The Big Screen

by David Thomson

  Korda and Churchill had been social acquaintances through much of the 1930s—they had the same tastes and a similar sense of cinema. Korda had gone so far as to buy the rights to Churchill’s book about the Duke of Marlborough, as a way of cementing friendship. He never made that film, though decades later the BBC would do it as a very successful miniseries. Then, in the awkward interval between Churchill’s becoming prime minister and America’s entry into the war, Korda yielded to Churchill’s pleas for a truly patriotic picture that might help erase isolationist feelings in America.

  So Korda set up an American office (to make a film about Lord Nelson, and to serve as a cover for some secret service operations that kept an eye on Nazi movements in the United States as well as sentiments in Washington). This gentlemanly espionage was for real, but it appealed to the boys in Winston and Alex—it may also be felt as a harbinger of the British playfulness that would dream up James Bond.

  Nelson was the subject, but Korda insisted on a love story to humanize the hero, so the picture became That Hamilton Woman, which also took advantage of the stranded status of Olivier and Leigh in Hollywood. There is a strong likelihood that, amid the passion that united these famous lovers, Korda himself had moments with Vivien Leigh and moments enough to discover that the celebrated lovers (Viv and Larry) nursed a serious competitive gulf. Scarlett O’Hara had swept Vivien past Larry—and he had little appreciation for such things. Whatever, That Hamilton Woman, with airy sets (by Vincent Korda), rich costumes, and model ships for Trafalgar, was shot in six weeks at the General Services Studio in Los Angeles, with Alex directing personally. Olivier looked like a ghost; he had so many Nelsonian wounds to accommodate, and research was never quite sure which arm or which eye the great man had lost. Churchill himself wrote one or two key speeches, and the picture was a hit on both sides of the Atlantic. Some in Washington were suspicious of Korda’s game, and he had been subpoenaed to appear before a Senate committee on December 12, 1941. Five days ahead of that deadline, the Japanese struck Pearl Harbor and he was excused. Thus the knighthood for a resourceful and brave Hungarian who took Britishness so seriously.

  Meanwhile, at Ealing, Michael Balcon pursued a very different course. He saw that the war itself was filled with dramatic potential, and he trusted that a documentary-like approach would be in order. To that end, he was impressed by the work done in Britain in the 1930s by several government agencies inspired to make documentary films.

  The driving force behind this work was John Grierson, born in Deanstown, Scotland, in 1898. (Another Scot, John Reith, would play a similar role in the foundation of the BBC and in the formulation of its duties.) Grierson attended the University of Glasgow and then went on a Rockefeller fellowship to the University of Chicago. On his return, he joined the film unit of the Empire Marketing Board and directed and produced a fifty-minute documentary, Drifters (1929), about the fishing industry. In 1933 he moved over to the GPO Film Unit, which in time became the Crown Film Unit.

  Grierson was less a filmmaker than a preacher, a leader, and a managerial inspiration. He was also part of a British movement in the 1930s, leftist in sentiment, that believed in the precise factual observation of society. This led to the magazine Picture Post and to a sociological study known as Mass Observation. In the process, Grierson attracted a number of considerable talents, including the Brazilian Alberto Cavalcanti and filmmakers such as Harry Watt and Basil Wright.

  The British documentary that evolved under Grierson could be sharply critical of society, but it had an educational thrust to let the citizen know how his country worked. (Of course, that depended on the shaky premise that the filmmakers knew the answers.) A key film made in this spirit was Night Mail (1936), produced by Grierson, directed and produced by Harry Watt and Basil Wright, with music by Benjamin Britten and a verse commentary by W. H. Auden, and sound supervision by Cavalcanti. The whole thing was just twenty-five minutes, and it was innocently admiring of the Post Office, but to this day it is a touching demonstration of the idea that movie could be a collaboration of all the arts in which the nation might commune with itself.

