The Great Ealing Film Challenge 27: Where No Vultures Fly (1951)

Where No Vultures Fly (1951) is, in many ways, an overlooked Ealing film of the early 1950s, being released after the one-two hit of The Lavender Hill Mob (June 1951) and The Man in the White Suit (August 1951), and belonging to a genre – colonial action-adventure – that is less well-covered in histories of the studio. Yet it was an important film in late 1951/early 1952: a huge financial hit for the studio (one of the top performing British films of 1952), screened for the 1951 Royal Command Performance, and a re-assertion that colour cinematography once again had a place within the Ealing production schedule. (three years after initial experiments with colour in the 1948 films Saraband for Dead Lovers and Scott of the Antarctic)

Released as Ivory Hunters in the U.S., the film is a dramatisation of the work of Mervyn Cowie and his colleagues, who fought for the formation of the National Parks of Kenya. The story was developed by director Harry Watt and melds influences from documentary filmmaking (the travelogue-style sequences of animals, landscape and tribal customs) with action-adventure tropes (including a rhino attack, tribal confrontation, and a car chase to the border). Bob Payton (Anthony Steel), his wife Mary (Dinah Sheridan) and son Tim (William Simons) head into the bush when he convinces the government to set up Kenya’s first national game reserve. With a tiny patrol force, Payton struggles to prevent the death of the animals under his care, fighting against native and Western hunters, and ivory poachers.

The film looks amazing, even in the unrestored print available commercially. Like The Love Lottery (1954) before it, a fully restored version of the 3-strip Technicolor would be amazing to see, but even without that, the vibrant blue skies, verdant greenery and the striking array of colours in the tribal outfits pop off the screen. Of course, the danger of the colour cinematography is that it can create a spectacle around the black population, given it is the scenes of native dancing, singing and celebrating that feature the strongest colour imagery: and the film as a whole could be accused of presenting Africa (and Africans) as a spectacle, an ‘other’ place of vast savannahs, waterholes, and exotic animals and peoples. Given the time period, there is no sense that the film explores the black perspective – the central characters are all white (Bob Payton is a third generation East African settler), and it is those colonial interests, hopes, fears and beliefs that the film presents (or challenges). We are presented with cunning (and corrupt) tribal leaders, skilled hunters and trackers, brave patrolmen, and noble savages: not a blanket perspective by any means, but still a limited (and largely visual) point of view of this other culture.

Not that white culture is presented as entirely positive. The convivial photographer Mannering (Harold Warrender) is also the chief villain, the leader of an ivory poaching ring who regards Africa as a country to be stripped of its useful resources, and then abandoned. (this is hardly a spoiler: Mannering’s villainy is telegraphed early on by virtue of being the only other white character with more than three lines). This sets up a rather obvious binary between Payton as the ‘good’ colonial figure, and Mannering as the ‘bad,’ with Payton fighting for a ‘new’ Africa and a new relationship with the black communities (although, with white leadership), while Mannering wants to strip mine the same communities and leave them to it. (for more on the film’s link to colonial issues, I recommend the discussion on http://www.colonialfilm.org.uk/node/295, which explores the film in relation to wider social and cultural opinions on colonialism)

I’ve talked many times in this blog about the strength of Ealing’s location filming, and that comes to the fore in this film: shot completely outdoors, with no studio work. As noted above, there is a travelogue quality to the film, but that adds to the sense that the film was physically in these locations, with these animals, rather than simply intercut with scenes shot on Ealing Common a year later. Although other films and television wildlife shows in the six decades since this film was released may have inured audiences to many of the shots achieved here, the images of the elephant stampede (and waterhole bathing), the swift-editing that creates the rhino attack on the Payton’s truck, the cheetah attack on Payton, and the baby giraffe that licks Steel’s face, offer spectacular imagery that underpins the film’s narrative interests.

Produced over the same period as The Man in the White Suit (1951), and released three months later, it is tempting to try and draw parallels with that film, and other Ealing productions: Where No Vultures Fly features a little man tilting at the windmills of big government and shady private enterprise, he has to use cunning and subterfuge to put his plans in motion (and keep them going), and to convince the local population that this is the best route forward. Of course, unlike the Alec Guinness film, Payton is successful in his endeavour, and is a resolutely moral and straight-forward individual throughout, so the parallels are only so compelling. Other critics (notably Charles Barr and George Perry) have noted a connection between Where No Vultures Fly and the classic American western, with Payton bringing civilisation to the wilderness and fighting off (and with) an indigenous population. Yet, even with the wide-open spaces of Africa, tribal face-offs, and Payton’s regular horse-riding skills on display, this comparison feels more tortuous, as what Payton creates is hardly a civilisation – if anything, he is trying to fence off and retain the wilderness, to banish the advances of man (the telescopic rifle and the bulldozer are dismissed as bad technologies in an early montage), rather than engage with them. Payton is hardly your typical loner Western hero, with Mary and Tim’s sub-plots developing ideas around how to survive in the bush.

