The Age of the Dream Palace: Cinema and Society in 1930s Britain

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The Age of the Dream Palace

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Cinema and Society series GENERAL EDITOR: JEFFREY RICHARDS The Age of the Dream Palace: Cinema and Society in 1930s Britain Jeffrey Richards Best of British: Cinema and Society from 1930 to the Present Anthony Aldgate & Jeffrey Richards Brigadoon, Braveheart and the Scots: Distortions of Scotland in Hollywood Cinema Colin McArthur The British at War: Cinema, State and Propaganda, 1939–1945 James Chapman British Cinema and the Cold War Tony Shaw Children, Cinema and Censorship: From Dracula to the Dead End Kids Sarah J. Smith The Crowded Prairie: American National Identity in the Hollywood Western Michael Coyne An Everyday Magic: Cinema and Cultural Memory Annette Kuhn Femininity in the Frame: Women and 1950s British Popular Cinema Melanie Bell Film and Community in Britain and France: From La Règle du Jeu to Room at the Top Margaret Butler Film Propaganda: Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany Richard Taylor From Moscow to Madrid: Postmodern Cities, European Cinema Ewa Mazierska & Laura Rascaroli Hollywood Genres and Post-War America: Masculinity, Family and Nation in Popular Movies and Film Noir Mike Chopra-Gant Hollywood’s History Films David Eldridge Licence to Thrill: A Cultural History of the James Bond Films James Chapman Past and Present: National Identity and the British Historical Film James Chapman Powell and Pressburger: A Cinema of Magic Spaces Andrew Moor Propaganda and the German Cinema, 1933–1945 David Welch Shooting the Civil War: Cinema, History and American National Identity Jenny Barrett Spaghetti Westerns: Cowboys and Europeans from Karl May to Sergio Leone Christopher Frayling Spectacular Narratives: Hollywood in the Age of the Blockbuster Geoff King Typical Men: The Representation of Masculinity in Popular British Cinema Andrew Spicer The Unknown 1930s: An Alternative History of the British Cinema, 1929–1939 Edited by Jeffrey Richards

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THE AGE OF THE DREAM PALACE Cinema and Society in 1930s Britain

JEFFREY RICHARDS

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This edition published in 2010 by I.B.Tauris & Co Ltd 6 Salem Road, London W2 4BU 175 Fifth Avenue, New York NY 10010 www.ibtauris.com Distributed in the United States and Canada Exclusively by Palgrave Macmillan 175 Fifth Avenue, New York NY 10010 First published in 1984 by Routledge & Kegan Paul plc Copyright © 1984, 1989, 2010 Jeffrey Richards The right of Jeffrey Richards to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or any part thereof, may not be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. ISBN: 978 1 84885 122 1 A full CIP record for this book is available from the British Library A full CIP record is available from the Library of Congress Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: available Printed and bound in India by Thomson Press India Ltd

Dream Palace:Dream Palace

For John Laird and

Gary Shaw

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Cinema and Society series GENERAL EDITOR: JEFFREY RICHARDS The Age of the Dream Palace: Cinema and Society in 1930s Britain Jeffrey Richards Best of British: Cinema and Society from 1930 to the Present Anthony Aldgate & Jeffrey Richards Brigadoon, Braveheart and the Scots: Distortions of Scotland in Hollywood Cinema Colin McArthur The British at War: Cinema, State and Propaganda, 1939–1945 James Chapman British Cinema and the Cold War Tony Shaw Children, Cinema and Censorship: From Dracula to the Dead End Kids Sarah J. Smith The Crowded Prairie: American National Identity in the Hollywood Western Michael Coyne An Everyday Magic: Cinema and Cultural Memory Annette Kuhn Femininity in the Frame: Women and 1950s British Popular Cinema Melanie Bell Film and Community in Britain and France: From La Règle du Jeu to Room at the Top Margaret Butler Film Propaganda: Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany Richard Taylor From Moscow to Madrid: Postmodern Cities, European Cinema Ewa Mazierska & Laura Rascaroli Hollywood Genres and Post-War America: Masculinity, Family and Nation in Popular Movies and Film Noir Mike Chopra-Gant Hollywood’s History Films David Eldridge Licence to Thrill: A Cultural History of the James Bond Films James Chapman Past and Present: National Identity and the British Historical Film James Chapman Powell and Pressburger: A Cinema of Magic Spaces Andrew Moor Propaganda and the German Cinema, 1933–1945 David Welch Shooting the Civil War: Cinema, History and American National Identity Jenny Barrett Spaghetti Westerns: Cowboys and Europeans from Karl May to Sergio Leone Christopher Frayling Spectacular Narratives: Hollywood in the Age of the Blockbuster Geoff King Typical Men: The Representation of Masculinity in Popular British Cinema Andrew Spicer The Unknown 1930s: An Alternative History of the British Cinema, 1929–1939 Edited by Jeffrey Richards

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Contents

Illustrations

ix

Abbreviations

xi

Acknowledgments Introduction to the New Edition Introduction

xiii xv 1

Part 1 The Context 01 Going to the Pictures

11

02 The Dream Merchants

34

03 ‘The Devil’s Camera’

46

04 ‘Our Movie-made Children’

67

Part 2 The Constraints 05 The Aims and Principles of Censorship

89

06 Censorship in Operation: Domestic Policy

108

07 Censorship in Operation: Foreign Policy

122

08 Censorship in Operation: Imperial Policy

134

Part 3 The Stars 09 Stars

155

10 Gracie Fields: Consensus Personified

169

11 George Formby: The Road from Wigan Pier

191

12 Jessie Matthews: The Dancing Divinity

207

13 The Romantic Adventurer: Robert Donat and Leslie Howard

225

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viii CONTENTS

Part 4 The Films 14 Putting Britain on the Screen

245

15 Visions of the Past – Messages for the Present

257

16 Images of Peace and War

273

17 Class and Consensus: Lower Down

296

18 Class and Consensus: Higher up

310

Conclusions

323

Notes

325

Sources

352

General Index

363

Index of Film Titles

371

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Illustrations

1 2 3 4

The Odeon, Sutton Coldfield The Odeon, Woolwich

Red Ensign Jew Siiss (1934) 5 TheDrum 6 East Meets West 7 Sing As We Go 8 Shipyard Sally 9 NoLimit 10 I(s in the Air 11 The Good Companions 12 Evergreen 13 Knight Without Armour 14 Goodbye, Mr. Chips (1939) 15 The Scarlet Pimpernel 16 Pygmalion 17 ThePrivateLife ofHenry VllI 18 Victoria the Great 19 The Iron Duke 20 Hi.s Lordship 21 George Arliss and Leslie Banks 22 Storm in a Teacup 23-4 Things to Come 25 Fire ouer England 26 Our Fighting Navy 27 The Last Coupon 28 Say It With Flowers 29 The Citackl 30 The Stars Look Down 31 The Skin Game 32 The Good Companions

ix

Abbreviations

ABPC BBFC BFI BIP FO GB HC Deb. LCC PRO

Associated British Picture Corporation British Board of Film Censors British Film Institute British International Pictures Foreign Office Gaumont British Picture Corporation House of Commons Debates London County Council Public Record Office

xi

Acknow ledgments

I am indebted to many friends and colleagues for supplying information, advice and assistance of various kinds and I render my grateful thanks to: Anthony Aldgate, Nicholas Pronay, Peter Stead, Allen Eyles, Kenneth Short, Richard Taylor, John MacKenzie, Philip French, Ann Lloyd, Brian Barfield, J ames Ferman, Mrs Penfold, Christopher Robson, Thorold Dickinson, Charles Barr, Elaine Burrows, Jeffrey Hulbert, Dame Anna Neagle t Lt-Col A. R. Rawlinson, Dorothy McCulla, John K. Walton, Peggy and Eddie Stamp, Chris Hanney, Gary Shaw, John Laird, Derek Smith and Agnese and Bob Geoghegan (Archive Film Agency). lowe a particular debt of gratitude to Stephen Constantine, who painstakingly read and constructively commented upon the entire manuscript, and to Julian Fox, who generously opened up to me his archive of statistical information on the British cinema. I would also like to thank the staffs of Lancaster University Library, the British Film Institute, the National Film Archive, Birmingham Reference Library, and the British Museum Reading Room for their courtesy and helpfulness. My thanks are also due to the Wolfson Foundation, who generously provided a grant to cover the cost of necessary research in London, and to Lancaster University, who kindly allowed me two terms of sabbatical leave to complete the research and writing of the book. I trust that what follows will be regarded as an adequate return on the investment of confidence in the project placed by all the abovementioned. Film stills appear by courtesy of the Stills Division of the National Film Archive. Odeon photographs appear by permission of John Maltby Ltd. Song lyrics are reproduced by permission as follows: 'On the Beat' by Roger McDougall, © 1940 Francis Day & Hunter Ltd. Reproduced by permission of EMI Music Publishing Ltd. 'Sing As We Go' by Harry ParrDavies, © 1934 Francis Day & Hunter Ltd. Reproduced by permission of EMI Music Publishing Ltd. 'Over My Shoulder' by Harry Woods, © 1933 for all countries by Cinephonic Music Co. Ltd, 37 Soho Square, London WI V 5DG. AU rights reserved. International copyright secured. Reproduced by permission of Campbell Connelly and Co. Ltd. 'A Lad fra' Lancasheer' by G. Formby and D. Godfrey, © Lawrence Wright Music Co. Ltd. Reproduced by permission of ATV Music Ltd. xiii

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Introduction to the New Edition

When The Age of the Dream Palace was first published in 1984 I described the 1930s as ‘the least known and least appreciated decade in the history of British sound cinema’. In the succeeding decades, a steady stream of illuminating, scholarly and in-depth studies of almost every aspect of the subject has substantially remedied this lack of appreciation. But, although long out of print, Dream Palace remains in demand and second-hand copies are apparently eagerly sought. A reprint of the original text would therefore seem to be timely. It remains largely unchanged, though half a dozen errors of fact in the original have been silently corrected. I would, however, like to draw the attention of readers to some of the most useful books that have appeared since 1984 and that, in important ways, complement my account. My own further thoughts on the decade can be found in my book Films and British National Identity (Manchester University Press, 1997), in a collection of essays I edited in The Unknown 1930s (I.B.Tauris, 1998) and my own essay ‘Things to Come and science fiction in the 1930s’ in I.Q. Hunter (ed.), British Science Fiction Cinema (Routledge, 1999). Rachael Low’s Film Making in 1930s Britain (Allen & Unwin, 1985) is an authoritative account of film production in the decade. John Sedgwick’s Popular Filmgoing in 1930s Britain (Exeter University Press, 2000) analyses in persuasive detail the popular preferences in cinemagoing. Stephen Shafer analyses themes and motifs in 1930s cinema in British Popular Films 1929–1939 (Routledge, 1997). The definitive accounts of British film censorship are James C. Robertson’s The British Board of Film Censors, 1896–1950 (Croom Helm, 1985) and The Hidden Screen (Routledge, 1989). Allen Eyles has lovingly and exhaustively chronicled the histories of the great cinema chains in Odeon cinemas I: Oscar Deutsch Entertains Our Nation (CTA/BFI, 2002), Gaumont British Cinemas (CTA/BFI, 1997) and ABC: the First Name in Entertainment (CTA/BFI, 1993). Annette Kuhn has compiled a fascinating oral history of 1930s cinema-going in An Everyday Magic: Cinema and Cultural Memory (I.B.Tauris, 2002). Contemporary first-hand evidence of cinema-goers’ experiences and expectations can be found in Jeffrey Richards and Dorothy xv

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xvi INTRODUCTION TO THE NEW EDITION

Sheridan (eds), Mass Observation at the Movies (Routledge, 1987). On specific genres, David Sutton has written the first substantial account of 1930s comedy in A Chorus of Raspberries: British Film Comedy 1929–1939 (Exeter University Press 2000) and Steve Chibnall has rescued the quota quickies from ‘the enormous condescension of posterity’ in Quota Quickies: The Birth of the British ‘B’ Film (BFI, 2007). Sue Harper illuminatingly covers the costume film in Picturing the Past: The Rise and Fall of the British Costume Film (BFI, 1994). There are important studies of the noncommercial cinema in Ian Aitken, Film and Reform: John Grierson and the Documentary Film Movement (Routledge, 1990), Stephen G. Jones, The British Labour Movement and Film 1918–1939 (Routledge, 1987) and Alan G. Burton, The British Consumer Co-operative Movement and Film, 1890s– 1960s (Manchester University Press, 2005). There is a new and excellent biography of Alexander Korda, Korda: Britain’s Only Movie Mogul by Charles Drazin (Sidgwick and Jackson, 2002). Far away from the glamour of international film-making at Denham, the cheap and cheerful film product of Mancunian Films is the subject of Philip Martin Williams and David L. Williams, Hooray for Jollywood: the life of John E. Blakeley and the Mancunian Film Corporation (History on your Doorstep, 2001), cinemagoing in Wales is explored in Peter Miskell, A Social History of the Cinema in Wales, 1918–1951 (University of Wales Press, 2006) and the unsung populist film-maker John Baxter receives overdue recognition in Geoff Brown and Tony Aldgate, The Common Touch: the Films of John Baxter (BFI, 1989). There are notable monographs on key films in Tom Ryall, Blackmail (BFI, 1993), Christopher Frayling, Things to Come (BFI, 1995), Mark Glancy, The 39 Steps (I.B.Tauris, 2003), Greg Walker, The Private Life of Henry VIII (I.B.Tauris, 2003) and Scott Anthony, Night Mail, (BFI, 2007). There are regular articles on aspects of 1930s cinema in The Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television and The Journal of Popular British Cinema (later renamed The Journal of British Cinema and Television). At the time I was writing, cinema-going was in decline and access to 1930s films was limited. The nature of cinema-going has changed over recent decades with the rise of the multiplex. But technological change has meant that more films than ever before are being viewed, but they are being viewed not just in cinemas but also on television, video, DVD and computer and this means that opportunities to see 1930s films are greater than they have ever been since the films were originally released, allowing for increased knowledge and appreciation of a decade that is no longer the lost decade of British sound cinema. Jeffrey Richards

Introduction

The title of this book was chosen to evoke that period between the two world wars which is often described as 'the golden age of the cinema'. It was a period in which the local cinema occupied a special place in the life of the community, a place to which people went regularly in order to be taken out of themselves and their lives for an hour or two. In palatial, sumptuously appointed buildings, they could for no more than a few coppers purchase ready-made dreams. The image most commonly applied to films was and is that of dreams. D. A. Spencer and H. D. Waley summed up this view most succinctly in 1939: For the average human being there yawns a considerable gap between what he or she would like to get out of life and what life actually offers. This gap can be partly bridged by day-dreaming, and it is as aids to daydreaming that we must regard most fiction films. 1 The American anthropologist Hortense Powdermaker, applying the same idea to Hollywood, coined the phrase 'dream factory' to apply to film studios, and an inventive publicist for the newly erected Astoria Cinema, Brixton, talked of 'an acre of seats in a garden of dreams'.2 But there was more to it than that. The queuing to enter, the sitting in silence, the habitual attendance on the same night all this had the feel of ritual. It is not surprising then that the analogy most commonly applied to cinema-going was that of religion. Cinemas were described as cathedrals of the movies; regular cinema-goers talked of their seats as 'pews'; stars were worshipped and regularly described as 'gods and goddesses'. 3 The role of the cinema manager was defined by one practitioner directly in religious terms: The manager of a high-class cinema has many opportunities nowadays for useful service and there is really no reason why his social relations should not be somewhat similar to those built up around the modern parson. 4 Conversely many clerics and committed Christians fought the cinema, seeing it as an alternative religion, the religion of Antichrist, which seduced people from the churches with visions of lUXUry and sin. The Devil's Camera was the title given to one particularly virulent anti-cinema polemic. 5 As that perceptive critic Richard Winnington wrote in 1948:

2 INTRODUCTION

the film serves a political and social need as a narcotic, rivalling or even superseding the church in the valuable respect of providing the masses with an escape dream. 6 Consciously or unconsciously he echoes Marx, who would probably have agreed that by the middle of the twentieth century films had replaced religion as the 'opiate of the masses'. But if cinema~going was a religion and cinematic productions dreams, drugged or otherwise, it was a religion which was directed and organized by shrewd high priests, the men who produced the films, manufactured the stars, ran the studios, created the dreams. In order to understand the function of the cinema in society it is necessary to look beyond the ritual forms of cinema-going and star-worship to assess just what beliefs and attitudes were being preached, what star types adored, what world-views promoted. One does not have to be a Marxist to agree with Marx that The class which has the means of material production at its disposal has control at the same time over the means of mental production, so that thereby, generally speaking, the ideas of those who lack the means of mental production are subject to it.... In so far, therefore, as they rule as a class and determine the extent and compass of an epoch, it is selfevident that they ... among other things ... regulate the production and distribution of the ideas of their age: thus their ideas are the ruling ideas of the epoch. 7 The basic proposition was refined and expanded by Gramsci, whose ideas of 'hegemony' have been usefully applied to culture and the mass media by Stuart Hall. 8 According to this theory, the ruling class exert their authority over the other classes by a combination of force and the winning of consent. The ruling class's view of 'reality' comes to constitute the primary 'reality' of the subordinate classes, and the ruling class sets the limits, both mental and structural, within which the subordinate classes live. 'Hegemony' is maintained by the agency of superstructures - the family, the church, education, the media, culture, law, the police, the army which contain the subordinate classes. The dominated classes maintain their own distinctive forms of social life and class practice, but they are incorporated within the structure and assigned a specifically defined place within the dominant ideology. Consent to 'hegemony' is gained by the promotion of consensus, and the mass media play a vital role in the creation and preservation of this consensus. The mass media operate in five basic ways, all of them overlapping and mutually supportive, to transmit the dominant ideology and to create for it a consensus of support. First, they provide images of the lives, attitudes

INTRODUCTION 3

and values of various groups in society, created with selected recognizable facets. This is important because, as Hortense Powdermaker discovered, film audiences have a tendency to accept as accurate depictions of places, attitudes, life-styles of which they themselves have no first-hand experience. 9 Thus for instance a British working-class view of the United States might be entirely the product of the view of America in Hollywood films. Second, they provide images of society as a whole, again selecting acceptable elements and aspects from everyday life, organizing them in a coherent pattern governed by a set of presuppositions and making sense of them. The process of selection results in the conferring of status or acceptability on those issues, institutions or individuals which regularly appear in a favourable light say, for instance, the police or the monarchy. What J. S. R. Goodlad says of popular drama is equally applicable to popular film: It may serve as the vehicle by which a community expresses its beliefs about what is right and wrong; indeed it may function instrumentally as a medium through which a community repeatedly instructs its members in correct behaviour .10

Popular films and in particular genre films, such as crime dramas, horror pictures or Westerns, which regularly use the same elements, characters and situations, function as rituals, cementing the beliefs and ideals of society, enforcing social norms and exposing and isolating deviants. Lastly, there is a tendency in the mass media to promote uniformity and standardization, which affects not only dress, hairstyle and vocabulary but also and more subtly attitude and world-view. It is therefore of central importance to discover who controls the mass media and what ideas and attitudes they are disseminating through them. The object of my investigations is the British cinema in the 1930s, the least known and least appreciated decade in the history of the British sound film. It is a definable decade, bounded at one end by the arrival in Britain of the talkies and at the other by the outbreak of the Second WorId War. Although it was a period in which there was a major revival of filmmaking, it still languishes under the reputation of being a 'dud decade'. There are probably three principal reasons for this. First, there is the lingering memory of the 'quota quickies', a truly awful flood of cinematic rubbish produced to fill the requirements of the statutory British film quota. This created the impression of poor quality which took a long time to eradicate. One of the biggest laughs in the 1946 Bobby Howes stage show Here Come the Boys came when he hissed at a recalcitrant maid: 'All right, go to the pictures. I hope it's a British film.'ll Yet a decade which produced such high-quality work as Alfred Hitchcock's thrillers, the

4 INTRODUCTION

polished musicals of Jessie Matthews, and Korda's historical and Imperial epics cannot be written off so lightly. There may also be some truth in William K. Everson's view that the British are not nostalgic about the 1930s but are ashamed of the decade, associating it with mass unemployment and appeasement. 12 Although the image of The Devil's Decade is essentially a partial and selective one, the tenacity with which it has maintained its grip on the national folk memory is a tribute to the skill of the image-makers and opinion-leaders who fostered it. It may also reflect a deep-seated guilt that so many people voted for and supported the policies of the subsequently discredited National Government, who were prepared to come to an accommodation with the dictators rather than risk another world war. Certainly, the largely left-wing British film culture of the time was hostile to the products of the British commercial cinema, alleging that it wholly failed to depict the reality of British life and the British character. In the arts, it was very much an era of realism - of the Left Book Club and committed left-wing poetry, of Mass Observation and massively detailed social realist novels like those of J. B. Priestley, A. J. Cronin and Winifred Holtby. The only intellectually respectable area of the cinema was the documentary movement. But I have deliberately ignored this for several reasons. First, it has been exhaustively chronicled and analysed elsewhere. 13 Second, it was irrelevant to the bulk of cinema-goers, who neither saw nor particularly wanted to see its products. Third, much of it was far less radical than has often been alleged, operating as it did under the constraints of both censorship and sponsorship.I4 For the commercial cinema, its value was for the future. It trained up a whole school of filmmakers who were during the Second World War to enter the mainstream commercial industry and bring a brand new texture of realism to feature films. However, for all the calls from all the critics for more films about everyday British life, it is doubtful whether the cinema-going public were terribly concerned about its absence from the screen. As a jaundiced Victor Small wrote in the Left Review in 1938: No one is less interested in the fate of what might well be a social asset than the 18 millions of British citizens who pour their odd cash into cinema box-offices each week. Let us be quite clear on this: the extent to which a product supplies or creates a social demand affects any criticism of that product. There was never any demand for British films and as yet no demand has been created .... it would seem our film companies will never touch subjects of social significance. 15 He did not mean by this that British films were unpopular per se; the box office success of, for instance, the films of Gracie Fields, George Formby and Jessie Matthews refutes that. He meant that the general public was not much interested in committed, 'relevant', socially concerned films.

INTRODUCTION

5

They went to films to be entertained, but with their entertainment they frequently got a message that may not have been relevant to social change but was centrally important to the maintenance of the status quo. This book is not a history of the British cinema in the 1930s. It is rather a series of linked essays on various aspects of it, seeking to explore the ways in which mass culture can be used to generate ideological consensus, promote it where it does not exist and confirm it where it does. Film does not of course operate in a vacuum. It is part of a wider cultural process, involving overlapping influences of newspapers, wireless and literature. But it was cinema which occupied the primary place in the nation's leisure between the wars, and it is cinema which will be the focus of this particular study. My approach will be historical and contextual. I shall not be approaching the films as individual works of art. It is indeed doubtful if they are works of art at all in the true sense of that word. They are rather - to use the term applied to present-day American television films 'product'. They are not the result of individual artists setting out to convey a personal view of the world or to debate a problem central to the human condition. Indeed, I have tended to avoid those films which it could be argued are the products of a single creative intelligence, the films of Alfred Hitchcock for instance, on the grounds that they are inclined to tell us rather more about the individual artist than about society and the operation of 'hegemony', Furthermore, I shall not come to discuss films at all until the second half of the book, when I have firmly established the nature of the audience, the conditions of production and the constraints imposed upon it. I was criticized - perhaps rightly - over my book Visions of Yesterday, in which I sought to come to terms with the cinema of Empire, for relying too much on plot and dialogue and not enough on the visual image. It is of course one of the continuing problems in writing about films to convey the essence, detail and impact of the visual image, particularly a visual image in motion. Film-makers were aware of the power of the image and it behoves us to be equally aware. This awareness can be demonstrated by a revealing anecdote. When Alexander Korda was producing The Four Feathers (1939), he discovered that in the sequence of the regimental ball, the actors were in dark blue uniforms. This was militarily correct, according to the technical advisers. Korda insisted that they be put into scarlet, commenting tersely, 'This is Technicolor.' The result was a swirl of colour, a sequence of eye-catching splendour, factually inaccurate but emotionally satisfying. I6 But I want to put in a word of defence for what might be called the literary interpretation. First, the public, as successive surveys revealed, went to the films for the stars and the story, which involves us necessarily in a discussion of narrative and of archetypes. 17 Second, many films are

6 INTRODUCTION

based on books. They are not original cinematic creations so much as 'cinematizations', as the industry called them, of literary properties, whose success with the public in that form led producers to assume a guaranteed audience. Third, still more films are based on plays, and there was a continuing, almost organic, relationship between the British film studios and the British stage. Whether it be the music hall providing the stars and the sketches to serve as the basis of comedies or the revue stage providing the performers and the set-pieces for musical comedy or the West End stage providing the stars and the subjects for serious drama, the camera was often at second hand merely photographing what went on in that world beyond the proscenium arch. Fourth, we are dealing, as has been said, not so much with works of art as with artefacts. They are entertainment, produced by a conveyor-belt mass production process, works of collaboration between writers, directors, cameramen, etc., which often represent considered decisions made by men not actually involved in translating the script into visual images but who nevertheless retained the final say in the production. In many of the productions of London Films, the unifying intelligence is that of producer Alexander Korda, just as the production schedule of Gaumont British bore the imprint of production chief Michael Balcon, who never actually directed a film himself I mention all this because it has been suggested of the film that 'visual images ... may indeed suggest a message quite other than that overtly conveyed by plotting and dialogue,.18 Quite so, but is it likely to have been the case that a director would, in the strict studio conditions of the 1930s industry, have tried to visually subvert a script approved by the allpowerful producer? Or if he had, that the producer would allow it to stand without editing or reshooting? How can any visuals meaningfully subvert that sort of producer control? I do not want to deny the visual power of film. It would be foolish to do so. But I do want to argue that in the 1930s at any rate the visuals are chosen to match the message, to tell the story as it is written. So I suggest that the story with its characters and motivations, its dramatic confrontations and dialogue exchanges, comes first; how it is told comes second. Even then, the interpretative freedom of the director in choosing his visuals is strictly limited by the constraints under which he worked: the sacrosanctity of the script, the power of the producer, the demands of the censorship code, the very nature of the system. The effect that the system had on visual style is perfectly summarized by Roy Armes: Divided responsibility and anonymity are the key characteristics of such a system, and films become entertainment artefacts produced to a formula for an undifferentiated mass audience. Stress is placed on the maintenance of excitement and interest by a fast flowing story, the

INTRODUCTION 7

visual style is organized so as to allow the forefronting of star performers, and verisimilitude is preserved at all costs. The function of style is to disguise the actual nature of production, to control not simply the discontinuities of shooting, but also the very existence of the studio and beyond it, a whole economic and financial structure. The ideal is 'transparency,' the seamless image of a world which has an illusory resemblance to our own, but which is presented as 'coherent, continuous, universal, and wholly decipherable.' All the elements of productiondecor, choice of lens, invisible editing links, dubbing of sound and grading of prints - serve the same aim: to present significant action and star performance with the utmost clarity to a spectator who must never be disturbed in his willing suspension of disbelief. 19 The great imponderable in all this is to assess how the audiences reacted to the films produced in this way. The old hypodermic idea -that films injected their ideas directly into the audience as a whole - was long ago discredited. It is far more reasonable to assume that how an audience reacts depends ultimately on the age, sex, class, health, intelligence and preconceptions of that audience both collectively and individually. Although we do have the testimony of individual film fans, both in the form of letters to fan magazines and the evidence collected by J. P. Mayer in the 1940s, this is by its very nature specialized. More general evidence exists, again in fairly sporadic form, of box-office returns, particularly the record of the top money-makers for specific years, and of reissues, which generally signalled a film's box-office success. But I have drawn on two particular sources of evidence for popular reaction, both of which have been under~utilized by scholars. The first is the Motion Picture Herald's annual ranking of British stars in terms of their drawing power at the box office. This seems to me to be an almost infallible record of audience reaction to particular personalities and one of the sources of ultimate power that the audience possessed. In the last resort they could make or break stars by going to see their films or by staying away from them. The public loved and made stars of Gracie Fields and George Formby. But many aspiring stage stars - Gertrude Lawrence, for instance - never transferred successfully to the screen. Despite a big publicity build-up, Binkie Stuart never became the British Shirley Temple. Audiences preferred the real thing. The second source of information on popular reactions is contemporary newspaper reviews. Allowances have to be made for the attitudes and readerships of the individual papers, but the critics were writing with the tastes and interests of their readers in mind. What they wrote was important. For as Winifred Holmes testified in a contemporary study of cinema·going in an unnamed Southern town:

8 INTRODUCTION

newspaper reviews of films are read with interest and playa large part in influencing people of all classes in their appreciation of the films shown. 20 This study will begin therefore with an examination of the role of cinema-going in people's lives in the Thirties, will discuss the production context and will examine the constraints within which the industry operated. It will then move on to look at the role and nature of the star system and the images and vehicles of the most popular British stars of the Thirties. Finally it will turn to the question of the images of society presented in the films themselves. The whole will, I trust, add up to a revealing and constructive investigation into the role of popular cinema in the promotion of ideology.

Part 1

The Context

Going to the Pictures

Cinema~going

was indisputably the most popular form of entertainment in Britain in the 19308. When A. J. P. Taylor describes it as 'the essential social habit of the age,' he is merely echoing the verdict of a score of contemporary commentators and authorities.! The Commission on Educational and Cultural Films declared in 1932: 'The cinema has become the staple entertainment of the average family.' It quoted a statement made to a League of Nations committee that 'Only the Bible and the Koran have an indisputably larger circulation than that of the latest film from Los Angeles.,2 The Social Survey of Merseyside reported in 1934: '30 years have seen its rise from little more than a scientific toy in a sideshow at fairs to one of the most important social institutions of the country.,3 The New Survey of London Life and Labour concluded in 1935 that it was 'easily the most important agency of popular entertainment.' The cinema had become 'par excellence the people's entertainment,' it said, completely eclipsing the theatre, which 'has only a limited appeal to the working class today,.4 In his study of York in 1935-6, Seebohm Rowntree declared that 'as elsewhere, the cinemas are the most popular form of indoor recreation,.5 J. B. Priestley, reaching Leicester on his English Journey in 1933, lamented the fact that there was only one live show in the city and commented: In a town with nearly a quarter of a million people not without intelligence or money, this is not good enough. Soon we shall be as badly off as America, where I could find myself in large cities that had not a single living actor performing in them, nothing but films, films, films. There a whole generation has grown up that associates entertainment with moving pictures and with nothing else; and I am not sure that as much could not be said of this country.6 But exactly who went to the cinema and how often? The number of cinemas and the average attendance at them rose steadily throughout the decade. Annual admissions rose from 903 million in 1934, the first year for which reliable statistics exist, to 907 million in 1935, to 917 million in 1936, to 946 million in 1937, to 987 million in 1938, to 990 million in 1939, to 1,027 million in 1940. 7 By 1939, the cinema industry itself estimated its average weekly admission figure at 23 million, though there were of course seasonal fluctuations. 8 The number of cinemas also increased to 11

12 THE CONTEXT

meet the extra demand. There were an estimated 3,000 cinemas in operation in 1926. By 1935 there were 4,448 and by 1938 4,967,9 In Manchester and Salford the number of cinemas had risen from 137 in 1930 to 156 in 1939; in Liverpool from 85 in 1930 to 96 in 1939; in Newcastle from 33 in 1930 to 48 in 1939; in Birmingham from 94 in 1930 to 110 in 1939; and in Leeds from 60 in 1930 to 70 in 1939. 10 The actual number of new cinemas was much larger than this, however, for with the changeover to sound many old cinemas had been demolished and replaced, sometimes on the same site, by new ones. So while the overall number did not increase dramatically, the quality and capacity for accommodation did. An estimated 302 new cinemas were built between 1932 and 1934 alone. l l It is worth comparing cinema attendance figures with those of other media of communication to put them in context. In 1938-9 the circulation of daily newspapers was 10.48 million and of Sunday papers 13.59 million; and there were 8.95 million wireless licences. 12 It should be noted, however, that the newspaper and the wireless would be available to whole families. The first systematic survey of cinema-going was undertaken in 1934 by the statistician Simon Rowson, and although his figures for average and overall attendance have been revised subsequently, some of his findings are still of interest. He calculated the number of available cinema seats per head of the population and revealed, as one might have suspected, that the populous industrial areas had most cinemas and the agricultural areas fewest. There was one seat for every nine persons in Scotland and Lancashire, one for every ten in the North of England and South Wales, one for every eleven in Yorkshire, one for every twelve in the Midlands, one for every thirteen in North Wales, one for every fourteen in London and the Home Counties, one for every fifteen in the West of England and one for every nineteen in the Eastern counties. 13 But perhaps Rowson's most interesting conclusion is that 'about 43 per cent of all cinema admissions were at prices not exceeding 6d. each and about another 37 per cent paid not more than 10d.' or, put another way, 80 per cent of cinemagoers went in the cheap seats.14 This suggests that the bulk of the cinema~ goers were working-class, a conclusion supported by virtually all other surveys. As early as 1917 the National Council of Public Morals' Enquiry into the cinema concluded: 'the picture house is the cheapest, most accessible, and most widely enjoyed form of public entertainment; it is most popular in the poorest districts, and is attended by a very large number of children and young people,.15 This continued to be the case into the Thirties. The Social Survey of Merseyside (1934) revealed that something like 40 per cent of the total population go to the cinema in anyone week; of these about two thirds, say 25 per cent of the total population, go twice or more. The Report suggests that the manual

GOING TO THE PICTURES 13

working class go more frequently than Class B (Le. the lower middle class); the questionnaires indicate this to be so for men only. There are considerable differences, too, between ages. Working class children, it appears, nearly all attend the cinema at least once weekly .... As the questionnaire results show, the young attend in greater numbers than the population as a whole. Of the married, women go more often than their husbands. 16 These conclusions were echoed by Seebohm Rowntree in his study of York: By 1939 the number of cinemas had increased [from 7 in 1936] to 10 and the estimated weekly attendance to over 50,000 [from 45,000 in 1936]. This is equal to about half the popUlation of York. Of course a great many people visit cinemas more than once a week - a number of them do so three or four times. Fully half the people who attend cinemas are children and young people, and of the adults about 75 per cent are women. 17 A pattern of attendance emerges from the detailed case studies of the leisure of thirteen working-class families which he gives. The sons and daughters all went to the cinema, sometimes twice a week; so did the younger married couples. The older married couples did not go. Also of interest is the fact that married couples tended to go early in the week when they still had money for such luxuries, and children went at weekends as part of their Friday or Saturday night out. 18 Touring the East End of London late in 1936, Richard Carr discovered that: In the world of entertainment, the cinema now plays an all-important part, though less in the case of the older than the younger people. The middle-aged and elderly men continue to find their main relaxation in pigeon clubs, in darts matches and championships, in their working men's clubs, their trade unions and political organizations and more recently in radio construction and listening. But women and young people depend nowadays almost entirely for their entertainment upon the cinema. 19 Similarly, a survey of adolescents aged between fourteen and twentyone and drawn from all social classes, which was taken in Edinburgh in 1933, found that 71 per cent of them went to the cinema regularly, 63 per cent once a week. 2o A small sample of working-class men aged between nineteen and twenty-two, interviewed by the Birmingham Cinema Enquiry, revealed that 75 per cent went to the cinema weekly.21 Cinema-going was as important to the unemployed as it was to those in employment. E. W. Bakke found this in his study of Greenwich in 1931: The most prominent feature of the spare time activity of the employed

14 THE CONTEXT

and unemployed alike is the cinema. It is a community institution. In only one instance during my stay in Greenwich did I find a man who had never been to a cinema. Every family in which the head was at work, responded to the question 'How often do you attend the cinema?' with the answer 'Usually once a week' or similar words. Weekend parties in which the whole family occupies a 'pew' in the local picture house are common. The influence of these hours extends far beyond the time spent in the theatre. There is food for conversation both in anticipation of the next show and in thoughts of the ones attended weeks and months ago. Here is a common theme on which one is sure to find ready words in the homes, on the street, in the 'pub' or wherever two or more are gathered together. 22 Similarly the Carnegie Trust's study of unemployed youths in Glasgow, Cardiff and Liverpool in 1936-9, concluded: 'Attendance at cinemas is the most important single activity of the young men of the enquiry.' About 80 per cent attended at least once a week and 25 per cent of those attended more often. 23 This pattern of attendance continued into the Forties as the more extensive wartime survey taken in June and July 1943 confirms. It concluded that 'the lower economic groups and those with elementary education go to the cinema more than the higher economic groups and those with higher education. Factory workers, clerical and distributive workers go rather more than any other occupation groups.,Z4 It confirmed that people in Scotland, the North, London and the Midlands went more frequently than those in the East or the South~West, and that town~ dwellers went more frequently than countryfolk. But the more specific breakdowns are interesting and confirm the evidence for the Thirties. During the two months under examination, 32 per cent of the population went to the cinema once a week or more, a further 12 per cent once a month or once a fortnight and 26 per cent less frequently within the two-month period. In all, 70 per cent went at some time in the period. The survey also showed that 43 per cent of the fourteen to seventeen age group went twice a week or more and 79 per cent of that group went once a week. In the eighteen to forty group, 43 per cent went at least once a week. Of those over sixty-five, 69 per cent never went to the cinema. Of those between forty-one and forty-five, 27 per cent went at least once a week, and of those between forty-five and sixty-five, 17 per cent went once a week. It shows a consistent pattern of attendance in which the young go most frequently to the cinema and people go less and less frequently as they get older. This means that the bulk of the audience will always have been under forty. The survey also found that there was little difference in cinema-going between married couples and single people. It was age that was the decisive factor.25

GOING TO THE PICTURES 15

The evidence on income groups and education groups is also consistent. 35 per cent of those in lower income groups went once a week or more, but only 25 per cent of those in middle income groups and only 19 per cent of those in upper income groupS.26 In education, 33 per cent of those with elementary school education went once a week, 31 per cent of those with secondary education and 14 per cent of those with university education. 27 Conversely, there was a higher proportion of occasional attenders among higher income groups and the better educated: 40 per cent of higher income groups went to the cinema only occasionally, as against 35 per cent in middle income groups and 23 per cent of lower income groups; 46 per cent of those with university education went only occasionally as against 32 per cent with secondary education and 23 per cent with elementary education. Analysis by occupation revealed that 'Relatively high proportions of workers in light manufacturing and in the clerical, distributive and miscellaneous groups go to the cinema once a week or more. Light munitions and clerical workers go more than other groups. Only small proportions in these groups do not go to the cinema. Agricultural workers and the retired and unoccupied show the lowest proportions of frequent cinemagoers. Of managerial and professional workers a high proportion go less than once a week.' This confirms the evidence on the higher education and economic groupS.28 Also, and very illuminatingly, the survey analysed cinema enthusiasts, those who admitted to going at least once a week. Of these, 61 per cent were women, as opposed to 39 per cent men; 57 per cent were in the eighteen to forty age group, and 70 per cent in all were under forty; 80 per cent were in the lower income bracket and 92 per cent were town or citydwellers. 29 One must conclude therefore that while a large proportion of the population at large went to the cinema occasionally, the enthusiasts were young, working-class, urban and more often female than male. The New Survey of London Life and Labour detected a further pattern in that women on their own tended to go in the afternoon, particularly housewives 'after they have finished their shopping and before the children come home from school', and that 'from six o'clock onwards the cinemas are largely given over to the younger generation,.30 It should be noted, however, that throughout the Thirties films were becoming increasingly respectable and widening their audience appeal. As the Commission on Educational and Cultural Films disarmingly put it in 1932: Fewer people talk of moving pictures as 'those things that flicker'. 'Cinema-minded' is in common use like 'air-minded'. The two words are of the same age. A fellow of an Oxford college no longer feels an

16 THE CONTEXT

embarrassed explanation to be necessary when he is recognized leaving a cinema. A growing number of cultivated and unaffected people enjoy going to the pictures, and frequent not merely the performances of intellectual film societies, but also the local picture house, to see, for instance, Marlene Dietrich. Indeed it is becoming distinctly rare to find an educated person who does not know something about the outstanding films of the past year or two, and who has not seen the work of a few prominent film actors. The weekly reviews have their columns of film criticism - indeed, wherever books and pictures and music are discussed the film is discussed too. The cinema is acquiring prestige. 31 One of the reasons for the increase in middle-class patronage was the spread of cinemas to the middle-class suburbs. Respectable houses where middle-class housewives could go in the afternoon appeared, often equipped with elegant restaurants enabling them to take tea with their friends. Few suburban cinemas had been built in the 1920s, but the coming of sound in 1928 provided an irresistible new incentive and there was an upsurge in suburban cinema-building that was to continue unabated throughout the Thirties. Oscar Deutsch's promise to put a ring of Odeons round London resulted in the appearance of no less than nine in London suburbs in 1934 and ten in 1935. Alan A. Jackson, the historian of suburban London, writes: Few suburbs were too select to manage without a cinema, although when one was proposed for Claygate in 1927, it was coyly justified as a means of putting the housewife 'on equal terms with the housewife of more urban localities in the matter of securing the domestic treasure of which she dreams'. But whether they were for servant girls or their employers, cinemas appeared in places like Haslemere, Cranleigh, Esher and Godalming ... as readily as at Rayners Lane and North Ilford. And they came soon after the houses, often enough before the churches; they were part of the very fabric of the new suburbia. 32 Mrs Edna Thorpe, a housewife from a suburban housing estate, spoke for many when she said in a BBC discussion programme in 1938: Speaking as a housewife, I find a seat at the cinema one of the easiest and cheapest ways of getting a change from the daily round. It brings interest, amusement, education, almost to our doors at prices to suit nearly everybody. 33 Daphne Hudson gave a sardonic account of the rise in cinema-going in the middle-class suburb of Muswell Hill in London, where two new cinemas had appeared to encourage the habit. She described the more expensive of the two cinemas as 'the Mecca of the aged': A telling commentary on the nature of the audience is the enormous

GOING TO THE PICTURES

17

demand for the deaf aids which are installed. It has even been known for an old lady to request a cushion for her sciatica and accommodation for her pekingese. Retired gentlefolk, a considerable element in the neighbourhood, make the cinema a genteel recreation and choose their films with care, boycotting anything with a doubtful title. They have no use for anything farfetched or exotic. They like a good, sensible plot of medium pace. They like films about ordinary people like themselves or historically familiar characters - Britishers like Clive and Rhodes, whose motives they can understand and admire. A tale with a true British flavour, though not necessarily of British production, goes down as well as anything. The most astonishing success was Victoria the Great. It attracted not only keen filmgoers but many for whom the appeal was a personal or patriotic one. And a vast number had never,judging by their disconcerted manner, been inside a cinema before; but they remembered Victoria, and overcame their prejudices against 'new fangled amusements' in order to revive memories of times which had been their own. They hobbled forth, pushing each other in bathchairs, of which a considerable number were in evidence, and turning aside from the brink of the grave to take a last look at the Grand Old Lady. Never had a cinema seen so large an audience and certainly never had so great a proportion been over 80 years of age. 34 For all the humour of this passage, it does encapsulate a trend of the Thirties - the winning to films of the middle classes of suburbia. But it is important to stress the fact that the cinema audience was not, as is often stated, classless. It embraced all classes, but that is not quite the same thing. For the classes rarely mixed at the cinema. The increasing numbers of middle-class patrons were almost certainly due to the appearance of plush, comfortable and well-appointed cinemas in their neighbourhoods. But even in working-class areas like Greenwich there was a social hierarchy of cinemas. E. W. Bakke reported: One interesting feature of the cinema audience is its sense of class distinction. Two theatres in Greenwich were spoken of by skilled workers as 'Not attended by a very good class of people', 'Not such a good crowd there as at New Cross', 'You don't want to go there', said one engineer to me, 'We always go to the Prince of Wales where the class of people is better', The theatres in question were very neatly and attractively furnished, the seats looked comfortable, the attendants were uniformed, the air was good. But they were obviously not places for which one 'dressed up'. Those attending in many cases wore working clothes. The men invariably left their caps on. It is quite probable that the lower paid workers found the theatres close to home where no carfare was necessary more within the realm of possibility for them. The interesting thing to me was the warnings I received from working men

18 THE CONTEXT

that the working people who went there 'weren't such a good class'. The difference, so far as I could learn from further questioning and observation, was not one of character but of income and industrial status. 35 All the evidence, then, indicates that in Britain in the Thirties cinemagoing was regular and habitual, assuming a dominant role in the leisure of the working classes and in the life of the young and an increasingly important part in middle-class leisure. The neighbourhood cinema had come to assume a place in the life of the community analogous to those other prime foci of leisure time activities, the church and the pub. Statistics can tell us how often people went to the cinema in the 1930s. But what exactly was it like to go? This is fast becoming an irrecoverable experience, a memory to older generations, something unknown to younger generations. With cinema audiences falling throughout the Fifties, Sixties and Seventies, and with the rise of home-centred, and specifically television-centred, leisure, 'going to the pictures' has ceased to be the high point it once was in people's leisure-time activities. For one thing, cinemas are increasingly few and far between, and many of them can no longer lay claim to the description 'picture palace' once so freely applied. The story since the Fifties has been one of closure and demolition. The cinema was the twentieth century's distinctive contribution to building types, just as the railway station was the nineteenth century's. Significantly, both forms were in their time described as and to some extent designed as cathedrals. But unlike their medieval counterparts, these cathedrals of the modern age all face annihilation. Already a priceless and irreplaceable part of our architectural heritage has been wantonly swept away. The history of cinema buildings in recent years is a dispiriting chronicle of vandalism and philistinism by local authorities, cinema chains and soulless speculators. Despite the valiant work of conservation groups, cinema after cinema has been levelled to make way for yet another anonymous supermarket. Many of the cinemas which have survived have been twinned, tripled or quadrupled, with the size of screen and auditorium so reduced that the effect is now little different to watching a television screen in your own sitting room. The distinctive experience of 'going to the pictures' has effectively been abolished. Similarly, as part and parcel of the depersonalization, standardization and characterless functionalism that are so much a hallmark of our times, the old names have vanished. Instead of the Roxy and the Rialto, the Alhambra and the Trocadero, the Majestic and the Palace, the Tivoli and the Savoy, the Empress and the Coronet, the Pavilion and the Grand, the Regal and the Globe - names replete with the promise of exotic locales, full-blooded romance, Imperial splendour and unimaginable lUXUry - we have the anodyne ABC or Studio One. Gone are the smart suburban

GOING TO THE PICTURES 19

cinemas where middle-class ladies met their friends for tea and a matinee. Gone are the run-down but beloved locals often known affectionately as 'The Fleapit' or 'The Bughutch'. Only a handful of anonymous city centre cinemas remain in all those big cities which once boasted fifty or a hundred picture houses. As someone who was a youngster in the Fifties, I probably belong to the last generation to have known the delight of attending the local cinema regularly, an experience which included uniformed commissionaires and queues, the double feature programme the 'A' feature or 'The Big Picture' and the 'B' feature or 'supporting picture', the Pathe or Movietone Newsreel, and that promise of delights to come, the trailer. But most of all one remembers the feel of the faded plush, the distinctive smell of disinfectant and orange peel, the cheer that greeted the lowering of the lights, the swish of the curtains and then total absorption into living dreams. If the Fifties were the tail end of an era, the Thirties were its heyday the era of the supercinema. 36 The earliest cinemas - the so-called 'penny gaffs' - were usually converted shops. When it became clear that films had come to stay, small, neat, unpretentious, purpose-built cinemas or picture theatres began to appear, usually called by names like the Bijou, the Picturedrome or the Electra. One game cinema historians like to play is to try to identify the earliest purpose-built cinema. Dennis Sharp opted for the Central Hall, Colne (1907), but more recently David Atwell has argued the case for the Haven, Stourport (1904).37 The great age of cinema-building began in the 1920s. There were some 4,000 cinemas in operation in 1921, and it was estimated that another 2,000 were needed to meet public demand. The old plain rectangular boxes began to be superseded by ever larger, more imposing and more lavishly decorated structures, designed in a wide variety of styles. The buildings themselves became escapist fantasies, their decor and accoutrements sweeping marble staircases, silvery fountains, uniformed staff and glittering chandeliers providing a real-life extension of the dream world of the screen. The Twenties and Thirties produced cinemas in the form of Chinese pagodas (the Palace, Southall), Egyptian temples (the Pyramid, Sale), Jacobean manor-houses (the Beaufort, Meriden), Assyrian ziggurats (the Plaza, Stockland Green, Birmingham), Italian palazzi (the Plaza, Regent Street, London) and Spanish haciendas (the Avenue, Northfields, Ealing), fit settings in which to watch Garbo romancing, Doug Fairbanks swashbuckling or Valentino sheikhing. In Britain in the Thirties there were three major and notable developments in cinema-building. First, there was the 'atmospherics', pioneered in the United States in the Twenties by John Eberson. They sought paradoxically to make the cinema audience feel that they were outdoors, creating stage sets to give the impression of Persian courtyards, Spanish patios or the gardens of an Italian villa and then bathing them in

20 THE CONTEXT

artificial light. They came to London in 1929 in the Astoria cinemas at Finsbury Park, Brixton, The Old Kent Road and Streatham. These fabulously florid follies, designed by Edward A. Stone and T. R. Somerford, arose amid the drab surroundings of working~class areas of London. To enter them was truly to enter a palace of dreams. The Italianate auditorium of the Brixton Astoria was a riot of trailing vines, antique statuary and Lombardy poplars, with the ever-changing effects of dawn, dusk, stars and clouds projected on to the ceiling; while the auditorium of the Finsbury Park Astoria was designed as a Moorish walled city, its great gate flanked by giant plaster figures, its entrance hall complete with decorated columns, mosaic tiling and twinkling fountain, summoning up all the mystery and enchantment of the harem. The first 'atmospheric' outside London was the Alhambra in Moseley Road, Birmingham, opened on Boxing Day 1928. The Birmingham Evening Despatch reported: From the drabness of Moseley Rd. in winter time patrons will be transported to colourful scenes, copied with great skill and artistry from the original Alhambra in Southern Spain .... The builders and decorators of Birmingham's new showplace have drawn their inspiration largely from the courtyard of the old Alhambra. They have incorporated much of the ornamentation introduced by the Moors, whose favourite colours, red, blue and gold, are blended superbly, while the atmospheric motif is strengthened by unique lighting effects. The auditorium is flooded with light from a great golden centre-piece in the ceiling. This centre-piece which is fitted with a 6 foot diameter glass bowl, represents the sun, set in an azure blue Mediterranean sky. The ceiling is beautifully finished and lighted by means of reflectors artfully concealed in special troughs, behind the striking imitation Moorish tile cornices, which help, as much as anything, to create the illusion of an outdoor setting. 3s The effect was completed by the presence of mosaic floors, bronze lanterns, imitation marble columns, gold-domed Moorish kiosks, Arabic inscriptions and landscape views of a Moorish town in handpainted satin embroidery. The second great achievement of the Thirties was Theodore Komisatjevsky's Granadas at Tooting and Woolwich, designed for Sidney Bernstein's cinema chain. His style was High Theatrical and his achievements were architectural extravaganzas which those masters of the Hollywood rococo, Cecil B. DeMille and Josef von Sternberg, might well have commissioned as sets for some of their more exotic spectacles. Komisatjevksy's philosophy can be seen as representative of the attitude of all designers of picture palaces: The picture theatre supplies folk with the flavour of romance for which

GOING TO THE PICTURES 21

they crave. The richly decorated theatre, the comfort with which they are surrounded, the efficiency of the service contribute to an atmosphere and a sense of well being of which the majority have hitherto only imagined. While there they can with reason consider themselves as good as anyone, and are able to enjoy their cigarettes or their little love affairs in comfortable seats and amidst attractive and appealing surroundings. 39 The Granadas at Tooting and Woolwich came closest to reproducing the style and ambiance of a cathedral, a combination and distillation of Venetian Renaissance and Spanish Gothic, with distinct echoes of the Doge's Palace and the cathedral of Burgos. They were awe-inspiring creations, rich in Romanesque arches and ornately worked balustrades, heroic murals and halls of mirrors, secluded cloisters and baronial banqueting halls, carved panelling and minstrels' galleries. Far from the spectacular medieval of Komisarjevsky was the house style devised for Oscar Deutsch's Odeons - the quintessence of the Modern Movement in architecture. The style, perfected by Birmingham architects Harry Weedon and Cecil Clavering, with its streamlined curves, clean lines, fin towers, cream faience tiling, Art Deco embellishments and nighttime floodlighting became so distinctive a feature of the decade and so much a part of people's lives that the concepts 'The Thirties' and 'The Odeon' are almost inseparable. 40 But there was more to going to the cinema than the building itself, however luxurious and palatial. Cinema-going was surrounded by all the paraphernalia of promotion and advertising. The weekly trade paper Kine Weekly ran a regular feature on showmanship to highlight the methods cinema managers used to promote their current attractions. The foyer, the environs of the cinema and even the staff were pressed into service. Just taking a few examples at random from a single issue of Kine Weekly, we find the manager of the Adelphi Cinema, Hay Mills, Birmingham, transforming the carpark of his cinema into a football ground, complete with posters, goal posts and floodlights to advertise The Last Coupon, the Leslie Fuller comedy about a pools win. For Shanghai Express, the manager of the Empire, Stirchley, turned the foyer into a railway station, distributed railway tickets for the 'Shanghai Express' locally as an advertising gimmick and had a large cut-out of a train fixed to the wall of a nearby garage. For Bring 'Em Back Alive, the manager of the King's Cinema, Dundee, set up a jungle scene in his foyer, complete with tropical foliage, trees and animals. The doorman was kitted out in drill suit and pith-helmet, and the usherettes were also put into tropical garb. To advertise Jack's the Boy, the Jack Hulbert comedy about a rookie policeman, the manager of the Stoll Picture House, Bedminster, Bristol, hired four tall men, dressed them as policemen with large papier mache

22 THE CONTEXT

heads and set them to parade the streets. Two of them caused a sensation by appearing at the Bristol City Football Ground during a cup tie. Each week there would be a different film to promote, and so the foyer could in as many weeks go from jungle to battleship to coal-mine, providing an extra source of interest for patrons. 41 To entertain patrons once they got inside the auditorium, the best cinemas provided an organ and resident organist. The splendour of the 'mighty Wurlitzer' was described by David Atwell: These electric monsters were originally developed by an Englishman Hope-J ones, who went to America and basically designed the first Mighty Wurlitzer with electric action and a movable console that would loom up from the Stygian depths below the stage into view of the audience, with the organist already in full flow. This mighty monster has an average of four manuals, entailing about 200 stop keys and about 60 pistons involving as much as 100 miles of wiring. Its greatest claim was that it could imitate not only the effect of a full orchestra, but every instrument in it. Any tune could be played, any effect imitated; even drums, cymbals, castanets, sleigh bells and whistles could be operated electrically by remote control. Their consoles were frequently themselves minor masterpieces of art de co design with changing light sequences. Some wellknown names made their reputations at the consoles of the Comptons or Mighty Wurlitzers in the thirties, principally the three famous 'Reginalds'; Dixon, Foort, and PorterBrown. 42 Another invaluable adjunct was the cinema cafe, something else which has now almost totally disappeared. Used mainly for luncheon and tea, which were reasonably priced and courteously served in pleasant surroundings, it made a trip to the cinema even more of a special occasion. The best cafes boasted a Palm Court trio to play soothing music to accompany the meal. Winifred Holtby describes the regenerative effect of the cinema cafe on one of the characters in her evocative cross-sectional panorama of English life in the Thirties, South Riding (1936): Walking up Willoughby Place she realized that she was very tired. At the end of the road she found a super cinema. It blazed with lights and rippled with palms; a commissionaire in a gold and scarlet uniform paraded the entrance. Up on the first floor Lily could see ladies in green arm-chairs eating muffins behind great sheets of plate glass. The thought of tea and toast suddenly tempted her. She went in and dragged herelf up the shallow carpeted staircase. The tea room was palatial. Marble pillars swelled into branching archways. Painted cupids billowed across the ceiling. Waitresses in green taffeta tripped between the

GOING TO THE PICTURES 23

tables; from some hidden source a fountain of music throbbed and quivered, 'tum tum tum tum, ter-um, ter-um, Tum, tum, tum, tum, terurn, ter-um'. The beautiful Blue Danube. She used to waltz to that with Tom when he was courting. A lovely waltz. Their bodies melted together. One will, one impulse, moved them. She lay back in her chair. It was richly padded. The tea was good. The toast was hot, dripping with butter.43 The principal attraction was of course the films, but it is important to stress that this was only part of a total experience which the phrase 'going to the pictures' encapsulated. What then of people's reactions to this experience? What did they get out of it? The novelist Elizabeth Bowen was asked to reflect on this for a collection of essays on the cinema published in 1938: I gO to the cinema for any number of different reasons - these I ought to sort out and range in order of their importance. At random, here are a few of them; I go to be distracted (or 'taken out of myself); I go when I don't want to think; I go when I do want to think and need stimulus; I go to see pretty people; I go when I want to see life ginned up, charged with unlikely energy; I go to laugh; I go to be harrowed; I go when a day has been such a mess of detail that I am glad to see even the most arbitrary, the most preposterous pattern emerge; I go because I like bright lights, abrupt shadows, speed; I go to see America, France, Russia; I go because I like wisecracks and slick behaviour; I go because the screen is an oblong opening into the world of fantasy for me; I go because I like story, with its suspense; I go because I like sitting in a packed crowd in the dark, among hundreds riveted on the same thing; I go to have my most general feelings played on. These reasons, put down roughly, seem to fall under five headings; wish to escape, lassitude, sense of lack in my nature or my surroundings, loneliness (however passing) and natural frivolity.44 But this is not just a novelist's view. It is the view of informed commentators like architect P. Morton Shand ('The cinema is a pastime and a distraction, an excuse for not doing something else or sitting listlessly at home') and sociologist Seebohm Rowntree ('At a cost of 6d. or so a working woman, bored to death by a never·ending round of humdrum household chores, or a factory worker oppressed by the monotony of his work, can be transplanted, as if on a magic carpet, into a completely new world; a world of romance or high adventure,).45 It is also the view of the cinema-goers themselves. E. W. Bakke collected the views of cinema-goers in Greenwich: 'The pictures help you live in another world for a little while. I almost feel I'm in the picture'; 'I think the high society pictures are the best because they teach you how to be proper'; 'Pictures are my

