic dualism with its main female characters, with Louis caught between Sibella’s machinations and his courtship of uptight and abstemious widow Edith D’Ascoyne (Valerie Hobson), but both actresses bring humour and life to their different roles (Greenwood can be more obviously theatrical, while Hobson is more restrained but equally pointed) that allow some development beyond the obvious virgin/whore dynamic.

The sexual thrust of the film doesn’t end with the women. Dennis Price is a striking and sexual figure throughout: wooing Edith and Sibella, an expert in ladies underwear (from working in a draper’s shop), taunting Sibella’s cuckolded husband with the line ‘you’re a lucky man now, take my word for it’, and apparently also attractive to men, with a strongly suggestive scene with photography enthusiast Henry D’Ascoyne (Guinness) who offers to show Louis his equipment in the safety of his dark room. The D’Ascoyne line, from which Louis is descended, is not short on lust: the family line passes through male and female heirs because of the first Duchess’ ‘relationship’ with Charles II; while Louis murders Ascoyne D’Ascoyne (the younger; also Guinness) while he is on a dirty weekend in Maidenhead. (hardly an accidental choice of venue).

Of course, the film isn’t just about sex. It is about family, murder, the class system... Yet, at the same time, sex lies at the heart of the narrative. Sex is the (unspoken) reason Louis’ mother (Audrey Fildes) left the family home to marry her Italian lover (and was then shunned thereafter); and sex is the initial fuel behind Louis’ murderous decision to wreak revenge on the D’Ascoyne family. While his mother’s death and the family’s refusal for her to be buried at the ancestral home is the reason Louis gives to others, the film shows us he only makes the decision after Sibella spurns his advances and announces she has accepted a marriage proposal from Lionel Holland (John Penrose). Sex is what causes Louis to be tried for murder (after Sibella hides Lionel’s suicide note and insinuates Lionel confronted Louis over their affair); sex is what saves him from the hangman’s noose (Sibella, again, finds the note in exchange for future sexual favour, and the future death of another D’Ascoyne, Edith).

Like many of the Ealing films studied through this challenge, part of the joy of the film comes from the minor characters: notably Mr Elliot the executioner, who keeps forgetting to address Duke Louis by his correct title (Your Grace). By casting Guinness as the family D’Ascoyne, the film highlights the importance of such brief characters, with several short vignettes of the suffragette Lady Agatha (killed in a balloon ‘accident’), the dullard Reverend Lord Henry D’Ascoyne (poisoned port) and pompous Ethelred D’Ascoyne (hunting accident). While most of them remain caricatures of particular British upper class types – the obstinate naval captain, the bumbling priest, the horny playboy – they are well-observed and largely exist as backdrop to Louis’ progression to the Dukedom.

Unlike some of the others Ealing films the visual elements are enjoyable but rarely stand out: there are location shots throughout, notably in the grounds of various D’Ascoyne family estates and houses, but again they feel like a useful backdrop than a potent part of the narrative. The only exception to that might be the scene between Edith and Louis, which continues after potting shed has exploded, and the smoke drifts serenely behind Edith’s head. The film’s humour lies in tone, dialogue and performance as much as its visuals, although it all looks impressive in the restored print released by Studio Canal on Blu-Ray in 2011.

[Kind Hearts and Coronets is available on Blu-Ray and DVD from Studio Canal UK. See www.studiocanal.co.uk for more details]

Next time, more upper class romantic chaos in Young Man's Fancy (1939)...

The Great Ealing Film Challenge 87: The Man in the Sky (1957)

In the forthcoming collection Ealing Revisited (available to pre-order on Amazon here: http://tiny.cc/60qfhw), Robert Murphy describes The Man in the Sky as a film any national cinema should be proud of. Yet this film is rarely listed among the greats of Ealing’s oeuvre, never mind that of British cinema more generally. While I’m not going to summarise Murphy’s opinion here (you’ll have to read the book for that), I do want to consider how the film sits within broader ideas of what Ealing Studios were capable of, and whether that shifted in the final ‘Ealing Films’ made in association with MGM in 1956-8.