The trouble with both explanations is that they cannot contain the full range of narrative, thematic, and visual elements of the film. As the New York Times noted in its review, it is ‘both a documentary and an essentially dramatic yarn... the cameras have captured the game and its habitat as befits the "stars" of this adventure.’ (A.W., NYT 19 August 1952) The travelogue and documentary impulse works hand-in-hand with the plot and characterisation, rather than fighting against them, and creates a unique piece of filmmaking that doesn’t resemble any of the Ealing films I’ve watched so far (although I have yet to delve into their Australian productions, which are often lumped in with this one).

In fact, it is so different that the next blog post will jump straight to the film's sequel (also starring Anthony Steel, and directed by Harry Watt), West of Zanzibar (1954)...

The Great Ealing Film Challenge 26: San Demetrio, London (1943)

Back in wartime production mode, this is one of Ealing’s best-known war drama-documentary efforts and, if I’m honest, it was a bit of an effort to sit through. Because, although I understand that it’s a faithful recreation of an actual event, and despite my admiration for some of the performances (even Robert Beatty, although that may be because he is the butt of so many jokes), characters and model work, the film just goes on too long and then fails to illustrate one of the key moments of the narrative. It’s a solid effort, but one that wouldn’t suffer from being five to ten minutes shorter.

The story is straightforward: the San Demetrio, a ship in the British Merchant Navy, is attacked when sailing from Texas to Glasgow with a cargo of oil; although most of the crew abandon ship, one lifeboat of sailors are not picked up by a rescue boat, and end up returning to the ship for safety. Led by 2^nd officer Hawkins (Ralph Michaels) and Chief Engineer Pollard (Walter Fitzgerald), the small group put out the fires, partially repair the ship, and set out for home, returning triumphantly to the Clyde under their own steam.

As such, there are great moments of ingenuity, drama and comedy: Pollard’s engineer is surely an early inspiration for Star Trek’s Commander Scott with his frequent innovations and inventions – getting the damaged engines running, rigging up a new steering column, finding a way to make the malnourished men hot food and drink, and preventing the ship from sinking. The drama (given the relatively thin story) comes from that now-expected Ealing interplay of characters: the ‘below decks’ men struggling to survive, first in the confines of the lifeboat, and then on the pitching deck of a half-sunk ship; Mervyn Johns (a regular focus in these Ealing columns) is injured and struggles on to complete his work; equally, Gordon Jackson is the eager novice who has to quickly adapt to new circumstances. Yet, as with The Next of Kin, few of the men stand out – really Pollard is the closest thing the film has to a hero or central figure. The comedy, perhaps less obvious, comes from many of the same sources, and at least in part because of their situations – those same men play darts, read magazines (including, strangely, ‘True Romances’) and bet on anything they can find (including, towards the end, which country they’ll reach first); much of the humour also comes from the treatment of Robert Beatty’s character. From an unconvincing drunk routine in his early appearance in Galveston, his character (universally referred to as ‘Yank’) throws in with the men, even if he can’t play darts and doesn’t understand about smoking cigarettes near gallons of oil. Beatty also contributes to that traditional British cinema trope of combining different nationalities and classes: English, Welsh and Scottish are present here, and with Beatty, a token American.

Like The Cruel Sea, with which it shares many thematic concerns (as well as director Charles Frend), this is a story about men; about the bond between shipmates that (occasionally) ignores class and social structures (though sometimes simply replaces them with new ones), and, more noticeably in this film, about a lack of women. Although women are mentioned (most often wives and girlfriends back home; although one of the first lines is comparing a gun is compared to a woman - ‘Guns are like women, you can’t tell until you’re in action, and then it’s too late’), the closest the film gets to showing a real woman is the pin-ups stuck to the men’s locker room (although the credits do note a ‘shopgirl’, I can’t remember her at all). In fact, there are more obvious sightings of Japanese and black extras in the background shots in ‘Texas’ than there are any women. Yet one of the film’s most interesting and complex elements, the soundtrack (a strong layering of effects, dialogue and music featured throughout), is the work of a largely unknown (to me, at least) Ealing employee, Mary Habberfield, the ‘sound cutter.’

One of the other notable elements of the film is the sheer ability of the production to convey the story of this storm-tossed and rickety ship with a degree of verisimilitude. Partly this is due to some sterling special effects model work, several shots of which (most notably an early image of the ship in dock) I had to check were model-based (some of the others are more obvious, but no less impressive for the time); the rest is due to strong set design and editing, particularly after the ship is attacked, where the ravaged nature of the structure becomes clear, flooded incessantly by tonnes of water being thrown at the set and cast. One specific camera angle on the engine room set, looking down from on high past several levels of stairs and gantries, is repeated several times, but really ‘sells’ the change from the outset of the film to the point where it has been gutted by fire.