24 THE CONTEXT

first choice, because they make you think for a little while that life is all right'; 'The pictures remind you that things go all right for you, too, because you put yourself in the place of the actors'; 'Why, the pictures take you to places you can only dream of going. Then, too, they show you something of how other people live'; and so Bakke concludes: 'Numerous replies of this nature leave little doubt that the continuous appeal of the movie is that it satisfies the desire for new experience and a glimpse of other worlds, and at times an escape from the present environment:46 Similarly the Carnegie Trust investigators questioned the young men in Cardiff, Liverpool and Glasgow about the appeal of the cinema and concluded that it could be summarized under four headings: the cinema was a form of escape ('Something to get your mind off things'); it portrayed a romantic 'wish-fulfilment world'; it was a warm and comfortable building; and cinema topics were news ('It appears just as necessary for many of these young people to be able to discuss the latest film as it is for other people to be able to talk about the best-seller in literature'), It was also one of the few places suitable for courting - cheap, dark, private and, above all, away from parental observation,47 What films did the cinema-goer choose to see in his regular visits to the picture palace? The bulk of cinema-goers chose a film for its star or its story or both. But all' important class distinction emerges in the question of whether people went in the main to British or to American films. It emerges forcibly from a number of surveys that working-class audiences preferred the latter. In 1937 World Film News published the results of a survey of sixty-six exhibitors in a special symposium on box office appea1. 48 It made the point at once about the nature of the cinema audience by dividing it into three: working-class audiences, mixed 'family' audiences and middle-class audiences. Cinema exhibitors in working-class areas were reported as on the whole satisfied with the more vigorous American films .. , [but] practically unanimous in regarding the majority of British films as unsuitable for their audiences. British films, one Scottish exhibitor writes, should rather be called English films in a particularly parochial sense: they are more foreign to his audience than the products of Hollywood, over 6,000 miles away. Again and again exhibitors of this category complain of 'old school tie' standards inherent in so many British films. They describe 'the horse-laughs' with which the Oxford accents of supposed crooks are greeted and the impatience of their patrons with the well-worn 'social drama' type of filmed stageshow. Similarly, the lack of action and the excess of superfluous dialogue are censored. A significant statement which frequently occurs, is that English films are either too high·brow (in the Bloomsbury sense) or else too stupid for their audiences .... Films with tempo and action, stirring

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25

in their appeal, simple and straightforward in treatment and related to the lives of the people appear to be the type preferred in this group. Comedy and slapstick are also required. Romance and melodrama of the better type are popular, whereas history is almost universally condemned. These exhibitors agreed that British producers did not make a close enough study of public wants in the matter of films. When it came to the mixed 'family' audience, 'British output is nearer the tastes of this audience'. This group favoured Light comedy; a simple blending of pathos and humour; romantic films with a sensible story; 'not too true to life', though dealing with people like themselves whose lives they can understand and whose reactions they can appreciate. A happy ending is demanded .... People in this group want 'something they need not think about, something that will catch the eye, tickle their fancy but not trouble their mind.' Star value is often stated to be particularly important. American films with British actors are most popular, while British films with what are described as 'second·rate stars imported from Hollywood' are depreciated. However, when it comes to middle-class audiences, their tastes are almost exactly opposite to those of the working class: Satisfaction, particularly with the British supply, is much more general in this category. British pictures are stated to be improving, and are in some cases the type most in demand (especially in places like Bournemouth, Dorking, the Isle of Wight etc.). What kind of films did they want? 'Good, clean comedy and society drama with interesting dialogue, something people can think about and discuss afterwards' seems to sum up the most frequent attitude to what is wanted. The Gaumont (Matthews-Hitchcock) and Wilcox (Anna Neagle) type of British film seems to go down particularly well. History is often stated to be popular, as are mystery films. American gangster, crime or police films are frowned upon. In the highbrow line popularity seems sometimes, though not unequivocally, to extend as far as Things to Come, while Bergner, on the other hand, appears definitely to be welcome. As in the former group, star value is stressed, and opinions differ as to whether a single star or a team is the better policy. English actors and background are favoured even in American films, Mutiny on the Bounty being cited as a case in point. There is other evidence to confirm this view of audience tastes. When Mr T. H. Fligelstone, President of the Cinematograph Exhibitors Association,

26 THE CONTEXT

and Mr W. R. Fuller, the General Secretary, gave evidence to the Moyne Committee set up to investigate the state of the film industry in 1936, they reported that public opinion in certain areas, particularly in parts of Scotland and parts of London, has become definitely resentful of the increasing number of British films which must be compulsorily screened. They could not advance a reason for this. But committee member Alan Cameron put his finger on it when he asked if the areas which would not accept British films were middle-class or working-class areas. The answer from Mr Fuller was 'more working class'. Pressed by Lord Moyne on whether it was foreign or Jewish elements in these areas which did not like them, Mr Fuller answered that they were equally unpopular in working-class areas with no Jews or foreigners. 49 This view was confirmed by Richard Carr's 1936 report on cinema-going in the East End, where one cinema manager told him: East End audiences are very critical. They like good pictures, good American pictures, pictures of movement and action. They won't stand British pictures here at any price. When we have one in the programme, many of our patrons come in late or early to avoid seeing the British picture. Any good adventure or gangster film will pack the house, though often a poor British second feature will affect the takings considerably. Comedies? Yes, they like comedies. The Marx Brothers are very well received here .... About fifty per cent of our audience is Jewish, but I find very little difference in taste between the young Jewish people and others. How do I know what they like and what they don't like? I have a job not to know. If the regular patrons don't like a film they make a point of telling me afterwards. They say 'B--y awful film that' or some such remark. Or else they clap their hands during the film, or shuffle their feet and whistle. They certainly let me know whether or not they like the films we show. Another manager told Carr: Audiences down here are better judges of films than in any district I have yet worked in. They know what they like and they are certainly not backward in telling us when a picture is good or bad. They like pictures with fast, good dialogue, strong acting and plenty of movement. Costume pictures are not popular, and very few of my patrons have a good word to say for British films. British pictures are disliked because the acting is wooden, because the actors and actresses talk 'society fashion' and because they are too slow. The East End's favourite films of the year were all American: Mr. Deeds Goes To Town, Follow the Fleet, Top Hat, These Three, Fury, The

GOING TO THE PICTURES

27

Broadway Melody of 1936 and pre-eminently Mutiny on the Bounty. 'Good action pictures and good musicals seem to top the list in every cinema I visited', Carr concluded. 50 But this prejudice in favour of American films was not confined to London. The youths in Cardiff, Liverpool and Glasgow, interviewed by the Carnegie Trust investigators, stated their preference for American films over British. 51 The popularity of Hollywood films with the working class is further reflected in the increasing incidence of Hollywood stars' names, particularly Norma, Shirley, Gary and Marlene, amongst the children of that class in this period. A concrete example of the barracking of British films is reported in an article by Ernest Dyer in Sight and Sound:

In one and the same evening recently, I heard Paderewski booed in one cinema and Bergner barracked in another. Both were first-run cinemas in the centre of a large provincial city. The hooting of Paderewski was, of course, inexcusable hooliganism: the work of a few louts who wished to express their disapproval of Moonlight Sonata as entertainment. The extraordinary thing to me was that they remained quiet during the story part of the film, which Heaven knows deserved hooting, and reserved their catcalls for the actual playing of the dear old man himself.... At the second cinema, on the other hand, the clamour increased during the week until by Saturday the front stalls were 'counting out' Miss Bergner through her most emotional scene and declaring in unison 'We want Claudette' ([ Met Him in Paris with the charming Miss Colbert was the other feature). Mystified by the reaction to Paderewski's piano-playing, Dyer leaped to the defence of Dreaming Lips, the Elizabeth Bergner film: To defend Dreaming Lips is like defending Swift when he had forgotten the last shred of his manners. Miss Bergner drew a portrait that was uncomfortably accurate and laughter is the easiest method ofrepudiation. For her performance the film is a major work. D. H. Lawrence would have loved it. 52 Dyer is taking a wholly middle-class view when he deplores the barracking of two such important cultural figures as Paderewski and Bergner. But given the evidence we have of working-class tastes and expectations, the reaction to these films is entirely understandable. For one thing, they are both British films. Moonlight Sonata is a rather anodyne romance set in Sweden, but before it can be resolved there is a twenty-minute recital by Paderewski. This is fine for lovers of classical music, but what about those humbler souls who simply wanted to know how the story turned out? As for Dreaming Lips, it is a trite and ultimately tiresome melodrama, clearly based on a stage play and designed to demonstrate Miss Bergner's repertoire of mannerisms,

28 THE CONTEXT

entrancing to her cult following in the Thirties but exceedingly trying to those impervious to her magic. It too is set in the classical music world and includes a lengthy violin recital. It contains endless displays of Miss Bergner's 'little girl lost' kittenishness complete with wide-eyed innocence, clenched teeth smiles and simpering. The combination of classical music, posturing tweeness (she calls her husband 'Peeps') and well-upholstered and protracted middle-class Angst must have been vexing in the extreme for those working men and women waiting to see the unaffected freshness and bubbling good humour of Claudette Colbert. Richard Carr also reported on the 'taste of Tooting', a suburb of mixed working-class and lower-middle-class population, 'mainly office, shop, transport, printing and building workers,' with seven cinemas: Differences in taste are noticeable: the audience in one of the smaller cinemas, catering mostly for working class people, is much more responsive to speed, action and fast dialogue than in cinemas attended mainly by families, by women and by young girls, or middle class people. Love stories get a better response from women of all classes. The Granada is a combination of lower middle class and working class audiences of the family type, and does fairly well with Shirley Temple and George Arliss for example; but an increase of men in the audience is very noticeable when a film like Texas Rangers, Bullets or Ballots or Mutiny on the Bounty is shown. In the cinema where there is a tougher audience, much fidgeting and talking goes on during British pictures and most films of a purely 'love-interest type.' With such audiences action pictures, good musicals and good dialogue find an appreciative audience. The idols are Spencer Tracy, James Cagney, Edward G. Robinson, Gary Cooper, and in comedy films, W. C. Fields and Laurel and Hardy. 53 Winifred Holmes investigated an unnamed Southern town, with a population of 22,000 and four cinemas, and came to the conclusion that The middle and working classes in a small town go to different cinemas as a rule. That the middle classes go for the film first and foremost, while the working classes rather as a regular habit, looking on the cinema in their district as a kind of club. That the tastes of the two sections of the public differ: the working classes liking comedians better than the others and enjoying horror films almost exclusively, That newspaper reviews of films are read with interest and playa large part in influencing people of all classes in their appreciation of the films shown. 54 The reactions of the cinema managers are again illuminating. The manager of the biggest and most luxurious cinema, the Regal, whose

GOING TO THE PICTURES 29

audiences are 'select', confirmed that the greatest attraction in films was stars: Shirley Temple, Charles Laughton, George Arliss and Robert Donat are the biggest draws here. But I'm afraid George Arliss is losing much of his popularity because lately he's been in such poor films. American films are more popular than English ones on the whole because of their excellent technique and built-up star system. But British stars are beginning to come into their own and good British films like Rhodes of Africa, The Thirty-Nine Steps and The Ghost Goes West have been a great success. He listed the type of films his patrons liked best as 'musicals ... and thrillers, but not horror films .... Modern witty sophisticated drama appeals more to our patrons.' The picture at the working-class cinemas is somewhat different. The manager of the Grand declared: What pleases the women pleases the men; they read the papers and know all about what they are going to see, and they make up their minds beforehand as to whether they are going to enjoy the programme or not. American films are the most popular; so many British ones are too la-de-da and upstage for them. Musical comedy is the best bid and I must say that J essie Matthews and Gracie Fields are among the greatest draws. Jack Hulbert, Cecily Courtneidge [sic] and Charles Laughton are other popular British stars. Shirley Temple tops the list for American stars, then comes Wallace Beery, the Marx Brothers, and Laurel and Hardy. Boris Karloff is very popular too -- they love horror films. The other local cinema, the Plaza, was the only independent and the 'fleapit', patronized by soldiers from the barracks, the unemployed and the poorest working-class elements, since it was the cheapest. The manager reckoned that the men determined the choice here and he believed that stars were the biggest draw: 'Stars first, then titles. Karloff is the biggest draw here, then comes Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire, then Gracie Fields and George Formby. And of course the cowboy actors, Buck Jones, Gene Autry, Tom Wayne [sic] and Tom Tyler.' As for the sort of films his patrons liked: 'Society drama and sex pictures fail utterly here .... Action, horror, low·brow comedy, and musicals, if not too elaborate are what we go for here.'55 This generalized antipathy to British films is confirmed by the testimony of individual film-goers. In 1945 the sociologist J. P. Mayer appealed in Picturegoer magazine for film fans to provide him with details of their film-going, their likes and dislikes, and the influence of films upon them. He printed sixty of these reports in his book British Cinemas and

30 THE CONTEXT

Their Audiences. Seventy~eight per cent of the contributors were under forty of the sixty were female and most of them were working~ class or lower-middle-class. The bulk of them had first started attending the cinema in childhood and formed a regular habit then. Typical of the comments on British films are those of an eighteen-year-old girl ('Most of the films I have seen were American because American films are the best'), a twenty-eight-year-old female clerk ('I must confess to being proAmerican in my choice of films - so often British productions are merely stage successes transferred to the screen') and a twenty-five-year-old man in the RAMC ('I disliked British films. There were always so "lifeless" ,).56 One correspondent, a thirty-year-old female clerk, declared: 'British films have never in all my life made the slightest impression on me. They are dull, ugly and uninspired .... There are very few real British film stars, and those stars of the stage who grace the screen at intervals are too old to photograph well, poor dears.,57 What is interesting about these comments is that they come at a time when it was widely being said that the war had stimulated a 'renaissance' in British films and that their depth and their quality had improved immeasurably. But they reflect deeply rooted and long-established prejudices. The situation is not quite so cut and dried as this evidence suggests, however. It was generally agreed at the time that the quality, technical, artistic and dramatic, of British films rose steadily throughout the decade. There was greater demand for good British films too, though this may in part reflect the rise in cinema-going among the middle classes, who were predisposed towards the British film. 58 But the label of 'awfulness' stuck. There seem to be two main reasons for this. The first and most obvious reason was quality. The comments of both cinema managers and film fans make this clear. Many British films lacked the slickness and technical polish of their American counterparts. They were thought to lack pace and to be bogged down with dialogue. Too many were simply photographed stage plays. 59 Second, there was class. British films were thought to be too much in a middle-class or upper-class idiom. Both these faults were considerably exacerbated by the 'quota quickies', which were almost universally disparaged both inside and outside the cinema industry. The 1927 Cinematograph Films Act, which had imposed the quota system on the British cinema to encourage the production of British films, had included no stipulation as to the quality or entertainment value of such films. The result of this omission, as the delegation of film producers told the Moyne Committee in 1936, was that,

twenty~five,

whereas today an incredibly large number of first class films is produced in British studios, which compare favourably in technical quality, entertainment value and earning capacity with the best films made in

GOING TO THE PICTURES 31

any country, a considerable number of films is at present produced in Great Britain whose quality is so indifferent as to cast a slur upon the value of all British films. These poor quality films are made almost entirely by or for renters whose main business and sole interest is the distribution of foreign films in this country and who are not gravely concerned with the quality of the British films they distribute .... It is common knowledge that many of these films - scathingly referred to in the trade as 'quota quickies' - owing to the fact that, for purposes of economy, they are hurried through the studio in the shortest possible time - are lamentably poor in entertainment value and do much to detract from public appreciation of British films as a whole, since the general public has no means of knowing the true situation. 6o Some of these 'quota quickies' were so bad that they were shown first thing in the morning in cinemas while the charladies were still cleaning up, simply to comply with the letter of the Act. 61 The exhibitors confirmed this view when they gave their evidence. Mr T. H. Fligelstone declared: The exhibiting section of the industry has very little if anything to complain of the films produced by the British renting companies. Our complaint is of films produced to comply with the quota by the foreign renting companies .... The British films produced today by the British companies are standing on their own feet. Our difficulty is with films made by foreign renters simply to comply with quota requirements. 62 There were particular problems too which made matters worse. One was the number of good British films available. The Cinematograph Exhibitors Association in their memorandum to the Moyne Committee said that of the 178 British films trade shown in the calendar years 1935. 73 rated as good first features, 41 as varying second features, 31 as inferior and 33 as definitely unshowable. It was the American renting companies that were responsible for the majority of the films in the last two categories. The figure of 178 films then was misleading because exhibitors would not touch at least 64 of them if they could help it. This limited supply created very real problems: Exhibitors normally book a number of feature films each year varying according to the character of the cinema from 104 to 208. For the purposes of average, we may take a figure ranging from 120 to 160 films. On a rule of thumb basis, which is sufficiently accurate, for purposes of generalization, it will be seen that the normal better class hall requires about 24 British films a year to satisfy its quota while the normal industrial cinema will require 32 to 40 British films a year. When the Films Act came into operation, there were usually 3 cinemas competing in any given town or district. Today in the populous areas there are as

32 THE CONTEXT

many as 5 or 6 cinemas competing for patronage. Very few British films (or for that matter American) are of such outstanding quality that more than one run is possible in any town or district. It will be seen that in the principal areas on the 1935 showing exhibitors have no margin of choice. The 114 British films, varying from good first to variable second features, are booked without any choice. The position of the independent exhibitors is made much worse when the best films are taken by the circuits, which, in addition by virtue of their booking powers, are able to book some of the better films marketed by other producers. For the independents in such situations there remains the constant nightmare of sorting through inferior and bad films in an endeavour to find something that will not repel any more of their patrons than can be avoided. Through a sense of loyalty to the Films Act many exhibitors are weary of the constant loss of money which they suffer through constantly having to show British films to which the public does not respond, where there is available a considerable margin of selection in foreign (American) films to which the public would respond. s3 What in effect this meant was that since many of the independent cinemas were in the poorer areas, the worst British films were shown to workingclass audiences, thus intensifying a prejudice against British films in general. ' Some exhibitors deliberately accentuated the quality difference: It is common practice when films are run in a theatre to have your not particularly good, if we do not call it bad, English picture running in conjunction with ... a really first rate American film, and the public necessarily draws the conclusion that the American film is good and the British bad. 64 The direness of quality in these second features was reinforced by the class-bound view of the world they presented. World Film News in 1937 made a pointed comparison between 'B' features produced in Britain and America: The two national pulses of England and America, reflected in the second features, are entirely different. For some reason or other the English producer has decided that English audiences dislike any sort of realism, while the American producer concentrates on drawing his characterisation, if not his situations from life. The English second feature is practically always frenziedly upper class. If it is a comedy, it is peopled with grotesque characters with whose facetious horseplay one is meant to maintain sympathy. Members of the aristocracy are presented with the intelligence of apes and a far lower moral standard. Their sense of humour finds an outlet in tiresome horseplay reminiscent of the dormitory rag. The mirthful piece de resistance is the spectacle of the

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33

hero dressing up as a woman. These characters do not live and are not meant to live .... The American second feature usually draws its characters from life. They are human beings, not pegs for 'funny dialogue'. The American second feature draws on the mass man and woman to represent the issues of their stories. Salesmen, plumbers, engineers and workers of all descriptions realistically go about their business as though it was their business and they lived by it. We are taken with ease from hotel to kitchen, from theatre lobby to road gang. The films may not be in many respects remarkable, but they abound with people, who compared with the British quota ghosts, are terribly alive. 65 The Robsons in The Film Answers Back (1939) extended this analysis to apply to the British cinema as a whole, proclaiming American films superior to British in both style and content: in the absence of class prejudice, in insistence on the rights of man, in clear, bright, sharply defined imagery, in the tempo, personnel and philosophy which reflected the vitality and youthful vigour of the American society. By contrast, they saw British films as rigid, class-ridden, stage-bound and slow-moving. 'In most English films all the nice people conform to the most correct West End theatre standards in character, accent, mannerisms and culture right down to the last pair of flannels but a taximan or a charwoman is made to talk and act like a mental defective.,66 This is an overly schematic view, given for instance the proved popularity with British audiences of the films of Gracie Fields, Jessie Matthews and Formby and the fact that Hollywood made a whole series of films glorifying the British Empire, but it does contain an element of truth and highlights the differences of style and content which led some sections of society to go to Hollywood films for their entertainment.

The Dream Merchants

We have looked at the dreamers dreaming gently in the plush seats of the local Odeon or Plaza. We shall turn in due course to the nature and content of the dreams themselves. But it is important before that to establish the context within which the dreams were manufactured. For manufactured they were, since in the 1930s films were big business and film-making was a growth industry run on classic free enterprise lines. But the great movie moguls, the merchants of dreams, were as much a prey to dreams themselves, dreams of wealth and power, of status and influence, visions of financial empire a new Eldorado. of The Film Council sponsored in the mid-Thirties an in-depth the financial structure of the British film industry, revealing to no one's very great surprise that behind the studios, the cinema chains and the production companies, the dream palaces and the dream factories, lurked the hard-headed financial bastions of the City. The purse strings of the industry were ultimately held by such institutions as the National Provincial Bank, who held the overdraft and mortgages of the Gaumont British Picture Corporation; Prudential Assurance, who backed Alexander Korda's London Films and Denham Studios; Eagle, Star and British Dominions Insurance, who provided finance for Oscar Deutsch's Odeons; Equity and Law Life Assurance, who were behind Capitol Films Corporation, Union Cinemas and Pinewood Studios; and the Law Debenture Corporation, who backed the Associated British Picture Corporation. l The pillars of the City were all in business to make a profit, and they clearly deemed the circumstances ripe to profit from British films, a feeling confirmed by the emergence of giant combines at the heart of the industry. This confidence was the direct result of two factors - government action and the popularity of King Henry VIII. In the Twenties, there was no money to be made from British films. The British film industry was dwarfed by Hollywood. The American film industry had cemented its hold over British cinemas and their audiences during the First World War and the years following. The British industry found itself unable to fight back. The American companies could recoup their costs in their vast domestic market before they even started to tackle the world market, and to ensure their dominance of the British market, they developed selling techniques like blind and block booking: the 34

THE DREAM MERCHANTS

35

booking of groups of films in order to get individual popular titles and the booking of groups of films, sight unseen. Added to this, the mass workingclass audience preferred American films to British films, and the British distributors, the renters as they were called, were perfectly happy to make their profit by supplying this demand. By 1923 therefore only 10 per cent of the films shown in Britain were actually made in Britain, and by 1926 this had fallen to 5 per cent. Demand rose for government intervention and the result was the 1927 Cinematograph Films Act, a marked breach with the prevailing doctrine of free trade. The aim of the Act was to increase the proportion of British films being shown, to promote the development of a flourishing British film industry, to instigate the production of films that would employment to British labour and increase the prestige of Britain, her institutions and her manufactures, at home and abroad. To this end, blind booking of foreign films was banned, block booking restricted, and most important a quota imposed on renters and exhibitors, rising by stages to 20 per cent in 1933 and remaining at that level until 1938 when it would be reviewed. The measure of protection provided by the Act was a major stimulus to the industry, and a definite strategy emerged to meet the new situation. This lay in the creation of vertical combines in which the profits generated by the distribution and exhibition of American films would be used to finance production of British films, guaranteed a showing by the terms of the quota system, and these films would be promoted worldwide in a bid to break into the global market. This meant involvement in all three of the major spheres of the industry, production, distribution and exhibition, and on a massive scale. The inevitable consequence was the creation of huge, complex, interlocking empires run by movie moguls every bit as powerful within their industry as their Hollywood counterparts. Before the 1930s there had been almost no large cinema circuits. The pattern of the industry, established quite early on, was for medium- and small~sized circuits and a strong representation of individual exhibitors. In 1914 there were 109 circuits of two or more cinemas, but ninety· six of these had fewer than ten cinemas each. By 1920 there was still only one substantial cinema circuit - Provincial Cinematograph Theatres (PCT), with sixty-eight cinemas. By 1927, they had eighty-five cinemas, but their nearest rival, Moorhouse Film Service, still had only twenty-eight. But all this changed in the Thirties, when simultaneously two giant combines were created, which were to dominate the decade. Perhaps the most influential was the Gaumont British Picture Corporation (GB), registered in 1927. It was created by the merger of the production companies Gaumont and Gainsborough, with their studios at Shepherds Bush and Islington, the major renters W. and F. Film Service and Ideal Film Renting Company and the cinema chain peT pI us several smaller chains, providing a circuit of 187 cinemas. The merger was the work of the Jewish

36 THE CONTEXT

merchant banking family the Ostrers, who thus effectively became the 'first family of the British entertainment industry'. The brains behind the actual merger and the leading figure in the new combine, as chairman and joint managing director of GB, was Isidore Ostrer, who also acquired the Sunday Referee newspaper, Baird Television, Bush Radio and Radio Luxembourg, to give himself effectively a communications empire. James Mason, who married Isidore's daughter Pamela, described the clan in his autobiography: Isidore Ostrer, the father of Pamela and of Gaumont British, was one of a set of five brothers. The other four had been given various jobs in the organization in a descending scale of responsibility. Mark Ostrer was the big public man, while Isidore, the only brain of the group, remained discreetly in the background .... There was David, the oldest, who was married to a mid-European wife and was allowed to look after foreign sales. He looked like an unsuccessful Ruritanian pretender in an UFA film. Then came Maurice who was Isidore's shadow and lastly you got Harry who, having been a school teacher, became the literary department at the studios. The five of them had one opinion and one brain. 2 Although Isidore, a man of taste and refinement, was Chairman and Managing Director, GB had the services of two other remarkable figures, who shared a burning desire to promote the British film industry. The tireless Michael Balcon, head of Gainsborough Films, became production chief of GB. He later wrote: 'My only passion has always been the building up of a native industry with its roots firmly planted in the soil of this country.,3 The explosive C. M. Woolf, head of the old W. and F. Film Service, became Deputy Chairman and Joint Managing Director. The writer-director Adrian BruneI described him as 'a courageous backer with a faith in British films ... at a time when we most needed it,.4 On behalf of the company, Woolf announced in 1931 plans to produce forty films a year with the aim of breaking into the US market. But GB did not have the field to themselves. They had a major rival in ABC, run by a ruthless Glasgow lawyer, John Maxwell. A major distributor as chairman of Wardour Films, he moved into production with the formation in 1926 of British International Pictures (BIP), and he started to build up his cinema-owning interests with the formation of Associated British Cinemas (ABC) in 1928. In 1928 he had only twentyeight cinemas, but within a year this number had risen to eighty-eight. By 1933 he had 147 cinemas and in that year he merged BIP and ABC to form a single combine, the Associated British Picture Corporation (ABPC). He acquired new studios at Elstree and announced production of twenty films a year. His aim was to produce films marketable in Central Europe, hence his close links with German studios, his utilization of German film

THE DREAM MERCHANTS 37

personnel and the preponderance of operetta in his production schedules. 5 These two combines boasted excellent distribution and exhibition facilities, well-equipped studios and large production schedules. The stage was thus set for a renaissance of the British film industry. But the opportunities were such that a third rival entered the lists to challenge the pre-eminence of GB and ABPC. This was the Odeon circuit, launched in 1933 and destined to become the most famous and enduring of them al1. 6 By this stage GB had 287 cinemas, and ABPC had 147. Their nearest rivals were Moorhouse Film Service with fifty-six, A. B. King with forty~ two, Regent Cinemas with thirty-eight and Union Cinemas with thirtythree. Oscar Deutsch, a Birmingham scrap metal merchant and a man of driving ambition, magnetic personality, irresistible charm and strong patriotic feeling, had become an exhibitor in 1925 with the acquisition of the Crown Cinema, Coventry. In 1931 he founded Cinema Service Ltd, a six-cinema circuit and by 1933 had acquired twenty-six cinemas. In that year he launched his Odeon circuit. His revolutionary idea was a brand image - all cinemas built in a similar, easily identified style, and his ambition was to build an Odeon in a prime site in every town and city in the land. His method was to promote a separate company for each cinema, raising the money locally. Architect Robert Bullivant described how this worked: Oscar would have the builders in one at a time and say 'Look, if you are prepared to build the Odeon under the following conditions, I will award this contract to you on a negotiated basis without competition', There was no fiddle. The bills of quantities would come, say, to £26,000 and Oscar would say, 'Now I'm prepared to add 5% or 10% to that on condition that you will do the first £5,000 of work without asking for a certificate', He would then call in Eagle Star, with whom he was closely associated, and ask them to lend him £5,000 and they would say 'Right, on the security of the work that's been done, here's £5,000,' So Oscar would give the contractor the cheque he'd got from Star and they would then go and do another £5,000 of work. So, without any money of his own, Oscar was able to build a cinema out of thin air. He had his own company to supply the carpets, the curtains, the seating and all the equipment from which he made a profit. He did form a separate company for each one - the directors each put in £100 of capital, that's al1. 7 Deutsch's first purpose-built cinema was the Odeon, Perry Barr, in Birmingham, built in the Moorish style in 1930. But it was not long before his architects had produced the distinctive Odeon house style, an arresting and impressive distillation of the Modern movement in architecture. Significantly, Deutsch's extensive building programme began in exclusive South Coast resorts like Worthing and Lancing and in high-class London

38 THE CONTEXT

suburbs like Weybridge, Surbiton and South Harrow. Later he was to ring Birmingham with Odeons, built in the prosperous suburbs of Kingstanding, Sutton Coldfield and Shirley. For where the early cinema circuits had gone for the teeming and populous working-class inner city areas, Deutsch was realizing a vast new potential audience in the middle in particular suburban housewives and through them their families. The upsurge in cinemaMgoing in Muswell Hill described in the previous chapter followed closely on the opening in 1936 of the Muswell Hill Odeon. Deutsch's achievement was to offer luxury, combined with respectability, something he further ensured by opening all his cinemas with a ceremonial flourish and inviting leading civic dignitaries to attend. His empire grew rapidly. By 1936 he had 146 cinemas and at its height his holdings exceeded 300. He opened thirty-six new cinemas in 1937 alone and in that same year he acquired control of the County, London and Southern and the Scottish Singleton circuits. 1937 also saw the liquidation of the subsidiary Odeon companies, which had served their purpose, and the creation of a new, all-embracing central organization, Odeon Theatres Ltd, whose headquarters were moved from Birmingham to London in 1939 following the opening of the circuit's massive new flagship, the Odeon, Leicester Square. Unlike the other two major circuits, Odeon did not go into production. But in order to ensure high-quality productions to exhibit, Oscar Deutsch made a deal with United Artists to distribute their films, which included not only the stylish and star-studded Hollywood productions of Samuel Goldwyn but also the prestige products of two of the leading British production companies: Alexander Korda's London Films and Herbert Wilcox's British and Dominion Films. By the mid-Thirties the three giants had inevitably locked horns. In 1937 John Maxwell launched a bid to take over GB, which foundered amidst lawsuits and acrimony. He consoled himself by gobbling up the financially ailing Union circuit of 136 cinemas, thus giving ABPC a total of 431 cinemas to GB's 345. In 1938 Oscar Deutsch similarly tried and failed to take over GB, and like Maxwell he too turned elsewhere, to absorb the small but prestigious Paramount circuit. In terms of exhibition, then, the situation as the decade ended was that the three main circuits owned 1,011 cinemas, about 21 per cent of the total number. Another 15 per cent were owned by smaller circuits with ten or more cinemas, the largest number being the seventy-five cinemas of the A. B. King circuit. The remaining 64 per cent of cinemas were independently owned. s The rise and rise of the giant combines was accompanied by a fever of speculative investment in every aspect of the film industry, but chiefly in production. A situation akin to the South Sea Bubble developed in Wardour Street and its environs. That most acute and perceptive of

THE DREAM MERCHANTS

39

observers World Film News summarized the situation caustically in January 1937: England is at the peak of a gold-rush in films. In the first ten months of 1936 loans of nearly 13 million pounds were poured into the three great spheres of production, renting and exhibition. Banks, insurance companies, legal investment trusts, even motor manufacturers, are falling over each other in their eagerness to stake a claim. Men and women who have scarcely given a thought to films all their lives are clamouring for posts in the studios, attracted by the rumour of high salaries and speedy promotion. But if we take even a superficial glance at this apparent EI Dorado we find some In of the torrent of money recently poured into them, few British production companies have paid any dividends in the last four years, which means that most never paid any dividends at all. In spite of the rapid development in production and in studio construction, the Association of Cine Technicians must battle unceasingly to get employment for British technicians. In spite of the yearly-rising demands of the Quota Act for British footage, the overwhelming domination of the British market by American interests, though somewhat lessened, is by no means undermined. The present meteoric expansion of the British film trade constitutes one of the most dangerous and highly speculative booms in the history offinance. 9 This situation was the direct result of the twin stimuli mentioned earlier. To meet the quota demands imposed by the 1927 Act, only two American companies, Warner-First National at Teddington Studios and Fox at Wembley, had set up production units in Britain to supply their own quota films. The other six major US companies contracted with British independent producers to supply the product. This led to the setting-up of fifty-nine new companies in 1929 alone. Some of the newcomers became major production units in their own right - Associated Talking Pictures (ATP) at Ealing Studios (1929), British Lion at Beaconsfield (1927) and British and Dominion at Eistree (1928), for instance. The outcry against the quality of some of the so-called 'quota quickies', however, led to the next major stimulus. In 1933 United Artists, the only one of the big American companies which did not produce but merely distributed the work of independent producers, decided to include the work of 'quality' British producers which would fulfil the quota requirements while satisfying the demand for a better standard of film and providing an opportunity to make a profit from them abroad. They contracted with Alexander Korda for films and his Private Life of Henry VIII (1933) became a major international success, won a Best Actor Oscar for Charles Laughton and grossed 212 million dollars. The success of Henry VIII was reflected in another dramatic rise in new production companies. The first rise had followed the passing of the Cinematograph Act in 1927, with the

40 THE CONTEXT

number of new companies rising from fifteen in 1925 to twenty~one in 1926 to twenty-six in 1927 to thirty-seven in 1928 to fifty-nine in 1929. The apprehension and complications attending the coming of souIl:d calmed the initial frenzy, with only thirty-six new companies floated in 1930 and forty-six in 1932. But after Henry VIII came another surge, with eightysix companies set up in 1934 and no less than 108 in 1935. Korda's success gained him the financial backing of the Prudential Assurance Company and a seat on the board of United Artists. Armed with this, he built a massive new studio at Denham and launched an ambitious film· making programme. United Artists had by 1937 increased the number of its English production affiliates from two to eleven, by including companies pledged to quality film-making and headed by such luminaries as Erich Pommer, Paul Czinner and Victor Saville. Just as the number of production companies mushroomed, so too did film production itself. The number of British feature films increased from ninety-six in the year ending 31 March 1930 to 215 in the year ending 31 March 1936. Another measure of growth is that the number of sound stages expanded from nineteen in 1928 to seventy in 1938. But like the South Sea Bubble itself, this boom was based on very insecure foundations, as World Film News was quick to point out: The great majority of the production units are private companies with relatively small capitals, the bulk of their production costs being secured by means of insurance policies against the non-payment of bank overdrafts. But the boom has three main features peculiar to itself: 1 It is based almost entirely on expectation with very little concrete results to justify the wholesale optimism. The security offered is, in nine cases out of ten, the highly problematical one of the expected returns from films about to be made or in production. At the same time, the possible insertion of a 'quality clause' when the Quota Act comes before parliament for revision this year has very probably contributed to the general expectancy. 2 Though, in the exhibition field, ordinary shareholders are, on the whole, obtaining good dividends, in the production sphere they are noteven in the boom period. An analysis of the ordinary share dividends paid during the last two years reveals that of the older companies engaged solely in production, British Lion, B. and D. and A.T.P. paid nothing, while Sound City paid 3% in 1936. 3 The expansion has, in general, not been financed by the usual procedure of increase in the capital of the companies concerned, but by a spectacular increase in loans; whereas in normal booms the increase in business usually enables the expanding enterprises largely to liquidate their loan obligations. 1o The Bubble was bound to burst in the end, and burst it did, with

THE DREAM MERCHANTS 41

spectacular results, in 1936--7. Films in the pipeline continued to come out, a record 228 in the year up to 31 March 1938. But the slump to 103 in the next financial year is a measure of the crisis that the collapse precipitated. It began with the announcement in 1936 by one of the two major production companies, ABPC, that having failed to break into the world market with its films, it was cutting back on film production and concentrating on cinema-ownership and exhibition, where, as the World Film News report indicated, the money lay. In 1937 GB's production subsidiary, Gainsborough, announced a loss of £98,000, and Isidore Ostrer followed John Maxwell's lead in announcing that because of failure to break into the world market, GB would cease production and close its Shepherd's Bush Studio. A reduced schedule of production would continue at Gainsborough's Islington Studio, but GB would in future concentrate on exhibition. In the same year Julius Hagen of Twickenham Films, one of the biggest quota film producers, called in the receivers, saying: 'The proceeds I have obtained from pictures made for world release have been utterly disappointing.' Finally the collapse of the Capitol Films Group, one of the leading loan-financed boom companies, in 1937 revealed the entire rickety financial edifice for what it was and it all came tumbling down. It was generally agreed that the combination of highly speculative financing, based on overdrafts, mortgages and debentures, and the needless extravagance and over-inflated ambition of some of the producers, had brought the industry to the verge of disaster. Sight and Sound summed up the situation in a scathing editorial: British production has fallen into three main types: expensive films designed for world markets; cheaper films designed for the home market and 'quickies' made as cheaply as possible and designed only to enable renters to meet their quota obligations. But lack of quality has not been confined to the 'quickies' nor have the other two types been successful in recovering from the markets for which they were made the money which was expended on them. Pretentiousness posing as quality, ill-advised attempts to reproduce in this country types of films native to other countries, the obsession for producing international films, inefficient production methods, and extravagance have all been made possible and encouraged by the vast sums of money which have flowed into the industry. One need only instance films which have been hurriedly planned, publicized, begun and never finished; films which have taken months longer in production than was scheduled; the engagement of American 'stars' at salaries far exceeding their box-office value today and the large salaries drawn by others while they waited for the company which had summoned them to England to find and script a suitable story. Such stupidities and extravagances have unnecessarily increased the risks which are always inherent in film production and

42 THE CONTEXT

have obscured the real merit, and more than absorbed the profits, of the good and successful films that have been made. 11 With the industry facing collapse and the Quota Act about to run out, the government set up the committee under Lord Mayne to review its working. On the recommendation of this committee, a new Cinematograph Act was passed in 1938, providing for a renewal of the quota of 1212 per cent rising to 25 per cent for exhibition and of 15 per cent rising to 30 per cent for renters, with a minimum cost limit to ensure the elimination of the cheapest 'quota quickies'. The reaction of American companies this time was to involve themselves much more directly in British production. MGM announced its intention of producing quality films in Britain and engaged Michael Balcon to head production. Although he soon left to take over from Basil Dean at Ealing and to create one of the most celebrated and distinctive studios in British film history, MGM did in fact produce three of the best-known and bestloved British films of the Thirties before war broke out (A Yank at Oxford, The Citadel and Goodbye, Mr. Chips). RKO appointed Herbert Wilcox to head its British production unit and Warner Bros announced an expanded production schedule for their Teddington Studios, with four films taken from their Hollywood schedule. The boom had attracted to the film industry a motley crew of maverick British aristocrats, eccentric millionaires and emigre entrepreneurs. Typical of this new breed of film-makers were the monocled and moustachioed Captain the Hon. Richard Norton (Wellington and Oxford) of British and Dominion Films, teetotal big game hunter and world traveller Lady Yule of British National Films, and Max Schach of Capitol Films, described by Alan Wood as 'a tiny chainsmoking Czechoslovakian likened by the journalist Hilda Merchant to a perky griffin behind an enormous desk'. 12 None was perhaps more improbable than J. Arthur Rank, millionaire flour magnate, Methodist Sunday school teacher and tad turn Yorkshireman. He had become interested in films in the early Thirties as a means of promoting Christian values. In 1934 he founded British National with Lady Yule, widow of a Calcutta jute magnate. They set up a company to build new studios at Pinewood. Their first production, Turn of the Tide (1935), a tale of vendetta between two Yorkshire fishing families, won considerable critical acclaim and third prize at the Venice Film Festival. But it was coldshouldered by British distributors, and Rank realized that he needed to become more and more involved in distribution and exhibition in order to ensure a showing for his productions. Five months before Turn of the Tide was released, C. M. Woolf, after a bitter row with the Ostrers, left GB to found his own renting company, General Film Distributors Ltd (GFD). Rank ensured financial backing for him from the General Cinema Finance Corporation, of which he was a

THE DREAM MERCHANTS 43

director. In 1936 Rank was part of an Anglo-American consortium which bought the Hollywood company Universal, and Universal's British renting outlet was merged with GFD, which hereafter distributed Universal films in Britain. Woolf wanted to link up with British National, but Lady Yule refused, and in 1937 Rank relinquished his share in British National in return for Lady Yule's share of Pinewood Studios. In the same year Rank became chairman of GFD and in 1938 chairman of General Cinema Finance Corporation. From this platform, he launched his empire-building operations. When Korda ran into financial difficulties, Rank bought Denham Studios. In 1939 he bought the new Amalgamated Studios at Elstree, from under the nose of John Maxwell. He bought a share of the Odeon circuit. Then in the early 19408, there was suddenly a clean sweep of the old titans. In 1940 John Maxwell died and Warner Bros acquired a dominant interest in ABPC. In 1941 Oscar Deutsch died and Rank took over the Odeon circuit. In 1942 Isidore Ostrer, who had retired to the USA, sold GB to Rank. By the end of the war, J. Arthur Rank was the colossus of the British film industry and a new era had begun. 13 The capitalist structure of the industry dictated the pattern of filmp making but it also had some influence on the content of films. Although the output of the different studios was largely determined by the taste and vision of the production chiefs, men like Michael Balcon, Alexander Korda, Herbert Wilcox and Basil Dean, the big combines had certain guiding principles, which had to be observed. Chief of these was the need to make films which cmJd be sold abroad, and this inevitably led to a demand for films that were international rather than national in their appeal. For GB this meant turning out films that would appeal to Americans, often starring imported American stars, and for ABPC films that would sell in Central Europe, often starring imported German stars. The growing feeling among commentators that the film industry was not producing films that reflected Britain and the British way of life was reinforced by the influx into the industry of refugees from Central Europe, who began flooding in after the coming to power of Hitler and the Nazis in 1933. They provided expertise and polish, but often a Continental style and feel to British films. The producers included such internationally renowned figures as Erich Pommer, the former head of Ufa, and Dr Paul Czinner, and the stars included Elizabeth Bergner, Conrad Veidt, Richard Tauber, Fritz Kortner and Peter Lorre. The upsurge of chauvinism that this influx stimulated is encapsulated in an article in World Film News, waspishly entitled, 'The Flora and Fauna of the British Film Industry'. It charted the origins of the leading figures in the industry with a map of the world pinpointing their places of birth, which seemed to be everywhere except Britain itself. The article concluded: To a large extent, therefore, our British cinema, at the outset of its

44 THE CONTEXT

second decade of protected life, will be dependent for its prestige and profit upon Messrs. Asher, Banks (Bianchi), Biro, Collier, Czinner, Esway, Fairbanks, Goetz, Grune, Hellman, Kalmus, Kane, Klement, Korda, Korda, Mendes, O'Brien, Rock, Salomon, Schach, Schenck, Soskin, Stein, Stromberg, Toeplitz and their colleagues, not to mention the many technicians who have settled on our shores to lend us their expert aid. On these gentlemen and their creative attitude to our English industries, our countryside, our people (and our banking system), we depend for the projection of our national life. On their deep, inborn sense of our history, our heritage and our customs we depend for the dramatization of our English traditions as well as for the more mundane business of fulfilling our British quota. 14 It is true that many films were characterized by styles of lighting and art direction recognizable as the hallmarks of the Ufa production regime in Germany and the constant stream of frothy operettas set in Old Vienna, Old Heidelberg - everywhere but Old England - did nothing to halt the criticism that a vital source of national projection was being misused. But set against this stylistic evidence, there is the obvious fact that the Kordas produced such quintessentially English properties as The Scarlet Pimpernel, Sanders of the River and Fire over England and even the feared American giant MGM made films set in such recognizable British institutions as Oxford University (A Yank at Oxford) and a public school (Goodbye, Mr. Chips). Significantly, these films and others like them were largely supportive of the existing social structure and the dominant ideology. For in Gramscian terms, the producers saw their interests lying in more than just making money. They were anxious to maintain government protection for the industry and to gain respectability for themselves and their industry. It was for these reasons that they set up and operated the censorship system and depicted themselves as playing a vital role in the projection of Britain. As the representatives of the Film Producers Group of the Federation of British Industries told the Moyne Committee: It is sufficient here to state that under the protective influence of the Act there has been built up and is being progressively increased an industry of very considerable magnitude, the importance of which cannot be measured by figures alone since it is inalienably associated with national prestige and British moral and cultural influence both at home, in the overseas Empire and in the foreign countries, where the popularity of British films is constantly increasing. The British film production industry has world~wide interests and British films can carry British scenes, themes, culture and the message of Britain to the furthest parts of the world. 15

THE DREAM MERCHANTS 45

There were to be honours and recognition for responsible and patriotic producers, and in due course Alexander Korda and Michael Balcon received knighthoods, Herbert Wilcox the eBE and Basil Dean the OBE. For the important role played by the cinema in the maintenance of hegemony was fully appreciated.

'The Devil's Camera'

The enormous influence and impact of films was widely accepted. When he declared in the House of Commons in 1932: Whether we are interested in the film or not we cannot deny its enormous public importance. It is the most powerful engine of propaganda and advertisement on the globe today. It appeals to every class. It has enormous influence on the education of youth. It is an amazing platform for the dissemination of ideas good and bad, the novelist John Buchan was merely echoing the stated views of many public figures from the Prime Minister and the Archbishop of Canterbury down.! The Moyne Committee, reporting on the working of the Cinematograph Films Act in 1936, took the same view: The cinematograph film is today one of the most widely~used means for the amusement of the public at large. It is also undoubtedly a most important factor in the education of all classes of the community, in the spread of national culture and in presenting national ideas and customs to the world. Its potentialities moreover in shaping the ideas of the very large numbers to whom it appeals are almost unlimited. The propaganda value of the film cannot be over-emphasized. 2 It was the very widespread currency of this view which caused powerful elements among what we might call 'the authorities', i.e. teachers, clergymen, magistrates, politicians and public bodies of various kinds, to react to the cinema with fear and hostility. They did not have to look far to see some immediate effects of the films, for they were obvious in matters of fashion, courtship, and role-playing. The New Survey of London Life and Labour noted: The influence of films can be traced in the clothes and appearance of the women and in the furnishing of their houses. Girls copy the fashions of their favourite film star. At the time of writing, girls in all classes of society wear 'Garbo' hats and wave their hair d la Norma Shearer or Lilian Harvey.3 The testimony of the fans themselves is instructive here, and J. P. Mayer's correspondents wrote about the influence of the films upon them. A twenty4hree-year-old shorthand typist reported: 'Regarding fashion, I 46

, THE DEVIL'S CAMERA' 47

myself have taken dozens of clothes and hair styles from films, and will continue to do so, as I believe that this is a sure way of keeping in step with fashions.,4 Manufacturers were quick to respond to this public demand as the popularity of Tudor-style hats for women in the wake of the success of The Private Life of Henry VIII (1933) and of the fifteenth· century Juliet cap after the release of MGM's Romeo and Juliet (1936) testifies. 5 But the influence of films on people's beliefs and attitudes was much harder to quantify, and herein lay a major problem for 'the authorities'. The New Survey of London Life and Labour concluded: It is impossible to measure the effect the films must have on the outlook and habits of the people. Undoubtedly they have great educational possibilities which have so far been imperfectly attained. But the prime object aimed at is not to instruct or 'uplift' but to amuse, and in this object the cinema has proved very successful. 6

Some of J. P. Mayer's correspondents freely admitted the influence of film on their attitudes and outlook. A twenty-three-year-old male bank clerk, currently in the RAF, admitted: I attribute much of the mild success I have attained to the influence of the films. They have taught me to be careful with money, meticulous in dress, good~mannered, even-tempered, to try and view things from the other person's point of view, and last but not least - hard work pays dividends .... I freely admit that I have learned a lot on the technique of lovemaking from films, probably all I know in fact. 7 A twenty-five-year-old in the RAMe, who had been an errand boy before the war and had spent some time in a boys' home wrote: Films taught me all the things I should like to associate with life. Crime does not pay; the wrong-doer getting his just deserts; kindness pays; love-thy-neighbour; plumping for the 'small' man; 'flaying' the rich; making the best of life; 'true' love wins in marriage; decency; the mild and honest man triumphing over the immoral, unscrupulous one; all the ideals worthy of life, which we would all like to see or would we ? at least one would presume so. It is oft-remarked that films should be more like life. If they were, people would be disgusted to 'see' how they lived, and would protest strongly; in fact, of course, such a film would never get past the censor. So I maintain, as that course is impossible, that, as has also been said, that life should be more like the films. I try to live my life as films would have us believe, and they have helped me to get a great deal out of life, though it is tough going. 8 Answers such as these would have reassured the moralists who assumed that the influence of cinema was automatically bad. But any scientific

48 THE CONTEXT

survey of people's reactions would need to take into account how often they went to the cinema, how impressionable they were and what other influences they were subjected to, and this information is lacking. There were perhaps three main groups hostile to the cinema as such. One group consisted of teachers and educationalists. Richard Ford, in his wide-ranging study on children and the cinema published in 1939, noted: There is especially a marked antipathy towards cinemas on the part of many teachers, who regard film-going as a primary cause of mental and physical lassitude among their pupils. 9 After quoting several

anti~cinema

comments from teachers, he concluded:

Many of them ... probably imagine that cinemagoing is a craze like stamp collecting, roller skating or cigarette cards - a juvenile habit which disappears after a certain age level. They do not realize that filmgoing is just as much a part of the national life as listening to the radio or reading the daily papers. They will ultimately adjust themselves, and will realize that their proper course is to encourage their children to see certain films which they (as teachers) know to provide healthy entertainment. Today teachers do not recommend films at local cinemas; they lack sufficient knowledge; they are afraid of parental objections; and they may be afraid of the Board of Education Inspectors. 10 The LeC Report on school children and the cinema (1932) confirmed the existence among teachers of strongly held anti·cinema views; and the Edinburgh Cinema Enquiry (1933) sought to detail their objections. A total of 649 teachers were canvassed and 60 per cent agreed that frequent cinema attendance by pupils made their work more difficult, the late hours it entailed being given as the chief source of restlessness and lack of concentration. While 61 per cent thought films gave children false ideas about life, laying too much stress on crime and on extremes of wealth and poverty, as well as instilling too many American ideas, only 51 per cent of teachers thought that cinema-going caused eyestrain, only 46 per cent thought that films influenced speech and writing adversely and only 37 per cent thought that films adversely affected children's originality and creative impulses. However, a staggering 93 per cent thought the average film programme unsuitable for children, and 74 per cent called for special children's matinees. l l The Headmasters' Conference was also greatly concerned about film content, deploring the brutality in films and thinking even worse 'the vulgarity and sloppy sentimentality', 'the appeal of pictures to the sexual side of nature' and the 'drip, drip, drip of the commonplace' .12 There was, on the other hand, an active and vocal minority which sedulously sought to promote the use of film in education. The Commission

, THE DEVIL'S CAMERA' 49

of Enquiry into the Cinema, set up in 1917, had initiated investigations into the possible educational uses of film. The results were published in 1925 in a volume called The Cinema in Education, edited by Sir James Marchant. It was the first scientific investigation of the effectiveness of film in teaching and decisively established its value. But school and educational authorities were reluctant to commit themselves to the expenditure involved in the provision of cinematic equipment, and producers were reluctant to embark on the production of educational films on a large scale without a guaranteed market. I3 The pressure to use film continued to build up, however. Three separate reports appeared in the early Thirties strongly advocating it. Frances Consitt's Report on the Value of Films in the Teaching of History (1931) was sponsored by the Historical Association. Sound Films in Schools (1931), reporting on the so-called Middlesex Experiment in the use of film in the teaching of children between the ages of eight and eighteen, was sponsored by the National Union of Teachers and Middlesex Education Committee. Finally there was The Film in National Life (1932), the report of the Commission on Educational and Cultural Films, a body established in 1929 by some 100 educational and scientific organizations and chaired by Sir Benjamin Gott, Secretary for Education in Middlesex. It declared: We want the trade and the schools to cooperate in making films for the service of education in the three distinct but related uses: teaching films for the classroom, interest films for the school hall, and entertainment films designed to the needs of children. The technique of using films in the teaching of special subjects must be specially learned. We want an authoritative body to which a teacher can go for advice as to what films are available and how to use them; a body which will arrange either directly or through the trade for the distribution of films to schools and institutions. In particular, we want a catalogue which will tell teachers what they want to know about films. 14 Many of these functions were performed by the British Film Institute, set up in 1933 with among others the aim of promoting the use of film in education. Throughout the Thirties there were conferences and books on film and education. There was a bid to provide a reliable supply of teaching films. Gaumont-British Instructional Films had produced 240 by 1939. But for all this enthusiasm, film did not become an important part of the educational process in the Thirties. There was a shortage of suitable films. But more seriously, the schools proved reluctant to equip themselves for showing them. In 1935 there were only an estimated 1,000 projectors in use in 32,000 schools. Many teachers remained hostile to or sceptical of the value of film and still more found it more convenient to build the BBC's schools wireless broadcasts into the curriculum.