One of the most striking changes to this film is the shift out of the London streets and into a more suburban landscape: here, the new houses and outskirts of Wolverhampton. Rather than the bomb-strewn locations of Hue & Cry (1947) or The Blue Lamp (1950), these are clean and character-less avenues; in place of the community and support of It Always Rains on Sunday (1947) or Lease of Life (1954), we have an absent neighbour, a local laundrette and a shop selling flying saucers and spaceship toys. That is not to say there is no community in the film, but the workers of Conway Aero Manufacturing (who arguably best fill that role) are literally onlookers, commentators, always outside and never part of the drama. That community is also a professional one, to which John Mitchell (Jack Hawkins) belongs, but which has little place for his wife Mary (Elizabeth Sellars). In that sense, the film mirrors the work/home life split seen in Ealing’s other 1956 Hawkins film, The Long Arm (1956).

The storyline here is simple but potent: John Mitchell is a test pilot at Conway’s, which is going to go bankrupt if they don’t secure a lucrative new contract. During a routine test of the new plane, an engine fire causes Mitchell to order everyone to parachute to safety, but he decides to stay onboard, knowing that losing the plane will definitely sink Conway. In an Earthbound precursor of Apollo 13, the ground crew and Mitchell struggle to find a way for him to land the plane safely. Mitchell circles the field for 30 minutes; below, his wife and colleagues watch and wait...

The first element that is striking about the film is its desire to tell the story in real time. The first and third are partially compressed, but the second act is wholly in real time, as Mitchell circles the airfield. (dialogue exchanges and well-placed clocks attest to the real time element) Hawkins is particularly strong here: isolated in the plane set, and with only occasional (and often one-sided) dialogue exchanges, he has to convey Mitchell’s stubborn, scared and uncertain emotions, and convince the audience the character would be committed enough to see this unlikely flight through. Given the brisk nature of the visual storytelling in the opening of the film (in 12 minutes we learn about the Mitchell family, meet their children, understand the financial pressure they’re under, meet the team at Conway, get introduced to seven or eight supporting characters, and then we’re up in the plane), director Crichton pulls that pace back, and allows the film to linger on Hawkins’ face (or one of the other characters), to rely on performance to propel the story along.

The second striking element is the performance of Elizabeth Sellars, whose Mary Mitchell is as close to breaking point in the domestic sphere as her husband is up in the air. This may be billed as a story about the man in the sky (my own narrative recap above focused almost wholly on this aspect), but it is clear that the woman in the house is also holding an increasingly shaky and unwieldy machine together, and the Mitchell marriage becomes the main problem the film has to solve. True, the film initially paints that problem in broad strokes (notably their inability to buy a new dream house), but it continues to cut back to Mary during the airborne drama (of which she is blithely unaware until close to the landing) and emphasises her perspective on the Mitchell’s lives. That the marriage is the main issue is also clear given that John’s (successful) landing occurs almost 15 minutes before the film ends, with the remaining time largely given over to a Hawkins-Sellars confrontation about his apparently suicidal decision on the plane, and their future life. It is a conversation that can seem one-sided, given John physically and verbally dominates it (Hawkins flirts with playing John as a bully here), but the camera often comes back to Sellar’s face while John continues his stern but blustering defence of his decisions (and refutes Mary’s belief he wanted to kill himself). Although this ends with John justifying himself and agreeing to buy their dream house, the visual focus on Mary (and her scenes throughout) suggests it remains open-ended, a papering over of the cracks, rather than a long-term solution.

The desire to play the drama through performance as much as dialogue or event, also reveal the visual strengths of the film: Crichton and cinematographer Douglas Slocombe use deep focus shots in places, particularly when shooting the crowds who gather on the airfield (often shooting down from the tower, with characters in fore- and background action clearly in focus); there is a playfulness around some compositions (the crowd running back and forth across the horizontal length of the frame to keep the plane in sight as it goes behind buildings) and a simplicity to others (the plane, isolated in the sky, while everyone stands together on the ground); while they favour a slow zoom into close-up on characters faces to emphasise emotional shifts (including a shot near the end of Hawkins in the bathroom, just after Mary has accused John of not thinking of the family: the frame pushes closer and closer in on him, and we see him snap)

With nice character moments scattered throughout (the reporter who is told this is only a story if the plane crashes, Conway being promised the contract if it lands, the tea ladies who complain no one is buying their tea because they’re staring at the sky), and some impressive sound design (the creaking and shrieking noises of the tortured plane make it sound alive in the central sequences), this remains a fascinating film, and one that should be better known among the Ealing canon.

[The Man in the Sky is available on DVD from Studio Canal UK. See www.studiocanal.co.uk for more details]

Next time, is this Alec Guinness' (and Ealing's) finest hour? Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949)...