  Grierson left for Canada before the war broke out (and he would prove a key figure on the Canadian Film Board), but at Ealing, Balcon snapped up Cavalcanti and Harry Watt and began to apply the lessons of documentary to the war effort. A real piece of heroism was recalled: a factory foreman had retrieved important machinery parts as the Germans invaded France. J. B. Priestley made a script of it, and Charles Frend directed The Foreman Went to France (1942), with actors in all the parts. Harry Watt was sent to a sand dune beach in South Wales to make Nine Men (1943), ostensibly about the North African desert war. With a script by Graham Greene, Cavalcanti made Went the Day Well?, a film about an English village taken over by German invasion. And Charles Frend made San Demetrio London (1943), on the travails of Atlantic convoys. At the same time, Ealing was making very broad Will Hay comedies, such as The Black Sheep of Whitehall (1942) and The Goose Steps Out (1942). (In the latter, Hay impersonates a Nazi officer and addresses Germans on how to behave in Britain.) There was also Basil Dearden’s The Bells Go Down (1943), a dramatization of the work of the London Fire Brigade during the Blitz.

  The Bells Go Down used actors such as Tommy Trinder, Finlay Currie, and James Mason, but it had the misfortune of opening at the same time as Fires Were Started, a feature-length documentary made by the Crown Film Unit and directed by Humphrey Jennings.

  Jennings was born in Suffolk in 1907 and educated at Cambridge. He was an intellectual, a part of Mass Observation, and the part-time compiler of Pandemonium, an immense anthology of Englishness. By all rights and qualification, he should have been a don at Cambridge, but he was interested in visual art (he was a surrealist by taste) and thus was drawn into documentary films. He was very productive in the war years, when his best works are Listen to Britain (1942), a montage of British scenes driven by sound; Fires Were Started; and A Diary for Timothy (1944–45), a kind of open letter to a baby born as the war ends, written by E. M. Forster and spoken by Michael Redgrave, with music by Richard Addinsell.

  Jennings seemed lost after the war, and he died in 1950 in Greece, in a climbing accident. But he remains a British hero, and a man who could make Fires Were Started like a painter in his studio, with not a reference to the enemy. Moreover, A Diary for Timothy makes it clear that Jennings knew that victory in the war was a prelude to more intractable social problems. Had he been American, his work might have been banned, as he was marked down as un-American. In Britain, however, the feeling endures that Jennings was close to the national endeavor and a filmmaker touched by genius.

  His career is a reminder of the difficulties Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger overcame at the same time in their film The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943). Powell had worked steadily through the 1930s, but seldom with the means to demonstrate his florid visual sense. But in 1937 his The Edge of the World impressed Alexander Korda, who introduced Powell to Pressburger, one of his many Hungarian hirings. The two men were very different, but that seemed to encourage them. Pressburger was the writer, Powell the director. They combined for the first time on The Spy in Black (1939), starring Conrad Veidt, and within a few years they had formed a company, the Archers. Colonel Blimp was their second film under this logo.

  It was highly ambitious and daring: it was cut first at 163 minutes and was in Technicolor—the sets by Alfred Junge (who had worked for Balcon), the camerawork by Georges Périnal, who had worked with René Clair in the early 1930s and who had later shot The Private Life of Henry VIII and Rembrandt. The scale of Blimp was risky under wartime conditions, but the real problem in the film—and it would trouble Churchill himself—was that the story was a tribute to a lasting friendship between an Englishman, Clive Candy (Roger Livesey), and a German, Theo Kretschmar-Schuldorff (Anton Walbrook). In addition, by taking on the name Blimp—a figure in cartoons by David Low meant to ridicule idiocy in the British officer class—the Archers risked
offending the army and the War Office. Churchill himself asked his aides for ways “To stop this foolish production before it gets any further. I am not prepared to allow propaganda detrimental to the morale of the Army.”

  Of course, we know now that Blimp is the first great film made by the Archers, and we know that it is as sympathetic toward the foolish Candy as it is to several redheaded women all played by the young Deborah Kerr. But in a history, it deserves its place for extra reasons—chiefly that it was made and shown despite official alarm. By 1943, I doubt any such picture could have come from the other major participants in the war. Late in the film, the aging Theo gives a long, hesitant speech about what has happened in Germany between 1919 and 1939 that is so absorbing we hardly realize how unexpected it would have been at the time. It is a scene that establishes Anton Walbrook as a great actor.

