Monthly Archives: May 2019

  • My Death is a Mockery

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Tony Young (1952)

    This double-bill of The Tell-Tale Heart and My Death is a Mockery, presented in BFI’s regular ‘Projecting the Archive’ slot, was designed to mark the eightieth birthday of Adelphi Films.  A family business founded by Arthur Dent, Adelphi was a production and distribution company whose heyday was in the 1940s and 1950s.   With a catalogue dominated by relatively inexpensive crime dramas and musical comedies, Adelphi seems never to have been a major player in the business though it was responsible for John Guillermin’s drama The Crowded Day (1954).  To suggest that the company is still going strong at eighty is quite an exaggeration.  It turns out to mean that Arthur Dent’s granddaughter maintains a website[1] which advertises Adelphi films available from Amazon, includes a comprehensive list of its output and invites help in recovering lost works.  None of this got in the way of BFI’s Adelphi celebration being enjoyable, thanks in no small part to Vic Pratt’s informative and entertaining introduction.

    Neither part of the double-bill was long but The Tell-Tale Heart, definitely a short, was the curtain-raiser.  J B Williams’s film, a twenty-one-minute dramatised reading by Stanley Baker of Edgar Allan Poe’s short story, is a curiosity all right.  It’s of some historical interest that it was made and released in British cinemas (in December 1953, according to IMDb) at all.  Its recent rediscovery vindicates the Adelphi website’s invitation to ‘Help Us Find Missing Films’ (though it’s unfortunate that, at the time of writing this, The Tell-Tale Heart is still listed there as missing!)  Jeff Wells, a 16mm enthusiast, bought a copy secondhand in Brighton in 1984.  In 2017 he was clearing out his loft, came across the film and contacted Adelphi.

    The narrator of Poe’s short story describes how he murdered an old man, dismembered the corpse and hid it under floorboards.  (I say ‘he’ though the text doesn’t actually make clear the narrator’s gender.)  Police officers who subsequently interview the murderer don’t seem suspicious but a guilty conscience causes him to hear an ever-louder sound that he takes to be the continued beating of the heart of the man he thought he’d killed.  Terrified, the narrator confesses his guilt to the police.  In J B Williams’s one man show, Stanley Baker holds attention with his strong presence and fine voice but, excellent screen actor that he is, plays the role almost too discreetly.   His character’s living nightmare isn’t frightening.  Neither are the rudimentary creepy effects.

    As The Tell-Tale Heart nears its end, Baker’s character is revealed to be behind prison bars.  The condemned cell is the setting too of the starting point and conclusion of My Death is a Mockery.  Tony Young’s film, with a screenplay by Douglas Baber (adapted from his novel of the same name), gets off to a sluggish start.  A perfunctory, merely expository conversation between a prison governor (Vincent Holman) and a visiting priest, Father Matthews (Liam Gaffney), precedes a lengthier dialogue between the latter and John Bradley (Donald Houston), the man awaiting execution.  A single, hour-long flashback then describes the events leading up to Bradley’s arrest before Young returns to the prison cell in the closing stages.  The structure inevitably limits the drama to a matter of how things happened.  The film, at seventy-five minutes, is brief for a feature but doesn’t feel brief.

    After serving in the Royal Navy in World War II, John Bradley runs a trawler business based in Devon but is struggling to make ends meet.  He’s urged by his wife Helen (Kathleen Byron) and against his better judgment to accept a moneymaking proposition put to them by Hansen (Bill Kerr), an Australian opportunist the Bradleys meet by chance.  Hansen’s scheme involves using Bradley’s boat to smuggle French brandy from a contact on the French coast.  The first few smuggling trips are successful, in spite of Hansen’s flakiness and the two men’s increasing dislike for each other.  Things go wrong when a pick-up is interrupted by the French police.  Hansen’s contact Le Cambre (Edward Leslie) shoots and kills one of the police and makes his escape on Bradley’s trawler.  In a struggle between them, Bradley strikes and accidentally kills the Frenchman, whose body is then thrown overboard, weighted down with crates of contraband.  The boat is stopped and directed back to England by customs officers (Christopher Quest and Michael Voysey).  Under questioning by a police detective (Kenneth Henry), Hansen loses his nerve again and accuses Bradley of murder.  The Englishman is convicted of the killing not of the disappeared Le Cambre but of the French police officer.

