Monthly Archives: April 2020

  • Tunes of Glory

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Ronald Neame (1960)

    According to Piers Paul Read’s biography of him, Alec Guinness found James Kennaway’s script for Tunes of Glory the second of ‘only two I have read with pleasure as something to read’.  (The first was Kind Hearts and Coronets.)  This isn’t hard to understand:  Kennaway’s adaptation of his own novel, published in 1956, features plenty of sharp, tangy dialogue – much of it spoken by Major Jock Sinclair, the character that Guinness played.  Drawing on his time in the Gordon Highlanders in the early post-war years, Kennaway describes life in a Scottish regimental barracks in 1948 and dramatises a battle of wills between its chalk-and-cheese commanding officers.

    The chippy, volatile Sinclair, who rose through the ranks, won the Military Medal and DSO in World War II and has been acting head of the regiment since its previous full colonel was killed during the North African campaign.  In the film’s opening sequence, in the officers’ mess, Sinclair tells his colleagues that a new commanding officer will arrive next day.  The background of Lieutenant Colonel Basil Barrow (John Mills) is very different from his own – Eton, Oxford and, for some of the fifteen years since Barrow served as a subaltern in the highland regiment to which he’s now returning, a lecturer at Sandhurst.  In the event, Barrow arrives at the barracks that same evening – in time to witness the carousal that marks the changing of the regimental order.  Sinclair, who will stay on though no longer in charge, invites his successor to join the gathering in a drink and Barrow accepts.   Sinclair is appalled when he specifies a soft drink because whisky ‘doesn’t agree with me’.  The first conversation between them outlines the scope for conflict between the gallus Scot and the humourless, pedantic Englishman, and hints at the insecurities of both.

    A few scenes take place in the town outside the barracks:  an ill-fated pub outing; a theatre dressing-room, when Sinclair pays a call on an old flame, the actress Mary Titterington (Kay Walsh); his subsequent visit to Mary’s home.  But most of the narrative is set in the barracks, where Ronald Neame creates the sense of a closed order, and a degree of uncomfortable suspense.  For Sinclair and other officers who’ve recently seen action in WW2, some of the required routines of military service in peacetime are ludicrous.  Not for Barrow, though.  He’s assumed to have enjoyed preferential treatment thanks to his social and educational background, to have been given a cushy job far from the front line.  It’s only when Sinclair jokes about spending a night in the cells of Barlinnie for being drunk and disorderly that he learns Barrow spent much longer as a prisoner of war in Japan.

    Barrow’s strict adherence to army regulations is a crucial means of subduing traumatic memories of his time as a POW, and maintaining self-control.  Sinclair et al deride, in particular, their chilly ‘Sassenach’ commander’s attempts to make the highland dancing practised by the regiment more disciplined and decorous – fit for a party to which Barrow invites local townspeople, and which turns out badly.  A subplot concerns a secret romance between Sinclair’s daughter Morag (Susannah York, in her feature film debut) and Corporal Ian Fraser (John Fraser), rising star of the regiment’s pipe band.  The antipathy between Barrow and Sinclair comes to a head when the latter, seeing Morag and Fraser together in a pub, weighs in with a punch that knocks the uniformed piper to the ground.   Assaulting an officer of a different rank renders Sinclair liable to court-martial by Brigade HQ.  Although keenly aware of his increasing unpopularity (and decreasing authority) within the regiment, by-the-book Barrow can see no alternative to putting court-martial proceedings in train – until, that is, a pivotal exchange with Sinclair.  It’s at this point that Tunes of Glory starts to wobble.

    In spite of his excellent dialogue, James Kennaway (who died very young, aged only forty, in 1968) isn’t so good at plotting the climax and resolution of his absorbing story.  Sinclair persuades Barrow to change his mind by warning him that publicity around a court martial case will cause more harm to the reputation of the regiment than to any of the individuals involved.  Sinclair is meant to be cannily exploiting the fact that the regiment means a great deal emotionally to Barrow, whose father and grandfather also served in it.  But that’s just what makes it implausible that Barrow hasn’t already considered the implications of pressing ahead with the court martial.