  Powell and Pressburger had become a dynamic team in a way that neither of them would ever quite manage on his own. And as the war closed, they moved into their glory years, working for the Rank Organisation or for Korda. Their list is famous now: A Canterbury Tale, (1944), I Know Where I’m Going, (1945), A Matter of Life and Death (1946), Black Narcissus (1947), The Red Shoes (1948), and The Small Back Room (1949). Yes, The Red Shoes is the most famous—also the most beautiful and the one most devoted to artistic creation (Powell’s godhead). But we should note the cheeky wit of the films, the irreverence in days of rationing, a superb sense of craft collaboration, and the sultry performances—think of Walbrook’s Lermontov in The Red Shoes, or David Farrar’s cripple in The Small Back Room. Think of the redheads: Kerr, Kathleen Byron, Moira Shearer (and Pamela Brown—in black and white, but red in Powell’s heart). There is one scene of Kerr in Blimp, with auburn hair and in a cornflower blue dress, in shadow and firelight, that must be among the most romantic shots made during the war. No one in Britain before—not even Korda with Oberon—had seen that you could make a film just because you were crazy about a girl.

  For all their originality, the Archers were not exceptional in those postwar years. The country was dirt poor, but the English were wild for movies. A boy from South London, born a Quaker and raised so that he was not allowed to see movies, had gone into the industry as a teenager, to make tea and carry messages. He had chosen to be an editor and he had caught the eye of Noel Coward. His name was David Lean, and he had his list, too: In Which We Serve (1942; codirected with Coward and a bizarre tribute to a figure very like Louis Mountbatten), This Happy Breed (1944), Blithe Spirit (1945), Brief Encounter (1945), Great Expectations (1946), Oliver Twist (1948) The Passionate Friends (1949), Madeleine (1950). You may know David Lean because of later, bigger films—The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957), Lawrence of Arabia (1962), Doctor Zhivago (1965), Ryan’s Daughter (1970)—but I’d like to suggest that these later pictures are not as satisfying as the films he made in the 1940s.

  There were other marvels: Laurence Olivier moved into the breach in 1944 and offered to direct Henry V—after the American William Wyler had stepped aside. I don’t mean to disparage Wyler, but how could he have competed with Olivier’s exultant display of heroism and swashbuckling, or his knowledge of Shakespeare? All his life, Olivier had doubts over his masculinity—years earlier, in Hollywood, big actresses had felt he didn’t cut it—so Agincourt was his redemption. Then remember the wondrous opening: the busy Globe Theatre and the glimpse we get of the real actor nervous about playing the king. Henry V became a patriotic duty for British moviegoers, but it is a magical picture, at ease cutting together paintings of a city and the sweeping green meadows of Ireland for its battlefield. Think of the rush of arrows in the air, William Walton’s music, and the lusty courtship at the end. Remember the panorama of Englishmen, and the sturdy eloquence of Leslie Banks as the Chorus. Seen at the age of four, Henry V could direct your life.

  Hamlet, a few years later, is not as piercing, I daresay, but true to its time, it is a film noir about a trapped man. Olivier is an ambiguous figure in British film history, and it may be hard for the rest of us to like him as much as he liked himself. But in the late 1940s, on-screen as well as-stage, he was a flag blowing in his own wind and a hero to the nation. We do not need to call him a great director, but Henry V and Hamlet were events that thrilled the world (and the Academy).

  Still, that’s not all. Ealing carried on after the war under Balcon and it uncovered Robert Hamer, a Cambridge student expelled for homosexual behavior, and thereafter a terrible drunk. Before he was through, he made Pink String and Sealing Wax (1945), It Always Rains on Sunday (1947), and Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949), a landmark comedy about class, murder, and voice-over narration (just before Sunset Blvd.). Harry Watt was allowed to discover Australia with The Overlanders (1946) and Eureka Stockade (1949). And gradually there developed what would become known as “the Ealing comedy,” a vein of social satire rooted in ordinary British life and eccentric characters: Hue and Cry (1947), Passport to Pimlico (1949), Whisky Galore (1949), The Lavender Hill Mob (1951), The Ladykillers (1955). Two names go with that list: the young Scot, born in America, Alexander Mackendrick, who directed Whisky Galore, The Man in the White Suit (1951), and The Ladykillers; and Alec Guinness, the first of an outstanding generation of British stage actors, who proved himself a subtle master of film. His first coup was playing eight members of the D’Ascoyne family in Kind Hearts and Coronets, all slain by the silky, murderous design of a social upstart, Louis Mazzini (Dennis Price), who has hints of Oscar Wilde and the thrill of being outrageous.