50 THE CONTEXT

There was a similar split between a hostile majority and a sympathetic minority in the clergy. The Very Reverend Cosmo Gordon Lang, the Archbishop of Canterbury, presenting a high-powered deputation in favour of tighter film censorship to Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald in 1935, declared: Twenty-million people every week witness these entertainment films. It must, therefore be a most potent, I am not sure one might not say even the most potent influence existing upon the national character and its standards of life and morality.I5 But as the Archbishop's involvement with the deputation indicates, there was a general fear and dislike of the cinema among clergymen. There were notable exceptions. One was the ever-forthright Dr Donald Soper, Methodist minister in Islington, who declared: I have always regarded the cinema as the biggest single creative force in the world, and I have always felt that the children ought to have their rightful place in it. I know that many good, well-meaning people - and associations as well believe that the influence of the films is a bad one; but I don't agree with them. We must take a sensible view of the cinema; we must realize that it is the most remarkable recreational and educational factor that we have, and that, this being so, we must make use ofit.16 Accordingly, Dr Soper ran regular and successful children's matinees at his church, as did many clergymen in the populous inner city areas so many indeed that by the late Thirties the cinema trade itself began to regard them as potential rivals for customers.17 There was a Christian Cinema Council which met regularly to discuss matters to do with the cinema and its influence. But as in the field of education, this was very much an enthusiastic minority. More typical was the view of the Rev. Scott Lidgett, put to the chief censor, the Rt Hon. Edward Shortt, during a deputation to him from the London Public Morality Council in 1930: Some of us have given very long years to very poor populations in London. We have striven in concert with the teaching profession and with the local education authority to raise the standard, especially in the case of young people, by bringing to their minds a knowledge of the true and beautiful and good within their reach which a comparatively short time ago was not within the reach of the poorest popUlations. The cinema has opened up another avenue which makes all our labours in that direction much more difficult by attracting away from all kinds of educative and recreational enterprise the popular stream towards the cinema. l8 Matters came to a head when the cinema threatened to take the public

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away not only from improving recreation but also from the churches. This became a very real possibility with the passing of the Sunday Public Entertainment Act in 1932. A spate of prosecutions of cinemas for Sunday opening had highlighted the problem, pressure from the public had built up for a change in the law and so Sunday film shows by local option were legalized, so long as safeguards for labour were established and a charitable levy imposed on the takings. When the Act was debated by the Lower House of Convocation, the Rt Rev. E. S. Woods, the Bishop of Croydon, moved the motion that 'This House is of the opinion that the Church should approve the opening of cinemas on Sunday Evenings provided that in addition to the safeguards provided in the Act the hours of opening should not be before 6 p.m. and that the pictures should be of a wholesome character.' In support of his motion, he made an enlightened and important speech: It looks as if with the new order of civilization - the birth pangs of which we are passing through now - the problem of the right use of leisure is going to be every bit as serious as the problems of wages and industrial conditions. What is called the new technocracy is beginning to say that, owing to the enormously increased power of production, we are approaching a period where the average work time may well be 4 days a week or 4 hours a day. What are people going to do with these long hours of freedom? The Church should say plainly that Sunday is not an unsuitable day for some forms of recreation. With regard to the vast sections of the community who have very few facilities for Sunday outdoor recreation in summer time and who, in winter, are completely without a comfortable room and fireside, books and wireless, there must clearly be something in the nature of provided recreation. There are masses of young people in the streets of all big urban centres on Sunday evenings who literally have nowhere to go and nothing to do. I fear that, with the great majority, it would not enter their heads to come to church. Is there anything that can be done for them? I should say open the cinemas and give them healthy films and it is a course which, according to many unmistakable signs, people are generally going to demand. The unwise people are those who try to block it, and, by blocking it, increase the demand until it reaches a point where it sweeps all obstacles away and becomes a revolution which cannot be controlled .... There are occasions when the Church must set itself against the whole world. This is not one ofthem. 19 However, the Dean of Canterbury clearly spoke for the majority of churchmen when he replied that 'the average man in a workshop was against Sunday cinemas. His idea of Sunday was to stand at his door with his coat off to hear the church bells, to see his children well dressed, to see the whole family at home for Sunday meals and to see nothing break up

52 THE CONTEXT

the family unit. The Sunday cinema was just another step to rob such of their leisure on Sunday.' An amendment to the bishop's motion was proposed attacking the exploitation of Sunday for commercial gain and was passed almost unanimously. 20 The progress of the Sunday Opening debate in Birmingham is typical of the battles fought up and down the country on this issue. In Birmingham there had been sporadic demands for Sunday opening throughout the Twenties, and since 1912 there had been occasional specially licensed Sunday shows for charitable purposes. 21 But the Sunday opening of cinemas in neighbouring Smethwick prompted the Birmingham Gazette to ask in 1929 'why not in Birmingham?,22 The Birmingham City Justices rejected the suggestion, saying: 'There is no public demand for regular opening of entertainment houses on Sunday', a statement which provoked a flood of letters to local newspapers and the revival of the slumbering Sunday opening issue. 23 The movement for Sunday opening, calling itself the 'Brighter Sunday' movement, gathered momentum, gained the support of the Trades and Labour Council and reached the national press. Alderman William Lovsey, a Birmingham justice and vocal champion of the 'Brighter Sunday' movement, told the Daily Express in 1930: There is a great demand for a brighter Sunday. Hotels have their entertainment, the city orchestras give concerts and the theatres often open for charity performances. One can boat and fish and play golf on the municipal links, but the cinemas remain closed. What is the difference between these entertainments and a picture show? A brighter Sunday evening in Birmingham must come sooner or later.24 The local branch of the Cinematograph Exhibitors Association, responding to the evidence of public demand, declared its willingness to open cinemas on Sundays. So on 3 January 1930 the Birmingham licensing justices were formally petitioned for permission to open cinemas on Sundays.25 The Anglican and Free Churches in Birmingham, headed by Dr Ernest Barnes, the Bishop of Birmingham, issued a lengthy manifesto summarizing their reasons for opposing Sunday opening: that Sunday was needed as a day of rest, that it was undesirable to commercialize Sunday, that there was a danger of imposing a seven-day working week on those working in the cinema trade, that church organizations and social clubs already provided enough Sunday entertainment for the young, and that Sunday was in danger of being exploited for profit by the cinema trade. 26 The Justices rejected the request for Sunday opening, giving as their reasons the fact that no public body other than the Trades Council supported it, that there was plenty of other Sunday entertainment available and that all other cities comparable to Birmingham forbade it. But there was underneath all this an essentially moralistic objection: the belief that Sunday cinema opening - indeed even the cinema itself - was

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potentially both immoral and demoralizing. 27 But the passing of the Sunday Entertainment Act in 1932 altered the situation and the CEA renewed their petition to the justices, citing the Act. Despite the continued opposition of the Christian Social Council, representing the Anglican and Free Churches, permission for Sunday opening was granted on condition that the opening hours would be 7 p.m. to 10 p.m., the entertainment was to be 'healthy and elevating', that 10 per cent of the profits went to charity and that no employee should work more than three Sundays in four. 28 It is interesting to note that the main opposition to Bishop Woods' procinema motion in the Lower House of Convocation came from two of the leading Birmingham sabbatarians, Canon Guy Rogers, the Rector of Birmingham, and the Venerable J. H. Richards, the Archdeacon of Aston. Both of them said that they did not oppose Sunday opening in principle but they thought other activities like social clubs were preferable. They also thought the much-attacked 'Sunday parading' was preferable to the cinema. Canon Rogers said the 'Sunday parade' was harmless ('It is a little usually of very jolly character, although it sometimes boisterous'), Archdeacon Richards said that he had observed 'Sunday parading' for thirty years in Birmingham and it was not a problem ('If there is a danger, it is very often through the sexual excitement produced by what is so often purveyed to them at the local theatres,).29 This view of the benign nature of 'Sunday parading' contrasts markedly with the church's view of 'Sunday parades' in a previous generation. The Rev. H. S. Pelham, Domestic Chaplain to the Bishop of Birmingham, had written in 1914: 'It is a heartrending occupation to walk about the centre of Birmingham on a Saturday and Sunday night, and to witness the thousands of boys and girls ragging about and engaging in perfectly filthy conversation. This goes on in the poorer parts of the city as well, and is largely responsible for the terrifying spread of immorality.'so For the clerics of the Thirties, this evil had evidently paled beside the insidious lure of the silver screen. But Pelham's view was endorsed by the Chief Constable of Birmingham, Sir Charles Rafter, who supported Sunday cinema opening in a report submitted to the Justices in 1930: The housing conditions of working class people tend to drive young lads and girls onto the streets, especially those living in non-parlour type houses. It is difficult for young people of both sexes to enjoy themselves together in the presence of their elders and there is no facility for courting couples. The result is that they go on the streets, and the only places open are the licensed houses. That street parades are an evil must be generally conceded. My opinion is that with public houses alone open they are a greater evil than would be the case if places of entertainment were open also. s1

54 THE CONTEXT

In the event, the first city-wide Sunday opening of cinemas took place on 5 February 1933 and was pronounced a success. Interestingly the churches reported no decline in the size of congregations and the ~Sunday parades' of young people appeared equally undiminished, suggesting that cinema-going was an addition to rather than a substitute for existing activities. 32 The churches continued to try to restrict the conditions under which Sunday shows took place, but the battle was lost. Behind the opposition to Sunday cinema, apart from fear of the desecration of the Sabbath and concern for the workers' rest, lay the clear moral disapproval of the cinema and particularly of film content. This brings us to the third and largest group of the cinema's opponents, a group which generally embraced those in teaching and the church who saw films as evil, a group which we can call the moralists. There were those who thought the cinema had specific bad effects. One was the danger of passivity, the result of 'frowsting' indoors instead of getting out and doing something more active. As Seebohm Rowntree pointed out in his study of York: Undoubtedly the cinema shared with other forms of entertainment the danger that it may become to some merely a way of escape from monotony rather than a means of recreation. True recreation is constructive, and wholesome recreation implies re-creating physical, intellectual or moral vitality. As one among several ways of spending leisure, visits to the cinema may well be re-creative. But some cinema 'fans' rely on the cinema too exclusively as a way of passing their leisure hours. It becomes for them a means of escapism rather than re-creation, and this arrests their development. 33 This was a fear shared by the Carnegie Trust investigators into unemployed youth: The harmful effects of indiscriminate cinema attendance are obvious. Young men may come to accept their experiences vicariously. If their only mental sally into adventure comes while they are sitting in a comfortable seat, the enthusiasm and spirit for personal action will soon disappear. 34 Another fear was that of the lowering of public taste, and this was a fear held by those who in general supported the cinema. John Buchan, who was himself a director of British Instructional Films, said in parliament: The really vicious film is not very common; it is very rare. What we have to complain of much more is silliness and vulgarity ... vulgarity may be a real danger, ifit results in a general degradation of the public taste and a communal softening of the brain. 35

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The Commission on Educational and Cultural Films shared this fear: Plain vulgarity may do little harm. It is the steady stream of third-rate films passed for 'Universal Exhibition' which is the danger, with its sentimental and sham-emotional standards of values applied to unreal people. a6 But there were many groups and individuals who held the cinema directly responsible for virtually every problem faced by society. At its most extreme this was a fanatical view, mingling an almost pathological puritanism with naked racism, and it was at its most extreme in a book called The Devil's Camera by two journalists, R. G. Burnett and E. D. Martell, published in 1932 and dedicated 'to the ultimate sanity of the white races'. The authors declare: This is not an indiscriminate and irresponsible attack on cinematography as such. We object not to the film camera but to the prostitution of it by sex-mad and cynical financiers. 37 They later identify these financiers as 'mainly Jewish': For every production of the moral tone and superlative merit of King of Kings, Ben-Hur or Disraeli, there have been scores of sinister exploitations of vice and crime and blasphemy .... When all the possible bouquets have been handed out to those who deserve them the cinema is still revealed as at present a dread menace to civilization. Unless it is cleaned up within this generation it will undermine every existing agency for decency and public order .... Nothing is sacred. There is no reticence. The basest passions are exhibited in their morbid brutality to a degree that would have been unthinkable a few years ago. Decent people dare not contemplate this disgusting revolution without wishing to strike a blow against it. Our very civilization is at stake. The cinema, as at present debased, is the Hun of the modern world. 38 They call on the testimony of an 'impartial investigator' who had done a tour of the London cinemas: I saw stories of seduction, illegitimacy, kept women, press cynicism, municipal corruption, 'petting' parties, French studio life, cocktails, sneers at virtue, revengeful or forgiving prostitutes, and of course shootings galore guns, guns, guns! When wives were mentioned, there were winks .... Every film I saw took it for granted as the initial presumption that all of us in the audience were 'in the know', disillusioned, and had long ago seen through our idealisms. Money, drink, sexual love and power and position were the only things that counted. A pretty face - or perhaps I should say figure - a jolly big wad of notes, a swift car, a will of your own and be hanged to all life's

56 THE CONTEXT

restrictions, modesties and moral laws. And all enswathed in an atmosphere of loveliness, evening dress, jazz music, rich food and absol ute irresponsibility. 39 They listed the deleterious effects of cinema as the undermining of moral values, respect for religion, authority and law in the young, the degradation of women and the undermining of marriage and family life, the incitement to crime: the glamourization of war. They were also concerned about the effect on natives of films showing whites in a state of degradation: No well-informed person will deny that our English~speaking civilisation stands at the crossroads of destiny .... Both in Great Britain and the United States just now the paramount need is for high ideals, frugality of living and hard honest work. It is unimaginably tragic that at such a time the cinemas should be revelling in squandermania, promiscuity, crime and idleness. Our national strength is being sapped, our capacity to triumph over adversity undermined. This sinister weapon, in its celluloid self so flimsy and trivial, is robbing us of the qualities we most need in the struggle for surviva1. 4o Their demands were then for films to promote these qualities and for much more stringent censorship to purge the screen of the harmful sorts of films it had detailed. For all the hysteria of tone, this was essentially the standpoint and the demand of the moralists. Both individual commentators and action groups adopted the same stance linking morality with national and indeed racial purity. Major Rawdon Hoare, a self-confessed Conservative and cousin of the Secretary of State for India and later Home Secretary Sir Samuel Hoare, wrote one of a spate of 'state of the nation' books that followed in the wake of J. B. Priestley's English Journey. In This Our Country (1935) the sight of a supercinema on the outskirts of Maidenhead prompted him to reflect on the role of the cinema in society: Through the films as through the wireless a great deal may be done. And many of the English film companies are trying honestly to produce a superior type of film. But there still seems a great deal to be accomplished. Hero-worship has now changed into the admiration of film-stars. Small boys no longer read with gaping mouths about the adventures of men who helped to build our Empire. They sit instead amid gilded luxury and watch the latest 'star' go through the various antics of love, hate and adventure that we now see so much of on the films .... True it is that a certain number of the films are for adults only, though many of the taller boys and girls can still obtain an entrance under a false age. In any case those films available for them are by no means in the backwoods as regards sex-appeal. ... Is it

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necessary to start their minds on 'canned' sex quite so early? They will begin to think of these matters soon enough without the help of sensuous films. People complain that the younger generation are becoming immoral. It is surprising to me that they're not a great deal worse. It has often been said that the films keep the men out of the pubs, and the girls and the youths from under the bushes. This may be true. But I believe that if a survey could be taken it would be found a good deal of lost time is made up for beneath those bushes directly the cinema is over. 41 Stopping at a filling station on the Great West Road, the Major was served by a petrol pump attendant who, although from the East End of London, affected an American accent: The powerful influence of the cinema had changed this youth from the East End into something that was neither one thing nor the other, into something that had lost the many good qualities of the people belonging to that part of London, and yet had failed dismally to give him the American stamp he so-much desired. He is only one among millions whose entire lives are being influenced by the American Cinema. What good can all this do to England? Will it create patriotism? Will it create a desire to keep our great Empire together? I doubt it. But quite definitely it is creating a race of youths belonging to all classes whose experience of life is based largely on the harrowing and frequently sordid plots of American films. 42 The most celebrated group to adopt the moralist stance was the Birmingham Cinema Enquiry, which became known also as the National Cinema Enquiry. It grew out of a conference held in Birmingham in 1930 by the National Council of Women on the subject of film content. To investigate further it was decided to set up the Birmingham Cinema Enquiry Committee, headed by the Vice-Chancellor of Birmingham University, Sir Charles Grant Robertson. Its included interested and concerned magistrates, doctors, teachers and clergymen. Its stated purpose was to try to persuade the Home Office to hold an enquiry into film content. But the Committee's lack of objectivity was clear from the outset; its members had already made up their minds about the link between films and deviant behaviour. As the Birmingham Gazette reported: 'It is not antagonistic to cinemas as an institution but merely to the standard of films, the chief objection to which is what is said to be "vicious sensationalism" that portrays an unreal idea of the values of life.,43 A public meeting was held on 7 October 1930 to launch a petition for an enquiry by the Home Office, its object, according to Dr W. A. Potts, psychological adviser to the Birmingham Justices, being 'to find out how

58 THE CONTEXT

far unhappy homes, divorce, illegitimacy and disease were due to the pictures,.44 To support their demands the Birmingham Committee launched an enquiry into the effect of the cinema on children by circulating a questionnaire to 'a number of representative elementary, secondary and private schools in Birmingham'. They were particularly concerned about the children, who were more susceptible to the false values promoted by films.' As Grant Robertson said at an Enquiry meeting on 7 November 1930: The basis of our British civilization, and I do not put it too strongly, is built upon some very fundamental ideas, and certain fundamental standards, and standards upon which we have built at any rate our British life. If these go, what remains?45 Dr H. P. Newsholme, Medical Officer of Health for Birmingham, extended the field of those at risk from children, adolescents and the immature adult to include 'the less civilized races all over the world, who are children in mind and who rely on us to give them the truth'. For them, he declared, films were marred by 'three great blemishes, the blemishes of false perspective, the obsession of sex and the over-emphasis of sensational elements'.46 The Committee's petition ('a strong protest against the harmful and undesirable nature of many of the films shown in picture houses') with 18,000 signatures was handed into the Home Secretary, Mr J. R. Clynes, by a deputation headed by Grant Robertson in May 1931. They called for a public enquiry into the production, classification and exhibition of films and stricter censorship, citing the petition and the questionnaire as evidence of the concern felt. Mr Clynes declared himself sympathetic and agreed to consider the proposa1. 47 After a busy first year, the Committee published its first annual report on 1 July 1931 pronouncing seventy-nine of the 285 films shown in the city to be 'unsatisfactory'.48 Their work was defended by Mr G. A. Bryson, the deputy chairman of the Birmingham Justices, who said: We don't want our children to go about saying 'Oh, yeah' and 'O.K. kid' and there is no doubt a tendency to Americanize the English language throughout the film that is, I think, deplorable. He concluded: We are satisfied that the members of the Cinema Enquiry are in earnest; that they are not killjoys or busybodies, but wish to keep the films clean and healthy and wholesome. A minority of the justices dissented from this view. Mr W. A. Dalley called the Enquiry members 'an interfering lot of old women of both sexes', and the redoubtable Alderman Lovsey called them 'troglodytes'. But the

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majority of the justices endorsed Bryson's view. 49 The Birmingham Enquiry next held a national conference on problems connected with the cinema at Birmingham University on 27 February 1932. It was attended by' representatives of forty-two social organizations, twenty-two educational bodies, nineteen religious bodies, four medical bodies and forty towns and cities. Grant Robertson was calling this time for state censorship. If the cinema was properly controlled, he argued: We can make it a tremendous instrument to maintain what I like to think is the supremacy of the English-speaking and British people over all others in the world. 50 Dr W. A. Potts, representing this time the National Council of Mental Hygiene, attributed the 90 per cent increase in indecent assaults on boys and 62 per cent increase in assaults on young children in recent years to the sex content of films.51 The conference resolved once more to call for a government enquiry into the cinema, and Grant Robertson headed a deputation to the Home Office. Sir Herbert Samuel, the Home Secretary, received them on 6 April 1932 and listened sympathetically but said that he thought the British Board of Film Censors (BBFC) was doing a good job and that, having just set up a liaison committee to maintain links between them and the local licensing bodies, he wanted to await the outcome of their discussions. 52 But the Birmingham Enquiry persisted. In March 1933 Grant Robertson presided at another meeting at the University, which again called for tighter censorship. Mr Sidney Dark, Editor of the Church Times, gave full rein to the sense of moral outrage that many of the Enquiry's supporters felt. He declared that: The large proportion of the people who filled the picture theatres were young, comparatively unintelligent and with untrained judgement. This vast army of the least intelligent and least morally equipped members of society were allowed to have all sorts of intellectual and moral poison pumped into them without any kind of interference. Judging by the output of Hollywood, to describe that city as a cesspool, would be complimentary. A considerable proportion of the films imported into this country were dangerously false. They accentuated the trivial and neglected all that was important and vital in life. In this complex age it was race suicide to allow foreigners to impregnate falsehood into the lifeblood of this nation. 53 The climactic assault of the cinema's moralist critics came on 15 January 1935 with a delegation presented to the Prime Minister, Ramsay MacDonald, by the Archbishop of Canterbury. The speakers included Grant Robertson and the deputation included the President of the NUT, the Chief Rabbi, the General Secretary of the National Council of

60 THE CONTEXT

Evangelical Free Churches, the Director of the NSPCC, the President of the National Association of Schoolmasters, the President of the Mothers' Union, the Chairman of the Parents National Educational Union, the Vice-Chairman of the Public Morality Council, and the Editor of the Methodist Times. Grant Robertson summarized the reasons why they wanted an enquiry into the film industry; the large number of children and adolescents attending the cinema, the 'undesirable and disquieting character of films', the fact that the BBFC was a trade-financed organization and by implication therefore parti pris; the fact that the Home Office consultative committee had proved disappointing and the local licensing laws permitted too wide a leeway in the showing of undesirable films. Mr MacDonald agreed to look into the situation, but no enquiry was forthcoming and the Birmingham Cinema Enquiry and similar bodies faded away in the second half of the 1930s. 54 There had in fact never been general concern about the content of films, as Home Office statistics reveal. In February 1931 the Home Office sent out a questionnaire to all local licensing authorities to establish the precise scope of the content problem. Of the 603 licensing authorities, only twenty-one had received any complaints from the public about films exhibited in their areas in the previous three years. The total number of films complained of in those years was thirty-eight. Of the 603 authorities, 586 stated that they had not during the three years prohibited exhibition of any film passed by the BBFC. Eight authorities had banned twentyseven films on the grounds usually of sexual immorality. Such evidence convinced the Home Office that the standard of censorship adopted by the BBFC was on the whole acceptable and that there was no general public alarm at film content. 55 The coming of sound had led to an upsurge of gangster films and 'sex' films in Hollywood. But moralistic movements in America, such as the Catholic Legion of Decency, brought such pressure to bear on Hollywood that the Hays Code, Hollywood's own code of censorship, was rewritten and strictly enforced. In consequence studios turned away from the controversial contemporary themes to historical drama, costume adventure and dramatizations of Victorian novels. So by 1935 there was comparatively little for moralists to complain about in films. The President of the BBFC noted with satisfaction in his annual report for that year that there had been 'a marked diminution of hostile criticism of the cinema and films, and of adverse comment on the work of the Board'. 56 It is worth noting in passing that one group among 'the authorities' almost always in favour of the cinema was the police. As early as 1917 Roderick Ross, the Chief Constable of Edinburgh, was telling the Commission of Enquiry into the Cinema, 'my divisional officers, who have opportunities of judging, emphatically state that the picture houses have been instrumental in reducing intemperance in the city,.57 Many British

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chief constables, when circulated with a copy of his statement, endorsed this view. 58 As has already been seen, Sir Charles Rafter, Chief Constable of Birmingham, supported Sunday cinema opening as a way of keeping young people out of the public houses. In his annual report for 1935 the Chief Constable of Sheffield, Major F. S. said that the increase in the number of cinemas had been accompanied by a diminution in drunkenness and he welcomed the cinema as an aid in the fight against intemperance. 59 In fact, the equation is not quite as straightforward as all these statements seem to suggest. Other factors, such as the rise of a whole range of alternative leisure pursuits, a rise in the standard of living, shorter opening hours and a reduction in the strength of liquor, need to be taken into account to explain the fall in drunkenness in the years following the First World War. But in the context of public opinion in the Thirties the clear beneficent effect of cinema-going as perceived by the police is what is important. Some police officers also came to the rescue of the cinema when it was charged with causing crime. The trade paper Kinematograph Weekly was only too happy to print an article by MajorGeneral Sir Wyndham Childs, the former Assistant Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, rejecting the idea often canvassed by opponents of the cinema that the crime rate was affected by films: The cold fact is that crime in this country is the direct result of environment - that is to say, criminal surroundings, excessive taxation, with the sequelae of unemployment, discontent, jealousy, and, in many cases, misery and hatred, and the monstrous flaunting of wealth at our fashionable restaurants and 'salons' .... Crime is the result of rotten conditions of living, so don't blame the films.6o Many police officers took more or less the same view, as did the Home Office. In parliament, there was certainly not hostility to the cinema as such. After all, parliament passed the Sunday Public Entertainment Act in 1932, enabling people to see even more films. But they feared the overwhelming influence of Hollywood films, which were in danger of swamping the home-grown product. There was no question of banning American films, a move which might have had serious electoral consequences, as Colonel Josiah Wedgwood MP (Labour, Newcastle under Lyme) warned the Commons in the debate on the Cinematograph Films Act in 1927. Confessing himself to be an unashamed fan of Hollywood films, he went on: Believe me, the people of this country really know what they want to see best, and, if you come along and say 'No, this is not highbrow enough; the House of Commons thinks you ought to see something which will improve your morals, and sell British hats at the same time', you are

62 THE CONTEXT

making the House of Commons ridiculous and you will certainly not improve the electoral temper of the people who go to the pictures. 61 He thought that people were perfectly satisfied with the diet of predominantly American films that they were getting, and that there was as much need for a British film industry as there was for a British banana industry. But his was very much a minority point of view. The importance the government attached to the film industry was indicated by the President of the Board of Trade, Sir Philip Cunliffe-Lister, in moving the Cinematograph Films Bill of 1927, which would extend a measure of protection to the native film industry, allowing it to compete more successfully with its American rival: The cinema is today the most universal means through which national ideas and national atmosphere can be spread, and even if these be intangible things, surely they are among the most important influences in civilization. Everybody will admit that the strongest bonds of Empire - outside, of course, the strongest of all, the crown - are just those intangible bonds - a common outlook, the same ideas and the same ideals which we all share and which are expressed in a common language and a common literature. Should we be content for a moment if we depended upon foreign literature and upon a foreign Press in this country? .... At any rate the greatest proportion of the Press is British, and we should be very anxious if the proportion was in the opposite sense as it is with British films. 62 Not only was the cinema a vital medium for promoting British ideals and Imperial unity, it was also a crucial asset in trade: From the trade point of view, the influence of the cinema is no less important. It is the greatest advertising power in the world. Just let the House imagine the effect upon trade of millions of people in every country, day after day, seeing the fashions, the styles and the products of a particular country. Cunliffe-Lister cited evidence from South America, New Zealand and Canada of the creation of a market for American goods by the showing of American films and the consequent decline in demand for British goods. 63 The combination of political, cultural and commercial motives for stimulating the British film industry continued to govern the thinking of the British government, and led in due course to the renewal of protection with the 1937 Cinematograph Films Act, introduced by the President of the Board of Trade, Oliver Stanley, in similar terms to his predecessor Cunliffe-Lister: It is not only that films are a medium of entertainment ... but they are also a powerful vehicle for propaganda .... I want the world to be able to

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see British films true to British life, accepting British standards and spreading British ideals. 64 Politicians were essentially exercised by three questions. The first was the positive desire to see British films stressing British life and ideals. This was a recurrent refrain. Ramsay MacDonald, Leader of the Opposition, in 1927 called for film makers 'to use our own natural scenery; to use our history, which is more magnificent for film production than the history of any other nation in the world; to use the romance, the folklore, the tradition that has never been exploited for the film industry'.65 His sentiments were echoed by Lt-Col John Moore-Brabazon (Unionist, Chatham): Have we ever seen a film which has shown the struggle for liberty which has gone on in this country? Has it ever gone round the world to show what sort of people we are? Do we ever see a film showing the real sweetness of the English character? Never . We can never get this sort of film produced to show England at its best. 66 The same call came in the 1937 debate, from, for instance, Sir Arnold Wilson (National Conservative, Hitchin): '1 want to see our films become more representative of national ideas and outlook, and to see every part of our land play its part in our films,' and R. W. Sorensen (Labour, West Leyton), 'I want the cinema to be a real reflection of British thought and British life.'67 The converse of this factor was the fear of Americanization. In 1927 LtCol R. V. K. Applin (Conservative, Enfield) quoted in the Commons an article from the Daily Express (18 March), which declared: The plain truth about the film situation is that the bulk of our picturegoers are Americanized to an extent that makes them regard a British film as a foreign film, and an interesting but more frequently irritating interlude to their favourite entertainment. They go to see American stars; they have been bought up on American publicity. They talk America, think America, and dream America. We have several million people, mostly women, who, to all intent and purpose, are temporary American citizens. Colonel Applin added: 'There is the greatest indictment I have read yet of the system under which films are shown in this country.,68 Mr R. W. Sorensen took up the same theme in 1937: I rather assumed that the chief function of the cinema in this country was to accomplish what 1 am sure will never be accomplished, or even attempted, in any other way - the annexation of this country by the United States of America. As it is, the United States have already advanced far towards that annexation .... 1 think we ought to realize

64 THE CONTEXT

how comprehensive is the psychological influence of a large proportion of the pictures which nearly 20,000,000 see every week, most of them emanating from non-British sources. Personally I have very little opportunity of visiting the pictures, and, if I do get an opportunity, I do not use it, because I dread having to spend an hour or two suffering from a mixture of glucose, chewing gum, leaden bullets and nasal noises. 69 The third element was fear of the influence of unsatisfactory films, and films showing white people in degraded states, on the subject races of the Empire. Sir Robert Horne (Conservative, Glasgow Hillhead), a former Chancellor of the Exchequer, said in 1927: I do not suppose that there is anything which has done so much harm to the prestige 'and position of Western people and the white race as the exhibition of films which have tended to degrade us in the eyes of peoples who have been accustomed to look upon us with admiration and respect. 70 Arthur Greenwood (Labour, Nelson and Colne) agreed: I think that the majority of films that are being shown in the East today reflect little credit on the people &f this and other countries in the West, that they do, indeed, bring into contempt Western civilization. That is a very serious feature of the film industry today. It is, unwittingly, if you like, creating erroneous impressions of Western civilization and probably doing incalculable harm in Asia and the East generally. 71 This had become even more urgent by 1937, as Oliver Stanley stressed: Today we in this country know that we are on our defence, and are doubly on our defence. We are on our defence as Westerners and as democrats. The decadence of the West is just as much the talk of the bazaars of the East as the decay of democracy is the stock leader of the newspapers of the dictators. Wherever in the world a film by its lack of taste or lack of character, by showing an exotic or eccentric minority as a national element, by showing the fantastic in the guise of the normal, gives colour to either of these beliefs, then it is weakening our defences. 72 Another group which favoured the cinema as an art form but hated Hollywood was the intellectuals, who were at the heart of the indigenous and distinctive British film culture that emerged in the 19308. In his seminal article on British responses to Hollywood, Peter Stead defines this film culture as 'a national film institute, a network of film societies, a number of intellectual film journals, a whole tradition of documentary film making and close links between those interested in film and educational-

, THE DEVIL'S CAMERA' 65

ists, especially those engaged in adult education.,73 Their standpoint was one of nostalgia for the silent cinema and a marked preference for Continental and particularly Soviet films, both feelings dictated by the belief that they represented the best in Film as Art, and also the belief that there was an 'intelligent audience' waiting to be discovered which wanted more intellectually demanding and artistically complex films. Inevitably the intellectuals detested Hollywood, believing that its commercialism stifled Art, that its films were artificial and eschewed the realism they sought in their films, that its movie moguls manipulated the mass audience unscrupulously and that its cinema failed to fulfil its role as educator. But this group was wholly out of touch with the popular mood. The mass audience went to the cinema for entertainment and not education. As Mrs Edna Thorpe, the typical housewife, put it in 1938: Not many of us go to the pictures with a conscious desire to be instructed ... our first wish is to be amused or interested by some aspect of life which seems different from our own. 74 People did not want to see Continental films or documentaries, for much the same reason. As Mr T. H. Fligelstone, President of the Cinematograph Exhibitors' Association (CEA), told the Moyne Committee, the public would not accept documentaries: 'The public come into our cinemas to be amused, not educated.,75 Mr W. R. Fuller, General Secretary of the CEA, observed acidly of the failure to interest the public in the Empire Marketing Board's films: 'No documentary film ... has ever set the Thames a fire.,76 To the distress of the intellectuals, the public seemed perfectly happy with the flow of Hollywood films - so much so that some of the intellectuals became positively exasperated at the failure of the 'intelligent audience' to emerge. The poet 'Bryher', writing in the key intellectual journal Close up, denounced British film audiences in 1928 for their passivity: They hypnotize themselves into an expectation that a given star or theatre or idea will produce a given result. They surrender to this, all logical features in abeyance, and achieve complete gratification whatever the material set in front of them provided it is presented in an expected and familiar manner .... To watch hypnotically something which has become a habit and which is not recorded as it happens by the brain, differs little from the drugtaker's point of view and it is destructive because it is used as a cover to prevent real consideration of problems, artistic or sociological and the creation of intelligent English films.77 However, as the 19308 wore on and Hollywood films got better and better, some important intellectual figures (J. B. Priestley, Graham

66 THE CONTEXT

Greene, Elizabeth Bowen, Lewis Grassic Gibbon) began to sing their praises and to urge the British film-makers to seek to emulate them in technical expertise and artistic flair. By the late Thirties too, Hollywood was producing enough British Imperial epics and pro-British films to satisy even the most chauvinistic critic of its output too many for some of the more diehard isolationists in America's capital. The strict enforcement of the Hays Code had purged the screen of the immorality that so upset the moralist critics of Hollywood's output. These developments left the intellectual critics of Hollywood even more isolated.

'Our Movie-made Children'

Children were even more regular and habitual cinema-goers than adults. It was generally agreed that children's experience of film-watching was more intense than that of adults, owing to the visual impact, child identification with characters and the child's tendency to 'accept as true, correct, proper and right what they saw on the screen'.1 In consequence the cinema's influence on children greatly preoccupied society's traditional cultural elites and groups concerned with child training and welfare. Few of the concerned groups would have dissented from the view expressed by Dr John Mackie of Leith Academy, who compiled and edited the report of the Edinburgh Cinema Enquiry in 1933: The public ... should realize the importance that the cinema has assumed in the lives of the children. Seven children out of every ten go to the pictures at least once a week. Most children spend longer at the cinema than they do at many school subjects. Here is an influence of first importance. 2 It was in order to assess the extent and nature of this influence that organizations in London, Birmingham, Edinburgh, Sheffield and Birkenhead set out to gather information about the frequency of attendance and cinematic preferences of children. 3 Richard Ford, who was instrumental in organizing the Odeon cinema clubs for children and wrote the first book on children and the cinema in Britain, estimated that in 1939 some 4,600,000 children went to the cinema every week. 4 The local investigations break this figure down into more precisely defined groupings. The LCe Education Committee commis· sioned from its chief inspector, Dr F. M. Spencer, a report on school children and the cinema, which was published in 1932 and acquired considerable authority. The conclusions were based on a sample of twentynine schools from all over London and involved 21,280 children. The results were broken down into different age, sex and social groups. It was discovered that 38.9 per cent of the child population of London went to the cinema at least once a week and a further 17.3 per cent at least once a month, meaning that over half of all London children were regular cinema-goers. Only 13.4 per cent of children never went to the cinema. Interestingly, 63 per cent of children under five attended cinemas, 30 per cent of them once a week, indicating that the cinema habit started early. 67

68 THE CONTEXT

Boys tended to go to the cinema more often than girls: at ages eight to ten, 45 per cent of boys went weekly as oppposed to 37 per cent of girls and at ages eleven to fourteen, 46 per cent of boys as opposed to 39 per cent of girls. But at ages eleven to fourteen, a slightly higher percentage of girls (13 per cent to the boys 12 per cent) went to the cinema twice a week. The London Enquiry found that children usually went to the cinema on Saturday afternoons, when the management would put on a cheap matinee. It also noted that 'it appears to be the case that at the lower ages the better off children (in a socially "good" schooD go less frequently, and at the higher ages no more frequently than the worse-off children. Taken all round the income level of the parents (within the ordinary elementary school limits) does not seem greatly to affect the percentage of attendance. In some schools the poorer children go more frequently to cinemas than do the better off children.' The London Enquiry concluded that whereas adults went on average twenty-one times a year to the cinema, children went on average thirty-two times. 5 The picture emerging in London was emphatically confirmed by the Edinburgh Cinema Enquiry, conducted at about the same time. Twentyone schools from all areas of the city were investigated, and replies from 1,310 boys and 1,270 girls between the ages of nine and eighteen processed. They divided the schools into class A (better districts of the city) and class B (more densely populated and therefore poorer areas). The investigators found that 69 per cent of all Edinburgh children between nine and eighteen attended the cinema at least once a week. More boys (77 per cent) went than girls (61 per cent). The children from poorer districts went more often than those in better-off districts. In class A schools, 69 per cent of boys wen.t once a week and 16 per cent less than once a month. and 51 per cent of girls went once a week and 29 per cent less than once a month. In class B schools, 86 per cent of boys went once a week and 7 per cent less than once a month, and 78 per cent of girls went once a week and 13 per cent less than once a month. The report concluded: 'the fact that the girls do not go nearly so often as the boys must be due partly to the fact that some of them must give help in the home while their brothers go off to the pictures, and perhaps partly to their more conscientious regard for other duties - for example, let us say, home lessons.,6 It is also likely to have a lot to do with the granting of parental permission. In Birkenhead, 1,653 elementary school children between eight and fourteen were questioned, of whom 70.1 per cent went at least once a month, 45.4 per cent at least once a week, and only 4.1 per cent never went to the cinema. The reason for the larger attendance figures in the Edinburgh survey is the age limit of the sample. In London and Birkenhead fourteen was the upper age limit, and in Edinburgh eighteen. It is clear from other evidence that adolescents went even more often than children and the Edinburgh findings tend to support that view. 7

'OUR MOVIE-MADE CHILDREN' 69

All the surveys so far mentioned were taken in the early 1930s, but the pattern established by them persisted throughout the decade and into the war years as the wartime cinema survey confirms. The evidence, taken in 1943 from the mothers of 1,013 children, was that 44 per cent of children aged eight to fourteen went to the cinema once a week, as against 32 per cent of adults and 79 per cent of those aged between fourteen and seventeen. Forty"seven per cent of children from lower-income groups went weekly but only 31 per cent of children from middle- and higherincome groups. Twenty-eight per cent of the children of mothers with higher education went to the cinema weekly, as against 50 per cent of mothers with an elementary education. 8 Asked why they went to the cinema, children invariably and not surprisingly answered that it was for entertainment, amusement and to pass the time. But there was more detail available on their preferences. The London Enquiry concluded that infants and young children preferred cartoons, that comic films were popular with all ages and that preferences varied according to age and sex. Cowboy films were popular with all age and with younger than groups, but more popular with boys than older children. War and adventure films were very popular with boys and less so with girls. Topical, nature, travel and animal films did not come high in the order of preference. Romance and love stories were disliked by boys but more popular with girls aged eleven to fourteen. As a general rule, the older children grew the more their interest in cartoons, cowboy and war films declined and their interest in mystery and detective films increased. 9 The other surveys confirmed these findings. The Birmingham Enquiry revealed that comedies were most popular with all children, with detective and adventure stories next in line. lo The order of preference for the Birkenhead children was travel and adventure, comedy, mystery, Western and war films. But Birkenhead noted that 'a strong distaste for "love" pictures is almost general, varying from boredom to repugnance,.ll The Edinburgh Enquiry went into more detail. The films boys liked best were war films and gangster/mystery films, and the ones they liked least were love stories ('evidently really disliked') and society life films. But Edinburgh broke down their children into class A from better-off areas and class B from poorer areas and further into junior and senior groups by age. They found that while the tastes of junior and senior working-class war, rrn.Tc1".:lo,.U boys and of junior middle-class boys coincided and cowboy films), senior middle~class boys were developing more sophisticated tastes (for mystery, travel and musical films). Edinburgh girls as a whole liked films with child characters, cowboy, comic and musical films, but disliked war and gangster films. Junior girls of both classes disliked love stories. 12 But there was an interesting distinction between senior girls of the two classes:

70 THE CONTEX'r

Regarding pictures displaying emotion, some of the younger girls want to see Love pictures. The older girls from the better districts will have none of them, but the poorer Senior girls give Love pictures a high place. In one of the schools in the poorest quarters, the vot~ in favour of Love was nearly 30 per cent. 13 Clearly love was a powerful part of the romantic dream of escape from the slums, but it operated le~s potently for comfortably situated middle-class girls. But the question which exercised concerned groups most was the extent of the cinema's influence on its youthful patrons and how this influence could be controlled and directed into approved channels. From the outset there had been a predisposition to regard the cinema as potentially and often actually dangerous. The rising tide of criticism led the industry to initiate self-censorship with the creation in 1913 of the British Board of Film Censors and then to invite the National Council of Public Morals to undertake an 'independent enquiry into the physical, social, moral and educational influence of the cinema, with special reference to young people', which it did in 1917, with the express approval of the Home Secretary, Herbert Samuel. The Commission of Enquiry published an invaluable 400 page report of evidence and conclusions, representing the sort of cross-section of interest groups which was to become the hallmark of such enquiries. It was headed by the Bishop of Birmingham and included Dr Marie Stopes, Sir Robert Baden-Powell and the chief censor, T. P. O'Connor, as well as representatives of the Sunday School Union, the Salvation Army, the National Union of Teachers, the LCC Education Committee, the Child Study Society, the Jewish Community, the Ragged School Union, the YMCA, the National Free Church Council and the Society of Authors. Similarly the Edinburgh Cinema Enquiry of 1931-3, headed by Very Rev. J. H. Miller, Warden of New College Settlement, Edinburgh, and former Moderator of the United Free Church, contained representatives of the Boys' Brigade, the Boys' Club Union, the Boy Scouts, the Church Lads' Brigade, the Church of ScotIand, the Catholic Church, the Edinburgh Education Committee, the Educational Institute of Scotland, the Edinburgh Diocesan Social Services Board, the Howard League, the Mothers' Union, the National Council of Women, the National Vigilance Association, the Scottish Temperance Alliance, the St Vincent de Paul Society, the Girls' Club Union, the Girl Guides, the Girls' Association, the Girls' Friendly Society, the YWCA, the Women Citizens Association and the Juvenile Organizations Committee. The 1917 Commission found that 'the picture palace is attended by a larger number of children than any other form of public amusement' and concluded that: 'in the course of our enquiry we have been much impressed

'OUR MOVIE-MADE CHILDREN' 71

by the evidence brought before us that moving pictures are having a profound influence upon the mental and moral outlook of millions of our young people - an influence more subtle in that it is subconsciously exercised - and we leave our labours with the deep conviction that no social problem of the day demands more earnest attention. The cinema, under wise guidance, may be made a powerful influence for good; if neglected, if its abuse is unchecked, its potentialities for evil are manifold.,14 Exactly the same view in almost the same words was advanced by the Vice-Chairman of the Edinburgh Cinema Enquiry in 1933 and by the Chairman of the Birmingham Cinema Enquiry in 1931. 15 The 1917 Commission addressed itself first to the link between the cinema and juvenile crime. From the moment it had become the dominant medium of entertainment with the young, it had been held responsible for juvenile crime, just as in the nineteenth century the 'penny dreadful' and the 'penny gaff had. The Commission declared: It is very strongly alleged and widely believed that the picture house is responsible for the increase in juvenile crime and that boys are often led to imitate crimes ... which they may have seen in the pictures, or to steal money that they may pay for admission. 16 Their conclusions after taking evidence from a wide variety of sources was that: the problem [of juvenile crime] is far too complex to be solved by laying stress on only one factor and that probably a subordinate one, among all the contributing conditions. Many well-meaning persons who bring such charges have neither the knowledge nor the skill for difficult social investigations. Even in those cases where a crime can be shown to be imitative of what has been seen in the pictures, the whole blame must not be cast on the cinema. On the negative side we must take account of the absence of restraining moral principles which a good home and wise training would supply, and which in so many cases are an;ogetrler lacking. On the positive side we must recognize the superfluous energy of youth, and its spirit of adventure, which are often deprived oflawful and useful outlets. The cinema suggests the form of activity rather than provides the impulse to it. That same impulse, unless rightly restrained and wisely directed, in other circumstances would find some other form .... Our conclusion then must be, that while a connection between the cinema and crime has to a limited extent in cases been shown, yet it certainly has not been proved that the increase in juvenile crime generally has been consequent on the cinema, or has been independent of other factors more conducive to wrongdoing.!7 These wise words ought to have settled the question once and for all. But the considerable conflict of opinion in the evidence presented to the

72 THE CONTEXT

Commission indicates the fundamental disagreement that lay at the heart of this issue and suggests why the subject continued to be raised again and again. On the one hand, Percival Sharp, Director of Education for Newcastle-upon-Tyne, whose duty it was to enquire into all cases of children committed to Industrial Schools, reported: I have not during the last three years of investigation had a single case brought to my notice in respect of which it is alleged, or even suggested by police, school attendance officer or head teacher that the genesis of wrongdoing was to be found in the cinema show, either immediately or remotely .... I may add ... I do not recall a single such instance in the preceding ten years, during which I acted in a similar capacity in a Lancashire county borough of 100,000 population. 1s On the other hand, J. G. Legge, Director of Education for Liverpool, produced as part of his evidence a 1916 report on juvenile crime issued by a joint committee of justices and members of the Education Committee, which stated: Nearly all the witnesses were agreed that constant attendance at cinematograph theatres has an injurious effect upon juvenile mind and character. Not only are children frequently induced to steal in order to obtain admission (it is quite a common excuse in theft or begging cases that the money was wanted for 'the pictures'), but what is perhaps of even greater importance is that in very many cases the intellectual morale of the child is injured and its powers of concentration are weakened by a too frequent attendance at such places. 19 But what carried great weight with the Commission was the very positive statement made in evidence by Roderick Ross, Chief Constable of Edinburgh, and concurred in by the Chief Constables of Aberdeen and Dundee: It is my opinion that the cinema, as a rule, has proved to those who patronise it an educative, morally healthy and pleasure-giving entertainment .... In some quarters it has been alleged that the exhibition of films which showed burglars and other criminals at work have been the means in inciting boys to emulate the example given by committing crime. No such case has come to my knowledge or to the knowledge of my detective officers. I however consider that there is grave danger in such representations. Boys are generally of an adventurous disposition, and ever ready to emulate anything in the way of an example which would afford them vent for the inherent love of adventure which is in their natures. For this reason I am decidedly opposed to representations of such a nature being shown to the young. It has also been frequently alleged that juvenile crime was in measure due to the love of the cinema

'OUR MOVIE-MADE

CHILDRI61 The idea of an eminent KC being involved in blackmail and murder was sufficient to have Counsel for the Defence banned in 1935.52 The Prison Breakers, which involved an assistant commissioner of police being blackmailed into helping a crook steal a vital Foreign Office treaty, had Colonel Hanna leaping to the defence of the police ('We never allow the English police to be shown in such a light') and Miss Shortt

CENSORSHIP IN OPERATION: DOMESTIC POLICY

119

leaping to the defence of the government ('I think it is a pity to burlesque the Home Secretary quite so much,).53 With the offending elements deleted, the film was duly released as Prison Breaker in February 1936. In assessing how the Board dealt with 'subjects calculated to ferment social unrest', the obvious area to examine is that of industrial relations. Eight subjects involving industrial disputes were submitted to the Board at script or planning stage. Perhaps the most celebrated story of life in the Depression, Walter Greenwood's Love on the Dole, a best-selling play and book, did not reach the screen in the Thirties. Gaumont British submitted the play to the Board on 15 March 1936. It was rejected by both Colonel Hanna and Miss Shortt. Colonel Hanna called it a very sordid story in very sordid surroundings. The language throughout is very coarse and full of swearwords, some of which are quite prohibitive. The scenes of mob fighting the police are not shown in the stageplay but only described. They mighi easily be prohibitive. Even if the book is well reviewed and the stage play had a successful run, I think this subject as it stands would be very undesirable as a film. Miss Shortt added: I do not consider this play suitable for production as a film. There is too much of the tragic and sordid side of poverty and a certain amount of dialogue would have to be deleted and the final incident of Sally selling herself is prohibitive. 54 Gaumont British dropped the project. It was submitted by Atlantic Productions on 12 June 1936. Colonel Hanna reported: 'I have read this playa second time but cannot modify the first report in any way. I still consider it very undesirable.'55 It is clear that the ban on filming resulted from a mixture of moral (bad language, sexual immorality) and political (marchers v. police) considerations. But there is the general impression that it was unwholesome and dangerous to show the masses 'the tragic side of poverty', lest they be stirred up to do something about it, and that is a profoundly political judgment. What is perhaps even more remarkable than its thirties banning is that Love on the Dole was eventually filmed in 1940, complete with the sequences of Sally selling herself and the mob fighting the police, and argued powerfully that the conditions depicted therein should not be allowed to return. No further script-readers' reports exist on the project, but that circumstances had changed and with them the standards and objectives of censorship is evident from the review of the film in the Sunday Pictorial: What a difference a war makes! Time after time our Censors have

120 THE CONSTRAINTS

waxed apoplectic at the suggestion that Walter Greenwood's Love on the Dole was fit subject for a film. A novel about unemployment was one thing. But a picture on the screen for all the world to see was obviously another. Various changes, they insisted, would be necessary before any script would pass. Now with unemployment a minor headache, the moralists have relaxed and the film has at last been made without a single change. The result is terrific ... but it is not depressing. On the contrary, it holds enormous promise for the future. If every man and woman in Britain could see this film, I don't think we would ever go back to the dreadful pre-war years when two million men and women were allowed to rot in idleness. I don't think the censor meant us to feel that way about it. But Walter Greenwood did. He succeeds magnifi· cently.56 It was indeed the war that had made all the difference. Unemployment was a thing of the past. But a world in which unemployment and depression were unknown was one of the things Britain was fighting for, and one of the approved objectives of propaganda, according to the Ministry of Information guide-lines, was to explain 'Why we Fight'. Love on the Dole thus lines up with those wartime features and documentaries which argued for a 'brave new postwar world' in which the conditions of the Thirties 'must never happen again'. The Board's general attitude and policy is summed up by its verdict on Tidal Waters, a synopsis submitted in 1932 by Gainsborough Pictures. It was a story of Thames dockland life, centring on a strike of watermen and their antagonism towards dockworkers who are not on strike, CUlminating in a plot to destroy a fleet of barges. Colonel Hanna commented:

The author seems to realize the difficulties of handling this subject. He does not propose to stress the differences between capital and labour which led to the strike and suggests that it might be more of a quarrel between the two sections of workers. Our attitude to the subject has always been very definite. Strikes or labour unrest where the scene is laid in England, have never been shown in any detail. It is impossible to show such strikes without taking a definite side either with or against the strikers and this would at once range the films as political propaganda of a type that we have always held to be unsuitable for exhibition in this country. Scenes of sabotage are obviously prohibitive. If therefore the strike is the prominent feature of the story we would consider the subject unsuitable. If the love story is the main feature with a very shadowy reference to the strike in the background, it is possible that the story would be acceptable. 57 He suggested further discussion with the company and the submission of

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121

the full scenario. But no further action was taken by the company and the project was abandoned. It is instructive to compare the disapproved film projects with the approved ones. Red Ensign, a scenario submitted by Gaumont British, had just those elements (strikes, sabotage), which had earned Tidal Waters disapproval. But the difference is that the hero of Red Ensign is the crusading managing director of a Clydeside shipyard who risks everything to build a new ship, investing his own money and overcoming sabotage attempts by rivals. When the workers go on strike, he persuades them by a patriotic speech to work for nothing. Colonel Hanna passed the project for filming with the comment: 'Quite a good story with a strong patriotic note.,58 It was passed for exhibition on 15 January 1934 and ironically retitled Strike when released in the United States. John Baxter's The Navvy was a scenario whose purpose was 'to create a thoughtful and kindly interest in the greatest problem that confronts the revival of world trade: the regulation of the introduction of machinery into industry'. The film traces the effect of unemployment on its navvy hero, made redundant by the introduction of the machine drill. His response is not industrial unrest or a threat to public order. He remains cheerful, keeps his chin up and eventually finds work again. The script was passed without comment and the finished film was released as A Real Bloke on 19 February 1935. 59 Sitting on Top of the World, a synopsis submitted by screenwriter H. B. Parkinson in 1935, was a proposed vehicle for Gracie Fields. The central is Betty Perkins, a mill girl who trains greyhounds. She wins a fortune when her dog races successfully at the White City. She returns to her Lancashire village to find a strike in progress. She uses some of her winnings to set up a soup kitchen for the strikers' families. But when the strikers plan to march on the mill-owner's house Betty, fearing violence, gets there first, persuades the owner to agree to the workers' terms and ends the strike peacefully. The censors it without objection, noting only 'the dog racing part seems very improbable but no doubt Miss Gracie Fields will get away with it.'60 The synopsis demonstrates to perfection the formula of the Gracie Fields films, combining the Cinderella element of winning a fortune with her role as harmonizer of capital and labour. In the event, Gracie did not star in it. Her sister Betty Fields played the lead, a minor company (City Films) produced and it was released as On Top of the World in January 1936. The Board's general position on industrial disputes and indeed on class conflict is quite clear from the examples quoted. They banned or discouraged films which confronted these subjects head on. But they positively welcomed films which preached class harmony and the cheerful, uncomplaining acceptance of the status quo.