    En route to Bradley’s cell, Father Matthews exchanges a few words with a warder (Meadows White), who complains that it’s bad for the morale of prison staff when a condemned man is as gloomy as this one is.  Donald Houston certainly lives up to this advance billing.  In and out of custody, he gives a strong, realistic performance but is too closed off.  Even so, the main dramatic interest emerges in the way that the stolid Bradley, when the going gets tough, shows unexpected nerve – in contrast to the plausible but craven Hansen.  Bill Kerr is almost the antithesis of Houston.  His mobile face takes the camera but his acting is sometimes as wobbly as his character.  Kerr was better known for comedy (before and after this film) and the opening credits announce this as his first dramatic screen role.  In retrospect, these words read almost as an excuse for the performance we’re in for.

    Houston loosens up in the few lighter illustrations of the Bradleys’ married life.  It’s no surprise since he’s partnering Kathleen Byron, whose emotional fluidity lifts My Death is a Mockery.  It enables Byron to make just about credible Helen’s switch from persuading her husband to break the law to immediate regretful anxiety that he’s doing so.  It also elevates Helen’s ambiguous reactions to Hansen’s sexual advances to something more than a crude plot mechanism for reinforcing the bad feeling between the two men.  The utterly untrustworthy Le Cambre, a  strikingly Francophobic creation, is rendered simply ridiculous by Edward Leslie’s cartoon accent.  Kenneth Henry is better as the smiling, steely police detective.  The cast also includes a parrot on board Bradley’s trawler, talkative enough to tip the wink to the customs men.  The film has a few continuity problems.  Not only does Donald Houston’s bushy hair keep changing style in the course of a single conversation; there’s also the matter of the sticking plaster above Bill Kerr’s left eyebrow.  This makes its first appearance, without explanation, on the first smuggling trip.  It’s only when it reappears on the fateful voyage, and after Bradley has punched Hansen in the face for groping Helen, you realise what’s happened.

    Released in August 1952, My Death is a Mockery had within a few months acquired a singular notoriety.  This was the film that Christopher Craig watched at his local cinema just before embarking on the warehouse robbery that resulted in the deaths of both PC Sidney Miles and Craig’s accomplice Derek Bentley.  (According to IMDb, Peter Medak’s Let Him Have It specifically refers to My Death is a Mockery.)    Vic Pratt made mention of this in his introduction, suggesting that the life of crime depicted in the film further fuelled the public controversy about delinquency that the Craig and Bentley case brought to a head.  Perhaps this was so, although the kind of crime shown here is so different from typical youth violence of the era that the comparison seems a stretch.  Pratt was surely right, anyway, to place My Death is a Mockery in the category of contemporary British pictures which dramatised the peacetime economic struggles of men who’d fought in World War II, and the lengths to which they felt compelled to go.  (Basil Dearden’s The League of Gentlemen (1960) is a tonally distinctive, altogether superior example of the sub-genre.)  There are startling resonances between Tony Young’s picture and the crime that followed Christopher Craig’s viewing of it.  Like Derek Bentley, John Bradley is to be hanged for a homicide that he didn’t commit.  Like Craig, Hansen, the prime mover in the lawbreaking that generates a killing, goes to prison but survives.   The film takes its title from Bradley’s last words to the priest who fails to comfort him.

    21 May 2019

    [1] http://www.adelphifilms.com/

  • The Grapes of Wrath

    Old YorkerFilm review

    John Ford (1940)

    John Ford’s The Grapes of Wrath is widely regarded as that rare thing, a great film of a great book.  Never having read John Steinbeck’s novel, I can’t comment on one half of the accolade but the screen version does have plenty of strengths.  The principals in this narrative of resilience are the Joad family, Oklahoma tenant farmers who, after losing their livelihood in the Great Depression, travel to California in search of work and a fresh start.  With the help of Nunnally Johnson’s screenplay, Ford tells their story with admirable clarity.  Steinbeck’s title is a phrase in the lyrics of the Battle Hymn of the Republic (‘He [the Lord] is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored’).  In Ford’s hands, the Joads’ odyssey in their dilapidated truck is both realised and mythicised.  The descriptions of communities of migrant workers and of the dispossessed, on the road or in camps, often have the quality of urgent reportage – a quality reinforced by the starkness of Gregg Toland’s black-and-white photography.   At the same time, Toland’s lighting of skies and landscape defines the images in a way that makes us feel we’re experiencing an essential human story, set in a particular place and time.  Ford’s command of the crowd and action sequences interwoven into the drama of the family’s vicissitudes delivers a narrative of remarkable rhythmical variety and flow.

