by Rachel Cooke
Betty at work
(Getty Images.)
Gainsborough’s reputation was, famously, for melodrama. But Betty, who had an instinctive feeling for popular taste, now turned the studio’s sights to comedy; of the dozen films she was to produce between 1947 and 1949, more than half were funnies. Post-war audiences needed cheering up, and she would be the person to do it. There was Miranda, the story of a man who captures a beautiful mermaid and takes her to see London disguised as an invalid in a wheelchair; there was Marry Me, about a newspaper reporter who goes undercover at a matchmaking service; most successful of all, there were the Huggets films – Here Come the Huggets, Vote for Huggett, and The Huggetts Abroad – which depict the quotidian adventures of a working-class family, and thus anticipate the television soap operas of the future.
What did Muriel make of Betty’s new job? Mostly, she was relieved that Sydney had someone reliable to share the workload. It was now becoming apparent to her that her husband was a workaholic. His weight was out of control – he had recently finished the first of what would be many stints in a weight-loss clinic – and his days were impossibly long; it was usual for him to rise at 5 a.m. to ‘diddy up’ a script before heading into the studio. But Betty’s rise must have been galling nevertheless. Her sister-in-law now had her dream job, while Muriel remained a frustrated director. Sydney had put her in charge of script development at Shepherd’s Bush, and while this was highly demanding – good screen writers were perilously thin on the ground, and yet the studio’s wheels simply had to be kept turning – there was a sense that she was treading water. It’s striking that while Muriel and Sydney collaborated on between thirty and forty pictures over this period, including writing several screenplays together, she mentions only half a dozen by name in her memoirs, and then only in passing.* Yes, Sydney was still determined to do the right thing by his wife, and in 1949 put her forward to direct So Long at the Fair, a thriller that he and Betty were co-producing, but its star, Jean Simmons, soon put a stop to that idea. ‘Heigh ho,’ wrote Muriel in her diary. ‘I see a storming future ahead of this young lady
The Boxes were by now well on their way to being extremely wealthy. Betty and her husband Peter Rogers† were able to indulge their taste for fast cars with white leather seats and, in Betty’s case, for couture clothes and fur coats. Muriel and Sydney owned a Rolls-Royce and a large property with extensive grounds in Mill Hill, north London, called Mote End. They had several live-in staff, among them a housekeeper, a gardener and a chauffeur. Both couples ate at London’s most fashionable restaurants – the White Tower, Les Ambassadeurs, Kettners, Mirabelle – and enjoyed holidays abroad. They were able to buy homes and businesses for their siblings. But what was the use of money, Muriel sometimes wondered, if they were too exhausted to be able to enjoy spending it?
In 1949 Arthur Rank announced that he was closing the outmoded studios at Shepherd’s Bush and moving production to Pinewood in Buckinghamshire, a shift that would help stem the Rank Organisation’s mounting losses. For Betty, who would work at Pinewood for the next two decades, this was ‘total luxury’. But for Muriel and Sydney, the move brought mostly frustration. Michael Balcon refused to countenance the idea of Muriel directing a film she had written, based on Romeo and Juliet, and in the spring of 1950 every script written or promoted by the Boxes was turned down. One project, though, did get the green light from the board. Cockpit, a film Sydney produced at Gainsborough, had come with them to Pinewood, having not been thought fit for release. Rather than leave it on the shelf, however, Sydney decided to rewrite certain sections of the script – it was set in Germany after the war, and starred Dennis Price and Richard Attenborough – and have them reshot in the hope of recouping some of the cash that had already been invested in it. In effect, what he was talking about was a cut-and-paste job. This gave Muriel her chance: it was an impossible gig; no other director would want it. She was also familiar with the material and – perhaps it was this that swung things her way in the end – would not ask to be paid. Reluctantly, Balcon and his colleagues gave their consent.