    When Barrow informs the devious Major Charlie Scott (Dennis Price) that he’s changed his mind and won’t proceed, Scott claims to be unsurprised:  after all, he says coolly and crushingly, everyone in the regiment knows that Sinclair is still running the show.  Barrow returns to his quarters and puts a bullet through his brain.  Sinclair resumes command and, after explaining that Barrow’s death has been confirmed as suicide when the balance of his mind was disturbed, announces plans for a funeral with full military honours, where the regimental pipers will play ‘all the tunes of glory’.  The other officers take issue, protesting that Brigade HQ will never, in the circumstances, agree to such grandiose obsequies.  As he continues to insist on these arrangements, Sinclair becomes agitated, then suffers an on-the-spot meltdown.  He’s escorted out of the barracks, his officers and men saluting as he’s driven away.

    After the fatal gunshot is heard in the barracks games room, Sinclair orders the timid young subaltern MacKinnon (Peter McEnery) to go upstairs to investigate.  As they wait to learn the outcome, Sinclair, Scott et al gather to form a tableau – the contrived composition is inimical to what should be the group’s sudden horror that doing down ‘the barrow boy’, as they disparagingly call him, has gone further than intended.  Much better is the sequence, after a distraught MacKinnon has reported back, in which Sinclair accompanies him to Barrow’s quarters.  The old soldier tells the horrified younger one to look at the corpse – it’s something he’ll need to get used to in the army – and Peter McEnery, with the help of Anne V Coates’s editing, manages this well:  it’s as if MacKinnon finds himself looking straight at the body even before he means to.  After sending MacKinnon on his way, Sinclair remains professional until his exit line (and the effect is theatrical):  ‘It’s not the body that worries me – it’s the ghost’.

    It might have been better if this laconic anticipation of the terrible remorse Sinclair will suffer had ended Tunes of Glory.  Instead, we also get him telling his colleagues that Barrow’s death wasn’t suicide but murder, then the lengthy melodramatic finale.  It’s hard to suppress a groan when Sinclair asks the pipe major (Douglas MacRae) which of his men will play a solo at the funeral, Corporal Piper Fraser enters (complete with black eye) and a supposedly thunderstruck Sinclair suppresses his fury.  In another very stagy moment, Sinclair, as he goes bonkers, carries on talking with his back to the other officers:  all but two leave the room without his realising.  The exceptions, Scott and Captain Jimmy Cairns (Gordon Jackson), are the minor polar opposites beside Sinclair and Barrow’s major ones. Scott is perfidious in his relationships with both commanding officers; Cairns is unobtrusively loyal to them.

    There are differing accounts of how Alec Guinness and John Mills came to play Sinclair and Barrow respectively.  Read’s biography of Guinness notes that Mills, in his autobiography, wrote that ‘he and Alec first thought to toss a coin … but then agreed on what [Mills] called “off-beat” casting – Alec as the swaggering Scot, Mills as the gentlemanly Barrow’.  Both performances were widely admired; I find them both problematic.  As the hard-drinking, cruelly insensitive man’s-man Sinclair, Guinness is essentially miscast:  uncouthness doesn’t come easily to him.  (Even his Fagin in David Lean’s Oliver Twist has a sui generis yet credible suavity.)   It’s often absorbing to watch a great actor trying to overcome miscasting, and it is here.  Guinness delivers some fine effects, especially in his walk and gestures, but you always see the effort required to produce them.  His ginger moustache and toupee, presumably meant to signal Sinclair’s hot-headedness, seem to have come from a dressing-up box; they underline the artificiality of Guinness’s portrait.

    The problems with John Mills’s playing of Barrow may be down to the director more than the actor.  Mills is incisively good in his early scenes but the signs of Barrow’s psychological frailty soon start appearing and burst out in the set piece of the regimental party.  Infuriated by his colleagues’ persistently boisterous dancing, Barrow calls proceedings to a halt.  He then drives off from the barracks, accompanied by his adjutant Cairns, in an attempt to expel some of his angry tension.  Barrow talks briefly to Cairns about the legacy of  his time as a POW and his feelings of isolation.  This exchange is well played by Mills and Gordon Jackson (excellent throughout, as usual) but would have been stronger if Barrow’s intervention at the party had been more controlled and swiftly decisive – his extreme reaction to the dancing would still have been enough to intensify the other officers’ scornful hostility towards Barrow.  The way Ronald Neame stages the party debacle, and has Mills play it, Barrow seems to have suffered, just as Sinclair eventually suffers, a public nervous breakdown. After this, his quiet opening up to Cairns doesn’t mean enough.