Censorship in Operation: Foreign Policy

The censors showed just as much concern for the feelings of foreign governments as they did for those of the home government, their warrant for this being the rule banning 'subjects which are calculated to wound the susceptibilities of foreign peoples'. It became standard practice for the censors to suggest that virtually any film set in a foreign country should be referred to the relevant embassy for approval. Thus, when in 1936 Gaumont British wanted to film Dark Invader, the memoirs of a German secret agent in the First World War, they were referred to the German Embassy.l Dennis Wheatley's novel Eunuch of Stamboul was referred to the Turkish Embassy.2 Broken Chains, a drama involving the Mayerling scandal, was referred to the Austrians. 3 This fear of causing offence became almost surreal in some cases as when Lt. Daring R.N., a drama about a British naval squadron suppressing Chinese pirates, earned the comment: 'I do not think there is anything to which the Chinese could take exception.,4 Dr. Nikola, a thriller about an Oxford undergraduate being spirited off to Tibet by a mysterious doctor who turns out to be the Dalai Lama in search of a successor, caused Miss Shortt to express concern as to what the Tibetans might think about it. 5 The sort of thing the Board liked is quite clear from its comments on two other films. The Last Barricade, a love story set in Spain during the Spanish Civil War, elicited the comment: 'Quite harmless love story. The setting, though purporting to be Spain, might just as well be Ruritania, for all the political significance it possesses.,6 It was duly filmed and released in March 1938. The Chinese Fish, a Balkan espionage drama, involving two fictional countries, earned similar approval: 'Quite harmless melodrama, with no flavour of real politics or identification with any state.' It was filmed and released as The Silent Battle in March 1939. 7 It is clear that when a political judgment was called for, the President would be called in. Thus Colonel Hanna commented on Broken Chains: 'Even if it is historically accurate in every detail, it does not necessarily make it desirable. It is pretty recent and court scandals are unhealthy subjects to deal with in these days of confused politics.'s He referred it to Lord Tyrrell for a final decision. It was never made. Similarly I Serve, a drama about the love of King Alexander and Queen Draga of Serbia culminating in his suicide in 1903, was submitted in scenario form by Gaumont British on 10 October 1934. 9 It was bad luck for them that the 122

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previous day King Alexander of Yugoslavia had been assassinated in Marseilles. Although Colonel Hanna thought the script 'pretty accurate', he submitted it to Edward Shortt for a final decision. He clearly decided against it, a judgment which Kine Weekly fully understood. It reported on 25 October: The decision of Gaumont British to abandon production of I Serve is a very sensible one and will cause no surprise. In view of the recent Marseilles assassinations, a story based on the royal murders at Belgrade in 1903 could hardly have been made at this juncture. Happily the picture had not started and the only loss is in preparation, and the only dislocation is finding a new story for Conrad Veidt. 10 When there was any doubt about a film topic, the President did not hesitate to consult government departments. Three films were thought to be potentially offensive to Turkey. Abdul Hamid, submitted in 1933, was set in 1908 and dealt with the cruelty, treachery and immorality of the Turkish Sultan, Abdul Hamid II. The report noted: 'I am of the opinion that the events here set forth even if historically accurate in every detail are of too recent date to warrant being broadcast in film form.'ll But, unusually, the company went ahead, produced the film under the title Abdul the Damned and submitted it to the censors on 22 February 1935. It was viewed by Edward Shortt together with representatives of both the Home Office and the Foreign Office. They passed it for exhibition with two small deletions on 26 February 1935. Presumably they felt that it was far enough in the past to be regarded as historical and unlikely to offend the republican regime which had replaced the monarchy. Two other films were not so fortunate. On 17 October 1938, Paramount Film Services submitted a scenario, Lawrence of Arabia. Colonel Hanna reported: 'It may not be prohibitive to exhibit a film of this nature at this time but I venture to say emphatically that it would be most impolitic', and he suggested that the Colonial Office be consulted. 12 He was mainly concerned that the film might upset the Arabs. But J. Brooke Wilkinson added a note to the scenario report, dated 7 November 1938: Discussed scenario with Colonel Hanna. I drew attention to the additional objection the film might have in the Turks, especially in view of a letter addressed some time ago to Lord Tyrrell in the matter from the Foreign Office. Behind this stark minute lies a long and complex story. Since 1935 Alexander Korda had been planning to film Lawrence's Revolt in the Desert. A script had been prepared and at various times Leslie Howard, Robert Donat and Walter Hudd had been announced as playing the title role. 13 The script was sent to the Turkish Embassy, which objected to the Foreign Office that 'the Turks were represented as tyrants and oppressors

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of the Arabs and ... it was most undesirable that a film which cast such aspersions on Turkish history and national character should be produced.,14 Sir Lancelot Oliphant of the Foreign Office accordingly wrote to Lord Tyrrell on 14 December 1937 asking him to do whatever lay in his power to avoid giving offence to the Turks. 15 Korda in one of his frequent financial manoeuvres sold the script and the project to Paramount, and this was the script whi~h arrived at the BBFC in 1938. Lord Tyrrell forwarded it to the Foreign Office and on 2 November 1938 received from Rex Leeper of the Foreign Office a detailed list of cuts and amendments that would need to be made to make the script acceptable to the Turks. 16 Lord Tyrrell discussed the situation with his officials and decided that 'it would be advisable not to hold out any hope to the producers that the film, if produced, would be certificated.' The project was abandoned. 17 The same process can be seen to lie behind the banning of a film of Franz Werfel's book The Forty Days of Musa Dagh, which graphically detailed the Turkish persecution of the Armenian population of Asia Minor in 1915. It was submitted by MGM on 28 February 1939 and received a discouraging report from Colonel Hanna: Personally I think there is nothing to be said in favour of trying to revive all the horrors of a particularly ugly page in history. There are many hardships, many horrors, many grievous errors in war but a merciful providence in time softens one's recollections of these things and it is not kind to arouse old animosities. 18 This was the old soldier speaking from the heart. He asked to see a full scenario, since he did not believe it totally prohibitive. A full scenario was submitted on 22 April, and Colonel Hanna reported that it was absolutely unfilmable in view of the scenes of rape, violence, suicide, cruelty and execution it contained. 19 But once again it was political rather than moral considerations that clinched the decision. Wilkinson added a note to the scenario report, dated 2 June 1939, to the effect that Lord Tyrrell had called in Sam Eckman, British representative of MGM, and put to him certain political points which made it impossible for a film of this book to receive a certificate in Britain. Undoubtedly the reasons were the same as those which caused the banning of Lawrence of Arabia - fear of offending the Turks. It is interesting to note that in each of the Turkish film projects, the President of the BBFC himself took the final decision. Such matters of high policy were too important to leave to Colonel Hanna. Perhaps nothing has been the subject of so much controversy then and now as the extent and nature of the British cinema's depiction of events in Nazi Germany. Speaking in the Commons in 1938, Geoffrey Mander summed up the critical view which obtained then and has obtained since: 'Nothing anti-government, nothing anti~Fascist is permitted but anything that is favourable to the policy that the government are pursuing is

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allowed to go forward.,20 This is true as far as it goes, but it does not tell the whole story. It suggests that there was some special dispensation banning anti~Fascist films. It would be more accurate to place anti~Nazi films in context by saying that the policy of the Board towards the depiction of all foreign countries, Fascist and non-Fascist was one of appeasement, the avoidance of offence by the elimination of any hostile depiction. It is instructive therefore to compare depictions of Nazi Germany with depictions of Bolshevik Russia and see if there was any difference of attitude towards them on the part of the Board. The Board's attitude to Germany is coherently summed up by Colonel Hanna's report on the celebrated March of Time film 'Inside Nazi Germany', whose script was submitted to him on 15 February 1938. Colonel Hanna reported: In my opinion the public exhibition of this picture in England would give very grave offence to a nation with whom we are on terms of friendship and which it would be impolitic to offend. I suggest that conditions are by no means similar in the US and in England: 3000 miles of Atlantic Ocean is a useful buffer. The cinemagoing public in England seek amusement, not political guidance from the screen, and are quite likely to resent such guidance if it comes from an alien source. 21 It is clear from this that no overtly anti-Nazi film would be permitted. But we can at least see how many the industry sought to initiate and when. There are unlikely to have been many more than the ones listed in the scenario reports since any producer with any hope of getting his production certificated would know that BBFC approval was essential. The evidence points to two bursts of activity in the anti-Nazi field, the first just after Hitler came to power in 1933 and the second as war approached in 1939. Initially there were three proposals. The first, A German Tragedy, was submitted by Gaumont British in May 1933. This was a synopsis for a drama about a Jewish doctor in Germany who loses his job and his family as a result of anti-Jewish persecution. Colonel Hanna reported:

The story is pathetic and would probably in itself be quite free from any objectionable feature, but with the recent political agitation which has just taken place in Germany in connection with the Jewish population, it undoubtedly comes definitely under the of political propaganda [sic). Feeling still runs very strongly in London on this subject and a film based on this story might easily provoke a disturbance (vide Times May 9 1933). On these grounds we do not consider the subject a desirable one at the present juncture. 22 The Times report to which Colonel Hanna referred reported on fights

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between Jews and Fascists in the vicinity of Leicester Square on the previous Sunday, in which 300 people had been involved. The provoking of riots by the showing of films was a real and continuing worry. During the 1938 parliamentary debate on censorship, Edgar Granville (Liberal National, Suffolk, Eye) reported that he had visited cinemas to see newsreels featuring events in Germany and that there had been uproar. 'In one, the first 20 rows were packed with Nazis and the back rows were packed with oppositionists, and it became a shouting match. I wanted to hear the news film but I had no opportunity of doing so.' He believed that if editorial comment on recent events was included in newsreels, 'You will have disturbances in cinemas all over the country'.23 The disturbances which attended Fascist marches and rallies in Britain, culminating in the celebrated Battle of Cable Street in 1936, virtually ensured that the Board's view of its duty to preserve public order would preclude the approving of any anti-Nazi films. Gaumont British submitted a new synopsis in June 1933 for a film based on the novel City Without Jews by the anti-Nazi Austrian writer Hugo Bettauer, who had in fact been murdered for writing it. It was unquestionably political propaganda, telling as it did of the decline of Austria in the wake of the expulsion from the country of all the Jews by a Fascist government. Colonel Hanna merely repeated the comments he had made on A German Tragedy and the project was abandoned. 24 A complete scenario for The Mad Dog of Europe was submitted by writer Al Rosen in November 1934. It told the story of two families, the Aryan Schmidts and the Jewish Mendelssohns. Franz Schmidt marries Ilse Mendelssohn and the fates of the two families are linked. Rudolph Mittler, an Austrian painter and army corporal, capitalizes on post-war economic depression by forming a National Socialist Party with brown shirts and swastikas. Eventually he becomes head of state, launches an anti-Semitic campaign and Franz Schmidt's brother Heinrich becomes one of his most devoted followers. Both Herr Schmidt and Herr Mendelssohn are murdered by the Nazis, Frau Mendelssohn commits suicide and Heinrich is shot by the Nazis after he helps Ilse and Franz to escape. 'Various wellknown figures in German history such as Von Hindenburg, Ludendorff, von Papen and Goering appear under thinly disguised alterations of name', notes Colonel Hanna. His verdict was: This is pure anti-Hitler propaganda and as such I think unsuitable for production as a film. The names are absurdly disguised with no attempt to disguise the country and main political events. In any case it would be impossible to disassociate the story from Germany oftoday.25 This was the last of the explicitly anti-Nazi films until 1939. But the extent of fear of causing Germany offence can be seen in Miss Shortt's comment on The Exiles, a story submitted by United Artists in 1938. It

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told of a famous scientist fleeing on a false passport from an unknown country to the United States and being saved from deportation by popular outcry. She noted: 'I do not think any exception can be taken to this story providing the producers carry out their intention of not making the country identifiable in any way and I suggest the exiles themselves are not made to look unmistakable Jews. ,26 This fear also lies behind the rejection of a project called In His Steps submitted in 1938 by Associated Independent Producers. In a Central European dictatorship, Amaria, religious persecution rages. A Pimpernel figure, an Amarian exile living in England, helps victims to escape and stirs up support for them in England; Colonel Hanna observed: Presumably the intention is to work up sympathy with the victims of a religious persecution. The names of the countries are entirely fictitious ... the religious persecutions are not confined to one race or religion, but it would be difficult in my opinion to dissociate the story with current events in mid~Europe. If that is conceded I suggest it would be undesirable to show England taking a prominent part in rescue work. It would almost bring the subject into the category of political propaganda. I do not think a film based on this story would be desirable in this country at the present moment. 27 By 1939, the industry was once again concerned with anti-Nazi projects. But it was not until the outbreak of hostilities that the censors would permit any relaxation of the rule banning explicitly anti-Nazi films. The Boulting Brothers submitted the play Pastor Hall, a dramatization of the persecution of Pastor Niemoller by the Nazis, on 17 July 1939. Colonel Hanna reported: 'Its exhibition at the present time would be inexpedient.' Miss Shortt concurred: 'I do not consider this play suitable for production as a film. Even with the nationality disguised, it must be evident that the story is anti-Nazi propaganda.,28 Once war was declared, however, the film was rushed into production and was in release by May 1940. Twentieth Century·Fox submitted the synopsis of an unpublished novel called Swastika on 15 August 1939. This concerned a German and his American wife and child who return to Germany after a long absence and learn about anti-Jewish persecution. Colonel Hanna reported: 'Apart from the grossly offensive liaison between Eric and his stepmother, the story is mainly concerned with relating the horrors of the Jewish persecution in Germany today and as such has been classed by Lord Tyrrell as unsuitable for exhibition on the film in this country at the present juncture.,29 Even the use of an accurately depicted contemporary background worried the censors. Passport for a Girl, a book by Mary Borden, was submitted on 21 May 1939. It was a love story set against the background of the Anschluss, the persecution of the Jews, the Czechoslovak Crisis, the Munich Pact and the concentration camps a background depicted, as

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Colonel Hanna admitted, 'with extreme historical accuracy'. But he still did not believe it was possible to film it 'without bringing in all the controversies which so nearly ended (and may yet end) in war'. 30 A revised synopsis, submitted on 14 June 1939, was likewise banned. 31 As soon as the war broke out, however, the rules changed. On 6 October 1939, the first anti·Nazi project, Liberty Radio, came in. The synopsis recounted the story of an underground anti-Nazi radio station in Vienna, hunted down by the Gestapo. Colonel Hanna reported: 'Whilst during war time our rule against the representation of living persons does not extend to enemy aliens, our ordinary standards of not allowing scenes of extreme horror or gross brutality will stand.,32 In view of the changed circumstances, Lord Tyrrell was consulted about the project, gave his approval and the film was eventually released as Freedom Radio in February 1941. It took the censors a little time to get used to the new rules. When on 10 November 1939 Twentieth Century-Fox submitted a screen treatment called Report on a Fugitive, involving the Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia, Miss Shortt was still worried about mentions of Hitler and Goering: 'I presume the Film Censorship previous ban on this type of story is now lifted.,33 The ban was indeed lifted, and the film was produced under the title Night Train to Munich. It was released in May 1940. The evidence for the Thirties, then, is quite clear. No feature film overtly critical of Nazi Germany was permitted. Even covert criticism was discouraged, though it sometimes got through. The secret police who persecu~e the heroes of The Lady Vanishes (1938) and The Four Just Men (1939), although ostensibly of fictional Middle European countries, are as near in uniform, accent and behaviour to the Gestapo as they could be, short of actually sporting swastikas. Gaumont British were, however, determined to make a film denouncing anti-Semitism, perhaps because of the prominence on the board of the Jewish Ostrer family. They managed it with Jew Suss, which depicted anti-Semitism in eighteenth-century Wurttemberg. They even managed to include in the script the line: '1730-1830-1930. They will always persecute us.' But the censors made no political objection, calling only for the modification of some violence and of some unacceptable language when the scenario was submitted. 34 The finished film, starring Conrad Veidt, was passed for release on 14 June 1934. It can only be concluded that a historical setting made the message palatable. Although Britain had resumed diplomatic relations with Russia in 1929 and Russia had been admitted to the League of Nations in 1934, there was still intense fear and suspicion of Bolshevism in Establishment circles. Yet film projects which set out to denounce or criticize conditions in Russia were regularly banned by BBFC. Nine were submitted. Sabotage (1933), based on the real-life trial of two English employees of Metro-Vickers working in Moscow, who were falsely accused of sabotage, was banned. In

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the proposed film version, the sabotage turned out to be the work of an OGPU agent. 'Political propaganda very much brought up to date. We consider the subject unsuitable,' wrote Colonel Hanna. 35 Ogpu (1933), a synopsis about the activities of the Russian secret police among a group of English expatriates in Moscow, was likewise rejected. 36 Both had been proposed by Gaumont British. Columbia Pictures' scenario Red Square (1934), the story of the rise to power of a fictional Russian revolutionary leader, was rejected with the comment: The bulk of the story consists of scenes showing Bolshevist activities and counterplots them ... the whole film reeks of blood, hate and lust in the most sordid settings. Scenes and dialogue are coarse and brutal and go far beyond anything that we have ever allowed on the screen. 37 Here moral and political considerations intertwine, as they also do in the case of Paul Trent's novel A Soviet Marriage (1931), which denounced Russian marriage laws. Colonel Hanna observed: The language is very outspoken on the subject of sex and full of swearwords, especially the word 'bloody' which is freely used by all the characters, especially the women. The character of Boris is a most unpleasant one. Sensuality and animal passion are the dominating characteristics. 38 Even if the immorality had been removed, the attack on the of another country would have sunk the project. It is clear from the case of the proposed film Soviet that the Board was terrified of anything to do with Russia, whether it was pro- or antiBolshevik. They were in fact prepared to ban on sight anything to do with Russia at all, simply on the grounds that Russia was 'controversial'. They were dissuaded from this action by the Foreign Office. Soviet was a scenario submitted in 1933 by MGM and told of an American engineer engaged by the Soviet government to take charge of a big electric power and lighting plant under construction in Russia. The story centred mainly on a romantic triangle between the engineer, a Russian girl and the local commissar but ended with all three working together to save the dam from destruction during a flood. Colonel Hanna, ever alert for propaganda, reported: This is not a political story and with the exception of one or two speeches could not be described as propoganda lsic]. It emphasises the forced labour and hard driving of the working class under the 5 year plan. The dialogue is very outspoken and frequently goes far beyond what the English censor would allow. Many of the scenes are quite prohibitive as

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I visualize them. The general note is sordid and the love interest of the coarsest. If produced as submitted, I have no hesitation in saying that it would not receive our certificate. 39 But added to the scenario report is the minute of a meeting on 16 March 1933 when Captain Miller of the Foreign Office came to the BBFC Offices to discuss the scenario: He was strongly opposed to the suggestion of warning the producer that stories about Russia were controversial and therefore undesirable; and advised that we should confine our remarks to our ordinary censorial objections to specific scenes and dialogue in the script. This was agreed to. A rewritten script, meeting the individual objections, was presented and approved on 24 July 1933 but the film was not made. 40 The idea that Russia itself was a controversial subject certainly lends credence to the reason given for the ban on the showing of the classics of the Russian revolutionary cinema such as Battleship Potemkin. For if nothing else, in banning those films which extolled the revolution and in banning proposed British films which condemned it, the Board was at least being consistent in their suppression of comment. Captain Miller of the Foreign Office was also consulted at the meeting on 16 March 1933 about Radio Pictures' desire to film R. H. BruceLockhart's Memoirs of a British Agent. Colonel Hanna's view was that 'it would be quite impossible to film this book. The main interest is the hitherto untold secrets of our Foreign Office diplomacy, involving many of our leading cabinet ministers, some of whom are still alive. Our F.O. would never consent to such revelations on the screen.,41 Captain Miller suggested that the book be submitted to his department for their views and the Board agreed. These views are not recorded but they are almost certain to have confirmed Colonel Hanna's view. In the event, there was a film from Warner Bros in 1934 ostensibly based on the book. Called British Agent and starring Leslie Howard as 'Stephen Locke', it was a heavily fictionalized account of 'Locke's' attempts to prevent a GermanSoviet peace treaty being signed during the First World War. One novelty was the appearance as characters in the film of Kerensky, Lenin and Trotsky. But as Kine Weekly noted: 'This drama of the Russian Revolution is prefaced by a title stating the story and characters are fictitious. The assertion, however, is superfluous, for nothing could be further from the truth than the events pictured on the screen.' All the newspaper reviews agreed that it was unrealistic but expertly produced hokum, the Sunday Express adding tartly: 'This film is based on Bruce Lockhart's Memoirs of a British Agent but is really the memoirs of a Hollywood agent.,42 Once the Board had agreed to Captain Miller's suggestion that Russia

CENSORSHIP IN OPERATION: FOREIGN POLICY

]31

might be used as a subject for films, the normal concern about the susceptibilities of foreign nations took over. A book The Elephant Never Forgets about an Englishwoman's adventures in Russia, elicited from Miss Shortt the comment: 'The Soviet authorities may object to the unpleasant portrayal of the Russian characters,' and from Colonel Hanna: 'the outspoken language of the Russian proletariat should be softened,.43 The film was not made. Two films did survive the vetting process and were produced. Forbidden Territory, a Dennis Wheatley novel about the rescue of a British baronet's son from a Siberian prison, was approved with the comment 'Sheer melodrama and there is no political element in it at aU.,44 The finished film was for exhibition on 27 September 1934. James Hilton's novel Knight Without Armour was approved for filming with the comment: 'Though set in Russia, not political propaganda.,45 It was filmed by Alexander Korda with Marlene Dietrich and Robert Donat, playing a Russian countess and an English-born revolutionary hero whose love transcends the violence of the times. It was released on 8 October 1937. It is of course impossible to maintain that either of these films is apolitical, since settings and actions are built on certain presuppositions. It would have been almost impossible to come away after seeing either of them without thinking that the Russian revolutionaries were a thoroughly beastly crew. But adventure and romance are the keynotes of the films and they were therefore acceptable to the Board. The subject of pacifism and anti-war feelings came within the BBFC realm of 'controversial politics' and so no film on the subject was permitted. This was despite the commitment of the British government to a policy of disarmament until 1935, and the deep anti-war feeling in the country reflected, among other things, in the spate of books denouncing the armaments manufacturers as 'merchants of death'. Producers evi· dently felt that such subjects were potentially good box-office since no less than nine such projects were submitted to the Board. One group of these centred on the 'merchants of death'. The Rumour, a stage play submitted in 1933 by Gaumont British, had a group of British financiers, the Imperial Armaments Association, deliberately stir up war between two Central European countries, send in British troops to stop it and then profit from fixing the post-war reparations and boundaries. Banning it, Colonel Hanna noted: 'I consider it would be quite prohibitive to show England or any other recognizable Great Power in the light of a stirrer up of strife for mercenary ends.)46 Even more explicit was Dealers in Death, a scenario submitted in 1935 by Amer-Anglo Corporation. The censors' report, banning it, declared: This is the most violent antiftwar propoganda [sic 1. There is no story but a running commentary throughout. It gives figures (very inaccurate) of

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the various armies of the world today and of present day naval shipbuilding programmes. Describes the principal armament factories of the world and the personalities of some of their leading men (Zaharoff, Schneider, Thyssen, Krupp etc.). Charges France with secretly supplying Germany with war material so that the war should be prolonged. Charges Heads of armaments firms, at all times, with bringing about wars, great and small, for their own personal profit. Attacks American armament firms and their agents as well as European ones. Gives a lurid forecast of the horrors of the next Great War and ends with a Board meeting of armaments magnates to declare still bigger dividends. 47 Armaments dealers and firms, if fictional and not representative of named countries, were not prohibited as villains. Indeed they were popular villains in films of the 1930s and figure as such in, for instance, High Treason (1929), Seven Sinners (1936), The Tunnel (1935) and Four Men and a Prayer (1932). The point about these films is that they were genre pieces, detective stories or adventure stories or science fiction stories, and Colonel Hanna and company were not sophisticated enough to see that the repetition of such images could fix a view of villainous armaments dealers in the popular mind, just as repeated exposure to the image of the bloodthirsty and savage redskin in Westerns established a stereotype of the American Indian. The second group of anti-war films were fantasies, generally involving the return of the dead to preach anti-war messages. They did not find a sympathetic audience in Colonel Hanna, who noted of The Road of the Poplars, a one-act play about the anti-war visions in the mind of a First World War victim submitted in 1934: 'Personally I dislike these morbid and fantastic stories of the Great War.'48 So such films were regularly banned. He Died Again (1934), a book about the Unknown Warrior coming to life again and preaching that true Christianity was the only force that could give peace to the world, was liked but banned by Colonel Hanna: 'A powerful and well-written book but I am definitely of the opinion that the screen in this country is not a suitable medium for propoganda [sic] along these lines.' Miss Shortt concurred, adding: 'it would be most distasteful to thousands of people to have the unknown warrior portrayed as an individual. ,49 The report on Miracle at Verdun, a play submitted by Phoenix Films in August 1934, is worth quoting in full because of the film's approach and the comments it elicited: The action of the play is supposed to take place in 1939. A small cemetery near Verdun of about 2000 graves, both French and German, gives up its dead and the individuals make their way to their respective

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homes. We are shown how the news is received in the middle of the night by the French Prime Minister (in bed with his mistress), the German Chancellor and the English Prime Minister. Then how it is received in a French village and a German village, on the return of their local dead who have been resurrected. Then comes the big scene at the Quai d'Orsay at an International Conference, presided over by the English P.M. and attended by the German Chancellor, French and Belgian Prime Ministers, American, Italian and Japanese Ambassadors, representatives of other states, the Cardinal Archbishop of Paris representing the Church of Rome, the Chief Rabbi and another cleric described as the Head of the Free Evangelicals, eminent scientists etc. The political speeches by the laymen are quite impossible. The French, German and Italian representatives almost come to blows on presentday politics, the Belgian is shown as a Red Bolshevik, the American Ambassador tells the Japanese that he can have Australia if he wants it. The speeches of the clergy are even worse. They sail perilously near blasphemy in my opinion and they unite in saying that the miracle was not wrought by God but by the powers of darkness. The throughout is very coarse .... I have no hesitation in pronouncing it quite unsuitable for reproduction on the screen. no After 1937, there were no further pacifist film projects, a reflection of changing times and changing attitudes. But the evidence of the scenario reports is comprehensive and conclusive. The Board strictly enforced the 'no controversy' rule, excluding discussion at virtually any level of such burning current issues as Fascism, Pacifism and Bolshevism. In the area of foreign affairs, then, the BBFC pursued its own policy of appeasement and applied it not just to the Fascist dictatorships but to all countries. The could only encourage the view among the cinema-going British public that all foreign countries were far-off places of which we knew and indeed wanted to know very little. It is an attitude perfectly encapsulated in this classic exchange between Flanagan and Allen: Flanagan: She fainted and they gave her Czechoslovakia. Allen: Czechoslovakia? They gave her salvolatile.

Censorship in Operation: Imperial Policy

One might have expected the government to make a positive use of feature films to promote the Empire and Imperial unity. There were certainly constant calls for films to propagandize on behalf of the Empire. Referring to a unanimous resolution of the 1926 Imperial Conference calling for an increase in Imperial film production, Sir Philip Cunliffe-Lister, President of the Board of Trade, had said in the Commons in 1927: I believe that that resolution expresses a sentiment which is prevalent in the House and the country and throughout the Empire. It is based on a realisation that the cinema is today the most universal means through which national ideas and national atmosphere can be spread .... Today films are shown to millions of people throughout the Empire and must unconsciously influence the ideas and outlook of British people of all races. But only a fraction, something like 5 per cent, of the films which are at present shown in the British Empire are of British origin. That, as I submit, and as the Imperial Conference held, is a position, which is intolerable, if we can do anything effective to remedy it. 1 Sir Philip's statement was quoted as summarizing current government policy in 1936. 2 The 1930 Imperial Conference reaffirmed its resolution of 1926: The Conference, recognizing the value of films for propaganda purposes, whether direct or indirect, in connection with inter~Imperial trade, as well as for other purposes, and realizing that the present period is one of rapid development, and therefore of great opportunity, recommend that attention should be devoted to establishing and maintaining contact between the different parts of the Empire in relation to film production with a view to sharing of experience and the promotion of the production of such films as will best serve the interests of the several parts of the Commonwealth. 3 In 1932 The Film in National Life called for much wider use of the Empire as a film subject, declaring: 'N 0 single country can offer to cinematography as fruitful a field as the British Empire.,4 Winifred Holmes wrote in Sight and Sound in 1936: It is essential for the continued unity and goodwill of the Empire that 134

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more and better British films should be distributed everywhere and that these films should add to England's prestige and show more of her ideals and epic qualities than before. 5 The Australian High Commissioner, Major-General Sir Granville Ryrie, called in 1927 for arrangements to be made between educational authorities and various Empire governments 'for children to be marched to the cinema in the morning to see wholesome British films depicting what was going on in the Empire.,6 There was cinematic propaganda for the Empire, but it was not widespread, and the nature and circumstances of its production typify the way in which the government worked with to feature films. They were reluctant to become directly involved in feature film production a reluctance which stemmed in part from a deep-rooted hostility to the whole concept of positive propaganda, the feeling that it was somehow ungentlemanly, and in part from the Treasury's reluctance, at a time of financial stringency, to sanction the expenditure. The Empire Marketing Board, with its celebrated film unit producing a stream of documentary shorts extolling Imperial produce, was axed in 1933, the victim of just such a mentality. Philip Taylor has concluded: In so far as propaganda in the Empire was concerned, the Board's demise was more significant because despite the efforts of the BBC's Empire service from 1932 and despite the work of the Colonial Empire Marketing Board from 1937, the projection of the British Empire went largely unpractised until the Second World War.7 But this failure was not for want of trying on the part of a dedicated group of officials and civil servants centred around Reginald (Rex) Leeper and Sir Robert Vansittart of the Foreign Office. Pressure from them resulted in, for instance, the setting up of the British Council. But all the overseas propaganda activities of the British government, like the British Council, were aimed at influential elites. When in 1938 the government finally approved a committee to coordinate propaganda under the chairmanship of Vansittart, it called for the use of feature film to influence a mass audience. The committee issued a report advocating the creation of a National Film Council and a National Film Unit, proclaiming the particular importance of feature films because 'they strike subconscious chords and reinforce or modify prejudices or opinions already held, and thus in the long run make a more than newsreels or 8 documentaries. But the government remained unmoved and there was no official use of feature film until the Second World War. Taylor was discussing propaganda overseas but a somewhat similar situation prevailed at home. The government was content to leave the matter to the commercial film-

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makers, who did indeed come up with films of Empire. Alexander Korda produced three, Sanders of the River (1935), The Drum (1938) and The Four Feathers (1939), and Michael Balcon produced three, Rhodes of Africa (1936), The Great Barrier (1936) and King Solomon's Mines (1937). Why were the commercial producers moved to spend so much money on Imperial topics? One reason was given by Paul Holt in the Daily Express in 1938 when he announced: Mr. Korda plans to make a lot of films about the Empire in the future. That is good news for this newspaper. It is also good business for Mr. Korda. He knows that films about the Empire make money. He knows that films of his like Sanders of the River and Elephant Boy and The Drum have been far more successful at the box office of the country than any equal amount of sophisticated sex nonsense. Korda knows too that Hollywood knows it; that Hollywood has British producers fazed about British Empire films; can beat them any day they choose with Cavalcades, Mutinies on the Bounty, Houses of Rothschild, Bengal Lancers, Lloyds of London. Patriotism goes with profit. 9 'Patriotism with profit' might well be the slogan of these producers of Imperial epics and a good reason why the government would be content to leave to ordinary commercial interests the projection of the British Empire. But it is important to stress that there was patriotism. Both Korda and Balcon were intensely patriotic and both were concerned with the favourable promotion of the national image. It is now known that in the 1930s both of them advised the Conservative Party Film Association on the making of its propaganda films.lO There were particularly close links with Korda, as Sir Joseph Ball, deputy director of the National Publicity Bureau, reported to Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain in 1938. But Gaumont British, the biggest British film company and the one for which Balcon worked, was also close to the government, and indeed in 1935 Isidore Ostrer, GB's chairman, made a secret agreement to place his entire organization at the disposal of the government. The fact that the scripts of the Gaumont British Imperial epics were all vetted and passed by the BBFC and that the Korda epics were produced with the full-hearted cooperation of the army and the colonial authorities in India, Nigeria and the Sudan confirms that the government were happy with the Imperial image that was being projected. In Korda's case, there were also close links with key figures not in favour with the government but whose views on propaganda and Empire clearly harmonized with Korda's own. That unrepentant old Imperialist and master of propaganda Winston Churchill was on Korda's payroll during his wilderness years, hired to script a Jubilee film on the reign of King George V that was never made. l1 Even more significantly, Sir Robert Vansittart, having failed to persuade the government to initiate its

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own propaganda feature film programme, set to work to use the commercial cinema. Under the heading 'Britain to put the Empire on the screen', the Daily Express reported in July 1938: He has signed a contract with Alexander Korda to write dialogue and scenarios for a series of new films. Films will glorify the British Empire. The story Sir Robert was working on yesterday was Edward Thomson's Burmese Silver which will have little Sabu and Conrad Veidt in it. After he's finished that he moves over to help with Four Feathers . ... Surprising that a key man of the government should turn to scriptwriting? Not at all. He is co-author of Sixty Glorious Years, the new Neagle epic. Sir Robert has the sense to know that the film is a great potent, propaganda medium. 12 But this positive use of feature films to bang the Imperial drum was complemented by the continuing negative use of censorship to vet all Imperial projects, excising anything critical of British rule and banning any topic which might cause offence or controversy. It is clear that when ...."'.,"''''''' ...... "p; such Imperial projects the censors had four major considerations in mind. Firstly, did the films reflect adversely on the British army or the white race, thus imperilling the prestige that was a vital element in the maintenance of British rule? Secondly, would the films offend foreign countries? Thirdly, was it politically expedient that the film should be shown, or, in other words, would the film's subject or attitudes inflame the native population? Lastly, did the film deal with miscegenation? Their warrant for these was two rules from 'O'Connor's 43': rule 21, banning 'scenes which held up the King's uniform to contempt and ridicule', and rule 22, 'subjects dealing with India, in which British officers are seen in an odious light, and otherwise attempting to suggest the disloyalty of native states, or bringing into disrepute British prestige in the Empire'. These rules were amplified by 1928 to further include a ban on scenes of 'white men in state of degradation amidst native surroundand men of other races', ings' and 'equivocal situations between white 'British possessions represented as lawless sinks of iniquity' and 'conflict between armed forces of a state and the populace'.13 The censors' fears about Imperial films provoking unrest were not without justification. When Alexander Korda's The Drum (1938), with Indian boy star Sabu playing a pro-British prince on the North-West Frontier was shown in Madras and Bombay, there were riots and the film was hastily banned. Similarly the Hollywood film Gunga Din (1939) was banned in India, Japan and Malaya because it 'offended racial and religious susceptibilities'. With its dhoti-clad Indian villain, the Guru, looking like a sort of demented Gandhi and with Indian religious customs flouted wholesale, this ban is not perhaps surprising. 14 It would seem sensible to examine the Hollywood Imperial projects

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separately from the British ones, in order to assess if there were any differences of approach by the censors. Hollywood companies, particularly the Anglophile Fox company, regularly submitted scripts and synopses of subjects dealing with the Empire or with racial themes. It was sensible insurance to do so, given the fate of Frank Capra's The Bitter Tea of General Yen (1933). This film, which dealt with the love of a Chinese warlord for an American girl, was banned throughout the British Empire and in consequence became one of the few Capra films to be a box-office failure. 15 Altogether twelve Imperial projects were submitted by Hollywood either as synopses, scenarios or literary properties in which companies had an interest. One group fell under the general heading of miscegenation. Miscegenation was a popular theme of melodrama and calculated to produce an ambivalent frisBon as tinted potentates sought to paw white girls or dusky vamps attempted to seduce white men from their duties. The first to be considered was a synopsis submitted by Universal Pictures in 1931, The White Captive. This was a piece of somewhat lurid hokum, in which an English doctor, jilted by his takes up a post in the middle of the Malayan jungle and becomes a drunkard. His fiancee turns up, intending to redeem him, but falls victim to the lustful attentions of the local Rajah, whom she shoots. She then escapes with the doctor during a providential volcanic eruption. Colonel Hanna noted: The sight of a white man drifting to degradation through drink in native surroundings is always unpleasant and the amorous desire of a native to possession of a white woman is almost, if not quite, a prohibitive theme. 16 He suggested that a complete scenario be submitted but nothing more was heard of the project. In 1932 Universal submitted a full scenario, Pagan River, in which they returned again to the subject of white men in Malaya. This time they touched more centrally on the role of the British administrator. The plot hinges again on the threat of miscegenation. Jimmie Keynes, a young political officer, sent to keep the peace between two warring tribes, falls for the daughter of chieftain Dato Noor, who kills her rather than have her marry a white man. The girl's native fiance challenges Jimmie to a duel. But, in the words of the synopsis, 'Jimmie shows the white feather' and is drowned while fleeing downriver. The British Resident, Martin Aske, in order to preserve the prestige of the white race, takes up the challenge. Both protagonists are injured, but Dato N oor declares honour satisfied and says that he will in future maintain the peace. Colonel Hanna did not like this any more than White Captive: The story is fanciful and far-fetched, but with the exception of the duel,

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is not prohibitive, though many of the incidents are. Under no circumstances would we pass a scene of a British Resident, stripped to the waist, fighting a duel with a native chief. 17 He listed all the prohibitive incidents in the film, the removal of which would effectively take out all the action. With characteristically meticulous attention to detail, he appended a personal note: I can also offer the following suggestions: (0 Guard would only be for the Resident. No one else could inspect it. (ii) Sikhs under a Malay sergeant: impossible. (iii) There are no in the Malay jungle. The film was not made. A larger group needed to be considered under the heading of the maintenance of British prestige and in particular of army prestige. In 1934 Paramount submitted a scenario for Lives of a Bengal Lancer. Colonel Hanna appended a critical note on the detail of the script: The dialogue and behaviour of the officers is American and very unEnglish throughout. Especially the attitude of Colonel Stone to his son and the backchat of Fortescue and McGregor. Swords are never drawn in the orderly room. 'Last post' is not called 'taps'. The author's Hindustani does not appear to extend to the difference between a punkah and a punkah-wallah. 1H But he concluded, 'It is a Hollywood melodrama pure and simple ... the story is quite harmless. It has no political and no discredit is brought on the service.' Presumably by 'no political significance' he meant that the film did not attack the Empire. Far from it, as the Daily Mail suggested: The film paid a remarkable tribute to the wisdom and courage which have marked British government in India. It is a powerful and popular argument for the continuance of that rule. 19 Also in 1934 the censors viewed a performance of the stage play Clive of India at the behest of MGM. They declared it unobjectionable. 2o The play was bought and filmed by Twentieth Century Pictures. Their scenario was approved late in 1934 with the one reservation that scenes of the Black Hole of Calcutta must not be too gruesome. The finished film was passed for release on 21 February 1935. It was a romantic and heroic portrait of Clive of India, emphasizing his devotion to India, duty and Empire. The New York Times called it 'a handsome tribute to the glory of British rule in India'.21 R. J. Minney's success as co-author and scenarist of Clive of India clearly prompted thoughts of a follow-up, and in November 1934 a synopsis from

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Minney called Gunga Din was submitted by United Artists. The story centres on the love of two friends, Hugh Harding and Kenneth O'Brien, for the same girl, Eve, who marries Kenneth. Hugh goes to India with the army, and when the O'Briens visit him there, Eve is kidnapped by border tribes. Hugh sets out with Kenneth and the faithful Din to rescue Eve, something he succeeds in doing, even though both Kenneth and Gunga Din are killed. Colonel Hanna remarked with some asperity: There is no justification for connecting this story with Kipling's poem. It is obviously written by a man who knows nothing about the service or about India. However, it is quite innocuous. 22 The synopsis was approved but not filmed. The subsequent RKO film Gunga Din (1939), the script of which was not submitted to the censors, bore no relation to Minney's synopsis. In April 1936 Warner Bros submitted the manuscript of David Garth's novel Four Men and a Prayer, in which they were interested. The story was approved. 23 It dealt with the attempt, ultimately successful, of the four sons of a disgraced and murdered Indian Army colonel to prove their father's innocence of gunrunning. The novel was purchased, however, by Twentieth Century-Fox, who submitted a synopsis in June 1936. The reactions of the script readers tell us a good deal about their respective preoccupation. Miss Shortt approved the synopsis without further comment. But Colonel Hanna gave vent to considerable annoyance: As a melodramatic tale I take no exception to the story generally, but some of the details are inaccurate, the court martial e.g. There is no such rank as Colonel Commandant in an English cavalry regiment. The D.S.C. is a decoration only awarded to certain ranks in the Royal Navy, The President of a General Court Martial on a Colonel is bound to be a general officer. The President of the court martial cannot also be 'the chief accuser' nor would he make theoretical about how England controlled India. The sentence of the Court is not made public till after confirmation. The Court could not forfeit the K.C.B. or D.S.O .... It is little touches like this that make an English story in American hands so supremely ridiculous. 24 His comments constitute more than Blimpish choler, since the bringing of the British army into ridicule could be grounds for disallowing a film altogether and so the Colonel's very firm views on the subject of the army must always be taken seriously. In May 1937 Fox submitted the complete scenario of the film. Colonel Hanna approved it in general but found so many errors in the court martial sequence that he completely rewrote it in conformity with British army practice and returned it to Fox. 25 The completed film was released in 1938.

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A synopsis for a proposed Fox remake of King of the Khyber Rifles, previously filmed in 1929, was submitted in 1939. Colonel Hanna was singularly unimpressed. The story might be convincing, or perhaps plausible if the author was dealing with units of the American army, but the officers as here portrayed do not exist in the English army .... The story in itself is not prohibitive, if this ridiculous caricaturing, for it is nothing else, of English officers is cut out. 26 He specified the elimination of several scenes, including one showing the mutinous conduct of the Khyber Rifles, a scene of Captain Boyd drunk and fighting in the officers' club and a conversation about the succession to a dukedom ('American snobbery and not English'). His clear concern was to preserve the image of the British officer and to remove the implication of disloyalty in a native regiment. In the event the film was not made. Fox eventually filmed a new version of King of the Khyber Rifles from a totally different screenplay in 1953. Colonel Hanna had occasion to return to this theme when Fox submitted a scenario for Wee Willie Winkie, based on Kipling's short story, in 1937:

It gives the opportunity for showing America a little more life in the English army as imagined by an American scenario writer and a very small frontier incident (only 2 or 3 casualtiesD.27 He was anxious to warn the producer against the inaccuracies of military procedure and suggested a personal interview with a representative of the film company so that he could detail his complaints. Miss Shortt had approved the script without comment. It was filmed by John Ford and released in 1937. The differences in approach between Colonel Hanna and Miss Shortt towards Hollywood Imperial subjects and Colonel Hanna's mounting exasperation with their inaccuracy can be perfectly judged from the last Hollywood Imperial epic to be submitted before the war, a synopsis by Republic Pictures, called Storm over India, which the Board received in June 1939. Colonel Hanna's impatience with such films had now reached breaking point: Another of these conventional and spectacular stories of frontier fighting in India, written by an American with no knowledge of geography and a complete ignorance of the British army. Kabul is apparently the capital of Burmah, which is on the Northwest Frontier of India and approached by the Khyber Pass! This country is ruled by Prince Singhi, a 12-year old boy with an English governess, under an English Governor-General. His cousin, Prince Ramah, who has been studying at Sandhurst, Oxford and Cambridge, returns home despising the English. He fosters

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rebellion amongst his cousin's subjects and encourages them to throw off British rule. Captain Macgregor of the Ogilvie Highlanders, a type of English officer who has no existence outside American film studios, is beguiled away from his post, and all his detachment is cut up. Owing to his previous conduct, he is not tried by court martial but just summarily reduced to the rank of lieutenant! To everybody's surprise, he asks to resign! After his stripes and decorations are removed, this is allowed. He then goes off and joins Prince Ramah, intending to give away the latter's headquarters and ammunition store, when he discovers it. He is entirely successful. Guided by this information, his father Colonel MacGregor of the Ogilvie Highlanders, defeats Ramah, and the gallant captain is restored to the Army! I think this is an even worse parody of the English officer than any we have had up to now, and I think we are entitled to say definitely we will not allow such caricatures to go out under our certificate. Apart from this, there is no political significance about the story which is pure fiction and quite harmless. Miss Shortt noted more succinctly that it was 'suitable for production' but suggested that they use fictional place names to avoid identification with any real state in India. 28 The film, a straight crib of Lives of a Bengal Lancer, was never made but it highlights again the Colonel's continued preoccupation with accurate depictions of British army procedures and of the behaviour of British officers and the continued belief that a film which romanticizes and heroizes the maintenance of the British Raj in India has no 'political significance'. It is clear that for the censors 'political significance' lay in any suggestion of a change in the status quo rather than in the clear demonstration of support for the existing situation. Other films set in the Empire caused concern for more traditional censorship reasons. When Fox submitted a treatment for a film biography of Henry M. Stanley in 1937, it included his coverage of the Abyssinian campaign of Lord Napier. Miss Shortt warned that it would be ill-advised to bring in an Abyssinian invasion in the present political circumstances. 29 Notice was taken of the warning and when a completed screenplay was submitted in 1938, it was entitled Stanley and Livingstone and concentrated on his search for the lost explorer. It was approved without further comment and filmed with Spencer Tracy and Cedric Hardwicke in the leading roles. 30 In 1937 United Artists submitted the synopsis of a book by Louis Bromfield entitled The Rains Came, a drama about the love of an English aristocrat for an Indian doctor. Colonel Hanna commented: A story about India written by a person with no knowledge of the country. Quite a charming little Sunday School story! In my opinion, absolutely unfit for exhibition as a film in this country.31

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Miss Shortt thought it suitable for filming, provided that the immorality was removed. In November 1938 a complete scenario was submitted by Fox and the script was approved. 32 The finished film, according to one critic 'the merest skeleton of the Bromfield work', was released in 1940. In 1938 Warner Bros submitted a treatment for a film called South-east Frontier. This was based on a Somerset Maugham play, Caesar's Wife, which had been filmed previously in 1925. The action of the original was set in Cairo, but the proposed new film translated the action to Afghanistan and set it against the siege of the British Embassy in Kabul in 1928. The story centred on a romantic triangle involving the British ambassador, his wife and his secretary which is resolved when the embassy is besieged and the secretary does 'the decent thing', through to Peshawar, alerts the RAF and secures the relief of the embassy. Colonel Hanna had no objection to this script, apart from requesting the removal of a scene in which a prisoner is tortured, but Miss Shortt, in line with her usual practice, suggested that the Afghan government's opinion on the script be sought. 33 The project was dropped, like several Imperial projects being mooted in 1939, such as Fox's King of the Khyber Rifles and Republic's Storm over India. This coincides with the demise of the Hollywood Imperial epic in 1940-1 - a demise encouraged by the United States Office of War Information, which banned a proposed MGM film version of Kim and the wartime reissue of Gunga Din, for fear of offending Indians whose cooperation was needed in the war effort and alienating the Anglophobe and isolationist elements in the United States who disapproved of Old World Imperialism. 34 British producers submitted more Imperial projects than their Hollywood counterparts, some twenty in all, but only a handful of them reached the screen. The same criteria applied in judging the suitability of scripts but it is worth considering in detail how the process worked. The censors were particularly concerned by the sensitive state of India, gripped by agitation throughout the decade and the subject of successive conferences and negotiations. The danger of films inflaming passions both at home and in India was foremost in their minds, and this consideration became even more acute after the passing of the Government of India Act in 1935, which its architects hoped would still Indian demands for selfgovernment. The authorities were anxious that nothing should interfere with the implementation of the embodied in the Act and in particular that ill-will should not be created. This is particularly evident in the fate of the synopsis for a film called Fifty Seven, submitted in November 1936 by Paramount. The story was set on the North-West Frontier of India at the time of the Indian Mutiny and centred on the relationship between a missionary's daughter campaigning against suttee and a young British officer.

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The censor noted: 'In the light of present world conditions, the changes now in progress in Indian government, it might be well to weigh these facts carefully in the production of a film.,35 These reservations were confirmed when the project was submitted to the India Office, and the department advised production. The Home Secretary, Sir Samuel Hoare, later revealed in parliament that the reason had been that 'it was the kind of film that would create the worst kind of feelings in India between the Indians and ourselves'.36 The subject had come up when another Indian Mutiny film, The Relief of Lucknow, was banned in 1938. This time the reasons were given by Lord Tyrrell, the BBFC President: The B.B.F.C. has been advised by all the authorities responsible for the government of India, both civil and military, that in their considered opinion, such a film would revive memories of the days of conflict in India which it has been the earnest endeavour of both countries to obliterate with a view to promoting harmonious cooperation between the two peoples. 37 The abandonment of The Relief of Lucknow caused intense suspicion in left-wing circles and George Elvin, General Secretary of the Association of Cine-Technicians (ACT), opined that it had been banned 'because it was devoid of the flagwaving Imperialist faults of The Drum'. But it seems more likely that it was because it possessed the same 'flagwaving Imperialist faults' that it was banned. The Times had reported on 12 November 1938: British heroism is to be made the subject of a series of historical films to be made by Mr. F. W. Baker. The first film will describe the Reliefof Lucknow. Mr. Maurice Elvey will direct the film and every effort will be made to ensure historical accuracy. The second film will probably describe Wolfe's taking of Quebec. On 1 December, the casting of Arthur Wontner as Sir Henry Lawrence and Geoffrey Toone as Kavanagh was announced. Then on 8 December, the abandonment of the production after consultation with the BBFC was announced. The track records of the personnel involved and the prospectus of the film do not suggest an anti-Imperialist epic, and indeed Baker, Elvey and Toone went on to make instead Sword of Honour, a drama about a student at Sandhurst proving that he is not a coward. 38 But The Relief of Lucknow episode was raised in the Commons debate on censorship, and Sir Samuel Hoare, replying, linked it to the banning of the previous Mutiny film. He said that the Secretary of State for India had discussed the matter with the Chairman of the BBFC: He made it quite clear that the responsibility was entirely on the

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shoulders of the chairman of the Board of Film Censors and that if they decided that the film should go on, there was nothing that he could or would do. But he did make it plain - and 1 believe it was the right course and that any honourable Member here would take the same course that to produce a film depicting scenes of the Indian Mutiny would be undesirable at this time when we are just embarking upon a new chapter in the constitutional development of India and when we want to get rid of the differences which there have been between us in the past (Hon. Members: Why?) Well, I think everyone wants to see the new Constitution in India a success, The chairman of the Board of Film Censors heard what my right hon. Friend said on the subject. He discussed the question with the promoters of the film, and the promoters of the film, so I understand, took the same view. They have no grievance in the matter at all and the film, I am glad to say, will not be exhibited ... or produced. 39 It is a textbook example of the BBFC in operation. A proposal to film A. E. W. Mason's novel The Broken Road in 1937 was rejected, almost certainly on the same grounds. It was the story of the dilemma of an Indian prince brought up in England and finding himself accepted neither in India nor in England and being driven to rebellion in consequence. Miss Shortt warned: 'The controversy about Western education for Eastern princes being the main theme in this book, I think it would be a difficult story for production as a film.'40 The film was not made. Causing offence to foreign countries was another objection raised to films with Imperial settings. The Dop Doctor, a book by Richard Dehan, was submitted by Grosvenor Films in 1936. It was the story of a drunken ex-Harley Street doctor, disgraced for performing an illegal operation, who drifts to South Africa and redeems himself during the siege of Mafeking and by winning the love of a good woman. The censors noted:

This book was published shortly after the South African War and ga ve considerable offence in South Africa owing to the way both English and Dutch characters in the book were depicted. A silent film of this book was submitted for censorship in 1915 and after one or two deletions had been made was passed by the Board, but I understand considerable objection was taken to it by the Union government, and as far as I know it was withdrawn from exhibition in this country. It was in fact banned under the Defence of the Realm Act. Colonel Hanna therefore suggested: 'I think it would be best to warn the producer about the fate of the silent film and endeavour to discourage him from going on with the project.'41 The film was not made. The censors also objected to the Japanese being depicted as the villains

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in East Meets West and Rangoon Adventure, 80 no mention of Japan was made, though it was obvious that the villain of East Meets West was Japanese. 42 In 1937 the censors rejected a proposal to film Colonel J. H. Patterson's classic book about the building of the Uganda railway, The Maneaters of Tsavo, because it involved the Fashoda Incident. Miss Shortt observed: 'In my opinion this story is too full of political controversy and too recent history to be suitable for a film.' Colonel Hanna observed that the Fashoda Incident had occurred only forty years before, causing great resentment in France, and he feared that a film about it would reawaken that resentment. 43 The relative political naIvety of Colonel Hanna, however, is nowhere better demonstrated than in his attitude to the commentary of a documentary, This Tanganyika (1939). He reported: 'There is nothing provocative in the commentary from a political point of view.' But Miss Shortt noted that the film depicted the natives' preference for British rule and the dangers to British territory if Lake Victoria were used as an enemy aircraft base. It summed up with pro-British propaganda about any controversy which might arise about the future of the territory, a former German colony claimed by Hitler. Miss Shortt suggested that this final statement be deleted, since it fell within the area of controversial issues. 44 The conclusion must therefore be that the Board's position was that proBritish propaganda was acceptable as long as it did not touch on controversy. A further objection to potential screenplays was, as we have seen, ridicule of the army. This objection sank Gaumont British's plan to film Hall Caine's novel The White Prophet. It was the story of a British officer, Colonel Lord, who joined the crusade of a Muslim prophet, Ishmael Ameer, against the selfishness and venality of modern civilization. But Ameer developed political ambitions, planned a coup against the British in the Sudan and was ultimately foiled by Lord's fiancee, who opened Lord's eyes to the prophet's perfidy. Colonel Hanna thought that it did contain scenes with 'a tendency to bring the British army into contempt and ridicule'. He noted: Hall Caine is a novelist of very high standing in the literary world, but his knowledge of military life is very limited .... No scene of cavalry charging the mob and causing 100 deaths ... would be permissible on the screen. The final scenes ... of court martial on Colonel Lord; petition for clemency signed by every officer and man in the Army of occupation, interference by His Majesty who grants Colonel Lord a free pardon under the Great Seal of England, promotes him to General and posts him to command of troops in Egypt are too fantastic and could not be shown in this form. 45 The project was abandoned.

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The defamation of British officers lay behind objections to The General Goes Too Far, a novel about adultery and murder among the British garrison of a West African colony, proposed as a film in May 1936. Colonel Hanna erupted: A thoroughly objectionable story showing officers of the British Army in a most offensive and objectionable light. Two are shown as murderers, and a third, Haverell, was certainly contemplating it. Morals are lax, and the character of the colonial governor as a vindictive prosecutor of private spite is very objectionable. Another officer is shown as embezzling public money to support an expensive mistress. I strongly advise that the proposal to film this book be abandoned. 46 But the producers persisted, cleaned up the characters and their motivations, removing the affront to the services, and the script, submitted in July 1936, was approved and filmed as The High Command. 47 In May 1936 a scenario taken from a recent headline story was submitted by Warner Bros. Hail and Farewell concerned the adventures of various officers and men of the Northumberland Fusiliers during a brief reunion with families and sweethearts when the troopship bringing the batallion from the West Indies to Egypt put in at Southampton for six hours. It was a story that captured the imagination to such an extent that Erich Pommer's Pendennis Films were simultaneously making their own version of the episode as Farewell Again for Korda. But that version was not submitted to the censors at script Hail and Farewell was approved by Colonel Hanna and Miss Shortt with several provisos. Colonel Hanna suggested that the 'dashing young officer' who goes ofT with a good-time girl should be replaced by an NCO, presumably on the basis of the belief that it was acceptable for an NCO to compromise himself but not for an officer. Miss Shortt noted that there was too much mixing between junior officers and the other ranks 'in an undignified manner'. 48 Gaumont British were keen promoters of Imperial epics. But they ran into trouble when they got too close to the news. In 1934 they submitted a synopsis called Black Land. The setting was the fictional East African protectorate of Bugenya, whose only product was gold. The Paarl Mining Company, headed by the villainous Meyer, monopolize the mining rights and both overwork and underpay the natives, whose cause is championed by the British Commissioner, Lee, and the local chieftain, Peleti. A prospector called Bendix, who has civilized ideas about the treatment of natives and possesses a devoted native servant, Buelo, is given permission to look for gold. But when he discovers it and thus threatens the Paarl Company's monopoly, Meyer and his accomplice, the Commissioner's secretary, Fleming, frame him for the rape of a native girl and arm the

148 THE CONSTRAINTS

natives, who rise in revolt. Bendix is tried and expelled from the colony, and as a result of the disturbances Peleti is deposed by the acting British Commissioner, Admiral Nicholls. But Buelo discovers vital information which clears both Bendix and Peleti, Paarl are deprived of their mining rights and laws are passed protecting native labour. The censors both gave their consent to the outline. Miss Shortt noted approvingly: 'The native discontent is not against the government but against the greed of one individual and all the government authorities are shown in sympathy with the native.' Colonel Hanna raised two objections. Fleming could not be the Commissioner's secretary, because he was a crook, and this might reflect on the integrity of colonial administrators. More seriously, he noted that the Acting Commissioner, Admiral Nicholls, bore too close a resemblance to Admiral Evans, 'who recently deposed the Basuto chief Tschekedi' and there was no need to introduce such a character.49 In fact the whole synopsis was a thinly disguised and somewhat rewritten version of recent events in Southern Africa, the details of which must have been unknown to the censors or they would have been bound to ban the whole thing at once. The setting for the actual events was the Southern African Protectorate of Bechuanaland, whose mineral rights were controlled by the British South Africa Company. In 1929 Tschekedi Khama, the regent of the Ngwato, tried to get these concessions revoked, but the British High Commissioner in South Africa, the Earl of Athlone, had opposed his bid and secured new concessions for both the British South Africa Company and De Beers Consolidated, whose chairman was Sir Ernest Oppenheimer. British public opinion was focused dramatically on Bechuanaland in 1933 when a native court, presided over by Tschekedi, sentenced a white youth to be flogged for sexual irregularities with African girls. Sir Herbert Stanley, the High Commissioner in South Africa and a man sympathetic to native interests, was away and the Acting Commissioner, Admiral Evans, moved in and deposed Tschekedi. There was an outcry in the British press, and after two weeks Tschekedi was restored to his position. As a result of the publicity, a government investigation headed by Sir Alan Pim was mounted into social and economic conditions in the Protectorate. With the names changed, and reading Tschekedi for Peleti, Oppenheimer for Meyer, Evans for Nicholls, Stanley for Lee, Bechuanaland for Bugenya and De Beers for Paarl, it is possible to see this as a dramatized version of recent events, with a fictionalized subplot and a pro-British slant. Alarmed perhaps by Colonel Hanna's identification of one of the leading characters, Gaumont clearly had second thoughts and the idea was abandoned. 50 However, when Gaumont retreated into the past for their subjects they had rather better fortune. Rhodes of Africa, a whitewashing biography of .the British South Africa Company's hero, stressing his Imperial vision

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rather than his greed and ambition, was approved in 1935, with the single deletion of a scene of Queen Victoria signing the company's charter, in line with the ban on depictions of the late Queen. 51 The film was released in March 1936. King Solomon's Mines was approved in September 1936 with a request for the toning down of violence, and the film was released in July 1937. 52 The third of Gaumont's Imperial epics, The Great Barrier, the story of the building of the Canadian Pacific Railway, was approved in April 1936 and released in February 1937. 53 There would have been a fourth, Soldiers Three. Gaumont British acquired an option on nine of Kipling's short stories and submitted them in January 1934, intending to use them as the basis of a script. Colonel Hanna read them and, apart from warning that with the story 'The Incarnation of Krishna Mulvaney' they should be careful of giving offence to Hindus, had no objection to the content. But he added a note: The date of these stories is approximately 1890-1905. It is suggested that some of them could belong just as well to 1933. I suggest that this would be quite wrong. This type of soldier was common in the army of India 40 years ago but it is certainly quite different today.54 Due note was taken of this, and a script was produced, set in period, dealing with the martial and amorous exploits of the soldiers three, culminating in their role in the suppression of a native uprising. The script was written by Colonel A. R. Rawlinson and approved by Kipling himself. 55 Colonel Hanna read it in December 1934 and, apart from correcting some misused army terms of command and all swear" words, approved it.56 But the script was reworked and resubmitted in May 1936. 57 It was again approved. By now Gaumont had sent a second unit to India under Geoffrey Barkas to shoot location footage and were announcing provisional casting. 58 Victor McLaglen, C. Aubrey Smith and Maureen O'Sullivan were named as likely to play leading roles. Raoul Walsh and later Walter Forde were named as directors. But the film was in fact never made. In 1937 Balcon left Gaumont British for MGM and Gaumont itself ceased production. Balcon took the script of Soldiers Three with him to MGM, where it was revised several times, before Balcon himself moved to Ealing and MGM closed down its British operation. 59 The project remained on their books, however, and was filmed disastrously in 1951. Ironically Victor McLaglen did play one of the soldiers three in Gunga Din (1939), but this script bore no relation to the original Kipling 'Soldiers Three' stories. It was a case of studio politics rather than censorial interference defeating a project. The ability of studios to meet censorial objections should never be underrated. In December 1935 a French novel, La Dame de Malacca, was submitted. The plot centred on Audrey, an innocent Irish girl, who marries Major Herbert Carter to escape her dreary existence. She has a profound

150 THE CONSTRAINTS

physical repugnance to him, however. They go out to Malaya and she there falls in love with the anti-British Sultan Selim of Udaigar, a British protectorate. Selim grants concessions on his land to Japan to build military bases, thus setting up a threat to Britain. To stop this, Lord Brandmore, the British Governor, persuades Herbert to say that his marriage has never been consummated. As a result the marriage is dissolved, Audrey marries Selim and the Japanese bases are not built. Colonel Hanna was outraged: I consider this story to be quite unfit for the screen. The details of Herbert and Audrey's married life and her repulsion from him are prohibitive. The shameful light in which the Governor is shown by making a bargain of such a nature with the Sultan for 'diplomatic' reasons is monstrous. The suggestion of trouble between England and Japan is undesirable. There are various veiled sneers at England in the book.6o What followed demonstrates both the strengths and the weaknesses of the censorship system. Gaumont British went ahead and fashioned from the novel a screenplay called The Scarlet Sultan, which they submitted in March 1936. The offensive sexual element had been removed, the antiBritish aspect eliminated and a stylish melodrama created, with the role of the Sultan specially tailored to fit the talents of George Arliss. The revised version centred on the Sultan of Renang, on whose territory Britain and Japan both sought to establish naval bases. The anti·British Selim has become the pro-British Nezim, the Sultan's son, and Audrey is transformed into Marguerite, the beautiful but neglected French wife of a boorish British customs officer, Neville Carter. Nezim falls in love with Marguerite and tries to engineer Neville's death in order to be free to marry. But the Sultan foils the plan, Neville and Marguerite are reconciled, thus avoiding miscegenation, and after honourable dealings with the British Governor, the Sultan signs friendship treaties with both powers. Miss Shortt was hostile to the project: I do not consider this a suitable story for production as a film, because it is far too involved with political intrigue and the different incidents between white men and black are impossible. Colonel Hanna was in a nursing home but by no means out of action. J. Brooke Wilkinson added a note to the scenario report: Had an interview with Mr. George ArHss and Mr. Bromley (the associate producer) relative to the story, and as the matter was very urgent, discussed the scenario with Colonel Hanna in the Nursing Home. I explained that Mr. ArHss had given me an undertaking that

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there would be no reference to Japan, Malaya or 'blacks'. We do not consider the subject to be altogether prohibitive as would be the case if the story was produced as originally written. 61 The references to Japan, Malaya and 'blacks' were all deleted and the film was eventually released as East Meets West in September 1936, with no reference to La Dame de Malacca in the credits. Renang had been named Rungay to distance it still further from Malaya. But it was perfectly obvious from internal evidence in the film that the setting was Malaya and the villain was Japanese, even though these facts were never explicitly mentioned. The letter of the censor's demands had been met, even if there was some flexibility in interpreting their spirit. It is interesting to note that a greater proportion of the Hollywood projects, six out of twelve, reached the screen than of the British projects, six out of twenty. This is a fair reflection of the overall picture in that a much larger number of Imperial epics were produced in Hollywood in the 1930s than in Britain. 62 It does seem that the British censors were harder on the whole on British productions than they were on American ones, giving rise to the suspicion that the authorities were happy to leave the task of propagandizing to Hollywood and thus avoid any opprobrium attached to unpopular representations of Imperial ideology. Judging by reviews, Hollywood did Whitehall's job well. As the New York Times observed of Lives of a Bengal Lancer: 'It is so sympathetic in its discussion of England's colonial management that it ought to prove a great blessing to Downing St.,63 It is also worthy of note that the British projects which got through the censors' net, the Gaumont British trilogy and the Korda trilogy, the latter not submitted at script stage, came closest to their Hollywood counterparts in substance and approach, that is to say that they concerned themselves with myth rather than with reality. As Basil Wright observed with exasperation of The Drum, it 'could have told us something of ... the political and social problems which the British Raj .64 But it did not. That was not its job, any more than it was the job of Hollywood's Imperial films, which were exclusively romanticized biopics (Clive of India, Stanley and Livingstone) or Kiplingesque adventure films (Lives of a Bengal Lancer, Wee Willie Winkie, Gunga Din). These films followed each other in content, casting and approach very closely and were in effect Imperial Westerns. No less an authority than R. J. Minney, author of Clive of India, described Bengal Lancer as 'a wild west picture in an Indian setting', and it was indeed remade as a cavalry Western, Geronimo, in 1939 with few script alterations. 65 This being the case, characters and plots tended to be standardized, and the North-West Frontier setting as mythic a locale as the Great Plains of the United States. But this is not to undervalue their role in transmitting the ideas of Britain's Imperial

152 THE CONSTRAINTS

responsibility and the innate superiority of the white race, but to stress that they did it in a fundamentally mythic and unreal, or historical rather than contemporary and potentially contentious setting. The effect on audiences of such films is testified to by Bertolt Brecht, who to illustrate his argument that plays and films, whether good or bad, always embodied an image of the world which was transmitted to the audience, cited the example of Gunga Din (1939): In the film Gunga Din . .. I saw British occupation forces fighting a native population. An Indian tribe - this term itself implies something wild and uncivilized, as against the word 'people' attacked a body of British troops stationed in India. The Indians were primitive creatures, either comic or wicked: comic when loyal to the British and wicked when hostile. The British soldiers were honest, good-humoured chaps and when they used their fists on the mob and 'knocked some sense' into them the audience laughed. One of the Indians betrayed his compatriots to the British, sacrificed his life so that his fellow-countrymen should be defeated, and earned the audience's heartfelt applause. My heart was touched too: I felt like applauding and laughed in all the right places. Despite the fact that I knew all the time that there was something wrong, that the Indians are not primitive and uncultured people but have a magnificent age-old culture, and that this Gunga Din could also be seen in a very different light, e.g., as a traitor to his people, I was amused and touched because this utterly distorted account was an artistic success and considerable resources in talent and ingenuity had been applied in making it. 66 In the long run films like this were probably more valuable Imperially than any number of analytical and deeply argued lectures, speeches and editorials. For they cemented a timeless and unchanging image of a beneficent and romantically inspiring British Empire into the popular consciousness. This image may well have provoked a different response in the three different audiences who would see the film - the domestic audience, the foreign audience and the native audience in the Empire itself - but the image remained a positive and useful one. It sustained the status quo and, by appealing to the desire for escapism and adventure on one level, conveyed on another the presuppositions on which such adventure was predicated.