At heart then, the film is another example of Britain ‘pulling together’ in wartime (even if that version of Britain doesn’t include women). Slow to get going, and then failing to deliver any strong narrative conclusion (they come within sight of Ireland, then the film cuts to their employer talking about salvage rights, and we never see the ship actually arrive on the Clyde), its heart is in the right place, even if its delivery is a little off.

Next time, off on an African adventure Where No Vultures Fly (1951)!

The Great Ealing Film Challenge 25: The Gaunt Stranger (1938)

This, the first film (chronologically) on the master list of 95 Ealing films covered on this challenge (although some people have already helpfully pointed out other options, most notably a series of short films made during the war years), fails to really suggest the range of genres, characters and concerns that fuel most descriptions of ‘Ealing Studios’ from the war years on. Not a bad film by any standards, it (like Saloon Bar before it) is a solid piece of genre filmmaking, engaging enough but rarely doing much to stand out from other similar films of the period.

In one sense, The Gaunt Stranger completely fails to live up to its title, not being about a stranger or anyone that could be described as ‘gaunt.’ To be fair, the U.S. title for the film, The Phantom Strikes, is equally misleading, given it features no phantoms or, indeed, a character called ‘The Phantom.’ The film, the first that producer Michael Balcon would make at Ealing Studios (initially through a company called CADAP – Co-operative Association of Producers and Distributors – of which Balcon was a major figure), is an adaptation (by well-known British writer Sidney Gilliat) of an Edgar Wallace story, ‘The Ringer.’ (a story Balcon and director Forde had previously adapted in 1931) The plot concerns a mysterious master of disguise (the ‘Ringer,’ Henry Arthur Milton): assumed dead for two years, it is revealed he has returned to London to kill Maurice Meister, a local crook who murdered his sister, Gwen Milton years before.

An amusing reverse murder-mystery unfolds, as the crime is announced two days before it is committed, everyone knows the Ringer will do it, but no one knows who the Ringer is. The police, represented by Detective Inspector Wembury (Patrick Barr), police surgeon Dr Lomond (Alexander Knox), and Inspector Bliss (John Longdon), team up with petty thief Sam Hackett (Sonnie Hale, the putative star of the film), to try and protect the intended victim Maurice Meister (Wilfred Lawson). Also thrown into the mix are the Ringer’s wife Cora Ann Milton (Louise Henry), recently arrived in the country; Meister’s secretary Mary Lenley (Patricia Roc); and her criminal brother Johnny (Peter Croft).

The film resembles Saloon Bar in other ways than the focus on a murder investigation, not least the attempt to introduce comic elements into an otherwise straight-forward detective story: Hale is the main comedian here, playing the little man reluctantly dragged out of prison by Wembury (‘I’ve come down in the world, I’m helping the police’), and constantly trying to escape his predicament. Yet much of the routine falls flat, at least in part because the film doesn’t seem that interested in his character (he disappears for large stretches at a time, or is used for exposition purposes), and because the narrative is constantly trying to keep the audience guessing as to who might be the Ringer in disguise.

Stylistically, director Forde adds a few subtle touches, notably the opening credits (a shadowy street scene, suddenly illuminated by a policeman’s lamp, which casts around the screen, lighting up the film’s credit slides, arranged as a series of bill posters on the brick walls) and a repeated visual motif where the camera pans slowly right-to-left (and cross-fades between images) across Meister’s largely empty rooms; this happens three times, first to establish the space (and scale) of Meister’s house (as he plays piano); second, to show Hale’s movement through several of the rooms (in his assumed role as butler); and third, near the end, to show the emptiness of the house on the night of Meister’s murder, as a superimposed pendulum ticks away the remaining minutes of his life, building the tension.

Necessarily busy in order to keep viewers guessing, the film suggests other narrative interests that it rarely pursues: the characters of John and Mary Lenley, for example, are ciphers, largely there to add to the list of potential murderers, or suggest unexplored narrative options: it appears important that Meister and Wembury have relationships with both Lenleys (John worked for Meister’s criminal business and Wembury arrested him; both men are romantically interested in Mary), but this (like so much else) proves a red herring. The denouement of who the Ringer is (no spoilers here) is enjoyable, but the film’s real surprise is the post-revelation sequence where the Ringer, rushed to hospital having taken a suicide pill, escapes from the ambulance and, with wife Cora Ann in tow, flies away in a plane.

The murderer not only gets away with his plan, he gets the girl, and suffers no punishment for the crime whatsoever. While there is some justification for this – Meister is a crook that the police have been unable to catch or convict, the Ringer is avenging his sister’s death – the fact remains that the ostensible bad guy of the film beats all the supposed representatives of law and order, and flies off into the sunset with his wife. It turns out that, all along, the film was rooting for the Ringer. Given the later morality on display in Ealing films such as Pink String and Sealing Wax or The Long Arm, this resolution felt surprisingly modern and open-ended.

