Monthly Archives: November 2015

  • Woman in a Dressing Gown

    Old YorkerFilm review

    J Lee Thompson (1957)

    The physical circumstances and domestic routines of the title character, Amy Preston (Yvonne Mitchell), are set out clearly – overemphatically – in the film’s opening sequence.   She, her husband Jim (Anthony Quayle) and their late teenage son Brian (Andrew Ray) live in a poky flat in a London council block, where Amy is a whirling-dervish skivvy.  Her inept attempts at cooking breakfast foreshadow a wide-ranging housekeeping incompetence that tries the patience of the two men, who expect a better standard of service.  The music on the radio in the kitchen never stops playing; Amy never stops buzzing about; yet she never seems to gets anything done:  unless she goes out, she’s still in her dressing gown at the end of the day.  Jim has a mundane but busy office job – so busy that he has to work Sundays, or so he tells Amy.  In fact, this is when he visits his mistress Georgie (Sylvia Syms), who’s also his secretary at the office.  In Her Brilliant Career, a very enjoyable biography of various notable working women in the 1950s, Rachel Cooke makes admiring mention of Woman in a Dressing Gown and Sylvia Syms, whom Cooke interviewed for the book, describes J Lee Thompson and the writer Ted Willis as ‘proto-feminists’.  The film, however, turns out not to be the straightforward piece of social realism I’d expected from the references in Her Brilliant Career; or from Pauline Kael’s judgment that it ‘carries unpretentiousness to a fault’ (her note is highly enthusiastic about the lead performance); or indeed from Woman in a Dressing Gown‘s first ten minutes.  The psychological complexity that Thompson achieves is thanks partly to his intelligent direction but chiefly to Yvonne Mitchell’s portrait of Amy.

    Ted Wills’s screenplay is adapted from his own television play, broadcast on ITV in 1956.  He writes excellent dialogue but a combination of the acting conventions of the time and the weaker elements of the script tends to muddy the social waters of the film.  Whereas Yvonne Mitchell’s gestures and accent – and her laugh – situate Amy convincingly at the uneasy cusp of working-class and lower-middle-class, Anthony Quayle and Andrew Ray seem a cut above.  Quayle nevertheless gives an intelligent performance; he makes Jim Preston both authentically guilt-ridden and aware of his own dullness.  The son Brian works in a factory but his social life and his girlfriend (Roberta Woolley) suggest that he’s slumming it in a blue-collar job.  As played by Andrew Ray, it’s hard to believe that Brian would even bring the girlfriend back to his shamingly untidy home (to groove to jazz records), and especially surprising that he’s prepared for her to meet the mother whose slovenliness exasperates him.  The role of Brian is rather crudely written:  he’s thoughtlessly demanding and intolerant of Amy until, when he finds out about Jim’s affair, he abruptly changes sides so that there can be a melodramatic showdown between father and son.

    In Her Brilliant Career, Sylvia Syms is also quoted as saying of the character she plays that:

    ‘… Georgie is only in love with Jim, the most boring man in the world, because her horizons are so limited.  He’s her boss; he’s the only man she knows.’

    This isn’t persuasive:  why would the beautiful, assured Georgie, who appears to have a nice flat of her own, have such a desperately circumscribed social life (as distinct from a social life including various men to all of whom she was subservient)?  Sylvia Syms’s playing of Georgie is more interesting than her retrospective reading of the role:  Jim Preston fears Georgie will soon find a better catch and this is what Syms picks up on so well (it’s the best acting I’ve seen from her in her youth).  She has a lovely emotional transparency but at the same time suggests that Georgie, while she’s committed wholeheartedly to Jim for now, will soon get over him – then commit wholeheartedly to someone else.  In smaller roles, Carole Lesley is weak as Amy’s neighbour but there’s an excellent cameo from Olga Lindo, who plays the manageress of a hairdressing salon to which Amy pays a rare and ill-fated visit.  There’s an eloquent exchange of looks between Lindo and Marianne Stone, as the stylist, when Amy leaves the hairdresser’s, her shampoo and set about to be immediately ruined in a downpour.

