Monthly Archives: July 2016

  • Went the Day Well?

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Alberto Cavalcanti (1942)

    ‘Went the day well?
    We died and never knew.
    But, well or ill,
    Freedom, we died for you.
    Went the day well?’

    According to Wikipedia, this:

    ‘… epitaph is by the Greek scholar John Maxwell Edmonds. and originally appeared in The Times dated February 6th 1918, page 7, under a short section headed Four Epitaphs. It is the second of four epitaphs composed for graves and memorials to those fallen in battle – each covering different situations of death.’

    The verse provides the epigraph to this Ealing Studios film, for which John Dighton wrote the screenplay (with Angus MacPhail and Diana Morgan), adapted from a short story by Graham Greene called The Lieutenant Died Last.  I’d seen Went the Day Well? maybe twice before but was ashamed to realise I’d not previously appreciated it was made during rather than shortly after the end of World War II.  It’s an absorbing action drama but it’s as propaganda that the film is remarkable.

    The story of a German occupation of an English village called Bramley End and the locals’ resistance and resilience, Went the Day Well? has none of the soaring, sentimental rhetoric of Mrs Miniver, made in Hollywood in the same year (and released in America less than six months after Pearl Harbor).  It’s both starker and more nuanced than I remember the William Wyler movie as being:  people, including people that in the course of the picture we get to know and like, or at least respect, get shot or blown up.  Cavalcanti’s direction is both gripping and poetic:  while the momentum is relentless, he keeps reminding us of the beauty and vulnerability of the English countryside – the birdsong, the meadows and hedgerows, the imperilled sunshine (the film is brilliantly lit by Wilkie Cooper).  If this were simply a dramatic narrative, you’d be surprised how soon the Germans – who are posing as British soldiers (with, for the most part, improbably impeccable accents) – are unmasked.  Even as propaganda, it seems surprising at first that more time isn’t spent comparing and contrasting how the more or less vigilant people of Bramley End are or are not picking up on the telltale signs.  Then you realise that it makes complete sense to get swiftly into the business of describing the villagers’ resourceful, necessarily violent fightback.  Although made with artistry, Went the Day Well? is chiefly concerned with giving practical moral advice.

    This is a British film of the period where the limitations of the stylised acting can be overlooked because the urgency of the subject and story is so great.  And, although the ethos of the film might seem to be conventionally patriotic, it has some challenging and subversive strands.  It’s the local squire Oliver Wilsford who turns out to be the fifth columnist in the community.  Women, as well as men, have to commit acts of violence – and their responses are very different.  While the postmistress Mrs Collins kills a Nazi officer with a sense of compulsive but fearful duty, Ivy Dawking, one of the staff of servants in the big house where much of the action takes place, eagerly positions her rifle as if taking out Germans will be even more fun than shooting for prizes at a fair.

    A good few members of the NFT3 audience seemed to be laughing almost continuously.   Perhaps plenty of people did so in 1942 as well – but there was something disrespectful in these affectionate BFI chuckles:  they seemed to express a confusion of facile nostalgia for a more clear-cut moral landscape and a lost, heroic era of British history, with a condescending amusement at the style of the film and the playing.  I wasn’t immune from these feelings myself but Cavalcanti wiped the smile off my face quite quickly.  For example, the appearance of the Home Guard in Bramley End can’t help connoting Dad’s Army – yet the local defence men end up as corpses here.  So too, and heroically, does another natural figure of fun nowadays, the vicar.

    Good performances by Mervyn Johns (as a workman-cum-verger, who also introduces and concludes the story), Leslie Banks (the squire), Thora Hird (Ivy Dawking), Patricia Hayes (some kind of assistant to the postmistress), and, at least when she kills the German soldier, Muriel George (Mrs Collins); also with C V France (as the vicar), Marie Lohr (a posh woman who becomes a real heroine), Harry Fowler (a plucky teenager) and John Slater (one of the Germans).  The acting of Valerie Taylor, as the vicar’s daughter Nora, is very much of its time and clarse but, because of what Nora feels about Wilsford, Taylor is very affecting in her final act.  The music is by William Walton.

    13 July 2010

  • They Made Me a Fugitive

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Alberto Cavalcanti (1947)

    It sounds American rather than British (there’s a 1939 Hollywood movie called They Made Me a Criminal, directed by Busby Berkeley and starring John Garfield).  So does the source material – A Convict Has Escaped, a novel by Jackson Budd.  This is a very conscious attempt at British noir, with ‘hardboiled’ dialogue by the scenarist Noel Langley and most of the action set in a deeply-shadowed cityscape.   The words issue awkwardly from the mouths of the cast.  The actors point up lines that should be thrown away and the vernacular – strained through underlying received-pronunciation voices – is often ridiculous.  (Locutions such as ‘Whip it quick’, ‘Keep yer ruddy gob shut wontcha’, ‘He don’t come here no more – now ‘op it’ don’t benefit from an elocuted delivery.)   What makes the film absorbing and exciting is the odd marriage of these elements with Alberto Cavalcanti’s macabre imagination, and the performance of Trevor Howard as the fugitive of the title.

