Monthly Archives: December 2019

  • The Clouded Yellow

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Ralph Thomas (1950)

    IMDb gives the running time as ninety-five minutes.  My DVD runs for only eighty-one:  an online review by Adam Wilson[1] helpfully itemises the material cut from this version.  I’m not sure how much seeing The Clouded Yellow uncut would have changed my thoughts about it but the note below clearly needs this health warning …

    The DVD sleeve also describes Ralph Thomas’s mystery film as ‘An edge of the seat thriller in the style of Alfred Hitchcock’.   Although that’s not really the case, the scenario does echo The 39 Steps in several ways.  The main couple are fugitives as a result of one of them being wrongfully suspected of murder.  They travel from place to place, trying to stay one step ahead of their pursuers and uncover the truth of what happened to get them into their predicament.  Solving the mystery depends on unlocking a crucial memory.  There are significant differences from The 39 Steps too.  The principals already know each other, and the mutual attraction between them is clear, by the time they go on the run together.  And in this case, it’s the heroine, not the hero, who’s wanted for murder.

    After working in espionage during World War II, David Somers (Trevor Howard) is ‘let go’ by the British secret service.  In need of a job of some kind, he takes on an assignment to catalogue the large butterfly collection of Nicholas Fenton (Barry Jones) at his home in the English countryside.  The household also includes Fenton’s wife Jess (Sonia Dresdel) and her emotionally troubled, orphaned niece Sophie Malraux (Jean Simmons).  Sophie’s psychological problems result from the childhood trauma of discovering her parents’ dead bodies:  her father apparently killed her mother then himself.  The other key figure in the vicinity is Hick (Maxwell Reed), a dodgy gamekeeper with whom Jess has been having a supposedly secret affair.   Hick also taunts and pesters Sophie.  When he’s found stabbed to death, a combination of the girl’s curious behaviour and circumstantial evidence points to her guilt.

    The script by Janet Green and Eric Ambler isn’t the best.  Insect cataloguing is an amusing change of tack for an ex-spy and it’s not the writers’ fault that The Collector casts a long shadow for a viewer coming to The Clouded Yellow after seeing William Wyler’s film.  But the lepidopterist isn’t much of a metaphor here – not, at least, beyond the idea of Sophie as, like the title species, rare, beautiful and fragile (and caught in a net).  Nicholas Fenton is eventually revealed as homicidally possessive but only of his serially adulterous wife.  Besides, it’s clear too soon that this apparently benign fellow is the killer of Sophie’s parents and Hick.  Jess is the only other possibility and it would be feebly obvious if she were the culprit since the screenplay sets her up as prime suspect in the viewer’s mind and Sonia Dresdel telegraphs Jess’s sinister side.  There’s a moment, while she and Somers are on the run, when Sophie fearfully imagines that she sees the figure of Jess approaching them.  The vision triggers a memory that her aunt was present when Sophie found her parents dead but this, unless I misunderstood, is merely a red herring[2].

    Getting fired by the secret service places David Somers in the company of male screen protagonists of the period who, after ‘a good war’, struggle to adjust to peacetime civvy street.  One of the script’s strengths, further reinforced by Trevor Howard’s excellent characterisation, is in showing how Somers uses the nerve and resource that were his professional stock-in-trade, as well as contacts made during his secret agent years, on a mission increasingly driven by his personal feelings for Sophie.  What’s less clear, at least in this abbreviated version of The Clouded Yellow, is why the secret service chief (André Morell) so readily gets rid of Somers only then to have him tailed by his former colleague Willy Shepley (Kenneth More).  (I get the writers’ motivation for this – it’s integral to the plot – but not the spymaster’s.)

    At first, Kenneth More has an indifferent air, as if frustrated to be playing such a reserved character.  This starts to make sense, however, once Shepley’s feelings of kinship with Somers, and consequently mixed feelings about tracking him down, emerge.  In the end, More’s acting is impressive.  With the signal exception of Maxwell Reed (it’s as well Hick gets a letter-opener in the back before Reed can do any more bad acting), the supporting cast is fine  – most notably Lily Kann as a mittel-European whom Somers brought to safety in England during the war and who is now keen to repay her debt to him, and Maire O’Neill, as the keeper of a safe house (which proves to be anything but).