    Willis and Thompson are somewhat opaque about the cause(s) of Jim’s unfaithfulness.  The social comment side of Woman in a Dressing Gown may want to ascribe this to his wife’s increasing age and deteriorating appearance – but it has to be more than that.  Amy’s disorderliness, her exhausting anxiety to please and her non-stop chatter make her a pain to live with.  (There’s also a suggestion that she’s never properly got over the death of her and Jim’s second child, a daughter, who lived only a few hours.)  What saves the film, and makes it exciting, is that Yvonne Mitchell’s characterisation is rich enough to fuse these different factors persuasively:  she gives Amy a social resonance but makes her completely individual too.   Amy knows something – everything – is wrong.  Mitchell suggests that she’s subconsciously impelled to keep moving and talking but she can’t control what she says or does and, as a result, she makes matters worse.  The maddening music on the radio – which gets on the nerves of anyone watching Woman in a Dressing Gown, as it gets on Jim’s and Brian’s – is a highly effective expression of her state of mind.

    Mitchell and Thompson work things up to such a pitch that, by the time Jim tells his wife he wants to leave her for Georgie and Amy tries desperately to save the marriage, she seems to be going insane.   In terms of plotting, the sequences in streets and local shops at this point in the film may be contrived – but they work because, by now, the whole story seems to be happening in Amy’s head as much as in the world outside it.  (I may have imagined this but it seemed that, once the marriage was disintegrating, the clutter in the Prestons’ flat reduced to reveal vacant space.)  The abbreviated timeframe of the story – it appears to take place over a very few days – and the sudden shifts in the closing stages perhaps expose the one-set origins of the piece.  (I assume the television play was broadcast live.)  But the hugely qualified happy ending is powerful.  Jim decides to stay with Amy.  Normal domestic service is resumed.

    11 August 2014

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

  • Bank Holiday

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Carol Reed (1938)

    The BFI programme note comprised an extract from a 2005 study of Carol Reed by Peter William Evans.  At the start of this extract, Evans describes Bank Holiday as ‘remarkable for its uncompromising attitude even in sexual matters towards female self-determination’ and quotes a description of the main character, a young nurse called Catherine, by another writer on film, Bruce Babington.  Catherine is, according to Babington, a woman ‘moving between two men, one of them prosaically embodying her own class restrictions, the other higher-classed and romantic’.  Catherine is about to spend the August Bank Holiday weekend with her boyfriend, Geoffrey, in the fictional seaside resort of Bexborough.  (Close to London, it could be Brighton or Southend; according to IMDB, the sea front sequences were shot in different towns although there’s no precise information about the filming locations.)  Catherine’s thoughts are elsewhere – back in London, where she has just witnessed the death in childbirth of a young woman called Ann Howard and broken the news to Ann’s husband, Stephen:  his reaction to his wife’s death is that he wants to see her body but not his newborn son.  By the end of Bank Holiday, the relationship between Catherine and Geoffrey has ended; she has dashed back to London midway through the weekend, convinced that Stephen Howard is on the point of suicide.  She is right.  Stephen is saved in the nick of time.  In the film’s final scene, he’s in a hospital bed, being cared for by Nurse Catherine.  According to Peter William Evans:

    ‘Catherine, the maternally defined nurse, but as yet childless spinster, is enchanted by the fantasy of the caring father-figure painted by Stephen’s wife [whom Catherine has been nursing for some time]. The mature man … is the nurse’s object of desire; his dying wife, the mother of his child, becomes the screen on which is projected her own maternal fantasy.  …’

    Evans sees in the film’s lighting scheme, in particular a shot of Catherine in her ‘snowy white uniform’, ‘an ironic portrayal of the darker forces that illuminate her fantasy’.  He refers to ‘Catherine’s pursuit of a lover who, in some senses, is … dead’.  Appraising the film’s ending, Evans concludes that:

    ‘The fantasy of romantic love, the ‘holiday’, turns out … to be no more than a desire for convention and all the constraints that social heavens allow.’

