Sapphire
Basil Dearden (1959)
Sapphire is of real historical interest, not least because this crime drama, progressive in its time, is dated now. The film is instructive not only as an exposé of racial attitudes in nineteen-fifties London, in the light of the post-war African-Caribbean immigration boom, but also as a less than intentional expression of some of these attitudes. The opening title sequence is a declaration of confrontational intent. The dead body of a woman hurtles onto the screen, accompanied by a dissonant, turbulent jazzy score (by Philip Green, played by Johnny Dankworth and his orchestra); the names of the film, its producer (Michael Relph) and its director appear in hot-red letters. The face of the corpse (played by Yvonne Buckingham) is young and beautiful. What’s not immediately evident is that the dead girl was pregnant and her light-skinned complexion belies the fact that she was also black. A student at the Royal Academy of Music, Sapphire has been in a relationship with David Harris (Paul Massie), a young white man, who has a promising future as an architect. David still lives at home with his parents (Bernard Miles and Olga Lindo), his married sister (Yvonne Mitchell) and her twin daughters. He had only recently discovered that Sapphire wasn’t white and that she was carrying his child. He soon becomes the prime suspect.
This was the first of a pair of ‘social problem’ films on which Basil Dearden and the screenwriter Janet Green collaborated: the second was the homosexual drama Victim, two years later. As you’d expect, there are preachy moments in Sapphire and Janet Green’s script (with additional dialogue by Lukas Heller) sometimes comes across as a conscientious check-list of racial views and dilemmas. Sapphire’s landlady, horrified to discover her former tenant’s ethnicity, is taken to task by Sapphire’s friend and fellow-lodger Patsy (Jocelyn Britton). The landlady insists that she’s not personally racist but knows the economic survival of her boarding-house depends on a reputation which will be sullied by the knowledge that she takes in black lodgers. She then turns the moral tables on Patsy: the girl admits that, although she knew Sapphire wasn’t white, she didn’t, when she took her friend to her parents’ home, let them know that, for fear of their reaction. Sapphire’s previous landlady, when interviewed by the police, explains that she does take in lodgers of inconspicuous colour but that ‘you can always tell’ that even light-skinned blacks are black: they’re ‘always playing music’ and ‘too keen to please’. These illustrations of different kinds of racial prejudice, although individually blatant, cumulatively develop a more substantial and impressive picture of the moral climate of the period.
Janet Green offers some genuinely interesting and more sophisticated perspectives too. It emerges that Sapphire decided, once she realised she could pass for white, to disguise her ethnicity, creating a distance verging on hostility between her and the other young immigrants with whom she’d previously shared a social life in London. The juxtaposition of two scenes featuring Sapphire’s former boyfriend, Paul Slade (Gordon Heath), a well-connected young black lawyer, is highly effective. During his interview with the detective in charge of the murder investigation, the good-looking, articulate Slade seems self-assured to the point of cocksureness. Once he leaves the police station and gets into his sports car, he expresses to his (black) wife frustration with how he was treated by the ‘sanctimonious’ detective (Nigel Patrick). (Slade adds that he thinks the detective was none too bright – a judgment that’s amusingly confirmed when Patrick, presumably through a slip of the tongue, directs enquiries to the Royal College of Music instead of the Royal Academy of Music.)
Sapphire becomes at several points an example of attitudes that it seeks to critique. The first jarring moment is when Sapphire’s brother, a doctor in the Midlands, appears on the scene. Dr Robbins (Earl Cameron), unlike his sister, is evidently black; his arrival in the police interview room is announced by shock-horror chords on the soundtrack. (That these convey Nigel Patrick’s detective’s shock at the colour of the doctor’s skin isn’t an adequate explanation: the music isn’t used elsewhere primarily to express a character’s point of view.) The landlady who noted that blacks were ‘always playing music’ seems to be vindicated by the sequence in the basement Tulip Club, where bongo drums catalyse the jiving self-abandonment of the mainly black clientele; and a locked drawer in Sapphire’s room in the boarding-house conceals garishly vivid dance clothes and shoes, as if to reveal the dead girl in her true colour(s). Basil Dearden also exaggerates the noxious atmosphere of a den of dodgy black men. A favoured disparaging epithet of the policemen in the film is ‘monkey’: it’s a relief that the word is used to describe white characters.