Part 3

The Stars

Stars

It ought not to need stressing that a study of stars and their images and their popularity is central to an understanding of how cinema works in the context of society. But it does. There has been a good deal of attention paid to the role of the director, the producer and the writer in the creation of films. But much less attention has been directed towards the role of the star.l Yet it was the star that the public went to see more often than not. Successive surveys revealed that the star and to a lesser extent the story was what attracted the mass audience to the cinema. 2 Fan magazines and fan clubs were devoted to the doings and the life-style of the stars. The stars set fashions in clothing, hair-styles, speech, deportment, even lovemaking. As Andrew Tudor observed, 'the basic psychological machinery through which most people relate to film involves some combination of identification and projection', and what the audience identified with and projected themselves onto was the stars.3 This inevitably had an influence on the films themselves, for film subjects were chosen, shaped and put together to highlight the qualities and characteristics of a favoured star. These are the vehicle films, the eloquent testimony to the concept of the actor as auteur. 4 In his handbook for aspiring screenwriters, Money for Film. Stories (1937), the writer and director Norman Lee noted:

Writers, as a class, object to creating characters to fit stars. They prefer the situation the other way round. If you are a Shaw, or a Coward, you can write as you feel. The producers will worry about finding right players for the parts. An unknown writer will discover a certain laziness on the part of producers to go this far in his case. So unless he wants to fill his house with rejected film stories, he had better take my advice and write for the stars. 5 Accordingly he devoted ten pages to setting out the character types of the leading British and American stars, for example Clifford Mollison: He is best in bashful parts. He shines as the well brought up young man, with good manners, whose mentality stops short when it is most needed to extricate Cliff from trouble. He always the girl, winning her by shyness and reticence, even against the more confident, experienced advances of his rivals. Cliff is the Dear Fool. He gets there, but largely 155

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by accident. He is lovable and you always feel the deepest sympathy for him. 6 The old movie moguls were shrewd enough to appreciate the value and importance of the stars. Carl Laemmle, the head of Universal Pictures, said: 'The production of the stars is a prime necessity in the film industry.,7 Stars were therefore assiduously promoted by the studio publicity machines. But publicity alone could not make a star. There are several notable examples of expensive attempts to promote new film stars which failed, because the public did not take to them or their films. Samuel Goldwyn's attempt to make a major star out of Anna Sten is perhaps the classic case. Similarly the studios' policy of grooming lookalikes in order to maintain their hold over their top stars rarely produced major rivals for these top stars. Clark Gable at MGM had two lookalikes (James Craig and John Carroll) as did Tyrone Power at Fox (George Montgomery and Richard Greene). So what made a star, what created that 'magical, mystical quality that excites hero worship,?8 Essentially the stars had to fulfil a need and to represent an ideal. They had to accomplish the difficult task of being both ordinary for the purposes of identification and extraordinary for the purposes of admiration. 9 The great success of such British stars as Gracie Fields, George Formby and Jessie Matthews lay in the achievement of this elusive blend. The process of identification might last for the duration of the film only or might continue after it, depending on the need and character of the individual member of the audience. It would arise because the star represented qualities, attributes, achievements that the spectator woul~ like to have. Projection took this even further, to the stage of a total involvement with the star, which would take the form of imitation of dress, manner and speech. A female medical student recalled for J. P. Mayer her obsession with Deanna Durbin at the age of fourteen: She became my first and only screen idol. I collected pictures of her, and articles about her and spent hours sticking them in scrapbooks. I would pay any price within the range of my pocket money for a book, if it had a new picture, however tiny, of her in it. I adored her and my adoration influenced my life a great deal. I wanted to be as much like her as possible, both in my manners and clothes. Whenever I was to get a new dress, I would find from my collection a particularly nice picture of Deanna and ask for a dress like she was wearing. I did my hair as much like her as I could manage. If I found myself in any annoying or aggravating situation, which I previously dealt with by an outburst of temper, I found myself wondering what Deanna would do, and modified my own reactions accordingly. She had far more influence on me than any amount of lectures or rows from parents would have had. I went to

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all her films, and as often as I could too. 10 This sort of projection was most common among the young, who were in search of role models. We should also not underestimate the element of physical attraction, both to stars of the opposite sex and to stars of the same sex. In some cases this attraction turned into love. A female clerk told J. P. Mayer: It was in my early teens that I first fell in love - and that was with Jan Kiepura, whom I had seen in Tell Me Tonight. Love? Infatuation you would say! And I suppose you are right. But it was heartbreakingly real to me. I was assured by adults that I would soon grow out of that But no! All through my teens I continued falling in love, with one film star after another. And each time was sheer torture - a desperate longing to be made love to by them all. 11

A shorthand typist recalled her love for Tyrone Power: When he kisses his leading lady a funny thrill runs up my spine to the heart. Sometimes in dreams which seem very real, I imagine he is kissing me. 12 The projection, identification and attraction which took place in the cinema was supplemented outside it by the fan magazines. E. W. Bakke noted their popularity in Greenwich in 1931: A large number of Picturegoers, Movie Magazines and their like ranging in price from 3d. to Is. 3d. provide the devotees with the secrets of backstage happenings and the intimate details of the lives of the most popular and would-be popular players. The price range of these magazines makes it possible for those in rather pressing circumstances to afford their weekly reading. Testimony of the news vendors and my observations point towards the conclusion that it is women and especially the young women who are interested in this added aspect of cinemagoing. 13 Their appeal was analysed by Margaret Farrand Thorp in 1939. She was writing of America but her analysis is equally applicable to England. She singled out the principal characteristics as glamour, defined as 'sex appeal plus luxury plus elegance plus romance.' The place to study glamour today is the fan ... Fan magazines are distilled as stimulants of the most exhilarating kind. Everything is superlative, surprising, exciting .... Nothing ever stands still, nothing ever rests, least of all the sentences .... Clothes of course are endlessly pictured and described usually with marble fountains, private swimming pools or limousines in the background .... Every aspect of life, trivial and important, should be bathed in the purple glow

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of luxury and now the aura of glamour can follow a star even beyond life's bounds .... However thick the luxury in which a star is lapped, she takes care today to make it known that she is really a person of simple wholesome tastes, submitting to elegance as part of her job but escaping from it as often as possible. It soothes the fans to hear that luxury is fundamentally a burden. 14 More recently Richard Dyer has expanded on this, noting the celebration of conspicuous consumption and the legitimization of the myth of success. In addition he says that fan magazines are exclusively concerned with the promotion of youth and beauty, leisure rather than work, love and romance rather than marriage and family, but provide compensation for those who never achieve this by giving details too of the unhappiness, ill-health, scandal and disgrace that sometimes accompanies stardom. 15 Taking just the October 1935 issues of the British fan magazine Picturegoer, one finds abundant evidence of these concerns. There is the inspiring but also cautionary story of 'The Drudge Who Reached the Stars', 'a poignant life story telling of the difficulties that had to be overcome by Barbara Stanwyck on her long and arduous road to stardom'. There is the reassuring story that 'success has not gone to Bill Powell's head'. There are the all-important intimate details of the stars' lives, such as the fact that Glenda Farrell reads detective stories in bed and Ronald Colman is the first actor to play tennis under floodlights. There is a column of beauty hints called 'Leave it to Anne', an article by Fay Wray on 'How I plan my wardrobe' and a plethora of advertisements for Lavona shampoo, Lux toilet soap, Banderine hair oil, Halo hair-nets and a slimming course. Beyond the personal level, film stars function also on a broader, societal level, performing the same ideological role as films themselves. Given the framework of capitalist production and middle-class censorship, the stars can be used to promote conformity to patterns of behaviour favoured by the Establishment. They can be used to gloss over ambiguities and instabilities in society by individualizing social and economic problems and resolving them on a personal level by the use of their star charisma. All this was part of a middle-class individualistic impulse observed by Edgar Morin: After 1930 there is an acceleration in the movement of the great mass of people to the psychological level of middle class individuality. This revolutionary accession is a key phenomenon of the twentieth century and it must be considered as a total human phenomenon, for it also develops on the political and social level; on the level of everyday affective life it is expressed by new affirmations of and new participations in individuality. The affective life is, as we have said, both

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imaginary and practical. Men and women of rising social groups no longer caress only disembodied dreams; they tend to live their dreams as intensely, as precisely, and as concretely as possible; they even assimilate them into their lovemaking. They accede to the soul ci vilization of the middle class .... The amelioration of material conditions of existence, a certain social progress, no matter how fragile (vacations with pay, shortening of the work day), new needs and new leisure make increasingly urgent one fundamental demand: the desire to live one's own life, i.e. to live one's own dreams and to dream one's life. A natural movement impels the great mass of people to accede to the affective level of the middle·class personality: their needs are modelled on the ruling standards of authority, which are those of middle·class culture. These needs are stimulated and channeled by the means of communication which are the property of the middle class. Thus the increasingly middle-class nature of the cinematic version of the imaginary corresponds to the increasingly middle-class nature of the psychology of the great mass of people. The stars comply with this evolution all the more precisely since the requirements of affective assimilation are essentially addressed to the heroes of the cinema. Of course these heroes remain heroes, i.e. models and mediators; but, by combining the exceptional and the ordinary, the ideal and the everyday, ever more intimately and diversely permit their public to identify itself with them by means of certain increasingly realistic points of reference. 16 The classic cases in the British cinema are the use of the native workingclass stars Gracie Fields and George Formby to promote consensus, the values of decency and hard work, and the overcoming of problems by individual effort. The other side of the positive use of star types to promote certain values is the use of them simply to distract attention from reality by allowing the viewer to opt out into a total world. For many America was that fantasy world and American stars the ultimate selfprojection. George Orwell discovered this when musing on the reactions of ordinary people to the Slump: They don't necessarily lower their standards by cutting out luxuries and concentrating on necessities; more often it is the other way about the more natural way if you come to think of it. Hence the fact that in a decade of unparalleled depression, the consumption of all cheap luxuries has increased. The two things that have probably made the greatest difference of all are the movies and the mass production of cheap smart clothes since the war. The youth who leaves school at 14 and gets a blind alley job is out of work at 20, probably for life; but for two pounds ten on the hire purchase he can buy himself a suit which for a little while and

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THE srARS

at a little distance, looks as though it had been tailored in Savile Row. The girl can look like a fashion plate at an ever lower price. You may have three half pence in your pocket and not a prospect in the world and only the corner of a leaky bedroom to go home to: but in your new clothes you can stand on the street corner, indulging in a private daydream of yourself as Clark Gable or Greta Garbo, which compensates you for a great deal. 17

It goes without saying that Hollywood stars were more popular on the whole than British stars. From 1936 onwards, the Motion Picture Herald published lists from the box-office returns of the most popular international stars in Britain and the most popular British stars in Britain, enabling us to assess their relative standing with the fans. There are fluctuations in popularity with falls in favour sometimes explained by the lack of a film released during the current year. But clear patterns are discernible. IS In 1936 only two British stars figured in the top ten international list: Gracie Fields, who was third in the international list and top of the British list, and Jessie Matthews, who was sixth in the international list and second in the British list. The top international stars were in order of popularity: Shirley Temple, Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, Gracie Fields, Clark Gable, Laurel and Hardy, Jessie Matthews, James Cagney, Wallace Beery, Greta Garbo and Norma Shearer. The fondness for tough he-men (Gable, Cagney and Beery) is notable here, and the absence of any male British stars from the top ten is very interesting. After Fields and Matthews, the top British stars were Jack Hulbert (eleventh in the international list), George Formby (thirteenth in the international list), Robert Donat (fifteenth in the international list) and Jack Buchanan (twentieth in the international list). The next most popular British stars, the comedy team of Tom Walls and Ralph Lynn, did not figure in the international list at all. By 1937 George Formby had moved up to second in the British list, and from 1938 to 1940 inclusive he was first. Gracie Fields was first in the British list in 1936 and 1937, second in 1938 and 1939, and third in 1940. J essie Matthews and Jack Hulbert, on the other hand, both experienced spectacular declines, with Jessie going from second in 1936 to third in 1937 to fourth in 1938 to nineteenth in 1939 and not appearing at all in 1940. Jack Hulbert, third in 1936, was ninth in 1937, seventeenth in 1938 and did not appear at all in 1939 and 1940. Jack Buchanan also experienced a fall, being sixth in 1936, fifth in 1937, sixth in 1938, twentysecond in 1939 and thirteenth in 1940. Robert Donat, on the other hand, experienced a dramatic revival. Fifth in 1936, he fell to nineteenth in 1937 and sixteenth in 1938 before recovering to third in 1939 and second in 1940.

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There were similar fluctuations in the fortunes of the Hollywood stars. Shirley Temple remained top box-office attraction in 1936, 1937 and 1938, but fell to third in 1939 and eleventh in 1940, a direct reflection of the fact that she was growing up. She was in fact replaced by another young star, Deanna Durbin, sixth in 1938, first in 1939, and second to Mickey Rooney in 1940. Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers vanished from the list following their break-up as a team. From 1937 to 1939 inclusive Jeanette MacDonald, Robert Taylor and Gary Cooper were regular fixtures in the top ten list, but in 1939-40 Clark Gable slipped to twelfth. Before 1936, the evidence is less systematic and authoritative. But there are indicators. The Granada Cinemas published the results of the Bernstein Questionnaires conducted in 1931, 1933 and 1937, taken in their better cinemas and suggesting the tastes of more middle-class filmgoers.19 The preference is on the whole in each list for gentlemanly Hollywood actors and ladylike Hollywood actresses. The only British stars to figure in the 1931 top ten are Ralph Lynn (seventh) and Tom Walls (eighth). In 1933 Jack Hulbert is the top British male star (seventh), and Gracie Fields the top British female star (seventh). In 1937 Robert Donat (tenth) and Leslie Howard (eleventh) are the top British male stars, and Jessie Matthews the top female star (seventh). For Hollywood, the top male stars are Ronald Colman, Clive Brook, George Arliss, Robert Montgomery and Maurice Chevalier in 1931; George Arliss, Clark Gable, Wallace Beery, Clive Brook, Robert Montgomery and Ronald Colman in 1933; Gary Cooper, Clark Gable, Charles Laughton, Robert Taylor, Ronald Colman, William Powell and Franchot Tone in 1937. Among female remarkably, Norma Shearer is top in 1931, 1933 and 1937, followed in 1931 by Constance Bennett, Marie Dressler, Ruth Chatterton, Janet Gaynor and Greta Garbo, in 1933 by Marie Dressler, Greta Garbo, Kay Francis, Marlene Dietrich and Katharine Hepburn, and in 1937 by Myrna Loy, Greta Garbo, Ginger Rogers, Claudette Colbert and Shirley Temple. The aura of gentility surrounding the lists is almost overpowering. Gracie Fields's popularity is firmly attested not only by Motion Picture Herald but also by her choice as the most popular film star in a Daily Express popularity poll in 1933, and her choice as top female British star in the Daily Mail poll of 1937. 20 But her pre-eminence in national and international ratings was approached by only a handful of other stars during the decade, most notably George Formby, Jessie Matthews, Robert Donat, Jack Hulbert and Jack Buchanan. Discussing the reasons for the relative lack of success of British films, Eric Rideout noted in 1937: 'The public can only be induced to enter a theatre ... by box-office names. We have in this country a very limited number of such names, certainly insufficient to make the requisite number of British pictures in a year.,21 Britain seemed almost incapable of creating and developing its own stars from scratch. It was not that Britain lacked potential stars.

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Hollywood had a thriving British colony, which it supplemented regularly by raids on the British cinema. For Hollywood sensed star potential and would snap up anyone who showed promise. During the 19308 Errol Flynn, Herbert Marshall, Ian Hunter, Brian Aherne, George Sanders, Madeleine Carroll, Patric Knowles and John Loder, many of them already established actors in the British cinema, were lured away to Hollywood. But Hollywood also developed the careers of David Niven and Joan Fontaine, who had no background in British films. It was not entirely oneway traffic. Some stars, particularly 'character' stars like Charles Laughton and Cedric Hardwicke, commuted across the Atlantic, playing plum roles in both Britain and America. Some established Hollywood British stars, whose names and careers had been made in the United States, returned, notably Clive Brook, George ArHss and Leslie Howard. But if someone was a success in the British cinema, Hollywood was interested. However unlikely a candidate for the Hollywood treatment, they would be tried out. Cicely Courtneidge and Sydney Howard, two quintessentially English performers, were, because of their British popularity, given disastrous Hollywood try-outs, in Imperfect Lady and Transatlantic Merrygoround respectively. It was only matters of temperament or the quirks of personal preference that kept three of Britain's biggest stars away from Hollywood in their heydays. Jessie Matthews turned down a number of Hollywood offers. But Hollywood's desperation to use the top names was so great that in the case of two of them, Gracie Fields, signed by Twentieth Century-Fox and Robert Donat, signed by MGM, the studios agreed to allow them to make their films in England. What was the source of British film stars? It was not on the whole the cinema, whereas in America it often was. As Dilys Powell pointed out: In America, a man took no RADA courses. There was no Strasberg school yet to teach him method acting. He might drift into films. A good horseman might turn into a Gary Cooper or a John Wayne. Some quirk of voice, some angle of mouth or nose or eyes might signal a screen personality. And the lucky fellow had no traditions to overcome. He learned the business of film acting from the ground Up.22 But in Britain, the stage was the almost exclusive source of film stars, as The Times revealed when it declared of Victor Saville's film Friday the Thirteenth (1933) that it was 'gratifying proof of the wealth of talent we at the moment,,23 and James Agate noted when have on the English he reviewed The Fire Raisers (1933) and discovered that 'the cast was composed almost entirely of well-known English actors known to me through scores of plays. ,24 If the list of top British stars between 1936 and 1940 is examined, it is clear that the bulk of them are either from the music hall, where they were already established stars (Gracie Fields, George Formby, Will Hay,

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Leslie Fuller, Will Fyffe, Sandy Powell, Arthur Lucan and Kitty McShane, Max Miller, 'the Crazy Gang'), or from the musical stage and revue (Jessie Matthews, Jack Hulbert, Cicely Courtneidge, Jack Buchanan, Sydney Howard, Richard Tauber, Bobby Howes, Paul Robeson, Sonnie Hale, Arthur Tracy). However, hardly any of the top box~office stars in Britain in the Thirties were stars of the 'legitimate' theatre. Tom Walls and Ralph Lynn, popular in films for much of the decade, starred on stage in the Aldwych farces. As in Hollywood, there had been an initial rush when talkies arrived to sign stage trained performers who could handle dialogue and song. Admittedly the reliance on the music hall and the musical stage partly reflects the predominance of the comedy and musical genres among the cinema's output. But the absence of top theatrical stars partly reflects the attitude of the theatrical profession to the cinema. Making the grade in the theatre was still the aim of most aspiring young actors and actresses. Many shared the view of the young Jack Hawkins: Like many actors in those days 1 did not take my films seriously. One tended to regard them as second rate compared with the live theatre which in many cases was quite true and little more than a means of paying one's income tax. 25 Michael Redgrave, given the plum role of the male lead in The Lady Vanishes, took the part for the money to support his growing family. 'I simply didn't care a damn,' he said, '1 was nearly half way through the picture before I started acting.' He started to act when reprimanded by his co~star Paul Lukas who, having seen him on the in Three told him: '1 didn't realize you are a real actor. You are a great actor. But let me tell you something - you are not acting in this film. You are doing nothing at all.,26 Other future theatrical knights were no keener on the screen. Ralph Richardson, established by the end of the decade as a major screen star, ninth in the British box-office returns in 1939, said later: '1 don't think films give an actor much satisfaction, when he's making them; but if they go well and they're successful, well, then he's very happy and lucky.,27 John Gielgud, who starred in The Good Companions and Secret Agent, disliked films for rather different reasons: Since I was always acting in the theatre at night, I found filming terribly exhausting. 1 had to get up very early in the morning and was performance, so 1 always fidgeting to get away by 5 or 6 for the grew to dislike working for the cinema. 28 Most stage actors and actresses were working in the theatre at night. The absence of home-grown film stars was pointed up by the arrival and success of Anna Neagle, who did not have an established stage reputation. Her career was shrewdly and single-mindedly promoted by her husband,

164 THE STARS produ..:er~director

Herbert Wilcox. The critic P. L. Mannock observed in

1934:

The success of Anna Neagle in Nell Gwyn is something more than the personal achievement of a young actress. It is the fulfilment of a theory I have long possessed about British stars. For years I have periodically insisted that British studios have been tackling the star problem from the wrong end. Until lately it could be asserted that we had not 'created' a single British film star since the arrival of talkies in 1928. I say 'created' in the sense that we had discovered, built up and exploited someone who had not a ready made stage fame. The undoubted establishment of Miss Neagle, formerly one of Mr. Cochran's young ladies, has made that reproach no longer possible. 29 It is perhaps true to say that the British cinema created only two other major stars, apart from Anna Neagle in the 19308, who were not already established stage stars. Robert Donat, who although he had made his mark on the stage in Precious Bane and The Sleeping Clergyman had not achieved full stage stardom, became a major international star in a succession of classic British films. C. A. Lejeune said of him after seeing The Thirty-Nine Steps: 'For the first time on our screens we have a British equivalent of a Clark Gable or a Ronald Colman playing in a purely national idiom.'3o The other was Donat's co-star in The Thirty-Nine Steps, Madeleine Carroll, whose career began in silent films, and who, after a number of indifferent talkies, established herself as a major British star in the title role of I Was a Spy and as the first of Hitchcock's cool blondes in The Thirty-Nine Steps and Secret Agent. But she eventually joined the exodus to Hollywood. Interestingly the star-making situation was remedied during the Second World War when a revitalized national cinema produced a whole roster of native British stars: James Mason, John Mills, Stewart Granger, Eric Portman, Michael Wilding, Michael Rennie, Phyllis Calvert, Patricia Roc, Jean Kent and Margaret Lockwood. Stage stardom is no guarantee of film success. Gerald du Maurier and Owen Nares, admittedly both past their prime, and Gertrude Lawrence, still in hers, made no impact on the screen at all and thus left no record of the magic that entranced theatre-goers. But there was one performer who made his mark on the stage, slipped through Hollywood's net and was still not transformed into the major film star by the British cinema that he became when Hollywood took his career in hand for a second time Laurence Olivier. His film career in the 1930s highlights the British cinema's lack of star-making enterprise. 31 Like many aspiring young stage actors, he eked out his earnings with some film work. One of his earliest appearances was in Potiphar's Wife (1931), a laborious screen transcription of a 'naughty' stage play about the immoral carryings-on of the upper classes. Olivier was wasted in the role

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of a chauffeur accused of trying to seduce his employer's wife. His relaxed naturalness and vibrant good looks together shrieked out 'star quality'. But no one seems to have appreciated it. Instead while he was appearing in the New York production of Private Lives, he was snapped up by Hollywood and was groomed as a new young Ronald Colman. But the films he made there (The Yellow Ticket, Friends and Lovers and Westward Passage) made little impact and when he was tested unsuccessfully for the role of Don Antonio opposite Garbo in Queen Christina (1933), his Hollywood career seemed to be over. He failed to re-establish himself in British films either with Gloria Swanson's unsuccessful comeback attempt, Perfect Understanding, or a slow-moving comedy about professional corespondents, No Funny Business, co-starring Gertrude Lawrence. On stage, however, in 1934, playing Tony Cavendish, an egocentric stage star modelled on John Barrymore, in the George Kauffman-Edna Ferber play Theatre Royal, he gave abundant evidence of bravura swashbuckling style. His Romeo in Romeo and Juliet in 1935 confirmed a stage presence of electric vitality and striking masculinity, which could Hollywood director, Edward H. have set British films alight. A Griffith, in 1936 declared him to be the logical successor to John Barrymore as 'the screen's leading classic romantic actor'.32 So Alexander Korda signed him to a film contract. But what did Korda do with him? Olivier's first appearance was in the cameo role of the balloonist Vincent Lunardi in Conquest of the Air, a characteristically grandiose project which failed to get off the ground. Filmed in 1935, it remained on the shelf until 1941, when it was eventually released in a truncated version. Equally inauspicious was Olivier's next assignment, Moscow Nights (1935), the product of Korda's policy of buying up French films, utilizing their action and location footage and reshooting the dialogue scenes with an English cast. A conventional romantic melodrama set in Russia in 1916, it was directed by Anthony Asquith and turned out better than anyone had a right to expect. As the Sunday Times noted: 'The situations in the story are not original, but the treatment throughout is excellent, and Mr. Asquith must be complimented on almost every ground.,33 But the film is illuminated and transformed by Olivier, who shows himself in complete rapport with the camera, which not only captures his dynamic good looks but shows him playing with all the understatement demanded by the film medium. Not only does he imbue his role as a young army officer with a wholly and charm, but he moves with apparent ease from the subtle comedy of a half-humorous, half-serious courtship of the heroine (Penelope Dudley Ward) through the feverish calm of his playing at the gaming tables to a passionate denunciation of the villain (Harry Baur) during his court martial. It is screen acting of the highest order, giving the lie to the myth that he could not act for the camera until he went to Hollywood, and amazing the Observer's critic C.

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A. Lejeune, who noted: 'The surprise of the picture is Laurence Olivier who plays the young officer with as much wit and feeling as if the tomfool fellow were really a possible character.'34 Korda, however, sold off the film as part of a package to C. M. Woolfs General Film Distributors and it was released with no reference to Korda in the credits. He apparently felt it lacked the quality that he wanted associated with his name. In 1936, Olivier landed the key role of Orlando in Paul Czinner'sAs You Like It, but the film was designed as a vehicle for Czinner's wife, Elizabeth Bergner, who was totally miscast as Rosalind. Her accent suggesting the Vienna Woods rather than the Forest of Arden, she played the part with the familiar coyness and simpering little-girlishness that were her infuriating stock in trade. But Czinner surrounded her with a strong cast of Shakespearian veterans including Henry Ainley and Leon Quartermaine. Olivier's Orlando, dashing, virile and direct, seemed not only oddly extraneous to the proceedings but strangely disturbing whenever he appeared, probably because he cut like a gust of fresh air through the artificial prettiness and cloying atmosphere of this doll's house conception of Shakespeare. The Daily Telegraph thought his performance a 'triumph,.35 He brought a similar swashbuckling quality to his next film, Fire over England (1937), a full-blooded and stylish Korda costume drama about the Armada, dominated by Flora Robson's magisterial performance as Queen Elizabeth I. Olivier played the fictional Michael Ingolby, a naive impetuous youth who becomes a man during the course of the film. Darkly good-looking, patriotic and devil-may-care, he projected the style, vigour and characteristics that in Hollywood would have brought him the sort of film parts Errol Flynn was playing in the classic swashbuckling adventures that Britain seemed incapable of mounting. One only has to compare the swashbuckling sequences in Fire over England with those in the Warner Bros epic, The Sea Hawk (1940), which was closely modelled on it, to see how far Britain was behind Hollywood in this area. But even after this, Olivier still did not get film parts commensurate with his talent. Twenty-One Days (1937), an improbable melodrama in which Olivier and his co-star Vivien Leigh played a young couple who have three weeks of happiness together before he has to give himself up to the police, was so poor that it was not released by Korda, but sold off to Columbia and released by them in 1940, by which time Olivier and Vivien Leigh were both international stars. The next two Korda films saw Olivier as the nominal hero completely upstaged by Ralph Richardson. The Divorce of Lady X (1937), a pleasant but unremarkable romantic comedy photographed in exquisite but unnecessary Technicolor, cast Olivier as a young divorce lawyer pursued by Merle Oberon. But Ralph Richardson as an inimitably dotty aristocrat effortlessly stole the film, as he also did Q Planes (1938). In this fast~moving, topical espionage thriller, Olivier had

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little to do but smoulder fetchingly as a test pilot, while Richardson enjoyed himself hugely as a whimsical, umbrella-wielding and bowlerhatted secret service agent. Then in 1939 Hollywood beckoned again and in the space of two years Olivier had established himself as an international film star, playing Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights (1939), Maxim de Winter in Rebecca (1939), Mr Darcy in Pride and Prejudice (1940) and Lord Nelson in Lady Hamilton (1940). He was superb in all four parts, winning Academy Award nominations for the first two. All four were quintessentially English properties, which the British cinema might have hoped to tackle, but they were done by Hollywood with all the polish, and imagination of the American industry at its peak. Olivier's British film career can only be summed up as one of wasted opportunity, and it tells us much of the nature of the industry and its lack of adventure that it could not find the vehicle to showcase Olivier's talents as Hollywood did so triumphantly. It may also be that with his magnetism and charisma Olivier did not fit the star types which Britain usually produced and with which it could deal. If Raymond Durgnat is right and you can 'write the social history of a nation in terms of its film stars',36 Britain's self-image in the 1930s was good-natured, soft-spoken, law-abiding, gentlemanly and genially amateur. Britain was certainly adept at producing debonair gentleman heroes and it kept both the British and the American film industries liberally supplied with them. But it is perhaps a reflection of the classbased nature of British society and the British that there were several American star types that had no British equivalent. There were no decent, honest, hard-working, 'ordinary guys', the equivalents of Henry Fonda, Spencer Tracy, Gary Cooper or James Stewart. There were no tough-guy badmen like James Cagney, Humphrey Bogart, George Raft or Edward G. Robinson. Most noticeably Britain was unable to produce the equivalent of the tough, two-fisted professional, the air mail pilot, gold prospector, oil man, racing driver, deep sea fisherman, forest ranger, newspaper correspondent hero, played by such all-American actors as Chester Morris, Richard Arlen, Preston Foster and Richard Dix. It is significant that when Gaumont British needed a rugged engineer for The Tunnel they imported Richard Dix, and when they needed a railroad builder for The Great Barrier they brought over Richard Arlen. The in The Tunnel could not be more contrast between the two pointed. The boss is the American, a sweaty, hairy-chested, he-man, gritty, tough and classless. His friend and assistant, the Englishman played by Leslie Banks, is dependable, quiet, humorous, self-effacing and gentlemanly. Professionalism was looked on askance by the British ruling elite, which prided itself on a public school training, producing gentlemen who were 'trained for nothing but ready for anything'. It was not until the

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1950s that the British cinema would produce in Jack Hawkins an actor whose keynote was his tough professionalism,3? and that too is perhaps part of the story of the film star as indicator of social change, a story which has yet to be written.

Gracie Fields: Consensus Personified

Gracie Fields was more than just a film star. She was a phenomenon. She was a music hall star who by being herself, the indomitable, eternal 'Lancashire Lass', became a national symbol. To the British as a whole in the 1930s, she was simply 'Our Gracie'. She became Britain's highest-paid film star. Ships were named after her. She was honoured in 1938 with the CBE, the first female variety artiste to receive the decoration; in 1979, shortly before her death, she became a Dame of the British Empire. During the 1930s, her tours across England were like royal progresses; her concerts were sell-outs; her records were hits. When in 1939 she was seriously ill, a cartoon by Strube appeared in a national newspaper which showed a little man with a bunch of flowers looking up at a hospital window. The caption said simply 'Our Gracie' and eloquently summed up the popular adulation she enjoyed throughout the decade. The nation held its breath while she underwent two operations. The Queen and major political leaders sent messages of sympathy; 250,000 letters and telegrams poured in from Britain and the Empire wishing her well. When she recovered, the nation rejoiced. 1 What was it that made her so universally beloved? First, there was her talent. She was neither beautiful nor, in her film heyday, young, and paradoxically this endeared her still further. But she combined a phenomenal singing voice, a natural comic talent and an inexhaustible vitality. Her voice was remarkable for its range, power, purity, and tonal shadings, enabling her to sing anything and everything - opera, ballads, hymns, comic songs. She had a bubbling sense of fun which she harnessed to impeccable comic timing, exuberance and an inability to resist sending up the pompous or pretentious. Above all she was natural and real, with accents of none of the stilted artificiality, cultivated poise and her English female acting contemporaries, Many of the songs she performed came to be indelibly associated with her. 'Sally' became her personal theme tune. She provided one anthem for the Depression ('Sing As We Go') and another for the early days of the Second World War ('Wish Me Luck As You Wave Me Goodbye'), But equally popular were her comic songs with their roots in the everyday experience of her working-class audience: the awful family party ('1 Took My Harp to a Party'), the rituals of birth and the naming of children ('Mrs. Binns' twins'), the family awaiting the first visit of the daughter's fiance 169

170 THE STARS

('Fred Fanackapan'), the timorous spinster yearning for wedlock ('In My Little Bottom Drawer'), horticultural pride in a nation of gardeners ('The Biggest Aspidistra in the World'), cinema-going and its impact ('I Never Cried So Much In All My Life'). The more she sang of their familiar Ie€mrlgs and the more they loved her. She enjoyed a magical rapport with her audience, something which is fully revealed in the recording of Gracie performing live at the Holborn Empire in 1933. 2 Her talent is abundantly demonstrated in the range of songs from straight sentimental ballads to gleeful comic songs. But she also carries on a dialogue with her audience, to which they respond with mounting affection and appreciation. 'Remember where you are,' she says in mock reproof as they applaud noisily, only to elicit louder approbation. She gets them to join in 'Sally' with an appeal to shared experience: 'Now, let's forget we're in the Holborn Empire. Let's imagine we're in our front room and we're having a bit of a do. We've had a nice tea - some boiled ham and lettuce and a tin of salmon and we're all right now.' At the end, she puts on a 'posh' voice: 'Ladies and gentlemen, I do want to thank you so very, very much. No I mean it, honest to God.' This elicits prolonged applause and reveals an instinctive sympathy with and understanding of her working-class audience. This indicates the third area of her appeal - her undisguised origins and naturalness, which made her a potent symbol for the masses. She was pure Lancashire and remained so, never going 'posh' and never losing her accent. J. B. Priestley wrote of her in 1934: 'Listen to her for a quarter of an hour and you will learn more about Lancashire women and Lancashire than you would from a dozen books on these subjects. All the qualities are there, shrewdness, homely simplicity, irony, fierce independence, an impish delight in mocking whatever is thought to be affected and pretentious. ,3 Despite her film stardom and her eventual residence in Capri, she never severed her links with her native Rochdale. She testifies to this in her autobiography, saying of Rochdale: 'Though people have described it as a huddled, damp, hard little town, it was never like that to me; it was home and I belonged there.'4 She made Rochdale a household name in the 1930s, easily eclipsing the memory of the town's previously most celebrated citizen - the Victorian statesman John Bright. In 1931 she came to the financial aid of the ailing Rochdale Football Club. In 1933 she did a week of concerts for nothing at the Theatre Royal, Rochdale, to raise money for the unemployed. 5 She stayed not at the best hotel but in a small beer-shop, run by her mother's oldest friend. The Sunday Chronicle reported: 'No Queen in her own country ever received greater homage nor was more ecstatically cheered and adored by her people .... She talked to everyone in Rochdale's own tongue, not with the faintest air of being patronizing but with sheer, obvious enjoyment ... who else in the world could have a

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whole Lancashire town at her feet simply by being herself?,6 In 1938 amid great celebrations she received the freedom of Rochdale. Everyone knew Gracie's story. Born over a chip shop in Rochdale, she had been launched into a singing career by her mother, Jenny, 'the most stagestruck woman in the world,' and as a child sang for coppers and round the Rochdale pubs. After touring with various troupes of child performers, she got work in touring revues and learned her craft the hard way round the provinces. It all paid off when Mr. Tower of London, the show in which she had starred on tour, was booked into the West End in 1922. It established her as a major stage star. The move into films in 1931 was a logical development. Her film career was to be the means by which she reached the four corners of Britain and realized that symbolic status for which her talents and background so well fitted her. In a perceptive article written for World Film News in 1936, Joanna Macfadyen analysed Gracie's appeal to the urban proletariat: She is the apotheosis of all the pleasures of their annual week's holiday from the mills; the clown member of any family who can be relied on to chase away the blues. She was a mill girl and now she has made good ... she is a product of the English industrial revolution; the entertainer who knows all about the seamy side of the lives of her kind but, probably unconsciously, shares with them the philosophy of doing anything, even singing nonsense sadly, rather than thinking angrily, and probably impotently, on the why and how of their colourless everyday.7 Gracie, she said, represented the English 'ideal of high spirits and "the good sort", a favourite character in England with which hordes of English identify themselves .... Gracie's act puts the men in a hearty family mood (no vicarious illicit love affairs here), the women adore her (they share her dress sense, there are no envious wish~fulfilments nor are wrecked marriages the basis of her entertainment) and children enjoy the racket.' Much of this analysis, coupled with Gracie's spectacular personal success story - rise from poverty to stardom via natural talent and hard work - probably also explains her success with the middle-class audiences, enabling her eventually to make the transition from a sectional to a national symbol. For Gracie perfectly embodied the success myth at the heart of stardom which, according to Richard Dyer, 'tries to orchestrate several contradictory elements: that ordinariness is the hallmark of the star (ii) that the system rewards talent and "specialness" (iii) that luck, "breaks", which may happen to anyone typify the career of the star (i)

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and (iv) that hard work and professionalism are necessary for stardom'.s Gracie's roots were in the industrial North, but her rise from there to take the West End by storm enabled her to merge her different followings into one adoring mass. Gracie became a symbol for the nation as a whole in the Thirties perhaps for two main reasons. The first was that she preached a message of hope. In an era of Depression and unemployment at home and wars and rumours of wars abroad, her reaction was that 'never say die' spirit which achieved its finest hour during the Second World War. A look at her film titles reveals a repeated set of injunctions to eschew despair or apathy, anger or revolution - Looking on the Bright Side, Sing As We Go, Look Up and Laugh, Keep Smiling and The Show Goes On. It was a message of courage and cheerfulness, delivered not by a politician or statesman but by one of their own, who knew what they were enduring and whose advice could be trusted. In parodying Victorian ballads like 'Out in the Cold, Cold Snow' and 'Heaven Will Protect an Honest Girl', she was also rejecting maudlin self-pity and exalting as an answer to the problems of the decade a robust and optimistic self-reliance, of which her own career was a paradigm. When, early in the war, Basil Dean put on an ENSA show to promote goodwill between France and Britain, he chose Maurice Chevalier to represent France and Gracie to represent Britain. It was the obvious choice and simply confirmed what was apparent to all. Gracie had become Britannia and this was the second source of her symbolic power. She embodied the spirit and mood of the nation in the 19308. But what was that mood? Britain in the 19308 is often depicted as a deeply divided society, and this view is encapsulated in the popular images of that decade, which amount to a folk memory: images of Hunger Marches and dole queues, of closed shipyards and silent coalpits, of Mosleyite Fascist rallies and volunteers for the Spanish Civil War. But in recent years historians have been putting forward a very different view of the 1930s. 9 For one thing, it seems, Britain was not universally depressed. The old heavy industries of Britain's industrial pre-eminence, mining, shipbuilding, textiles, may have been in decline and with them the areas which sustained these activities. But the Midlands and the South, revitalized by the rise of motor manufacture and the arrival of new light industry, were flourishing. The middle classes were enjoying greater affluence than ever, and overall the standard of living was rising. Income per head in Britain had risen by a third between 1920 and 1939. Food was cheap and made cheaper by the appearance of chain stores. Families were getting smaller and so money went further. Life expectancy rose from forty-five in 1900 to sixty in 1932.

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As A. J. P. Taylor put it: 'Most English people were enjoying a richer life than any previously known in the history of the world: longer holidays, shorter hours, higher real wages.,l0 As for society being politically divided, the position was the exact opposite. The fact of the matter is that the nation had drawn back from confrontation after the General Strike of 1926. Among the unemployed, political apathy rather than activism was the rule. The Wall Street crash and the ensuing financial crisis did not result in the collapse of capitalism and the spontaneous outbreak of world revolution, as the Marxists had predicted. In Britain it led to the election of a National Government in 1931 with a majority of 497 seats, a government ostensibly of all the parties but dominated by the Conservatives, pledged to implement the necessary economic measures to ensure survival and recovery. This government, re-elected in 1935, continued to run the country for the rest of the decade, with an avowed policy of preserving stability and promoting recovery at home and working for peace and disarmament abroad. What the triumph of the National Government indicates and what would-be revolutionaries failed to appreciate was the underlying conservatism and cohesiveness of British society. As a perceptive foreign observer, Franc;ois Bedarida, puts it: 'When faced with a really serious crisis the English have recourse to their own unique form of defence - national consensus"ll But consensus needs promoting, and the Thirties produced three figures who spoke for it and embodied widely admired aspects of Englishness, which were readily communicated by the mass media. If George Orwell is right and he usually is Britain was, if anything, 'a family. It has its private language and its common memories and at the approach of an enemy it closes its ranks.'12 If one continues the family metaphor into the realm of politics, the 1930s produced the perfect grandfather, father and elder sister figures in King George V, Stanley Baldwin, and Gracie Fields, all of whom promoted consensus, co-operation and national unity both in their persons and in their actions. The King certainly saw his own role as that of the head of the family, as he declared in his 1934 Christmas broadcast: 'If I may be regarded as in some true sense the head of this great and widespread family, sharing its life and sustained by its affection, this will be a full reward for the long and sometimes anxious labours of my reign.'13 The King's role was to stress the soundness and continuity of our traditional institutions, to reassure and to reconcile, and no one could have been better fitted for the task, His biographer Sir Harold Nicolson described the King as a man 'who preferred continuity to variety, the familiar to the surprising, the accustomed to the unexpected,.14 He was conservative - with a small c highly conscientious and resolutely old-fashioned, deploring the changes in manners, habits and mores wrought by the Great War. He was devoted to his home and his family, ran his life according to an unvarying routine,

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collected stamps and disliked foreign travel. He was in short a reassuringly fixed point in an all too rapidly changing world, and he sought continuously to maintain the social cohesiveness and national unity of his kingdom. To this end, he issued a statement immediately after the General Strike, calling for reconciliation: At such a moment it is supremely important to bring together all my people .... This task requires the co·operation of all able and well· disposed men in the country .... Let us forget whatever elements of bitterness the events of the past few days may have created, only remembering how steady and how orderly the country has remained. 15 He was also instrumental in securing the formation of the National Government, sending for the leaders of all three parties in 1931 and telling them that he hoped they would form such a government. The historian C. L. Mowat has pronounced the King's intervention decisive~ for 'without the King's appeal, MacDonald, whatever daydreams of a national government he may have had in the past would never have been persuaded to try to form a coalition, and even more important, he could not have suggested that the opposition leaders serve under him whereas the King could and did' .16 The Silver Jubilee celebrations in 1935 were to show how important a figure the King had become and how much in tune he was with the mood of the 1930s. If the 1920s had been the era of revolt against middle· class conventions in matters social, sexual, artistic and political, of revulsion from the men and attitudes responsible for the slaughter of the Great War and of the debunking of eminent Victorians and of Queen Victoria herself, the 1930s looked with longing to Victoria as a symbol of certainty and security in a troubled age, as the phenomenal success of Laurence Housman's play Victoria Regina and Herbert Wilcox's films Victoria the Great and Sixty Glorious Years confirms. A paradigm of this change of mood is perhaps Noel Coward's career. In the Twenties he was the bete noire of the Establishment, with his plays about sex and drugs and his daring revue lyrics mocking home and church and Empire. But in 1931, with Britain going off the gold standard, he produced Cavalcade, a glorification of the class system and its virtues, a patriotic extravaganza which caused audiences to stand and sing the National Anthem ecstatically and Coward himself to declare in his first night curtain speech: 'In spite of the troublous times we are living in, it is still pretty exciting to be English.,17 In the play, all those both above and below stairs in the Marryot household lament the passing of the Old Queen and her era and one of the characters sings a song called 'Twentieth Century Blues'. The virtues and values of the Victorian era were seen to reside in Victoria's grandson, the King. His nearly fatal illness in 1928 and the

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Silver Jubilee celebrations in 1935 revealed the extent of the affection in which he had come to be held amongst his people. It amounted, as Malcolm Muggeridge recalled, 'to adulation ... if anything more prevalent among the lower than the upper classes' .18 Wherever he went in Britain in Silver Jubilee year, he was with choruses of 'For He's a Jolly Good Fellow' until he was prompted to remark with genuine surprise: 'I'd no idea they felt like that about me. I'm beginning to think they must really like me for myself.,19 Harold Nicolson rationalized the feeling by saying: 'In those 25 years his subjects had come to recognize that King George represented and enhanced those domestic and public virtues that they recognized as specifically British virtues. In them they saw reflected and what they cherished as their own individual ideals faith, duty, honesty, courage, common sense, tolerance, decency and truth.'2o Intellectually this may be true, but instinctively the King evoked an emotional response as the decent, hard-working grandfather who was doing his best for the family. It was an image that was confirmed by the wireless. For beginning in 1932 he made the first of his annual Christmas broadcasts to the Empire, and for the first time in British history the nation as a whole was able to hear the voice of its sovereign. To the surprise of some, it was a considerably less pukka voice than that of the average BBC announcer and opened up no gulf of class by its tones. It was a gruff, kindly, reassuring voice, a voice 'devoid of all condescension, artifice and pose' in short it was the voice of a beloved grandfather. If the King was the nation's grandfather, what more convincing father figure could there be than Stanley Baldwin, three times Prime Minister and the effective moving force behind the National Government from 1931 to 1937. Like most of the leading politicians of the 1930s, he was to be branded one of the 'Guilty Men' once war revealed the folly of the policy of appeasement. But the universal denigration of Baldwin which followed his death contrasts markedly with the enormous esteem in which he was held during the Thirties. Winston Churchill, a formidable opponent of Baldwin on many issues, declared of him at the 1935 Party Conference that he had 'gathered to himself a greater volume of confidence and goodwill than any other man I recollect in my long public career,.21 Why was this? Firstly, Baldwin, like the King projected an image of Englishness that was reassuring. He was a veritable John Bull, bluff, honest and commonsensical, modest, decent and honourable, the qualities and virtues of both the country squire and the paternalist head of an old-established family business. All his most publicized interests were designed to further the sense of reassurance he exuded: his mistrust of the intelligentsia - 'a very ugly word for a very ugly thing' his passion for detective stories and cricket, his love of steam trains and railway timetables; his devotion to the countryside; his attachment to his

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pipe. Also, like the King, he was revealed by the wireless and even more by the newsreels to be a trustworthy and even likeable chap with a voice that was calm, wise and unmarked by class accent. But more than this, he stood for the policies that the people wanted and voted for in the Thirties peace and stability. These were themes to which he regularly returned in his speeches. He wrote in 1938: 'I knew that I had been chosen as God's instrument for the work of healing the nation.'22 He regularly reiterated his desire to reunite Disraeli's 'Two Nations' and as the Spectator noted in 1936: 'For more than a dozen years Mr. Baldwin has fought with remarkable success against those influences in Conservatism which would make it a class party narrow in outlook and wedded to the support of indefensible vested interests.,23 His belief in consensus derived from deeply held Christian principles, which underlay a much-praised speech he made in the Commons in 1923 rejecting the use of mass unemployment as a means of solving the economic problems of the nation: Four words of one syllable each are words which contain salvation for this country and for the whole world, and they are 'Faith', 'Hope', 'Love' and 'Work'. No government in this country today which has not faith in the people, hope in the future, love for its fellow-men and which will not work and work and work will ever bring this country through into better days and better times, or will ever bring Europe through or the world through.24 It was typical of his sentiments and his style simple, honest and direct. Baldwin located himself in the powerful rural tradition, which saw the countryside as the timeless and uncorrupted source of England's moral strength. It was a view perfectly summed up by that popular song of World War Two: 'There'll always be an England, while there's a country lane, wherever there's a cottage small beside a field of grain.' Baldwin spoke in the same vein in a celebrated speech on England when he declared:

To me England is the country and the country is England .... The sounds of England, the tinkle of the hammer on the anvil in the country smithy, the corncrake on a dewy morning, the sound of the scythe against the whetstone, and the sight of a plough team coming over the brow of a hill, the sight that has been seen in England since England was a land, and may be seen in England long after the Empire has perished and every works has ceased to function, for centuries the one eternal sight of England .... These are the things that make England. 25 The image he painted was Arcadian and nostalgic. But in fact since the middle of the nineteenth century the bulk of the British population had dwelt in towns and cities. The industrial heartland needed its spokesman too. If the King symbolized the unity of the nation and Baldwin the solid

Dream Palaces The Orlean was the distinctive symbol of 1930s British architecture. 1 (above) The Ode on, Sutton Coldfield, built in 1936 2 (below) The Odeon, Woolwich, built in 1937 Both cinemas are showing British films.

