When We Are Married
Lance Comfort (1943)
Hard work by the cast and hard work for the audience (this member of it anyway); hard too to put your finger on why this is. There are some good performances – especially from Raymond Huntley (Councillor Parker) and Ernest Butcher (Herbert Soppitt) – but the film is stolid. I don’t know how many of the actors had been in the original stage production in 1938 but it’s as if they’re reproducing theatre performances without the dynamism that a live audience generates for actors, especially in comedy. Plenty of people in the sizeable NFT1 audience responded as if they were in a different kind of theatre and applauded warmly at the end (this is getting to be par for the course for nearly anything in NFT1) but that was obviously no help to the players on screen. The fact that they’re all now dead confirmed their absolute separation from the audience – and made me unhappy in a way that doesn’t happen, not to anything like the same extent anyway, when a film of this era has a life of its own.
Because of this pervasive stiffness to the proceedings the lines plop heavily and there are gaps between them long enough for you to become conscious of the limitations of the original, even though J B Priestley’s single-set play has been opened up reasonably well. (Priestley did the screenplay.) You wouldn’t be aware of this if you were swept along by the verve of the production or the performances – as I recall, that did happen when I saw When We Are Married on stage in the mid-1980s[1]. This is serviceable social comedy – it puts across insistently the prejudices of time (the Edwardian decade) and place (Yorkshire) and class (petit bourgeois). The idea that drives the story is a good one: three couples, married at the same time and now celebrating their silver weddings, discover that they’ve never been married at all because the clergyman who officiated wasn’t at the time qualified to do so. Most of these people are no strangers to moral censoriousness so to discover they’ve been living in sin for a quarter century is a pleasing comeuppance.
The experience causes the Helliwells, Parkers and Soppitts to look at their partners in a different light. It’s an opportunity for worms to turn: the henpecked Herbert Soppitt asserts his authority over his overbearing wife Clara; Annie Parker tells Albert how relentlessly boring he is; Maria Helliwell, when she finds out about her Alderman husband’s peccadillo in Blackpool, prepares to go back to mother. Since the couples are steeped in the detail of social convention, it’s hard to believe at least one of them wouldn’t have spotted from the certificates the thing that proves they were legally married (it turns out that a registrar’s signature was enough at a chapel wedding of the time). But never mind – the material is potentially very enjoyable if played to the hilt. That’s not what happens in Lance Comfort’s film. The acting is too stagy for cinema and not defiantly theatrical enough to defy the medium.
The problem is epitomised by Sydney Howard, who plays the increasingly drunken photographer sent by the local paper to record the silver wedding celebrations. In a lengthy introduction to the screening by a BFI archivis we were told that Howard was an inexplicably forgotten comic genius of stage and screen. You can see his talent in the elaborate and original movements, especially of his hands – but what he does is too evidently clever. Howard’s speech patterns and sorrowful countenance both bring to mind Alastair Sim but, on the evidence of this film anyway, he’s nothing like as easy a screen actor. Watching Sydney Howard here is like watching from the very front of the theatre stalls: the performance may look magical to people further away from the stage but from where you’re sitting you can see the mechanics of its construction. The other members of the company are Olga Lindo (Maria), Marian Spencer (Annie), Ethel Coleridge (Clara), Lloyd Pearson (Alderman Helliwell), Marjorie Rhodes (Mrs Northup, the Helliwells’ irascible housekeeper), Lydia Sherwood (the Blackpool love interest), and Patricia Hayes (an eccentric but straight-talking maid). It was surprising to see Barry Morse (Lt Gerard from The Fugitive) as the young man who uncovers the illicit nature of the three marriages – Morse is charming in the role. Lesley Holmes plays his sweetheart, Nancy.
21 September 2011
[1] The actors in that production certainly included Patricia Routledge, Prunella Scales and Timothy West. If the 1987 television version had the same line-up as the previous year’s theatre one – the TV cast comprised Peter Vaughan, Bernard Cribbins, Rosemary Leach, Patsy Rowlands, Joss Ackland, Liz Smith and Colin Douglas, as well as Routledge and the Wests – then it was an astonishing company. I feel guilty that I don’t remember it better.