The Good Die Young
Lewis Gilbert (1954)
At the start of the 1950s, the Woolf brothers, John and James, set up the Independent Film Distributors company and twin production companies, Romulus Films and Remus Films. Over the course of the next fifteen years or so, the Woolfs were involved in financing and/or distributing films as variously successful as John Huston’s The African Queen, Laurence Olivier’s Richard III, Jack Clayton’s Room at the Top and Bryan Forbes’s The L-Shaped Room. Their abiding, unifying mission was to develop ‘transatlantic projects’ (Wikipedia). James died three years before his elder brother and Romulus Films enjoyed their most conspicuous triumph with Oliver! (1968), which won six Oscars, including the Best Picture award for its producer. The relationship between the fraternal production arms isn’t easy to work out from online film databases. According to Wikipedia, The Good Die Young is a Remus Films Production; IMDb credits Romulus as well as Remus. What’s not in doubt is that this film is an unhappily literal-minded example of the Woolfs’ attempts to design fare for an American market.
A black-and-white crime story, The Good Die Young is immediately at pains to establish its film noir credentials. The opening credits scroll single-mindedly down the screen; beneath the titles, a car heads towards the camera through wet nighttime streets; the accompanying music is ominous and urgent. The film’s action takes place in London but the authorship and setting of the source material – Richard Macaulay’s novel of the same name – are American. An ‘export’ version of the film was made, a few minutes longer than the version released in British cinemas. The voice (not credited) that introduces the occupants of the car has a vaguely mid-Atlantic sound – as if to help give viewers across the pond their bearings. Although the cast is mostly British, it includes four transatlantic actors, all playing American characters – Richard Basehart, Gloria Grahame, John Ireland and the lesser known Lee Paterson. Yet none of these was a box-office draw strong enough to guarantee commercial success. It’s hard to see the point of tailoring a British noir for US audiences when Hollywood noirs were hardly in short supply.
The opening voiceover introduces:
‘Four men, each from a different walk of life – a clerk, an airman, a prizefighter and a gentleman of leisure. A few weeks ago, they were strangers. Now they are here, driving together – to what?’
Answer: to rob a post office. Viewed at this distance in time, the film’s set-up seems to anticipate Basil Dearden’s The League of Gentlemen, especially since the would-be robbers are struggling to get to grips with post-World War II life. The title is explained in a speech from Miles ‘Rave’ Ravenscourt (Laurence Harvey), the ‘gentleman’ of the quartet:
‘All the good boys got themselves killed in the war, or should have done. The good die young; that’s what we were meant to do. But we didn’t die. Oh no – we fooled them, we stayed alive. And, worse than that, we came back. So now we’re in the way, we’re redundant. We’re not wanted.’
In her note accompanying the recent BFI re-release of The Good Die Young (which is how I came upon it), Josephine Botting describes this speech as ‘key to the film’. She then explains that, and suggests why, it was cut from the version released in Britain: ‘the censors may well have felt that cinema entertainment should not appear to take in vain the sacrifices made during [World War II]’. This may be right but it’s questionable on two counts. First, only half the gang is British albeit they do include the prime criminal mover (Rave). Second, the four are such a motley crew of fighting men. Joe Halsey (Richard Basehart), the clerk, has recently returned to office work after serving two years in the Korean War. Eddie Blaine (John Ireland) is still a US airman, en route to a new posting in West Germany. Unless I missed it, Mike Morgan (Stanley Baker) didn’t see active service in WW2: his fighting, for a good few years, has been confined to a boxing ring.
The planning of the heist accounts for much less screen time than in The League of Gentlemen. The screenplay, by Vernon Harris and Lewis Gilbert, devotes more attention to the personal circumstances of the four men, and what drives them to crime. Three of these backstories, however, aren’t sufficiently developed. Instead, each man’s essential predicament, after being outlined, is illustrated repeatedly. Joe Halsey walks out of his job in America to follow his English wife to London: she returned there months ago to be with her ailing mother and Joe’s getting suspicious. Once he’s in England, he’s soon vindicated. His wife Mary (Joan Collins) is firmly under the thumb of her mother (Freda Jackson), an outrageous hypochondriac who feigns grave illness whenever she thinks Mary’s going to leave her again. Eddie Blaine’s small-time film actress wife Denise (Gloria Grahame) is having an affair with a younger actor (Lee Patterson). Eddie is still nuts about Denise but his decision to go AWOL from the air force, so as to hang around in the London pub where he meets the other three men, is weakly motivated.