Censorship (1) 3 (above) The censors' attitude to films about industrial relations is embodied in Red Ensign (1934), in which managing director Leslie Banks quietens agitation led by Percy Parsons 4 (below) Although no overt anti~Nazi film was allowed, Jew Suss (1934) with Corrrad Veidt was able to condemn anti-Semitism in an eighteenth-century setting

Censorship (2) 5 (above) The censors' worry about hnperial propaganda in films was justified by the banning in India of The Drum (1938) with Roger Livesey and Sabu after showings of the film provoked riots 6 (below) To avoid a censors' ban, Gaumont British had to remove from East Meets West (1936) offensive sexual content and anti-British comments. Godfrey Tearle, Ballard Berkeley ~nd George Arliss

The Lancashire Britannia Gracie Fields was the apostle of consensus and class harmony. 7 (above) In Sing As We Go (1934), Gracie solved unemployment in the cotton industry 8 (below) In Shipyard Sally (1939), Gracie solved unemployment in the shipbuilding industry

The Holy Fool Gracie's male counterpart was innocent, accident-prone George Formby. 9 (above) George usually triumphed after a succession of humiliations, as in No Limit (1935) 10 (below) In It 's in the Air (1938) George joined the RAF

The Dancing Divinity Jessie Matthews's films celebrated the triumph of middle~class individualism. 11 (opposite) Her first big hit was The Good Companions (1933) with John Gielgud 12 (opposite below) Her most celebrated film was Evergreen (1934) The English Gentleman (1)

13 (right) Robert Donat was the ideal romantic adventurer, as in Knight Without Armour (1937) with Marlene Dietrich 14 (below) Donat's bestloved role was as the idealistic schoolmaster in Goodbye, Mr. Chips (1939)

The English Gentleman (2)

15 (left) Leslie Howard was seen by many as the perfect Englishman, typified by Sir Percy Blakeney in The Scarlet Pimpernel (1935) with Merle Oberon 16 (below) Howard was also the only star to make a career out of playing intellectual heroes, as in Pygmalion (1938) with Scott Sunderland

Visions of the Past 17 (above) The fashion for historical films in the 19308 was set by The Private Life of Henry VIII (1933) with Charles Laughton 18 (below) Victoria the Great (1937) represented the definitive hagiographic account of the 'Old Queen'. Anna Neagle played her both as an old woman and as a young one

Foreign Affairs (1) George Arliss's films advocated a foreign policy of peaceful negotiation and appeasement rather than military adventure. 19 (left) in The Iron Duke (1935), George Arliss as Wellington settles the affairs of France over tea 20 (below) In His Lordship (1936), George Arliss as the Foreign Secretary settles an Arab crisis over tea

Foreign Affairs (2) 21 (right) The Iron Duke (George Arliss) visits Sanders of the River (Leslie Banks) at Sound City. Both films celebrated a British commitment to peace in our time 22 (below) Storm in a Teacup with Rex Harrison satirized a Hitlertype Scottish provost (Cecil Parker)

Things to Come 23-4 The high water mark of anti-war films was Things to Come (1936), which showed Everytown devastated by war and then rebuilt as a planned, scientific society

Preparedness 25 (above) By 1937, Fire over England, with Flora Robson as Elizabeth I, was calling for military preparedness against foreign aggression 26 (below) Our Fighting Navy (1937) with Richard Cromwell beat the drum for navy recruitment

The Working Classes Depiction of the working classes was either .... 27 (above) .... comic, as in The Last Coupon (1932) with Leslie Fuller 28 (below) .... or sentimental, as in Say It With Flowers (1934) with Mary Clare

Social Concern At the end of the decade, some films reflected social concern. 29 (above) The Citadel (1938) with Robert Donat. advocated a National Health Service 30 (below) The Stars Look Down (1939) with Michael Redgrave called for the nationalization of the mines

The State of the Nation 31 (left) The Skin Game (1931) highlighted the tragic consequences of a clash between middle class (Edmund Gwenn) and upper class (C. V. France) 32 (below) The Good Companions (1933) called for consensus and class harmony. Dennis Hoey, Viola Compton, John Gielgud, Percy Parsons, A W. Baskomb, Mary Glynne, Edmund Gwenn, Jessie Matthews, Margery Binner, Richard Dolman

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virtues of the countryman, who would speak for industrial Britain? The answer was Gracie Fields. It was the cinema which completed Gracie's rise to superstardom, and her film career fascinatingly shows the process by which she was transformed from a working·class heroine into a symbol of national consensus. The nature and content of her films changed, so that a potential symbol of working-class discontent was subtly subverted. It would be unrealistic to expect, as some critics in the Thirties apparently did, to see her leading a strike or storming Buckingham Palace, given the rigid censorship structure under which the film-makers operated. But as her films became more and more successful, back street stories gave way to backstage stories. The fact that her producer Basil Dean records no West End success for Gracie's films until The Show Goes On in 1937 suggests a conscious desire to win approval in that quarter and hence a shift of emphasis in subject matter.26 First Gracie was given a succession of theatrical stories, in which her rise to stardom was re-created and she was deliberately metamorphosed from a raw, unrefined mill girl into a glamourized theatrical dame, the very fact of stardom removing her from the exclusive possession of one class and making her the property of all. Secondly, an increasingly patriotic element was injected into her films, via the singing of patriotic songs and optimistic anthems and by the recurrence of the Union Jack, her association with which cemented her identification with the national rather than a class interest. Even the 'rags to riches' theatrical stories had an ideological significance in that they demonstrated the validity of and vindicated the principle that if you had talent and were prepared to work hard, you would make it to the top in society as at presently constituted. The beneficial influence of Gracie on the masses earned the warm approbation of the Conservative writer Major Rawdon Hoare: I am a great admirer of Gracie Fields because her astonishing personality on the screen ... has brought good healthy enjoyment to thousands of workers in Lancashire and elsewhere: she had brought the same to countless other people, but it is in relation to the work-people that I am thinking of her now. In her own way she has done a tremendous amount of good: in the cinemas there is an absence of healthy amusement, there is too much maudlin sex-appeal: but in the performances of Gracie Fields we get a breath of good fresh air and an opportunity for some real laughter. This all to the right spirit of England together clean living, with total absence of anything bordering on the unnatural. 27 Gracie was signed to a contract in 1931 by Basil Dean, head of ATP and he produced her first film, Sally In Our Alley (1931), directed by Maurice Elvey. It demonstrates a definite working·class slant and appeal, and

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shows the essential unglamourized Gracie - the working girl as heroine, complete with broad Lancashire accent, homely cheerful appearance, breezily good-natured and optimistic manner. A fundamental decency, forthrightness and common sense shines through everything she does. Shawls and apron are her costume, a tenement room her milieu. An orphan from Rochdale, working in London, she demonstrates that self~ reliance that becomes characteristic of her roles. Interestingly, she was often seen as an orphan or as someone with hostile, sick or worthless parents or relatives, emphasizing her total lack of self-pity and determination to survive by her own efforts. The setting is recognizably working-class. The Alley, though studiobuilt, accurately encapsulates the street life of the East End of London: gas lamps, grim tenements, lived-in streets, where ragged children play, vast old women in battered hats and shawls gossip and the men queue for the pub to open. The community's centres are the Green Man pub, where we see a drinking competition in progress, and news and gossip being exchanged, and Sam Bilson's coffee shop, where Sally works as a waitress, and which we see complete with steaming urns, chattering patrons and resident piano-player. The film successfully evokes the tightly-knit lowerclass urban community once to be found in the heart of every big city. The film combines two plot-themes. The first is the sort of sentimental romance that Maurice Elvey was expert at handling. Sally Winch (Gracie Fields) and George Miles (Ian Hunter) pledge their love when he goes off to the war. He is posted missing but she remains faithful to his memory. Ten years after the war, he returns, but they are kept apart initially by a series of misunderstandings, ending in a final triumphal reunion. The second theme is the much more contemporary story of the regeneration by Sally of a juvenile delinquent, Florrie Small (Florence Desmond). Florrie is the teenage daughter of a drunken bully, beaten and brutalized by her father. But she is no pathetic waif. For in self-defence she has become a liar and a thief, a work-shy trouble-maker and a movie and dreaming of addict who spends all her time reading film 'going on the pictures'. When Sally defends her against her father and takes her in, she repays the kindness with treachery and abuse. One of the film's high points is the scene in which Sally exorcises the 'evil spirit' in Florrie by encouraging her to smash up all Sally's prized crockery ('I believe that there's something put inside you by all you've been through that's got to come oue). Florrie exhausts herself, bursts into tears and confesses her misdeeds. Thus Sally exercises commonsense psychology to redeem a child not naturally evil but turned bad by environmental circumstances. The film also contains a sharp reminder of class differences. Sally is heard singing in the coffee bar by an upper-class lady out slumming and is invited to entertain at a high society party. It is deemed amusing to have a

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working-class girl perform. She arrives at the party and is at once looked down on because of her clothes, so Lady Daphne puts her into a black, backless evening dress and crimps her hair. Interestingly, this glamourization scene, played absolutely straight in later films, is mocked here, seen as part of a class put-down. Sally, awkward and trying to cover her bare back with a shawl. She sings 'Fred Fanackapan', is warmly applauded as an endearing curiosity and then pointedly ignored. A cheque is slipped to her and the guests resume their dancing, chatting and upper-class posturing. Bewildered at this sudden change of attitude, Gracie grabs a young man from Bacup and starts to dance with him. But he turns out to be a waiter, who is immediately sacked for Sally decides to asks the butler to call her a dancing with a taxi and is again snubbed. The film exposes hermetically sealed class divisions and a patronizing attitude to the working class by their 'betters' which leaves the audience along with Sally angry and uncomfortable. Sally retreats to her own people and during a concert at Sam's is duly reunited with George Miles. The film is perhaps less funny, less polished and less slick than later productions but it has undeniably more 'heart'. Gracie's second film, Looking on the Bright Side (1932), directed by Basil Dean and Graham Cutts, takes up some of the themes of Sally but introduces for the first time the 'showbiz' background that is to become increasingly prominent. Gracie, whose character in the film is called simply Gracie in recognition of her emergence as a star personality, is still homely and indomitable, utterly unglamorous and totally alive. She is a manicurist lodging in an East End tenement with a and her little daughter. Gracie loves a song-writing ladies' hairdresser, Laurie, and to help him get his songs accepted by impresario Oscar Schultz, she goes to a swish cocktail party at the Dorchester, sings the songs and wins great applause. Schultz wants to sign her up for his show but she refuses and returns home. Laurie stays, is signed up and rapidly abandons Gracie for star Josie, well-bred, well-spoken and catty, a veritable model of theatrical sophistication. His inspiration, however, soon dries up and he is sacked. To save his career, Gracie agrees to sing his songs in Schultz's show and is a big hit. She and Laurie are reunited. In distinct contrast to her later films, Gracie here refuses a chance of stardom, is not seen singing on the stge and has no glamorous transformation scene. There is also a pointed contrast drawn between the heartless metropolitan chic of the cocktail party and the spontaneity and warmth of Gracie and her tenement friends. The film is seriously flawed. The handling of the big musical numbers is disjointed, clumsy and inexpert, attempting similar effects to, for instance, Rouben Mamoulian's Love Me Tonight (1932) and failing dismally to carry them off. The leading man, Richard Dolman, is a disaster, playing Laurie as a lisping, lachrymose egotist, who spends the entire film alternately

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biting his lower lip in petulant rage or bursting into floods of tears. In contrast to the touching climax of Sally, there is a finale of unrelieved bathos, calculated to make even the most devoted Gracie fan cringe. She gives a party to celebrate her success singing his songs. She makes a speech with tears pouring down her cheeks: 'I feel like Cinderella. A fairy waved her wand and here I am at a party. I'm perfectly happy. Can't you see how happy I am.' In his room, Laurie pounds out 'Looking on the Bright Side' on the piano, sobbing as he does so. Everyone in the courtyard starts singing and dancing to the tune, he appears on his balcony and faces Gracie on hers. The balconies are pushed together and they embrace. 'Your success is my success, my dear,' says Gracie, now weeping for joy. There are, despite these drawbacks, some compensations. The songs are marvellous and Gracie performs them superbly. The intricate tenement set is truly impressive, its size and extent demonstrated by variations in camera angle. There is a marvellously funny supporting performance from Julian Rose as the bulbous, good·hearted Jewish impresario with a nice line in Goldwynisms ('You're making mountains out of moleskins'). There is also a gloriously funny self~contained comic interlude, the forerunner of several in later films, in which Gracie gives full rein to her comic gifts, when, sacked from her manicurist's job, she becomes a policewoman. She is chased by dogs, gets caught up in the traffic she is trying to direct and is finally discovered skipping with some children and put on report. Basil Dean noted: 'For all its crudities, Looking on the Bright Side did give Gracie ample opportunity to indulge in a riotous sense of fun, interspersed with slabs of unashamed English sentiment which pleased the popular audience mightily.,28 This Week of Grace (1933), again directed by Maurice Elvey, continued the class conflict theme but for the first time actually promoted the idea of consensus. Gracie plays factory girl Grace Milroy, who is put in charge of a run-down country estate for a year by the eccentric Duchess of Swinford. Gracie sets the estate to rights, puts the snobbish aristocrats in their place and wins the hand of the Duchess's nephew, Clive, Viscount Swinford (Henry Kendall), in marriage. 'You're different from us,' he tells her. 'You're real.' As a result of a misunderstanding, Gracie comes to believe that Clive has only married her because he thinks she has money. So she leaves him and goes on the stage as part of a chorus-line. But a reconciliation is effected when Gracie discovers that Clive has abandoned his playboy life of ease and opened a private car-hire firm. Unusually the film places Gracie securely in the bosom of a warmhearted, cheerful, argumentative family with a huge appetite for life. They live in a terraced house in Pennythorn Street ('Very matey - even the cops go round in couples'). Her father, Bill (Frank Pettingell), runs a garage when he is not 'down the pub' with his gormless son, Joe (Duggie Wakefield). Her mother, Mary Rose (Minnie Rayner), is a vast, hard-

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working, good-natured gossip. Much of the humour of the central part of the film derives from their eruption into the sedate life of Swinford Castle. The Times felt that there were 'too many passages in which a crude and uncomfortable humour is extracted from the awkwardness of the plebeian in high life,.29 But the sympathies of the film are entirely with this splendid rumbustious family. The film takes considerable pleasure from the discomfiture of toffee-nosed socialites and in caricaturing such stock upper-class figures as the crusty colonel, the twittering vicar, the designing mother and the snooty fiancee. But the film also makes it clear that both sides have something to learn. Gracie acquires an education with a crash course in English literature provided by the kindly castle librarian (John Stuart) and Clive discovers real life and hard work ('Better a good chauffeur than a dud statesman'). Kine Weekly declared that the film consolidated Gracie's position as 'England's premier entertainer'.30 This position may well have been threatened, however, by her next film, Love, Life and Laughter (1934), her last with director Maurice Elvey. It is by any standard easily her worst film and prompted her to demand script approval on future films. Hopefully described in the credits as an 'extravaganza', it reveals a crass attempt to move Gracie squarely into the mainstream of escapist cinema by furnishing her with a plot which is an unimaginative amalgam of the two most well-worn story-lines in Thirties British cinema - the 'show biz' success story and the Ruritanian romance. Gracie plays barmaid Nellie Gwynn, who is discovered singing in her pub and becomes an instant film star. She then has a brief romance with runaway Prince Charles Adolphus of Granau (John Loder), whom she sadly but dutifully renounces when he has to return to his country to become King. This trite tosh was glumly directed by Maurice Elvey, who told the story without style or conviction, and with little comedy. He succeeded only, as The Times put it, 'in the stupendous task of dampening a vitality which has always seemed to be undampable,.31 It was the first of three films to team Gracie with Old Etonian John Loder, a decision taken by Basil Dean, who 'thought it an amusing idea to play his stolid good nature and perfect manners opposite the forthrightness of a Lancashire mill girl.,32 Apart from being 'an amusing idea', it also had the effect of promoting romance across the class barrier and thus furthering implicitly the idea of national consensus. Sing As We Go (1934), arguably Gracie's finest film, took her back for the first time to her natural milieu Lancashire, and provided her with her first really worthwhile script since Sally In Our Alley. In a shrewd move, Basil Dean brought in J. B. Priestley, whom Robert Graves later described as 'The Gracie Fields of Literature', to provide a script and Dean himself directed it. 33 The script was basically a collection of sketches, but it dealt with a current problem (unemployment) and it was true in essence to working-class life as filtered through the music hall tradition, so

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beloved by both Priestley and Gracie. The film opens with the closing of Greybeck Mill. The reaction of the workers is typified by Grace Platt, who declares, 'If we can't spin, we can still sing,' and she leads the workers out with a lively rendering of 'Sing As We Go'. Gracie responds to being out of work by literally 'getting on her bike' and setting out for Blackpool to seek seasonal employment. Priestley knew his Blackpool and described it vividly in English Journey, calling it the 'great roaring spangled beast'.34 By shooting much of the film on location in the town, Basil Dean captured this image and the atmosphere of Blackpool indelibly, giving Gracie for the first time the genuine and recognizable setting her talent deserved. The action takes place against the background of the Tower Ballroom and the Tower Circus, the Pleasure Beach and the new open-air swimming pool. The rituals of life in the seaside boarding house and at the annual Winter Gardens convention of the Staghunters, an affectionate parody of the Buffaloes and the Masons, are precisely and amusingly re-created. Gracie runs the gamut of the Blackpool entertainment industry, demonstrating her versatility and resilience in a succession of amusingly observed vignettes. She begins as maid in a boarding house run by the fearsome Mrs Clotty, whose timid, henpecked husband laughs for the first time for years when Gracie empties a bowl of rhubarb over the head of the local Lothario and is sacked. She takes over for a drunken clairvoyante, Madame Osiris, has a spell as a human spider in a sideshow and loses her voice repeatedly singing 'Just a catchy little tune' as a song-plugger. In romantic terms, Basil Dean seems to have seen Gracie as 'the lovelorn clown'. For just as she gives up the prince whom she loves for the sake of his country in Love, Life and Laughter, so she gives up Hugh Phillips (John Loder), the mill-owner's son whom she loves in Sing As We Go, when she realizes he loves her friend Phyllis. Far from glamourizing Gracie, Sing As We Go sees Gracie dunked in the swimming pool and then entered, bedraggled and dishevelled, for the Bathing Beauty contest, causing a near riot which she placates by 'In My Little Bottom Drawer'. But there is a happy ending when a new miracle process is discovered, Gracie persuades a tycoon to invest in it, and Greybeck Mill reopens. Gracie is appointed welfare officer and leads the workers back with Union Jacks flying and a brass band playing 'Sing As We Go'. An expert blend of humour, sentiment and pathos, the film gives admirable scope to Gracie's talents as both comedian and Viewed today, it stands as a remarkably vivid and monument to that traditional British institution - the seaside holiday - and also to the promotion of consensus and hope which have already been isolated as the key elements of Gracie's message. The film gives no explanation for the unemployment. It comes almost as an 'act of God'. But it affects worker (Grace Platt) and boss (Hugh Phillips) equally. In Blackpool they join forces to look for the tycoon

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who it is hoped will invest in the new process that will save the mill. It is Gracie who finds and convinces him, indicating both that initiative and self-reliance by the workers will work and that capitalism has a human face. Gracie's send-up of a sniffy clerk at the Labour Exchange and her running duel with policeman Stanley Holloway are the only challenges to authority in the film and are entirely lighthearted. In other words the system is fine. It has just been going through a bad patch. The answer is to 'sing as we go'. As the Birmingham Mail reviewer noted, the film 'captured the spirit of good humour and optimism which alone has prevented the legions of the depressed and dispossessed in smitten industrial areas from succumbing to the tragedy surrounding them'. 35 Look Up and Laugh (1935), the second film scripted by Priestley and directed by Dean for Gracie, marks a very real shift in the nature of her films. For the first time she is not a working-class working girl. In her previous films, she was waitress, manicurist, factory hand, barmaid and mill girl. Here she is from the outset a variety artiste. She is petite bourgeoise, her father having a big house and a housekeeper, financed from the profits of his market trading. In a very real sense she is moving from being a symbol of the working classes to being something more abstract - a symbol of the nation and all that is best in British character. The Times put it very perceptively in its review of the film: Mr. Basil Dean has skilfully designed the film ... to bring out the most interesting aspects of Miss Gracie Fields' character, her gusto and good temper, her candid sentimentality, her readiness to defend herself and her friends all pomp and privilege, and, in fact, all those qualities which make her so excellent a representative of the people. For it is as a representative of the people that she now appears ... the sentiment is richly plebeian; there is a strong flavour of liberty, of equality, and, what is even more remarkable, of fraternity. But it is emphatically an indigenous sense of freedom that we are invited to admire; these true-born English men of the market are almost absurdly native, as indeed, is the whole film.36 It is perhaps rather as the champion of the middle-class small shopkeeper than as the tribune of the people that Gracie is depicted here. Indeed the film looks like a prototype of the post-war Ealing comedies like Passport to Pimlico, in which a lower-middle-class community band together to resist the excesses of some monolithic national organization. The introduction establishes the patriotic bona fides of the heroine, Grace Pearson. She appears driving a car, with a little Union Jack flying from the bonnet and singing the theme tune 'Look Up and Laugh'. This establishes her as affluent enough to own a car, hardly a working-class attribute in the Thirties, and seeing a patriotic need to keep cheerful, in line with the message of Sing As We Go.

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Gracie returns to her native town of Plumborough to find that Belfer (Alfred Drayton), a tyrannical store-owner, wants to demolish the old market and build another branch of his store in its place. Belfer says the market is old-fashioned and unpopular; Gracie counters that it is used by the people. When her father, the stall-holders' leader, is incapacitated by a stroke, Gracie takes over and leads the fight of the stall-holders against the big combine, turning down the offer of a West End stage job to do so. They are forced eventually to stage a sit-in at the market. Belfer gets the Council to cut off gas, light and heat and they face defeat until it is discovered that the market is licensed by a charter of King Edward III. The is lifted and the market is saved. cleverly conceived and immaculately There are several comic executed, the high point being an extended and cumulatively funny sequence in which Gracie and her cohorts sabotage the opening of Belfer's new store. But the film provides no romantic interest for Gracie. Her role is to lead the resistance by the community of small traders to the tyranny of the big businessman. But the final message is one of reconciliation. Belfer, the upstart nouveau ricke, becomes Mayor, thus being accommodated by the existing hierarchy; but in return he accepts the existence of the market, and the people march into it singing 'Look Up and Laugh'. The gates are closed and Gracie finds herself outside. With a sad smile, she gets into her car and drives off back to her stage career. This emphasizes the gulf that has opened up between Gracie and her people. She is no longer one of them. She is now of the stage and belongs to the world. But to help solve her people's she will return, whenever needed, problems. The transmutation of Gracie from working-class working girl to stage star is crucial. For it takes her from a recognizable world of back streets, tenements, factories and pubs into the never-neverland of the backstage romance. Her two final films for Ealing, Queen of Hearts (1936) and The Show Goes On (1937), both inhabit this timeless terrain, pitching their appeal squarely at an audience embracing all classes. Queen of Hearts is pure 'Cinderella' stuff, with Gracie as stage-struck Wigan-born seamstress Grace Perkins. She helps stage star Derek Cooper (John Loder) avoid prosecution for drunken driving and gets an audition for the 'Queen of Hearts' stage show. After various trials and tribulations, she becomes a star and is united with Derek. In a sense it is a rerun of Love, Life and Laughter, with Loder as a theatrical rather than a Ruritanian Prince Charming. The difference is that it is much better done than the previous film. It was the first of Gracie's films to be directed by Monty Banks, who was to become her second husband. Banks, Italian-born and American-educated, was a knockabout comedian and prolific director of low-budget British comedies, notably George Formby'S first two films for producer Basil Dean, No Limit and Keep Your Seats Please.

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As a director, Banks had enormous zest, invention and humour, and Queen of Hearts is plentifully imbued with these ingredients. His hand can be clearly seen in the stream of inventive comic business and in the extended slapstick sequences. Particularly well~done are an Apache dance in which Gracie is swung round, dragged by her hair, knocked about and thrown through a window; a car chase full of speeded~up action and disastrous encounters with buildings and other vehicles; and a final backstage chase with the police causing havoc as they try to arrest Gracie during a performance. Even more significant ideologically is the deliberate glamourization of Gracie. In Sally In Our Alley glamourization had been seen as an upper~ class attempt to subvert her working-class naturalness and had been mocked. Her other films had stressed her resolute lack of glamour. But Queen of Hearts deliberately and straightforwardly shows her transformation from humble seamstress to glittering stage star. We are given generous extracts from her show. She is resplendent in eighteenth-century costume, makeup and wig, and backed by a chorus of harlequins and Venetian soubrettes, when she 'Do You Remember My First Love Song'. Later she sings 'Queen of Hearts' backed by a fully uniformed Ruritanian regiment. 'It's all been a wonderful dream,' declares Gracie in her curtain speech, and this is the keynote of the film - pure wishfulfilment. It is admittedly a vastly entertaining confection and generously displays Gracie's talents. But unlike most of her previous films, it is essentially rootless and contains little which ordinary people would recognize from their own existence. Gracie's final film for ATP, The Show Goes On, retained the backstage 'rags to riches' theme and was significantly her most successful film yet at the box-office, indicating perhaps that the producers had captured that vital middle ground they sought. Basil Dean himself provided the screen story, which contained recognizable elements of Gracie's own career in it, and he took over again as her director. The film shows him at his best, It is full of confidently evoking the world of the theatre in all its acutely observed detail, comic business and snatches of authenticsounding dialogue, the legacy of a lifetime's experience of the theatre. It is this rich quota of incidental observation that does much to redeem the overly familiar plot-line. Gracie plays Sally Lee, an aspiring chorus girl whose stern Hindlebury father disapproves of the Her voice is heard and her career taken in hand by a consumptive composer, Martin Frazer (Owen Nares). Although they later become estranged, she feels it her duty when he falls ill to sacrifice her big chance and go with him to recuperate. But he behaves badly towards her to compel her to stay behind. She does stay and becomes a star; he dies in California. The details of Sally'S theatrical apprenticeship echo Gracie's own - the

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chorus line in a tatty pantomime with a drunken principal boy, a windswept pier-end concert party where the show 'dies the death', a hostile audience in a provincial variety theatre, the round of the agents' offices, the horrors of 'theatrical digs' and endless travelling in Third Class railway carriages. The culmination of the film, however, is the inevitable glamourization of Gracie, her metamorphosis into a fully fledged star and her apotheosis in a spectacular West End show. But in keeping with her star status, she also demonstrates her role as super-patriot. When she is seeing Martin off on the Queen Mary, she sees a troopship anchored nearby and sings to them from the quayside, 'You've Got to Smile When You Say Goodbye'. The soldiers join in the song before sailing off to fight for King and Country. She has become part of the Establishment, her role now to minimize class differences, stress social mobility by talent and channel all energies into national consensus. Gracie is on top form in the film, her naturalness and vigour again pointed up by the essential artificiality of her co~star, former stage matinee idol Owen Nares, who plays the doomed Martin Frazer in a stilted drawing-room theatrical style. Although the film shares the same theme as Queen of Hearts, Basil Dean's approach is markedly and characteristically different from that of Monty Banks. Dean's comedy is the comedy of character and situation, lacking Banks' penchant for slapstick. There is also an injection of that pathos which Dean, unlike Banks, associated with Gracie's screen character. Here her stardom is achieved at the cost of personal associated with the break with Martin and his eventual death. A phenomenon like Gracie could not of course be ignored by Hollywood. But her quintessential Englishness presented a problem. To internationalize her would be to destroy the source of her magic - the roots planted deep in working-class Lancashire. However in 1938 20th Century-Fox took the plunge and signed her for four films at a salary of £200,000, which was described as 'the highest salary ever paid to a human being'. Gracie visited Hollywood but saw the dangers only too clearly. She said: I have always been afraid that if I came to Hollywood to work, they'd make me half and half sort of, and they mightn't use the right halves either.37 So she persuaded Fox to let her make her first films in Britain. But her first film for them, We're Going to be Rich (1937), fulfilled all the misgivings of her fans. It showed her umistakably going 'Hollywood' in a South African Gold Rush musical, set in the 1880s and scripted by the prolific writer of Westerns James Edward Grant. Two imported Hollywood stars, Victor McLaglen and Brian Donlevy, co-starred with her, though Monty Banks directed. Gracie played Kit Dobson, a music hall singer

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known as 'The Lancashire Lark', who is torn between her feckless and irresponsible husband, 'Dobbie' (Victor McLaglen), and a sympathetic American saloon-owner (Brian Donlevy). Eventually she settles for her husband, abandons her plans to return home and leaves with him for the goldfields. Film Weekly summed up the dissatisfaction felt with the film: The tremendously vital Gracie Fields of the music halls and even of her earlier films has been toned down to such a degree that one can say for the first time, Gracie is part of the film, not its impetus and reason for existence. 38 The film glamourized the profit motive of Imperialism in line with her growing identification with official ideology. But it removed her fatally from England and her roots and emerged as an imitation Western that was weaker in the action department than its Hollywood counterpart, lacked the vigour and conviction of the genuine article and in the end left one with the impression that it was a script rejected by Mae West or Marlene Dietrich that had been made over for Gracie. The experience of We're Going to be Rich was a salutary one, and Gracie's next film, Keep Smiling (1938), returned to the backstage milieu of her last two Ealing films and to the slapstick that Monty Banks did so well. The result was a charming and very funny escapist entertainment, with Gracie as Gracie Gray, a variety artiste who gets together various out of work troupers to form a travelling variety company, demonstrating as we go . Their still that initiative, self-reliance and the operations are dogged by a jealous rival, Sneed, who tries ultimately to sabotage their show by kidnapping the star attraction, the pianist Sigani. But Gracie and her chums rescue Sigani from the pier-end Crazy House, where he is held prisoner, the show is a success and Gracie marries her musical director, Bert, played by an improbably genteel Roger Livesey. directed by For her final British film, Shipyard Sally (1939), Monty Banks, Gracie returned to the territory of Sing As We Go, but in such a way as to confirm her transformation into a national symbol. Gracie plays Sally Fitzgerald, an unsuccessful variety artiste, who with her father, Major Fitzgerald (Sydney Howard), takes over a Clydebank pub. When the shipyards close during the recession, Gracie is so generous with food and drink to the unemployed that the pub is soon on the verge of ruin. The government appoint a commission of enquiry into shipbuilding and Gracie urges the men to petition for work ('Britain owes you a lot. Demand work!'). Gracie is entrusted with the task of delivering the petition to the Commission's chairman, Lord Randall. The rest of the film consists of her attempts to get to see him - a visit in male clothes to his allmale club, an impersonation of an American singer at a party and finally, a country house weekend. Eventually she presents the petition ('They've

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been loyal to their country and their country should be loyal to them'). But believing it to have been rejected, she and her father return to Clydebank. There they find the flags flying, the band playing and the people cheering. Lord Randall, in response to the petition, has recommended the re-opening of the shipyards. The film sets the seal on Gracie's transformation into Britannia. The film deals with unemployment but at a time when the re~armament programme was cancelling the problem. The framework of the story is staunchly patriotic. It opens with the launching of the Queen Mary to the strains of 'Rule Britannia' and closes with Gracie singing 'Land of Hope and Glory' as the men return to work and there is a montage of ships being launched amid a forest of waving Union Jacks. The solution to unemployment is seen as an appeal to the good nature of the government and not any revolutionary act. A Communist chauffeur appears in the film, denouncing the ruling class, but he is gently mocked and his revolutionary solution is clearly disavowed. Gracie's role as mediator between and reconciler of capital and labour could not have been more clearly demonstrated than it is by Shipyard Sally. There were many attacks in the 1930s on Gracie's role in the cinema, in view of her popularity with the working classes. Her films were criticized for their unreality, as in a famous review of 1934 by C. A. Lejeune of the Observer, who, criticizing Gaumont British's decision to spend much money and effort on a film of Jew Silss, remarked: With all the sympathy in the world for the suppressed Jew, I fancy that there are other problems worthy of being tackled at some expense by the native film industry. At the cost of being repetitious, I suggest that there is still unemployment, there is still shipbuilding, and there is still farming. We have an industrial north that is bigger than Gracie Fields running round a Blackpool funfair. 39 Graham Greene, reviewing Shipyard Sally in the Spectator in 1939, wrote: All Miss Fields' films seem designed to show sympathy for the working class and an ability to appeal to the best circles; unemployment can always be wiped out by a sentimental song, industrial unrest is calmed by a Victorian ballad and dividends are made safe for democracy.4o Such comments are in line with the constant complaints in the intellectual film journals about the lack of realism in British films. These attacks were answered by J. B. Priestley, who agreed that working~class life was neglected in films, but added: This does not mean that I am in favour of a policy of giving us great slabs of English working class life, miles of celluloid showing us factories and engineering shops, folks sitting down to endless meat teas

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and a dreary round of housework, machine-minding, football matches and whistdrives. 41 He thought that the novel was a better vehicle for this than the film, which needed, in his view, 'a bit of glamour, an increased tempo, a touch of the fantastic, people who are more vivid than the ordinary run of folk: in short it demands a bonus somewhere'. This was the philosophy that underpinned the stories he provided for Gracie. It is now clear that Sing As We Go, for instance, is not as negligible as Lejeune and the rest would have us believe. David Robinson perceptively defended it in 1964: The interest of Sing As We Go is now perhaps less in her clowning than in the clear intention of Basil Dean the director and J. B. Priestley who wrote the film to be true to the lives of the audience for whom they were working. Admittedly this fairy tale of factory life is no documentary about the depression period; but the film at least acknowledges unemployment, and back-to-back housing, and its location shooting in Blackpool has a which evokes more of Northern working class life than many a forgotten GPO documentary.42 The fact that the film is set in Blackpool and not Greybeck Mill does not invalidate its reality. The seaside funfair world with its brassy gaiety and feverish activity was a tangible escape from the realities of the Depression. But the working class knew it was an escape and viewed it as such. Gracie's among the familiar scenes of the 'Wakes Week' excursionists were only heightened versions of their own remembered exploits. They were thus part of the reality rather than a substitute for it. The film fully acknowledges this in a poignant song which Gracie sings called 'Love Fools You' during which all the lights of the funfair go out. It is the end of the holidays and time to go back to work. At bottom, what counts is Gracie herself. Her personality transcends the content of the films. As Basil Wright noted in a review of The Show Goes On: 'Gracie really does represent a common denominator for those millions of English folk who like humour and sentiment of the type known as homely. Her personality is not merely powerful; it represents an intimacy with each audience that can arise only out of the true traditions of English music ha11.,43 Gracie's spirit and personality remained true to the people. Her naturalness, her stoicism in the face of defeat and disappointment, her cheerfulness, her innate common sense and fundamental all endeared her to the working-class audience. Whatever else may have changed in her films, that never did. Significantly, it was the intellectuals who criticized her films for not being realistic enough. But the mass cinema-going audience did not want the realism of Depression and international instability. They went to the cinema to escape it. The value

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of Gracie was that she was one of them but could rise above it all. If they had felt she was betraying them, they would have shunned her. They did not. Instead they took her to their hearts, suggesting that by embodying national consensus she really did represent something the people wanted. In the last resort that is the evidence that counts.

George Formby: The Road from Wigan Pier

When George Formby died in 1961, the Manchester Guardian rightly compared his popularity to that of Gracie Fields: The two Lancashire comedians in fact had much in common: the characters they created might have been man and wife, the one springing from Wigan, the other from Rochdale, with such pride in their roots that they never let us forget them. 1 George and Gracie shared certain qualities that were at a premium during the depression years of the 1930s and, with little alteration, during the war cheerfulness and indomitability. Although George did not have the repertoire of 'Keep your peeker up' songs 'Count your blessings and smile' was one of a handful in the Fieldsian vein of 'Sing as we go' - his catch-phrase 'Turned out nice again' conveyed the same irrepressible message. There was also the ineradicable Lancashireness. George had a wide range of songs that stressed it ('Emperor of Lancashire', 'A Lancashire Romeo', 'The Lancashire Toreador', 'A Lad fra' Lancasheer') as well as an accent as thick and unmistakable as hotpot. Although, unlike Gracie, he was not born in poverty, he was born in Wigan, which was the next best thing. He was the son of George Formby Sr, the much-loved music hall star billed as 'The Wigan Nightingale'. George Sr's catch-phrase 'Coughing better tonight' made light of the chest condition that killed him at the early age of forty-four. By then he had provided a comfortable background and respectable upbringing for young But George Sr, born illegitimate and learning his trade as a singing beggar, had known grinding poverty and out of it had created an act deeply rooted in and responsive to the realities of working-class life. George Sr invented Wigan Pier, which George Orwell immortalized in the title of his classic study of the depressed areas and the unemployed. In George Sr's coining, it expressed a grim irony by conferring on a smoky industrial town the ambiance of the seaside where for just two weeks a year the saturnalia of the 'Wakes' provided escape and respite. But as Old Etonian George Orwell was going there in search of real life, George Formby Jr - in the tradition of working-class boys made good - was escaping from it to enjoy the fruits of success in more affluent surroundings. 2 191

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George Sr also created the character of John Willie, the gormless Lancashire lad in baggy trousers, tight jacket and bowler hat, a figure that George Jr was to tum into a universal symbol. Colin MacInnes summed it up when he accorded to Formby as others accorded to Fields the role of incarnating the symbol of the age. 3 But where Gracie was Britannia, George was Everyman, 'the urban "little man" defeated - but refusing to admit it'. He was to that extent Gracie's counterpart if not her male equivalent. Each of them represented so fully defined a personality that in almost all his films George played a character called George, just as Gracie played a character called Gracie or, after her theme song, Sally. One of his principal characteristics was his innocence. It gave him the invulnerability, almost the sanctity, of the 'holy fool'. W. J. Ingoe, in the Catholic Herald, put his finger on it when he defined George's character as 'a platoon simpleton, a mother's boy, the beloved henpeck, the father who cannot hang a picture. Underlying his everyday follies, there is the sublime wisdom of the ordinary fool who loves and trusts the world.,4 It was an innocence that was essentially childlike, as were many of his reactions, which explains why George was as popular with children as he was with adults. The cry 'Ooh muther' which he emitted whenever in danger and the gleeful 'Aha, never touched me' when he escaped his pursuers were the reactions of a child. He even put his tongue out at his pursuers on occasions. He had the trusting nature, the sunny optimism and survival instinct of the child. It is a star type which has particularly appealed to cinema audiences, with George being succeeded in the 1950s by Norman Wisdom and in the 1960s by Charlie Drake who, although they both played for pathos rather more than George ever did, combined the appeal of the proletarian little man and the lost child at large in the grown-up world. If George's innocence was childlike, his attitude to sex can only be described as juvenile. The innuendo of the saucy songs he sang is not the ribald knowingness of sexual cavaliers like Max Miller, it is the almost childlike variety that finds words like 'bum' and 'knickers' sources of endless hilarity. It is part and parcel of an adolescent sexuality, the counterpart of the bravado and sauciness of the songs being a basic shyness and inexperience. For all his 'naughty' lyrics. George revealed in his bashful devotion to all the heroines of his films and in lines like 'She's absolutely wonderful and marvellous and beautiful' in 'I'm Leaning on a Lamp Post at the Corner of the Street' a youthful romanticism. So, shy, gauche, accident~prone George was a far readier figure for general identification than the unashamed sexual athletes who were his potential rivals and who alienated more respectable sections of the mass audience. Max Miller and Frank Randle both made strings of films and topped the bill in music hall but they never achieved the nationwide popularity of George. This may well be because the scrofulous old satyr, frothing with

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ale and senile lust, that Randle so often projected on stage, and Max Miller's persona of shameless Cockney Casanova, the ultimate 'saloon-bar Priapus', made too narrow and specific an appeal to achieve that universal symbolic status that George attained. 5 As with Gracie, George's songs were another continuing part of his appeal. He recorded 189 of them but they had a very different attraction from those of Gracie. They were the musical equivalent of the seaside comic postcard. Michael Balcon, who produced Formby's later films at Ealing Studios, testified to their importance, when he wrote: 'We used to gnash our teeth at ... the difficulty of integrating these numbers into the film. We even tried leaving them out, but the Formby public would not have it. No comedy songs, no audience.'6 The importance of the songs, as of the postcards, is that they dealt very largely with sex, a subject of fundamental importance which was not allowed to surface elsewhere in popular culture. In his essay on the art of Donald McGill, George Orwell, that most sensitive and perceptive of observers of popular culture, noted that the comic postcard was preoccupied with sex. 'More than half, perhaps three quarters of the jokes, are sex jokes.,7 But it was sex as escape valve rather than prescribed lifestyle, as Orwell discovered: When one examines McGill's postcards more clearly, one notices that his brand of humour only has meaning in relation to a fairly strict moral code. Whereas in papers like Esquire for instance or La Vie Parisienne, the imaginary background of the jokes is promiscuity, the utter breakdown of all standards, the background of the McGill postcard is marriage. The four leading jokes are nakedness, illegitimate babies, old maids and newly married couples, none of which would seem funny in a really dissolute or even 'sophisticated' society ... and this reflects, on a comic level, the working class outlook which takes it as a matter of course that youth and adventure almost indeed, individual life - end with 8 For as Orwell went on to observe, 'next to sex, the henpecked husband is the favourite joke', and the postcards enshrined the views that there was no such thing as a happy marriage, that wives were always dominant and that there was no intermediate stage between the amorous honeymooning couple and the safely married couple, consisting of a bossy, all~powerful wife and a henpecked husband. 9 In these caricatured with their own screen personalities sharpened, it is perhaps possible even to see, as the Manchester Guardian suggested, George and Gracie as the 'typical Lancashire married couple' as depicted by music hall, postcard and comic song. The whole subject of sex, repressed in polite society and genteel middleclass culture, surfaced in such archetypal working-class areas as seaside

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postcards and music hall. Orwell made a conscious link between the two) and these influences came together in George's comic songs.lO Though Gracie's 'Biggest Aspidistra in the World' is perhaps the ultimate hymn to phallic symbolism, rather dwarfing George's 'Little Stick of Blackpool Rock', the usual mode of her songs was the cheerful/inspirational rather than the saucy/sexy. An examination of George's songs, however, reveals the predominance of just those subjects identified by Orwell as the most popular in seaside postcards - nakedness, illegitimate babies, old maids and honeymoon couples. Many of the songs combined all four topics along with the full range of postcard stereotypes - fat ladies, mean Scotsmen, randy widows and amorous vicars. 'You've Got Something There', for instance, includes Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden (nakedness), a village maid with her illegitimate baby in a pram, the amorous Widow Brown getting through five husbands, 'Big Fat Miss Jones' oozing in every direction off the chair, a gold-digging chorus girl hooking a millionaire, and what is underneath Jock McGregor's kilt. 'Springtime's Here Again' features courting couples, girls in scanty clothes, an amorous curate, Mrs. Brown and the lodger, a hopeful old maid and the family tom cat. There are entire songs about underwear ('You Can't Go Wrong in These'), honeymooners ('On the Wigan Boat Express') and fat ladies ('Bunty's Such a Big Girl Now - Her Future's Sticking Out Behind'), the latter confirming Orwell's view that 'a recurrent, almost a dominant motif in comic postcards is the woman with the stick-out behind,.l1 The pursuit of sex is acknowledged to be on the mind of the healthy young proletarian but it has its limitations. Everyone is after it in 'Me Auntie Maggie's Remedy', one of many euphemisms for sex in the Formby oeuvre, but the song warns: 'I knew a girl who was putting on weight in a place where it just shouldn't be', reminding of the danger of illegitimate children. 'Hi-Tiddly-Hi-Ti Island' tells of a sexual paradise where there is nude bathing, free love and after two weeks you expire from an excess of pleasure, but it ends with the legitimizing line 'I'm taking the wife for a fortnight's stay'. Phallic symbolism is recurrent, in 'My Little Stick of Blackpool Rock', 'With My Little Ukelele in my Hand', 'My Grandad's Flanelette Nightshirt' and 'Under the Blasted Oak'. But often the attitude is one of braggadocio rather than actual performance. 'A Lad fra' Lancasheer', for instance, contains the revealing verse: I met a girl from London when she sat on Blackpool Pier She said could tell, I'm a lad fra' Lancasheer, She said are you a nudist, so I blushed and said 'No fear, I'm covered up like a lad fra' Lancasheer.'

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I whispered 'I'll be nudist if you'll be the same, my dear,' She said 'no fear, with a lad fra' Lancasheer'. The corollary of this boastfulness is to be seen in two of the other strongly present elements in the Formby songs: on the one hand, and sexual inexperience and, on the other, voyeurism. Shyness is the subject of songs like 'I'm Shy' and 'I Don't Like' and is emphasized in a film title, Much Too Shy. Sexual inexperience is referred to directly in 'Oh, dear, Mother, I Didn't Know What to Do', and even 'A Lancashire Romeo' contains the line 'I am shy and so I bought a book on how to make love in twenty easy lessons', Voyeurism is so common in the songs that one critic has called 'the troubadour of voyeurism'. 12 'When I'm Cleaning Windows' relates the amorous sights observed through windows by the eagle-eyed window cleaner. It was so popular that there was a second version, listing yet more sights. 'Mr. Wu's a Window Cleaner Now' celebrated the Chinese laundryman as voyeur, and 'Delivering the Morning Milk' told of the sights seen by the inquisitive milkman. There was even a song about the voyeur's trophy book, 'In My Little Snapshot Album', which contained photographs of couples kissing, a nudist camp and the vicar's wife chasing the curate. It underlines the essentially moralistic basis of the whole picture postcard approach, a moral which could be summed up as 'you can look, but you must not touch, not until you are safely married'. Another of George's recurrent film catch-phrases, the disapproving 'You cheeky fast cat' which any from a further confirms that, for all his he is really a good boy. George's songs were really no more subversive than the picture postcards they dramatized, but they performed the same important function, the function Orwell divined: Codes of law and morals, or religious systems, never have much room in them for a humorous view of life. Whatever is funny is subversive, every joke is ultimately a custard pie, and the reason why so large a proportion of jokes centre round obscenity is simply that all societies, as the price of survival, have to insist on a fairly high standard of sexual morality. A dirty joke is not, of course, a serious attack upon morality, but it is a sort of mental rebellion, a momentary wish that things were otherwise ... , The comic postcards are one expression of [this1point of which is still .., . . . ""~" ...,~~ view, but still worthy of attention. In a Christian, they naturally concentrate on sex jokes .... They stand for the worm's eye view of life, for the music hall world where marriage is a dirty joke or a comic disaster, where the rent is always behind and the clothes are always up the spout, where the lawyer is always a crook and the Scotsman always a miser, where the newlyweds make fools of

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themselves on the hideous beds of seaside lodging houses and the drunken, red-nosed husbands roll home at four in the morning to meet the linen-nightgowned wives who wait for them behind the front door, poker in hand. Their existence, the fact that people want them, is symptomatically important. Like the music halls, they are a sort of saturnalia, a harmless rebellion against virtue. i3 Although they all seem innocent enough now, George's songs were regarded as deeply shocking by some of the more respectable areas of society, and this very fact of cocking a snook at middle-class decorum was an irresistible part of their appeal to working-class audiences. That inflexibly strait-laced guardian of public taste and morality, the BBC, banned 'When I'm Cleaning Windows' as too rude. But the ban was rescinded when it became known that it was one of Queen Mary's favourite songs. 14 Even if it is not true, the fact that the story was believed and circulated gives it historical validity and it speaks volumes about the stratified nature of British society and its cultural assumptions. When it came to films, the songs, however cheeky, were contained in and by stories whose attitudes to life and work were irreproachable, thus limiting the extent of the rebellion the songs embodied. George's earliest films were constructed out of music hall routines and picture postcard gags. His actual film debut at the age of eleven was as the stable lad who outwits a gang of criminals in the silent racing thriller By the Shortest of Heads (1915). But this was a false start. His father had not wanted him to go on the stage and he had trained as a jockey. After his father's death, he took to the stage and, under the direction of his wife, the clog~dancer Beryl Ingham, he polished his stage act and won a considerable following on the music hall circuit. By 1934 he was well enough known for the cinema to beckon. His first two films as an adult performer were made for the Manchester-based Blakeley's Film Company. Boots! Boots! (1934), directed by Bert Tracy, and Off the Dole (1935), directed by Arthur Mertz, were filmed at the grandly named Albany Studios, in fact a room over a garage in Albany Street. Produced on minuscule budgets, with a handful of hastily run-up and unconvincing sets, amateurish supporting casts and primitive photographic techniques, they were in effect photographed revues, a series of music hall turns, songs and sketches recorded by a static camera. They represent, in short, music hall in its unrefined state and as such are an invaluable record of the pre· cinematic Formby at work. In both films, Formby is called John Willie and we see him adopting and developing his father's Lancashire Lad character. He wears comic clothes, does funny walks, sings and plays the banjulele, speaks in a broad Lancashire accent and displays impeccable comic timing. He also projects what is to become the Formby film character - the shy, cheerful, well-

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meaning proletarian. In Boots! Boots!, John Willie is the bootboy in a posh hotel , engaged in a running battle with authority in the person of the manager and too shy to court the kitchenmaid Snooky (Beryl Formby). John Willie takes lessons in lovemaking from a flighty chambermaid ('Eeh, it's champion'). Finally, he and Snooky, in the time-honoured wishfulfilment fashion , are drafted in to provide the hotel cabaret and become stars. The plot line was filled in with comic knockabout, a string of songs and verbal routines, like the old pantomime standby of calculating days off in such a way as to prove he should not be at work at all. The review in Kine Weekly was as usual perceptive and to the point: The character of the film naturally limits its market, but for the masses, for whom it is obviously intended, it should prove acceptable light entertainment. This is popular music ha11 entertainment, photographed and presented without any attempt at embellishment. The humour is far from subtle but it is breezily dispensed by a star who knows his wide public. IS Off the Dole is a much more interesting film, pointing up sharply , like the early Gracie Fields films , class differences in British society. There is in this film a straight romantic subplot, provided by two execrable Mayfair jeunes premiers: genteel Irene, courted and rescued from her brutal stepfather by man-ahout-town Rex. Their love scenes are hilariously bad, but they provide a stark if unconscious reminder of the gulf between characters like these and the world of John Willie. That world is revealed in the consciously and powerfully subversive opening in the Labour Exchange, where a working man addresses the other unemployed, in a cynical gag-routine which includes lines like 'a member of parliament is someone who gives your life for his country' and 'the only New Deal a working man'lI get is a lump of wood'. He ends with a song which encapsulates his bitterness:

I'm only what you calls a working man, A nobody some folks would have you think; Just what is known as an also-ran, The man who's blamed, 'cos he has a drink. But we are the producers of the goods, And British goods are dear, you'll agree; But somehow 1 think it's funny , who gets all the money? There's one thing 1 do know, it isn't me. 'Who gets the blame,'cos the beggar gets the pain, - the poor working man, Who is given promises, and knows that's all he'll get? - the poor working man. Who has to live in houses you can cut through with a knife?

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Who is it builds your motor car that lasts you all your life? But who was to the fore in the Great World War? - Why, the poor old working man.' It has all the hallmarks of an act polished and refined in the music halls, and it is a powerful reminder that, however watchful the censors may have been, strong expressions of opinion about the condition of life for working people did slip through their net. John Willie suffers the hardship of being put off the dole for not trying hard enough to get work, a very real threat hanging over the unemployed in the 1930s. But at this point, the film veers off into McGill·land as John Willie takes over his uncle's detective agency and has to deal with an unmarried mother ('You will go to those Blackpool illuminations'), a nudist camp and a quarrelsome couple whose amorous reconciliation he observes from a hiding place in their bedroom. Equally predictably the songs provide the moralistic counterpoint: 'If You Don't Want the Goods, Don't Maul 'Em' and 'I'm Going to Stick to my Mother' with the line 'You'll never catch me going out with lasses 'cos I'm shy as shy can be'. Kine Weekly's verdict was 'likely to appeal in industrial areas' and it did. 16 The film, made for a mere £8,000, netted £30,000, and the success of the two pictures attracted the attention of Basil Dean, the production chief at Ealing Studios, and the man who had already signed and launched Gracie Fields. He sent for a copy of Boots! Boots! and ran it. 'A very crude affair,' he concluded. 'Commonplace story, poor photography .... Yet, in spite of these infelicities, I thought to myself here is another personality that seems to bounce off the screen.,17 So Formby was signed for Ealing, where he was to make eleven films. Dean had already appreciated the value of giving his working-class stars the right material, and the success of the scripts J. B. Priestley had provided for Gracie Fields convinced him that he needed another established North Country writer to supply a story for George, someone who was able 'to appreciate to the full the special qualities of Lancashire folk, their particull;l.r brand of humour and above all, their uninhibited approach to life',ls He settled on Walter Greenwood, the author of Love on the Dole, who provided the screen story No Limit. This and George's second film, Keep Your Seats Please, were both directed by Monty Banks, before he moved on to take over the direction of Gracie's films, and Dean eventually set up a special Formby unit headed by director Anthony Kimmins and producer Jack Kitchin. George's success was immediate. No Limit was released in late 1935 and was to be reissued in 1938, 1946 and 1957. In the Motion Picture Herald's list of British box-office attractions for 1936 George was already fourth. By 1937 he was second to Gracie and from 1938 to 1943 inclusive he was first. The public had found what it wanted - a working-class hero

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to match the working-class heroine they had already taken to their hearts. No Limit set important precedents for Formby's films. It took him away from the revue format and from explicit social comment and put him in a setting of action and adventure, played for laughs as well as thrills, that was sufficiently rooted in reality to provide points of identification for ordinary audience members. Where Priestley had taken Gracie to Blackpool, Greenwood takes George to the Isle of Man and the T-T Races, brought to life by the use of extensive and exciting location-shooting and details of seaside life like George performing as a blackface minstrel on the beach to raise the money to pay the rent to his landlady. The story~line, as in all George's films, is simple. George plays George Shuttleworth, a chimney sweep's assistant in the Lancashire town of Slagdyke. He lives with his widowed mother and his cantankerous grandfather, dreaming of entering the T-T races on his home-made motorbike. When his mother lends him the money, he is able to travel to the Isle of Man to take part. But his money is stolen, his bike falls to pieces and when he nearly runs a baby over he swears not to ride again. He is befriended by Florrie Dibney (Florence Desmond), the secretary of the head of Rainbow Motorcycles, who arranges to get a new bike for him and encourages him to race again. The arrogant star rider Bert Tyldesley, Florrie's boyfriend, who has picked on George from the outset, fails in an attempt to prevent him competing. Inspired by the knowledge that Florrie loves him, George races, beats Tyldesley and wins the championship and Florrie. It was and is an excellent film, tightly directed by Monty Banks and culminating in a well-shot and action-packed race. Its success ensured that the formula would be followed: a simple story-line fleshed out with cheerful songs, plenty of slapstick and comic chases. At the centre would be George, the shy, innocent, accident-prone Lancashire lad, grinning and good-hearted. After the early films in which he was variously a bootboy, unemployed and a chimney he was frequently cast in skilled trades: typesetter (Trouble Brewing), photographer (l See Ice), gramophone engineer (Feather Your Nest). The settings of the stories were also moved from the industrial North to a generalized South, sometimes even to a village, though George himself remained indelibly Lancashire. The pattern the films followed was to put George through a succession of humiliations until he achieved final triumph, the point of universal could win through adversity, identification being that if anybody could. First there would be his bashful courtship of a brisk, sensible girl, almost always with a cut-glass Kensington accent. He would have to overcome a suave upper-class rival, who usually turned out to be a crook. But he would win the girl in the end. Second, he would have an ambition - to be T-T champion (No Limit), a newspaper photographer (/ See Ice), a detective (Trouble Brewing), a jockey (Come On, George) and

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this would be fulfilled. Third, he would frequently prove successful in sport and usually in working-class sport. George was himself a keen motorcyclist, and motorcycling and motorbike chases frequently found their way into his films (No Limit, It's in the Air, Feather Your Nest, Spare a Copper). But he also found himself involved in boxing (Keep Fit), wrestling (Trouble Brewing), horse racing (Come On, George) and ice hockey (1 See Ice). Fourth, he would frequently be involved in tracking down crooks (Keep Fit, Trouble Brewing, Come On, George). The sum total would be success with the girl, success at his job, success in sport or in detective work: the perfect wish-fulfilment recipe, with the moral- if you keep plugging away, you are bound to make it in the end. Keep Your Seats Please (1937), also directed by Monty Banks, was untypical of later Formby vehicles but very characteristic of Banks's work (cf. Queen of Hearts). It uprooted George from the North and cast him as George Withers, an unemployed concert party artiste, stranded in the South of England. But it put him into a tightly plotted, fast-moving farce with a sure-fire plot based on the Russian novel Twelve Chairs, which later served as a vehicle for the talents of Fred Allen and Mel Brooks. An eccentric old lady dies, leaving a fortune in jewels hidden in one of her dining room chairs. The chairs are sold and George, who is the beneficiary under her will, sets out to find the right chair, in competition with a crooked solicitor (Alastair Sim). As in No Limit, Ealing provided George with an established co-star, Florence Desmond, playing another unemployed variety artiste called Florrie, who even gets, as in No Limit, to sing a song of her own. In addition, Florrie's niece is played by Binkie Stuart, who was being built up as Britain's answer to Shirley Temple, and in this film sings, dances and acts cute. It is as if the studio was not yet sure if George could carry a film on his own - doubts which the success of Keep Your Seats Please dispelled. Monty Banks handles a succession of farcical sequences very well, as George and his friends create chaos successively in a voice teacher's apartment, a doctor's surgery, on the of a theatre during a magician's act and in a hospital, as they search for the missing chairs. George eventually gets the jewels and Florrie. But the film contains one key scene which stands in counterpoint to the saucy lyrics of the songs and highlights the shyness, reticence and prudery which lay at the heart of his cinematic approach to anything smacking of sex. In the doctor's surgery, is ordered to undress, and when he refuses, a nurse is sent to undress him. He resists furiously, is chased round the room shouting 'I'm too young', and ends up on top of the wardrobe, shouting 'You cheeky fast cat'. When the nurse gets him down, she upends him and forcibly debags him. The same thing occurs in his next film, Feather Your Nest, when he finds himself in a Turkish bath, is ordered to strip, replies 'What, in front of all these men', and is forcibly debagged and put through the

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steam room, the cold bath and the full massage treatment, despite his protests and struggles. Feather Your Nest (1937), although it had an American director, William Beaudine, finally perfected the mixture and placed George unequivocally at the centre of attention. He plays Willie Piper, assistant sound engineer at the Monarch Gramophone Company. As accident-prone as ever, he breaks a new recording of 'I'm Leaning on a Lamp Post' by crooner Rex Randall, secretly makes a new recording of himself singing the song and substitutes it. When the substitution is discovered, he is sacked but the already issued record becomes a hit and he is taken on as a recording artist at a salary of £30 a week. It is a straightforward wish· fulfilment fantasy, but interwoven with it is a recognizable predicament of Everyman. Willie is secretly engaged to Mary Taylor (Polly Ward), daughter of the formidable landlady of the Fox and Hare pub. They have saved up and put down a deposit on a house, a new semi-detatched on a newly built suburban estate, which Willie christens 'The Nest'. Willie's unsuccessful attempts to get a five shillings a week rise so that he can announce his engagement run through the first part of the film. But Mary eventually announces the engagement anyway and furnishes the house on hire purchase. Willie is forced to keep his sacking secret, and one of the highpoints of the film comes when the furniture is repossessed during his engagement party and he desperately shuffles the guests from one room to another to prevent them noticing. The newly built housing estate is a far cry from the terraced housing of No Limit, and Willie's entire situation, to middle-class status. both professional and domestic, shows him But the struggles of an engaged couple to acquire and furnish a home will have provided a ready point of identification for many. The next five Formby films were directed and co-written by Anthony Kimmins and followed closely the pattern established by ,No Limit. Keep Fit (1938) poked fun at the Thirties 'Health and Beauty' craze and at the frantic newspaper circulation wars of the decade in a story which cast George as George Green, the barber in a large city store. He is in love with the poised and we1l bred manicurist Joan Allen (Kay Walsh) but has a rival for her affections in suave he· man Hector Kent (Guy Middleton), manager of the sports department. George undergoes a series of ritual humiliations at the hands of Kent. He is tricked into participation in a gymnastics contest in which Kent performs superbly and George, in long inept and causes drawers and constantly shouting 'Mother', is Joan, arranges to 'rescue' his friend hilarity. In order to Ernie from drowning, but the plan goes wrong and Kent ends up rescuing them both. Finally, the ultimate humiliation comes when George is used as 'Before' and Kent as 'After' in a 'Before and After' advertisement for 'Keep Fit' courses. However, a triple triumph awaits. Kent is accidentally knocked out, George is assumed to have done it and the Echo, as part of its 8

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circulation battle with the Gazette, arranges a highly publicized return bout. George wants to flee but, encouraged by Joan, stays, trains, fights and wins. Crooked bookies who had sought to capitalize on the fight are foiled, Kent is exposed as bully, ex-convict and thief of the store takings and wins Joan's love. I See Ice (1938) is set against the background of ice shows and ice hockey, with George as George Bright, eager-beaver photographer's assistant anxious to use his new invention (a miniature camera concealed in a bow tie) to get exclusive photographs which will make him a newspaper photographer. His endeavours to fulfil this ambition form one thread of the story-line. His love for ice skater Judy Gaye (Kay Walsh again) and the attempts of her partner, upper-class cad Paul Martine (Cyril Ritchard), to part them form the other thread. The situation is complicated by the fact that the police are after George for pulling the communication cord on a train and Martine keeps informing them of George's whereabouts, precipitating a succession of chases. The escalating cycle of humiliations ends with George in jail, but he emerges to get exclusive photographs of an ice hockey match from which the press have been excluded, to win the girl and a job on a national daily paper. The international situation impinged on George's world for the first time in It's in the Air (1938). The film opens with an air raid precaution exercise taking place and there is an underlying theme of preparedness throughout. George plays George Brown and we find him living in a leafy Southern suburbia with a pukka sister, Ann, and a dog, Scruffy. Already rejected by the RAF because he cannot tell left from right, he is turned down as an air raid warden too. By a series of misunderstandings, he ends up as a recruit at a nearby RAF base, falls foul of a bellowing sergeantmajor and causes havoc during a parade ground drill, a fire drill and the test flight of a new plane. As usual he falls for a pretty girl, Polly (Polly Ward), the sergeant-major's daughter and is subjected to a series of supercilious character practical jokes by her current boyfriend, a called who eventually away his imposture. But at the end, after a spectacular stunt flying sequence when Craig bails out and leaves the hapless George at the controls of the plane, George gets the girl and is admitted to the RAF. Trouble Brewing (1939) was a mixture of elements of Keep Fit and I See Ice, with George as George Gullip, typesetter on the Daily Sun, who has invented an indelible ink which leaves thumb-prints and which he seeks to use in tracking down a gang of counterfeiters, thus furthering his desire to be a detective. The hunt for the crooks leads him through the inevitable humiliations, including capturing the chief of police whom he suspects of being the criminal mastermind and blundering into a wrestling match. The climax takes place in a brewery, presumably selected as the counterfeiters' headquarters in order to justify the title. After a slapstick

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battle, they are rounded up and George wins the girl, Mary Brian, the editor's secretary (Googie Withers). George does not have a rival for her hand in this film, but the Daily Sun's bullying editor turns out to be the head of the counterfeiters. The film shows its awareness of the need to remain in touch with the mass audience by building the film's action around such archetypal working~class leisure activities as horse race betting, wrestling and beer. Horse racing forms the background to Come On, George (1939), Formby's last peacetime film and his last with Anthony Kimmins. It puts George for the first time in an entirely rural setting, placing Urban Man in the heart of Baldwin country without any sense of incongruity. is an ice-cream seller at a race track who dreams of being a jockey. He his chance when he tames and rides a fierce untameable horse called 'Maneater', of whose reputation he is unaware. When he discovers the truth, he plans to flee but, encouraged by the love of Ann Johnson (Pat Kirkwood), granddaughter of the Avonbury village bobby, he wins the vital race and foils the inevitable crooks. The film underlines George's childlike quality by including a real child, Ann's brother Squib, who is throughout infinitely more worldly and self-assured than George. With the outbreak of war, George's persona required almost no alteration for use in the war effort. His 'little man' became a symbol of democracy, keeping up everyone's spirits with a smile and a song and fighting spies and saboteurs instead of the peacetime crooks. Formby also toured tirelessly putting on shows for the troops, a contribution to the maintenance of morale by the award of the OBE in 1946. His popularity continued undiminished and he remained Britain's top boxoffice attraction throughout the darkest days of the war. It is likely that Gracie would have continued alongside George, adapting her established persona with little difficulty to meet the new situation. But when in 1940 Italy entered the war, she accepted an engagement touring Canada to raise money for the Navy in order to her Italian-born husband, Monty Banks, out of the country. Gracie raised £300,000 on her tour and Monty took out American citizenship, which saved him from internment. But her leaving the country produced a sense of betrayal in ordinary people not unlike that which followed the abdication of King Edward VIII. She was denounced in the press, accused of fleeing the country with a fortune in jewels and planning to sit the war out in comfort abroad. Although she returned to Britain in 1941 and re-established herself touring the country and the various theatres of operations in North Africa and the Far East with ENSA, she never became the national symbol during the war years that she had been during the Thirties. George, however, carried blithely on. His first wartime film, Let George Do It (1940), directed by Marcel Varnel, was a slick, fast~paced comic espionage thriller. It was set in

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Norway to which George Hepplewhite, a ukelele player with the Dinky-Do concert party, is sent by British Intelligence after the usual mix-up, to spy on handleader Mark Mendez (Garry Marsh), who is believed to be sending vital information to the Nazis. George's instinct is to flee, but he falls in love with his contact, pretty hotel receptionist Mary Wilson (Phyllis Calvert), stays on and breaks the musical code by which Mendez transmits his messages. George ends up on board a U·boat which is planning to sink a British ship, but is fired out of the torpedo tubes onto the deck of a British destroyer and reunited with Mary. The film included a fantasy sequence in which George travelled by barrage balloon to Germany, landed at a Nazi party rally and knocked out Hitler. It was the ultimate visual encapsulation of propaganda value to the war effort. His last two films for Ealing returned him for the first time since No Limit to the North of England. Spare a Copper (1940), directed by John Paddy Carstairs, was set in Liverpool in 1939 just before the outbreak of war and highlighted the fear of fifth-columnists, a recurrent theme of wartime films but a threat which never in fact materialized. George plays George Carter, a reserve policeman, who fails to get into the Flying Squad. He redeems himself, earning the respect of his shop assistant girl friend, by foiling the bid of a ring of saboteurs and fifth-columnists led by a. prominent local businessman to destroy the latest British warship. It is interesting to see George cast as a policeman, for he follows in the footsteps of many of the leading film comedians of the Thirties who had played members of the police force (Gracie Fields in Looking on the Bright Side, Jack Hulbert in Jack's the Boy, Will Hay in Ask a Policeman). Such films reinforce the view of the police as lovable and reliable, very much in the mould of those policemen who played football with the strikers in 1926 rather than beating them up. The sentiment behind the characterization is captured in the song 'On the Beat', sung by George and his fellow policemen as they go out on patrol: You'll see us standing guard in every street, If things upset you, there's no need to worry or frown, Ask a policeman and he won't let you down. A subsequent verse interestingly refers to nursemaids and cooks being romantically attracted to policemen, indicating that they are seen as respectable members of the working class defending the status quo, which is very far from being the traditional working.class view of the police. With George's last film for Ealing, Turned Out Nice Again (1941), directed by Marcel Varnel, the wheel came full circle. There was no reference to or indication of the war. There was a Northern setting, in an unnamed Lancashire town, and a script which returned to the picture postcard inspiration of the song. There was George, for the first time married, and fulfilling the roles of both 'Mother's Boy' and 'beloved

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henpeck'. He plays George Pearson, cheerful, hard~working and indispensable worker at Dawson's Underwear Company, ensuring that much of the humour is underwear-based. He leads the church choir, is a pigeon-fancier and is dominated by his formidable widowed mother, who runs a grocer's shop. When he is appointed overseer at the works, he is able to marry his sweetheart, Lydia (Peggy Bryan). In the classic manner of the postcard, George and Lydia soon go from eager honeymooners to battling couple, with Lydia asserting her dominance. Several threads run through the story. There is the familiar one of George being cheated by con men with a worthless yarn but turning the tables on them at the end. There is the coyness about sex mixed with the saucy humour derived from ladies' underwear. There is a particularly funny scene in which George and his Unele Arnold compose a letter to Feathered World magazine and stumble over how to express the fact that the pigeons won't mate. They settle in the end for the statement 'They won't.' Later George, the provincial boy at the London underwear convention, is shocked at the models in their up· to-date lingerie ('Ooh, look at the cheeky fast cats dancing in their knickers'), But centrally there is a battle for George's soul between his possessive, domineering, old-fashioned mother and his go-ahead young wife. It mirrors the actual assault on Victorian values represented by the Second World War and the accelerated social and attitudinal changes it unleashed. The film's metaphor for this struggle is perhaps appropriately underwear, with the attitude of George and his mother represented by the old-fashioned restrictive uniform of corsets, and bloomers, and the new liberated stance of his wife embodied in the phenomenon of 'panties, scanties and step-ins'. But the difference between them threaten to wreck the marriage. Once they are married, Lydia slims, dyes her hair, wears up-to-date underwear and insists on moving to a Tudor-style suburban semi, furnished on the HP. All this is anathema to Mother, who denounces them for 'living above their station', Lydia insists she is helping to get on in his work and she emphasizes this by buying him a dinner when he goes to the convention in London. George sides with his mother, denounces Lydia's modern ways and she leaves. She gets a job, something else George opposes, as assistant to the personnel manager at Dawsons. Denouncing their underwear as old-fashioned, she designs new underwear, and after modelling it in London, puts Dawsons back on the map and in the forefront of the business. is reconciled to Lydia, breaks his mother's hold on him and leaves with Lydia for London to promote the new lines. Lydia and all she stands for social mobility, female emancipation and implicitly sexual liberation - triumph. In this way the old stereotypes and situations of the picture postcards are reworked to encompass the changes in attitude being wrought by the war. Formby moved from Ealing to Columbia Pictures and made seven more

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films in similar vein to his Ealing works. But he reached his peak in 1943. In 1944 James Mason supplanted him as the most popular British boxoffice draw and the public's taste changed. Like Churchill, George was indelibly associated with the dark days of 1940, and, like Churchill, he was rejected as the public looked to a new world once the war ended. George's final film, George in Civvy Street (1946), was a flop and he returned to the theatre, where he continued to work until his death. But he had embodied an era in British history and his films can be seen as a reflection of the spirit of that era just as much as the comic seaside postcards of which George Orwell wrote: These things are a sort of diary upon which the English people have unconsciously recorded themselves. Their old-fashioned outlook, their graded snobberies, their mixture of bawdiness and hypocrisy, their extreme gentleness, their deeply moral attitude to life, are all mirrored there. 19 They are mirrored too in the twenty films of George Formby and in George himself, the working-class Everyman taking the road from Wigan Pier.