[UPDATED April 2014: The Gaunt Stranger is now available as part of The Ealing Studios Rarities Collection, Volume 7, from Network]

Next time: back to the war onboard San Demetrio, London (1943)...

The Great Ealing Film Challenge 24: The Next of Kin (1942)

Charles Barr suggests that many of Ealing’s war films can be usefully grouped together as representing particular themes or interests: he places Next of Kin (a regular shortening of the title, although the on-screen credit keeps the definite article The Next of Kin) alongside The Foremen Went to France (1942) and Went the Day Well? (1943) as films that deal with ‘battles of wits’ which ‘enforces resource and alertness, and penalises complacency and amateurism.’ (Barr 1980, 33) While the Tommy Trinder film has yet to make an appearance in this challenge, it is useful to consider the relationship of The Next of Kin to Went the Day Well? and Ealing’s other war films. (it is also fair to note the film bears little resemblance to the U.S. film poster seen here!)

The theme of The Next of Kin can be summed up by many of the wartime posters that make up important background elements of its mise-en-scene: ‘Careless Talk Costs Lives’ or ‘Telling a friend may mean telling The Enemy.’ This is effectively a dramatisation of those sentiments and the general sense of ‘loose lips sink ships’ that was present during the Second World War. The film began as a production for the military, to educate and remind soldiers of this issue – producer Michael Balcon and director Thorold Dickinson saw it as a chance to convey that message to a wider public, and expanded the initial budget (and running time) to produce this final version.

Caught between propaganda and drama, the film struggles to find a suitable balance: and one of the most obvious differences with Went the Day Well? is that there are few characters in The Next of Kin that are developed enough to care about. In the later film, the well-drawn characters create interest and drama (and shock, when they are often killed); here, one of the ironies of the film is that the most interesting characters are the German spies, not the British soldiers who inadvertently reveal information on troop movements and plans. Mervyn Johns as Davis (or ‘Number 23’), remains a fascinating chameleonic figure, easily moving between the different British classes on display, able to make friends, yet also retaining a slightly whiny, put-upon figure whenever he meets up with his German handler, Barratt (Stephen Murray). The standout sequence is one between him and an ATS driver (Thora Hird) where, in the space of two scenes, he has charmed her by helping fix a tyre, been invited into the bosom of a military dance, and discovered vital information via a pompous male sergeant. Well-played by Hird and Johns, it shows his character’s skill and demonstrates how Davis remains the most multi-faceted character within the film.

The only other characters who make an impact are Miss Clare (Phyllis Stanley), a drug-addicted performer who tours around army camps, and her dresser, Ma / Mrs Webster (Mary Clare). Ma is revealed early on as a German spy, using Clare’s cocaine addiction to force her to pump young squaddies for information to relay back to Berlin. (the film does not, however, suggest that it is simply young women who can entice military secrets out of men, as the example of Johns’ character shows) Equally compelling is bookshop owner Barratt who blackmails his Dutch refugee employee Beppie (Nora Pilbeam) by threatening that the Gestapo will take her Rotterdam-based parents into protective custody unless she gets information from her soldier boyfriend. The fact that these characters are the source of most of the actual dramatic elements of the film is most notable when Beppie kills Barratt, and is then killed by Davis: without those figures to focus on, the film abandons character-based drama in favour of the action footage of largely faceless battalions landing at the port of Norville, and their battles with the (pre-warned) German troops. While this is well-shot and tense in places, there is very little at stake in terms of individuals – again, the comparison with the final fight sequence in Went the Day Well? favours the later film, because there is more engagement with the characters.

So where are the British characters in all this? They are largely forgettable vanilla privates, majors and lieutenants, who tend to merge together, pawns in the spies’ webs and schemes. The main British character, security officer Richards (Reginald Tate), has to handle the brunt of the propaganda, often spouting slogans and warnings rather than anything that would endear us to him as a character.

You could argue that this was the point of the film, that normal, uneventful British types were being duped into giving away pieces of information by talented, colourful, German spies, and that everyone should be wary. The opening titles exclaim ‘This is the story of how YOU unwittingly worked for the Enemy’ – and it is possible the association with the Directorate of Army Kinematography reduced the ability of Ealing to effectively dramatise or introduce stronger British characters (something the studio was noted for, and which is visible in earlier films like Saloon Bar). As noted above, the reliance on British soldiers as a mass – obeying orders, rushing a beach, training together – does work to overwhelm the few individuals we see. The British soldiers are successful in their mission, but the revelation of secret plans means more men are killed – and ‘the next of kin casualties have been informed’ – allowing the film to (rather ponderously) reiterate to its central message at the end.