    John Oliver, the BFI curator who introduced the screening of Bank Holiday, commended it in much more straightforward terms – as a strong drama and a valuable slice of social history and ritual.   It’s possible that Oliver was tailoring his remarks for the audience in NFT1 – this was a free-for-seniors matinee (packed out) – but his well-organised, perceptive introduction was much more in tune with the film that I saw than was Evans’s interpretation.  The sexual themes are certainly, for the time, daring:  Geoff and Catherine intend to book into the Grand Hotel at Bexborough as a married couple (as Geoff goes up an escalator from the underground to the mainline train station in London, he keeps seeing posters for a film called ‘Sinners’); and Peter William Evans does well to highlight a moment in Bank Holiday when Catherine ‘in a swimming pool scene resists the controlling gaze of her insipid partner Geoff by refusing to dive into the water to stimulate even further his visual pleasure’.  (According to Wikipedia, the censor originally trimmed five minutes from Bank Holiday:  it would be interesting exactly which five minutes.)  But I don’t think either the screenplay – by Rodney Ackland (best known as the author of the play The Pink Room, which eventually became Absolute Hell), Roger Burford and Hans Wilhelm – or Carol Reed’s direction pins down the sexual-romantic implications of the story in the schematic way that Evans suggests.  Bank Holiday is all the more absorbing because some of these implications are inchoate in what’s on screen.

    It was natural for Reed and the writers to want to keep the timeframe neat, moving from the beginning to the end of the August Bank Holiday.  Reed begins with an efficient, amusing montage of various types of worker downing tools, as midday strikes, presumably on the Saturday.  (The placards outside a newsagent’s, forecasting the weekend weather and warning of ‘storm clouds of war over Europe’, seem, in long retrospect, a predictive reminder that the bank holiday ritual the film goes on to describe was presumably interrupted for several years not long after Bank Holiday‘s release, in June 1938.)  Work doesn’t, of course, stop in the hospital where the chain-smoking Stephen Howard (John Lodge) waits anxiously outside a maternity ward; his wife Ann is about to have surgery to deliver her baby.  At first, you think that Stephen, as he suggests in his opening conversation with Catherine (Margaret Lockwood), is just like any nervous father-to-be.  There’s nothing in Catherine’s voice or face to suggest otherwise, when she talks either with Stephen or with Ann (Linden Travers) as she’s taken down to theatre.  The mood changes instantly in a brief exchange between Catherine and the surgeon who’ll be operating on Ann.  Catherine asks ‘what chance’ Ann has.  ‘Very little, I’m afraid,’ replies the surgeon (Felix Aylmer), before adding, ‘The baby should be all right’.  This is a startling suggestion that the loss of the mother, although somewhat regrettable, is of secondary importance to the survival of the child inside her.  It’s difficult to tell, watching a British film of the late 1930s more than seventy years on, whether the matter-of- fact tone of the surgeon’s prediction reflects contemporary dramatic convention or that maternal mortality rates in childbirth were much higher at the time.  I hadn’t known, until I googled the subject after seeing the film, that these mortality rates declined hardly at all during the first three decades of the twentieth century and were beginning to fall steeply only around the time that Bank Holiday appeared.  Even so, it seems that the mortality rate in this country during the 1930s was around 4% (expressed as 40 in every 1000) so the emotionless prognosis still seems odd.