    Set immediately after the end of World War II, Fugitive is a striking follow-up to Cavalcanti’s Went the Day Well?   The villagers of Bramley End were fighting to preserve the British way of life.  Here – in the aftermath of victory, in a bleak, black-market London – the characters are already lamenting the country going down the tubes.  Clem Morgan (Howard) had a good war as a RAF pilot but is drawn into the criminal world because he can’t find a decent job on civvy street.  It’s Clem’s innate sense of honour, even so, that leads to his being framed for killing a policeman and sentenced to fifteen years for manslaughter.  During the war, Morgan was shot down over Germany and escaped from a POW camp.   When he breaks out of peacetime prison and goes on the run, his efforts seem doomed to failure not because he’s certain to be captured but because the outlook looks grim even if he stays on the outside.    While the social themes are interesting, they need Cavalcanti’s melodramatic intensity to bring them to life.   With the help of the director of photography Otto Heller, Cavalcanti gives the streets an expressionistic life of their own – the low-angle shots and the glistening, oily sheen of the images make us feel we’re looking at the very fundament of London:  the drains might be suppurating.  The gang of black marketeers led by the dandified psychopath Narcy (short for Narcissus) operate from the Valhalla funeral parlour and Cavalcanti relishes the deathly paraphernalia – the coffins, a looming poster of a widow’s face, especially the giant letters RIP on the rooftop where Morgan and Narcy have their climactic fight to the death.

    Some  passages are remarkable, not least in terms of the frankness of the violence meted out to women – Sally (Sally Gray), the heroine, and Cora (René Ray), the girlfriend of the member of Narcy’s gang who really killed the policeman whose death Morgan is jailed for.   When Narcy (Griffith Jones) hits Sally in the corridor of the theatre where she works in the chorus line, it’s shocking, after he’s knocked her to the ground, that he kicks her.  (Her injuries from this beating are improbably minor.)   The film really started to grip me when Morgan, on the run in Devon, breaks into a house.   Appearing through the French windows, Trevor Howard cuts a slightly comical figure and, when the strangely undisturbed lady of the house, Mrs Fenshaw (Vida Hope), starts talking with him, her posh, dead-sounding voice has at first the same effect.  Yet her unchanging face and tone throughout their encounter, which culminates in her asking Morgan to kill her blotto husband, is weirdly gripping.  (When Morgan refuses and takes his leave, Mrs Fenshaw does the job herself.)   Morgan later describes this woman as ‘Mad as a hatter’ – with feeling.  You understand how unnerved he’s been by the experience:  he broke in expecting to startle the occupants of the house and ends up spooked by them.   This seems a typical, vividly disorienting Cavalcanti touch.

    It’s complemented by a fine, nuanced sequence in which Morgan, after making it back to London, goes up with Sally to her room and she removes pieces of lead shot from his back.   If Narcy’s assaults on Sally and Cora are surprisingly brutal for the time, this later scene is a good example of the dividends of avoiding physical explicitness.   When she gets to work with her tweezers, the camera stays on Sally’s face and we share her amazement that Morgan doesn’t seem even to flinch.  When Cavalcanti cuts to his face, we get a very different picture.  Sally Gray, who elsewhere seems very limited, comes to life in this scene and Trevor Howard is superb.  Morgan doesn’t really speak until, in one of the script’s wittier moments, he starts saying, ‘She loves me … she loves me not’, as the pieces of shot come out.

    The distinctive, dated performance style probably enhances They Made Me a Fugitive as a period piece in the view of Ealing aficionados yet I can’t believe this acting isn’t bad.  If it were, as some people think, ingeniously stylised, why are those who can deliver a different (better) kind of acting allowed to do so – Ballard Berkeley as a police inspector, Maurice Denham, in a brief, brilliant appearance as the hapless Mr Fenshaw?    Trevor Howard, as soon as he appears, is so much stronger and easier a presence than anyone else that he seems to have come from a different planet.  Howard makes you feel how deep Morgan’s bitterness goes.   You see it in his eyes behind the mesh of his prison cell.  When, at the end of the picture, Morgan’s on his way back to jail and Sally tells him she’ll wait for him no matter how long it takes, Howard’s ruefully dry reply (‘That’s what I was afraid of’) is very moving – at this moment, Morgan badly needs his sarcasm to restrain the feelings he’s developed for the girl.

    Howard’s physicality animates Fugitive and he knows how to vary his delivery so that he (alone here) makes the most of lines by speaking them casually.  Griffith Jones over-elaborates Narcy’s malignity:  he’s eventually effective only because his and Howard’s acting styles are so different – that serves to reinforce the polarisation of the hero and the villain they’re playing.  Narcy’s acolytes may be laughable when they open their mouths – it’s probably to Sam Kydd’s advantage that he has no lines – but the gang members are a successfully grotesque collection of faces and bodies.  Mary Merrall’s enjoyment in playing the sharp-tongued harridan Aggie, the only woman in the gang, is occasionally infectious.  Music by Marius-François Gaillard; editing by Margery Saunders.

    29 July 2010

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