Visually, there are elements of later Ealing concerns (the location work is strong, the cast is diverse and interesting), there are nice comic touches (Johns, in the bookshop, leafs through a book titled ‘I Am A Nazi Agent’), while the film’s emphasis on sexuality does tend towards the limited view of women seen in some Ealing films: Clare’s exotic dancer, Beppie’s shop worker, Ma’s German spy and Hird’s female van driver. While Clare and Hird are unwilling dupes, there is no sense that the film presents women as the only source of secret information, it leaks just as easily in conversations between men: as seen in the appealing final sequence where those recurring upper class twit characters of 1930s/40s British films (played by Basil Radford and Naunton Wayne) chat about a munitions factory. Yet as the camera reveals in a sly pan to the right, sat next to them (and lighting their cigarettes) is Davis, revelling in the detail they are giving. If there is any doubt that his character dominates the film, this final return and centrality appears to confirm it.

Next time, back to the earlier Ealing film on the list with The Gaunt Stranger (1938)...

The Great Ealing Film Challenge 23: Saloon Bar (1940)

Bouncing back to an earlier point in Ealing’s filmography, Saloon Bar can also be seen as a throwback to lower budget British filmmaking of the 1930s with its reliance on studio-based production, limited sets, small cast and reliance on genre. The film, with its script written by Angus Macphail and John Dighton (regular Ealing contributors, who also worked on The Black Sheep of Whitehall, The Ghost of St Michaels and The Next of Kin; while Dighton contributed stories to Dead of Night) and direction from Walter Forde, fits the mould of those early Ealing efforts. However, the film also links to broader ideas of what Ealing films encapsulated, with its emphasis on a small community fighting against larger bureaucracy (here, attempting to acquit a wrongly convicted man), some strongly drawn characters, and a strong combination of elements from crime, detective and comedy genres.

Set among the regulars who inhabit the saloon bar of the Cap and Bells, the film follows Joe Harris (Gordon Harker), a bookie who returns to the bar on Christmas Eve after months away and decides to investigate the murder of Mrs Truscott, for which Eddie Graves (Alec Clunes), a regular at the bar, and boyfriend of barmaid Queenie (Elizabeth Allan), is about to hang. Joe, with help from bar staff Ivy (Anna Konstam) and Fred (Al Millen) and customers Charlie Wickers (Ealing stalwart Mervyn Johns, as stoic and logical as ever) and Sally (Joyce Barbour), investigate various clues and ultimately uncover a story of bigamy, blackmail and intrigue. Meanwhile, there is a thin subplot involving the bar owner’s wife, who is about to give birth in an upstairs room.

Where the film works is in drawing out the different characters that make up the bar’s staff and customers. Broadly drawn in places (notably Queenie and Harry Small), the actors are able to give these characters life, particularly Harker as Joe and Barbour as Sally. Most of these performances contribute to the film’s ability to suggest camaraderie among the characters, and a reason why they would band together in this way. Even characters like Sally and Doris, who only appear in a handful of scenes, contribute to the working class milieu and focus of the film, and show how the film rarely takes sides on what is acceptable and what is not. For example, Harry Small’s bigamy is a problem, but Doris’ paying ‘gentlemen friends’ are less so: when she asks ‘Are you saying I take money from men?’ Joe replies ‘It doesn’t matter to me what you do in your spare time.’ Equally, Sally’s job managing a chorus of dancing girls is barely commented on, just another job. It is obviously too much to suggest the film is celebrating female independence here (Doris may have more than ‘one umbrella in her hatstand’ but she also works in the rival bar, the Shakespeare, and blocks Joe’s investigation) but it appears to lack any strict moral perspective on those professions.

The film is obviously shot on a tight budget: much of the film’s narrative takes place in the saloon bar of the title, with only five or six other locations being used through the film. There is little real tension built up: the film makes it clear Eddie is innocent, most obviously through a subjective flashback sequence that shows Eddie packing a case while the murder is committed. While this could be seen as unreliable narration, given it is Queenie’s retelling of Eddie’s story, the film constantly refers to his appeal, and the bar regulars (whom the audience get to know best) stress their belief in his innocence. The film’s pleasures largely comes from their attempts to solve the mystery, particularly the haphazard investigative style (Joe pretending to be a psychic researcher to check a man’s alibi; Sally discovering a relevant scrapbook in the theatre’s prop room) and Wickers’ continual rejection of each new clue (there is a brief moment where the film suggests Wickers could be the murderer, but his character is obviously too gloomy and despondent to ever commit anything)

The film’s comedy stems from some off-beat humour – for example, a young couple sit in the corner of the bar, largely oblivious to the whole investigation. The film occasionally eavesdrops on the (largely one-sided) conversation where the girl, a wannabe starlet with brash (and misplaced) confidence, offers increasingly bizarre stories about her attempts to break into show business: starting with worrying that a strange man wanted to take advantage to her, through having her skirts gathered around her neck, to being naked and performing a fan dance. These snatches of conversation build to the girl exclaiming that she’s shocked that the regulars are discussing murder in front of her! However, there is also a recurring joke around a group of young lads singing / ruining Christmas carols outside the bar that is painful first time round (and does not improve with repetition) and very broad comedy around a series of drunken toffs unable to start their cars. There are also some obvious gags around sandwiches past their sell-by date, a blind man beating Joe at pinball, the maid mishearing Joe and claiming he was from the Bicycle Institute (rather than the Psychical Institute) etc.

