Monthly Archives: August 2020

  • The Man Who Never Was

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Ronald Neame (1956)

    The British intelligence deception of 1943 known as Operation Mincemeat has inspired several books, plays and films over the decades, most recently Ben Macintyre’s book and television documentary in 2010.  The British acquired a human corpse, supplied it with a false identity and a briefcase containing letters that suggested the Allies were planning to attack Sardinia and Greece rather than Sicily, their actual point of invasion.   The corpse, named Major William Martin, and his documents were put into the sea near the coast of Spain and floated to shore.  Major Martin fooled German intelligence into thinking his letters were genuine.  Since the turn of the millennium, Mincemeat has been a stage play and even a stage musical but Ronald Neame’s picture appears still to be the only screen dramatisation of the ruse.  Perhaps it’s time for a remake.  There’s room for a film of this amazing story better than The Man Who Never Was.

    It’s an odd concoction – in terms of structure, tone and the casting of some key parts.  Although Nigel Balchin’s screenplay is based on the 1953 book by Ewen Montagu, who played a major role in planning Operation Mincemeat, the security services didn’t give Montagu carte blanche in revealing operational details.  The film’s first half is, nevertheless, a military-intelligence procedural, occasionally to the point of dullness:  it doesn’t help either that the staging of parts of the procedure, such as the dressing of the cadaver, is almost laughably unrealistic.  Once the body has been recovered by a Spanish fisherman and the matter reported to the Germans, The Man Who Never Was turns into a mediocre espionage thriller.  Neame’s narrative focuses chiefly on Patrick O’Reilly, a pro-German Irish spy dispatched to London by the Nazis to investigate the veracity of Major Martin’s identity.  The dominance of this part of the plot, which is entirely fictitious, isn’t explained by the star status of the actor playing the spy:  O’Reilly proved to be Stephen Boyd’s breakthrough role.  Soon afterwards, he signed a contract with 20th Century Fox, who distributed the British-made The Man Who Never Was.  Did Fox’s involvement in the production dictate the presence of Hollywood names in the predominantly British cast?

    The choice of Clifton Webb to play Ewen Montagu (who has a cameo as an air vice-marshal, sharing the screen with his alter ego) is particularly baffling.  Webb was thrice Oscar-nominated in the 1940s but always better known as a comedy-musical actor on Broadway.  He was hardly a major cinema box-office draw by the mid-1950s.  Balchin’s script does little to flesh out the personality of Montagu, which adds to the pressure on the actor playing him to supply plausible presence.  Webb is unconvincing throughout as a hard-nosed military man.  He’d enjoyed stage success in Noel Coward plays but his clipped English accent often wobbles here, especially when Montagu gets excited (a relative term).  Webb is thoroughly uncomfortable in what is, or should be, the lead role.  You almost wonder if this is why the overeager but charismatic Stephen Boyd takes over proceedings to the extent that he does.

    Gloria Grahame is another matter, and a more complicated one.  She plays Lucy Sherwood, an American working in a London library.  Lucy is the flatmate of Pam (Josephine Griffin), Montagu’s assistant.  When her boss asks Pam to compose a love letter, supposedly from Major Martin’s fiancée, to include among his papers, it’s Lucy who dictates the letter:  she makes it heartfelt because she and her boyfriend Joe (William Russell), a RAF pilot, have just been separated.  When, later on, Joe is killed in action, Lucy shows genuine distress in the presence of O’Reilly, who’s got hold of information that she was Martin’s fiancée.  It’s enough to convince the Germans’ spy that Martin is genuine too.  At first, I supposed Lucy was part of the true Mincemeat story, not least because the plotting seemed unnecessarily unwieldy if she wasn’t:  if Pam were played by a stronger actress than Josephine Griffin, there’d be no need to invent Lucy.  By the end of the film, even before I learned that the O’Reilly element was fiction, I was more inclined to think Lucy’s main purpose was as a means of accommodating a high-profile American actress.

    Grahame had won her Best Supporting Actress Oscar for The Bad and the Beautiful only a couple of years before the making of The Man Who Never Was.  A few months after its release, British film audiences would have seen her as Ado Annie in Oklahoma!, her last big-time movie role.  Unlike Clifton Webb, she’s vibrant but she’s also, in her looks, movement and performing style, pure contemporary Hollywood.  The Lucy strand is the only dramatically charged element of a story that otherwise derives its potency from being based in historical fact; because this strand is so different, it feels incongruous.  Gloria Grahame belongs in a different film.  She unbalances this one.