    It’s the two leads, though, who elevate The Clouded Yellow and enrich the title’s adjective:  what’s going inside Somers and Sophie – what’s obscured from view – is crucial to the story.  Trevor Howard, admirably understated yet incisive in the early scenes on the Fenton estate, builds a highly persuasive portrait of a man who was good at a difficult job and has known unhappiness:  the discipline required for the former has taught Somers to keep evidence of the latter under wraps.  The age difference between him and Sophie is striking (Trevor Howard was sixteen years older than his co-star) but it makes emotional sense that Somers, accustomed to protecting deserving cases, is drawn to this unstable, unhappy girl.

    Jean Simmons is remarkable:  she engages so completely with the character that you accept that the decidedly vulnerable Sophie, in order to escape from the prison of her life with the Fentons, is willing and able to take an extraordinary adventure and ordeal in her stride.  In the closing stages, the film turns into, on the surface at least, a routine action picture – albeit that the climax on rooftops high above a railway line is genuinely exciting.  The ending is almost laughably abrupt yet it feels right.  Simmons and Howard have thoroughly convinced you that Sophie and Somers are made for each other – so that seeing them both survive and walk away from the camera together is all you need.

    Ralph Thomas is best remembered for much lighter fare than this – the ‘Doctor’ films, then ‘Carry On’ – but his unobtrusive direction is often astute.  Benjamin Frankel’s score supports the narrative well and Thomas’s use of it is, for the time, unusually rationed and effective:  the film is particularly suspenseful and unnerving when it’s silent.  Almost needless to say, this black-and-white thriller has come to be defined as British noir:  Geoffrey Unsworth’s expressive chiaroscuro lighting certainly helps justify the label.  The cross-country chase allows for some fascinating views, shot on location, of contemporary England:  Newcastle-upon-Tyne (showing the legacy of World War II bomb damage), the Lake District and Liverpool – in order of stops on the principals’ urgent itinerary.

    21 December 2019

    [1] http://www.cineoutsider.com/reviews/dvd/c/clouded_yellow_uncut.html

    [2] Something (else) I must have got wrong but can’t get right from reading up about the film … I thought Jess told Somers that Sophie’s father, an eminent classical composer, was her brother rather than her brother-in-law.  Yet Fenton killed Malraux because Jess was having an affair with him, as she was with Hick. (Fenton killed Malraux’s wife along with him simply in order to disguise the nature of the crime.)   This suggests either that Jess and her brother were incestuous lovers or that Fenton was demented enough to suspect that they were.

  • Show Boat

    Old YorkerFilm review

    James Whale (1936)

    This was the second Hollywood version of the stage musical Show Boat, adapted by Oscar Hammerstein from Edna Ferber’s 1926 novel of the same name and first produced on Broadway by Florenz Ziegfeld the following year.  The first Show Boat movie, in 1929, was a part-talkie, part-silent from Universal.  The producer, Carl Laemmle, was unhappy with this hybrid and wanted a second bite at the cherry, in the form of a full sound picture.  Although a subsequent 1951 Technicolor remake fared well enough at the box office, James Whale’s version is widely regarded as the pick of the three Show Boat films to date.  This is due in no small part to the enduring impact of Paul Robeson’s rendition of ‘Ol’ Man River’.

    Robeson plays Joe, a manual labourer on the Mississippi.  The character features in Ferber’s novel but Hammerstein and Jerome Kern, with whom he collaborated on the song score, expanded the role for their stage show, with Robeson specifically in mind.  He wasn’t available for the original Broadway production but he did play Joe on the London stage in 1928 and in a Broadway revival of 1932, prior to Whale’s Show Boat.  Joe is a contradictory conception.  The characterisation of him in the opening dialogue with his wife Queenie – and, later on, in their duet ‘Ah Still Suits Me’ – is racist and demeaning:  Joe is a black lazybones.  His wife, a cook, is played by Hattie McDaniel, the definitive Mammy figure – so racial stereotypes are very much the order of the day.  Yet in between his exchanges with Queenie, Joe launches into the august lament ‘Ol’ Man River’, whose lyrics affirm the trials of life from a specifically ‘darkie’[1], and an impassioned, point of view.