  And one more: Carol Reed. Born in London in 1906, the illegitimate son of the actor Herbert Beerbohm Tree, Reed worked in the theater and with Basil Dean at Ealing. He began to direct in the mid-1930s, but it was after the war that he really became himself, with an unmatched trio of films—Odd Man Out (1947), with James Mason as an Irish bankrobber mortally wounded and on the run in Belfast; The Fallen Idol (1948), from the Greene short story, with Ralph Richardson as the butler and Bobby Henrey as the child of the Belgravia house who trusts him. That project was a fruit of the friendship between Korda and Greene. In the glow of its success, the two men speculated over another project. Alex was keen for a spy story, to be set somewhere like Berlin or Vienna. In a world of intrigue and displaced persons, that subject was begging. Greene had a cue for him, an opening line, about one day seeing a man walking on the Strand in London, a man he believed was dead. Oh yes, said Alex, with enthusiasm, go with that. It was the start of The Third Man, a coproduction with Selznick on which Greene, Reed, and Korda overlooked all Selznick’s mistaken brainwaves. The only American they listened to was Orson Welles: they gave him the cuckoo-clock speech in the scene on the big wheel in the desolate Prater playground. The result was an international wonder, with zither accompaniment.

  Nothing lasts forever: “The fun has gone out of the film industry,” wrote Graham Greene when he heard—Korda died in 1956. He was only sixty-three, the age at which David Selznick had died. But those two had both filled their time and they had been knockabout, disputing partners on The Third Man (and then in court afterward). Robert Hamer ended up a drunk. Carol Reed went off the boil in ways he never understood. Powell and Pressburger broke up. And Britain, in general, remembered that it was a land of literature, theater—and television, the scale of which seemed to reassure and intrigue the British temperament. Michael Balcon persevered at Ealing, and no one deserved a knighthood more. But the kind of movies he liked would come to be made for television.

  Still, you have to appreciate the impact British films made in those postwar years. Olivier got an honorary Oscar for Henry V, and Best Picture for Hamlet. In 1947, Britain won four Oscars: Guy Green for black-and-white cinematography on Great Expectations; Jack Cardiff for color on Black Narcissus; John Bryan for black-and-white art direction on Great Expectations; and Alfred Junge for color design on Black Narcissus. Then there were the nominations. Oscar meant a lot more in those days than it does now, and it had been American territory. But the British had broken through, and
they have never lost that ground, even if British film production is often lamented by the British themselves. But the lesson of Ealing was plain. The British were equipped to make modest films that surprised audiences with their insight about human behavior. In time that model would be revived by perhaps the best film studio there ever was, the BBC, and a new tradition that would include John Boorman, Stephen Frears, Mike Leigh, Alan Clarke, Terence Davies, and even Joseph Losey, who made some of the most insightful English films, from The Servant to The Go-Between.

  Both those films had scripts by Harold Pinter, just one of many writers in other forms who are unthinkable without the influence of the movies. Pinter also inherited a genteel, oblique recognition of how emotional, intimate, and unspoken violence can be. Of course, that tone was established by Alfred Hitchcock, as repressed yet as overwhelmed by feeling as so many of the best English films.

  Brief Encounter

  There are English jokes about Brief Encounter, and eyebrow-raising whenever its lush Rachmaninoff music (Piano Concerto No. 2) starts up. It sounds so emotional, yet the characters do so little. Lindsay Anderson, once a fierce and smart critic at Sequence, used to pummel David Lean’s polite indirection: “When emotion threatens, make your characters talk about something else in a little, uncertain, high-pitched voice.”

  There was a cliché about British understatement, and it was based on life. But was British restraint modest, brave, and civilized, or did the British really feel so little? That complaint might be turned into praise if we were talking about films as varied as those by Ozu, Bresson, or Hawks. There is a vein of deep feeling that prefers to evade the heart of the matter, and in English theater you can find that obliqueness in both Noel Coward and Harold Pinter. Does anyone come away from Brief Encounter unaware of its depth of feelings? There are times when it seems nothing less than a film about hysteria and the dysfunction between a stiff upper lip and a mind turning to jelly. The best English movies often play with masking their feelings, so it’s a shock, at the end of The Red Shoes, when Lermontov shrieks with distress that Victoria Page is dead. Michael Powell’s films are full of emotional autocrats who use cruelty or rudeness as a mask.