The film has some interesting visual tics: the bar itself is a blandly lit area, but when the film ventures outside (notably to scenes set in Gabbot’s garage, or the final chase through the shadowy, but studio-bound, streets), there are more interesting visual compositions. This sequence – like the introductory scenes that play up the importance of Graves about to hang –uses a faster-paced editing style than the more casual approach found throughout. The camera also prowls around various scenes, framing and reframing characters or aspects of set design (the frosted windows of the bar, Joe’s car). Set design also works to confirm audience understanding of class difference in the film: the saloon bar is old fashioned and snug, while The Shakespeare public house is a modern, brightly lit and fashionably designed area with (modernist) ideas above its station (possibly signalled by Joe’s treatment by the bouncers, or the fact that Doris – the main barmaid – is revealed to be a working girl on the side)

In a nice moment, the epilogue of the film returns to the idea of community: the young starlet appears to have mislaid her date (she is now regaling Wickers with her stories), but she has joined the cast of bar regulars just as Charlie announces the birth of his baby boy, and a ‘lock in’ for everyone – including the local policeman on the beat, who turns up just as the doors are being closed. It is a moment of reunification – the small community has identified and got rid of the unwelcome elements (mainly Harry Small, but Doris is also absent), and is now reassembled around traditional patriarchal and gender roles of marriage, children, domesticity and Christianity, as Christmas music plays over the credits. While not perhaps a classic, Saloon Bar offers an early sense of Ealing community and genre-hybridity that would inform some of their later comedies.

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

Next time: wartime propaganda with The Next of Kin (1942)...

The Great Ealing Film Challenge 22: Pink String and Sealing Wax (1945)

At some point during this Challenge, I knew I would find an Ealing film I just didn’t like, and which I might struggle to find anything interesting to write about. While that isn’t quite the case with Pink String and Sealing Wax, this is the film that has most tested my patience while watching it, partly because of the film it is, and partly because of the film it could have been. My main knowledge of the film was that it starred Googie Withers, whose Ealing appearances I’ve only yet scratched the surface of (the female lead in Trouble Brewing (1939), a small appearance in Dead of Night (1945). Yet while Withers gives a strong performance around which much of the film revolves, she is also frustratingly sidelined for increasingly tangential subplots.

Withers plays Pearl Bond, a fascinating and flawed portrait of a character whose desires and mistakes set the plot in motion yet ultimately doom her: a working class woman in Victorian times, working in the Brighton pub owned by her drunken husband Joe (Garry Marsh), her infidelity a constant source of gossip among the pub regulars. From the moment Withers sashays onto screen, with an array of low-cut tops, bushy black hair, quick put-downs and an eye for Dan Powell (John Carol), it is clear this is a character the film will struggle to contain.

But perhaps this entrance is so compelling because it comes after ten minutes spent in the company of the Sutton family, led by stern patriarch Edward (Mervyn Johns), with his wife Ellen (Mary Merrall), eldest son David (Gordon Jackson), and daughters Victoria (Jean Ireland) and Peggy (Sally Ann Howes). The Suttons are (some might say unfortunately) the focus of the film, its alleged moral centre, and the pivot around which most of the narrative revolves. While it often appears the film is mocking the family (most notably the moral binaries expressed by the father), it also celebrates them by showing their successes and their ability to overcome problems – problems like Pearl Bond.

The Suttons run a chemists, although Edward also serves as ‘public analyst’ (equivalent of a forensic expert) for the local courts. He is a proud, religious and unwavering man, whose children largely live in fear of him, while his wife appears to suffer him. He mocks David’s love poetry, chastises his son for writing letters to a girl he is not engaged to, forces his daughters to recite scripture, dismisses Victoria’s hopes of being a singer, and punishes Peggy when she feeds the guinea pigs he plans to experiment on. In any other film, Edward would be an ogre – and at times the film delights in showing how his children misbehave and ignore his strictures. David gets drunk in the local pub (where he meets Pearl); Victoria performs for a famous singer and gets an audition in London; Peggy steals money from the church collection plate to fund Victoria’s train ticket.