    Ronald Neame is the antithesis of an auteur.  As usual, he gives the impression of executing scenes as a series of jobs to get through.  Even though the series of events he depicts in The Man Who Never Was is extraordinary enough to be somewhat Neame-proof, his pedestrian direction still has you noticing his reverse alchemy.   There’s no controlling vision, and not much orchestration of the acting.  You never come away from a sequence thinking how interestingly it’s been done.  The chief pleasures in the large cast come from performers distinctive enough to vivify their small roles without directorial help – Miles Malleson (as a laboratory scientist), Joan Hickson (a chatty landlady), Richard Wattis (a testy assistant in a gents’ outfitter’s).  In a quieter register, William Squire (as the commander of the submarine that carries Major Martin to his Spanish destination) and William Russell both do well.  (Russell, still going strong at the age of ninety-five, is probably the only surviving member of the cast.)  The voice of Winston Churchill is supplied by an uncredited Peter Sellers.  In the week the film was released in British cinemas the BBC broadcast a Goon Show parody of its storyline.

    The true identity of William Martin has been the subject of enduring debate.  The favoured candidate, at least in terms of recent dramatisations, is Glyndwr Michael, described by Wikipedia as ‘a homeless, alcoholic rat-catcher from Aberbargoed, Wales … who had died by self-administering a small dose of rat poison’.  (Also according to Wikipedia, ‘The [2001] play Operation Mincemeat, written by Adrian Jackson and Farhana Sheikh, … focused on Michael’s homelessness …  In 2015 the Welsh theatre company Theatr na nÓg produced “Y dyn na fu erioed” (The Man who Never Was), a musical based on the operation and Glyndwr Michael’s upbringing’.)    It’s no surprise that Neame’s film, made only a decade after the end of World War II, was keen to give its title character a nobler identity.   He’s a young Scotsman who has died of pneumonia.  There’s a rather moving interview between Montagu and the dead man’s father (Moultrie Kelsall), who gives permission for his son’s body to be used in exchange for an assurance (or the best assurance Montagu can give) that it will eventually receive Christian burial.  In the film’s closing scene, Montagu, who has been awarded the CBE, leaves his decoration on the grave of the man who never was.

    As far as I’m concerned, making the title character a Scot was fully justified.  As I watched, I kept wondering why my backlog of recordings from television includes so many Ronald Neame movies – this is the third I’ve seen recently, after Tunes of Glory and The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie.  But I knew why I’d recorded this one.  I’d seen it once before, I’d guess in my early teens (certainly before we had colour television:  I was expecting the film to be in black and white).  It left a strong and lasting impression thanks entirely to the Scottish voiceover which, at the very beginning and the very end, intones the lines:

    ‘Last night I dreamed a deadly dream, beyond the Isle of Skye.

    I saw a dead man win a fight, and I think that man was I.’

    The words are taken from the anonymous Old English ballad ‘The Battle of Otterburn’ (which appears in a manuscript dated around 1550 and was included in the collection of ballads anthologised by the American folklorist Francis James Child in the second half of the nineteenth century).  In adolescence, I was scared stiff by these words and The Man Who Never Was’s accompanying image of a corpse on the seashore.  I wanted to know what effect they’d have more than fifty years later.  They were still chilling.

    1 August 2020

  • Blue Black Permanent

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Margaret Tait (1992)

    In a 1983 interview about her work, the Scottish film-maker Margaret Tait (1918-99) described herself as a creator of ‘film poems’ that offer ‘felt rather than logical connections’.   A DVD produced by BFI in 2018 includes three of her short films, as well as this interview (with the video artist Tamara Krikorian) and a BFI Southbank panel discussion of Tait’s work.  The main item on the DVD is Blue Black Permanent, her only dramatic feature in a filmography comprising more than thirty pieces and spanning nearly fifty years.  Tait was in her mid-seventies when she made the feature, which proved to be her penultimate film.  I’m not sure why she decided at this late stage to attempt a full-length drama (though it’s still not long:  86 minutes) but the result didn’t leave me regretting she didn’t do more.

    Blue Black Permanent moves between Orkney and Edinburgh.  (Tait was born and raised in the former, went to university and worked for some years in the latter, and shot films in both locations.)  Barbara Thorburn (Celia Imrie), now in her late thirties, remembers her 1950s childhood.  The central figure in it was her mother Greta (Gerda Stevenson), whose death Barbara still struggles to come to terms with – as she tells her partner, Philip Lomax (Jack Shepherd).  He and Barbara share a home in Edinburgh, where Barbara’s parents also lived.  Greta hailed from Orkney, however, and, at the time of her death, was staying there with her three children, of whom ten-year-old Barbara (Katie Groat) is the eldest, in a coastal cottage belonging to a relative.  Greta’s body was found one morning on the seashore, near the water’s edge.  Greta wrote poetry:  her husband Jim (James Fleet) discovers in the cottage a poem that his wife had started but not finished.  Greta may or may not have ended her own life – Barbara speculates that she might have ‘sleepwalked’ into the sea.  It later emerges that Mary Kelday (Liz Robertson), Greta’s own mother, also drowned in the sea off Orkney.