Muriel reshot almost 60 per cent of Cockpit, which was renamed The Lost People on its release. She had to use all her ingenuity to make the new sequences and the old work together. On set, she kept a Moviola – a miniature projection machine usually used in the cutting room by an editor – with her at all times, the better that she could check the original footage for lighting, quality and continuity against the scenes she was about to shoot. The experience was, she said, akin to ‘solving an intricate film jigsaw’, and she knew ‘it would never add up to much’. But she didn’t care. ‘Its importance to me was that it demonstrated to those who mattered that I had the ability to handle artists and dialogue as well as move my camera around.’ For all that it had terrible reviews, and only just managed to recoup its costs, the film gave her confidence. Nothing could keep her from the director’s chair now.
In 1950 Sydney left Rank and set up his own company, London Independent Producers; his intention was to make four or five pictures a year. The first of these was to be a low-budget adaptation of The Happy Family, a stage play about a grocery store that stands on the proposed site of the Festival of Britain – it is, like the more famous Passport to Pimlico, a comedy about a community under siege – and he handed it, quietly but very deliberately, to Muriel. At the casting stage, to avoid ruffling feathers, he told agents that he and his wife would be co-directing the film (the large cast included Stanley Holloway, George Cole and Dandy Nichols), but the moment shooting started he left her quite alone. Muriel was so nervous that when Maud Millar, a film gossip journalist, approached her on set in the first week and asked her what job she was doing on the picture, she could not bring herself to give an honest answer. In her diary she wrote warmly of her unit and her cast: they were, she said, ‘full of fun’. But she also added: ‘I only hope that Sydney sticks by me to the end. I couldn’t do it without him being around – at least not this first one.’
For Muriel, The Happy Family changed everything. She finished it on time and on budget, and at the wrap party in the studio canteen Stanley Holloway led the cast in a chorus of ‘For She’s a Jolly Good Fellow’. It made a substantial profit and picked up good reviews both in Britain and America on its release in 1952. In future, British producers could have no objections to the idea of her as a director, or at least none they were willing to articulate to her face (though her agent would never be able to persuade an American studio to back her). She now moved swiftly on to her next project: Street Corner, a drama-documentary about women in the police force for which she and Sydney had also written the script (it was conceived as a female version of the 1950 Ealing Studios movie The Blue Lamp, which starred Jack Warner as Police Constable George Dixon and was the film that gave birth to the television series Dixon of Dock Green). This was a less happy experience than The Happy Family: the extras were ‘terrible’, location work was frequently interrupted by the digging up of roads and Scotland Yard, which did not care for the film, kept trying to interfere. But she enjoyed the research: ‘While examining the cell [at Marylebone police station] where Emmeline Pankhurst was imprisoned, I could not help wondering what that eminent suffragette would have said if she could have glimpsed the future and seen me, a woman-director, in the company of a female in the higher ranks of the police force, nattering away on the spot where she was forcibly fed. A sobering thought.’
Muriel on the set of The Happy Family
(From Muriel Box, Odd Woman Out.)
The movies now came thick and fast. Street Corner, released in 1953, was followed by the short A Prince for Cynthia; 1954 brought the release of The Beachcomber and To Dorothy a Son; and they were followed by Simon and Laura (1955), Eyewitness (1956), The Passionate Stranger and The Truth about Women (both 1957), This Other Eden and Subway in the Sky (both 1959). Muriel did not have an entirely free hand when it came to the work that she did. Her budgets were small and schedules tight. She was lucky to ha
ve Sydney’s backing, but even he needed to be sure a film would find favour with nervous distributors (and, ultimately, he produced only half of the films she made). Nor was she the most creative of directors. Her shots are prosaic, and her films want for pace and, sometimes, for emotional truth. The Beachcomber and The Passionate Stranger are second rate and predictable: the former, a plodding drama adapted from a story by Somerset Maugham starring Glynis Johns as a resourceful missionary; the latter, a silly confection about a romantic novelist whose chauffeur finds her latest story and assumes she is in love with him. This Other Eden is a feeble Irish comedy – hilarity does not ensue – and Subway in the Sky is a bog-standard thriller about a soldier who goes on the run when faced with a false murder charge.