    I’m not sure things would have worked much better with the main roles reversed.  Though Guinness would surely have found Barrow an easier fit, John Mills would likely have struggled to make Sinclair as dangerous as he needs to be.  The supporting cast is full of people I first got to know as television actors in the 1960s – Richard Leech, Allan Cuthbertson, Gerald Harper, Paul Whitsun-Jones, Eric Woodburn (Dr Snoddie in Dr Finlay’s Casebook):  they all have a nostalgic impact.  As might be expected, the women’s parts aren’t up to much.  As Mary, Kay Walsh (Nancy to Alec Guinness’s Fagin twelve years earlier) is entertaining when Sinclair turns up at the theatre, mechanical when she starts professing her supposedly deeper feelings for him later on.  It’s frustrating that the script forgets about Morag in the closing stages but not hard to see why Susannah York went on to bigger and better things.

    25 April 2020

  • The Rocking Horse Winner

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Anthony Pelissier (1949)

    Two British films released in consecutive years, each based on a short story by a celebrated English novelist, share as a plot catalyst the friendly relations between an upper-middle-class boy and a servant.  Whereas Graham Greene wrote the screenplay for Carol Reed’s The Fallen Idol (1948), an adaptation of Greene’s story The Basement Room, D H Lawrence’s The Rocking Horse Winner reached the screen nearly two decades after the author’s death:  first published in 1926, the story is updated to the late 1940s in Anthony Pelissier’s screenplay.  The Fallen Idol is perhaps the better film (it’s certainly the better known) but The Rocking Horse Winner runs it a close second.

    In The Fallen Idol a diplomat’s young son moves from hero worship of the embassy butler to suspecting him of murder.  In The Rocking Horse Winner young Paul Grahame (John Howard Davies) and his parents’ newly recruited odd-job man Bassett (John Mills) hit it off immediately.  Paul, unlike the diplomat’s son, doesn’t become disillusioned with his much older companion but the two stories do have something else in common:  a child takes what he sees or hears from adults at face value, with traumatic results.   In The Rocking Horse Winner, Paul is misled not by Bassett but by his mother, Hester (Valerie Hobson).

    Hester and her husband Richard (Hugh Sinclair) have three children – Paul is the eldest – and a nice house.  They employ, as well as Bassett, a nanny (Susan Richards) and a cook but they live well beyond their means.  The family is continually in debt thanks to Richard’s failure to keep a decent job and gambling at cards, and Hester’s lavish spending.  The Grahames are repeatedly bailed out by Hester’s elder brother Oscar (Ronald Squire), whose batman Bassett was during the recent war.  Before that, he worked as a stable lad and occasionally rode as a jockey – Bassett shows Paul a photograph of him winning a race.  The boy is taken with it and with the rocking horse his parents get him for Christmas.  Bassett shows Paul how to sit on the toy horse as if it were a racehorse, assuring  the boy that ‘if you speak nicely to him and whisper in his ear, there’s not a race he wouldn’t win for you’.  When Uncle Oscar makes him a present of a whip, Paul is able to ride the rocking horse all the more vigorously.

    Paul realises his parents don’t have the money they need, and discovers from a crucial conversation with his mother why they don’t:  it’s all a matter of luck.

    Hester: Your father has no luck. …

    Paul: Are you lucky, Mummy?

    Hester: I thought I was before I was married.  Now I think I’m very unlucky.  …

    Paul: I’m lucky. … If you’re lucky, you keep on getting more money, don’t you?

    Hester: I suppose so.

    Paul: That’s what you said.  And I have money in my money box. And I keep on getting it. So I must be lucky, mustn’t I?  I’ll give it to you if you like, Mummy.  All of it.   You can have it all!

    All is twenty-two shillings and seven pence at the last count.  Even though Hester doesn’t take up his offer, Paul is determined to continue getting richer, to help his mother, whom he loves very much.  He finds an extraordinary way of doing so:  he develops a mysterious knack for picking horse racing winners.  He goes into ‘partnership’ with Bassett, who puts their bets on.  In time, Paul lets Uncle Oscar in on the secret.  The contents of a cash box, kept under lock and key in Bassett’s quarters, increase to several hundred pounds, and keep growing.