    The boat of the title is the Cotton Blossom, home to the personnel of a travelling show that provides entertainments, in the form of vaudeville and melodrama, to river-town audiences on ports of call along the Mississippi.  At the heart of the story, which begins in the 1880s and ends in the mid-1920s, are the Hawks family – the showboat impresario Cap’n Andy (Charles Winninger), his bossy wife Parthenia (Helen Westley) and their daughter Magnolia (Irene Dunne), who becomes the star of the show after the departure of Julie LaVerne (Helen Morgan), the company’s leading lady and Magnolia’s mentor.  When Julie, who passes herself off as white, is revealed to be of mixed race, she and her white husband Steve (Donald Cook) stand accused of breaking the state law that forbids interracial marriage.   About to be confronted by the police, Steve cuts his wife’s hand and puts his mouth to the wound, in order to claim truthfully that he too has non-white blood in him.  This dramatic gesture, in combination with the support of Magnolia and others, is enough to get the police off Julie and Steve’s backs but the showboat management parts company with them soon after.

    By this stage, ‘Ol’ Man River’ has been performed.  Its power resides principally in Paul Robeson’s commanding voice but also in the chorus and images of Joe and other black stevedores, as they plant cotton, tote that barge and lift that bale.  The impression made by this, and by the miscegenation theme, is so strong that, for twenty-first-century viewers at any rate, they overpower Show Boat’s main plot line, centred on Magnolia Hawks’s romance with and marriage to the charming, incorrigible gambler Gaylord Ravenal (Alan Jones).  The racial elements also upstage the onstage and backstage ones, and not only in sequences where the latter directly reflect the former – as when Magnolia performs ‘Gallivantin’ Around’ in blackface.  For similar reasons, the brief reappearance of Julie, now an alcoholic and deserted by Steve, matters more than the progress of Magnolia’s performing career.

    Even so, the quality of the songs – including ‘Can’t Help Lovin’ Dat Man’, ‘Only Make Believe’ and ‘Bill’ (for which P G Wodehouse wrote the original lyrics, reworked by Hammerstein) – and the cast’s energy do more than carry Show Boat along.  To modern eyes, the film looks technically primitive but that’s rather an effective means of portraying showboat theatre – which flourished from the early 1800s and, after the major interruption of the Civil War, enjoyed a renaissance in the last decades of the century – as a now-vanished popular art form.  James Whale is excellent throughout at orchestrating crowd scenes, from the opening excited rush of locals to greet the arrival of the Cotton Blossom to volatile audience reactions at a New Year’s Eve entertainment, where nervous but eventually triumphant Magnolia is an eleventh-hour replacement for the indisposed Julie.

    Paul Robeson isn’t the whole show.  Irene Dunne shows plenty of musical-comedy resource and versatility, though she tends to be a bit noble when Magnolia is suffering.  Alan Jones is too bland to convince as a charismatic gambling addict but he sings beautifully.  So does Helen Morgan, an unusual and arresting presence as Julie.  Her facial movements are oddly slow:  Julie seems somehow freighted with melancholy and regret.  (Morgan was herself to die after a long struggle with alcoholism, aged only forty-one.)   There are enjoyable performances from Charles Winninger, Helen Westley and Sammy White, as a comic and dancer in the Hawks company.  Magnolia and Gaylord have a daughter, Kim.  As a child, she’s played eagerly and hyper-competently by Marilyn Knowlden.  Kim is duller as a teenager and young woman (Sunnie O’Dea) but that doesn’t stop her following in her mother’s theatrical footsteps.

    In terms of the time it takes on screen, Kim’s rise to stardom on the New York stage is meteoric, to say the least.  This is one of those pictures where it looks as if the film-makers were suddenly told the studio would be closing in ten minutes’ time and they’d have to wrap everything up that quickly.  Perhaps James Whale means to illustrate in the closing stages that, by the mid-1930s, cultural memory is already forgetting that the lavish Broadway musicals of the preceding decade had their roots in relatively rough-and-ready showboat entertainments of bygone days.  If so, he makes the point more emphatically than may have been intended:  ‘Ol’ Man River’ is reprised at the very end but only for a few seconds.  That does, though, have a striking dual effect.  On the one hand, it confirms the film’s tendency to downplay its racially charged aspect.  On the other, it suggests that, in spite of that tendency and pace the lyrics of Show Boat‘s classic song, the African Americans on the Mississippi can’t quite be forgotten – even if Hollywood would prefer it that way.

    20 December 2019

    [1] In Whale’s film, that word replaced the N-word in the original show lyrics:

    ‘Niggers all work on de Mississippi,

    Niggers all work while de white folks play …’

     

Posts navigation