The film constantly underlines how awful Edward’s behaviour is, and how his children have to deceive him to move on in life. When he states that if Victoria accepts the scholarship from the music school, she won’t be allowed to stay in ‘his house,’ his wife (for the first time in the film) stands up to him, threatening to leave (there is a bald statement she stays for the children, not for him), unless Edward relents.

But if we are supposed to hate Edward, or reject his view of the world, how does that sit with the film’s ultimate vindication of him, as the man who saves David and sends Googie Withers to her death?

Because Pearl, while the Suttons were bickering over music schools and guinea pigs, has been cultivating David’s friendship, largely to make her lover Dan jealous. When David explains about the qualities of strychnine poisoning (obviously an appropriate romantic chat-up technique when you are the son of a pharmacist), Pearl sees a way to use him as an unwitting accomplice (she manoeuvres him out of the pharmacy after establishing where the poisons are kept) to get rid of Joe. The film thrives on this melodrama and, as already noted, Googie Withers plays Pearl as a force of nature: fun, conniving, and a survivor. With Joe dead, and her plans unravelling, Pearl goes to Edward and threatens to implicate David: and here, despite the unbending portrayal to this point of Edward as a figure to be mocked, the film celebrates him. Confronting Pearl, he becomes a minor-key Sherlock Holmes, stripping away all the elements of her story, revealing her lies, and laying out what he will tell the police. Johns comes into his own here – so often the film has forced him to play Edward stiffly, all crisp dialogue and doubting frowns. Here, although those traits are still visible, the challenge of duelling with Pearl makes those qualities heroic – because he finally comes to the aid of one of his children.

Despite this last minute denouement, however, the film has made it impossible to accept Edward as a hero. The performances point to this (Johns is uptight and repressed; Withers is cocky and full of life) and even though they are both cruel and unforgiving at points in the narrative, Pearl’s sequences are dramatic and broadly comic, where Edward is monotone and stoic. The film ends with Pearl dead (having thrown herself into the sea), David married to a suitable girl (his letter-writing sweetheart), Victoria an acceptable singing star, and Edward’s view of the world at least partially confirmed. David and Victoria have had minor rebellions, but Edward’s patriarchal view of the world has been reaffirmed. (there is also an unmotivated narrative framework of a stuffy newspaperman at the Brighton Herald and Southern Weekly News – the title is emphasised in both the opening and closing shots of the film – reciting the ‘official’ version of Edward’s life as pillar of the community to his secretary)

Narratively, the film eventually promotes Edward. But visually and thematically, Pearl is the heart of the film. If Pearl and Edward are competing forces in David’s life, then they are also involved in a tug-of-war over the film’s purpose and interests. What remains unknown is whether there was a similar struggle between writer Diana Morgan and director Robert Hamer (who is also credited with ‘script contributions’) as they adapted this play for the screen...

Coming Soon: get your drinks order in for Saloon Bar (1940)...

The Great Ealing Film Challenge 21: The Gentle Gunman (1952)

Another minor revelation when approaching my survey of Ealing films: they made this film about ‘the Troubles’ that included an attempt to present both sides of the conflict, and which cast cherub-faced John Mills as an IRA terrorist! Despite the odds (and there are several, including the presence of my Ealing bête noire, Robert Beatty), the film is a fascinating and enjoyable piece of thriller fiction that rarely lets its politics get in the way of the more genre-based pleasures. Based on a play (that had previously been produced for the BBC in 1950), the story’s stage roots are quite obvious at points in the film: most notably in several long scenes set in an Irish garage. Yet the film also expands out into tube station bombings, night-time shootings, and rooftop chases that give the film a fluidity and tension beyond what a theatrical production would (likely) have been able to convey.

The film is focused on Terry (Mills) and Matt Sullivan (Dirk Bogarde), both members of the IRA, and both involved with the same woman, Maureen Fagan (Elizabeth Sellars). The film opens with Matt arriving at a republican cell in London, looking for Terry, whose behaviour has aroused suspicion among their brethren. The London sequences are really strong, mostly filmed on location, with the darkened wartime lighting, wet streets, and people huddled in houses and in tube stations. Matt is tasked with placing a bomb on Camden Town tube platform, before catching the last tube. Despite the presence of women and children sheltering from an air raid, Matt places the bomb and is about to get on the tube – when a group of kids notice his abandoned case is ticking. Matt freezes, misses the train, then panics – running off the platform. Terry, who has been watching him, throws the bomb into the tunnel, and heads after Matt.

This tube station sequence (and the following arrests of the Irish cell, and Matt and Terry’s rooftop confrontation where Terry confirms he’s been working with the English, doubting his role as ‘an anarchist in the middle of an air-raid’) is suitably tense, and strikingly shot and edited. There are nice compositions – Matt and Terry sit in adjacent phone booths, talking on the phone to avoid being spotted; Bogarde in the background spots Mills, lighting up a cigarette in the extreme left of frame; the two actors on the roof, faces obscured by hats, occasional bursts of light from below illuminating them – and the editing, particularly in the tube sequence, builds to the explosion through quick cuts to Bogarde’s face and the playing children. This opening really sets the tone for the film, and I felt a tinge of disappointment when it became clear the bulk of the film would actually be set in a garage in Ireland rather than in this shady and dangerous wartime London.