    The Rocking Horse Winner depends significantly on supernatural elements but there’s nothing fey about these:  they’re rooted in real psychological anxiety and need.  Paul hears the house ‘whispering’ to him – the insistent susurration ‘There must be more money, more money, more money…’ plays on the soundtrack.  What might have been a merely conventional eerie effect is transformed by our knowing that Paul isn’t just sensitive to domestic atmosphere but has picked up the house’s message from remarks he’s overheard his parents making.  His conviction that a particular racehorse will win comes through energetically riding the rocking horse – the result, in other words, of considerable physical effort and mental concentration.  It feels like an act of will rather than a piece of magic.  (Whenever Paul’s unsure about his choice of horse, it loses.)  And there’s no sentimentalisation of the animal in the nursery – quite the opposite.  Paul doesn’t give his toy horse a name.  (It is, rather, a means of eliciting other equine names.)  The exposed teeth in the rocking horse’s mouth give it an increasingly sinister grin.  The postscript to the story’s tragic climax sees Bassett, on Hester’s instruction, set fire to the rocking horse.  In the film’s final shot, the toy looks unnervingly resistant to the enveloping flames.

    Anthony Pelissier had an unusual career as a cinema director.  The Rocking Horse Winner was the second of six features he made within only four years, sandwiched between The History of Mr Polly (also starring John Mills) and Night Without Stars.  Pelissier also directed a segment of the anthology film Encore during this short time before moving into television.  In the late 1960s, he made a few documentary shorts but never directed a feature film after Meet Mr Lucifer (1953).  (He died in 1988.)  The Rocking Horse Winner suggests this was a real loss to British cinema.  Pelissier’s storytelling is clear, economical and sometimes imaginative – as in an episode cross-cutting between Paul’s exciting, enjoyable afternoon with Oscar at Goodwood races (and it really is Goodwood) and Hester’s concurrent, humiliating visit to a pawnbroker (Charles Goldner) – to raise the cash she needs to get rid of the bailiff (Cyril Smith) who has arrived at the Grahames’ home.

    As usual in a British film of the era, it takes a while to adjust to aspects of the acting style.  John Mills’s working-man accent, at the start, veers uncertainly between London and the West Country.   While Ronald Squire is agreeably relaxed and understated throughout, Valerie Hobson and Hugh Sinclair sometimes seem wooden.  Pelissier handles the cast skilfully, though:  in the end, all the performances are effective.  (This includes the smaller roles, notably Susan Richards’s nanny and Charles Goldner’s intent, observant pawnbroker.)   Leading players from David Lean’s famous Dickens films join forces here:  Mills and Hobson were the adult Pip and Estella in Great Expectations (1946), John Howard Davies the title character in Oliver Twist (1948).  It’s arguable that all three, under Pelissier’s direction, surpass what they achieved with Lean.

    In fact, this is unarguable in Valerie Hobson’s case.  It wasn’t a great loss to British cinema when, in 1954, she retired from acting to become Mrs John Profumo but what she does in The Rocking Horse Winner is in a different league from Hobson’s work in Great Expectations and Kind Hearts and Coronets.  What comes across at first as shallow acting somehow develops into a remarkably unsentimental portrait of a woman trapped in the social prejudices and compulsions of her time and class, whose determined materialism limits her capacity for maternal love.  Hobson’s speech rhythms reinforce Hester’s impatience – convey that she never quite has time to bother with Paul.  Hobson is especially good in the pawn shop sequence, where Hester, desperate and offended, repeatedly struggles to subdue her distaste for the man she’s forced to do business with.  Although he’s much stronger than Hobson in Great Expectations, John Mills’s presence here reminds you that he was on the old side to play Pip; in his late thirties at the time, Mills got by thanks largely to his lack of height and weight.  He’s effortlessly middle-aged in The Rocking Horse Winner, which he also produced.  He plays Bassett with humour, warmth and empathy, without salt-of-the-earth condescension.

    John Howard Davies (the future producer of Fawlty Towers) is so memorable in Oliver Twist that it’s harder to say that he’s better in The Rocking Horse Winner but his Paul is emotionally richer than his Oliver.  Here’s another similarity between this picture and The Fallen Idol: both feature outstanding performances from (fair-haired) boy actors.  Davies, who was ten when the film was made, manages to seem both older and younger than that:  he’s willowy, not much shorter than John Mills; he combines eager innocence with utter seriousness of purpose.  Paul is doing what he knows his mother needs but she doesn’t know he’s doing it – and he doesn’t understand the implications of her incorrigible extravagance (or his father’s financial irresponsibility).  John Howard Davies makes the predicament poignant.