    Yet the flow is repeatedly interrupted by a style of acting that, for this viewer, disqualifies the film from greatness.  It’s a style so consistently in evidence that Ford must have encouraged it.  He presents a remarkable collection of faces but it seems that whenever he focuses on a particular one, its owner begins to emote.  This is true of the smallest parts.  The Joads talk with some raggedy kids at one of the migrant camps; each of the kids, at the approach of the camera, starts accentuating misery.  At a petrol station, where the Joads can afford only a single gallon of petrol, the affable pump attendant signals emphatic disappointment:  he’s suddenly woeful, his shoulders slump.  Almost the entire cast seems to have been instructed to decide the primary emotion their character is feeling at any particular time and play it to the hilt.  This is all the more apparent in the larger roles, where moods change and there are plenty of lines to be spoken.  The delivery of these means that characters tend not to talk but to speechify.  The itinerant ex-preacher played by John Carradine is a conspicuous example.

    It’s of great benefit to the film that Henry Fonda, as the hero Tom Joad, is an exception to this.  At the start, Tom, just released from prison, hitches a lift back to his parents’ home and reacts touchily to what he takes to be prying on the part of the truck driver giving him a lift:  Fonda snarls a bit too relentlessly.  What follows, though, is increasingly impressive – and expressive.   To a degree unusual for a Hollywood star of his generation, Fonda transmits personality through physicality – and through his whole body.  He thus animates Tom Joad’s impulsive nature more fully than could be achieved by facial and vocal means only.  He also relates vitally to Ford’s geography.  In Oklahoma, Tom is a creature of the place where he was born and raised in an extraordinarily real way.  Because nothing in Fonda’s acting comes over as predetermined, Tom in California is, for good or ill, discovering a new land.

    The Joads seem to have turned the corner when they reach a government-run camp that offers basic work, decent washing facilities and regular social events.  On arrival there, Tom has an interview with the caretaker of the camp (Grant Mitchell, in one of the few subtle performances in lesser roles).  As he goes to the door of the caretaker’s office, Tom says, ‘Ma’s shore [sic] gonna like it here – she ain’t been treated decent for a long time’.  Fonda’s delivery is beautifully understated.  It anticipates the fine job that he makes of Tom’s big speech as he prepares to leave the camp and his family for good.  Henry Fonda’s wordless walk away from the camera and his mother (Jane Darwell) is the film’s most moving moment.

    Jane Darwell won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for her portrait of the indomitable Ma Joad (and Ford the second of his four Best Director Oscars for this film).  Darwell is an unarguably strong presence.  Her considerable weight confirms Ma as the family’s anchor.  She’s emotionally more sophisticated than everyone except Fonda.   Even so, you learn to get apprehensive whenever Ma Joad gazes into the middle distance (and Jane Darwell registers the proximity of the camera) to impart gallant thoughts.  As she, her husband (Russell Simpson) and what remains of their family finally go back on the road, Ma delivers The Grapes of Wrath’s closing speech:

    ‘Rich fellas come up an’ they die, an’ their kids ain’t no good, an’ they die out. But we keep a-comin’.  We’re the people that live. Can’t nobody wipe us out.  Can’t nobody lick us. We’ll go on forever, Pa.  We’re the people.’

    According to the directions in the screenplay, Ma Joad ‘says this with a simple, unaffected conviction’.  Jane Darwell delivers the paean to common folks with a lot of skill;  whether that results in simple, unaffected conviction is harder to say.  The closing credits are accompanied by a final burst of Alfred Newman’s music – a series of variations on the traditional song ‘Red River Valley’.  We hear it often enough to last several lifetimes but there’s no denying it’s an integral and affecting part of this potent film.

    19 May 2019

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