The plot becomes a little tortuous here, as Matt reports Terry as a traitor, we learn he is now sleeping with Terry’s old girlfriend Maureen, meet local republicans Shinto (Beatty) and Murphy (Michael Golden), as well as Maureen’s mother Molly (Barbara Mullen) and brother Johnny (James Kennedy), and a plot is set in motion to recapture the men captured in the London raid. Most of this, as I said above, takes place in the garage – with occasional cuts to Belfast docks, where Johnny works. The night-time city scenes are more atmospheric (the garage is largely shot during the day, or on well-lit studio sets) and play to the film’s generic interests in the shadowy world of crime thrillers. Johnny is shot, Matt tries to get him back over the border, Terry returns, and the three of them are captured by Shinto. The denouement of the film returns to similar issues from the tube station: a tense ambush at the docks (in daytime), innocent people under threat of guns and grenades, and Matt forced to choose his path. Although not as successful a sequence as the opening, it is brutal in its dispatching of minor characters and does set up a nice double-cross from Terry that ends the film.

Despite its narrative content – and even with the wartime setting allowing some distance – the film does go to some lengths to avoid taking sides in the Troubles (or, at least, to avoid being seen to take sides). Despite the criminal and terrorist past of the two brothers, who in most films would have to be caught, killed or morally rebuked, Matt and Terry wander away at the end, with no sense of punishment, and with their fraternal bond stronger than ever. Terry, of course, has represented a dispassionate logical view throughout (his riposte to Shinto’s statement that a man had died for Ireland is ‘better had he lived for it.’): the film obviously shares this sentiment, and Matt’s realisation of this truth is likely what ensures he survives to the end.

Yet despite Terry’s centrality here, there is an issue over the casting of John Mills. Given his other appearances for Ealing (The Big Blockade and The Black Sheep of Whitehall in wartime, playing Captain Scott in Scott of the Antarctic, then returning for a late Ealing appearance in Dunkirk), there is nothing that suggests he is capable of playing an IRA traitor, even if the character is actually helping the British at the same time. He is the cool-headed older brother and man of action (no longer ‘a boy’), able to impart grown-up advice to his younger brother (a strong performance from Bogarde, but in the tough rebellious role he was already known for) and lead him away from the path of violence. Yet Mills, although solid, rarely feels threatening: he is supposed to have been a stalwart republican until he sees the ‘error’ of those ways, but Mills largely ambles around the film being avuncular and chatty – we rarely see any sign of an underlying steely resolve or determination.

At the same time, as the images through the article show, the film’s producers and distributors seemed intent on drawing a female audience – the appeal of Mills and Bogarde might accomplish that on its own, but the film moves beyond the idea that violence (and this genre) as a man’s game, by making an explicit link to the central female character, Maureen. Sellars plays her as strong, passionate and opinionated, but that passion gets her brother shot and her mother rejecting her: when Terry takes Matt away at the end, it is as much away from Maureen as it is the IRA (Terry notes: ‘if Maureen ever had a child it’d be born in uniform with a tommy gun for a rattler’). Although there is a feminine anti-violence view through Molly, Sellars’ performance tends to dominate, and elevates Maureen within the film.

It might be obvious that although I liked much of the film, it does struggle in the middle to balance the melodrama of the Matt/Terry/Maureen relationship with its interest in being a tense crime thriller. One of the most curious additions, given that generic focus, is the bookends provided by the characters Dr. Brannigan (Joseph Tomelty) and Henry Truethorn (Gilbert Harding), elderly gentlemen (one Irish, one English) engaged in a seemingly interminable argument/squabble over the Irish-English relationship. These are comic characters – the film opens with them blustering and bickering over a chess game – but they are pulled into the action when Matt, Terry and an injured Johnny burst in on Brannigan’s surgery (during another round of the same argument). Even when taken prisoner and locked in a storehouse, Brannigan and Truethorn continue their comic bickering and, at the end, the film returns to them, still debating, still playing a game of chess. The film has come full circle to these men, and ends with the following salutation:

T: ‘To England, where the situation may be serious, but is never hopeless'

B: ‘To Ireland, where the situation is always hopeless, but never serious’

So, the film ends on an indecisive political note (matching the balance it has tried to maintain throughout), and an uncertain generic one, stuck between drama (serious) and comedy (never serious): as the comic banter of Brannigan and Truethorn continues, the camera switches back to Terry and Matt, two brothers fading away into the Irish countryside, walking away from the garage, from the IRA, from Maureen, and (presumably) from any solid answers to the English/Irish question.