Jessie Matthews: The Dancing Divinity

The Americans called her 'The Dancing Divinity' and in January 1937 the editor of Picturegoer declared: Jessie Matthews is the only English screen actress who, without having a Hollywood compaign devoted to her, has a name which is news in the United States and is strong enough to carry a picture. She is in fact one of the biggest assets we have in the fight to secure a proper place for British films in the international market. 1 Unlike Gracie Fields or George Formby, Jessie achieved real star status in America and that without ever actually filming in Hollywood. Fans on both sides of the Atlantic dreamed of the ideal pairing - Jessie Matthews and Fred Astaire. Three separate companies (Gaumont British, RKO Radio and Columbia) sought at different times, but in vain, to make this dream a reality. The extent to which this teaming was envisged and actually canvassed is clear evidence of Jessie's international stellar eminence. 2 Her star quality is perfectly evident from her films. Jessie was a genuine screen original. She danced divinely, sang charmingly, had a nice sense of comedy and projected a unique brand of innocent sexuality. A slim, saucereyed, snub-nosed gamine, she dripped with a emphasized by figure-hugging and decollete gowns which set ofT every curve of her supple, sinuous body. Writing of her stage appearances, Hannen SwafTer in the Daily Express drew attention to her 'elfin qualities of charm and sweetness' and the Daily Mail to her 'childlike beauty and charm'.3 These were qualities often remarked upon. It was this elfin/child quality counterpointing the palpable sexuality that gave her an enduring appeal, that quality which the Sunday Referee summed up as 'wistful and winsome femininity'.4 Curiously, despite her international eminence, Jessie was never the top box-office draw in Britain. But she was second in 1936, third in 1937, fourth in 1938 before slumping to nineteenth in 1939. In the Bernstein popularity polls, she was ranked third most popular British female star after Gracie and Cicely Courtneidge in 1933, but the most popular in 1937. But the Bernstein poll has something of a middle-class bias and there is evidence that Jessie was particularly popular in middle-class areas. 5 That Gracie, who could sing and clown but had neither Jessie's youth nor her 207

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looks and could not dance, should so consistently have outrun Jessie at the box-office may perhaps be explicable in class terms. In fact, the two stars had a good deal in common. Both had been born and raised in poverty - Jessie in Soho, where she was born the seventh of sixteen children of a London street trader over a butcher's shop in Berwick Street; Gracie in Rochdale over her grandmother's chip shop. Their respective rises to fame had been masterminded by ambitious stage-struck relatives: Gracie's mother Jenny, Jessie's sister Rosie. Both capitalized on natural talent with dedicated hard work to reach stardom on the stage: Gracie in the music hall, Jessie in revue. Both made the triumphant transition from stage to films. The images they projected on screen also had something in common. Both were seen as independent, strong-willed working women achieving success in a hard, competitive world. It is true that Jessie's films frequently saw her as an aspiring singer/dancer achieving stage stardom. But several of Gracie's later films took the same theme. Both women became particularly associated with theme songs which sought to combat depression and apathy, and both chose these titles for their autobiographies. Gracie's was 'Sing As We Go': Sing as we go, and let the world go by, Singing a song we march along the highway, Say goodbye to sorrow, there's always tomorrow To sing of today. It was a communal anthem of optimism and determination, echoed by the closing line of the most celebrated of all Thirties .films, Gone With the Wind - 'Tomorrow is another day.' Jessie's song was 'Over My Shoulder':

Over my shoulder goes one care, Over my shoulder go two cares, Why should I cry, it's blue above I'm free at last and I'm in love. The songs point up one essential difference. Love is one of Jessie's central pursuits - love as the source of happiness. Gracie's films are littered with unhappy romances. Jessie sings constantly of love - 'It's Love Again', 'Head over Heels in Love', 'I Nearly Let Love Go Slipping Through My Fingers', 'May I Have the Next Romance with You?'. Jessie's songs are of self ('I'); Gracie's songs are pre-eminently of the community ('we') the difference between middle-class individualism and working-class solidarity. If the pursuit of romantic love, then, is one difference, its pursuit in an essentially unreal world is another. In a perceptive article William K. Everson wrote that post-war British guilt about the complacency of the 1930s led to the films of Jessie Matthews inspiring far less nostalgia than

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those of Gracie Fields and that at the time working-class audiences saw J essie's Mayfair accent and la-de-da ways as snobbery. As a result, Jessie never inspired the universal love that Gracie did: Gracie Fields' films were of the depression, about recognizable people, situations and problems, and they offered cheerful optimism without being unrealistic or dishonest. Jessie Matthews' films, however, resolutely turned their back on contemporary reality, transcending even the acceptable level of escapism. They were hymns of praise to elegance, luxury, glitter and glamour, quite literally art deco films, and as trivial and superficial as that brief-tenured art form. 6 It is true that Jessie's six vehicle films from Evergreen on were Art Deco fantasies, taking place in a highly stylized, high contrast, hermetically sealed black and white world of ritzy nightclubs, luxury hotels, ocean liners, newspaper offices, radio studios, theatres and mansions, where vast floorspaces were polished to a preternatural brightness, chrome gleamed and angular metallic accoutrements spoke of the influence of modernism. But the films of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers took place in exactly the same milieu and they were enormously popular and regarded as quite legitimate escapism. 'rhe difference comes down in the end to one of class. To British audiences, American films were classless. But an ineradicable air of upperclass high jinks hangs over Jessie's films. It does not just reside in their content stories peopled almost exclusively by film stars, socialites, millionaires and aristocrats, where even, as in Gangway, a Scotland Yard inspector turns out to be an incognito Oxford-educated peer. It is stressed supremely in Jessie's absurdly over-elocuted Mayfair accent, which invariably provokes mirth in contemporary audiences, an accent suggest-

ing betrayal of humble working-class origins. To be fair, Jessie needed that accent to succeed in her chosen field - musical comedy and revue in the Thirties. It was a peculiarly middle-class form of entertainment. But then that middle-class audience is likely to have applauded her self-help success story, and the desire to get on which is evidenced by the adoption of a refined accent. Her popularity is unquestionable. The box-office returns never lie. The escapist content of her films is also undoubted and they represent the pinnacle in Britain of that sort of film-making and that sort of ethos, a style and ethos shared by, for instance, Jack Buchanan. It is the middle-class middle-brow musical comedy distillation of a strong and popular stage tradition, just as the films of Gracie Fields and George Formby embody a working-class low-brow distillation of the spirit of the music hall. But the evidence suggests that Jessie evoked an ambivalence of response, both as a middle-class symbol in the Thirties and since then as a symbol of frivolity and the wilful disregard of the real world that

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prevented her ever overtaking either Gracie or George in the esteem of the total film-going audience. J essie had had a spectacular rise to stardom, making her West End debut at the age of sixteen as one of C. B. Cochran's 'Young Ladies' in the chorus of Music Box Revue in 1923. Within three years she was taking the lead in Charlot's 1926 Revue, 'achieving', as the Daily Chronicle reported, 'a triumph that would have turned the head of many an actress who has been 20 years on the stage'.7 By 1928, when she was appearing for Cochran in This Year of Grace, the Sunday Express ranked her with Evelyn Laye and Cicely Courtneidge as 'the three brightest female stars of our English light musical stage'. 8 Inevitably the cinema companies started to express an interest. She was tested by Paramount, Warner Bros and MGM when she was in New York starring with Jack Buchanan on stage in Wake Up and Dream. But she was under contract to Cochran and anxious to return to Britain to her lover, Sonnie Hale, whom she married in 1931 and who was to become a major influence on her career throughout the 1930s. It was in Britain in 1931 that she made her first major film, Out of the Blue, for BIP. But the director, Gene Gerrard, was inexperienced, the filming technically fraught and Jessie's never confident view of her looks was almost fatally undermined. When she and Sonnie saw the result, they agreed that she had no glamour, looked terrified and photographed badly. 'It was a disaster', she wrote in her autobiography; 'Out of the Blue was adapted from a stage musical and it should never have left the boards'.9 Out of the Blue is indeed a painfully laborious screen transcription of a popular musical comedy, Little Tommy Tucker. The plot is hackneyed, a melange of upper-crust romantic misunderstandings amongst a familiar cast of genial baronets, wacky socialites, dithering silly-ass aristocrats, millionaire hoteliers and deferential butlers, all set against the inevitable background of English stately home and Biarritz luxury hotel. The dialogue is a feeble collection of excruciating and predictable puns. Yet the result does serve both as a record of the sort of musical comedy popular on the stage and as a reminder of a whole volume of such shows which were transferred more or less intact to the cinema screen and formed a large proportion of the British cinema's output. If the plot has any novelty, it is in the involvement of the wireless. Radio broadcasting and the BBC in particular was a popular subject and setting for films in the Thirties, for example in Death at Broadcasting House, Radio Parade of 1935, Radio Lover and Let's Be Famous. The hero of Out of the Blue, Bill Coverdale (Gene Gerrard), is a radio announcer known as 'Uncle Bartholomew' and the plot centres on 'Tommy' Tucker (Jessie Matthews), daughter of genial but impoverished Sir Jeremy Tucker, Bart, of Naveston Towers, falling in love with his voice, like Little

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Betty Bouncer, who in the words of the popular song 'loved an announcer down at the B.B.C.'. Besides directing (very badly), Gene Gerrard also starred and made rather a better job of that. A now forgotten musical comedy star sounding exactly like George Cole, he was a sort of lower· middle-class suburban equivalent of Jack Buchanan. But he made a likeable and tireless hero, reeling off his nonsense patter, throwing himself about gamely and projecting a sort of Buchananesque charm. Many of the supporting cast, however, made no concession to the change of medium and declaimed hammily as if projecting to the back of the stalls. Yet Jessie shines through it all. Despite an unattractive hairdo, poor makeup and an arch accent, the star quality is there. She sings two songs charmingly and exhibits her supple dancer's body in a single loose-legged dance at the end when she and Bill are finally united. It also begins the tradition of her playing independent-spirited girls who go out and triumph on their own, putting her very much in the vanguard of actual developments in the role of women since the Great War had accelerated their social and political emancipation. In Out of the Blue, Tommy accepts an offer to sing at Biarritz, declaring, 'It may not be the family tradition. But damn it, it's honest.' So she goes out to work, Little Tommy Tucker singing for her supper. The star potential displayed by Jessie in Out of the Blue was appreciated by director Albert de Courville and he insisted on her as the female lead in the romantic comedy he was directing for Michael Baleon at Gainsborough There Goes the Bride. Balcon had but a test convinced him, and when he saw the rushes, he signed her to a two-year contract and was to build her into one of the biggest British stars and the only one to be handled, according to Everson, with a showmanship that matched Hollywood: 'Recognition of Matthews' talent and the willingness to spend time and money to build her into a star in the Hollywood tradition, illustrates a shrewdness not often encountered in Britain.,l0 Balcon put Jessie to work so quickly that she had completed three more films (The Man from Toronto, The Midshipmaid and The Good Companions) before There Goes the Bride was shown. When it was, the instinct of Baleon and de Courville was confirmed. The press was rapturous in its praise of her. The Observer declared: 'She is going to be the biggest star name we have in this country before she is through. She has got everything that a director needs to build up a star: vivacity, cheek, charm, and the real trouping spirit, and her pert little face photographs irresistibly.,ll The Daily Mail considered her 'a brilliantly original cinema star. To her irresistible vitality and her transparent honesty she adds extreme grace of movement and a tremendous sense of humour. Miss Matthews is a personality and a portent. Her arrival is a revolution. I feel

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certain she will be a sensation.'12 Even The Times concurred: 'Miss Matthews is not yet properly broken in to the camera, and she is too inclined to underline her mannerisms, but her vivacity and her pertness, if the word is not too harsh to match Miss Matthews's peculiar quality shake the screen into life and interest every time she appears on it .... Altogether Miss Matthews would seem to have a particularly bright future in talking pictures.,13 With two songs and plenty of fast-paced, zany comedy, There Goes the Bride (1932) was a considerable improvement on the leaden Out of the Blue. It is a sophisticated, fluidly cinematic comedy, dominated by Jessie's vivacious personality. Although it is set in Paris, the actors remain resolutely English and the Frenchness resides in the frothy lightness and whimsicality of the treatment, reminiscent at times of Rene Clair, and a tribute to the directorial ability of de Courville, a little known talent of the British cinema. Once again, Jessie plays a self-willed, no-nonsense modern girl Annette Marquand, who runs away to Paris to escape an arranged marriage. She fastens on to a stuffy lawyer, Max, whom she proceeds to embarrass at every turn. She ruins his engagement and gets into a succession of comic scrapes, ending up in jail before she and Max are finally united. Her thoroughly modern attitude is demonstrated by her response when Max refuses to take her to a party and she says she'll go out on the town alone. He replies: 'You don't know what might happen to you at this hour,' and Annette retorts: 'I know. But I've often wondered. Now maybe I'll find out.' The film is weakened by the casting of the hopelessly uncharismatic Owen Nares as the ultra·correct lawyer Max, a part calling for someone with the sophisticated comic timing and presence of a Cary Grant in the sort of form he showed as the harassed palaeontologist beset by a madcap Katharine Hepburn in Bringing Up Baby. Michael Balcon put Jessie straight into another comedy, The Man from Toronto (1933), directed by Sinclair Hill. It is a spirited version of a very familiar theme, given additional fresh air appeal by location-shooting in the Olde English village of Amberley. The will of a wealthy eccentric leaves a quarter of a million pounds to his Canadian nephew (Ian Hunter with a wholly unconvincing accent) on condition that he marries a widow, Leila Farrer (Jessie Matthews), whom he has never seen. She poses as her own maid, Polly Perkins, to observe him and if need be to win his love, which she eventually does. The humour is predicated on the fact that we know that Jessie is posing as a maid, an upper-class person consciously and parodically impersonating a lower-class one. The real maid (Kathleen Harrison) is predictably a caricature, a slow-witted, slow-moving Cockney. This source of humour is one of the most common in Thirties comedies, whether it be an upper~class gentleman impersonating a butler (as in the Jack Buchanan vehicle Come Out of the Pantry) or the palpable and

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comical discomfort of the proletarian who finds himself translated to high society (as in the Leslie Fuller vehicle The Last Coupon). These plot devices are two sides of the same coin and the moral is the same: people are funny when they try to be what they are not, so they should stick to their own class. The existing class structure is thus consistently affirmed. Jessie, who smokes, drives a fast car, dances a daring dance and is twice seen in her underwear, is depicted yet again as a thoroughly modern lady. Like the endorsement of the class structure implicit in the role reversal humour of The Man from Toronto, Jessie's next film, The Midshipmaid (1933), directed by Albert de Courville, also contained a serious message under all the comical high jinks. It was one of the popular nautical farces of Ian Hay and Commander Stephen King-Hall which transformed the peacetime navy into a musical comedy locale for singing midshipmen, beautiful stowaways and crusty old admirals. Apart from The Midshipmaid, Admirals All and The Middle Watch were filmed in the 1930s, the latter twice. The Midshipmaid is a routine 'staging the ship's concert' musical, with dashing naval officers in Mediterranean whites engaging in jolly japes and gormless, chinless, talentless 'other ranks' doing pathetic 'turns'. Jessie, as the pretty daughter of a visiting VIP, has virtually nothing to do except be the centre of attention in the wardroom and to sing 'I Would Dare Anything for One Little Kiss from You', as a duet with - of all people - Basil Sydney as the gallant Commander Ffosberry, who wins her heart. The film's saving grace is Fred Kerr, an actor who had brought chuntering to a fine art. He snorts, barks, scow Is and puffs his way Newbiggin, unforgettably through the role of Jessie's father, Sir Bart, the man who has been brought in to suggest economies in the fleet. The moral of the film is that at the end he rejects economies as a danger to naval efficiency. Although he had effectively discovered her for films, Albert de Courville's dictatorial methods undermined Jessie's self-confidence. It was Victor Saville who restored this self-confidence. He insisted on casting her for the key role of Susie Dean in The Good Companions, and Michael Balcon arranged the shooting schedule of The Midshipmaid to enable her to work simultaneously on Saville's film. Jessie acknowledged Saville's importance in the creation of her screen image: I knew that Victor had given me this screen personality that went down so well with the public. 'Our Jessie', the little girl from Soho, the waif with the big eyes, who had become a sex symbol, the 'pin-up' with the legs, who adorned the bedroom walls of so many young men. He'd handled this image so well, with enough discretion never to make it vulgar. 14

The Good Companions (1933) is an outstanding film by any definition. It fully deserved the rave reviews it received and confirmed Jessie's growing

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stature. The Observer's verdict that it was 'a tremendous personal triumph for Jessie Matthews' was widely echoed. IS It also established Victor Saville as one of Britain's leading directors, a position he maintained until he abandoned direction for production at the end of the decade. He handled with tremendous skill and sensitivity the complex narrative structure of Priestley's best-selling novel, transferring to the screen the essentials of his picaresque populist parable about a concert party touring the seaside resorts of England. As Saville had foreseen, Jessie was perfect as Susie Dean, at once vivacious, sexy and vulnerable. Susie Dean, a 'born in a trunk' performer, with a burning ambition for stardom, achieves her triumph in a sure-fire finale. A rival theatrical proprietor hires thugs to break up the Good Companions' performance when there is a West End impresario in the audience. Susie struggles to perform 'Let Me Give My Happiness to You' amid a mounting barrage of catcalls. But finally she runs off the stage in tears. A fight breaks out, but after the police have restored order, the audience calls for Susie. She returns and, with tears of happiness pouring down her face, delivers her song and the film dissolves to her triumphant debut in the West End. This established for her the role she was to play in her next few films, the talented, strong-willed and independent-minded chorus girl who achieves theatrical stardom. But in The Good Companions Priestley's vision of the seaside resorts, piers, railway stations, cheap hotels and cafes provides a more realistic backdrop for the story than the highly stylized Art Deco world of her later extravaganzas. Victor Saville consolidated his reputation with his next picture, Friday the Thirteenth (1933). It was another multi-strand picture: the story of a London omnibus crash, interweaving the tales of seven passengers, all resolved in one way or another by the dramatic denouement. It features an all-star cast in a variety of episodes, comic, tragic, romantic and sentimental, handled with pace, polish and great assurance. Jessie, topbilled, played Millie Adams, a non-stop variety artiste, planning to marry a correct and dedicated schoolmaster (Ralph Richardson). They quarrel about whether she will continue her career after marriage but are reunited after the crash. It is in a sense a rerun of the prickly but loving relationship between the showgirl and the schoolmaster (John Gielgud) in The Good Companions, done with great warmth and style by the two stars. Jessie's next film, Waltzes from Vienna (1934), was atypical both of its star and of its director, Alfred Hitchcock, and has in consequence been dismissed by admirers of both. But like The Midshipmaid and The Man from Toronto, it represents an important film genre of the 1930s - the Viennese musical. Hitchcock later said of it: It was a musical without music, made very cheaply. It had no relation to my usual work. In fact, at this time, my reputation wasn't very good, but

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luckily I was unaware of this .... I don't ever remember saying to myself 'You're finished, your career is at its lowest ebb'. And yet outwardly, to other people, I believe it was. 16 His first comment was certainly true. Although it was a filming of a long. running London stage musical, itself derived from a Viennese original, Walzerkrieg, the score consists almost entirely of 'The Blue Danube', suggesting that the title 'Waltz from Vienna' might be more appropriate. The plot is trite, trivial and repetitive, centring on the celebrated and much-filmed quarrels of the Strauss family, in particular the dilemma of the younger Johann Strauss (Esmond Knight), torn between the love of a pastrycook's daughter, Teresa 'Rasi' Ebezeder (Jessie Matthews), and a career in her father's bakery, and his stuttering musical career, which is being fostered by the glamorous Countess Helga von Stahl (Fay Compton). Someone - presumably Hitchcock - decided to send the whole thing up, and the romantic conventions of the Viennese musical are here seasoned and sharpened by considerable and often highly sophisticated humour. Hitchcock directs with an almost musical rhythm, and that combined with the wit makes this a far from negligible entertainment. It opens hilariously with the Vienna fire brigade called to a fire at the pastrycook's and carrying out customers who continue drinking and talking as if nothing were happening. Meanwhile Strauss and a rival fight over who will rescue 'Rasi'. Among the other delights of the film are Strauss composing 'The Blue Danube' to the sounds and rhythms of the bakery; Countess Helga and her lover Prince Gustav in their respective baths relaying messages via servants who stop and kiss between messages; a comic fight between Strauss and Gustav; and a priceless moment when Prince Gustav kicks a servant downstairs and the servant rises imperturbably to say: 'Thank you, your excellency. Will there be anything else?' appropriately enough for a Jessie, looking good enough to eat pastrycook's daughter is called upon to do little but look pretty and pert, although she is top·billed. It is fourth-billed Esmond Knight, breathlessly romantic as the dashing young composer, who carries the main burden of the film. Hitchcock made no secret of his dislike of the project and played practical jokes on the actors, ruining their concentration. Jessie did not get on with him, finding him dictatorial and unsympathetic, and pronounced the film 'perfectly dreadful'.17 But her next film satisfied everyone. It was Evergreen (1934), the first film to be specifically tailored for her, highlighting her singing, dancing and comedy talents and projecting her as a brisk, resourceful, thoroughly modern miss. It was the first of six films, done with all the gloss, polish and sophistication of their American counterparts. They matched Hollywood in every department, drawing admittedly on American talent with

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the aim of appealing to the vast United States market. The American writer Lesser Samuels worked on three of the films (First a Girl, Sailing Along, and Gangway) and Dwight Taylor, who had scripted the AstaireRogers films The Gay Divorce, Top Hat and Follow the Fleet worked on two (Head Over Heels and Gangway). Buddy Bradley choreographed all the films except for First a Girl and Glen MacWilliams photographed all six. It was a German, art director Alfred Junge, who designed all the films except First a Girl and provided the consistent Art Deco feel. The first three films were directed by Victor Saville and the last three by Sonnie Hale. But Hale's influence was not confined to direction. He it was who first suggested filming Evergreen, which Jessie had already done on the He co-starred in First a Girl and It's Love Again and co-wrote Gangway and Sailing Along. The result of the labours of this team was a product that was glamorously international in its appeal, in marked contradistinction to the films of Gracie Fields, whose feel and appeal was resolutely national. Evergreen, with its tuneful Rodgers and Hart score, is still the bestremembered of Jessie's musicals. Everson calls it 'the definitive (if not the most typical) Matthews vehicle ... easily the biggest and most professional-looking British talkie made to that time ... and still Britain's best musical' .18 Evergreen is really Cinderella with a contemporary twist - the Thirties' interest in rejuvenation experiments, involving monkey glands and the like. It opens in the Edwardian era with the adored music hall star Harriet Green (Jessie Matthews) making her farewell appearance before marrying the Marquis of Staines and retiring. But threatened with the exposure of the existence of her illegitimate daughter, she flees to South Africa and eventually dies there. Years later - the present - and the child Harriet Green Jr (also Jessie) is now a starving chorus girl, seeking work in a new show. She is recognized by producer Leslie Benn (Sonnie Hale), and when the temperamental star of the show is sacked, Benn devises a gimmick to make the show a success - Harriet will pose as her mother making a comeback at the age of sixty. She is a hit, but the strains of the imposture are too much and she publicly confesses the fraud on stage. She wins over the initially hostile audience to become a star in her own right. She is united with the eager-beaver publicity agent Tommy Thompson (Barry Mackay). The timespan of the story allows Jessie to perform an Edwardian music hall song ('Daddy Wouldn't Buy Me a Bow-Wow'), a modern ballad ('Evergreen'), and a sensuous solo dance ('Dancing on the Ceiling') which perfectly encapsulates the essence of her appeal. It also puts her 'modern miss' image in its historical context in a spectacular production number, 'Springtime in Your Heart', which traces the process of female emancipation: from 1904 when correct young Edwardian ladies dance the polka, to

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1914 when bomb-cases drop over a line of pretty girls, turning them into soldiers, to 1924 and the frenzied dancing of the flappers, to 1934 and the spirited modern dance of the liberated girls of the present. The film earned rave reviews in both Britain and America, with C. A. Lejeune in the Observer, for m~;tanCje.

Jessie Matthews grows so much in stature in every part she tackles that our directors might safely dispense with their production numbers and leave it to her to pull them through. Her movement and poise in this new picture of Victor Saville's is enchanting; she has found just how to get maximum effect from the minimum appearance of effort, and her best moments now have that emotional quality that comes from a perfect fitness of form and idea. 19 As Saville admitted, 'The big problem was to find a dancer capable of partnering Jessie. We never did.'20 Saville wanted to sign Fred Astaire, then appearing at the Palace Theatre in The Gay Divorce, but RKO had him under contract and refused to release him. So Jessie carried her films precious little help from alone and indeed often danced alone. She either of the two actors who became her regular partners. Barry Mackay, who appeared with her in Evergreen, Sailing Along and Gangway, was a tiresomely winsome, conventionally breathless upper·class English juvenile. Graham Greene talked rather unkindly of his 'repulsive boyishness' but one can see his point. 21 There was a grinning adolescent quality about him and he wholly lacked star charisma. The other drawback was Sonnie Hale, whom Jessie insisted on having in her films until he became her director. It is difficult now to see where Sonnie Hale's appeal lay. Apparently an acceptable stage performer, he emerges on screen as curiously graceless and unattractive. Not good~looking enough to play the leading man, he undertook comic relief but without ever endearing himself. Yet this man found himself at the centre of one of the more bizarre scandals of the age. Married to Evelyn Laye, he embarked on an affair with which resulted in an un savoury divorce court case. London was treated to the spectacle of the two most beautiful women on the stage fighting over the love of perhaps the least attractive male. The divorce case also indicates another of those areas of star appeal - the larger·than-life disasters that befell stars and reassured those whose mundane lives were untouched by either celebrity or notoriety. Jessie's life story, much of it highly publicized at the time and more of it revealed later in biographies, was a veritable catalogue of soap opera traumas, involving, besides the divorce scandal, miscarriages, nervous breakdowns and eventually three marriages. It is not surprising that there have been several as yet unfulfilled projects to turn her life story into a film. One of them, announced in 1976, was to have starred Liza Minnelli. 22 Jessie was at the height of her popularity when she starred in First a

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Girl (1~35), playing yet again a talented girl trying to get a break in show business. This one was an adaptation of a German film, Reinhold Schunzel's Viktor und Viktoria, which worked every variation conceivable on the theme of transvestism. Male impersonation by female stars and female impersonation by male stars was a long-established element of the British theatrical tradition. It had its roots in Elizabethan drama, notably Shakespeare's As You Like It, and more recently in popular farces like Charley's Aunt, in pantomime where the dame was regularly played by a man and the principal boy by a girl, and in music hall where performers like Hetty King, Ella Shields and Vesta Tilley had devoted followings for their male impersonation and where comics like Max Miller and Norman Evans included female impersonation in their acts. It inevitably entered the cinema, and such established stars as Gracie Fields (Shipyard Sally) and Cicely Courtneidge (Me and Marlborough) tried their hands at male impersonation. Jessie joined them in First a Girl. The Continental sophistication of the plot, toned down slightly for the English censors, was still handled with great elegance and panache by director Victor Saville. The story is set in Paris and Vienna, as befits such sexual shenanigans, and starts when Elizabeth (Jessie Matthews), an aspiring performer, meets Victor (Sonnie Hale), an unsuccessful Shakespearian actor who earns his living as a female impersonator. When Victor loses his voice, he insists that Elizabeth takes his place. Dressed in male attire and calling herself Bill, Elizabeth goes on for Victor and wins a Continental tour. Her imposture is suspected by Princess Helen Miranoff (Anna Lee), who sets out with her fiance, Robert Adams (Griffith Jones), to expose the fraud. Eventually they are successful, but Robert falls in love with Elizabeth and she relinquishes her tour to the now-recovered Victor. The usual romantic complications and stratagems adopted to conceal Elizabeth's real identity are interspersed with lavishly staged musical numbers, including the daring 'Half and Half in which 'Bill' as a woman dances with a chorus of women in top hats and white evening suits, and 'Everything's in Rhythm with My Heart' with Jessie in feathers on the perch of a giant bird-case. With her lips, eyes and her shape incontrovertibly proclaiming her true gender, Jessie is never for a moment convincing as a man, but she handles very well the comic scenes this involves, such as a session of double brandies and cigars with Robert which leaves her hopelessly incapacitated. Sonnie Hale is, if anything, even more resistible than usual. Like Evergreen, the film garnered ecstatic reviews. The Sunday Times thought that Jessie 'had never done anything better than this. She is delightful to look at, joyous to hear. Especially clever is her male impersonation.' The whole thing was, it concluded, 'a smart, colourful, well-photographed, perfectly directed, tasteful, tuneful and goodhumoured comedY'.23 But travesty was not to everyone's taste, and C. A. Lejeune in

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the Observer admitted: 'I have a violent physical animus against men dressed up as women and women dressed up as men. It distresses me to see Jessie Matthews and Sonnie Hale, both of whom I admire enormously, reduced to this sort of undergraduate antic.'~4 It's Love Again (1936), Saville's last and favourite film with won general approbation too. The Era observed: 'A Jessie Matthews picture is a never~failing source of pleasure and revenue and this latest musical, cunningly fashioned to the captivating personality of the star, shows success in every frame of its length. Miss Matthews holds a unique position among British stars if only that there is no one to compare with her in her own line of country.'25 Kine Weekly called it 'a cast iron box office proposition for all classes if ever there was one'.26 Even Graham Greene admitted: 'For once it is possible to praise an English "musical" above an American. Mr. Victor Saville has directed It's Love Again with speed, efficiency and a real sense of the absurd.,27 They are all right. It's Love Again sparkles with wit and moves with all the elegance, polish and assurance of a Rolls-Royce. Jessie plays Elaine Bradford, an aspiring singer and dancer, who hits on the idea of posing as a celebrity, Mrs Smythe-Smythe, aviatrix, tiger·hunter and maharajah's mistress, in order to advance her career. She is unaware that Mrs SmytheSmythe was invented by gossip columnist Peter Carlton (Robert Young) in order to provide himself with copy. When they meet, they embark upon a sparring relationship which leads inevitably to love. At one stage, Peter chases her through the Underground, loudly proclaiming his love, to the astonishment of travellers. Her pose, however, leads to stardom in a new musical Safari, almost ruined when a rival columnist exposes 'Mrs Smythe-Smythe'. But Elaine steps in as herself and saves the show. For once Jessie had a first-rate co-star in the Hollywood actor Robert Young, whose charming and zany columnist Peter provided her with an admirable foil. There were also scene-stealing performances from Robb Wilton as an imperturbable butler ('There's a potentate outside. He wants a whisky and soda') and from Ernest Milton as an overwrought theatrical impresario, constantly threatening to enter a monastery. 'I'm doing my best,' one hapless auditioning female tells him; 'I know,' he retorts. 'That's why it's so pitiful.' Sonnie is once again on hand as the comic friend of the hero and contrives to do impersonations of a maharajah and a British Indian Army colonel. Jessie herself is on top form, whether performing a jazzed-up Nautch dance in a glittering Oriental outfit or 'I Nearly Let Love Go Slipping through My Fingers' in a figure-hugging sequinned jumpsuit. All three of her musicals with Saville were variations on the same theme. Jessie is an aspiring performer who undertakes an outrageous imposture (as her mother in Evergreen, as a man in First a Girl, as a notorious celebrity in It's Love Again). This leads to complications both

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professional and romantic, which are eventually resolved in stardom and love. But in 1936 following a salary dispute, Saville left Gaumont British, and at Jessie's insistence Sonnie Hale took over as her director. They completed three more films together, using the same production team and variations on the plot format. But critical reaction to the films was considerably less warm than to Saville's and the blame for this was squarely laid at Sonnie's door. Graham Greene was the most vitriolic critic. He wrote of Gangway in Night and Day: 'Miss Jessie Matthews had only once been properly directed ~ by Mr. Victor Saville. Mr. Sonnie Hale, whatever his qualities as a comedian, is a pitiably amateurish director and as a writer hardly distinguished. The best one can say about Gangway is that it is better than his previous picture.,28 Even Picturegoer joined in the criticism, declaring of Sailing Along: 'Possibly a director of wider actual experience of directing musicals than Sonnie Hale would be better able to give her the important pictures her talent and popularity warrant.'29 The general diminution of critical approval of Jessie's films was accompanied by a rise in costs, as Sonnie took longer to complete them than Saville had. Profits fell at a time when Gaumont British was in any case experiencing financial problems. As a result Asking for Trouble, their next large-scale musical project, for which American co-stars Kent Taylor and Noel Madison had been imported, was cancelled in 1938. Sonnie's contract expired and was not renewed. He was never to direct another film and was to act in only four more before returning finally and permanently to the stage. Jessie meanwhile was put into a modestly budgeted and shorter comedy, directed by the up-and-coming director Carol Reed, Climbing High. With this assignment, her Gaumont British contract expired, and so did Gaumont British at about the same time. Climbing High was to be released by MGM. It was Jessie's last major film. There is no doubt that Head Over Heels (1937), Jessie's first film with Sonnie directing, was a distinct disappointment after the brilliance of the three Saville films. It had a fine score (,Head Over Heels in Love,' 'Looking around Corners,' 'There's That Look in Your Eye Again') and the usual lavish Art Deco sets. But they merely compensated for a threadbare romantic triangle in a redundant Parisian setting and a story-line that was short on comic embellishment and style. Jessie was as usual an aspiring singer-dancer, Jeanne Corbet, torn between a flashy actor (Louis Borell) and a shy radio engineer (Robert Flemyng), but eventually achieving stardom and settling for the engineer. The comic potential of the setting Jeanne becomes a star by singing advertising jingles on commercial radio - was not exploited and there was no French flavour to the proceedings, which might just as well have been set in London, particularly since Robert Flemyng's Pierre came across more as a rather correct public school prefect than as a struggling French engineerinventor.

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Gangway (1938), was, as Graham Greene admitted, something of an improvement. Jessie was cast as Pat Wayne, assistant film critic of the Daily Journal, who is assigned to track down the international jewel thief 'Sparkle'. She encounters Inspector Bob Deering of Scotland Yard, who is on the same job, and they both end up in New York where, after a brush with gangsters, they are united. As ever the Art Deco sets were stunning, adding an ocean liner to the usual hotel, nightclub, and apartment locales of this 'make believe' world. Jessie was full of grace and charm, singing and dancing the title song in the form of a fight with a dancer whose show she had panned in a newspaper review, gliding effortlessly through 'Moon or No Moon' on the deck of the liner and finally performing 'When You've Got to You've Got to , while to escape from the gangsters' clutches in a New York night club. But although Sonnie Hale's handling of the disguises, complications and comedy routines was bright enough, there were handicaps. The plot-line resorted with something of an air of desperation to those hoariest of British film perennials the international jewel thief and the hero who turns out to be an incognito peer. Jessie was ill-served by her leading man, the amiable but undistinguished Barry Mackay, who warbled along with her and danced a few steps but was no substitute for a genuinely charismatic, sophisticated or attractive male lead, such as Robert Young had supplied. Lastly, there was a too overt bid for American interest by setting the finale in a very ersatz New York and including machine~gun battles, gang warfare and an attempted robbery. Despite the ikonic presence of American actors Nat Pendleton and Noel Madison, the whole episode, like all such British attempts, was unsuccessful. One interesting sociological sidelight provided by the plot is its reflection of the acknowledged power of American films on the British pUblic. At the beginning of the film, Pat Wayne and the office boy (Graham Moffatt) talk of their longing to go to America, their vision of which, it emerges, has been wholly shaped by the movies. They converse in movie-Americanese and muse wistfully about the endless gang wars and earthquakes which liven up the existence of Americans ('Nothing ever happens in England'). This movie obsession is also shared by two of the most unlikely characters in the film, the gangster 'Smiles' Hogan (Nat Pendleton), who talks rhapsodically about Shirley Temple, and the detective (Alastair Sim), who turns out to be the fan of the ageing film star Nedda Beaumont, another of the film's characters. Jessie's last film with Sonnie was by far the best of the three and finally regained the standard attained by the earlier Saville films. Sailing Along (1938) had a very funny script, a first-rate supporting cast and excellent production values. Jessie played Kay Martin, a Thames bargee's daughter determined to be a star. Seen dancing by eccentric millionaire Anthony

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Gulliver (Roland Young), she is introduced to the stage director Dicky Randall (Jack Whiting), who promises her an audition. Her audition is sabotaged and she is dropped. But Gulliver's sister Victoria (Athene Seyler) takes over the management of her career. After a programme of deportment, elocution and singing she is successfully launched as a star, both Dicky and Gulliver fall in love with her but she realizes she loves her rugged foster brother, Steve (Barry Mackay), and she goes off with him on his schooner to sail round the world. Jessie played Kay as a tough~tender Cockney tomboy, exuding independence and self-confidence. She fights, sends people up, behaves with endearing outrageousness. Although transformed inevitably into a lady, she never loses her spirit. For although the film begins unusually on a river barge, the action soon moves to the familiar terrain of West End mansion and theatre. The songs are less memorable than in previous films but the dance routines are admirable, and for the first time Jessie has a genuine dancing partner in Jack Whiting, with whom she performs the splendid dance number 'My River', which ranges from the docks to the upper reaches of the Thames. Although there had been some talk of importing Ray Milland to co-star, the part of Steve fell again to Barry Mackay. But also on hand were Roland Young as the good-natured, befuddled millionaire Gulliver who had made his money in soup but prefers discovering artistic genius ('There is more to life than drenching the British Empire in soup'), Alastair Sim as his protege, a wild-eyed abstract painter who eventually confesses that he prefers doing conventional country scenes, and Athene Seyler as Gulliver's formidable sister who champions Kay's career. The scenes involving these three, who can do wonders with a lift of the eyebrow, a curl of the lips and a clearing of the throat, are pure gold. Jessie remained in character as a working girl for Climbing High (1939). She played a hard-up photographer's model, Diana Castle, who falls in love with a wealthy young man, Dicky Brooke (Michael Redgrave), believing him to be poor. She succeeds eventually in extracting him from the clutches of his gold-digging titled fiancee (Margaret Vyner). The climax comes in Switzerland, thus justifying the title, and sees Jessie escaping from the murderous attentions of a lunatic on top of the Alps. Most critics thought it amusing enough if something of a comedown from her previous films. Interestingly Film Pictorial thought that it cried out for musical numbers. 3o Instead there were the usual crazy capers of the 'screwball comedy'. Film Weekly pronounced it 'an infectious if imperfect frolic', and Picturegoer felt that it was 'forced in its more slapstick moments and very thin in its story development,.31 Her career as a major British film star thus ended with the decade, just like that of her male counterpart and ertswhile stage co-star Jack Buchanan, the immaculate and easy-going man-about-town, whose films

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also took place in that luxurious never-never land of West End theatres, Mayfair nightclubs, Home Counties mansions, four-star hotels, Cunard liners and a Riviera where the champagne flowed without pause. 32 Jessie, like Jack, symbolized that carefree Art Deco world, where style was all and where stardom and romance were to be had in return for a tuneful song and a graceful dance. There was no place for them in the grim world of blackouts and austerity where survival was the name of the game. By the end of the war, they both came to seem the survivals of a long-distant, almost legendary epoch. But there was no doubt that Jessie was a potent cinematic figure in the 1930s. Throughout that decade Hollywood companies sought her services with varying of tenacity. At different times MGM, RKO, Paramount, Fox and Samuel Goldwyn all pursued her. In 1933 an exchange deal with Twentieth Century-Fox that would take her to Hollywood and bring Warner Baxter to Gaumont British was announced. But the deal fell through. In 1935 it was announced that she would definitely go to Hollywood to co-star with Robert Montgomery in This Time It's Love, and MGM prepared a series of projects for her. This scheme also came to nothing and the properties were retailored for the talents of Eleanor Powell. Each successive deal foundered on Jessie's recurrent illhealth and emotional problems, her apparent insistence on the inclusion of Sonnie in any deal and Michael Balcon's reluctance to lose his most valuable asset except as part of an exchange deal which would give him a big Hollywood star for Gaumont British. With her Gaumont British contract at an end, Jessie and Sonnie put on a lavish stage musical, I Can Take It, starring themselves. But the outbreak of war scotched it and they lost heavily on it. Almost incredibly Jessie tested for the role of Sally Hardcastle in Love on the Dole but lost it to Deborah Kerr. Instead she went to the United States to star in a stage musical, The Lady Comes Across. It was another flop, and her commitment to it lost her the chance to sign for Columbia Pictures as Fred Astaire's costar. Her long-awaited Hollywood debut came in fact in 1943 when she was one of a host of British stars who appeared in RKO's Forever and a Day, a tribute to Britain, whose proceeds went to various war charities. It told the story of a London house and its various occupants from 1805 to the Blitz. Jessie appeared in an episode directed by Victor Saville about a young girl coming from India in 1845 to marry the house's owner (lan Hunter). But it led to no further film work in America. Instead she returned to Britain to appear in a dire 'B' feature thriller, Candles at Nine (1945), which sank without trace. After the war, there were several lean years, but with the tenacity of the born survivor she soldiered on, turning to the theatre and straight drama, The Killing of Sister George and Night Must Fall as well as Somerset Maugham and Terence Rattigan. There were even to be a couple more film

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cameos (Tom Thumb, 1958, The Hound of the Baskervilles, 1978). But she hit the headlines again in 1963 when, now plump, matronly and silverhaired, she took over the leading role in the long-running BBC radio serial The Dales. She played that paragon of middle-class suburban virtue, Mrs Dale, until the serial ended in 1969. She was awarded the OBE in 1970. She continued to work on television, in radio, in cabaret and in concerts until her death in 1981. One of her last memorable appearances was in the lTV series Edward and Mrs Simpson, in which she played Mrs Simpson's aunt and returned to that high society world of the 19308 where she had reigned supreme - that merry madcap world of the 'Bright Young Things', their japes and scrapes, their romances and their scandals, a gossamerlight, feather-brained world that was to shrivel before the blast of cold reality. Jessie was, as the surveys reveal, popular with middle-class audiences. But to have gained as high a position in the box-office listings as she did she must also have attained a good measure of popularity with workingclass audiences. This may have been due to her sexiness and her songs. But it may also be because her films are one of the best illustrations of Edgar Morin's maxim about the acceleration in movement of the great mass of the people 'to the psychological level of middle-class individuality'. The Matthews musicals are prime examples of the 'desire to live one's own life i.e. to live one's dreams and to dream one's life'. The accent here is on individual achievement whether in love or work. So while Gracie maintained her popularity by being the people's heroine with her roots in the community, Jessie gained hers by becoming the embodiment of an essentially individualist middle-class success ethic.