    Although it might seem far from typical D H Lawrence material, The Rocking Horse Winner sometimes reminded me of Sons and Lovers, and not just because the protagonists have the same first name.   It’s a matter of resonances rather than direct similarities.  The bonds between Gertrude Morel and her sons are much more complex than the relationship between Paul Grahame and his mother; besides, Hester doesn’t come close to reciprocating the strength of her son’s feelings for her.  However, she, like Gertrude, thinks she deserved a better husband than the one she got.  There’s no antagonism between Paul and Richard Grahame, as there is between Paul and Walter Morel – yet both fathers are excluded from the salient dynamic within the family.  Richard (at least as Hugh Sinclair plays him) is such a weak presence he’s hardly there at all and his interaction with Paul is negligible.  (He’s also conspicuously absent from the final scene between Hester and Bassett.)  Richard nevertheless makes an interesting remark in response to Hester’s concern that Paul is ‘such a strange boy – so easily upset’.  ‘He ought to be at school’ is her husband’s brisk reply.

    That’s a thought the viewer may have been having throughout the film.  Paul is as short of other children’s company as the diplomat’s son in The Fallen Idol but the latter’s isolation, in the much shorter timeframe of the story, is no mystery:  the boy is left in the care of the butler and his wife while his parents are briefly away from their embassy home.  Paul Grahame has two younger sisters but, apart from the early scenes in the nursery and round the Christmas tree, they’re barely seen together.  The boy has no friends; when he first meets Bassett, Paul enthuses that ‘It’s great having someone new’.  Despite that, you don’t get the impression that Paul is bored or lonely but the set-up is skewed so as to stress how a young child lives in his own world and the primacy of his mother in that world.  It makes Freudian sense that Richard Grahame, shiftless as he is, speaks up briefly for the reality principle.

    The intensity of Paul’s mission is expressed both in the alarming effort that he puts into finding winners and in the size of the fortune he makes doing so.  After an especially lucrative run, Oscar arranges for five thousand pounds of the money Paul and Bassett have accrued to be paid to Hester, in five annual instalments, under cover of a story from the family lawyer that she’s inherited the money from a long-lost relative.  The immediate consequences make clear why Paul’s quest is doomed to failure:  when Hester resumes her former shopping sprees, her son’s ‘luck’ deserts him.  The losing bets mount up and the cash-box contents dwindle.  As the Epsom Derby approaches, Paul is already ill, showing signs of nervous exhaustion.  He’s nonetheless determined to find the Derby winner and, on the eve of the race, embarks on a marathon rocking-horse ride that ends with him calling out the name ‘Malabar’ and collapsing unconscious.  That night, he keeps calling out the horse’s name; Oscar and Bassett place a sizeable bet on Malabar.  The following evening, Bassett comes to Paul’s bedside to tell him the horse has won the Derby.  The boy comes to briefly, receives the news happily and dies.

    In a letter to Edward Garnett, D H Lawrence summarised the psychosomatic resolution of Sons and Lovers as follows:

    ‘The battle goes on between the mother and [the women with whom Paul Morel is romantically involved], with the son as object. The mother gradually proves stronger, because of the ties of blood. The son decides to leave his soul in his mother’s hands, and, like his elder brother go for passion. He gets passion. Then the split begins to tell again. But, almost unconsciously, the mother realises what is the matter, and begins to die.’

    The death that climaxes The Rocking Horse Winner also feels emotionally necessary – though it’s more upsetting than Gertrude Morel’s:  John Howard Davies’s radiant benevolence makes matters worse in that respect.  There’s no consolation in the film’s ending, except for Bassett’s refusal to obey the anguished Hester’s order to burn, along with the rocking horse, the contents of the cash box (£70,000 – a staggering sum, equivalent to around £2.4m today).

    This gripping and powerful film often looks good.  Desmond Dickinson did the black-and-white cinematography: he and Anthony Pelissier combine mainly realistic visuals with eccentrically angled camerawork and heightened lighting for Paul’s rocking horse rides.  William Alwyn’s score supports the action without, for the most part, over-interpreting it.  Even allowing for the grim conclusion, it’s hard to understand why The Rocking Horse Winner seems to have been so overlooked at the time of its release.  Perhaps spending money on a cinema ticket to watch a spendthrift in action just didn’t appeal to potential audiences in post-war austerity Britain.

    21 April 2020

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