    In any case, Ann Howard’s death in childbirth is a shocking event in Bank Holiday.   It and Stephen Howard’s grief cast a long shadow over the entire film.  Although the American John Lodge is a mechanical actor, he gives Stephen Howard a strange dignity; Lodge’s lack of meaningful facial expression in response to Ann’s death is effective because it chimes with the enormity of the catastrophe – looks as well as words fail Stephen.  And Catherine’s inability to stop thinking about him during her time in Bexborough works very well.  Margaret Lockwood expresses a convincing sense of distraction:  neither her companion Geoffrey (Hugh Williams) nor the audience can be sure of what exactly she’s thinking or feeling.  The steps leading up to Stephen’s attempted suicide and the attempt itself are conventionally melodramatic but they include some atmospheric moments:  Stephen walking listlessly in the London rain; Catherine, on the beach at Bexborough in darkness, seeming telepathically to see Stephen standing on a London bridge and also looking into water.   But Ann’s death really is too big a thing to happen as part of the film’s timeframe, when other elements of the story are treated realistically.  (It might have been easier to accept if the death had occurred several weeks beforehand and Reed had shown, in flashbacks, how the bereaved husband had remained on Catherine’s mind.)  Catherine’s closing words to Stephen in his hospital bed are jarring:  when Stephen says to her, ‘You’ve come back’, she replies, ‘Everybody comes back.  The holiday is over’.  Since ‘everybody’ clearly doesn’t include Ann Howard and Catherine has no reason to think that Stephen isn’t still distraught at the loss of his wife, her words are bizarrely insensitive.

    The writing, direction and playing of the scenes between Catherine and Geoffrey on their ill-fated weekend is excellent.  What’s especially true is the way the pair keep trying to keep things going, to ignore the increasingly evident futility of their romance:  she smiles to reassure him; he then tries to reinvigorate proceedings.  As Geoffrey, Hugh Williams strikes a perfect balance between callow charm and fatuousness.  The comedy elements in the Catherine-Geoffrey storyline – trying to book into the hotel as Mr and Mrs Smith, and so on – supply a bridge to the more explicitly comical characters and subplots, which involve a beauty pageant being held at the Grand, and a working-class Cockney couple, Arthur and May (Wally Patch and Kathleen Harrison), with their many kids in tow.  Although these elements are overshadowed by what Catherine has left behind in London, Carol Reed manages them well.  They’re underwritten, though.  Doreen (Rene Ray), aka Miss Fulham, and her old-maid-in-waiting sidekick Milly (Merle Tottenham) drink cocktails to show the self-regarding vamp Miss Mayfair (Jeanne Stuart) how sophisticated they are but there’s no payoff to their downing Benedictine as if it was lemonade.  Nor is there any explanation of how or why the put upon May suddenly stands up to her feckless pub crawler husband, although you’re glad that she does.  Kathleen Harrison is vigorously amusing in the part; I particularly liked the way May rummages in a bag for the kids’ bathing costumes, which she then chucks in their direction.

    The film attaches some importance to social distinctions and the seaside pleasures associated with these.  There’s a funny scene in which a stage concert party performs their first show of the day to Arthur, an audience of one, who’s waiting for the pubs to open.  I wasn’t sure, therefore, if there was any good reason why Arthur and May and their family are among those in the Grand on the Sunday evening.   When Catherine gets a lift back to London with the Bexborough entertainments manager (Garry Marsh), who’s tried to make off with all the takings, their car is flagged down by the law en route.  Wilfrid Lawson delivers a superb cameo as the police sergeant who interviews the pair:  he asks questions of them with a weary calm, all the time determined to carry on eating his sandwich.

    Footnote

    Bank Holiday was preceded by a ten-minute documentary from 1964, Knees Up Mother Brown, made by Peter Smith, who introduced his film.  It describes a Darby and Joan club in Stepney and focuses on four women in their seventies who enjoy going there.  Although Smith clearly admires the club and means to celebrate those who attend it, the film is depressing.  You expect working-class women of this period to look much older than their years and they do – but they look more unhealthy than ancient.  There are clips from the club’s day trip to Southend.  The women go to the Kursaal and the images are accompanied by their voices on the soundtrack, including a conversation about where one of them is going to be buried.  The film ends suddenly and expressively:  the human figures disappear from the screen, leaving the amusement park empty.

    10 November 2014

Posts navigation