The Romantic Adventurer: Robert Donat and Leslie Howard The British cinema's one undisputed romantic leading man in the 1930s was Robert Donat. In London Films' poll of the most popular British stars in 1935 he was ranked fourth - but after Charles Laughton, George Arliss and Cedric Hardwicke, who were essentially character actors. l In the Motion Picture Herald box-office listings, he came fifth in 1936 after Fields, Formby, Matthews and Hulbert, third in 1939 after Fields and Formby, and second in 1940 after Formby. His fall in the in 1937-8 was due largely to his absence from the screen. But there can be no doubting his status as the premier romantic male lead. As with Jessie Matthews, Hollywood would certainly have snapped him up, had it not been for his reluctance to leave Britain due to his ill~health, his family ties, his dislike of film star ballyhoo and his chronic indecisiveness. This latter characteristic was related to his uncertain health and it was his health which was to dominate and dictate the course of his career. When he died in 1958, Campbell Dixon wrote of him: 'Robert Donat was one of the greatest actors of his generation and probably the most unlucky. The gods gave him every grace and every gift except one good health.'2 His whole life was a ceaseless battle against the crippling and debilitating effects of chronic asthma which constantly interrupted his only added to the affection in which he was held career. Yet his by the cinema-going public. In spite of this suffering, he managed to appear in half a dozen of the most memorable films to come out of British studios (Goodbye, Mr. Chips, The Ghost Goes West, The Thirty-Nine Steps, The Citadel, Knight Without Armour and Young Mr. pitt).3 His appeal was immediate. He was handsome, charming and graceful. Charles Laughton called him 'the most graceful actor of our time'. 4 But perhaps his asset was his voice, still to be heard and wondered at on his records of poetry readings. It was an incomparable voice, at once strong and fragile, lyrical and majestic, resonant and gentle. The voice mirrors the real Donat, a figure oddly in contrast with the debonair screen image, melancholy sensitivity reflecting the torment, confusion and loneliness which were part and parcel of his illness - an illness which he himself admitted was 90 per cent psychological. As often as his illness, it was his consuming self-doubt that caused him to turn down parts. His career, on both stage and screen, remains one of tragically unfulfilled promise. In the opinion of many, he could have been one of our greatest 225

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Shakespearian actors. But he essayed only two major Shakespearian roles on stage, Benedick and Romeo. and was satisfied with neither. The list of films he turned down reads like a roll call of Hollywood's finest productions. MGM early on spotted his star quality, and he was offered a leading role in their 1932 film version of Smilin' Through after Irving Thalberg had seen him on the London stage in Precious Bane. But he turned them down, something which only whetted their appetite the more. When they finally did sign him to a six-picture contract in 1938, it was agreed that he should make his films in Britain. The image he projected was that of the romantic idealist, often with a dash of the gentleman adventurer. This was how Hollywood, with its unfailing eye for star image, saw him, as is evidenced by the list of roles he was offered and turned down - Robin Hood, Captain Blood, Anthony Adverse, Horatio Nelson, Frederic Chopin, Marco Polo, Beau Geste, Romeo and Peter Ibbetson. It is this image - dreamer and man of action, gentleman and adventurer - that brackets him with Leslie Howard, whose popularity derived from a similar image. Although much of Howard's career was spent in Hollywood, he made several important films in Britain in the 1930s and returned to work exclusively in this country upon the outbreak of war. It is instructive to examine the two men's careers in tandem, for they did run oddly parallel, sometimes even overlapping, and they illuminate what was a key star archetype. Although both Howard and Donat were seen as quintessentially English actors, Howard's father was and Donat's Polish. Both received their training and early grounding in the theatre, and both meditated in published articles on the difference between acting for the stage and acting for the screen. Both were announced at various times for the leading roles in films about Nelson and Lawrence of Arabia. Both planned films of Hamlet, neither of which eventuated. Howard played in Hollywood three of the roles Donat rejected - in Smilin' Through, Romeo and Juliet and British Agent - and Donat expressed an interest in playing R. J. Mitchell in The First of the Few, the part Howard played so magnificently that Noel Coward called his performance 'acting that transcended acting'. 5 Hamlet, Nelson and Lawrence - men of ideas and men of action - very much an image for the times in the 19308, when young idealists went to Spain to fight Fascism and when many more dreamed of world peace, put their faith in the League of Nations and fought in their own way for policies which would give primacy to domestic improvement rather than foreign involvement. Donat's film career began when he was signed in 1933 to a three-year contract by Alexander Korda, whose newly formed London Film Produc~ tions were releasing through Paramount. His first three films were undistinguished, not much better than superior 'quota quickies'. The most interesting seems to be the first, Men of Tomorrow (1933), a drama about

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the trials and tribulations of Oxford undergraduates. It was directed by Leontine Sagan, who had earned a considerable critical reputation for a film about a German girls' school, Madchen in Uniform. But she was apparently out of her depth both thematically and technically with Men of Tomorrow, and it had to be reshot in part by Zoltan Korda. 6 Nevertheless it gained some respectful reviews. Picturegoer said: 'Miss Sagan has achieved the distinction of being the first person to deal faithfully and dramatically with the life of an English University.'7 Forsyth Hardy in Cinema Quarterly said it 'ranks high among British films. Leontine Sagan's direction has a rare quality of sympathetic understanding .... Her camera is always used with intelligence and with some lovely of Oxford's stately streets and riverside pubs on the Cherwell, the film makes a fascinating contribution to the movement for bringing Britain to the screen.,8 Donat played one of the undergraduates but was not mentioned in either review. The other two films were That Night in London (1933), a drama in which he played a country bank clerk on a spree in London with stolen money, and Cash (1933), a comedy in which he played an electricity inventor and his inspector who comes to the financial aid of a daughter. It was at this point that Korda made his great gamble, producing and directing for United Artists release the major costume drama The Private Life of Henry VIII. Donat was cast in the supporting role of Thomas Culpeper, the lover of Queen Katherine Howard. Korda's gamble paid off, the film was a smash hit in both Britain and America, and Donat, who wore his period costume and his lines well, was favourably noticed by critics and public alike. Meanwhile he achieved a notable success on the stage in James Bridie's A Sleeping Clergyman. In 1934 he received an offer from Hollywood to star in The Count of Monte Cristo, which, on the advice of Korda, he accepted. But when he arrived in Hollywood, he found that the production company was an independent (Reliance Films), who planned the film as a 'quickie' on a four~week shooting schedule and a low budget. He also discovered that though he was the choice of the director Rowland V. Lee, who had directed him in That Night in London, the producer, Edward Small, wanted to replace him with the John Barrymore look-alike Warren William. However, when the company executives saw the rushes, they realized Donat's quality and assigned a longer shooting schedule and larger budget. The resulting film was a hit. Several times it remains the definitive screen version of Dumas's classic, reasonably faithful to the original, except for the obligatory happy ending which reunited Edmond and Mercedes. It was stylishly directed and Donat's voice was heard to its best effect for the first time on the screen. It was his performance in the quintessentially romantic role of Edmond Dantes that won him international stardom. The Sunday Times said of his performance:

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A young English actor, Mr. Robert Donat, contributes to the film a striking -performance in the title role. It is his first Hollywood role but I cannot believe that it will be his last, for he has displayed all the assets that make for supremacy on the screen. His part is a very long one. It has many difficult and trying moments but he handles it with superb assurance, an ease and a certainty that mark him as a finished actor.9 The New York Times gave the American view: 'His performance is lean, intelligent and quietly overwhelming, and it is unmarked by hysteria or the grand ham manner which the part invites.,l0 As the wronged and imprisoned young sailor who returns to avenge his wrongs on his he gave the part the right blend of charm, sensitivity, idealism and brooding melancholy. But it was destined to be his only Hollywood role, though not because there was a shortage of offers. Warner Bros began negotiations with him and announced a programme of films for him to star in, beginning with Captain Blood. But at the last moment, Donat pulled out and was sued by Warners for breach of contract. Needing a Captain Blood at short notice, Warners took a chance on a young contract player called Errol Flynn and found themselves with a new star. Donat returned to Britain to appear in five splendid films in succession. First, he went to Gaumont British to play Richard Hannay, the debonair and quick-witted Canadian adventurer in Alfred Hitchcock's marvellous version of John Buchan's The Thirty-Nine Steps (1935). It was the story of an innocent bystander who gets involved with a spy ring which is smuggling Britain's air secrets out of the country. Wrongly suspected of murder, he flees from both the police and the spies, but finally succeeds in unmasking the villains and clearing himself. Hitchcock brought to the film great visual style, garnished with some effective Expressionist touches, and expertly blended fast-paced chase sequences, high tension and some sophisticated comedy, enhanced by the teaming of Donat and Madeleine Carroll. There were many memorable sequences: Donat and Carroll, handcuffed together, being forced to spend the night in each other's company at a lonely inn; Donat being mistaken for a visiting political speaker while on the run and being forced to give a nonsense speech to a rally; the climax at the London Palladium with police and spies closing in on the beleaguered Donat. Years later Hitchcock was to say of Donat: 'He was as much as anybody responsible for the worldwide success of this picture. I am sure that his performance really made it so delightful: he was not in any sense a comedian, but he had a beautiful dry quality and that was his great contribution.,ll The reviews praised Donat's relaxed air, his impeccable handling of the comedy and his stylish attack. Campbell Dixon declared in the Daily Telegraph: 'Robert Donat, one of the finest young actors in the

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world, makes a most convincing, engaging Richard Hannay.'12 C. A. Lejeune hailed him in the Observer: 'For the first time on our screens we have the British equivalent of a Clark Gable or a Ronald Colman playing in a purely national idiom. ,13 Colman was of course British but a Hollywood star and what Lejeune meant was that for the first time Britain had an unmistakable film star who combined masculine charm and romantic appeal. Donat returned to Korda for his next two films, The Ghost Goes West (936) and Knight Without Armour (1937), part of Korda's ambitious programme of creating international films which nevertheless contained an essence of Britishness. The Ghost Goes West was a piece of whimsy handled with light-hearted Gallic charm by Rene Clair. Donat, at his most debonair, caught the mood of the film exactly in his double role, as Murdoch Glourie, the philandering Glourie Ghost, condemned to walk the earth until he pulls the nose of the clan's hereditary enemy, the MacLaggan, and Donald Glourie, his descendant, living in reduced circumstances in the ancestral home. Donald manages to persuade his creditors to act as butlers and servants when an opportunity of selling the castle to American tycoon Joe Martin arises. The castle is transported to Florida, where the Ghost finally meets a MacLaggan and redeems his honour. The film has great fun at the expense of the Americans. Joe Martin, the tycoon, is loud, boastful and ignorant, the caricatured American abroad, who does not know the difference between grouse and duck. His wife is a neurotic spiritualist ('Ever since I had my nervous breakdown I've been extremely psychic'). To Donald's distaste the re-erected castle boasts radio in the suits of armour, electric chandeliers and a Negro band in kilts. The message is clear - the Americans may have the money but we have the style. Indeed, the audience, many of whose members may themselves not know the difference between a grouse and a duck, are invited to join in the essentially class-based as well as chauvinistic laughter at the expense of the vulgar Yanks. But as always, the pill is sugared by romance, for Donald marries the Martins' daughter (Jean Parker), Just as love transcended national differences in The Ghost Goes West, so it did also in Knight Without Armour, based on the novel by James Hilton. Director Jacques Feyder turned it into a stylish and visually elegant film, which, although many critics dismissed it as ersatz Sternberg, has much to recommend it. It does have some loose ends in the narrative understandable perhaps when one learns that the first cut of the film ran four hours. But it is always handsome to look at and rapturously celebrates the beauty of Marlene Dietrich, photographed in a succession of misty close-ups and in long shots, dreamily swathed in silks, furs and feathers. Again, it provided Donat with a tailor-made part as A. J. Fothergill, Oxford-educated, poetry-quoting, pipe-smoking Englishman

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recruited by the British secret service to infiltrate the Russian revolutionary movement. He is arrested and sent to Siberia, where he endures much suffering. But after the Revolution, he becomes an assistant commissar. He falls in love with and helps to escape from Russia the beautiful Countess Alexandra Adraxine (Dietrich) and much of the action of the film is taken up with their flight across country avoiding the murderous attention of the Bolsheviks. Not surprisingly, the film takes a very British view of the Russian Revolution, with the Whites and Reds alternately machine-gunning each other, a mixed-up commissar (John Clements) helping the fugitive to escape and then shooting himself, evidence of widespread cruelty and dislocation, and the fugitives choosing love and flight to dear old reactionary Britain, characterized at the start of the film by Royal Ascot and dinner in a first-class railway restaurant car, in preference to remaining in the people's paradise. Fothergill clearly chooses to forget his exile and mistreatment at the hands of the Tsarist authorities. What is rather more surprising is that the censors when approving the script should have believed that it contained no political element. The film did gain one champion among the critics. Graham Greene, usually so disparaging of Korda's productions, found to his surprise that Knight Without Armour was a first-class thriller ... beautifully directed, with spare and convincing dialogue and a nearly watertight scenario .... The story, of course, is melodrama, but melodrama of the most engaging kind, the heroic wishfulfilment dream of adolescence all the world over rescues, escapes, discarnate embraces .... Mr. Donat is the best film actor at any rate in star parts - we possess; he is convincing, his voice has a pleasant roughness and his range is far greater than that of his chief rival for film honours, Mr. Laurence Olivier. 14 After he signed for MGM in 1938, they put him into two films on which they lavished the same meticulous care in all departments that characterized the best of their Hollywood output. The first was The Citadel (1938), based on A. J. Cronin's novel and directed by King Vidor. It was the moving story of an idealistic young Scottish doctor, Andrew Manson, who abandons his practice in a Welsh mining village for life as a society doctor in London. Eventually, his idealism reawakened, he assists a brilliant but unqualified TB expert in a serious operation. Accused before the Medical Council of unprofessional conduct, he vindicates himself in an impassioned speech in which he dedicates himself anew to the ideal of fighting for humanity. The direction of Vidor, who responded to such humanistic themes, was faultless, and Donat's performance as the crusading young doctor fighting against self-interest, ignorance, superstition and red tape reached new

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heights of sensitive expressiveness. His delivery of the final speech is touched with genius, as is his playing of scenes like his determined revival of a newly born baby which everyone believes to be dead, his glorious act of defiance in dynamiting the disease-ridden sewers of the village, and the sequence in which, having become a successful doctor, he concentrates on ordering an hors d'oeuvre, only half hearing a distressed mother who is telling him of her daughter's serious illness. In his autobiography Vidor paid tribute to Donat, calling him 'the most helpful and co-operative star with whom I have ever worked' and saying, 'I have observed no finer actor than Donat.,15 His performance earned him an Academy Award nomination, but he lost to Spencer Tracy, who took the Best Actor award for Boys' Town. Nominated again the following year, Donat won a success emphasized by the fact that it was also the year of Gone With the Wind, and Selznick's blockbuster carried off most of the other awards. The award came for what was probably Donat's most famous and certainly his best-loved film, Goodbye, Mr. Chips. James Hilton's nostalgic and affectionate novella about the life of a master at an English public school had originally been purchased by MGM as a vehicle for Charles Laughton. But Donat took it on, under the direction of Sam Wood, and achieved a triumph, ageing during the course of the film from twenty-five to eighty-three. The film charted the career of Mr. Chipping from his hesitant, eager first days through a disillusioned middle age when, disliked as a disciplinarian by the boys and a bore by the staff, he is passed over for promotion, through his rejuvenation by his to a much younger wife (Greer Garson) and then, after her death in childbirth, his maturing into a much-loved and respected old 'character', who retires to live near the school and, at the end, dies, recalling all the boys he has known. Through the character of Chips, with his unshakeable belief in the traditional virtues and values, the film resoundingly endorses the role of the public school in the system and the timelessness of the system itself, as three successive generations of the Colley family pass through the school and the care of Chips with his philosophy of endowing boys with 'a sense of humour and a sense of proportion', the infallible recipe for life. The outbreak of the war saw Donat rejected for military service on health grounds, and MGM urged him to come to Hollywood. They planned a film of the life of Henri Dunant, founder of the Red Cross, for him. But he refused to leave Britain, rejected all proposed film projects and returned to the stage. Then in 1942 he returned to the screen in the title role in Carol Reed's Young Mr. Pitt. Although it is today less well known than his Thirties films, it contains what is probably his finest performance and certainly the climax of his film acting career. Charles Oakley's verdict on it, that it was 'probably the finest historical moving picture ever to be staged in this country', still holds true. 16 Designed as a morale~booster

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showing how Britain had stood alone against a European dictator before and, under an inspired leader, had achieved victory, it enshrined the ultimate Donat interpretation of the dedicated idealist in his portrayal of Prime Minister William Pitt as the ailing, lonely, prematurely ageing but inflexibly determined leader, who sacrifices his health and his personal happiness to his duty to the country and his commitment to resist tyranny. He declaimed Pitt's speeches superbly, ending with a prophetic Guildhall speech: 'England has saved herself by her exertions and will, as I trust, save Europe by her example.' For much of the time during the war Donat pursued his dream of becoming a successful actor-manager in the theatre, and there were continual quarrels and eventually lawsuits with MGM, who wanted him to fulfil his contract to make the four remaining films he owed them. The actor-managership brought him only worry, frustration and expense. He eventually worked out his MGM contract with two charming but not particularly distinguished romantic trifles, The Adventures of Tartu (1945) and Perfect Strangers (1945). He continued to be dogged by ill-health. By the end of the war, his days as a romantic idealist were at an end. But he did turn in for the cinema four more performances in character parts which showed that his subtlety and depth as an actor had in no way diminished. He played the supercilious KC in Anthony Asquith's The Winslow Boy (1948), the feckless inventor William Friese-Greene in John Boulting's The Magic Box (1951), an elderly dying clergyman in Charles Frend's Lease of Life (1954) and finally an old Chinese mandarin in Mark Robson's Inn of the Sixth Happiness (1958), a role he completed just before he died. His last scene in that film must rank as one of the most poignant in the history of the cinema. He was already fatally ill and labouring under great difficulty, when he turned to the camera and said: 'We shall not meet each other again, I think.' The titles of two of Donat's films, Knight Without Armour and The Citadel, locate him unmistakably in the chivalric tradition and help to explain the nature of his romantic appeal. Interest in matters medieval and chivalric had revived as part of the whole Romantic reaction to the measured, passionless classicism of the eighteenth century, 'the age', as Edmund Burke had called it, 'of sophisters, economists and calculators'. In the wake of the novels and poems of Sir Walter Scott, with their idealized and stylized picture of medieval chivalry, and of the massive revival of interest in the Arthurian celebrated in poems, paintings and countless retellings of Malory, a living and meaningful code of life for the nineteenth-century gentleman had been fashioned. The image of the gentleman was reformulated as a latterday version of the medieval knight, the embodiment of the virtues of bravery, loyalty and courtesy, modesty, purity and honour and endowed with a sense of noblesse oblige towards women, children and social inferiors. The practical concomitants

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of this code - the idea that character was more important than intellect, that money-making was squalid and ungentlemanly and that there was a natural affinity between gentlemen and the lower classes - were to form dominant strands in our national ideology for over a century. By the middle of the nineteenth century the and of chivalry had been so far absorbed into the fabric of Victorian life and thought that it was automatic to see the gentleman exclusively in terms of the medieval paladin. The chivalric ideal was embraced by political movements as diverse as 'Young England' and Christian Socialism, propagated by youth organizations like the Boy Scouts and the Church Lads Brigade, taught in schools both public and state and dramatized in literature both factual and fictional. This process was not accidental. Chivalry was deliberately promoted by key figures of the age in order to produce a ruling elite for the nation and for the expanding Empire who would be inspired by noble and selfless values. Perhaps the greatest repositories of chivalric teaching were the public schools, which were geared to turning out successive generations of Torn Browns who, like Thomas Hughes's original, were sent to school to become 'brave, helpful, truthtelling Englishmen and men and Christians', The extent to which the chivalric ideal had formed the outlook and influenced the behaviour of generations of young Englishmen can be seen in two of the most sombre but celebrated events of 1912: the gallant deaths of Captain Robert Falcon Scott and his companions in the frozen wastes of Antarctica - 'We have been to the Pole,' wrote Scott, 'and we shall die like gentlemen' and in the actions of those gentleman passengers who with enviable sang froid climbed into full evening dress before going down with the Titanic. The climacteric of the nineteenth century's chivalric revival came in the Great War. So deeply had a generation been inculcated with the ideals of physical preparedness, duty and honour and so potent was the image of the glorious death of 'The Happy Warrior' that the declaration of war against the ogre Germany in defence of 'gallant little Belgium' was greeted with jubilation, and exhilarated young men flocked to the colours. But the reality of war turned out to be neither noble nor glorious. It was mud and blood and gas and gangrene. The chivalric ethic was, however, so deeply embedded in the literature and thought of Britain that even the slaughter of the war did not eradicate it. It was never quite as strong after it as before, an~ a long, slow process of erosion began, speeded up by the Second World War and completed by the 1960s. But in the 1930s it remained and the films of Robert Donat can be seen to reflect various facets of the ethics. 17 In Knight Without Armour A. J. Fothergill displays all the gallantry, patriotism and devotion to a 'lady fair' one would expect of a paladin. They are qualities shared by Richard Hannay in The Thirty-Nine Steps. In The Ghost Goes West, Scottish laird Murdoch Glourie seeks to redeem his honour. In the same film, the American tycoon Joe Martin embodies the

234 THE STARS

despised money-making ethic, which stands in contradistinction to chivalry. In The Citadel, Dr Andrew Manson is inspired by the desire to improve the lot of the poor. Climactically Donat's William Pitt highlights all the romantic and idealist qualities as the symbol of the righteous struggle of a free people a monstrous tyranny. In this, Donat's career again runs parallel to that of Leslie Howard. When Leslie Howard died in 1943 after the civil aircraft in which he was travelling back to England from a lecture tour of Spain and Portugal was shot down over the Bay of Biscay, the Observer's film critic, C. A. Lejeune, said, 'Howard was more than just a popular actor. Since the war he has become something of a symbol to the British people.,18 The war had brought into sharp focus the meaning of England and Englishness. People felt a need to articulate what they were fighting for. There was a spate of books with titles like The English People, The Character of England and Forever England which sought to distil the essence of the England that people were fighting for. Over and over again one finds recurring the ideas that together make up the concept 'England' - a love of tradition, of balance and order; a belief in tolerance and humanity; and above all, perhaps, a sense of humour, that redoubtable bulwark against tyranny. It was these values and virtues which were powerfully expressed and embodied by the two men who come to mind first as speaking for England in the darkest days of the war. There was Winston Churchill, the silvertongued orator, the warlord, England's man of destiny, putting the war in its historical context, speaking in a language deliberately archaic and therefore timeless. At the same time as he was speaking and broadcasting the official message, another voice was focusing on the detail of everyday life - the voice of Everyman: J. B. Priestley, the bluff, common-sense, plain-speaking yeoman of Yorkshire. But there was a third voice - that of Leslie Howard. 19 C. A. Lejeune said of him: 'He had a passion for England and the English idea that was almost Shakespearean.'2o This quality of Englishness was acknowledged in his obituary in the Manchester Guardian, which talked of a 'frank, intensely English quality in Howard's voice, face and bearing. It was this same intensely English quality which made him popular everywhere in intensely English film parts like Sir Percy Blakeney, his modern counterpart Pimpernel Smith and the professor of phonetics in Pygmalion.,21 Leslie Howard had returned to England from Hollywood burning with a desire to contribute to the war effort. His activities were prodigious. He broadcast regularly to the United his long residence in and affection for that country making him an ideal person to win over hearts and minds in a land where isolationism and Anglophobia were still strong. He wrote newspaper articles. He joined the Ideas Committee of the Ministry of Information. He acted in the MOl's first full-length feature film, Forty-Ninth Parallel, and in the documentary short From the Four

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Corners in which he showed three Commonwealth soldiers round London and talked about the ideals they were fighting for. He spoke the final epilogue for Noel Coward's tribute to the navy, In Which We Serve. He produced a film about nurses, The Lamp Still Burns, and directed and narrated a memorable film tribute to the ATS, The Gentle Sex. He made his final, moving public appearance as Nelson in the pageant of the Cathedral Steps on the steps of St Paul's, reciting the last prayer before Trafalgar. Above all he directed, starred in and masterminded two of the finest British wartime films, Pimpernel Smith (941) and The First of the Few (1942). Their humanity and their humour, their sensitivity and make them idealism, and above all their quiet and abiding of the British cinema. They the complete distillation and the triumphant culmination of those qualities and characteristics that had gone into Howard's star archetype. 22 The eponymous hero of Pimpernel Smith is an apparently absentminded Cambridge archeology professor, who rescues artists and intellectuals from the Nazis in 1939. Although trapped by the Germans at the end, he delivers a denunciation of their philosophy of terror before vanishing almost before their eyes. The Swedish scholars Furhammer and Isaksson have seen this as an explicit religious allegory, with Pimpernel Smith as a Christ figure, with a group of disciples, engaged upon the work of salvation, going knowingly into a trap but eluding his enemies by a miracle. 23 The First of the Few is a deeply felt and loving portrait of R. J. Mitchell, the designer of the Spitfire, a man with whom Leslie seems to have felt an instinctive rapport, him as a battling against government indifference, commercial pressure and illhealth to realize his dream of the production of a plane that would be his country's salvation. The parallels with the characterization of Donat's Young Mr Pitt are striking. The first strand of Leslie Howard's appeal lies in his Englishness, as the Manchester Guardian noted. But it was not the of the pukka 'officer and gentleman' type, granite-jawed and ramrod~straight in the manner of Clive Brook, though he did undertake this kind of role on a couple of occasions. In Captured (1933), an exciting prisoner-of-war camp drama, he played Captain Allison, an officer and gentleman who sacrifices his life to allow his wife's lover to escape. In British Agent (1934), a vigorous and nonsensical version of events in Russia in 1917, he played Stephen Locke, the British who seeks to Russia from making peace with Germany and thus the Allied cause. A pipesmoking, Oxford-educated athlete, a patriot and a gentleman, he puts his duty to his country before his love for Bolshevik revolutionary Kay Francis. Far more representative of the type of Englishness he represented was his definitive performance as Sir Percy Blakeney in The Scarlet Pimpernel

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(1935), one of the best-loved British films of the Thirties. Kine Weekly noted: 'Leslie Howard surpasses himself as Sir Percy Blakeney, his performance - a subtle combination of the romantic, the fatuous and the adventurous - is a supreme delight.,24 The film in fact only reached the screen after intense production difficulties. Rowland Brown, the talented American director of the gangster classics Blood Money and Smart Millions, was signed to direct, but within a few weeks of commencing he was taken off the picture. The producer, Alexander Korda, felt that he was making it too grim and gory and assumed the direction himself, in order to return to his original light-hearted conception. The film was finally handed over for completion to the American editor Harold Young, who received sole directorial credit on the final print. In spite of its deserved celebrity, the film does have weaknesses. The production values are, as always in Korda's films, excellent and memorably evoke the elegance and grace of upper-class eighteenth~ century England. But the film could have done with rather more of the blood and thunder Brown was accused of trying to inject. There is perhaps too little of the Pimpernel and too much of Sir Percy for a successful balance between the two identities to be maintained. Deeds are reported rather than seen and this sometimes leads to a feeling of anti~clirnax. The film is also seriously under·scored. It does, however, provide perfect visual match·ups for Sir Percy, his wife Marguerite and their enemy, Citizen Chauvelin, in the stars Leslie Howard, Merle Oberon and Raymond Massey. Leslie Howard, with his soft voice, lazy manner and dreamy~eyed good looks, is equally at home rescuing aristocrats, gleefully disguised at one point as an old hag, and fooling the world as a fop. The Times obituary expressed the belief that there was much of Leslie himself in the performance: 'For as the Pimpernel concealed a strength and tenacity of purpose behind a flippant air, so did Howard disguise an art conceived in terms of hard work and perfect timing behind the casual understatement, the offhand approach, the quietly humorous habit of self.depreciation.'25 One of the key elements of this image of Englishness is the humour. Sir Percy's foppish pose is beautifully conceived and played and involves several memorable encounters, such as a bantering exchange with a crusty old colonel, a lengthy controversy with the exasperated royal tailor about the length of the Prince of Wales's sleeve and his pointed taunting of the dour Chauvelin ('Demmed clever the French, how they speak that unspeakable language of theirs I will never know'), But along with this sense of humour goes a deeply felt idealism, expressed in a dedication to the rescue of condemned aristocrats from the tumbril, the guillotine and the bloodthirsty mob, the effortless superiority of the gentleman amateur who runs rings round the Froggies, and there is the underlying patriotism which binds it all together. It may have been Korda who with

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characteristic showmanship devised the film's tagline: 'Look, Marguerite ... England', saying 'They'll have to applaud after that', but it was Leslie who suggested including John of Gaunt's deathbed speech from Richard II 'this earth, this realm, this England', which he proceeded to deliver superbly.

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during the French Revolution which would remind audiences of Hitler and the Nazis'.ll The Return of the Scarlet Pimpernel (1938), produced by Arnold Pressburger and directed by Hans Schwartz, both of them refugees from the Continent, turned out as a stylish costume drama, done with pace, lightness and just the right note of insouciance. But its message was clearly established from the outset, contrasting France, with its ruthless dictator and blood-lusting mob, and Britain, characterized by elegant aristocrats playing cricket, the same aristocrats who under Sir Percy Blakeney (Barry K. Barnes) are soon risking their lives to rescue the victims of the Terror. The Pimpernel and his friends drink a toast to 'England and Freedom' and it is clear that for the film·makers as for their characters the two are synonymous. Given the attitude of the censors, this sort of message could only be expressed in costume pictures, but it is evident that as the decade wore on it was being expressed loud and clear. The same sort of change of attitude can be seen in films which actually dealt with the war and the armed forces. There were only some twenty-six war films made in Britain in the entire decade leading up to the outbreak of the Second World War. The highest number in anyone year was five in 1939, which was one more than the next highest totaL four in 1930 and 1938. There had only been one in 1931, 1932 and 1934. It is a minute proportion of the total output of the cinema in these years and an eloquent reflection of a general desire to avoid war. The war films of the early Thirties certainly portrayed war as hell, but in tacit acknowledgment of the class as a hell endured nobly by the upper classes and with comic resignation by their inferiors. R.e. Sherriffs Journey's End, the definitive First World War play, became the definitive First World War film when it reached the screen in 1930 with James Whale directing and Colin Clive recreating his stage performance as Captain Stanhope, a finely shaded study in torment which had electrified thea tre-goers. Largely set in a cramped dugout in the trenches, it is a meticulously observed and deeply moving study of men in war. But having said that, it must also be added that the suffering is endured exclusively by the officers. This of course reflects in part the fact that books and plays about the war were invariably written by men of the officer class and they were much more cognizant of the emotions, expressions and thought processes of their confreres than of the 'other ranks' But it also reflects a world view, mirrored in the cinema, in which on the whole it was the upper classes who experienced the noble and serious emotions in life and the working classes who supplied the comic relief. This is confirmed by the descriptions of the only working-class characters in the story by the film's producer George Pearson. Second Lieutenant Trotter is a Cockney risen

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from the ranks, who 'thinks more of the apricots for supper than saving his life, talks only of the "missus" at home, his garden and the height of his hollyhocks'. Private Mason is the Cockney servant, 'his only problem how to keep the taste of onion out of the tea. His one aim, to make bully beef look different.,12 The film pulls no punches in showing the futility, waste and appalling strain engendered by war. Lieutenants Osborne and Raleigh agree that war is silly and the Germans are 'quite decent'. But the story also shows how, despite all this, officers and gentlemen can still behave properly and honourably. The central relationship of the film is between Captain Denis Stanhope (Colin Clive) and Second Lieutenant Jimmy Raleigh (David Manners), who were at public school together. Stanhope is a courageous and dedicated commander, adored by his men. 'I'd go to hell with him,' says one of them. But the strain of war and the burden of command is so great that he has taken to drink. Extra stress is placed on him with the arrival of Raleigh, his former fag, who worships him and whose sister Stanhope loves. He is desperately afraid that his decline will be reported in Jimmy's letters home. Despite all the tensions and pressures that result from this situation, Raleigh retains his admiration for Stanhope. In the end, Raleigh is killed, as is the philosophical schoolmaster, Osborne, and the cowardly malingerer, Hibbert, who expiates his cowardice in death. Stanhope, his emotions stretched to the limit, will carryon. It is, as he told Hibbert, 'the only decent thing a man can do', It is small wonder that E, C. Mack pronounced the play 'probably the most effective propaganda for the English upper classes written in our time'.13 Tell England (1930), Anthony Asquith's film of Ernest Raymond's book, is very similar in stance and content to Journey's End. It centres on two public school boys, Edgar Doe (Carl Harbord) and Rupert Ray (Tony Bruce), who are first seen as best friends at school and later as officers at Gallipoli. Like Stanhope, Edgar succumbs to the pressure and takes to the bottle, quarrelling with Rupert and letting the side down. But eventually he pulls himself together and dies after a heroic action to knock out an enemy gun emplacement. The uncompromisingly graphic imagery of the film, the trench warfare and the terrible carnage, the incessant whine of shells and blast of explosions, convey the same sense of futility and helplessness that characterized All Quiet on the Western Front and Westfront 1918, the American and German counterparts of Tell England. At one point Edgar voice to this feeling when he declares that he knows what he would like to tell England about the war and we see a montage of barbed wire, explosions and bloody slaughter. But this is his view when drunk and cracking up. Where Tell England differs from the American and German films is in its ending when Edgar pulls himself together and realizes that war and death, however unpleasant, are a small price to pay

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for the preservation of the England of those fine, brave days before the war, the England, which they, as public school boys, were produced and trained to defend. Accordingly he composes his own epitaph, based on that of the Spartans at Thermopylae: 'Tell England, ye who pass this monument, we died for her and here we rest content.' Thus once the ruling class, the flower of whose sons did indeed perish in the Great War, are vindicated in their dominant role in society. By contrast, the working classes are seen as cheerful, illiterate, dialect-speaking cannon-fodder. Typical is the caricatured working-class batman Sims, who is asked by Rupert to keep an eye on Edgar ('Cor bless you, sir, it's all in a day's work'), and is duly killed. What is absent from both these films and others like them is any sense of hostility to the enemy. It is as if the war itself was somehow the enemy. This is even true of films which viewed the enemy at closer quarters. I Was a Spy (1933) was a large-scale but sober reconstruction of the true story of the Belgian nurse Marthe Cnockhaert, movingly played by Madeleine Carroll. While nursing German wounded, she was engaged in espionage and sabotage work for the Allies. The Observer praised the film: Victor Saville has directed his study of conflicting loyalties with a kind of austere passion that denies hysteria and keeps resolutely free from sentiment .... I Was a Spy is a war film without vituperation. It is moving and pitiful but it does not rant.14 In showing the carnage wrought by German poison gas and the British aerial bombing of a Sunday church it endorses the view that war is hell and that both sides are capable of atrocities. The ambiguity of Marthe's own role is crystallized by the scene in which she bursts into tears when awarded the Iron Cross for tending German casualties of an air raid brought about by information she has supplied to the British. At her trial, however, she defends herself by saying that Germany had no right to invade Belgium and that her actions are directed to driving them out of her country. So, as in Tell England, the of a heroic figure of the war is seen to have a solid basis in principle. But it is nevertheless true that the overall impression one gets from films about the Great War is that causes and principles become unimportant and that the war itself is the monstrous central fact of life and getting through it decently is the main thing. It must have been this about the independent existence of the war coupled with the sympathy for Germany over her post-war treatment thanks to the Versailles Treaty that determined in part how Germans were portrayed on the screen in the Thirties. For the image of Germany which came over in British films was not one of brutal stormtroopers, ranting Fuhrers or concentration camps, it was of the inflexibly honourable, heelwclicking and monocled Prussian officer, as

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classically incarnated by the British cinema's favourite German, Conrad Veidt. He had been the definitive actor of the great age of German Expressionist films (The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, The Hands of Orlae, Waxworks). During those years, he had frequently played the demented ranting tyrants in whom Siegfried Kracauer saw a pre-figuring of Hitler (Gessler, Rasputin, Ivan the Terrible). But with the coming of sound, he forsook such roles. With his pale, ascetic face, thin lips, hollow eyes and high forehead, he found himself cast as other-worldly figures such as the Christ-like visitor in The Passing of the Third Floor Back (1935) and the tormented possessor of eternal life in The Wandering Jew (1933). But sound also revealed that he possessed a distinctively metallic voice whose steely caress coupled with aristocratic charm and iron-willed determination enabled him to project an idealized Prussian officer and gentleman, to whom duty and love of country came before all. This image he memorably projected in a trio of espionage dramas: I Was a Spy (1933), in which he played the German Commandant, and Dark Journey (1937) and The Spy in Black (1939), in which he played officer spies in the Great War. In these roles, he won, as one reviewer put it, 'respect and sympathy as a patriot with the qualities that are admirable and admired in soldier, sailor or airman of any nationality - loyalty, courage, obedience and steadfast endurance'.15 This made him the exact and honourable counterpart of the Anglo-Saxon Imperial officer and gentleman. Ironically, although he had left Germany because his wife was part Jewish and he played the title roles in both The Wandering Jew and Jew Silss, he was to end his career in Hollywood playing fanatical Nazi officers. But for the 19308, the Germany he incarnated was very different in spirit from the one that Hitler was creating. 16 But as Britain began to rearm in 1935, so the cinema began to turn out films aimed at boosting the fighting services. There had been a continuing tradition of epics of the peacetime navy, Boys Own Paper tales in which the Royal Navy was engaged in putting down South American revolutions and piracy in the China films like The Flag Lieutenant (1932), White Ensign (1934), and Lt. Daring R.N. (1935). But after 1935 they took on a new urgency of tone and intent, as the publicity issued for Our Fighting Navy (1937) illustrates: The film Our Fighting Navy, a true to life story, depicts our modern fleet in all its phases. There has always been a naval way of doing things and our film proves that the Navy way is the right way, a way that brings out the finest qualities in the men who have adopted the Navy as their one and only job in life. Truly the men of the Navy are the sons of their fathers and possess more salt in their blood than any other race, resulting in the fact that we are the proud possessors of the finest navy in the world. The British Navy has not been used in the picture as a

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background to some stirring love drama, but the story deals with the protection of these islands of ours and the far outposts of the Empire. l7 When Gaumont British came to film C.S. Forester's Brown on the fierce opposition Resolution, they retitled it Forever England, of director Walter Forde, and billed it as 'a sea drama to stir the blood of everyone of British stock'. This was not the sort of film Forde had in mind. But the title pleased the Navy, which was, according to Geoff Brown, 'uncommonly cooperative during production. Prior to this, the use of naval equipment and personnel had been sanctioned only for documentary films.,IB For Forever England (1935), the Navy supplied four warships, Iron Duke, Cura~ao, Neptune and Broke, and 270 naval extras. Nevertheless Walter Forde went ahead and made the film he had intended, a simple, straightforward, soberly executed tale of heroism, in which a single rifleman, AB Albert Brown (John Mills), held the damaged German battle cruiser Zeithen at Resolution Island until the arrival of a British naval squadron. As a result, Kine Weekly complained that there was a shortage of patriotic flagwaving. 19 Interestingly, however, the film does, like other war films, highlight the importance of the class system. For Albert is the illegitimate son of an upper~class naval officer, Lieutenant Albert Somerville (Barry Mackay), and a greengrocer's daughter from Norwood (Betty Balfour). She refuses to marry him because the difference in their class would harm his career. But he gives her the watch which Nelson gave his grandfather. She it to her son Albert, and after he is killed it is found among his effects by Somerville, now commander of the naval squadron in pursuit of Zeithen. So blood will tell but class still rules. Gaumont British matched their support for the Navy by producing in 1936 D.H.M.S. with full Army and War Office cooperation. Directed by Raoul Walsh, this was much more straightforwardly designed as an army recruitment piece. A New York racketeer (Wallace Ford), fleeing from America to England to avoid involvement in a murder trial, enlists in the British Army under an assumed name. He does not take to the discipline at first, but his friendship with a young lance corporal (John Mills) and the favours of the sergeant major's daughter (Anna Lee) gradually open his eyes to the delights of army life. There is much full-dress parading and jolly barracks life with japes and escapades and finally the transfer of the regiment to China where the ex-racketeer, now fully integrated into the regiment, dies heroically saving a party of whites from Chinese bandits. World Film News summarized popular critical reaction to the film: The majority of the press reviews were very favourable .... The subject matter is universally applauded. Propaganda is usually of doubtful boxoffice value, but in this case the trade considers that propaganda and

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entertainment have been admirably blended and look forward with confidence to a financial success. 20 Propaganda of both a specifically military and generally social kind was to be found in two films based on a true incident. In 1936 a British regiment returning to England after five years in India was ordered to proceed immediately to the Near East to deal with an outbreak of trouble. The War Office arranged to transport the families of the troops to Southampton for a brief reunion during the six hours in which it was docked there. This suggested an obvious film story, taking and mingling the individual predicaments of a cross-section of the regiment. The result was two films, Hail and Farewell (1936) and Farewell Again (1937). The first, directed by Ralph Ince, was really only a superior Warner Bros quota picture, but it elicited good reviews, from The Times's verdict of 'unpretentious and efficient' to Kine Weekly's 'excellent light booking for the masses'.21 Farewell Again, directed by Tim Whelan for producer Erich Pommer, was a quality film, which won rave reviews. The Sunday Pictorial said: 'Here is the sort of film every cinema in Britain ought to be compelled to show ... some of the most memorable scenes ever offered on film.,22 The Daily Mail declared: 'Its rich human quality, with its many echoes of active service, make it something to appeal to the heart of every British filmgoer ... a picture which will be cheered in every British cinema in which it is shown.'23 C.A. Lejeune in the Observer called it 'the first big British picture to catch the full sense of English character', while noting the paradox that it was produced by a German, directed by an American and photographed by a Chinaman, something to give the more chauvinistic critics of the industry pause for thought. 24 Both films displayed in their choice and treatment of stories, some of them very similar, a precise sense of class hierarchy and the promotion of consensus. Farewell Again made this clear from the outset with a foreword: All over the world, wherever the Union Jack is flown, men, from castle and cottage, city and village, are on duty, some have their families with them, many serve year after year, facing hardship, danger, death with only a brief glimpse of home. Each has his own joys and sorrows but a common purpose unites them all - their country's service. The propaganda element in all this was readily appreciated by the more perceptive critics. The New Statesman observed: From what one hears of the conditions on board troopships, one would suppose that a troopship film must have about as much propaganda value for the British army as a film of the distressed areas would have for the capitalist system as a whole. It says a lot then for the skill with which this film has been made that so far from rousing nausea in the

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audience it was received with spontaneous applause. 25 The Spectator agreed that it was propaganda, though 'of a fairly unobtrusive and so unobjectionable kind', adding: Call it sentimental and absurd, and then add that there is much to admire, if we make the necessary suspension of disbelief which we are all prepared to make in reading Kipling's 'Drums of the Fore and Aft' or Shakespeare's 'Henry V' or other similar fairy stories; or, if we forget to ask why the fighting in the Near East has to be done, and do not quarrel with the director's notion of the essential kindliness of homo sapiens. 26 In Hail and Farewell, Colonel (Nicholas Hannen) discovers that his wife is in love with another man and they resolve the triangle with civilized restraint. The sergeant major, a martinet on parade, is reduced to henpecked impotence by the arrival of his family. Joe Perkins, unreason~ ingly jealous of his wife, has his fears allayed. Two comical Lotharios, Bert (Claude Hulbert) and Nobby (Reginald Purdell), chase girls. The texture of Farewell Again is rather richer. The dispatch of the regiment to the Near East precipitates a series of crises in the lives of various characters. The dashing medical officer Captain Gilbert Reed has to break to his fiancee, Lady Joan Anstruther, the news that he is in love with someone else. But she accepts with good grace, having fallen for her golfing partner. The pathologically jealous Private Jim Carter deserts to check on his girl Elsie, but his affairs are sorted out successfully by the intervention of Captain Reed. Private Withers, the barrack-room spreads disaffection among the men which leads to a free-for-all between decks. But the Colonel gives them a pep talk ('England comes first and that's all there is to it'), a telegram arrives from the King wishing them good luck and a safe return, and Withers leads a loyal deputation of men to express their support ('We're with you, sir, the whole blinking lot of us'). Colonel Blair discovers that his wife is seriously ill and must remain behind for treatment and there is a restrained but The ship sails, with all the crises resolved one way or another, and to a general singing of 'Auld Lang Syne'. The depiction of the lower classes as on the whole comical or violent and the upper classes as rational and restrained merely echoes the wider depiction of class types in the British cinema. Here, however, they are seen to be united in a common cause - the defence and it is unity and harmony that the cinema was of the Empire concerned always to stress.

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'England' said George Orwell,' is the most class-ridden country under the sun.,l The broad division of society into upper, middle and lower classes, each with its own internal divisions and groupings and each with its distinctive badges of accent, attitude, clothing and environment, was widely recognized in the 1930s and governed the nation's attitude and outlook on an official and an unofficial level. 2 The cinema both reflected and perpetuated this state of affairs. But it also promoted an attitude of consensus, of harmony and sympathetic understanding between the existing classes as the way forward. The approach to the class in British films of the 1930s is typified by an inconsequential but in many ways characteristic comedy, While Parents Sleep (1935), based predictably enough on a hit stage play. Jack Hawkins, who appeared in the stage version, recalled that 'the play ... was regarded as being fearfully naughty, almost blue.'3 This reaction was no doubt due to the sexual shenanigans that formed the main motif of the plot. Naturally enough, the bulk of this was excised from the film version to meet the requirements of the censorship code, with the result - and this is also typical of the cinema in the Thirties - that the interest shifts from sex to class. 4 The action of the film centres on the upper-middle-class household of Colonel Claude Hammond and his wife. They have two sons, stalwart, moustached, pipe-smoking, poloplaying Neville, an officer in the Brigade of Guards, and genial, irresponsible, silly-ass naval officer Jerry. Neville is having an affair with glamorous aristocrat Verina, Lady Cattering, and as a cover for this invites her and her bluff, hearty, monocled, elderly husband, Lord Cattering, who is something at the Foreign Office, to dine with his parents at their home. The dinner party is disrupted by the arrival of a drunken Jerry, who brings with him Bubbles Thompson, a shopgirl from the department store Daring and Tobbs, whom he has picked up at a funfair. She is a vivacious lower-middle-class girl from Brixton. The dinner party is the key scene of the film, clearly delineating the differences between the upper, the upper-middle and the lower-middle classes, with their different points of reference, accents, attitudes and manners. Even their slang is different. Lady Cattering patronizes the Hammonds, remarking on the Colonel's having been with a 'provincial isn't there a prison there or regiment', and Bubbles ('Brixton 296

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something?'). Mrs Hammond, who defers to and fawns on Lady Cattering, is frostily unpleasant to Bubbles, who eventually flares up and runs off: 'I'm just as good as you are, so there. I'm going back to Brixton where people take you for what you are.' The film clearly highlights and exposes class snobbery, but it also subtly defuses any resentment that it might create in the audience in three ways. First, in a regularly utilized ploy which enlists sexism in the battle to make the class system acceptable, it attributes the snobbery exclusively to the wives. Lady Cattering and Mrs Hammond are both beastly to Bubbles, whereas their long-suffering and complacent husbands are charming to her and indeed to everyone else. This appeals to the deep-rooted female stereotyping of popular culture, implying that women, particularly wives, need taking in hand and dealing with firmly in order to get them to beha ve properly. Second, to counterpoint the snobbery of the wives, there is another familiar device - friendship established with the butler. In this case, the friendship is between Jerry and the butler, Bedworth, a working-class Cockney and the Colonel's former batman. They go in search of the runaway Bubbles together, get drunk together and remain close allies. When Mrs Hammond wants to get rid of Bedworth because of this excessive familiarity, the Colonel puts his foot down and adamantly refuses because of Bedworth's loyalty. Third, love breaks down the barriers as Jerry and Bubbles establish a relationship which survives all attempts to break it up and to which in the end his become reconciled. There are many similar of this twofold process - the careful delineation of class distinctions and the promotion of consensus within the stratified class system. It is typical of the tendency of the media to provide selective but consistent images both of society in general and of various groups and classes within it. There was almost no depiction in films of the total reality of workingclass life. As John Grierson noted sadly in 1938: 'We stretch back into things that were and forward into things to come; we have musicals and farces galore; but there is none of this other thing Irealism].,ii One thing that strikes you after seeing a number of Thirties films is that you almost never see people actually at work. This is understandable enough if you accept that large sections of the mass audience went to the films to escape from such everyday matters as work. But it also serves the useful ideological function of suppressing a potentially divisive area, cU~C;~~.,,""'~UC both to those who did not have work and to those who did but did not want to be reminded of it on their night out. Working-class audiences did, however, like stars who were both visibly and audibly from their own background, stars who shared some at least of their attitudes and outlook. The principal working-class stars were the product of the music halls and their films were inevitably comedies. But

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there was one continuing character with a rather sharper edge than most - Old Mother Riley. Played in drag by Arthur Lucan, Old Mother Riley was the central character in fourteen films made between 1937 and 1952. 6 Cheaply produced on rudimentary sets, with functional direction and the films adopt a genuinely populist stance and dismal supporting provide a comic heroine of titanic dimensions, exaggerated admittedly but rooted in truth. Old Mother Riley, the Irish washerwoman with apron, shawl, old black dress and poke bonnet, is the inextinguishable life force of the slums, a veritable Brunnhilde of the backstreets. A garrulous Malaprop, vituperative and combative, she has an unforgettable physical presence. She is a breast-beating, arm-waving, finger-pointing, hand-flourishing, elbow-stretching, knee-bending, superanimated, rubberlimbed rag doll. Hers is truly a case of body-language gone berserk, but it is an outward and visible sign of her refusal to be cowed or to conform. The plot of Old Mother Riley (1937), her first solo vehicle, has Mother Riley, a penniless match-seller, and her daughter Kitty taken into the home of the deceased match king William Briggs by his widow and son in order to fulfil the conditions of his will. But other relatives, the monocled aristocratic Captain Lawson and his snobbish wife, conspire with the butler to frame Mother Riley for robbery and to remove her from the house so that they can inherit the match king's fortune. Their scheme is exposed in court, Mother Riley is cleared and Kitty marries the match king's son. Wills and jewel thefts were among the most regular, not to say hackneyed plot elements of British films and reflect the inevitable But on the tenuous plot-line obsession with property of a capitalist they provide is hung a succession of sketches geared to the irrepressible personality of Mother Riley. At a formal dinner party, she transgresses all the accepted conventions, slurping her soup, tipping blancmange on a bishop and chattering away in 'common' language. In court, she creates similar havoc, insulting witnesses, burlesquing the proceedings and finally clambering out of the dock to lead all present in a celebratory 'hoolie'. But the humour is not based on making her seem out of place, uncomfortable or intimidated, it is with her all the way in deflating pomposity, subverting all the rules of middle-class decorum and triumphing in her anarchy. But she does so within a framework which makes it clear that society as presently structured is basically sound. The judge is fair, the courts are just, the Briggs are decent and Kitty marries their son. Nevertheless there is room for and need for the high-spirited release provided by Mother Riley. Old Mother Riley M.P. (1939) is even more resoundingly populist in its stance. Dismissed from the laundry where she works as a washerwoman, Old Mother Riley discovers that her ex-employer plans to knock down the street in which she lives. So she stands against him in a by-election, branding him a slave-driving employer and ruthless rackrenting landlord.

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Despite attempts to frame her for robbery, she is elected to parliament and there makes a rousing speech calling for an end to unemployment ('It's an Englishman's birthright to work'). She introduces a hill to provide work for all but it is thrown out by the House of Lords as being too costly. She is appointed Minister for Affairs and decides to finance her programme for full employment by calling in all Britain's outstanding foreign loans. She succeeds in prevailing upon the Emperor of Rocavia, who is significantly made up to look exactly like Kaiser Wilhelm II, to repay his debt. The film demonstrates her role as a champion of the working classes by depicting her as a crusader for full employment and against the unacceptable face of capitalism. But with the outbreak of the war, this of her activities was to take second to the war effort and her adventures combating spies and saboteurs. There was one director who returned regularly to working-class life for his subjects, and that was the virtually forgotten John Baxter, a director ripe for rediscovery. Baxter believed that 'British films must strike out on a line of their own and not just imitate Hollywood product because Hollywood can do that sort of stuff better than anyone in the world.,7 It was a philosophy he sought to put into practice and it earned him the praise of discerning critics. John Grierson excepted him from his denunciation of the cinema for ignoring real life and the Birmingham Mail said of him: 'If there is anyone now active in British film production who can put the authentic hallmark of British character into a film, it seems to me that it is John Baxter.'s His approach to which mingled warm-hearted sympathy with meticulous observation, is clear from his first film, Doss House (1933). Made for a mere £4,000 largely on a single set, it is essentially a study of a night spent in a Bloomsbury doss house by a disguised reporter looking for an escaped convict. It is therefore almost identical in form and content with James Greenwood's classic of Victorian social exploration, A Night in a Workhouse (1866). The and observations of the disguised reporter in that case roused the conscience of the nation. Doss House did not quite do that but Ralph Bond wrote in Close up: Doss House almost marks a revolution in British film production .... a British film company has dared to dramatize the lives of people for whom the last word in luxury is a bed to sleep in at night. To do that takes some courage. It is the whole tradition of the commercial film.9

Baxter's camera panned expressively across the faces of the Bloomsbury dossers as they played cards, slept or chatted amid a haze of tabacco smoke. They talked of their lives, their problems, their struggles, and the film was at pains to depict them as victims of circumstance rather than

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guilty of moral failing or culpable wickedness. Doss House set the pattern for the rest of Baxter's Thirties films, which include Floodtide (Thames bargemen), The Small Man (small shopkeepers), Music Hall (a failing provincial music hall and its starn and A Real Bloke (unemployed navvy). All were made on shoe-string budgets with rapid shooting schedules, and they all feature a closely integrated stock company of actors, mostly drawn from the music halls, who become after a viewing of the films as recognizable and distinctive as the stock companies of such Hollywood luminaries as John Ford and Frank Capra. They provide a high standard of ensemble playing, constituting a cohesive element which the screenplays lack. For structurally the films eschew the conventional linear narrative completely. The stories, often written by Baxter himself, are no more than slender threads woven into a colourful pattern of incidents, bits of business, snatches of dialogue. The style, then, is anecdotal, but the effect is a sympathetically re-created panorama of everyday life. The films are infused with sentiment and laced with humour. But we are encouraged to laugh with and not at the characters. Baxter believed that humour was the best way of making a serious point, and he also felt that Depression audiences did not want humourless tracts lecturing them on a state of affairs they knew only too well. The box-office girl in Music Hall, faced with unemployment, expresses Baxter's philosophy; 'Let's do what thousands of others are trying to do keep smi ling.' Both the style and the content of his films reflect Baxter's early John Montgomery, the only critic to have written about Baxter's work, said: 'Baxter had no knowledge of films when he first went to the tiny studio which was so ambitiously named Sound City. All his experience had been gained touring the provinces with opera, comedies and revues. But he had kept his eyes open and was especially familiar with the people of the industrial areas and the world of the music hall. In his spare time he observed keenly not only how people lived, but what they said, the jokes that made them laugh, the troubles that made them grumble.,lo His films amply illustrate Baxter's eye and ear for the details of working-class life and his affection for the people's entertainment, the music hall. One of his best films is Say It With Flowers, shot in 1934 at Twickenham Studios for the 'quota quickie' impresario Julius Hagen. Subtitled 'A Human Story', it centres on the Old Kent Road street market, whose stall· holders get together to stage a benefit concert to raise money to send the ailing flower-seller Kate to the seaside for her health. The street market itself and its environs - pub, cafe, chip shop - provide the setting, and they are effectively evoked, their atmosphere vividly captured in modes of speech, topics of conversation and authentic-sounding catch-phrases. Near the beginning of the film, there is a very long tracking shot in which the

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camera moves down past the stalls, pausing at each one to observe the stall~holders in action, their encounters with customers, their friendly banter with each other. These vignettes include the greengrocer and the fishmonger dealing with disgruntled customers, the nylon salesman chatting up a pretty girl, and the Jewish tailor drumming up custom. Kate, whom we also see in action in the market, is the living embodiment of the characteristics singled out by George Orwell as those of the English: 'their old~fashioned outlook, their snobberies, their mixture of bawdiness and hypocrisy, their extreme gentleness, their deeply moral attitude to life',l1 She looks up to the gentry and the stage stars who get their flowers from her ('In my opinion, the higher they are, the nicer they are'), She dismisses an obviously mannish Lesbian and a effete homosexual who also patronize her stall, with an amused: 'Oh well, boys will be girls and girls will be boys.' She exchanges grouses about politicians with an out~of-work labourer ('It don't seem to make much difference who's in and who's out. They do nothing except draw their £400 and try to look intelligent') and then gives him some money. She arbitrates with absolute fairness in a dispute between hawkers over a pitch. But when she is ill and, despite her spirit, unable to work, she almost despairs of the seaside trip that would cure her: 'I wonder if those folks who is high up in the world realize what a few pounds means to people like us.' But the help comes initially from her old friends who, in secret so as not to hurt her pride, organize the concert which takes place in the back room as chairman, The of the local pub with chip shop owner Bill organizing committee approach the old music hall stars to donate their services, because, as Bill observes 'they have always looked after our class', This leads to the triumphant finale when the old stars appear in the aspidistra-decked back room of the pub, evoking the flavour of the pre-war music hall in its Edwardian heyday. There is the venerable, leonine 'The Charles Coborn, immaculate in top hat, monocle and cane, Man Who Broke the Bank at Monte Carlo', the spirited Marie Kendall performing the comic song 'Did Your First Wife Ever Do That?' and finally the massive, matronly Florrie Forde, exuding a primal maternal warmth, performing a medley of her greatest hits ('A Lassie from Lancashire', 'Has Anybody Here Seen Kelly?" 'Tipperary', 'Oh, Oh, Antonio', 'Down at the Old Bull and Bush'). What is remarkable about all their performances is not just the complete, polished professionalism but the almost tangible rapport they establish with the audiences. It is partly the songs which, with their memorable tunes and simple sentiments, constitute a folk memory, past joys and sorrows shared, but it is also partly they themselves, comforting reminders of a continuity, comradeship and common humanity. The concert ends with Kate haltingly expressing her thanks before she and her husband Joe set off on their donkey cart for

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their trip, saying they never realized how many friends they had. The acting is excellent, with Mary Clare, the only star 'name', playing Kate with dignity, warmth and character. George Carney, who prepared for his part as chip shop owner Bill by visiting several East End chip shops and basing his characterization on what he observed Cockney rhyming slang and folk wisdom. His friends Titch, Steve and Scotty, are played by Baxter regulars Edgar Driver, Freddie Watts and Mark Daly, their talk in the pub, amusingly but convincingly observed, centring on betting, booze and the iniquities of 'the wife' ('She's only got two opinions - her own and her mother's'). If the scenes detailing Joe's devotion to his donkey and his pain at the thought of selling her are a shade over-sentimental, they are compensated for by the black humour of Scotty's visit to the ailing Kate and his tactless conversation about his sister's recent demise and the observation that Kate's stairs would be 'difficult to get a coffin down'. But the sentimentality which is undoubtedly present springs from a genuine sympathy with the people whose lives Baxter is depicting. Say It With Flowers represents an optimistic but wholly unpatronizing tribute to the community spirit of ordinary men and women, a spirit he was to hymn most memorably in his wartime classics, Love on the Dole (1941) and The Shipbuilders (1943). But if people were not prepared to tolerate poverty with a smile and a song, what avenue of escape did the cinema offer? The answer to that is that the cinema fell back on that most traditional source of working-class escape dreams - gambling, which since the 1920s had come to mean the football pools in particular. The permanent chance of the sudden acquisition by the operation of chance of a vast sum of money precluded the need for direct action to change society and to redistribute wealth. Nothing is more symptomatic of the nature of the British film industry in the 1930s than the fact that while film companies were forbidden by the censors to film Walter Greenwood's novel and play Love on the Dole, the definitive study of the effects of the Depression on the Northern working Ronald Gow, who had adapted the book for the stage, and Wendy Hiller, who had made her name in the role of Sally Hardcastle, collaborated on a film comedy, Lancashire Luck (1937), about a pools win. The story provided by Ronald Gow is strikingly similar to This Week of Grace, a wish-fulfilment fantasy with a consensus message. Wendy Hiller, an improbably well-spoken Gracie Fields substitute, plays a character, Betty Lovejoy, whose name carries a very different resonance from that of Sally Hardcastle. Betty is a mill-hand in a Northern industrial town, living with her carpenter father, George (George Carney), her housewife mother, Mary (Muriel George), and her out-of-work garage-hand brother, Joe (Nigel Stock). Mrs Lovejoy wins £500 on the pools. She uses it to buy a tea-room (middle-class respectability) in a country beauty spot (Edenic escape from the grimness of the town). The film-makers have some fun at

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the expense of the characteristic Thirties tea-room clientele of perspiring hikers and vegetarian cyclists. But the local aristocrat, Lady Maydew, disapproves of the Lovejoys and does everything in her power to drive them out, 'back to the slums where they came from'. The Lovejoys equally distrust the Maydews ('I don't trust them toffs and never did. It's all shop· window with them and nowt inside'). But Lady Maydew's weak-willed baronet son, Sir Gerald (George Galleon), falls in love with Betty, stands up to his mother and puts an end to the persecution. He will marry Betty and with George's help revive his languishing estate by exploiting its timber resources. The essential decency and human similarity of both as represented by and Sir Gerald, is encapsulated in succeeding scenes in which both try to drink their tea from their saucers, earning reproof from their womenfolk. So instead of the grinding poverty, the clashes between Hunger Marchers and the police and Sally selling herself to a rich man to escape, the grimly realistic elements of Love on the Dole, we get a pools win, flight from the city to the country and the productive alliance of a working-class family and a impoverished aristocrat. These are all fantasy but they enshrine important precepts. There is no need to act to change society - luck and love can make the necessary changes. There is no need to change the urban industrial evironment - just get out of it as fast as you can. There is no need for class antagonism, but instead alliance between upper and lower classes is the most constructive and sensible way of dealing with any problems which exist. The universal appeal of the pools and the importance of the win feature in the Mancunian Film Corporation's The Penny Pool (1937), directed by George Black Jr. Like most of this company's output, the film consists of the raw and unrefined material of music hall acts strung together by the flimsiest of plot-lines. The Penny Pool boasts the services of Jack Lewis's Singing Scholars, top-hatted and Eton-collared juveniles with pronounced regional accents, Macari and his Dutch Serenaders, and, in one grotesque sequence, an epicene boy singer and a Gracie Fields sound·alike, Elsie Brown, performing a duet 'How Sorry I Am for Old People'. But the raison d'etre of the film is Duggie Wakefield and his Gang, knockabout zanies who display superb timing, rubber-limbed contortionism and a rich sense of fun in some expert slapstick. There is a garage sketch in which they demolish a car, a singing waiter sketch, a 'Keep Fit' burlesque, a Home Defence sketch and a final works concert, in which Duggie and the diminutive Billy Nelson do a drag double act as Julie and Myrtle which anticipates the Two Ronnies by four decades. The plot, such as it is, has Renee Harland, who works at Bancrofts Universal Stores, sacked for filling in her pools coupon during her work time. Her employer's son, Tommy, who loves her, leaves with her and sets her up as manager of a restaurant. The villainous foreman, Jerry Rogers,

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sends her coupon in as his own and wins £15,000, but at the presentation he is unmasked by Duggie, and Renee gets her money. The juvenile leads display the often-seen class base of film performers. The impeccably genteel Luanne Shaw plays working-class Renee with a cut-glass accent while Gracie Fields's brother Tommy, affecting an unconvincing and frequently abandoned upper-class accent, plays the boss's son. Once again marriage to the boss's son and a windfall of money offset any problem that ordinary life may offer. The film makes a point of highlighting the importance of the football pools. Everyone does them, and in one scene we see a vicar, a judge and a policeman posting theirs along with the ordinary citizens. Bancroft, who bans them and sacks people for doing them, disapproving of for unearned increment', is himself won over in the end after learning that his wife does them too. But of course for everyone person who won the pools, there were thousands who did not, and it was important to show that wealth was not necessary for happiness. In fact, it could be more trouble than it was worth. So while the pools did bring wealth, it was no guarantee of happiness, and this was the theme of several cautionary tales. Carol Reed's Penny Paradise (1938) was based on a story suggested by producer Basil Dean who wanted a film set in his native Liverpool. Liverpool tugboat captain Joe Higgins (Edmund Gwenn) wins a fortune on the football pools. As a result, Joe's daughter Betty (Betty Driver) neglects her honest sweetheart, the tug's mate, Pat (Jimmy O'Dea), for the fortunehunting office clerk, Bert (Jack Livesey). Joe himself is plagued by relatives anxious to batten on to his wealth, and his romance with the widow Clegg (Maire O'Neill) is threatened. But in the end, it tUrns out that the winning coupon was not posted, a shock which reveals friends and foes in their true colours and resolves everything satisfactorily. A similar story is told in Thomas Bentley's The Last Coupon (1932). This is one of the films of the now forgotten Leslie Fuller, who starred in twenty-six films between 1930 and 1945. According to Norman Lee, who wrote and directed several of them, Fuller was second only in popularity to Gracie Fields in some areas. 12 He played an endearing lummox of the type popularized by Victor McLaglen - a good-hearted bruiser, devoted to his family, his betting and his booze, and cheerfully work-shy. The films, emanating from those same lower depths of the film industry as the Old Mother Riley comedies, shared with them a basic sympathy and a familiarity with the surface details of working-class life. Ironically the very poverty of the production helped to ensure the authentically poor surroundings. The setting is a grim Yorkshire pit village, complete with rows of back-to-back houses, their poky yards festooned with washing, and a working men's club that is all cloth caps, tobacco smoke and masculine cameraderie. The communal aspects of working-class life are well to the fore, with sequences at a football match,

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highlighting the authentic terrace banter between the locals and visiting Cockney supporters, and the working men's club with a boxing match in progress, and with the street as the focal point where news spreads like wildfire, the local colliery band gather to serenade a pools winner and the next-door neighbour is forever popping in to borrow OV