Like Joe and Eddie (well enough played by Basehart and Ireland), Rave Ravenscourt needs money. He has a rich wife, Eve (Margaret Leighton), and a rich father, Sir Francis (Robert Morley), but both have had enough of bankrolling Rave’s extravagant, dissolute lifestyle. He’s a thoroughly bad lot – and not only since civvy street proved a disappointment: it transpires that he won his war medals under false pretences. Laurence Harvey overdoes the glint-eyed cad act, making his character so transparently rotten that Rave isn’t even a plausibly agreeable drinking buddy: you don’t believe the three others, whom he corrupts, would, even in desperation, fall under his spell. Margaret Leighton, remarkably, does make Eve’s continued attachment to her husband just about believable; the effect, in combination with her lack of illusion about his faults, is sometimes even touching. The scene between Rave and Sir Francis at the latter’s club is hit and miss but ends well: Robert Morley watches his son depart with a look of real horror.
On paper, the washed-up boxer element is the most clichéd of the lot. On the screen, it’s another matter. To the relief of his wife, Angela (Rene Ray), Mike decides to give up the ring after the fight that starts his part of the narrative. He wins the bout despite a serious hand injury. From that point on, things go from bad to worse. As he enters a factory in the hope of finding work, the heavy metal gate traps Mike’s injured hand, which turns gangrenous and is amputated. He can’t get work after that but his thousand-pound savings – according to his new pal Rave – may be enough for Mike to buy a corner shop. Angela (whose conflicts Rene Ray conveys affectingly) uses all the money to raise bail for her ne’er-do-well younger brother, David (James Kenney), when he once more gets in trouble with the police.
The film builds Mike’s dire straits more dramatically, then, than the other trio’s but this part of The Good Die Young works chiefly thanks to Stanley Baker. It no doubt helped that, as a working-class boy in Glamorgan, Baker grew up intending to become either a miner or a boxer; at any rate, he’s convincing in Mike Morgan’s fight sequences. (And Lewis Gilbert gets a bit of sweaty atmosphere into the changing-room scenes before and after the fight, with lively performances in cameos, from Leslie Dwyer and George Rose, as, respectively, a fight promoter and Mike’s second). The boxer is meant to be in his early thirties and Baker looks all of that, though he was actually only in his mid-twenties at the time. That’s how good an actor he is: he feels and expresses Mike’s anxiety and weariness authentically. Baker’s exceptionally strong presence gives the fighter’s fate a tragic heft. The accident at the factory is well and naturally done: Mike stands aside to let a woman enter ahead of him and the gate swings back on his hand. It’s a pity that Baker then has to fall to the ground melodramatically – a collapse that anticipates his dying fall when the robbery goes wrong. In another contrived moment, he has a vociferous what-sort-of-man-have-I-become confrontation with his reflection in a mirror, forcing Angela, too, to look at his agonised face. But these excesses are the director’s fault (did Gilbert somehow think they were de rigueur in a noir worth its salt?), not the actor’s. Stanley Baker makes you feel the film would have been much better as the story of one man rather than four.
Mike, Joe and Eddie must be desperate: they accept Rave’s last-minute, virtually impromptu invitation to do the robbery – ‘Tonight – eleven o’clock’. The plotting around the hijacking of a post office van, with £90,000 on board, is pretty desperate, too. When things go wrong, Rave leads Joe and Eddie to a cemetery (Mike is already dead by this stage) to hide the money behind a whopping stone. He explains this as a kind of plan B, which seems highly unlikely given how sketchy plan A was. Rave then leads the other two across railway lines to dodge police pursuers. It’s a mystery how this inveterate sponger, who spends his life gambling and whoring, knows exactly which rails are and aren’t electrified but he does, and pushes Eddie onto one of the live rails. Then there were two. Joe manages to evade Rave’s homicidal attentions and, at last, to get his wife away from her mother. The Halseys dash to Heathrow for a flight back to America. Rave is also due at the airport, to accompany Eve to a new life in Kenya. To cut a longish story short, the two men kill each other.
The camera returns to the cemetery and the opening voiceover to the soundtrack:
‘Four men … four dead men. Buried here forever is what they thought they died for. £90,000 – an illusion called money which in the end would really have helped none of them. Would it?’
The voice thus sets the seal on a cautionary tale that sees the principals earn the wages of crime yet here’s an odd thing about The Good Die Young. Others with king-size moral defects do rather well out of things: Mary’s mother, who’ll presumably get her daughter back permanently now; Angela’s brother, who’s jumped bail and left the country; the faithless Denise, who’ll barely notice that Eddie’s gone. The film’s music is by Georges Auric. He often seems to be following instructions to deliver a conventional ‘dark’ score but his talent for expressing psychic dissonance still registers occasionally. With the self-satisfied final voiceover ringing in your ears and thoughts of the unjustly favoured minor characters in your head, that dissonance in the music comes through more strongly as the closing credits roll.
14 January 2021