The story and its themes always hold your interest but the stiff playing by most (though not all) of the cast is hard to ignore. This isn’t simply a matter of datedness; since it’s hard to see it as typical of Basil Dearden films (cf The League of Gentlemen, released less than a year after Sapphire), it’s not easy to explain. But there’s no doubt that the acting is antique and that this feels like a more serious shortcoming because Sapphire is straining to be socially and politically up-to-the-minute When Patsy arrives at a Charlotte Street coffee bar to break the news of Sapphire’s death to fellow students, they more or less form a queue to deliver their wooden reactions. It’s a sign of what’s to come: overlapping dialogue is in very short supply throughout, however tense and fraught the circumstances. Instead, there are terrible phoney sequences like the one in which a West Indian called Johnnie (Harry Baird) is being grilled about Sapphire’s death by the two main policemen. Their questions come thick and fast (though never so thick and fast as to overlap!); Johnnie is scared and confused. It’s painfully obvious that Basil Dearden has told Harry Baird to turn his head this way and that, from one interrogator to the other, to get the point of the scene across. Baird does so dutifully and metronomically.
I know it’s unkind to single out for criticism actors who were never big names but Walter Brooks, as a police sergeant, epitomises what’s wrong with the playing (and/or Dearden’s direction of the players). Once he’s delivered a line, Brooks looks to whoever has the next one, as if to say, ‘Your turn now’. Although I noticed him particularly, Brooks is not alone in performing like a boy roped unwillingly into a school play: in the interior scenes, there’s rarely any hint of life going on around Dearden’s waxwork actors. Outside, it’s a different matter. The dead girl’s body has been dumped on Hampstead Heath and the location filming in contemporary London (the DoP was Harry Waxman) makes, from the very start, an important contribution to Sapphire‘s real world pretensions. This is so even when individual scenes are clumsily improbable – as when David Harris (Paul Massie gives him a clenched, unvarying intensity) searches for ages on the Heath for a piece of incriminating evidence. It’s a compensation that David’s watched by a plain clothes policeman played by Peter Vaughan, who, in an uncredited appearance, is, as usual, excellent. (Basil Dignam, also uncredited, has a good cameo too, as the confidently liberal doctor who diagnosed Sapphire’s pregnancy.)
As Superintendent Hazard, Nigel Patrick is proficient but seems to belong in a different, more artificial setting than the one that Dearden and Janet Green are trying to suggest. (Patrick is much more effective in The League of Gentlemen.) The strikingly-named Hazard’s sidekick is the even more strikingly-named Inspector Learoyd (Michael Craig). The online Racial Slur Database lists Leroy as ‘A stereotypically black name. Typically used as the name of a character is [sic] a racial joke …’ Learoyd is a racist and perhaps Janet Green named him as a racial joke of her own. If so, the effect is too bald: because the surname is such an unusual one and it’s not seen written down, you hear it throughout the film as Leroy. At first, Michael Craig seems merely dull in the role (and he continues to look awkward pretending to smoke a pipe). As the film goes on, however, Craig’s characterisation becomes more interesting and more alienating: it’s Learoyd’s drabness – he’s not the familiar gaudy, sweaty screen bigot – that helps convince you the man’s racism is ingrained. Nor does Inspector Learoyd come across as a reformed character as a result of investigating the murder.
The film, like most of the 1950s films she appeared in, is indebted to Yvonne Mitchell, as David Harris’s sister, Millie. It’s almost a relief when she is revealed to be Sapphire’s killer: Mitchell’s Millie is the only character strong and complex enough to qualify as a murderer whose motive is believable hatred. (It may not pay to ask, though, how Millie got the victim’s corpse from the scene of the crime to Hampstead Heath and had the strength to hurl it to the ground in the way the opening shot suggests.) From the start, there’s a querulous note in Mitchell’s voice, which may express Millie’s resentment about her failing marriage to a merchant seaman (he’s ‘away’) – may indeed hint at why the marriage is failing. The whine develops into something harsher and rancorous once she begins to explain her resentment of what Sapphire has done to the Harris family. Millie’s voice softens only when she talks to her children: the short scene in which she puts them to bed is, in retrospect, very touching. Mitchell’s characterisation is finely thought out. When the twins are upset because their friend’s mother doesn’t want her daughter mixing with the Harris family as a result of the publicity about Sapphire and David, Millie’s reaction is contained – an expression of dignity and, as it transpires, of something more. It’s obvious that Millie is the culprit from the moment that she blurts out to Hazard, when he seems to suspect her father of the crime, that the police ‘won’t find a thing’ to incriminate Mr Harris. When Hazard takes his leave of her, Millie stands motionless for several moments. Yvonne Mitchell’s stillness is so expressive that she transcends the giveaway earlier in the scene. She delivers Millie’s eventual confession with force and originality.
10 July 2015