I really wanted to like Secret People more than I did. Made within a year of The Gentle Gunman (1952), another Ealing
project around terrorism (although about the IRA rather than the unidentified
and Europe-wide ‘Organisation’ at the heart of this film), Secret People is obviously trying to do something different with
its story, but I’m uncertain it succeeds or is as morally ambiguous as it
claims to be. There’s no doubting the quality of the filmmaking, or the
performances, but the film just doesn’t work as a whole, perhaps because the
central relationships that fuel the narrative fail to convince.
In 1930, Maria Brentano (Valentina Cortese) and her
sister Nora (Angela Fouldes) are sent to stay with Anselmo (Charles Goldner), a
European settled in London and running a cafe. Maria and Nora’s father, a
well-known left wing writer in the unidentified European country from which
they have fled (and a critic of the new military ruler General Galbern), dies
in custody; while Maria’s sweetheart Louis (Serge Reggiani) has gone into
hiding. The sisters are brought up by Anselmo, who helps them get British citizenship:
by 1937, Maria is working in the cafe, while Nora (now played by Audrey
Hepburn) has a budding career as a ballet dancer. Yet Galbern continues to
intrude on their lives, however accidentally: interviews in national newspapers
and, in Paris, visiting the same British exhibition as them. In Paris, Maria
meets Louis again and is drawn into the mysterious terrorist / rebel
organisation that he is a member of. Louis manoeuvres Nora into an opportunity
at a London society party that Galbern is attending, and convinces Maria to
carry a bomb into the party. When the bomb kills a waitress by accident, Maria
rejects Louis’ ways and the organisation’s creed of achieving their goals any
way they can, confesses all to the police, is given a new identity (Lena
Collins), but is then drawn back in when she realises the organisation has
recruited Nora.
That synopsis covers the bare bones, but doesn’t really
get to grips with the film’s attempt to deal with larger moral issues:
political assassination, rebel causes, blind loyalty, personal vs. public
politics, sisterly competition. Throw in director Thorold Dickinson’s own
political beliefs, his desire for British cinema to raise its artistic
ambitions, Ealing Studios’ more conservative outlook, and the presence of
compelling performances from European stars Cortese, Regianni and Goldner, and
the film is a striking creation of disparate and competing parts (the DVD
features a useful introduction by Philip Thorne that goes into more detail on
the background of the film than I can here). But that heady brew is also what
complicates and, I think, prevents it from completely gelling as a film.
So what works? Well, the female-centric storyline is
strong throughout, with a good meaty role for Cortese, and solid supporting
work from Hepburn, Irene Worth (as Jackson, a policewoman who helps Maria in
the latter part of the film) and Meg Jenkins, in a smaller role as the other
café worker, Penny. Cortese goes some way to selling the more melodramatic
elements of the film, notably the tempestuous relationship between Maria and
the mysterious Louis, but the film requires such abrupt shifts in her character
(most notably when she breaks down after the death of the waitress) that it can
be difficult to keep up. Her interactions with Hepburn sell the sisterly bond
well – there is a lovely moment where Hepburn, about to audition, appears to
wink at the audience, yet she is actually winking at Maria, sat off to one side
and reflected in the mirror – but the final confrontation between Maria and
Nora is too brief to cover everything the moment needs (not least the fact that
we learn Louis has seduced Nora, largely through tales of her heroic sister).
Hepburn can also be a little of a blank slate at times, but then that is
largely the role of the younger sister as written here. The male characters are
less convincing: Louis is a one-note cipher, mysterious and willing to do
anything for the cause, but with no real sense of what drives him; more
successful is Anselmo, avuncular, bluff, clever and heroic in equal measure,
driven to be a good man for his adopted country and his the children thrust
upon him.
The film looks impressive and has its own visual style,
with Dickinson and DoP Gordon Dines filling their frames with activity (there
are several scenes composed in depth, most obviously in the cafe and at the
society party, with a wealth of fore- and background activity to comprehend),
and using subtle spatial tricks (the post-party Maria walking ‘from’ her
darkened room into her memory of the garden party in one smooth shot) to
highlight shifts in tone. There are also strong visual narrative touches which
seem unusual choices at the time – Maria’s interrogation by the London
‘committee’ of the organisation takes place in a darkened room, where she can
only hear voices and see their shoes – but which pay off well in the final ten
minutes when a distinctive voice and pair of shoes return.
But with all that, the film struggles to maintain
narrative or tonal coherence, particularly towards the end: the final scenes,
where Maria becomes Lena, moves to Ireland, sees Nora perform, realises the
organisation is back, confronts Louis again, speed past and undo much of the
earlier, steady work building up these characters and situations. I’m loathe to
cry censorship again, despite talk of the UK Communist party disrupting public
screenings and Ealing trimming what they saw as a difficult film (the BBFC
website shows a 95 minute 55 second run time passed in August 1951, which matches
up with the DVD) but the rush to conclude the narrative feels just that:
rushed.
Fascinating yet frustrating, the film remains a curio if
only to see what Dickinson and Ealing might have produced together, after their
earlier success with The Next of Kin
(1943).
[Secret People
is released on DVD by Studio Canal. See www.studiocanal.co.uk
for more details]
Next time, Ealing's most blatant war propaganda in The Big Blockade (1942)...
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