But Street Corner was a ground-breaking film, with its mostly female cast, its clearly feminist point of view (the women officers are good at and absorbed by their work – an asset to their male colleagues, not an impediment) and its thoughtful examination of the pressures that might lead a young woman to commit a crime.* So, too, is Simon and Laura in which Kay Kendall and Peter Finch play married actors whose smug portrayal of a happy couple in a television soap opera is in stark contrast to the reality at home. At the box office, this was Muriel’s biggest success, and it’s easy to see why. The film is witty, charming and contains delightful performances. But it’s also surprisingly modern, satirising television, the coming medium, quite deftly. Ian Carmichael is expertly twittish as the BBC wunderkind struggling to build an audience for his clever new idea – and to keep his stars under control. The suggestion that ‘authenticity’ boosts ratings (a technical disaster causes a punch-up in the studio to go out live, and the show’s audience doubles) is strangely prescient. When the film was released in 1955 all the critics noted its ‘feminine angle’: Laura (Kendall) and the screenwriter of her show, Janet (Muriel Pavlow), are cool, confident and keen on their careers; Laura, it is clear, has been earning much more than Simon of late. Carmen Dillon was Simon and Laura’s production designer, and Julie Harris designed its costumes – Muriel liked to employ other women when she could† – and thanks to them it still looks fresh, especially compared to other movies of the era. (Dillon had already won an Oscar, in 1948, for her work on Olivier’s Hamlet; Harris would win one in 1966, for designing the costumes for Darling, starring Julie Christie.)
And, just occasionally, she was able to pursue a personal project. The Truth about Women, her favourite of her films, owed its existence more or less entirely to her. A comedy ‘with serious undertones’ whose screenplay she had written herself (a man writes his romantic history that he might helpfully reveal some universal ‘truths’ about the opposite sex), she saw it as an explicitly feminist film: ‘Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own made such an impact on me in my twenties that I had been possessed ever since with a strong urge to support equality between the sexes. Thus my approach to this subject was perhaps more enthusiastic and dedicated than to any other theme previously attempted. Unable to chain myself to the railings, at least I could rattle the film chains.’ The movie’s conclusion – cynical, and rather brave – is that men know nothing at all about women. When it comes to ‘truths’, its Don Juan of a hero can amass only blank pages.
The Truth about Women had a big budget (£183,000), an all-star cast (Diane Cilento, Julie Harris, Laurence Harvey) and costumes designed by Cecil Beaton. But British Lion, for whom it had been made, disliked it once it was complete – their line was that it just wasn’t funny enough – and refused it both a West End run and a press show. In public, Muriel continued to fight for it: she wrote a furious letter to the company’s managing director, urging him to show a little faith in his own investment. But in private, this experience left her feeling extremely low: ‘I’ve lost heart about my future – no confidence in anything – no subject S suggests has the slightest interest for me,’ she wrote in her diary. Even when the critics eventually lined up to praise it – they had paid for their seats themselves – her mood did not lift. She felt she had been badly treated, even lied to. Would a male director have been treated like this?
Muriel was addicted to her work; even as she was battling with British Lion, deflated and depressed, she had started on new projects (she was about to begin casting Too Young to Love, a mildly controversial film about a delinquent teenager that would be released in 1960). On those rare days when she wasn’t working, she wondered what she was for.* But life as a director could not be said to have made her happy. In the course of shooting a picture she would lose at least a stone, and her diaries record in miserable detail the many ailments, psychosomatic or otherwise, that followed her from set to set: headaches, low moods, painful joints, exhaustion, various infections and fevers (though her libido, you notice, was quite unaffected: she and Sydney did not share a bedroom, but they had a busy sex life). In spite of all that she had achieved, a part of her still felt only tenuously connected to the movies. One summer evening in 1959, she thought about Sydney,† who still worked late most nights, and found herself wondering if he would die at his desk. She wrote in her diary: ‘Me, I want different things from life, and always have done. I wouldn’t care if I never directed another [film] if it was a choice between making the sort Betty and Ralph [Thomas, the director] produce, or Peter Rogers. Highly commercial and successful financially. I can’t look back on one [of theirs] I would have cared a jot about directing. If S had offered them to me, I should have refused. I am a queer fish, and no doubt will remain so.’