    In the opening scene, Greta, Jim and their children are a happy family group on the beach at Orkney.   As Jim plays football with the Thorburns’ two little boys (James Holmes and Sean Holmes), the child Barbara swims in the sea.  She briefly disappears from her mother’s view; Greta is anxious and much relieved when Barbara reappears and runs back to her.  The sequence is visually striking throughout; Greta’s alarm resonates at later stages of the story, when we learn of her own fate and that of her mother.  For as long as Tait is working predominantly in images – of sea, sky and flotsam at Orkney, of buildings in Edinburgh – Blue Black Permanent is expressive.  This is often true of the characters’ faces too – in single shots.  At one point, the older Barbara looks out to sea and says wistfully that she wishes she could paint.  When Philip asks if she hasn’t photographed the scene, she replies dismissively that photography wouldn’t do it justice – an inadvertently ironic remark.  Tait’s camera delivers strong close-ups of people, almost as a series of photographs, but problems start up when her cast are speaking and interacting.  One of the most impressive presences in the film is Liz Robertson’s Mary Kelday, who says not a word.

    Gerda Stevenson’s dominant performance is self-consciously lyrical.  There’s a surfeit of rapt gazes, nervous laughter, catching the breath, halting delivery of lines.  Stevenson’s Greta is so fey that it’s hard to understand how she and her kindly but conventional husband got together, and have stayed together to raise a young family.   Perhaps Tait didn’t intend Greta to be interpreted realistically but Stevenson’s acting conflicts with the more naturalistic style of Celia Imrie, Jack Shepherd and James Fleet, none of whom seems comfortable.  Sean Scanlan is, more like Stevenson, very deliberate in his playing of Andrew Cunningham, an Edinburgh artist whose model is Wendy (Hilary Maclean) but whose muse seems to be Greta.

    There are effective rhyming sequences, for example on the Playfair Steps at the Mound in Edinburgh:  Greta stands there ecstatically during a cloudburst; decades later, Barbara gives money to a beggar at the foot of the steps.  (That too rhymes with a bit where a penny-for-the-guy gaggle of kids approach her and Philip, and startle Barbara with the masks they’re wearing.)   The film’s fine title refers to certain shots of the sea, as well as to the bottle of Quink left on the table with Greta’s incomplete poem, and the psychic legacy of her death.  But Margaret Tait’s gifts as a writer-director, on the evidence of Blue Black Permanent, didn’t include orchestration of actors or plausible dramatic construction.

    An episode in which Greta returns from Edinburgh to visit her elderly, ailing father Sam (Walter Leask) in Orkney includes a sequence where she and a few of his neighbours recall a local wedding they all attended.  They can’t stop laughing, much to the frustration of Sam, who didn’t go to the wedding:  the effect is awkwardly unnatural.  Barbara’s work as a photographer, barely mentioned for much of the film, belatedly becomes a main focus of attention, when she does a shoot for an Andrew Cunningham retrospective.  A more persistent difficulty is in what she tells Philip about herself.  It’s made repeatedly clear they’ve known each other for some time:  he’s startled when she describes him as a friend, replying that ‘I thought I was your lover’.  Either way, it’s unconvincing that Barbara, given her evident preoccupation with her past, has never mentioned it to Philip before.

    I’m glad I watched the feature before the short films (and the interview) on the DVD.  It would have been more disappointing to have seen the main course after these hors d’oeuvres.   The other way round, I ended up getting more from Tait’s earlier work than I did from Blue Black Permanent.  Each of the three shorts, all made in the 1950s, merits the ‘film poem’ label.  Her Orcadian mother is the subject of A Portrait of Ga (1953).  Rose Street (1956), at fifteen minutes the longest piece, is a day-in-the-life picture of the central Edinburgh street (it runs parallel to Princes Street), where Tait lived and worked at the time – the film closes on the door plate for her Ancona Films outfit on the second floor of one of the buildings.  Rose Street mostly comprises fascinating footage of workers, shoppers and kids playing in the street outside:  the contributions of both the last two groups seem performed yet revelatory too.  A published poet herself, Tait also created film poems of a more explicit kind.  The remaining piece, The Leaden Echo and the Golden Echo (1955), is a series of images accompanying her voice reading the Gerard Manley Hopkins poem.  (Another of her films, featured and discussed in the interview with Tamara Krikorian, is a portrait of Hugh MacDiarmid.)    These shorts, in their different ways, bear out what Margaret Tait describes as an abiding essential of her work – her conviction that there’s deep interest, even wonder, to be discovered in every particular place, in the things and the people it contains.

    31 July 2020

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