Ah, yes. Betty. What had she been up to all the while?
Soon after she arrived at Pinewood in 1949, she met the director Ralph Thomas. The son of a commercial traveller from Hull, Thomas had begun his career in the movies as a clapperboy at the Sound City studios in Shepperton. After the war – he’d served with the 9th Lancers and won the Military Cross – he’d worked as the supervisor of Rank’s trailer department, in which capacity he produced Betty’s mermaid film Miranda. Sydney had been so impressed with this he’d promptly invited him to direct at Gainsborough. Thomas had duly made three comedies for the studio, winning a reputation for efficiency. It was thanks to this that he’d survived the move to Pinewood.
He and Betty first worked together on the film with which he made his name, The Clouded Yellow, a taut thriller by Janet Green. Betty took to him straight away; she recognised a kindred spirit. When the film got into financial trouble halfway through shooting and Rank refused to bail her out, she borrowed heavily against her own home, determined not to lose the stars she’d signed. But she didn’t tell Ralph this was what she had done until the picture was finished, something for which he was profoundly grateful – and this sealed the deal. They were now a team. Their partnership would last for thirty years and thirty films. They suited one another: their pictures always ran on schedule and to budget; they were eager to please, sensible, flexible, unassuming in the sense that neither of them longed to make great art, and they had a feeling for what the public wanted. Their sets were famously happy. ‘You looked forward to going in each morning,’ Donald Sinden recalled. ‘We were always encouraged to enjoy ourselves – I mean to find enjoyment in our work.’
Betty, Ralph, Joy and Peter
(From Betty Box, Lifting the Lid.)
But their relationship wasn’t only professional: Betty and Ralph were also lovers. No one knew this officially – and yet, everyone knew.* When they were away – Betty loved to shoot films in exotic locations, which meant that they were often abroad for weeks at a time – they were a couple; they took rooms next door to one another in hotels. When they were at home, however, they went back to their real lives. Ralph had a wife, Joy, and two children. Betty had Peter. (They were childless by choice. Norman Hudis, the Carry On screenwriter, once asked Betty what she thought about having children. ‘Oh, I can’t be bothered,’ she said.) It was all unspoken, polite, arranged, according to the custom of the day. The two families could socialise perfectly happily, splashing about in their Buckinghamshir
e swimming pools as if all was right with the world. And perhaps it was. Marriages, in a funny sort of way, were more pliable, more accommodating, then – and histrionics to be avoided. No one seemed unhappy. Joy was devoted to her home, which was beautiful and luxurious, and to her young family. Peter had his own films to produce – the Carry On series, which were directed by Ralph’s brother Gerald – and his dogs, which plenty of people believed he loved better than any human being. (The actor Leslie Philips says that when his dog had puppies, Peter Rogers sent him a bouquet: ‘I thought the flowers were for me, but they were for the dog. I don’t know how Betty took that sort of thing.’) Glasses clinked and the sunshine kissed the women’s immaculate blonde up-dos and their sunglasses shaped like cats’ eyes, and everyone smiled. Between them, these two couples made about a hundred movies, films that now read like an index of the varying fortunes of the British film industry from Churchill to Wilson, from Kenneth More to Roger Moore.*
Betty was undoubtedly a hit maker, but she really owed her nickname in the industry – Betty Box Office – to one movie. In 1952, at Cardiff station (she was in the city for a screening of her thriller, Venetian Bird), she picked up a comic novel by Richard Gordon about the misadventures of a group of medical students at a fictional hospital called St Swithin’s. Reading it on the train to London, she laughed so hard her carriage emptied – or so she would later claim. At Paddington she promptly bought another six copies. This book, she had already decided, would make an excellent film. ‘It wasn’t an easy one to script,’ she writes in Lifting the Lid. ‘It had no real storyline. It was mainly a string of anecdotes. Ralph and I worked with three writers before we licked it into shape.’ The final screenplay was largely the work of an urbane old Etonian called Nicholas Phipps.